Current Challenges Facing the Theology of Communication
By Robert A. White, S.J.
[Robert White, S.J., organized a program in Communication Studies at the Gregorian University in Rome. This offered graduate-degree preparation for many individuals studying for theology degrees at “the Greg”. This paper opened a conference at St. Augustin University of Tanzania, September 2007 Mwanza – Tanzania.]
A central argument in these pages is that the Catholic Church is facing a crisis in its communication in many parts of the world, especially in Europe, and that this crisis of communication is due, in a significant degree, to a faulty theology of communication. Christianity is a religious system built around communication, and if its theology of communication is out of focus, things can go terribly wrong. Let me begin by briefly outlining what I mean by a theology, why communication is central to Christianity, and what role I think a theology of communication plays in the life of Christianity.
There are, of course, many definitions of theology, but for the purposes of this discussion, I understand a theology as a God perspective. Our language and symbols give names to the objects and experiences around us and define the specific meanings of objects in an otherwise shapeless mass of phenomena. Our religious “faith language” points to what we take to mean the presence and action of God. Religious symbols reveal the presence of God. A theology assembles all the symbols of the presence and action of God in a coherent, explainable system of “God meanings”.
A “good theology”, we argue, enables us to see the presence of God very accurately and to enter union with God’s action, yes, with greater human and social fulfillment, but above all with greater capacity to praise God. A saint is the most tangible evidence of a good theology. A good theology enables us to find joy, hope, redemption, and other fruits of the union with God.
Undoubtedly all religions depend on good communication for their existence because, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has emphasized, all are a symbolic form of knowledge, and symbols are a communicative language. Christianity, we would argue, is especially a religion of communication. Christianity is based on a concept of the divinity as self-revealing and self-communicating, a divinity which exists as a communicating trinity, with a loving communicating community as evidence of the visible presence of the divinity in its actions; it is not a cultural religion but a religion with a mandate to communicate itself to all cultures and to be accepted freely on the basis of its communication -- a religion which seeks to enculturate itself, through communication in all cultures and historical periods.
As a religion of communication, the communication dimension of a culture becomes extremely important for Christianity. The communicative discourse of Jesus, such as the parable, the way of creating symbols, such as the crucifixion of Jesus, and the mode of communication of the apostolic community in discursive discernment and letters, have become constitutive of Christianity. In every succeeding historical period, the taking on of the mode of communication of the context has been central in the development of Christianity. With the introduction of the printing press, the reading of scriptures personally and in small groups has become central to the Christian experience of God.
Because Christianity is so closely related to the communicative culture, it must continually cast off symbols that have ceased to have a sacred meaning, especially when these are co-opted by ideologies of power; it must find new ways to express itself. As David Martin has indicated in Breaking the Image, Christianity must continually discard old symbols that have taken on an antithetical meaning and discover new symbols in new cultural contexts. Christianity moved away from symbols of God as power to a Christ of humiliation, poverty, and powerless service. God is revealed less as all-powerful to a revelation in silence, the nada. A theology of communication helps us discern what language and symbols are truly revealing God’s presence and action in a specific cultural context.
The Evidence of an Inadequate Theology of Communication
Over time, a central focus of my research interest is pastoral renewal and religious revitalization movements. In helping a diocese to analyze how to plan a renewal process, one begins by studying the signs of stagnation.
The most typical sign is the fact that the young people of our community are going elsewhere for their spiritual inspiration, frequently to other churches.
Attendance at religious functions is falling off because they are performed routinely and are not an experience of God for people.
The homilies are not responding to people’s concerns and are not providing a language to discover the presence of God.
In general, the religious symbols we feature do not relate to the way people of this culture discover and experience God. They feel they can find God in experiences not related to the Church -- in Nature, friend groups, new spirituality movements, etc. There is no clear relation between religion, family life, economic activities, or recreational activities.
There seems to be little motivation to reach out and communicate to non-members or to give witness in the public sphere.
There is relatively little production of print or other media materials that seems original and appealing.
The Church is divided between “sectarian tendencies”. There are few strong unifying symbols that all can identify with—liberals and conservatives, young and old, upper, and lower status, etc.
The official Church adopts a condemnatory attitude toward the culture, especially toward the popular culture. The culture is blamed, not the communicative capacity of the Church.
