Narrative & Communication Theology in a Postliterate Culture
By Terrence W. Tilley and Angela Ann Zukowski
[Terrence Tilley served as the Avery Cardinal Dulles Professor of Catholic Theology at Fordham University in New York and Chairman of the Theology Department there. Angela Ann Zukowski is Director of the Pastoral Institute and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton, in Ohio. She developed a Virtual Learning Community training thousands of religious educators with a global reach of courses in both English and Spanish.]
A decade and a half ago, our late colleague, Thomas M. Martin, wrote, “the persistent experience of electronically-transmitted stories has profound impact on the basic notion of oneself as it relates to one’s religious sense of reality.” All of what follows could be read as an explication of this one sentence. In 1978, Walter Ong. S.J., wrote, “new technologies of print and electronics have affected not just the external world but the interior of man's mind, the entire noetic economy in which she/he experiences oneself and the world. In this sense, the technologies of writing, print, and electronics are more operative within us than outside us." All of what follows could also be taken as an explication of Ong’s point.
The main point these authors make is one we endorse: communication media not only affect us, but also, in an ontological sense, they effect us. If the emergence of a postliterate electronic culture is a shift in human consciousness as pervasive as Marshall McLuhan, Ong, and a host of others have said it is, then we are in some ways essentially different from our forebears who lived in a literate print culture. And if this is so, communication theology especially needs to be reconceived fundamentally for a postliterate age.
Media Create and Convey Meaning and Meanings
What the media communicate is meanings and meaning. These meanings, for better and worse, infiltrate our “soul” and constitute our very selves. A quarter century or so ago, when Bernard Lonergan reflected on the functional specialty of communications in theology, he wrote, “it is in this final stage that theological reflection bears fruit.” It is in this stage that meaning is communicated. Meaning, Lonergan noted, was cognitive, constitutive, communicative, and effective. While his sketch of communications as a functional specialty in theology is hardly definitive or exhaustive, it reminds us that we cannot forget the varied functions of meaning and the domains of communication.
Lonergan’s analysis could easily be extended to note that effective communication constitutes social selves, i.e., individuals as members of communities which constitute them and communities as networks of relationships constituted by common meaning which individuals share. Heidegger and Wittgenstein and their followers have made commonplace the insights these philosophers have won: “Language is not merely descriptive, but constitutive and performative.” “When we learn a language, we learn a world.” “Don’t ask for meaning, ask for use!” The languages in which we learn to communicate, the ways in which we learn to use what our shared tongues give us, the patterns, and images we discern and create in our communication: these all simultaneously give us a distinctive (but not isolated, private, or impenetrable) self in a common (but not determined, final, or unchangeable) world.
By “language” we do not mean “sentences” strung together, or “words,” or any sort of merely verbal expression. By “language” we mean to invoke the whole network of communication, verbal and nonverbal, words and gestures, images and sentences, in and through which we communicate (or fail to communicate) with each other. Poststructuralist thinkers, especially the late Michel Foucault, have taught us the complex ways in which language forms, institutions, and communication are co-constituted. Shifting the same gesture or image from one co-constituted discourse system to another shifts the meaning of the image or gesture. When Milton Berle “camped it up” in skits that included cross-dressing on his 1950s television show, it evoked relatively “innocent laughter” among its viewers. Today, those same scenes evoke much more ‘knowing’ laughter, as the culture has become far more aware of the significance of cross-dressing for gays and transvestites. The point is that the “meaning” of the gesture changes as the context in which it is performed changes, even though the “gesture” itself is “the same.” If “language” conveys meaning, it is not the isolated gesture or utterance which does so, but the act performed in the context of the co-constituted discourse system which does so. A second way to put this point is that as the “language” (in the sense of a communication or discourse system) changes, so does the meaning of our images, our gestures, our speech acts.
