Public Theology & Christian Living

by Vic Minish –

Everyday the mass of humanity is subjected either voluntarily or involuntarily to a steady stream of repetitive and ubiquitous images through the medium of television, film, billboards, computers, and other forms of mass media. Image as we are using it here has a double meaning. It is that which has replaced verbal and written expressions, but it is also appropriate to think of image as the bare façade of empty people; both are often joined and are born of the modern technological society. The image, and the technology that is necessary to bring them, is often assumed to be in a neutral relationship with the content that would be expressed through them.

To say it another way, most people assume that what is said (content) has little or nothing to do with the way a thing is said (form). This essay will challenge that assumption and suggest that humanity (not merely Christians) suffers a number of significant and substantial losses due to the rise of an image- and technologically-based culture.

It is not particularly the rise of an image-based culture that is problematic, but it is rather that the Image is subverting the Word—by which I mean a broadly literate word-based culture. To challenge the assumption of the neutrality of medium (image and technology) is not to promote Ludditism (i.e., opposition to technological change), but to suggest that there are a number of contributions to the manifestation of human dignity that spring from a firm commitment to high literacy and the patterns of life that are necessary to sustain it. Languages, both spoken and written, are unique gifts of God to human beings that bear his image (no ironic pun intended). In this way word and image exist within a proper relationship and context.

The Relationship of Form and Content

Absent from most cultural apologetic encounters over the last one hundred years was attention to how the gospel should be lived out in the world with the intended result that such engagement would develop specific patterns of cultural life that would allow Christianity to flourish and abound. Neil Postman’s 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, assisted the Christian community by awaking an interest in the relationship of form on content¹.

Postman’s book documented the notion that many had been struggling intuitively with for a long time, namely, that images have been replacing words as the primary mode of communication in Western culture, and the world is worse, not better, because of it. Postman was not suggesting that television and the like were evil. Rather, he was saying that humanity has not come to understand what these various image-based technologies are, how they shape our epistemology (i.e., theory of knowledge) or the relationship between what is conveyed and how we possess that content, and that as a result we do not understand their proper use.

The Divine Quality of the Word

From a Biblical perspective language can be understood as possessing a divine quality. The Genesis story reveals humanity as bearing God’s likeness, his vice-regency, with language as a special tool to be used both for their stewardship over creation and a means of communicating with God as well as with each other. Language (naming, creating, bearing authority) is one of the principle ways that we bear God’s image in the world (Gen. 2:19-20, cf. John 1:1-8).

Deuteronomy records the covenant renewal ceremony between Yahweh and his people through the prophet Moses before they begin the conquest in Canaan. Four times in as many verses the covenant people of God are told to give attention to “all the words” of God (Deut. 32:44-47), a theme repeated to the apostolic church (Rev. 22:18-19).

This commitment to the word, called logocentrism by its opponents, is a term that needs to be claimed, like the first followers of Jesus claimed the term “Christian” (Acts 11:26).² One of the assumptions of this view is that spoken or written language is seen as an adequate vehicle to convey truth. Christianity, in all of its traditional forms, expresses in this view the notion that the whole of the universe is saturated in and through the Word of God, being spoken into existence by him. By extension values and morals are inherent in things and not ascribed by men. As Charles Taylor noted, “The order of things embodies an ontic logic,” and that “correct human knowledge and valuation comes from our connecting ourselves rightly to the significance things already have.”³

One of the chief hallmarks of the Reformation was to clarify what Scripture was actually teaching. The Westminster Shorter Catechism explains the primacy of the preaching of God’s word in this way: “The Spirit of God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching, of the Word, an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, and of building them up in holiness and comfort, through faith, unto salvation.” Similarly, the Larger Catechism explains that “the Word preached” when attended to “with diligence, preparation, and prayer” is received “as the Word of God.” ⁴ Not all contemporary Christians will agree with the view of these two examples, of course, but it demonstrates how Christians in the past understood the primacy of the Word. This view is not unique to the Puritans and their spiritual descendants, but is taught in Scripture. Paul writes to the church at Corinth, “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong (1Cor. 1:27, NIV).”

According to a national survey conducted by the NEA, literary reading has been in decline since 1982, with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature. The steepest rate of decline is occurring in the youngest age groups. As the survey introduction explains,

Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy. To lose this human capacity— and all the diverse benefits it fosters— impoverishes both cultural and civic life.⁵

This comes as no surprise, since the mid 1970’s educators have been struggling with the anti-language assumptions of our culture, the inability of students to use their own language, follow sustained arguments, and employ the use of logic at the most elementary level.⁶

The Rise and Dominance of the Image and Its Consequences

In the introduction and conclusion to his book, Postman said that reality was reflected more by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where the public was held in slavery to their own desire for pleasure than George Orwell’s 1984 where they were oppressed by pain. The problem as Postman saw it is not what people watch on television, but that people watch television. The problem can be extended to computers and every other information disseminating technological device. Behind this is the idea that we have not quite come to understand what information is and how the transmission of it gives direction to the cultures in which it exists.⁷

