wholly intersections
  • My Blog
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Intro to Theology

Re-wiring Our Brains and Our Theology

12/10/2010

3 Comments

 
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?

3 Comments
Jedidiah Slaboda link
12/10/2010 04:30:45 am

Not sure if it is more myself that has changed/aged or the effects of wired life, but I am more "connected" than ever but have fewer late night sparking conversations than I used to. I recently read a post on another blog about a visit to a large church in which the pastor and musicians addressed cameras and their images were broadcasted to large screens so everyone could see.

Illusion and artifice are inescapable aspects of relationships but when the artifice is doubled and tripled it seems to become cheapened and shallower. Images of God are the blessing we love because without them we would not see God at all. What of images of images? Is exchanging the image for the image of an image in the same family as exchanging the image for the thing itself?

It is at least a threat to the value of the thing itself: now friendship means at least communion in life with another person as well as sharing space on your facebook page with another person's facebook profile.

Reply
Rob Shoaff
12/10/2010 11:34:53 am

Found Hipps' book at Ollie's for $5.99, kind of interesting as technology shifts to PDF, Kindle, and audio books.

It had some good points. I tell my students that there are three facts in life - someone is smarter than you, someone can do things faster than you, and someone will do things cheaper than you. Looking at history with Luddites, I see similarities with the economy and technology and I've begun to ask the same questions.

The thing to embrace is change. As I study the book In the a dust of the Rabbi in Sunday School I see that Jesus was always about change. When we become static, we are not living up to our purpose. Technology isn't the evil, but fixating, idolizing it, allow it to falsify relationship/communicatio/interaction is the evil, which happens when we are not constantly watching what we see, hear, and do. What is our intake.

It goes back to the song, Oh Be Careful Little Eyes What You See. I have an assignment with students from a NYT article published last spring about our daily input of data is about 34GB - words, images, video, and sound. How does our mind process this. Students need to learn how to filter what is important. I see this for all aspects of education.

I see more and more the reasons and the importance for the pauses found in the Bible - commanded by God and those religious ritual in Jewish life.

Reply
Bob Gorinski
12/10/2010 12:34:53 pm

Liked your brief summary. And the video.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Matt Hunter, Ph.D

    Multidisciplinary religious scholar and practitioner

    Archives

    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010

    Categories

    All
    American Religion
    Barna
    Biblical Worldview
    Christianity
    C.S. Lewis
    Data
    Dissertation
    Education
    Evangelism
    Interfaith
    Nationalism
    Patriotism
    Race
    Religion
    Religion And Pop Culture
    Religion And Pop-culture
    Religious History
    Science
    Sociology
    Teaching
    Theology
    Unchristian
    Violence
    Visual Culture
    Young Adults

    RSS Feed

    View my profile on LinkedIn
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.