Just as meaning has multiple dimensions, as Lonergan noted, so must the media in and through which we communicate have multiple dimensions. We are not constituted as social selves by words alone but by images, discourse systems, and natural and social locations which are part of the “meaning system” which provides us with media of communication, including verbal communication. Although there are many examples of this, the emergence of what we today call “fundamentalism” is instructive: its first recorded use, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is in 1922. While the notion of the “fundamentals” of the faith is a concept that goes back at least to the beginning of the Enlightenment era, it is only in the modern period and only in opposition to “liberalism” that a person could be a “fundamentalist” in the sense in which we now use that term. If being a “fundamentalist” is a constituent of a person’s character, her “social self,” and, if that self is, or is of, her essence, then that person could not (and that is a logical “could not”) have existed in an earlier era. In one way, this seems a commonplace.
However, theologians seem to presume, unwarrantedly, that these differences are accidental, not substantial. But each of us is a zoon politikon, to use Aristotle’s term. Each of us is homo loquens, homo ludens, homo sapiens. But to be each of these – political-social, speaking, playing, knowing – is to be a social self. We are social by nature and as our socialization changes, our nature changes. And the very potentiality for the sort of social self one might actualize is not a constant in human history. The media in which and through which we communicate are constitutive of the sorts of selves we can become. We do not mean to deny there are constants in human nature which transcend time. But we do mean to say that, in the concrete actuality of humanity, the essence of human nature is not, and cannot be, exhausted by these constants.
In this context, communication theology, whether poorly done or well done, constitutes social religious selves, the church individually and collectively. Communication effects the church. This is not a prescription, but a description, of what Lonergan’s eighth functional specialty is and does. The actual theology communicated has constituted the religious selves in the religious worlds of the church. Whether it is the sermon preached, the liturgy celebrated, the televangelist tuned-in, the images etched in stained glass or painted on walls or received on the TV tube, or the charismatic testimony heard, we are, as meaning-seeking beings, the product of the meanings we have ingested. Of course, this does not mean we “are what we eat”; what is distinctive about each of us is that we put it all together in different ways. What is common about each of us is that we share so many patterns of understanding, attitude, and action. We are, as religious selves, the result (but not the simple effect) of the theologies we have had communicated to us in a myriad of media.
Communication, Communio, and Narrative
For religious communication, the “basic question is how communication can lead to Communio.” Günter Virt has described authentic communio as that which we want when we seek “the ways of seeing each other free, of mutual openness, of sacrificing and receiving, in sum, for a full and successful unity of life.” But while this abstract and formal goal is one we can all applaud, the ways in which this abstract goal is imagined as a realizable possibility vary wildly. The media have shaped our imaginations of what that sort of abstract communio would be in the concrete. We imagine chat rooms on the world wide web as places of authentic communication. We imagine authentic communio as fleeting as the joys (rarely the sorrows) of casual sex. The media have shaped, some would say “warped,” our imaginations. As Philip Rossi put it, “Media have acquired the symbolic and mythic power that enables them to play a role not only in shaping culture but also in shaping our perceptions both of culture and of our own identity within culture.” The problem with Virt’s question is that the “dice are already loaded”: our imaginations of what communio means in the concrete are not in the least naive but shaped by the various images we have ingested through the media.
We want to add to this discussion of language, media, and imagination, that meaning is carried in narratives, whether implicit or explicit. Finally, the media tell us stories that infiltrate our souls. Even the fleeting and powerful images on our televisions get their significance from the narrative context in which they are placed--a point powerfully made by a Clio-award winning PSA. The advertisement begins with a black man’s face on the screen. A voice-over reads the name that appears alongside the picture, the arrest record which appears next, the criminal conviction and the sentence the criminal received. And then, in the final line, the picture is identified as an image of the cop who had caught the criminal. The point of the commercial is to counteract racism--because our racism (a “social evil” which infects us) initially gets us to tell the “wrong story” about the image of the black face: that the man pictured is the criminal. It is not that the image is racist, but the story we racists tend to tell to make sense of the visual image is conditioned by the discourse system in which we dwell and the media that have formed our imaginations. Our “habitual” narrative for this picture coupled with these words is a story that “automatically” associates the picture of an African American male with criminal behavior. And the commercial gives us our ‘comeupance’ because it exposes the warped narrative structure into which we imaginatively place the items of data in the thirty-second TV spot.
