Digital Faith

In last Thursday’s Methodist Recorder, Andrew Graystone,
Director of the Churches’
Media Council, said:

“Many church leaders are blissfully aware that there is a
revolution under way that’s every bit as radical as the invention of the
printing press. Five years from now we will either have learnt to minister in a
digital environment or we will be its victims. Analogue churches won’t survive
in a digital age.

“For a church, going digital means recognising that most
people spend many hours a day using a computer. It means acknowledging the
important place that gaming, surfing and blogging play in many people’s lives.

“It means learning to use contemporary communication tools
like e-mail and podcasting, rather than photocopying the weekly news sheet. It
means developing a language and a mindset – even a theology – that embraces
digital culture.”

Graystone was launching the programme for this year’s Churches’ Media
Conference, which will be exploring the digital revolution. He keyed his
comments in to the forthcoming switch-off of analogue television in the UK in
favour of digital.

A bit of Googling
showed that the Recorder is late reporting this: Methodist media chaplain Tony Miles blogged this on 30^th March.
However it was the first I had seen of this. (Perhaps I’d better subscribe to
Tony’s blog feed.)

Reading Graystone’s words, I fear too many churches and
Christians will interpret them altogether too superficially. They’ll spend a
few thousand on a video projector and laptop, they’ll use e-mail, they’ll set
up a church website (perhaps using bespoke
templates) and – er, that will be it.
They will miss what I see as the most important part of Graystone’s thinking.
It bookends the quotes above: the digital revolution is as radical as that
brought by the printing press, and it will require a new language, mindset and
theology. What follows constitutes some preliminary thoughts about what that
might involve as Graystone’s thoughts bounce around my mind. I make no claim to
originality, and there is plenty of thinking going on around these issues. Rex Miller (see next paragraph), Leonard Sweet and a thousand others are
further ahead in their thinking than I am. These are just some of the things in
my mind as a practitioner on the ground in largely older, more traditional
churches. I hope they help. Some of the language is ‘theological’: I’m using
some terms as a shorthand to cut down the length of what will by my standards
be a lengthy post, at least as long as one of my sermons!

In my mind, the best introduction I have read to the need
for a digital theology remains Rex
Miller’s book The
Millennium Matrix. Building on Marshall
McLuhan’s famous statement that ‘The medium is the message’, Miller avers
that ‘The medium is the worldview’. (I have mentioned this before.)
In speech-based oral cultures, truth was found in relationship with others. In
the print culture truth is put in a logical sequence of propositions. In the
broadcast culture of radio and television it is in personal stories and
experience. In the digital culture truth becomes interactive, conversational
and open-ended.

So what will digital theology look like? Methodologically,
the old days of ivory-tower one-way stuff from the experts (the papacy of
scholars) will go. It’s no accident the ‘emerging church’ talks about an ‘emerging
conversation’. Perhaps Bill Kinnon’s recent post ‘The People Formerly
Known As The Congregation’, which has made a big splash in the Christian
blogosphere, is a good indication of this. Note not only that Kinnon represents
people who will not be just told what to do by experts (who may well use power
abusively): he has begun, surprise, surprise, a conversation. Emerging
Grace has talked about the underlying issues of passivity, the clergy/laity
divide, institutionalism and other dehumanising factors. Jamie
Arpin-Ricci has then joined in with a community perspective. John
Frye has couched a reply in the pastor’s voice. And Greg
Laughery has offered a pastoral response. Theology is being done here in
conversation, and in this case the Christological-missiological ecclesiology of
the emerging church (as per Alan
Hirsch and others) is being developed. It isn’t being handed down. People aren’t
being forced to sign up or ‘submit’. Beliefs are still held passionately – this
gives the lie to the ‘postmoderns don’t believe in truth’ nonsense. But it’s
being done differently. It’s the methodology of digital theology. Kinnon didn’t
give a paper and the others gave formal responses: this is truly the
interactive and conversational approach characteristic of digital culture. It is
surely no accident that the emerging church has so enthusiastically embraced
blogging, where the website is not static but contains content for interaction.

(Which makes the phenomenon of blogging among those
committed to a Reformed theology interesting: Adrian Warnock is committed to the
dogmatic stances of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and
Together For The Gospel, the latter of which
seems to believe that denying women leadership in the church is essential to maintaining
the Gospel. Warnock, though holding convictions that in other circles have
tended to lead to intemperate attitudes to others, puts his convictions – with which
I by no means agree – over in a remarkably irenic tone, a tone more in keeping
with the conversational nature of the best blogging rather than the ‘flaming’
that has elsewhere and in other times characterised theological debates and
arguments.)