The communication training of pastoral personnel is not considered important. There is little interest in what we might call a theology of communication.
The Role of a Theology of Communication in a Religious Revitalization Movement
Our theology should lead us to go out to direct communication with the people and to listen to them in dialogue. Our theology directs us away from our own internal cogitation and the symbolic formulas of the past to a heart-to-heart communication with the people. We discover their problems, questions, and the symbols of compassion which give them hope and are expressions of their love.
A language of compassion and love of the people, as they are in their cultural context, emerges. The visual imagery of this symbolism bears the imprint of the culture of the people. Our theology of communication enables us to discern the experience of God in these symbols and in a sense “sanctifies” them.
The people have moments of conversion from their despair, isolation, conflicts, and futile life activities. This becomes transformed into liminal moments—retreats, revivals, encounters, charismatic revival, etc.—in which there is an opportunity for profound conversion to community. Again, the theology of communication points to the symbolic atmosphere which creates a liminal experience and an experience of giving oneself to God’s loving action. The theology of communication does not direct us toward a rationalistic reasoning but to a profound act of faith in God and in the Christian community. The conversion experience is carried on in the context of the Christian community with the development of a Christian personality and a Christian culture which emerges out of this general cultural context. The spirituality finds symbols in this culture which communicate to the person their Christian identity, and to the public its Christian identity, in a way that makes sense to the people of this culture. It communicates and attracts the best values of the culture and becomes attractive to the people of this culture. It is especially attractive and inspiring to the young people and provides role models for their life in this socio-cultural context. In a socially differentiated context, there will be many cultural expressions, but also unifying symbols which draw all together.
From this culture there emerges a new iconography, architecture, devotional literature, popular religious culture, models of public service, a new high culture which embodies these values, and an intellectual culture which is a reasonable option to people of faith. Our theology of communication directs us, not to the past or to strongly universalistic, absolutist, transcultural symbols, but to the ability to discover in this new cultural expression of Christianity, the presence of God.
At this point there can emerge a reflexive evaluation of the theology of communication which has been enabling this new cultural expression of Christianity and there can be an explicit codification of the theological method embodied in this. It becomes incorporated into the body of theology widely taught and elaborated, usually in some form of fundamental theology, ecclesiology, and Christology. It is always a theology which directs attention to the culture, to new local theologies, and to emerging theologians in that cultural context. It is deeply aware of the new symbolism, iconography and all the other expressive forms discussed above.
Finally, the theology of communication leads toward forms of communication which appeal to the contemporary culture and ways of training persons for communication in that culture. A vital theology of communication tends to activate every communicative dimension of the Church and brings all Christians into active cooperative union with our self-communicating God in a way that enables us to communicate the Spirit of the God of love to all persons. A vital theology of communication puts us into contact with the dynamic impulse of the Spirit, like opening a circuit of electricity.
In What Sense is the Church Facing a Crisis of Communication?
This flat statement is obviously an over-generalization inviting many distinctions. Virtually, all the studies of the Catholic Church today point out that the so-called “new movements” are the greatest area of vitality. Most of these are founded, directed, and carried forward by lay people who have a profound spirituality but relatively little formal training in the formal theological institutions of the Church. These organizations tend to operate independently of the parochial and diocesan structures and draw relatively little inspiration (or discouragement!) from the seminary-educated clergy. Another quite vital area of the Church are the missionary dioceses in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Also, indicative are clergy who choose special apostolates such as prisons, hospitals, or some youth movements which seem to be inspired by a theology of communication.
It may be helpful to describe this tendency in terms of what Weber called “an ideal type” of clerical culture. In the view of not a few observers, the heartland of the stagnation, with many exceptions, is found among the younger diocesan and religious clergy who recently have come out of seminary formation stamped with the primary motivation of total docility to the arbitrary decisions of the superior. Typically, they have no training in any form of communication in the seminary and have no interest in media or any form of communication outside the sacramentalist routine of a parish.