Images without narratives are indeterminate in meaning. Images do carry specific ranges of meanings if, and only if, they are set in an implicit or explicit narrative. The point we can draw from our reflections and from the examples of “Uncle Milty” and the “black cop” PSA is simple: Human meaning is intrinsically and unavoidably narratively structured.
While they did not explicitly advocate a narrative theology, both Martin and Ong reflected on the importance of narrative for communication as constitutive and effective. Narratives, enacted in ritual and expressed in lives, carry the substance of faith. In general, to understand a word, a phrase, a gesture, a sentence, an act, or a pattern, one needs to place them in a narrative context. In general, meaning is carried effectively in and by narratives. And this is also a descriptive, not a prescriptive, point. If you would tell me the shape of your faith, tell me first not of what you think, what you feel, or what you will; tell me first from where you have walked and where you are heading. Tell me of your journey. For “faith is first in the feet,” not the head, heart, or gut. It is not everyone who feels the Lord’s presence, who cries out the Lord’s name, who gazes on the Lord’s splendor, who shall enter the kingdom. The narrative of your life – with all its hesitations, anomalies, ambiguities, confusions, and errors to deflect one from a desired path – is the story of your faith, of the theology you live, of the theology or theologies which have affected the self you have become in walking the course of your life. We do not presume that you can, at any given moment, construct or narrate this story accurately; upon occasion, we may try to do just that and succeed or fail in varying degrees. But the vexing specter of “self-deception” is never fully vanquished and some of us never “spell out” the stories of our lives.
If we can take these various points as given, three important points are implied for communication theology. First and foremost, for us, not only must the central vehicle of communication not be conceived as “doctrines” or “morals” or “rules,” but as stories which contextualize images which shape our perceptions, our imaginations, even our very desires. Narratives, not bare propositions, carry images and thus effectively communicate meaning. Narratives form us as much as we form them. Whether considered as fides quae creditur or fides qua creditur, the Christian faith has a narrative structure. The shape of Christian faith is communicated in, through and by the stories of lives lived under an inspiration rooted in the story of that Just Man, by stories of hope and trust, of fear and love, of loss and gain, of theosis and redemption. “Faith is first in the feet.” We are people of the way. Doctrinal formulae and moral rules are more “shorthand” for the life of faith than pillars that support such a life. Theological propositions are not the operative center of the tradition as communicated and lived: as Lonergan implied, the theological work on them is preliminary to the fruitful practice of communication.
As we live in a world of evocative and flashing media, we need to communicate in narratives which can shape the imagination of what communio could really be. Our narratives cannot be didactic but must be as evocative of conversion as the Clio-award winning “black cop” PSA is. To construct such narratives requires utilizing the resources available in this culture, including but not limited to, traditional religious imagery. In an era in which we construct, rather than find, meaning (more on this below), we need to communicate stories which can be used to evoke not doctrines or morals per se, but images of how we can live together in communion in our world.
Second, the media in and through which the narrative is communicated, shapes the meaning of the narrative and, hence, of the social selves who hear, respond to, and dwell in those narratives. We have made this point in various ways. Pope John Paul II noted this in Redemptoris Missio when he acknowledged the Church could not merely “use” the media to spread the Christian message, but must “integrate that message into the ‘new culture’ created by modern communication.” That culture is not separable from the narratives that constitute it, but clearly is a culture, even a “virtual community,” constituted powerfully by “an electronic technology” that is as much in us as around us.
