In order to understand how technology changes our theology and church environments, we must build a foundational knowledge of what exactly media is and how it works.
First, we need to define a few key terms.
Next, I’d like to introduce you to Marshall McLuhan, whom you’ve already heard from in the previous section. McLuhan (1911–1980) was a Canadian professor and scholar whose life was dedicated to educating people about the effects of technology. He was also a devout Roman Catholic who made important connections between his faith and media studies.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan lays out the basics of his theories about media and applies them to a myriad of diverse technologies from roads and clothing to clocks and weapons. McLuhan viewed all mechanical technology as extensions of the human body and all electronic media as extensions of the human nervous system. For example, clothing is an extension of skin, a wheel is an extension of feet, and a camera is an extension of eyes. All electronic and digital media, whether radio or the Internet, is an extension of the central nervous system. Everything humans create is only an extension of a pre-existing part of us, and every technology can be traced back to its biological counterpart.
According to McLuhan,
“The medium gives power through extension but immobilizes and paralyzes what it extends. In this sense, technologies both extend and amputate. Amplification turns to amputation. The central nervous system reacts to the pressure and disorientation of the amputation by blocking perception.”
The part of the human body that is extended by a technology is numbed; it doesn’t function as it normally would have before it was extended. The more extensions that are applied to a person, the more fragmented they become.
At the very center of the church we find media, not as an extension of man, but as an extension of God. While some theologians or media ecologists may balk at the idea of saying that anything could an extension of God, I feel comfortable saying that because of the divinity and humanity, the incarnation, of Jesus Christ. The extensions of God are the sacraments of baptism and communion. Communion is an extension of God in the sense that in it we participate in his body and blood. Baptism is an extension of God in that we are baptized into Christ. In communion, we receive Jesus in bread and wine; in baptism, we are submerged into him.
This may sound like a form of transubstantiation, but it’s not. Protestant evangelical theologian Dr. Marcus Johnson writes,
“Just as Christ is the substance of the gospel, so is he the substance of the sacraments… What the church receives in Word and sacrament is never more, less, or other than Christ. To deny the true, sacramental presence of Christ in Word and sacrament is to implicitly deny that Christ continually gives himself to the church, his body.”
Without Christ being present in some way in the sacraments, they hold little meaning.
Let’s consider this in the context of a Protestant evangelical worship service. There are the sacraments, the extensions of God, which are to be the focus of the liturgy. But then built into the liturgy are also extensions of man in the form of architecture, spoken and written language, music, projectors, microphones, and more. In what ways do these extensions of God and man either unite or conflict? How does this affect our perception of God and our perception of ourselves as worshippers? Is liturgy to be understood as the extensions of God meeting the extensions of man? How do our extensions change how we participate in or act out God’s extensions?
We cannot say that all extensions of man clash with the extensions of God because in scripture God clearly mandates manmade technology to be a part of worship. On the most basic level, we cannot worship corporately without technology because even our speech, clothing, and architecture are technologies. In the Old Testament God commissions artists and craftsmen to create a worship environment that is rich with beautiful sounds, sights, smells, textures, and even tastes. All of these technologies served to draw the worshipper further into experiencing the physical reality of worship, whether at the temple, the synagogue, or during the celebration of feasts and festivals. These technologies complemented the purpose of God in creating a worship environment of wholeness, presence, and reality.
Contrast that with a more modern example of technology in liturgy. In The Medium and the Light, McLuhan devotes an entire essay to the changes the microphone brought to the Roman Catholic liturgy. He argues that the introduction of the microphone to mass forced the church to change from Latin to the vernacular, it turned around the priests so they now face the congregation, and it necessitated speakers that made acoustic-minded architecture obsolete. It also makes it difficult for personal meditation during mass because the amplified sound comes from all directions instead of one source. It even changes the tone of the message:
“…the microphone, which makes it so easy for a speaker to be heard by many, also forbids him to exhort or be vehement.”
McLuhan refuses to make a value judgment about such changes, but this example helps us understand how one “small” change in technology affects so much.
Let’s take a look at an example that might be easier for us to analyze. Many people access the Bible on their smart phones during church services. While many pastors may think, “Great! Now everybody can easily follow along with my sermon!” that is not the real effect of smart phones. Obviously, there’s the issue of distraction, but that’s an easy target that doesn’t need to be addressed here. The purpose of a weekly church service is for believers to be present together before God in order to receive Christ through the sacraments and the preaching of the gospel. Without smart phones (or even printed Bibles, to some extent), the preaching of the gospel is listened to and received corporately. With Bible apps on smart phones, the unified body of Christ acts more as a loosely associated collection of individuals who become sermon critics instead of receivers of the word. It seems this extension of man works against the extensions of God as it creates a worship environment that is certainly not characterized by wholeness, presence, and reality.
An important principle in McLuhan’s work is summarized by the well-known and often misunderstood phrase “the medium is the message.”McLuhan believed that all media (except thought and electric light) worked in pairs, with the content of one medium being a different medium. For example, the content of speech is thought, and the content of film is the novel. W. Terrance Gordon summarizes it well:
“The contained medium is the message of the containing one, but the effects of the latter are obscured for the user, who focuses on the former. Because those effects are so powerful, any message, in the ordinary sense of ‘content’ or ‘information,’ has far less impact than the medium itself. Thus, ‘the medium is the message.’”
Practically speaking, McLuhan described the difference between content and medium like this: “…the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”
When we are technological idiots, content acts like a Trojan horse that distracts us while the enemy army–the medium–slips past the city gates. Now, this doesn’t mean that technology has some sort of malevolent intentions against humans. However, each technology takes away possibilities for some things as it creates possibilities for other things. The Bible app is the Trojan horse that distracts us from the true message of the smart phone in worship, which is individualism. The smart phone creates the possibilities of quickly looking up related passages or other translations, but it takes away the possibility of experiencing the preaching of the word of God as a truly unifying, corporate experience.
