Theology and Communication

Julian Fox, Horacio Lopez

09/02/14

         Abstract

Can we so simply assert an intimate link between theology and communications? Could the Salesian 'gift of the Spirit' exist without this dimension? Is communications yet another subject that has to be taught in our Salesian context, and at what level or levels, specifically? And assuming it has a place in theological studies, where does it fit most appropriately — under Moral theology? Fundamental? Christology? Of course we can point to our Ratio, to the SSCS and other documents for responses to these questions, but they are questions, or at least some of them are, that go much wider than our Salesian context, and we cannot be so sure we have the right answers anyway! What follows is an attempt to clarify the issue for ourselves and, if not to answer the questions raised here and others we may have, at least to provide some direction for dialogue. It offers guidelines for re-orienting certain aspects of formation in the light of some of Marshall Mcluhan's insights or from the emerging discipline called digital humanities. There are some hints as to how to locate these elements in the formation curriculum. It recommends especially that we avoid communications being subsumed into some general notion in the Salesian context today, and that it should be given attention and clear direction from those responsible for government and animation in the Congregation.

Introduction

We are just 50 years from the singular ecclesial event of the 20th century, Vatican II, and are by now firmly part of the 21st century. Avery Cardinal Dulles, prominent theologian and commentator of that earlier era, was of the mind that 20th century theology was largely a reaction to the influences of print culture on the Church's faith and held that the church "cannot wall itself up in a cultural ghetto at a time when humanity as a whole is passing into the electronic age".[1] In Models of the Church, possibly still today the work for which he is best known to the ordinary student of theology, Dulles included a step back to the 19th century and recalled Vatican I's implicit theory of communications as being concerned foremost with institutional relations inside the Church where the hierarchy teaches authoritatively as ecclesia docens and the faithful accept, and learn, as ecclesia discens.[2]
Today we need little convincing that it is no longer print culture but digital culture that is influencing faith, and that despite all the shenanigans that at times go on as part of internal Church relations, the real challenge today is that we are all situated in a context of global communications and face formidable challenges from pervasive all-encompassing communications, inside and outside the Church. We are undergoing a change at anthropological level affecting our way of perceiving reality, our relationships, and this is tied quite directly to technological change in the realm of communications.
That is one way that theology and communications can be seen in relationship to one another. But do we want theology simply to be a reaction to communications, even if we make that sound nicer by calling it reflection on communications? There is enough evidence in the Church's reflection over 50 years (where the dominant figure constantly calling us to this reflection was Blessed John Paul II) that, as Dulles once put it, "the Church is communications",[3] and he was making a theological statement here rather than suggesting that the Church has adopted communications technologies in significant ways. Nearly fifty years of papal messages on communications, which now include Pope Benedict XVI, himself no slouch in theological reflection in the field, also leave us in no doubt that theology and communications have more than passing importance for faith and life today.
The Pontifical Council for Social Communication (henceforth PCCS, initials following the Italian translation of its title and used as such in their web address) has promoted and encouraged theological reflection on communication since the Second Vatican Council’s call in Inter Mirifica for such thinking, an effort first systematically undertaken in Comunio et Progressio in 1971 and subsequently continued with Aetatis Novae, though this latter was a pastorally oriented document. We are anxiously awaiting a promised new reflection which must be at least in advanced draft stage by now.
In 2011 the PCCS conducted a symposium in the United States (Santa Clara University, California) on how theologians might reflect on communication and information technologies and the new culture that they create. They focused on ecclesiology, historical theology, and a theological understanding of digital culture. This symposium delved into a range of issues that have already been part of exploration by Salesians in various parts of the world, and by the Social Communications Department in Rome. Topics such as 'media ecology approach', seeing value in 'hacker ethics', the 'virtue approach' which we can find back as far as Aristotle and subsequently Thomas Aquinas, are not unfamiliar to us as we help our Social Communications Delegates to understand and fulfil their ministry.[4] So we can see that the Church, and the Salesian Congregation with it, really does want to come to grips with the issues involved. The Santa Clara Symposium, incidentally, had a Salesian presence in Fr Frank Lever, at the time Dean of the Communications Faculty at the UPS, Rome.
The Salesian Social Communication System, in its second edition (henceforth SSCS), opens with a preface by the current General Councillor for Social Communications, Fr Filiberto González, who makes a theological claim for communication: speaking of the 'digital continent' he says "This 'continent' needs the manifestation of God's love… a Salesian communicator with spiritual depth who can bear witness to God amongst young people in today's digital age".[5] That Salesian communication is to be an occasion for divine encounter is the particular import of this statement in its context of evangelisation and education. The SSCS then adds an important new section called simply 'Communication', which states explicitly that it is "Jesus the Perfect Communicator", the principle of Incarnation, who is the basis of our theological understanding of communication.
Questions remain, nevertheless. Can we so simply assert an intimate link between theology and communications? Could the Salesian 'gift of the Spirit' exist without this dimension? Is communications yet another subject that has to be taught in our Salesian context, and at what level or levels, specifically? And assuming it has a place in theological studies, where does it fit most appropriately — under Moral theology? Fundamental? Christology? Of course we can point to our Ratio, to the SSCS and other documents for responses to these questions, but they are questions, or at least some of them are, that go much wider than our Salesian context, and we cannot be so sure we have the right answers anyway! What follows is an attempt to clarify the issue for ourselves and, if not to answer the questions raised here and others we may have, at least to provide some direction for dialogue.