We are awash in a sea of visual images, of envisioned stories and implied stories. They rush at us faster than Burma Shave signs on a highway. Today, the mass media engage in provocative story telling which effectively communicates meanings that constitute people’s lives. In this sense, we need to take Mother Angelica as seriously as we take MTV. We need to take seriously the change in the shape of the portrayed American family and the portrayed shape of friendship--Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver have been surpassed subsequently by Friends, The Simpsons, Roseanne, and Malcolm in the Middle. We need to take seriously the powerful popular narratives that shape cultures differently. We need to take seriously the emergence of telecommunications of all sorts, and their evolution into a world wide web of communications. We need to take seriously both the fact that the world is now, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, a global village and yet a fragmented conglomerate of isolated communities often ignorant or fearful of each other. We want to be able to communicate the meaning of the gospel in the fragmented communities which are reflected – however crookedly -- in the narratives which constitute the background structure of the varied “entertainment” and “information” programs; so we must take the power of the media of communications seriously--far more seriously, we believe, than theologians and church authorities are wont to do. If narratives shape us, then the fractured and fragmented narratives we see in our homes, taverns, stores, and even offices, have a potential (not available previously) to shape people into shattered selves.
Third, we need to note the theological and religious significance of the point that the same words or gestures placed in different contexts, different narratives, different discourse systems do not have the same meaning – and, we would argue, but cannot do so here -- cannot have the same meaning. The many meanings of “redemption” and the varying soteriologies of the New Testament and subapostolic eras provide a case in point. The conundra we face when trying to explicate soteriology as ransom, as at-one-ment, as redemption, as satisfaction, as substitution, suggest to us that the context in which these stories are told, or doctrines proclaimed, control their meaning. It is a commonplace, again, that “transubstantiation” really makes sense only in the context of the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis; without an operative concept of substance and accidents, this way of explicating the Real Presence falls flat. It cannot capture the imagination of anyone who does not dwell in the world constructed by the medieval myth (“myth” here meaning a constitutive story, not a false one). It is not that it cannot be understood by someone willing to enter into the discourse of Thomism. But as thomistic categories are not lingua franca, they cannot be presumed if we want to communicate an understanding of what the Real Presence is. The Eucharistic gestures (forty hours exposition, benediction, etc.) proper for expressing the Real Presence in Tridentine Catholicism seem somewhat anachronistic now to many of us. This is because they simply cannot mean “the same thing” in the present context, not only to us who find them anachronistic, but to those who engage in them. In the past, to participate in “Forty Hours” was to join in piety with the mainstream of the church; today, such participation is either nostalgic for the past or a protest against the present “lack of” piety. Similarly, the Latin Mass meant something very different as a daily event from what it means as an odd celebration undertaken by a tiny number of traditionalist Catholics. It does not mean, and it cannot mean now, what it meant then.
Beyond these three points, we especially need to take seriously the incredible power of television. TV whips images and stories at us at a remarkable clip, camera shots shifting as frequently as every two seconds. In each two-minute segment of commercials on TV, we can see four or five wildly different stories, conveying in dozens of pulsating images different ways of finding meaning, satisfaction, happiness, respect, or joy in one’s life. These brief stories have nothing to do with the story line in the program being sponsored. And the programs that run back-to-back -- split only by the short narratives of commercials – flow into each other even though they have nothing in common. To say the images conveyed by the television can be fragmented and fragmenting is something of an understatement. As Tom Martin put it, “The flow of images in television can be so complex and contradictory that any rational and orderly analysis simply flounders.” Even more strongly, the kaleidoscope of images creates a culture in which linear thinking, finding causal connections, understanding order, discriminating what’s reliable from unreliable, are all undermined. Walter Ong’s invocation of a “postliterate” culture here is indicative of the ways in which we need to work if we are to communicate.
The pervasiveness and the effectiveness of the electronic media truly create “a new culture.” This, in itself, raises profound new questions about how religious and theological communication can take place. The classic image we have is that what we must do is to communicate old truths in new ways, old patterns of life in new contexts. We need to update our manner of presentation (the accidents) but need to keep the truths (the substance) constant. If what we have said thus far is anywhere near accurate, this classic approach may be not merely dead, but incoherent if understood as simply “repackaging.”
