theo|digital

I’m posting chapters of my masters thesis on Scripture in a Digital Context.  See more here.

This is not a pipe

One of my favorite places to visit in Chicago is the world-class Art Institute, and over the last decade I’ve often stopped in when I could free an afternoon (although much harder to do now it changed to from voluntary donation to mandatory fee).  Among my many favorites there is Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, whose clever paintings are the perfect pair to the media ecologist’s mindset. Repeating the insights of priest-scholar AKM Adam, I start this chapter with Magritte’s portrait, The Tune and Also the Words, and how it perfectly illustrates the question that drove my thesis “If the Bible is not a book, then what is it?”

But there’s a lot more work in this chapter.  I next seek to explicate the basic stages of communications media history:  and I try to put this in parallel with the use of Christian Scripture in each stage.  This resource didn’t really exist, and so simply compiling this chart took a long time in my research. It was a great tool for getting overall understanding, however.  I cover:

1. Oral:  The Patriarchs
2. Early Chriographic:  Sinai and the Giving of the Law through the Exile
3. Early Chriographic 2: Jesus and the Early Church
4. Later Chriographic:   Church Fathers
5. Early Print:   Protestant Reformation
6. Later Print:  Wesley; American Tract Society
7. Electric:  North American Christianity
8. Electronic / Mass:  Global Christianity
9. Digital:  Glocal Christianity

Finally, having shown that the Word of God to the People of God has often not been a Book, I propose my own theological definition of Scripture.  Broadly set and drawing on language from both theology and communication theory, I say that Scripture is “the mediated revelation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and its illocutionary intent in salvation-history.”

Nerdy?  Yep!  But this is an exciting part for me. Try it out.

• Chapter 4 The Bible as Medium p55-78 (pdf, 1.4mb)

You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, “Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us.” 4 When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, 5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, 7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10 So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.”

You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. 11 Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

Dt 26:3-11

I thought I’d be able to post these in relatively quick succession, but again have been too busy to do so. This week I’ll try to get up several more, starting here with Chapter 3 (See more here).

This chapter of my thesis is the second of my two literature reviews. Chapter 2 is a survey of the doctrine of scripture through time.  Chapter 3 is my due diligence on the communications theory group of media ecology,  Both are huge topics, so all I could do as I wrote these was worry about how much I was leaving out.

If I remember correctly, I think I cut 5-10 pages from this chapter, trying to keep only the points that were too huge to miss, or points that  I would use later on. This was tough to do… because although I didn’t write the paper in chapter order, it was written over the course of a year, and was occasionally recharted during the process.  And this stuff can be difficult to hold in your head all at once!  For instance, I introduce McLuhan’s tetrad (an evaluation grid he created) in this chapter because I planned to use it later.  When wound up cutting the later analysis, I forgot to return and cut this portion of the introduction.

Anyway, this chapter is a quick  tour by way of key names:  Marshall McLuhan then Walter Ong, then briefer treatments of Neil Postman, and James Carey.  For McLuhan and Ong, I note their method and also their personal theological biases found elsewhere in their writings.  Its interesting that these two huge media ecologists were both Catholic theorists.

• Chapter 3 Foundational Literature in Media Ecology p39-54 (pdf, 0.8 mb)

Whoa.