They have not cultivated any special pastoral outreach interests because they would probably not be allowed to follow up this interest once they get to a parish. They simply passively await the assignment of the bishop or religious superiors and the directives of the equally authoritarian parish priest or others that they are placed to serve. They look forward to settling into the sacramentalist routine of a parish or other assignment, the little friendships they will have, and avoid any opinions or ideas that would be a threat to their getting to a comfortable parish of their own someday. Little in the thinking they cultivated in the seminary, the thinking they absorbed to defend the safety of their priestly careers, reflects a dynamic theology of communication. This leads us to the heart of the stagnation—the theology, or “system of thinking”, which is being taught to future priests in the seminary and to those who will be teaching in the seminaries.
What are some of the central characteristics of the world view of this seminary and clerical “system of thinking”? Central to the thinking is the absolute authority of the priestly knowledge and decision-making capacity. The Church has the truth, and the unswerving maintenance of this truthful position is the answer to the sinfulness, disorder, and corruption of the surrounding world. Only the clergy hold this truth and all ideas of lay people reflect ignorance or possible error.
This truthfulness is upheld by a set of syllogistic arguments which were presented in the seminary and are presumed to be airtight, even if not fully understood. A major enemy is the secularist thinking of modern scientists who have their stronghold in the universities. Young people who go to university are likely to lose their faith. The declining participation in the life of the Church is due mainly to the secularist, rationalist influence of the university professors and other intellectuals. Priests see their homilies as the place to present the propositions they learned in the seminary and the arguments supporting these propositions. Implicitly, much of the communication in the parish is to present the reasons for holding the faith and to develop an interiorly reasoned conviction.
The Origins of a Solipsistic, Rationalist, Non-Communicative Church
There is every evidence that, in the apostolic Christian Church, faith commitment was achieved through a process of participatory communication and consensus. Christ is made present in the formation of a community, and the evangelization of the context was a community activity. Elements of this communitarian life were kept alive especially in the monastic communities and in the great multiplication of lay confraternities.
In the late middle ages and early modernity, there was a widespread conviction that the culture and society of Europe were hopelessly evil and that the power structure of both Church and state were profoundly corrupted. The only way to preserve one’s personal integrity was to withdraw into one’s own conscience, one’s own sense of truth, and of right and wrong. The Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” (as a person) summed this up for many people. Many Protestant groups found assurance of one’s rightness in one’s inspired reading of scripture and in the shared life of the community. Catholics were not encouraged to form community but were to find assurance of their personal, individual integrity in conformity with the teaching of the Holy See.
With the advance of the Enlightenment, the public sphere became explicitly a-religious and much more rationalist. To preserve one’s personal religious and moral integrity, everyone had to form a reasoned act of faith which established rationally held convictions regardless of the people and norms of the situation around one. The spiritualities of the times which were the foundation of the theologies were all based on individual discernment and individual commitment. The “faith”, taught in seminaries and in the catechism, became a series of memorized dogmatic statements which were defended by the official interpretation of scripture, by tradition. by philosophical arguments, and by refuting, in some way, the positions of critics. There was no need for any dialogical communication and consensus in the community.
Catholics pretty much adopted the morality of the rationalist, scientific professionalism that became the dominant public culture of Europe, but their faith was a matter of personal interior commitment to the dogmatic propositions of the Church. This solipsistic religious faith was further reinforced by the domination of the public sphere by the liberal rationalist political movements in the nineteenth century and by totalitarian movements in the twentieth century. There was a brief move toward more public, communitarian Catholic life in Christian social movements in various parts of the world in the early twentieth century; this found its expression in the Second Vatican Council. However, postmodernist movements were evaluated as thoroughly “anti-Catholic” in their spirit, and Catholics, once more, withdrew into their personal convictions; they tended to see the culture, now dominated more by the pop culture of the media, as inherently non-Catholic.
There is a strongly Kantian logic underlying this. Discursive processes of arriving at truth and conviction, which are common in the deliberative culture of democratic societies, are not important because truth is there to be intuitively grasped by the individual mind. The heart of the spiritual is not the multifaceted symbol, but the univocal written statement. Cultures are only appearances. Underlying cultures are the true universalistic principles, and this is where God is to be discovered. Christianity is to approach culture not to learn new dimensions of the sacred, but to transform cultures. The hierarchical Church is the source of transcendent truth, and the clergy are expected to be the representatives of this to the people.