The nature of the problem is that “the average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day. One sees images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on websites, and on the sides of buses. Images grace soda cans and t-shirts and billboards.” There is something endemic in our image-based culture that is dehumanizing and enslaving to those who participate in it. It is not only the content, but it seems that the medium itself fails to promote that which is truly best in humanity and which promotes a deeper sense of well-being.⁸

Image has come to dominate public discourse, and more importantly has come to dominate the way we understand the world. Postman documents how the various media technologies have created a fundamental shift in the way humanity attends to the issues of their day. Postman’s diagnosis and evaluation is that there has been a significant decline in the printed word (typography) and the ascendancy of the television as the medium used to convey the content of culture, and that this change is lamentable.⁹

Postman’s ideas, shared by others in his milieu, such as Marshall McLuhan and Jacque Ellul, believe that the medium of communication does as much if not more to affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value, than does the content of what is communicated. Their work should cause us to consider the broader cultural effects on a society which has previously been committed to literacy and printed forms of communication, of replacing that, or at least subvert it, with a culture dominated by images.¹⁰

Jacques Ellul’s criticisms are similar to Postman’s and exposes the ways our image-oriented society, and even the church, has lost the truth of language. Ellul suggests that words have suffered a great deal of humiliation in our culture. That is to say, they are often distorted, abused, and turned from their customary meaning into something far different. For example, consider the way restaurants and other companies use adjectives in ways that do not actually relate to their product in order to market them, decadent desserts, fun size candy, user-friendly software programs.¹¹

Both Postman and Ellul make the substantivist¹² claim that the sum of form on content is greater than its parts. This perspective would seem to be affirmed by the incarnation. Jesus’ divinity is not antithetical or mutually exclusive to his humanity. His actions in the material world brought spiritual blessing and vice versa. Whatever else we may understand from the gospel of John we must surely understand that the incarnation was no neutral issue. These claims undermine the docetic leanings of the image-based culture, because it necessitates that we understand that logos (word) and semeia (sign) must not be divorced if they are to be understood and used properly.¹³

The consequences of this shift has been that most people have the ability to create extraordinary things with their computer but have fewer skills for understanding the world, living meaningfully in it, and making it better for others. The power of the image, and particularly its manipulability, undermine our ability to trust what we see, and influences the way we understand truth.¹⁴ TV and other representational media, including computers, provide technological applications that make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between that which is representational and that which is real. Some people will refuse to accept this idea because we can and do make distinctions. The issue is, do we?¹⁵

Marva Dawn identifies the problem of image replacing word as an epidemic of sociocultural attitude brought on by affluence. Dawn suggests that image as we have discussed it is not the loss of literacy, but the intrusion of the clutter of things. We suffer not from too little but too much. We are dissatisfied with what we have and are compelled to want more. Dawn suggests that Christians can organize their lives to live in ways that allow them to love God and neighbor and, in the process, alleviate the despair in their lives.¹⁶

Similarly, Mark Bauerlein notes that it is not simply a problem of people growing up reading less and watching television more, but that we are losing how we come to know.¹⁷ Take for example the affect of PowerPoint presentations. They give any presenter the sheen of authority and authenticity and can assist the same in glossing over a host of ignorance and lack of preparation. As Edward Tufte has argued, “[PowerPoint is a] cognitive style, characterized by foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial reasoning, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information… conspicuous decoration… and a preoccupation with format, not content [and] an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.” Tufte conclusion is that Power Point is “faux analytical.”¹⁸ Image, with PowerPoint as one example, changes the way we think, forcing us to express ourselves according to the function of the software rather than in a way that is more conducive to studied linear thought.

The Image’s Influence in Church

Most Christian academics and those working in the ministry would be in agreement that we live in an image savvy but intellectually impoverished era of the church. It was not always so. Early eighteenth century American Puritanism had a number of serious flaws, but anti-intellectualism was not one of them. The first generation of American Puritan ministers was distinguished by its scholarship at Oxford and Cambridge. There was one of these scholars for every forty to fifty families in New England. The Puritans were responsible for the establishment of Harvard and a scholarly tradition that was a positive influence on American educational life for almost three hundred years.¹⁹

In an ironic turn, it is American Evangelicalism’s complicity with modernity, and the shift from logocentrism to an image-based culture that has compounded the problems.²⁰ Earlier in American history the church was concerned to speak the truth to the watching world. With the triumph of image the dynamic has changed and the church has sought growth through the implementation of marketing initiatives rather than the gospel message—what Os Guinness has labeled “Christian Lite.”²¹ Similarly, David Wells and David Fitch, among others, have promoted the idea that there are a number of forms of communication that are incompatible with the mission of the church. Despite these prophetic warnings, the church has learned her lessons from the image culture: I have a right to be entertained, sermons and worship should be exciting, application should be easy and easy to understand.²²

Critics of this position will argue that the younger crowd responds to image more so than word because they are used to being entertained. This is to miss the point that Christianity requires genuine transformation, not just of content but of form as well. It was never the case that worshippers of Yahweh had only to replace the name of their former god with His yet continue in the same manner of worship. The Second Commandment (Exod. 20:4) has everything to do with form.

