Heck Lecture, Presented At Union Theological Seminary In Dayton Ohio
By Frances Forde Plude
I would like to begin with a story. Recently, I visited a theologian-friend in the Tyrolean Alps. I was feeling rather sad that the visit was ending and, as we were driving along a country road, I noticed this majestic mountain scene off in the distance. To the left there were clouds and rain. Further, to the right, was sunshine. I said: "In my country when you have rain and sunshine together you often see a rainbow". He teased me: "That's just American kitsch, Fran. We don't have rainbows in Germany."
Suddenly, a magnificent rainbow draped itself lovingly over this mountain scene. It was almost as if a voice in heaven had declared: "Look, she wants a rainbow, so give her a rainbow." This experience contained within it a powerful shared symbol for the two of us. As my friend travels around the world, he sends postcards to me from various places; whenever he finds a card with a rainbow on it, that is the postcard he selects. Just recently I received a postcard of a rainbow over the Sea of Galilee, as he visited the Holy Land.
Of course, each of you could tell stories of your own of the power of shared symbols, of words -- how much they communicate. A basic theme of my presentation is, however, that it is the shared experience that is powerful. In fact, my favorite definition of communication is "shared meaning."
However, before we get carried away by rainbows, let me give you a practical road map of our Heck Lecture journey. I will continue to stress the epistemological change in communication when it becomes easily dialogic, when it is widely shared -- as it has become with modern communication technologies like the telephone and the computer network. I believe the real information revolution is this easy technological interactivity. The computer alone allows interactivity with its user. But when the computer is networked, you are truly dialogic. The network is the real revolution. That is why the Internet is so popular.
I see interactivity appearing as a philosophical dialectic in Paul Ricoeur (with his emphasis on metaphor and narrative); and I believe the 1960s applied the dialectical theories of Hegel and Marx to the critique of mass culture, here in the U.S. and in many other places in the world. Even the deconstructionist, even the profound transformation of the man-woman relationship that is underway -- all this reflects mutations in our search for meaning. Of prime interest to us, however, is how interactivity poses a theological challenge. I will link all of this with Paul Tillich's conception of correlation, proposed in his Systematic Theology.
Tillich's wide-ranging genius linked the theologian to contemporary society -- to the arts, to Freudian psychology. It is an easy jump, then, to link theology with a body of work that includes more than 80 years of serious scholarship on the communication process -- not to mention the growth of a mass-mediated world.
I will also share the historical development of the new field of Communication Theology; this new way of thinking seems to demonstrate Tillich's vision of correlation -- between the theologian and a contemporary society that is certainly more electronically wired and interactive than it was in Tillich's time. Following up on Tillich's correlation theory, I will discuss practical applications of integrating communication with theology, especially when the communication is two-way.
Samples include:
how interactive communication technologies are instruments for a dialogic faith
how differing views of church will dictate differences in communication, some less dialogic than others
how women are more and more insistent they be true partners in faith dialogue
Then we can move to pastoral ministry, I will apply the concept of interactivity to language by viewing scripture and Christology as interactive communication between God, the people of God, and God's universe.
We can also view communication interactivity from a relationship perspective in prayer and spirituality. This can touch upon Tillich's "Power of Being" in a technological/interactive age. We can reflect upon how Protestant mystics and contemplatives from the East and the West have moved beyond language in prayer -- into what one mystic called "the cloud of unknowing". We can see, for the prayer of quiet. one must occasionally pull out the electronic plug. Thomas Merton found, for example, that authentic prayerful solitude enabled him to re-connect with humanity in a deeper, more caring, network.
I should address format and approach for a moment. With communication interactivity as my basic theme, I certainly do not want the Heck Lecture experience to be one-way. Each presentation will reserve time at the end for questions and responses from you in the audience. Frankly, we who are collaborating within the developing field of Communication Theology welcome input and new insights as the field matures.
In addition, there will be some small group discussions throughout the day tomorrow and a luncheon later, when I hope we can all interact. It will be especially important to relate some of these ideas to the "real world" of what we will all be doing in the future. So communication interactivity is our theme and here we examine it briefly in philosophy, more extensively in theology.
The Communication Context
To begin with, most people viewing the communication media field today tend not to think about interactivity at all. We worry about what some communication scholars have focused upon: media effects. We see U.S. video (on TV, cable, film) with its heavy emphasis on verbal and physical violence, with even the news media emphasis on violent news, and we worry about the effect of this on those we serve -- even on ourselves. And the key problem is the context in which this violence is portrayed: often the so-called "hero" is the most violent; often violence goes unpunished; often it is shown as a logical solution to a problem. And it only adds to the seriousness of the problem when we realize that on any evening in any major city in the world almost all the top ten movies showing in that city are American films.
In addition to the entertainment and news media content, think about the whole field of communication persuasion (what we used to call rhetoric), which is the basis of all advertising and public relations and the political "spin doctors". Think about the impact of music, within audio and video media.
