Philip Paek

COMM444
HIST391
15 August 2013
Dr. Read Schuchardt
Dr. Carla Lovett
A Digital Faith

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote that in society today, the medium is the
message. This has been a solid part of further understanding the impact of media as a
whole in the digital age that we live in today. However, I was sitting in a church service
this summer in Korea when the pastor said something that got me thinking. God cares
more about the relationship than the ritual. Thats when it hit me. Due to the
Reformation, much of the understanding of our faith has gone towards us personally
interpreting our relationship with God and creating views of our own. An innumerable
amount of denominations exist today and so I begin to wonder if the medium is the
message, and the claim that Marshall McLuhan is making is simply that media forms
hinder our relationship to the message itself, then can it then be safe to say that our
denominational practices are simply the medium between our relationship with God? Is it
right to say God cares more about the relationship than the ritual if that is just what our
medium is teaching us to believe? Does ritual even matter anymore in our relationship
with God in the personal, social, digital society we live in today? What I have come to

see is that throughout history and the existing digital age, the Church has become a
detrimental medium between us and God when in fact, its role in our lives should be to
simply facilitate that relationship not mediate it.

To begin to understand how the Church has become the mediator of our faith, we
need to start by understanding the root of it all. The word media comes from the plural
form of the word medium, which simply is defined as something that goes between.
When we consider McLuhan and his analysis of the media being the message, we can
then understand that he is specifically helping us understand that the messages that we
send are dictated by the medium through which we send them. For example, in
Understanding Media, McLuhan talks about how ineffective the American flag would
have been if it were to just have been a banner with the text stars and stripes written on
it. Though the content would be the same, the type of message that is portrayed from that
particular banner would have changed because the medium of the banner changed from
symbols to print. (82) Some other examples of the concept are seen through
contemporary art forms like cubism and dance. In cubism, we pay attention to the
aesthetic of the painting not in its subject matter that is hard to see, but the medium
through which it was made abstract. We focus on the message that the medium gives off
rather than what we traditionally see as the message. Similarly, dance is a perfect
example of the concept because dancers try to portray a message of movement as seen
specifically through their dance movements. Generally put, McLuhan believed that much

of everything we live around is dictated by this concept of how things mediate our
relationship to the world.

With that in mind, when my pastor said, God cares more about the relationship
than the ritual, I accepted that statement, but wondered if that was just a view that was a
result of the course of history. The early church believed in the importance of ritual all
the way up to the Reformation. It was only after the Reformation that our way of thinking
began to change in our faith. The printing press led to the mass production of books, and
increased literacy. Fast forward a few centuries, and we find that the more people began
to interpret scripture in their own ways, the more they began to find themselves split over
differences, bringing us to the 41,000 denominations that we have today as recorded by
the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. These denominations vary in issues
ranging from how communion should be taken to how baptism should be performed. But
at the root of it all, the common factor linking them is the same all believe in Christ the
Messiah and the rest should be history so to speak.

So then, if the medium does dictate the message that we are receiving, then there
are actually some questions to think about. Are our denominations dictating the specifics
of our relationship with our Heavenly Father? Are we not simply being taught the
message of our individual denominations as it plays the medium of our relationship? And

if that is true, then is the church not ultimately distorting our faith? These are all
questions to think about because the truth of the matter is that the culture and the things
of this world ultimately distort us.

The truth is, over history, this is all the result of us choosing to let the Church
mediate our experience with God. What I mean by this is that we are ultimately losing
out on our relationship with God because the media serves as the message we are
consuming. Yes, God does care more about the relationship than the ritual, but we are
missing the point and society is telling us that it is therefore okay to neglect ritual
altogether. Through playing the medium, the church is unintentionally working hand in
hand with the digital age that we live in and is causing us to not only lose touch with the
one that we call God, but only become closer to a relationship with the medium through
which we learn to call him God.

Richard Nieburh writes in his book Christ and Culture that, The fundamental
issue does not lie between Christ and the world []but between God and man. (117).
He illustrates in this book that culture in itself is something that doesnt naturally mesh
with the idea of God because man makes culture and man is inherently sinful. In our
manmade culture, manmade mediums convey manmade messages to us.

God might care more about the relationship than the ritual, but everything in the world
we live in today only contributes to that emphasis on relationship that the importance of
ritual is forgotten.

