"I believe in the God of Israel, even when He has done everything to make me cease to believe in Him."  So writes Zvi Kolitz in Yosl Rakover Talks to God, the the fictional first hand account of a Jew about to die in the Warsaw Ghetto.  This is one of the most powerful theological texts I have ever read. If theodicy (God and the problem of evil) is one of your things, click the link and read the short full text.  Among the many overlapping issues that Kolitz contends/wrestles with here is the question of what a mature personal relationship with God might look like. 

Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote Loving the Torah More Than God, a short commentary on Kolitz' text wrote:  "The simplest and most common reaction [to the Holocaust] would be to decide for atheism.  This would also be the reasonable reaction of all whose idea of God until that point was of some kindergarten deity who distributed prizes, applied penalties, or forgave faults and in His goodness treated men as eternal children... only he who has recognized the veiled face of God can demand that it be unveiled (Kolitz 81& 86)."  Levinas ends up advocating an allegedly superior religious humanism, where God's absence is God's presence and God "is recognized as being present and inside oneself (Kolitz 83)."

Deep stuff.  I can live with paradox, and mysticism, but Leon Wieseltier, (thankfully) less awed by Levinas than myself, writes, "...this is not paradox, it is contradiction... only an intellectual's incredibility."  Leon notes that in Yosl Rakover's monologue, God and humanity are not to be muddled, but Levinas' God is "so near that he may be said to be ourselves, and merely the hallowed name of of our highest standard (Kolitz 97)."

All this theophilosophicalizationism is invigorating for "us" intellectual types, but maybe it still keeps the "one who is there" (to use a lovely little abstraction) abstract.  While it may seem less mature and sophisticated and respectable, I suspect the following cinematic relationship is more mature than much of our piety and intellectualizing.  It carries the intimacy (if not the erudition) of Yosl Rakover, but expects more.

Lots to talk about here. 
First, he says "the methods change, but the message stays the same."  He also quotes Marshall McLuhan, who said: "the medium IS the message [or "massage" in an enduringly poignant typo]."  People who think about evangelism and Christian missions have always known this on some level and described this reality as "contextualization," or, adapting the message so that it communicates appropriately to a given audience and context.

So what does this mean for our high-tech, wired, online culture?
In a 1996 issue of Wired, Gary Wolf wrote that McLuhan, a devout Catholic, believed that:
"As an unholy imposter, the electronic universe was "a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ." Satan, McLuhan remarked, "is a very great electric engineer."

Hipps says that, most fundamentally, human beings are the medium of God's message.  Therefore, we have to ask how technology changes us, as communicators and receivers of communication, when we collude with technology (it should be obvious that I don't think technology is "of the devil")?

One thing that strikes me is this statement by Daniel Pink:
"In a world of Google, if you have a fact, I can in five seconds come up with a counter-fact.  Facts are now ubiquitous and free and therefore they don't have much value.  What has value is the ability to put facts in a context and deliver them with emotional impact, and that's what a story does."

A brief (and reductionistic) summary of the history of theology:
1.  Through humans, God tells a whole bunch of stories.

2.  Other humans collect those stories in a book and say "this here is the straight dope on God!"

3.  However, humans find these stories and this book rather confusing, so they re-sort (cut and paste) all the statements in the book ("facts" or "propositions") into a more "logical" set of categories (God, revelation, creation, humanity, evil, salvation, community, the future) so that those statements can provide singular authoritative "answers" to human "existential questions."  They call this "systematic theology" and work on it for 2000 years.

4. Humans (maybe starting with Hans Frei and Karl Barth, made popular by C.S. Lewis) start recognizing the limitations of this method of "knowing"  and communicating about God, the world and ourselves. 

5. In a world of Google (and "postmodernism" and the "global village" and genocide and corporate empire and string-theory), a lot "facts" and logical systems start making less sense.  Maybe people have less patience for logical arguments or following a line of thought (ie. things like this).  Maybe facts arranged in systems are boring.

6. People seek after stories and images to start to make sense of God, the world and themselves again. 
See #1 above.   Hmmm.

For more on theology and story see my friend Daniel Kirk's blog "Storied Theology."

So, do you have any sense of how you (or those you know) are different because of the technological innovations of the past say, 20 years?  Any sense of how your faith or belief system has changed?