Conclusion
Image, technology, and entertainment-based forms of worship by their nature do not require the same sober commitment that is required by traditional forms. Literacy, along with embodied listening and deliberate conversations, cannot be developed in a virtual world, neither can the patterns and rhythms of life that are worthy of emulating and generationally reproducible be fostered in a world dominated by image. As Postman argued, Most Americans, including preachers, have difficulty accepting the truth, if they think about it at all, that not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another. It is naïve to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value.²³

The bound Bible, the hymnal, these are better forms for conveying the content of the Biblical message over projection screens or even handouts precisely because they are cumbersome. They are demonstrative of the embodiment that is necessary for Christianity to exist. God after all has not communicated with humanity with timeless truth conveyed through sages and philosophers, but through a storied existence of theophany, prophets, incarnation, apostles, and inscripturation. All of these are, by modern standards, inconvenient, storied, and embodied existences.

Images, particularly signs and symbols, can convey important forms of knowledge, but as they are used within contemporary culture they often do not provide the necessary context to provide meaning. It must be remembered that cultures cannot be impacted, influenced, or evangelized directly, because cultures, unlike people and institutions, are not entities but are aggregates of practices and beliefs, a complex relationship of people and institutions with all manner of intellectual, social, economic, cultural, governmental beliefs, principles, and practices. The solution to the problem of image is indirect through the changes of personal habit, of being rather than doing.

Rev. Vic Minish (Ph.D.) is Rector of St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Anniston, Alabama, and teaches philosophy and apologetics at Birmingham Theological Seminary.

NOTES
¹The book’s genesis was a lecture Postman delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984 while he was participating in a panel on Orwell’s 1984 and the contemporary world.
²Logocentrism is a term deployed to describe a commitment to the traditional order of priorities in regard to language, meaning, and truth. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak (Baltimore, 1976). It is the deconstructionist view that the written word is in so many ways removed from the authentic living presence of speech, and has caused many to shift their trust away from an understanding of the world that is based in word to an understanding of reality that trusts in image and the technology that supports it.
³Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 186.
⁴Westminster Shorter Catechism, Answer 89; Larger Catechism, Answer 160.
⁵“Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” Research Division Report #46 (June 2004).
⁶Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton Press, 1979 ), 128.
⁷Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penquin Books, 1986), 160.
⁸Theodore Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 106.
⁹Postman, 8.
¹⁰Christine Rosen, “The Image Culture,” The New Atlantis (Fall 2005): 27.
¹¹See Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Main Hanks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1985). “Another example of a misnomer is the phrase user-friendly, which our society often uses to describe machines. I have not yet met a machine that was my friend! Similarly, we sometimes call worship liturgies “user-friendly.” The liturgy is not the friend; you are!” (Hugh Mackay, Turning Point: Australians Choosing Their Future [Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 1999]).
¹²As John Paul Russo explains, “Students of technology may be placed within two broad groupings: instrumentalists and substantivists. Instrumentalists believe that technologies are single tools that lie ready to hand as in a toolbox, and that tools are neutral or value free means to chosen ends. Instrumentalists [believe they] can pick and choose among options while keeping their hands on the reins of power. Substantivists argue that technology is a monolithic phenomenon vastly greater than the sum of its parts. Far from being neutral, technology has become the substance informing more and more of life…that directs decisions at every turn. Thus, choosing technology entails ‘unwitting cultural choices.’” See Russo’s “The Humanities in a Technological Society,” HUMANITAS 11:1, (1998). ¹³Marianne Meye Thompson, The Incarnate Word: Perspectives on Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1988, 119-121.
¹⁴Rosen, “The Image Culture,” 29.
¹⁵Thomas De Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), 18.
¹⁶See Marva Dawn, Unfettered Hope: A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003).
¹⁷Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008).
¹⁸Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Yale: 2003).
¹⁹Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 59-60. ²⁰The church laments the loss of the word but continues to use mediums incompatible with its ultimate goal. Drama, skits, video clips, power point, and other so-called visual aids is evidence that contemporary Christians are going soft on their commitment to the Word. See David E. Fitch, The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005).
²¹Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do About It (Grand Rapids: Hourglass Books, 1994).
²²See David Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993); and Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). ²³Postman, 117.

(First published in Areopagus Journal Vol. 10 No. 2 – Are We Still Amusing Ourselves to Death?)