New Media and Cyberspace Realities Invite New Narratives
Today the Church journeys between the flash of recognition of what is happening to it and the reverberations of what we are willing to do about it. The ways in which we live, work, play, process information, experience and witness to our religious beliefs and values as we encounter the global community, all this continues to evolve and be altered dramatically. As we have been discussing, key factors influencing this culture alteration are the mass media, emerging new communication tools, and the new reality of cyberspace. Theologians must search out ways to understand the new culture and the evolution of narratives within this culture. The document Aetatis Novae encourages us that "...the Spirit helps the Church interpret the signs of our times” and carry out its prophetic tasks, among which the study, evaluation, and right use of communications technology and the media of social communications are now fundamental. The Church can bring about desirable changes in how our narratives are communicated when she sees new alternative directions in theological reflection on the meaning and impact of the new cyberspace/media culture.
Communio et Progressio offered solid points of theological reflection for establishing a linkage between the Christian tenets and human tasks which are the very fabric of our Christian narratives. This pastoral document called the Church to enter into dialogue with the world. The communication initiatives of the Church must engage a narrative dimension which reflects authentic listening to the culture within which the community is rooted. If it is to be a community, a communion, then all the members of the Church have a place in the formation of the narrative. Thus, the community is open to the consequences of transformation which emerges within the narrative which is a type of authentic dialogue. In the perspective of the communication age, we see the vocation of the Church is to live out this unlimited narrative of God's love, reconciliation, and wholeness to the world. Christ remains the origin and the dynamic power of the Church's communication or narratives, as the Church proclaims the Gospel, teaches, heals, and continues the long journey out of the many forms of human enslavement into the reign of God. Since we are to do this through words of hope and through images of God's love, as well as through our own praxis or way of life, each person must embrace the Christian narrative as the heart of the faith community.
Sallie McFague reconfirms some of our thoughts: "Where theology becomes overly abstract, conceptual and systematic, it separates thought and life, belief and practice, words and their embodiment, making it more difficult, if not impossible, for us to believe in our hearts what we confess with our lips.” Many of our colleagues are sensing that our logical, scientific, and theological discourse may be secondary to our reality of lived faith. Maybe theology has removed itself too much from its narrative roots. We need to re-ignite the religious imagination and find new ways to move the "minds and hearts" of our people.
New and urgent questions face the Church as she seeks to communicate her story in contemporary culture. Today we step onto a new landscape filled with new technologies, mass media attractions and locations (cyberspace), only to find the people speaking a new language or having differing cultural experiences. They may no longer hear voices of religious tradition, or they may simply refuse to listen to how the stories are communicated (format and image). In preparing for the Fifth Centenary of Evangelization in the Americas, the American Bishops stated:
The evangelizer is faced with the problem of indifference to matters of religion. Relativism makes many wonder why they should hold any truths as sacred. With those forces of our age has come the growth of an extreme form of individualism that sees no need for the faith community or for the necessity of comparing one's own insights with those offered by tradition.
If communication is the heart of the Church's life, then theologians must enter into this new age in a decisive way. The Catholic Church has a long tradition of using media and the arts in narrating her faith. It is up to us, therefore, to identify the new language and artistic expressions needed to stimulate new approaches to the narrative, thus stimulating a public dialogue of faith within the new media culture.
Through many of her publications Gregor Goethals has engaged in a theological refection on the relationship of art, culture and new media age for telling our faith stories. She believes, along with Niebuhr, that persons who critically reflect upon their symbolic world are called into a "permanent revolution of the mind and heart," an unguarded adventure of the spirit which opens them to endless new possibilities of communication. She goes on to say those who take part in this revolution will be called upon to play dual roles as symbol makers and users, as well as, symbol destroyers – iconifiers and iconoclasts. They will live both within and without Christian faith. As iconifiers, they will understand their power to give visible form to invisible faith. Some may dare to venture into an uncharted sea searching for more adequate symbols of our time. They believe no single myth encompasses all. They understand the fragility of symbolic worlds and realize that even as symbols protect and provide us with meaning, they also limit our knowing. Sensitive to the potential of myth to distort, they must at times become daring iconoclasts. As women and men struggle to discover, to communicate narratives, and to participate in contemporary symbolic worlds of liberation and redemption, superficial distinctions between high and popular cultures may fade. As noted above, images without narratives are indeterminate in meaning. Images do carry specific ranges of meanings if, and only if, they are set in an implicit or explicit narrative. Similarly, iconifiers and iconoclasts join together with the storytellers as they enter into a continuous revolution of faith.