The culture and way that society works around us today only strengthens that
mindset. Almost everything today plays towards our need to have a personal, intimate
relationship with the things around us. Spending a portion of my summer in Korea, the
supposed bandwidth capital of the world, I realized just how much society is reliant on
technology especially smartphones. I saw exactly how much even something like
cellphones appealed to people today not necessarily because of the tool it offers as a
communication medium, but more because of the appealing message it played to the
individual. It was the first time I realized that some people go so far as to considering
their smartphones as a fashion accessory. This summer, Apple released the design
concept for the new iOS7 operating system that they will be releasing in the fall. One
thing I noticed was that Senior Vice President Jony Ive says in the design video on
Apples website that, even the simple act of changing your wallpaper has a very
noticeable effect on the way your iPhone looks and feels across the entire system. This
new operating system plays largely to the individual getting to be able to personalize the
look of their entire smartphone from more than just the wallpaper, but to the way
everything else looked. We see an increased personalization encouraging an increased

relationship with your communication medium. Similarly, the introduction of cellphone

cases opened up a wide variety of ways that people could personalize and have this
relationship with their products. Apple products know that this sell, and a connection
can even be made as to why iPhones even include the I in it for any other reason than
an appeal to the individual.

So what this is doing to us is that the stress of relationships in the personal,

intimate, digital age we live in is desensitizing us to the ritualistic God. Our culture is
training our minds to understand God on a more personal level to the point where God in
the digital age is an all-powerful friend rather than an all-powerful God. Although the
relationship is more important, throughout the course of history, a stress for ritual has
actually kept God where he belongs.

This summer, I had the chance to go to a Hillsong United concert held in

Chicago. Although it was a worship concert, I couldnt help but feel disgusted by the
experience as a whole. It felt more like a performance driven concert than worship. The
band utilized strobe lights, fog machines and lasers to accompany their worship and try to
create an atmosphere for the audience. Then at one point in the event, the lead singer
called for the audience to bring out their flashlights, to which thousands of smartphones

turned on as audience members found their flashlight apps and waved them around the
concert hall. I felt somewhat disturbed by how the medium of the concert affected the
message that I was receiving that night specifically. While the medium of that night was
music and I went to experience God, the message definitely did not feel like worship. The
medium to me that night became a testament in itself to the direction the digital age is
affecting even the direction that Christian music is heading. Although that night was
intended to be about praise and worship, the head-banging music that accompanied it
truly led me to believe that our digital age has led us to view God as much less godly
through the years.

The neglect of ritual in our chase for the relationship leads me to ask another
question, what is sacred anymore? In Europe today, old abandoned churches and
cathedrals all over the continent are being sold and turned into commercial buildings of
all kinds ranging from restaurants to nightclubs. I had the chance to eat in one of these
church-restaurants and couldnt help but feel that this act was yet another testament to the
direction modernity is taking our faith. The entire aesthetic appeal of the secular
restaurant rested in the fact that it used to be a holy place. They were actually
highlighting the fact that it used to be a sacred place of worship by renovating very little
of the building itself and including no extra decorations on the walls. The idea that
churches are being converted to commercial centers is one thing, but the sacred history

and amount of effort cathedral buildings contain makes us really stop and ask: what is
sacred anymore?

According to The Cathedral Builders by Jean Gimpel, these buildings were a

reflection of faith as well as community projects that took decades, and often even
centuries to complete (Gimpel). These buildings, which were built for glory of God
centuries ago, are now being converted into avenues of secular entertainment. On the
flipside, churches such as the Living Hope Church in Vancouver have been highlighted as
it bought out a former Kmart building to establish a mega church from the megastore that
used to stand. Its another thought to consider how even the venues that Christians choose
to worship in have lost a sense of sacredness and has taken a turn to simply being about
the congregation rather than the sacred place. God cares more about the body of the
church than the building itself, but when we choose to put personal encounter above the
tedious practice of our faith, I dont think we were meant to turn a blind eye to the ritual
that ultimately keeps God godly.

To trace this thought back to the history from where it came, we turn to the split
of the church as a whole. The Reformation revolutionized the church in its time as well as
what the church exists as today. Many scholars argue the effects of the Reformation. One

of the Catholic Churchs criticisms of the Reformation was the invention of the
Enlightenment. Some say Luther was the cause of Modernity, while others claim
modernity would have happened on its own. But the big idea is, the state the church is in
today is because of the self-interpreting way of thinking that we adopted through the
Reformation.

