A Theology of Communication:
What is Communication - Part 1
By Rev. William F. Fore - Founder of
Religion Online
The dictionary tells us that communication is: first, the act of
transmitting; second, facts or information transmitted; third, written
information, conversation, or talk; fourth, access between persons or places; or
fifth, interchange of thoughts or opinions.
The problem with all of these definitions is that they place communication in
a third-party role, as if it were something that occurs between two people or
things. None gives sufficient emphasis to communication as a relationship which
involves persons and things, a relationship of which we are all an integral
part. Trying to understand communication without these relationships is like
trying to understand a human being through an autopsy -- the life is missing.
I find more useful the following definition: communication is the process in
which relationships are established, maintained, modified, or terminated through
the increase or reduction of meaning. This allows us to examine the process of
communication in a way which includes the "relateds" and how they are always
affected as objects which become subjects, affecting and being affected, as well
as the changes in meaning and in messages which become filled or voided of
meaning as the process, and those related to it, constantly change.
Another problem is that communication is so integral to what we mean by
"human," and even to what we mean by "existence," that it is easy to use the
term universally to include almost everything, and so to render the term
meaningless. Arguments have been put forward that communication is education,
that it is the church, that it is incarnation, that it is Christianity. While
each of these connections contain helpful insights, and while in a sense
communication is a constituent of everything, sometimes a more arbitrary and
limited definition must be employed if the word is to be of practical value.
We need to explore both aspects of communication – its role as a part of
everything, of all of being, and also how it functions in everyday life. The
challenge at this point is a little like trying to understand water. Water is
essential to all living things, and we need to understand that. But we also need
a theory of hydrodynamics, which tells us how water works. We need both.
Therefore, we shall examine, first, how communication is essential to being
(its ontological aspects); second, how communication functions in society (its
ethical aspects); and finally, how communication works among practicing
Christians today (its confessional, pastoral aspects).
Communication and Being
Most theologians today have abandoned serious attempts to develop arguments
for the existence of God. Instead, they take an existential starting point,
agreeing with Kierkegaard that existence precedes essence that human beings
decide in the act of existing. We can no longer begin with a theory of reality
or a theory of God, but can only begin where we are as human beings in the midst
of all the contingencies of human experience.
What we discover is that, reduced to the most basic level possible, there
exist only three things: matter, energy, and relationships. And these
relationships, whether between atoms and molecules, bees and flowers, or humans
and God, are created, sustained, and modified by some kind of communication.
Another way of saying this is that everything relates to something, or else it
does not exist, and within all relationships communication is present.
There is nothing outside our experience. Even that which we call the
transcendent is understood as "that which exists in its own right beyond our
categories of thought and explanation, but not necessarily that which is
entirely outside our experience in all its modes." One implication of this
emphasis upon experience is that the deductive, the hypothetical, and the
projective kinds of thinking no longer are controlling, but are replaced by the
inductive, the coordinative, the analogical, and the dialogical.
It is significant that there is an increasing correspondence recently between
Christian process theology and theories of communication. Process theology holds
that things that endure are composed of a series or a process of distinct
occasions or experience, each one connected to the next, and each one affecting
the next. Nothing is independent and disconnected. All experience is related to
previous experiences. Everything -- atoms, animals, human beings, nature and the
universe -- is interrelated. And communication is the fundamental process by
which these relationships occur. Communication is a fundamental given of
existence, essential to the nature of being.
In process theology the past is the totality of that which influences the
present, and the future is the totality of that which will be influenced by the
present. Each present moment is but a selective incarnation of the whole past
universe. Our individual choices and actions, conditioned by the past, will make
a difference throughout the future. And the mechanism that connects the past,
present, and future, is communication. We create our future by communicating our
decisions. Since successful communication depends on the reduction of
uncertainty, our communication options must be free to create new and wholly
unprecedented relationships. This is what is meant by creating order out of
chaos.
Community is where our human existence takes place. Community is established
and maintained by the relationships created by our communications. We establish
our relative individuality within this community. The more we participate in
community, the more we become true individuals, and the more we become
individuals, the more richly we participate in community. Community, the
fulfilment of effective human communication, is essential to our becoming human.
Language is necessary to human beings in community. Language shapes images
and hence affects our actual sensibility and our modes of perception. Whitehead
writes that "the mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each
other." Walter Ong takes this a step further by holding that language and the
media created by communication technologies are not simply instruments external
to humans, to be used by them, but are in fact extensions and transformers of
human beings.
A similar view is taken by communication theoretician Harold Innis, who
argues that communication technologies fashion media which bias individual
perceptions of reality, and that different forms of communication technologies
create different forms of social organization over knowledge. Innis, Marshall
McLuhan, and Edmund Carpenter all suggest that different media of communication
bring about major shifts in human culture, along the following lines:
1. Media are extensions of the human sensory apparatus.
2. Media alter the internal sensory balance between eye, ear, and other
organs.
3. The dominant forms of media influence aesthetic preferences and all forms
of social, political, and economic structure.
The freedom which is essential in both communication theory and in Christian
theology is ideally suited for this cultural period in which ideological
pluralism challenges the older forms of Christian dogmatics, and a radical
reinterpretation of the biblical texts and the Christian tradition are necessary
in order to do justice to recent scholarship. God is not absolute, omnipotent,
wholly other; God is responsive. God’s love is not controlling; it is
persuasive. Christ is the force of creative transformation of the world, but
this transformation depends for its actuality on the decisions of individuals
communicating in their freedom. The concept of the interconnectedness of all
things makes possible a clearer understanding of the importance of ecological
sensitivity in both the natural world and in economic theory, where there is a
systematic discounting of the future in order to justify over consumption in the
present. A corresponding interconnectedness appears in communication theory,
which has moved away from the mechanical model of
information/transmitter/signal/receiver/audience (Shannon-Weaver, l948), to
models which at first added secondary relationships such as groups,
neighbourhoods, and social structures, then internal relationships such as
self-images, abilities, media selection and so on (Gerhard Maletzke, Hamburg
l963), until today the whole ecological system is recognized as part of the
complex mix of communication experience. Communication models now embrace a
never-ending, all-inclusive process, extending backward in time to take into
account our personal and corporate history, and forward in time to take into
account the future, involving other selves, families, communities, societies,
and, ultimately, the whole of creation.
In summary, communication in its most universal terms must be understood as a
basic constituent of the process of being. But we also need to examine from a
Christian perspective the role communication plays as a process which is used
and misused in our experience as social and political beings