A close review of technological innovations such as writing, print, and electronic communication can demonstrate how they have changed the way in which our stories/narratives have impacted how we think and organize ourselves. Drucker and Cathcart argue that the significant characteristics of the hero stories are related to communication technologies. The heroes in oral cultures must be memorable and therefore larger than life, superhuman or supernatural beings. Oral heroes are the heroes of myth and legend, heavy figures as Ong refers to them. Limited capacity for the storage of information in turn limits the number of heroes possible in oral cultures so that they tend to be composite figures; the actions of many are attributed to one hero. Thus, oral heroes are known for their actions.
The introduction of writing, and later, print, extended human memory and overcame its limitations. With the presence of a means to store information outside of collective memory, the heavy figures of myth and legend were no longer necessary, and greater numbers of lighter heroes were made possible. As oral poetry and song were replaced by written history, the hero was grounded – brought down to earth, and now, as much information can be stored about any given individual, heroes become more individualized. The heroes of literate cultures are realistic mortal figures, admired, but not objects of worship. Writing heroes include scholars, scientists, inventors, artists, and various saints. These new typographic heroes are known for their ideas, their intellectual/creative productions and/or spirituality.
As we move into the electronic culture, a new paradigm shift emerges. Daniel Boorstin states: "Now our heroes are celebrities and human pseudo events" and measured by the standards of the print culture, they are no hero at all. Our new standards are based on a reality mediated by the televised image. A new narrative emerges. In 1985 U.S. News and World Report published the results of a Roper poll in which young adults between the ages of 18-24 were asked who their heroes were. The most popular choice was Clint Eastwood, Eddy Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Steven Spielberg, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa.
Walter Ong noted considerable evidence exists that the dominant medium of communication of a culture affects the notion of hero. In the past, he says, some individuals may have been able to achieve heroic status by setting out to accomplish valorous deeds, but today it is the media and the mythmakers who construct the hero and the celebrity. For centuries the church has confronted the human community with stories of role models of greatness. We call them saints when what we often mean to say is "icon," "star," "hero," ones so possessed by an internal vision of divine goodness they give us a glimpse of the face of God in the midst of the human. They give us a taste of the possibilities of greatness in ourselves. Thus, we need new ways to capture the religious imagination of our youth through the telling and retelling of significant hero stories rooted in Christian values that give meaning and depth to their lives.
The essence of Ong's position, as we understand it, is that substantial technological changes of the kind that mark the transitions from writing to printing to electronic communication affect the social, cultural, and psychological fabric of our lives in the most profound ways by influencing the way we think and the way we organize ourselves. In effect, it also influences how we communicate our stories of faith. Exploring the relationship of communication technologies and narrative enables theologians to determine the influence and impact both religious and cultural narratives have on the formation of local culture.
Redemptoris Missio elaborates upon the concept that we live in a new culture with "new language, new psychology, and new techniques;" thus, we are to be tuned into this new culture. Television news, the soap opera, the ads are bare respecters of cultural difference, generating universal language, now not for an educated elite but for all of us. Television is becoming the source of a "new global vernacular" at odds with national, international cultures and religion. Thus, the Church is challenged to define innovative ways to become skilled in this new vernacular and dialogue with the culture.
This new language is a special type of rhetoric. It is unique because of its technological shape and character and by virtue of its history and culture: the rhetoric of look (the camera position, angle, motion, with its figures and its tropes in the disposition of lighting or in the patterns of editing); the rhetoric of image (how what the camera sees is shaped, framed and arranged, with its figures and tropes in the metaphors, the stereotypes, the ironies, and the surprises of its composition); the rhetoric of the voice (how the written and spoken words are constructed) and music.