More specifically the particular conversation begun by
Kinnon has a lot to do with the fallout from spiritual abuse, where power has
been used badly and people have been damaged, often by leaders who themselves
have unresolved damage in their own lives that leads to an insecurity that is
falsely satiated by power and prestige. Postmodernism has rightly criticised
the abuse of power; theology has sometimes done that, but the most obvious
example in recent decades is liberation theology and to pick up some books from
that movement is also to read the papacy of scholars, however much the authors
have been involved at street level. The interactive conversation of digital
theology brings new hope for dealing with the abuse of power, of encouraging a ‘servanthood’
mentality and celebrating what we learn from one another.

Digital theology, like digital culture, will also be
open-ended. This can sound quite threatening to someone like me whose basic
theological instincts are pretty conservative. After all, I believe the Bible
is not to be added to, because I believe in the finality of Christ. How open-ended
can we be when we believe in the finality of Christ? Actually, we can still be
open-ended. Theology is a provisional task and it always has been. It is
always, like the task of preaching, about building a bridge between the world
of the Bible and the world we inhabit. That is why it’s a mistake to fetch upon
the doctrinal statements or creeds of particular generations, be it the Fathers
(the Apostolic and Nicene Creeds) or the Reformation (the Westminster
Confession of Faith, the Thirty-Nine Articles) or the founder of a movement
(Wesley’s Forty-Four Sermons): worthy and profound as they all are, they are
snapshots of their times, and specifically related to the issues of their days.

My nervousness about open-ended theology and the finality of
Christ is about the danger of losing the foothold in the biblical revelation,
because that is determined by the finality of Christ. Provided that remains,
then theology has an ongoing task to interpret the Christian faith for the time
and place in which we live. It is also open-ended because we cannot claim the
same inspiration that we claim for the biblical writers. And even the biblical
writers expressed the message of Christ in different cultural forms, according
to the situations they were describing and the recipients of their work. So the
Synoptic Gospels couch the Gospel in terms of the kingdom of God, a very Jewish
concept, reflecting the geographical and religious context of their stories –
and in fact Matthew expresses it in the most Jewish language, the kingdom of heaven, with the classic Jewish aversion
of the divine name. John, with a Greek background in mind, speaks of eternal life.
The Acts of the Apostles concentrates on the kingdom while the message is being
preached to Jews but this becomes ‘Jesus is Lord’ in the wider Roman Empire, in
contrast to the claims that Caesar is Lord. Writing to the Romans, Paul picks
up the Roman legal term ‘justification’ and uses it to describe the Gospel. Open-ended
theology, rooted in the finality of Christ, will, if you like, be incarnated in a particular culture. We have
a task to do that for today. And what we do for our day will not do for future
generations, although I hope they will learn from us as we learn from the
Fathers, Reformers and others.

All this makes for a non-linear theology. Gone are the
systematic theologies. They never could cover everything, however much they
tried. At best they were consistent theologies, but tended to make one theme an
organising principle to the detriment of others. For Calvin it was the
sovereignty of God, despite the fact that the most fundamental statement made
in the whole of Scripture about God is, ‘God is love’. But the theology will be
non-linear as it mimics the habit of web surfing. We go to a website, read or
look at something, and while we are there we see a hyperlink to something else
and off we go. At the next site the same thing may happen. The little ‘down
arrow’ next to the ‘back button’ in the web browser becomes vital in tracing
our way back.

What would a non-linear, ‘surfing’ theology look like? It would
also be one that makes ‘connections’. If the conversational, interactive
theology makes connections between people in a dialogue, a non-linear theology
will make connections between different fields. The narrow specialisms will
shrink. Years ago I read Stephen
Lawhead’s sci-fi novels. I can’t remember whether it was in Dream
Thief or Empyrion
(Dream Thief, I think) where a key character describes himself as a ‘connections
man’. He connects different disciplines rather than doing what the typical PhD
does, finding one restricted original area of one discipline. The connections
people needed to be valued, he said, rather than to be despised. A digital
theology would value such people. It will connect biblical studies, doctrine,
church history, missiology, liturgy, pastoral studies, cultural analysis, art
criticism, literature, politics, economics, the sciences and so on. Breaking free
of the restrictions and jumping across the boundaries of various disciplines it
will re-tell what Middleton
and Walsh
called in ‘Truth
Is Stranger Than It Used To Be’ the non-totalising metanarrative of Christ
crucified in our cultures.

