media gospel

fullness of time

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—

1 John 1

Two thousand years ago, a group of men and women experienced God. They met him in a man.

They saw him, they listened to him, and they knew the feel of his cloak and the smell of his beard.

This man died, as so many men have, in a long line of absolutely faceless and meaningless erasure from the earth. Their extinguishers live on in history books, in monuments, in the names of streets and cities and these men disappear so senselessly into the dark. Their bones snapped without any remarkable story told. We don’t even know their names.

And, yet, he lived. This man was very much alive, in a hard-gnawing way, within the group of men and women who had loved him, held him, and wrapped his body away in linen and in stone. Here he was. His body was not rotting, his body was among them.

And so this remarkable, inexplicable event marked the men and women who had been baptized as indelibly as God had been marked by the wounds of his torture. They called it Resurrection, and they were a part of it with him.

Thus began the task of Christianity—if, in the beginning was the Word, and we have heard him, seen him, looked upon him and touched him—and we have been transformed entirely from this event, then what are we to do next?

We were to preach the Good News to all the nations—the Good News that God is among us, alive, and baptize them into the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and then, of course, what was this community of believers supposed to do, what we supposed to eat, drink, wear, eat, observe to hold onto the memory of God in the world?

Especially since the believers were from a religious community who organized themselves according to a social code promoting justice and caring for the poor, ate purely and wore clothing according to the prescriptions of their own long tradition.

What would it mean to be—as they began to be called, named after the Messiah whose anointing they were anointed into—Christian?

And that’s tradition. That’s the task of Christianity—to learn the long history of men and women who have continually asked: if God is alive—here, among us— as we say he is, then what is a Christian to do now? Because, as the first Christians so quickly found out, the Resurrection was not (as some might assume, rightfully) the end of all history. History kept marching along. The temple was destroyed and Christ wasn’t back in the way he was before. The world didn’t end. New Christians were born, Christians died—and not sacrificed to the forces of empire as Christ was himself—so what did this all mean?

Rome fell, Barbarians took over Europe, monks came, a new empire—a Christian one—came to Europe, kings and queens grew rich, saints fell in love with Poverty, an Arab prophet forbade his followers images—what would this religion full of gentiles do?, the birthplace of Christianity was rediscovered as a site of history and pilgrimage, and all throughout this articulation over and over again of what it was Christians believed and what it mean to be Christian, men and women wrote.

Luke says the man who was God came in the fullness of time, and I wonder what that means.

Surely it must mean technological advances: how could Christianity spread without a lingua franca—Greek? Without men who wrote letters and men who could read them? Without the roads of Rome as a catalyst to continental-wide travel?

Christianity is a medium—it’s a mediated religion—and it has always had a symbiotic relationship with the communications media of its day. The papyrus, the scroll, the codex, manuscripts, illumination, and then the printing press.

And now what? I wonder, pacing back and forth on the crunchy pine leaves on a perfect Carolina winter day in the woods.

You can’t ignore changes in media. If Christianity needed letters and roads to become what it did, won’t changes in letters and roads change how Christians respond to the world around it?

The classic sitcom wouldn’t exist without the telephone. The link between the rotary phone and the television may seem tenuous, but once phones got up off their receivers, left behind their booths and quarter slots and took up residence in our pockets, television changed. Now you watch television on a telephone. And so our stories are different.

It seems, as I walk up the driveway toward the road, that we are approaching the end of the period where Christianity is at the forward curve of the media, and uses the latest technological advance for its purposes.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps really it is the TikTokers who are the future. But I think that there has been a slow uncoupling. The Word has always been at the center of Christianity, and how to spread the word—often through written words—has been an all-consuming question of the Christian tradition.

But we swim in words on screens now. Even more so, the internet’s pivot to video leaves words behind in favor of an image of a person and the simulacrum of dialogue. Perhaps, if the medium of word-sharing is caving under the weight of the millions and trillions of words it has created and now turning toward something simpler: a human being, speaking. Perhaps Christianity itself needs to turn back to the human. But not the human on the screen. We are a mediated religion but also a tactile religion. Turn back to the Word we have seen, heard, touched with our hands and held deeply in the heart of another. The Word was once nothing more than your neighbor. There is nothing grander about God than the person sitting next to you.