Today's mass media are the windows of our culture. They provide the myths – the stories and images – that explain to us who we are, what we can do, what we cannot do, who as nations we once were, and who we can be, the worldview that explains, unites, and guides our lives.
Gregory Baum states that the mass media of communication are an exciting development at the heart of modern society. They embody human intelligence, artistic talent, and technological innovation. They exercise great power in shaping contemporary culture and the stories we remember and live by.
The narrative of our faith must be communicated in symbols, models, images, and words accessible to each culture and understood by it, or it does not get communicated at all. People today are fascinated by the image, by what is visible and concrete, rather than by reason or abstract knowledge. This means we must rediscover the image dimension of the Gospel, of our narrative. Since the word which moves, attracts, and empowers people today is not abstract doctrine but, instead, the word of story, metaphor and image, we must recover the liberating word within all aspects of our religious experience.
Paul VI's apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi aimed at making "the Church of the twentieth century better fitted for proclaiming the Gospel to the people of the twentieth century.” The document begins its reflections with three questions that had been centerpiece for the discussion at the 1974 Synod of Bishops:
In our day, what has happened to that hidden energy of the Good News, which is able to have a powerful effect in man's conscience?
To what extent and in what way is the evangelical force capable of really transforming the people of this century?
What methods should be followed in order that the power of the Gospel may have its effect?
Cyberspace and Virtual Reality: New Environments for Narrative Theology
Virtual realities and virtual communities are important as ways of re-enacting myth and as important forms of storytelling. These virtual environments redefine notions of deception and duplicity, as the fundamental imperatives of self-identity, self-disclosure and authentic interaction are abandoned for the sake of experimentation and play. Nonetheless, there is often a high degree of attachment to the narrative and to the electronic persona in cyberspace. People hold their MUD/MOO/IRC characters close to themselves suggesting a high degree of identification.
MUDs (multi-user domains) put you in virtual spaces in which you are able to navigate, converse and build. You join a MUD through a command that links your computer to the computer on which the MUD program resides. MUDs are a new kind of virtual parlor game and a new form of community. Sherry Turkle notes that MUDs are a new form of collaboratively written literature. MUD players and MUD authors are the creators, as well as the consumers, of media content and stories. In this, participating in a MUD has much in common with script writing, performance art, street theater, improvisational theater, or even commedia dell'arte. Turkle's research indicates that as MUD players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves and stories through social interaction. Thus, not only are MUDs places where the self is multiple and constructed by language, they are places where people and machines are in a new relation to each other, indeed can be mistaken for each other. In such ways, MUDs are evocative objects for thinking about human identity and, more generally, about a set of ideas that have come to be known as "post-modernism".
Turkel refers to Lanham's work The Electronic Word, where he argues open-ended screen text subverts traditional fantasies of a master narrative or definitive reading, by presenting the reader with possibilities for changing fonts, zooming in and out, and rearranging and replacing text. The result, he says, is " a body of work that is active not passive, a canon not frozen but volatile with contending human motive.” Lanham puts technology and postmodernism together and concludes that the computer is a "fulfillment of social thought."
The new era of virtual reality and cyberspace calls much of our traditional understanding of community, moral discourse, and storytelling into new perspectives. In cyberspace, says Turkle, we can talk, exchange stories, ideas and assume personae of our own creation. She goes on to share how opportunities are being created to build new kinds of communities, virtual communities, in which we participate with people from all over the world, people with whom we converse daily, people with whom we may have fairly intimate relationships but whom we may never physically meet. Thus, the perception of what we traditionally have understood by Christian communities or faith communities is undergoing a paradigm shift. Not only are the type and format of our stories shifting but also the place, location of where stories are communicated and reformulated for a new generation of believers.
Shields indicates that virtual encounters have real-life effects: they are transformative of consciousness. People carry their virtual memories into the real world in significant ways. Because there are real effects of virtual encounters, these events are, in fact, experienced as full social encounters wherein people have a wide range of feelings – acceptance and esteem as well as rejection and denial. In this context, MUDs and MOOs have an intensity unlike other kinds of role playing or storytelling. MUDs and MOOs, as communicative environments, can be contrasted with the Internet-Relay-Chat (IRC) system, which is also a synchronous system of communication, but the communication does not occur in a virtual background.
