On not losing the message
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
In a recent post, I linked to an mp3 on Marshall McLuhan and one by Gregory Wolfe. These two come together in the interview with Wolfe with Dick Staub. He discusses the tendency of Christians to ‘borrow’ forms from the wider culture and attempt to fuse them with the gospel. However, if it is true that ‘the medium is the message’ then there is a danger that the message we think we are communicating is not what is being heard.
For example, if we produce Christian ‘branded’ goods — say trinkets with Bible verses on — then what are we communicating? Isn’t the principle message ‘commercialism and consumerism are good’?
He goes onto balance this with the need for our faith to be incarnated in the forms of the day/culture. The synthesis?
So many Christians tend to say ‘let’s get on the bandwagon and imitate what is already going on’ rather than being transformative. And that would be to take what is the form of the day and bring about, through a real effort of mind and heart a transformation of the form into something new. Into something that isn’t just tagging along, but something that is dynamic, something that others would want to look to and imitate.
Tags: culture, provocations
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...