It might reasonably be argued that the  Gospel of Christ crucified has always been at
the heart of the Christian proclamation: the trouble is that it has got tied up
with the baggage of empire that has undermined it. This is not to suggest that
digital theology is or will be without baggage, too: it is bound to be, because
it is the work of fractured, fallen humans, ‘cracked eikons’ as Scot McKnight dubs humankind. But if we
can keep to the interactive, conversational and open-ended values, surfing our
theology together, we have a chance of creating a suitable wineskin in our day
for the new wine.

All this means a reshaping of church and a reshaping of
theological education, and both for Gospel reasons rather than the financial
and church decline pressures that are currently forcing denominational leaders into
painful decisions. The digital community can help. Tim Bednar’s paper from circa
2003, ‘We
Know More Than Our Pastors’ may have a lousy title but it points out the
way bloggers connect and converse across a wide range of people and subjects. The
colleges and the non-residential training courses have much they could offer if
they went for a conversational, connections approach to theological education. They
might even model something that new church leaders could take into active
ministry.

But perhaps the coalface will be the church. If more churches
are begun with the Hirsch DNA of beginning with Jesus, going on mission with
him into the culture, and then letting the resultant church take a shape
appropriate to the culture in which she has grown, that will be a prophetic
sign. Meanwhile the older churches can still find new life. We who lead may
still wish to preach (I do!) but we need to encourage a proper conversation in
the church – about what has been preached, about what to preach in the first
place, about the gifts and passions God has given each of us for his mission. Frost and Hirsch make a passionate case
in ‘The
Shaping Of Things To Come’ for a fivefold Ephesians chapter four ministry
leadership team in churches of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and
teachers. Generally we just concentrate on the pastors and teachers, making for
inward-looking churches. But a team leadership with these gifts would balance
the church and help re-emphasise the missional priority of the church. Team leadership
would also model what needs to happen across the whole body of the church,
namely the sharing of all gifts and talents. So, for example, although in
Ephesians 4 Paul seems to anticipate some prophets who are in a leadership
position in the church, in 1 Corinthians 12-14 he assumes that the gift of
prophecy resides in the body – it need not be exercised by a leader.

And that means the ‘control freakery’ of which many leaders
are guilty will have to go – we cling onto things like there’s an old-fashioned
demarcation dispute and say, “That’s my territory, not yours”. We do so out of
the same sense of personal insecurity that leads to spiritual abuse. In a world
where, as Chris Edmondson says in ‘Fit
To Lead’ the identity of Christian leaders is under considerable pressure,
we can fall back into a defensive attitude as self-protection. But it’s not
exactly Christ-like. I’m not entirely with those ministers who say their role is
to work themselves out of a job, but there is a blessing and a giving away that
needs to be done if we are to have an interactive, conversational, open-ended
approach. I have heard it said by a colleague that he believed in the
priesthood of all believers; nevertheless it was his job to come down from the
mountain like Moses with the word from the Lord. I wouldn’t be in this calling
without a sense that it involves bringing ‘a word from the Lord’ to people, but
the idea that I have an exclusive claim on that in the body of Christ is something
I struggle with. Ministers still have their particular skills in interpreting
the written Word and such interpretations can and will be prophetic, but we
bring our gifts to the conversation; we don’t use them to shut down the
discussion.

The ‘surfing’ element is also quite a challenge to ordained
ministry. I am someone who likes to keep a committee meeting to the agenda. It drives
me crazy when people go off on tangents. I am still very ‘linear’! A committee
meeting to me is a task-focussed group and we need to deal with that task,
preferably without the meeting dragging on until late at night. Bringing the
group back to the subject in hand can be a wearing task, especially trying to
do it lovingly. But sometimes the tangents have to be attended to. People have surfed
off as if clicking a hyperlink that interests them in the initial conversation
and it alerts us to other important interests. We will have to press the back
button to return to the original discussion, but in the meantime the surfing in
the conversation may make us aware of other things that need to be taken into
account in the life and mission of the church and certain individuals.

There’s nothing new under the sun in what I’m advocating
here. For thirty or forty years charismatic Christianity has been advancing the
cause of ‘every member ministry’, but the trouble is, it seems to have got lost
in the midst of a combination of on the one hand trying to cope with dodgy
mavericks who use that as a base for causing trouble and on the other hand the
afore-mentioned insecure, damaged leaders. It certainly has to be handled
wisely. And similarly people have always gone off on tangents in conversations.
But the digital age makes it all the more important to be attentive to these
trends and phenomena.

Well, that’s just the beginning. Hope it’s not too
pretentious and/or shallow. I’ll post more as and when I get any thoughts.

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