It is in this arena that quality conversations among theologians and various professionals engaged in the cyber culture need to merge into an understanding of theology and communication. Victor Turner called this time a liminal moment. It is a moment of passage when new cultural symbols and meanings emerge. Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity. In our time, we are simultaneously flooded with predictions of doom and predictions of immanent utopia. But the multiple viewpoints this new reality creates require that theologians explore these questions: What does the evolution of cyberculture imply? What impact will it have? and How do we enter into discourse within the new culture if our Christian narrative is to have meaning and relevance in this century?
Pastoral Challenges for Dialogue
It is important, however, to not simply instrumentalize the media for telling our stories. As papal documents note: "the first Areopagus of the modern age is the world of communication." This points to a conclusion of great importance for the Church's approach to media in the culture they do so much to shape: “(it) is not enough to use the media simply to spread the Christian message and the Church's authentic teaching. It is also necessary to integrate that message into the 'new culture' crated by modern communication...with new languages, new techniques, and new psychology.
We must ask ourselves whether we create a dynamic two-way communication theology where our theology and ministries help people to change their lives. Or do we leave people passively unresponsive to our message while they navigate through an interactive cyberspace culture? In the age of the image, are we connecting with reality through our religious use of images? There are no straightforward solutions to the complexity of issues surrounding the challenges of a communication theology today. "Faithful to the past and open to the future, we must accept the burden, and welcome the opportunity, of proclaiming the Gospel of Christ in our times. Where this is a summons to change, we must be willing to change. Where there is a call to stand firm, we must not yield.”
The spirit of the new age – of constant change and rapid saturation of images and sound – is not easily reconcilable with the demands of our story at times. The process of transformation of our culture begins, however, with a deep reverence and respect for the dignity of every individual. As we concentrate on enhancing our skills for engaging in quality conversation and dialogue with one another, we will begin the process of transformation, of telling our story within new contexts and new ways.
Conclusion
The faith lived in the church of tomorrow will not look like, and cannot look like, the faith lived in the church of yesterday. The communication media have made far more narratives into live options for our actualization than were available to our predecessors. William Clebsch once pithily said about modern humanity, “This new humanity makes history; the old was made by it. The same holds for religion.” But our postmodern, postliterate era intensifies the religious style of modernity. We each construct our faith, but the components we can choose are far wider, the mixes available to us spicier, and the results more individualistic and private.
An implication of this approach is to recognize that faith can be understood as a set of practices or virtues. The practices include believing, participating in the sacraments and worship life of the church, social and moral practices that fit the local community in which we live (as well as the catholic patterns of morality). One has to learn how to be a Christian. Being a faithful Christian is not merely “knowing” some doctrines are true and some commandments are right. Being a faithful Christian is more than “knowing Jesus” or “knowing God.” Being a faithful Christian is a “know-how,” specifically, knowing how to be a disciple. But if faith is a set of practices, then portraying the faith and communicating it is necessarily narrative, because one cannot carry out a practice or form of life save in narrative.
The narratives that constitute the Christian tradition are stories of God with us. The tradition has usually affirmed that these narratives have a triune structure: the God of Christians is Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier; Father, Son, and Spirit; Mother, Lover and Friend. The primary model for God may be the “model of love,” as Vincent Brümmer has put it, but that model is triune. The narratives, then, which this model protects must always take a triune and Christological form.
Our conclusion is, in one sense, very simple. Within a narrative understanding of faith, which we support, “communication” is no mere functional specialization. Rather the mode of communication shapes and reshapes the faith communicated. Our communicative praxis cannot be simply the sharing of doctrines and morals. Rather, it must be shaping others into the stories of being a disciple of Jesus, of the triune God with us. The praxis is not the delivery of information; rather it is always, wittingly or not, the shaping and reshaping of lives in communication and communion.