Theology, Communication

Language matters. There is a difference between 'theology of communication' and 'communication theology'. A prominent commentator in this area of communication and its relation to theology (or vice versa) is Franz-Josef Eilers SVD. He is decidedly against the term 'theology of communication', which he says sounds like "an initiative to 'baptize' the Mass Media and Mass communication to bring them into the flock of Christian Faith".[6] We need to clear the ground a little and at least know what it is we are talking about.
By way of a summary of writings on communication and theology over recent years commissioned by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACCS), Paul Soukup SJ explores the various ways in which 'theology' and 'communication' can come together:[7]

• 'theology of communications': theological reflection on communication
• 'communicative theology': encounter with God from a human communications perspective
• 'communication theology': communications as a hermeneutical principle for theology
• 'theological communication': communicating theological content, perhaps as in evangelisation

He goes on to say that it might be best, in the end, to just use a simple conjunctive 'theology and communication'. He adds that whereas in the past, theology was the queen of sciences (and we know that philosophy was regarded as the handmaid to that), today's academic world would not take that view. Instead communications and media play the role of mediation in general, including between our life experience and our act of believing; they are better known and appreciated in academic terms today, so it is at least timely and sensible to see communications as a mediator in our Fides quaerens intellectum (theological) efforts today.
Soukup belongs to the 'media ecology' approach, an approach that accepts that we live in two contexts that are constantly interwoven and interweaving: one is the context of media and today especially, digital culture; the other, for the believer, is the context of faith. Rather than begin from a perspective that there may be a clash between these, media ecology sees that they are bound up with one another, and we can move more easily between the two contexts if we accept this ecological approach. You will see that our own SSCS 2.0 takes the same point of view, making no fewer than twelve references to a 'communications ecosystem', at one point taking the term 'system' dear to Don Bosco himself, and saying "Today we have no hesitation in describing this as an ecosystem".[8]
Of the theology and communications approaches listed above, only 'communication theology' seems to suggest that communication may have intrinsic theological import. It is one thing to recommend various communications processes as useful for theological reflection, or to reflect in theological terms on these processes, but it is quite another to see these processes or some of them at least, as providing insight into our understanding of God. Lucio Ruiz, writing in the same collection commissioned by WACCS, makes a statement of fundamental importance when he says:
It is not technology that creates this communicational dynamics, as communication belongs to the deepest human reality. Therefore, our reflection must start off from an understanding of the personal being's ontology as a 'communicative being', because God made us in His own image and likeness, and as such, we are human creatures that are capable of having dialogue with one another (Cf. Gen. 1:26), capable of establishing relationships and thus capable of communicating with God and with others.[9]
The original reality of communication, then, is theological because, in the first instance, it is an action that can be applied to God, which is what we do. Eilers, in his already cited Communicating in ministry and Mission demonstrates the difference between Vatican II's Inter Mirifica (1963), asserting the right of the Church to use contemporary media, and Communio et Progressio's (1971) approach which is already beginning to look at the role of social communication in human society. Then, from a 'theology looking down on communications' perspective, he arrives at a 'communication as a theological principle', one where all of theology is considered from the perspective of communication.[10]

