A Theology of Communication - Part 4:

Christianity as Communication

By Rev. William F. Fore - Founder of Religion Online

All of creation is potentially a mediator of divine disclosure, but the church is the community which possess the greatest potential for communication about God. According to Avery Dulles, "The Church exists in order to bring men into communion with God and thereby to open them up to communication with each other." This task is variously called "mission", "evangelism," or "education".

Since the apprehension of God is a constantly recurring and renewed experience, the distinction between reaching non-Christians versus nurturing Christians is always inexact and elusive. In fact, we must reject the whole idea that the church deals with the sacred while the secular elements of culture deal only with the non-sacred. Church and culture are bound together. "The substance of culture is religion, and the form of religion is culture."

On the other hand, wherever there is an apprehension of and participation in God’s revelation, there exists the church. This means the church community and its communication exist in places not normally considered by society to be the church. And that which calls itself the church often is not fulfilling the role of church, namely, to be as pure a channel of communication about God as possible.

This situation leads the church into a paradox: how can it be the most effective and "pure" channel of communication without falling into the corruption which "effectiveness" can bring, and which sin-of-pride-in-purity engenders. All the church can do is attempt to be as faithful as possible in its faltering communication attempts, and then place itself under the same judgment as that which it uses to judge the rest of society.

Even though the church today is considerably less than perfect, it nonetheless often raises the right questions; it takes sides, and it represents a significant challenge to existing power structures. Through it, potent biblical and other religious symbols and images manage to become manifest. For example, Selma, sanctuary, and the churches in South Africa, South America, and the Philippines all have taken on powerful meaning as symbols of liberation in recent years. Above all, the church remains one of the only places in society where people still meet on a regular basis in face-to-face relationships.

But regardless of the degree of faithfulness of the church, communication about God goes on. It occurs wherever and whenever people tell what God has done in their lives -- even when the word God is not mentioned. Jurgen Habermas frequently uses the term "unconstrained communication" to refer to that communication which is the most comprehensive possible, transcending all other interests, values, and interpretations. This unconstrained communication makes possible, and in fact requires, ideological pluralism and at the same time resists attempts at ideological conformity. But it is not anti religious. Johannes Heinrichs points out that, even when the name of Jesus Christ is never mentioned, fundamental truth may be in the process of the communication. The same idea is called by Paul Tillich the "latent church," by Schillebeeckx the "anonymously Christian Church," and by Gregory Baum the "Church beyond the Church." Whatever the term, it is important for the Christian to identify and celebrate these moments of religious communication which occur outside the church, and within the secular culture.

Distortions of Communication

If it is true that human communication has the potential for being an instrument for both good and bad, of both reconciliation and exploitation, it becomes even more true in the case of these extensions of human communication in the mass media.

The mass media are not neutral tools, any more than the automobile and the washing machine are neutral. Every medium is more than just a technique of transmission. It is a synthesis of technology combined with economic, social, and political organization. Every medium therefore affects the communication process in a unique way, entirely aside from the way a particular communicator "uses" it. In fact, it is entirely accurate to say that the user is used by the medium at the same moment that the user uses the medium.

Everything that Christian doctrine teaches about original sin and the nature of humankind is eminently applicable to communication, and especially to the more potent forms of mass media. In this respect the use of mass media is no different from the use of any other form of power, and the tendency toward will-to-power and the other lessons of moral man operating in immoral society were never more apt.

A number of theologians have described ways in which Christian communication can be distorted. Five situations are particularly destructive to effective communication within the Christian community:

When loyalty to the church is substituted for loyalty to God. This happens when the church is believed because the source (church) is substituted for the message (God). The greatest distortions of this kind come when the church tries to communicate that it is the invulnerable possessor of truth.
When the Bible is substituted for God as an object of ultimate loyalty and faith, that is, when the authority of the Bible is substituted for the authority of God.
When Christology is substituted for theology, that is, love of Christ for the love of God.
When the church cuts itself off from its own tradition, or when that tradition is treated as something objective and final from the past, rather than as living memory in which the community of faith actively takes part and to which they add their own life-stories.
When Scripture is allegorized so that it caters to the desires of people for simple solutions at the expense of faithfulness to reality, or when scripture is taken so literally that attempts at new scriptural understanding are considered a betrayal of the original communication.

Tillich specifies four "demonries" which have great potential for distorting Christian communicating. Each demonry is a particularly powerful value in our culture which, when taken to its extreme, tends to destroy the human values in communication. They are: rationalisation, which tends toward sterile intellectualisation and robs life of its character and vitality; estheticism, which cuts off true communication by maintaining an esthetic distance in order to dominate, rather than to support, others; capitalism, which tends to depersonalize people by providing for their hedonistic needs in order to support production and consumption regardless of its human utility; and nationalism, which tends to make national things sacred and in doing so to create idols out of them.

In concluding this theological framework for considering communication, it is important to remind ourselves that there is no way entirely to eliminate all the hindrances to successful Christian communication. There always will be distortion in one form or another. The important thing is that communicators recognise the potential dangers and distortions, and that they not succumb to the temptation to misuse communication in the guise of communicating "more effectively."