How can I focus on interactive media when there is all this one-way media? Well, the answer is it is not one-way. Communication research shows that individuals do interact with news stories, with entertainment stories, with advertising stories.
In fact, viewers are busy sorting out a lot of things as they react to media. College students, for example, are notorious soap opera fans. They are clearly "studying" socialization in these dramas, even as they laugh at the content. And much has been said about how the Star Trek "trekkie" culture seems to key into an altruistic desire, especially among youth, to overcome evil. Incidentally, I have taught classes of female students, both traditional and non-traditional ages, where not a single woman has watched Star Trek at all regularly. Clearly there are gender differences in our story preferences.
Now we can look at the story of Communication Theology and how it grew.
Communication Theology and Pastoral Ministry
I'd like to begin these reflections with another story -- one that conjures up the perils of learning to survive in a computerized culture. Many years ago, my husband and I made the decision to buy a complete personal computer system and to learn about computers together. Then, as now, the best way to become computer literate is just to begin -- to fiddle with a computer until you get the hang of it. I was then struggling to teach and manage almost 1100 students majoring in Mass Communication at Emerson College in Boston. So, Don did a lot of research, compared prices, and on the 31st of December we entered the store where we thought we could get the best deal. I smiled sweetly and said to a salesman: "For tax purposes, we're going to purchase a complete computer system before the end of the day today; why don't you talk us into spending that money here in your store?"
So, he scurried around and put together a great deal, with lots of free software, etc. and we bought the system and took it all home. Don, who was electronically gifted, connected all the cables and set up the various components on card tables in our living room. And we were all set to enter the computer age leaning on each other. And three weeks later he was dead! He came down with pneumonia, it settled around his heart, and even with ten days of intensive care in the hospital, the doctors could not save his life.
I often say to audiences, if you think you're intimidated by computers, or resentful that we live in a computerized age, imagine how I felt every time I entered my empty home and saw all that computer stuff in my living room. A month or so later I thought of a solution. I called up our local high school, asked for the computer teacher, identified myself, and said: "I need to rent a kid". I asked if he could recommend one of his best students and asked what a fair hourly wage would be for this student to tutor me. In all the years since then I' have learned most things I know about computers from my students. And they get such a kick out of knowing that they are teaching their professor! We all need to confront the challenge of today's electronic culture; it was just our luck (or grace) to be called to be Gospel witnesses in an age of interactivity.
To re-cap the main concepts so far:
interactivity is an epistemological change in the communication process
interactivity is part of the dialectic of philosophy; it's reflected in Paul Tillich's methodology of correlation, in David Tracy's analogical imagination, and virtually all theologians today think and work in terms of correlation
correlation links theology, the arts, psychology, and with communication - helping to explain the growth of a new field: Communication Theology
interactive technologies are instruments for dialogic communities and in practical ways, for example, in the Common Ground project of Bernardin, and in women's desire for more participation in all aspects of the faith dialogue; and
some of my own thinking on this has resulted in an interactive framework of analysis model which helps to explain the value of strategic alliances -- interactive networks that foster collaborative thinking and action.
Now, we should get practical. Here I would like to explore how communication interactivity is the basis of varied areas of communication theology and pastoral practice, how interactive principles and technologies strengthen language, narrative and public discourse. Among these practical arenas are scripture; Christology; the power of narrative v. the propositional approach; homiletics or preaching; the public square; and networked communities such as your own congregations or the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Scripture Seen as a Dialogue of Love
The Vatican II document Dei Verbum "interprets (Scripture) as the personal self-revelation of the triune God who invites human beings to enter freely into a dialogue of love" (O'Collins, Retrieving Fundamental Theology (p 48). What a difference it makes if we see revelation as primarily interactive! And what a gift this represents -- that an all-powerful God interacts and invites.
Gerald O'Collins says:
Human beings reveal themselves to others (and to themselves) when they perform properly human acts which are always symbolic: speaking, working, dressing, eating, love making, traveling, worshiping, being sick and dying. The divine self-communication 'corresponds' to our symbolic nature. God, the revealer is God the symbolizer (p 98-99).
Collins adds:
Symbols emerge mysteriously... One finds such depth and range of meaning in the symbolic language of the fourth gospel: for instance, 'I am the bread of life;' 'I am the light of the world'... From the book of Genesis on, God's communication often takes the form of living symbols, the flood, the sign of the rainbow (which) symbolizes God's undying friendship (p 101).
For a communication theorist, all of this recalls the theory of symbolic Interactionism (Mead) or Barthes' semiotics.
However, there is another way to reflect upon the Bible and our electronic culture. This has been done creatively and persuasively by Tom Boomershine, a member of the United Theological Seminary faculty. I remember how excited I became when I first read Tom's question: "... would we not affirm that electronic technology has its source in the mind of God"? This echoes Rahner's reminder that the world is graced.
And Tillich says:
The new (aspect of) man's cultural activity is first, the double creation of language and technology. They belong together. In the first book of the Bible, man in paradise is requested by God to give names to the animals (language) and to cultivate the garden (technology). (Systematic Theology, Vol. III, p 57).