Seeking help from communications scholarship

If we are prepared to assert the theological import of communications per se, then it makes sense to seek out appropriate guides who are both knowledgeable and perceptive about communications, and open to its intrinsic fides querens intellectum possibilities. One need go no further than Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian, convert to Catholicism (after coming into contact with the writings of people like Chesterton, Lewis…) and an extraordinary communications guru of the 20th century. He knew his Aristotle and Aquinas better than many of the clerical scholars of his time, and applied this thinking to his own novel perceptions of what was really going on with contemporary communications processes. McLuhan's communication scholarship cannot be fully appreciated without first appreciating his Catholic Faith. He had a Catholic sacramental imagination — baptism and communion first, but he believed that God uses the tangible things of this world as a means of grace. Of course, the implication of this for him was that 'electronic communication', as he called it, was anti-sacramental. We become disincarnate bodies on the telephone — an idea now very much more reinforced by all of our 'virtual' experience online. McLuhan's importance for the 21st century lies in this kind of insight. It suggests we reaffirm our belief in an incarnate personal God in Jesus Christ as the only real way forward for true communication. McLuhan's best known dictum is "the medium is the message". What commentators often fail to quote is what he has said of that very dictum on at least two occasions: (1) "In Christ, Medium becomes message. Christ came to demonstrate God's love for man and to call all men to Him through himself as Mediator, as Medium. And in so doing he became the proclamation of his Church, the message of God to man. God's medium became God's message." (2) "In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message".[11]
In other words, without going to the theologians first, we already have indications from good communications scholarship that communication theology might well be located with those tracts of theology where we primarily study Jesus Christ: Fundamental theology and/or Christology.
There is something attractive about McLuhan's insights, once we understand the place his religious convictions have for them. and we Salesians have much we can learn from him as we try to tease out the exhortation of the Councillor General's about being adequate manifestations of God's love. That is a truly Christ-like competence! But it must also be obvious by now that if we are to gain some understanding of McLuhan and for that matter of other scholars in the communications area, and if we want Salesians in formation to begin to appreciate the importance of communication for their work of evangelisation and education (both of which McLuhan was vitally interested in), then we need to find room for that to happen and more, we need direction from our own governing and animation entities (be they departments or whatever) as to how to best achieve that.
Communications is too central to the Salesian enterprise — it is charismatically so, we already know from the Constitutions — to allow it to be subsumed under some general notion, be it youth ministry, theological formation, general services, or other. It might be at the heart of theological formation today, but it is also at the heart of just about everything we do as Salesians, especially our catechising ventures, since our Society began "as a simple catechism lesson".[12]

Establishing some directions for ourselves

If there has been the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in progress (we are too close to it all to be able to discern much further or to say that the revolution is already over!) which has profound anthropological consequences, it must be accepted that much of our Salesian documentation possibly represents an earlier viewpoint -that the kind of new thinking, new positions, new realisations that emerge from such a revolution are yet to find their way substantially into these documents. That's just reality — not a lament. It all takes time. But it does help us be more aware of what might need to change.
Print is no longer the exclusive or normative medium in which knowledge is produced. Theology should have no difficulty with that, despite being strongly tied to print for six hundred years! But if our theological teaching today is, in fact tied mainly to print, then that is problematic.
The Congregation's Ratio will of its very nature draw on time-worn traditional principles and largely leave to supplementary documentation its application to rapidly changing circumstances and different cultural situations. But that does not mean we should not take a very close look at even the 'time-worn' principles in the light of more recent insights (e.g. of people like McLuhan who reinforce, for example, the importance of training the senses — an idea already found in the Ratio but maybe in need of greater insistence).
There is almost certainly a need to look at the possibility of some bridging set of disciplines in our formation curriculum, certainly at an earlier stage, before specific formation (theology or further study for Brothers). These can be fully-fledged courses or at least units involving approaches taken from digital humanities, an emerging discipline which is an array of convergent practices linking, or capable of linking history, philosophy, linguistics, theology… They look at integrating technology, study, research, teaching. They also have a preference for open standards, shared knowledge and are not radically print-based approaches. If Salesians can be formed in a digital humanities way they are likely to be concerned about preservation of born-digital materials (which by and large our confreres are not too concerned about at the moment, in practice), will be interested in peer collaboration (which fits in nicely with the increasing rhetoric about 'family', 'networking' in our recent documents), will be more alert to popular culture as expressed in multimedia, interactive games, other visual media, none of which they will see as mere entertainment. They will see a variety of theological disciplines coming to bear on digital technologies, and vice versa.
If digital culture is a new, created culture, the result of technological advances, then it becomes a way of life. Our consecrated religious, Salesian existence is also a way of life. There are potential clashes between the two. The key is integration. In Vita Consecrata John Paul II stated that formation "must include every aspect of Christian life. It must therefore provide a human, cultural, spiritual and pastoral preparation which pays special attention to the harmonious integration of all its various aspects".[13] Personal, convergent media, various other communications process need personal and integrative formation strategies.
Finally, the whole area is so complex, continuing to rapidly evolve as part of the very nature of technological advance today (therefore the culture it creates continues toe evolve rapidly), that it would seem impossible for us to tackle things without specific and regular guidance from our Congregational Centre. What form this takes is an open question, but it is a sine qua non of our continued effective presence to today's world.