Young clergy raised in this cultural background may use the mass media extensively as a passive leisure activity, but they reject it as a form of their pastoral communication as being alienating and exploitative. They are not aggressively evangelizing in any sense, but they do treasure their little friendships in the parish contexts. Most gather around themselves in a parish a small group of special friends, but generally have relatively little communication with the mass of parishioners.
This tradition places considerable emphasis on a type of propositional theology of communication. This has evolved into a communication based on pastoral letters, synodal documents and bishops’ statements as the place where God is found. A variation on this is the emphasis on legal norms, canon law, and the judiciary tribunals of the Church as the place where God is revealed and experienced. The law-like, propositional catechism is another place where God’s mind is revealed. Many of the pronouncements of the Church take on the nature of political manifestoes and, in the secularization of the public sphere, the Church attempts to establish its own public, political sphere.
Another variation of this is a theology of communication based on technological power. The emphasis is on communication out from a single source, the official teaching of the Church, to the masses of people. The model is the commercial media which uses highly “professional” personnel and represents official sources. The big media model needs big funding. It therefore links religious media with the economically and politically powerful. God is to be revealed in the experience of the rituals of the hierarchy of the Church from a distance.
Still another variation is a theology of communication based on high culture. God is to be found in the more rational restrained culture of the educated elite. The great masters, of music, art, literature reveal God -- because they are unchanging and not influenced by contemporary culture. Again, God is more likely to be discovered in the productions of the highly paid professionals of high culture who cater to the tastes the rich and powerful. Fortunately, or unfortunately, this tends to be a church of a former generation and a dying church. There are some refugees from contemporary culture who give the impression that a younger generation wants this also, but this is, at best, ambiguous.
An Alternative Spirituality and Alternative Theology of Communication
The cultural context of the twenty-first century provides a quite different communication context than the sixteenth century. It is a context of general deliberative, discursive culture, with widespread access to information and ideas. One’s identity is not given to one by one’s nation, religion, and social class, but is constructed in a context of discursive interaction with others. People borrow heavily from the popular culture and from the consumerism of the day to tell themselves and others who they want to be. The empowerment of identities and the struggle to create the cultural capital of identities, including the right to express one’s own assumed identity, becomes a major area of political action, but more at the local, more interpersonal, level, than at the national level. There is a continual struggle against the alienating colonizing of the life-space by the powerful persuasive instruments of contemporary society.
Religious identity is also something not inherited but constructed, largely through an interactive, discursive process. Through interaction with others, one discovers values of goodness and beauty in others and one makes this a part of one’s own life. Instead of one overarching institutional spirituality, there are many movements and many spiritualities to choose from. Leadership in these movements is based on evidence of authentic union with God. Lay people are more likely to be the founders and directors of these movements. The clergy are not a source of inspiration; they are distant ritual figures. People gather symbols from the grounded context the clergy create, but they do not listen to them as the up-front source or “figure” in one’s life. One is not born into a spirituality, but spends a lifetime in “conversion”, discovering and creating a spirituality. This personal experience of God is one’s identity, the privileged place to discover God. One continues to keep seeking greater personal honesty and authenticity.
People find spirituality in contexts such as expressive ritual, charismatic demonstrations, music, or the liminal experience of pilgrimage. Spirituality tends to be “fundamentalist”, but not necessarily hierarchical and institutional. Some quite conservative movements that like to reach back to earlier Latin liturgies and forms of orthodoxies, tend to formulate their own spiritualities based upon their own collective identities. If they construct identities around these symbols, they tend to discover God there. People today do not necessarily reject the institutional Church; they see it as a great umbrella for many different movements representing different spiritualities. The Church, to them, is more of a discursive interaction among movements than a dogmatic, propositional legalistic unity.
The ordinary Catholic has no problem in rejecting the Church’s position on birth control or other positions if these do not seem quite reasonable. One takes from the institutional Church what seems fitting for one’s spiritual identity construction. The external witness of a coherent identity and whether this treats others decently, is more important than the logical, internal coherence of one’s moral code. For those whose point of reference is the institutional Church, this is religious confusion, but, in fact, most people are, in some way, constructing their personal belief system. Most people who persevere in a process of religious conversion gradually experience a coherence between their personal identities and the institutional framework they choose to live within.