Every new technology changes or re-creates the environment surrounding it so that,
“any new service environment, such as those created by the alphabet, railways, motor cars, telegraph or radio, deeply modifies the very nature and image of the people who use it. As electric media proliferates, whole societies at a time become discarnate, detached from mere bodily or physical ‘reality’ and they are relieved of any allegiance or sense of responsibility to it or for it. In the electric age, the alteration of human identity by a new service environment of information has left whole populations without personal or community values to a degree that far exceeds the effects of food- fuel- and energy-shortages.”
The main scholars and contributors to media ecology have so much to offer Christians in understanding technology and theology. This field of S
mart phones create a new environment that is characterized by fragmented attention, individualism, and a lack of true presence. This is easier for us to realize when we think about a scene we’ve all observed: a family eating at a restaurant with a teenager glued to their phone and completely uninvolved in the conversation. We see this situation and cringe, yet this is exactly what happens in our churches every week. The message of smart phones in church is not the use of Bible apps but the smart phone itself, and the individualism and isolation that comes with it.
There are dozens of other examples we could dive into, like the switch from hymnals, to projectors and PowerPoint presentations. We could talk about lack of valuable architecture and art that encourages churches to adopt the same design principles as a waiting room for a dentist’s office. When churches are not distinct but look just like any other building, their message may be viewed as ordinary and indistinct as well. Truly, in many evangelical churches the only physical artifact that is treated as remotely significant or sacred is the new carpet. However, let’s move on to a conversation about what we’ve discussed so far and how it affects our perception of God.
According to McLuhan,
“In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”
Here McLuhan is restating the incarnation in media terms. Immanuel, “God With Us,” is both what Jesus says but also who he is. In Christianity, the mediator is the message. As we discussed before, the incarnation is not just foundational to our thoughts about Jesus but also our thoughts about technology.
How does the incarnation inform our thoughts about technology?
First, consider the idea of wholeness. In the incarnation Christ is not fragmented into a being half-God and half-man. He is mysteriously and completely both God and man. Does our technology encourage our wholeness or our fragmentation — physically, mentally, and spiritually?
Second, think of presence. Jesus was truly present on earth; he was not an abstraction or an illusion or a spirit. While Jesus is called the mediator, his presence is not mediated; nothing separates humanity from Jesus. Does our technology encourage us to be fully present or does it encourage our distraction and isolation?
Third, consider reality. Jesus did not come to provide an escape from a difficult life but to bring us into a reality of union with him. Does our technology ground us further into the present reality into which Christ has placed us or does it uproot us into a life of escapism, abstraction, and unreality? Also, if the incarnation truly means the medium is the message, then what is our technology saying about who Jesus is to us?
Remember, when we say “incarnate” in the sense of technology, we mean technology that enables our whole presence in true reality. “Discarnate” refers to technology that mediates us to create an experience of “reality” that doesn’t include our physical presence. Examples of discarnate technology include things as ancient as letters and as recent as Snapchat and Periscope. By separating our true presence from our communication, discarnate media risks rendering us fragmented, isolated, and abstracted. One of the dangers of discarnate media is that it extends senses that are truly human. The danger isn’t that technology is so foreign; rather, the risk is in the fact that it extends our very bodies and minds.
If we don’t have a problem with discarnate media we’re essentially saying that our bodies aren’t important parts of who we are. This brings up an interesting problem because it forces us to determine how important our bodies truly are. If our bodies are not important parts of our identity and personhood, then by all means, revel in technologies that are discarnate in nature. However, if we confess with scripture that our bodies are important to our personhood and identity, if we confess that a physical body is part of what it means to be created in the image of God, if Christ’s physical presence on this earth has any significance, then we must confess that using discarnate media is inherently opposed to our faith. Perhaps this is another reason why Christians are so prone to technological idiocy; because we do not have a strong enough theology of our physical bodies to actually perceive a problem with discarnate media.
McLuhan highlighted the problem discarnate media presents Christians when he said, “Isn’t the real message of the Church in the secondary or side-effects of the Incarnation, that is to say, in Christ’s penetration into all of human existence?”
If the true message of the church is the incarnation, but our church services and everyday lives are filled with discarnate media, then what gospel are we preaching? Or better yet, what gospel are we living? McLuhan goes on to say,
“…it is only at the level of a lived Christianity that the medium really is the message.”
The incarnation is not just something to be appreciated through theology or the sacraments or the liturgy; it is something to be lived out in the life of every follower of Jesus, something to penetrate into all of our existence, something to inform even our choices about technology.
Ellul echoed this when he wrote,
“To speak quite frankly, without beating around the bush, a doctrine only has power (apart from that which God gives it) to the extent in which it is adopted, believed, and accepted by men who have a style of life which is in harmony with it.”
He goes on to say that reflecting the incarnation in the way we live is both an individual and collective task. It must be done in community with the support of the body of Christ, and it very well may take us out of our comfort zones. He warns,
“Confronted by these compromises, the church ought not to justify itself, or to justify the world’s solution, but it ought to find its own way, given by God, which it alone can follow. It is only on this condition that the church will cease to be a sociological movement, and be present in the world with the effectiveness given by the Holy Spirit.”
The task of the church in this matter is clear: we must reconsider our society’s acceptance of technology and find our own way. This will require us to have far more robust theologies of Christ and our union with him, of our own physical bodies, and corporate worship. Without this theological foundation for our choices about technology, we will have no way to combat the subtle but all-encompassing hypocrisy of technological idiocy. And until we address the problem of technological idiocy within the church, we cannot begin to create relationships and environments characterized by wholeness, presence, and reality.