Tom Boomershine confesses: "My hunch is that God has given us the technology of electronic communications in order to further God's steady purpose of loving us and enabling us to love one another". (Communicating Faith in a Technological Age, p 86). Also exciting to me was Tom's reminder that our own transition to an electronic culture simply mirrors the "transition from an oral to a written Gospel ... part of a cultural revolution from the patterns of Jewish oral culture to the patterns of Hellenistic literate culture."
He notes:
The new forms of community in early Christianity took place in the emerging literate culture of Hellenism and are a clear instance of interaction between community and communications technology (p 90).
And Boomershine's challenge rings out:
How is the living Christ seeking to be embodied in the culture of electronic communications? (The question is) how the Word is to be preached and the sacraments faithfully celebrated by means of electronic communications so that Christ's body can be authentically present in the culture of the electronic age (p 97).
Now, let us move from scripture to Christology. Whenever I reflect upon the text "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God". I am grasped by Communication Theology. If God's self-revealing dialogue runs through the Old Testament, how it comes alive in the Gospels! Now we have moved from symbol to person -- one who is God's Word Who communicates directly with us, who shares our humanity. Historical interaction!
In the Christology reading I did to prepare these talks I was amazed (even confused) by what is going in in Christology today. I knew, of course, of the search for the historical Jesus, of Ray Brown's wonderful scholarship, of the Jesus Seminar. I found in my files some media cover stories which appeared just within the last year:
A Time magazine cover story on "The Search for Jesus" (April 8, 1996)
A Newsweek Kenneth Woodward cover feature: "Re-thinking the Resurrection: A New Debate About the Risen Christ" (April 1996); and
The Atlantic Monthly cover: "The Search for a No-Frills Jesus" (December 1996)
And this is just the so-called "secular" press. I am no expert on this, but I do recall one prominent European theologian saying to me: "There's a lot of nonsense out there". One article notes that European scholars are aghast at all this reconstruction -- at the American university's tendency to American enthusiasm and entrepreneurship; we seem to them to have an exaggerated scholarly desire to break new ground. (Charlotte Allen, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1996).
Let us reflect again on Tom Boomershine's plea that churches do serious work on communicating God and the Scriptures authentically in our electronic culture. There is a certain irony, isn't there, that Christ appears regularly on the cover of our secular magazines. That the third most frequently visited Web sites in cyberspace are religious Web pages. (The only topics that are more popular are sex and finances).
All this is going on as we are trying, as church leadership, to figure out how to communicate in an electronic culture. We need to be aware that if we do not invest the time, the personnel, and the research in building these bridges between theology and communication theory and practice, there will be a lot of nonsense out there. There are communication theories about groupthink: the concurrence-seeking tendencies of close-knit groups that can cause them to suspend critical thinking and make inferior decisions.
We could be learning from communication and culture studies that show that "Humans are ... suspended in webs of significance that they themselves have spun". Such theories proclaim: "An organization doesn't have a culture; it is a culture -- a unique system of shared meanings.
However, beyond communication theory, I am grounded in Christology by the theologian, Walter Kasper's statement: “The question is: Who is Jesus Christ? Who is Jesus Christ for us today? ... The assertion 'Jesus is the Christ' is the basic statement of Christian belief, and Christology is no more than the conscientious elucidation of that proposition. (Jesus the Christ (p 15).
Karl Rahner speaks of "a searching Christology". However, he says we must "move from a searching Christology, which seeks to discover the absolute bringer of salvation in history, to a Christology which has really found this bringer of salvation in history. It is in this conviction, that the bringer of salvation has been found, that the very heart and substance of Christianity subsists (A New Christology, p 7).
But how can I ignore the volume entitled Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology, by Elizabeth Johnson? (One Trappist monk told me that taking a course with Professor Johnson on Christology saved his Faith!) In her chapter on Christology from a feminist perspective, Johnson notes:
Almost all theology in the Christian tradition, including liberation theology done from the perspective of the poor and oppressed, has been done by male theologians. In our day we are witnessing the phenomenon that, all over the world, the 'other half' of humanity, women, are waking up to their own dignity and finding their own voice.
She continues: “One result has been that within the community of disciples, faith is now being reflected upon explicitly from the perspective and experience of women... a theology based upon the conviction that women share equally with men in the dignity of being human. Johnson concludes: “The christological question 'Who do you say that I am?' receives a response with yet another dimension when answered from the experience of believing women (Consider Jesus, p 97).
Once again, I remind theologians and pastoral ministers that communication studies, as it examines cultural context and communication, has concluded that "masculine and feminine styles of discourse are best viewed as two distinct cultural dialects rather than as inferior or superior ways of speaking" (Text, p 497).
And a reminder that Deborah Tannen's research work on genderlect styles shows that men's "report talk focuses on status and independence. Women's rapport talk seeks human connection." (p. 497)
I would like to hear your thoughts.