The media are an important locus of discovering one’s identity and discovering God in the construction of one’s identity. The media are not a direct influence, as many (especially in the Church hierarchy) would like to think, but a source in which people can pick and choose the symbols one is looking for. If oral reading, and then reading of print, have been an important locus in the past, today the electronic media are a locus for picking and choosing symbols that conveniently fit one’s identity.
Many university-educated and professional people have relatively little interest in the Church because they perceive it in terms of the hierarchical, dogmatic, power-oriented Church they knew, superficially, in their childhood. That form of Church is completely alien to their quest of authentic identity constructed in their leisure time. When they contact the authenticity of the “new movements” they may find their way back to the Church. Many, of course, are still looking to sheer consumerism as the way to construct identity, and the coherence, even of external authenticity, is not really a part of this.
The New Theology of Communication
One of the most important sites of encountering God is in the small, dialogical faith-sharing groups. This is the occasion of spontaneous prayer, biblical reflection in groups, mutual discernment, and working together in loving outreach to less fortunate people. Although there is great variation in the expressive style of these groups, they also like spontaneous personal sharing of religious experiences. The presence of God is found in the consciousness of one’s experience so one can share this with other people.
The new movements place a much greater emphasis on communicating their message of new personal integration to the largest possible number of people. They almost invariably place a great deal of emphasis on the use of media, both small and mass media. This is one of the major contrasts with the theology of communication of the clerical Church which absolutely abhors the mass media as the source of myriad evils; this becomes an excuse for their not using it.
The conversion process that draws many to the new religious movements often begins in a personal crisis in which the meaning of life falls to pieces. They begin a search in life for a more coherent system of meaning. In part this will lead them to speak more intensively with personal acquaintances, but they will also be more open to the media as a source of information. Often the new movements are centered around a media figure.
The presence of God is more likely to be found in the horizontal, non-hierarchical, participatory, communitarian modes of communication. The more one can say what one thinks authentically, the more one has discovered God. This gives the lay person, who is close to his or her authentic feelings, much more status in the community. The clergy can have an influence, not in terms of their hierarchical authority, but to the degree they participate at the same level of authenticity as the lay people. They may be an influence as spiritual directors, but only if they are, in some way, a part of the movement and share the experiences of the movements. Their dogmatic knowledge is not, as such, an authentic revelation of the presence of God.
The lectio divina, the highly personal inspirations that come from reading a sacred text, whether it be the sacred scriptures or official documents of the Church, are more important for finding the presence of God than the content of the text itself. The text becomes a multifaceted symbol which can have somewhat different meanings to people coming from different cultural backgrounds. In this sense, the participation in ritual is a kind of liminal experience -- not in following the exact stipulations of the ritual format but as a revelation of the presence of God.
There is great interest in the shifting, changing, popular culture as a source of finding God. A good example of this is the enormous popularity of contemporary Christian music and the material culture associated with more evangelical, charismatic movements. Given the openness of the movements to the poor and marginal, as an authentic expression of the gospel, there is also an openness to the cultures of the more poor and marginal peoples. Many become fascinated with the spirituality of the native Americans, poor African Americans, or many other poor and marginal groups that seem to be more authentic because they are marginal.
What Are the Challenges?
In these reflections I have not attempted to sketch out what I think should be included in a theology of pastoral communication, but simply to argue that a theology of communication is important in any form of pastoral communication. I have attempted to illustrate this importance by indicating what I see to be the relation between the crisis in the Church’s communication in some parts of the world and the specific theology of communication that underlies this. The contrast of two ideal types I think can be helpful in seeing how a theology of communication is related to pastoral action. In the real world, of course, the ideal is to select the best alternatives of many ideal types to meet a given pastoral situation.
Particularly important, however, is the theology of communication that seems to support pastoral renewal occurring in many parts of the world. I doubt very much that we can engender a pastoral renewal by introducing a new form of theology of communication. The moves toward renewal originate in the profound awareness of crisis and the willingness of some people to give their lives to help people whose lives are caught in this crisis. One of the things that emerges in a renewal process is a theology of communication that, among other things, becomes important in the formation of the people who will work in the renewal. Yes, we want a renewal. Let us become aware of the importance of a theology of communication in a renewal process.