Scripture in its original form was heard, not visibly read. But that changed with
the invention of the printing press. Printing was to bring about the most radical
alteration ever made in Western intellectual history, and its effects were to be felt in every
area of human activity (Burke, 112). We can trace literacy to the Reformation, and the
spread of literacy on a mass scale to the invention of the printing press. It revolutionized
the way ideas were spread and played a hugely important role in the Reformation. The
more people learned to read, the more people interpreted scripture on their own. In a way,
we can trace the 41,000 denominations we have today as an effect of that literacy. The
idea adopted in the Reformation of sola scriptura highlights even the simple move to
dependence on the medium rather than God himself. In the mid 1500s, Martin Luther
said, Whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants to.
Everything is equally valid (ArtsLettersND//112). We understood that the personal
relationship we created with Scripture was good, but the individual interpretations that
readers began to create themselves also brought the Protestant Church to disagreements

on theology. Even looking at the Reformation happening in Switzerland around the same
time as Germany, Huldrych Zwingli and Luther came to countless disagreements when
determining their beliefs as was recorded at the Marburg Colloquy in the 1500s. The
problem wasnt literacy in itself, but rather the intentions of each individual to begin to
mediate their own relationship with God, instead of letting scripture facilitate the
working of the Holy Spirit.

So then, sure, the Catholic Church had wrong ideas that drove history to the point
of Luther and the 95 Theses, as well as the Reformation as a whole. However, is the
Protestant Church much better in this sense? All men are inherently sinful and it happens.
The Catholic church stuck to ritual, which is much of the reason why it maintains unity
within that Church, but the message that the Protestant church conveys is also a message
of being affected by the pattern of this world because of its emphasis on relationship.

Sadly, much is to blame on the effects of the digital society we live in. So much
of the modern, digital world we live in shares with us a message to not stay committed.
Everything is faster, everything is quick, and streams of information happen so rapidly
that none of it really stays within our long-term memory. It trains us to pay attention in
short bursts rather than for prolonged periods of time. Nothing that society teaches us

today speaks a message of commitment. The media preaches us to buy the next hot item,
to date casually, and to always keep our devices up to date with the newest updates. We
are reading more as a whole today than we did in years past, but the amount of
information we withhold is still at a minimum. The divorce rate rises by the year while
we cant even manage to stay committed to social media as trends change from MySpace
to Facebook and YouTube to Vimeo. This is the world we live in today, and this is the
reason why commitment is such a thing of the past.

Paralleling digital society to the Protestant church, isnt the Protestant church in
this case the same? Arent we just as bad at commitment with the church as the world
that we live in? With churches splitting at increased rates rapidly and new denominations
being created because of some small disagreement, is our church not just sharing with us
the message that the world also teaches us? Surely God is not preaching a message of
disunity like the world is right?

Again, sure the Catholic Church had some wrong ideas but has the Protestant
Church been any better?

The problem is that while the Churchs original role whether Catholic or
Protestant was to simply be a facilitator in our faith, many times it has acted as the

mediator instead. McLuhan realized this as he noted that, The medium is the Messiah.
The medium was never intended to be the Church, because the only true way for us to
experience Christ was in as unmediated a way as possible through the true medium
Christ Himself.

But the Protestant church clearly developed those views in response to the
indulgences of the Catholic Church, which are regrettable but are also a result of the
Churchs move to becoming more of a mediator than a facilitator. And it doesnt rest at
that, because in the digital age we live in today, there are still modern day indulgences.
According to The Guardian, the Vatican has [offered] indulgences to the followers of
Pope Francis tweets (Kington). Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli is quoted saying that
these things are important because the Vaticans social media accounts produce
authentic spiritual fruit in the hearts of everyone (Kington). So where is God in this
picture? And since when did the Pope or any man receive the right to produce spiritual
fruit in another persons heart? Is that not the job of the Holy Spirit? The common
problem is still alive today and ultimately is a sure sign of mankind striving once again to
self-mediate our relationship with God.

The Churchs role was and is simply a facilitator of this true medium. It was to
facilitate the body, which is the Church and the means through which the Church exists.
We saw this mistake in the Reformation and we saw it through every schism of the
Protestant Church. God is to be unmediated as he was in the early Church. He is the true
medium through which we experience the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The
relationship is more important than the ritual, but that is dependent on an unmediated
relationship. A relationship cant be more stressed than the ritual when its under digital
conditions because the relationship will then de-sanctify God as we have noticed and the
lack of ritual will only make him less godly.

So then the conclusion is simple. The Church had a role, but through its countless
shortcomings through history, it failed to live up to be a facilitator and chose to be the
mediator instead. The effects of the media age we live in has impacted the way it
therefore chose to mediate God for us. In the highly relationship heavy world we live in
today, our churches are spoon feeding their beliefs to us and not facilitating a personal
relationship between us and our creator. We have been overly emphasizing the
relationship as important as it is and forgotten about the sacred God that wants us to
experience him on His terms. Society and the course of history have seen to it that the
Church has, probably unintentionally, shifted from a point of facilitation, and so where
we stand today isnt a place we should be content with. Therefore, our call is simple: to

be unmediated and ultimately experience God through the true medium himself, which is
the Messiah.

Works Cited
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