Loading...
A Theology of Communication
Fore, William F.
Fore, William F.
Author(s)
Author(s) (Additional)
Illustrator(s)
Producer(s)
Contributor(s)
Contributor(s) (Other)
Editor(s)
Advisor(s)
Contact(s)
Data Collector(s)
Collections
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Online Access
Abstract
"All theologies have at least one thing in common: they are attempts to deal honestly and lucidly with the way things are, so as to help people understand what life is all about. Unfortunately, theology has become so specialized during the last 50 years that it has almost defined itself out of existence. Where, only a few centuries ago, theology was thought of as “the queen of the sciences”, the one discipline that held all the others together and which everyone took with the utmost seriousness, today it speaks only rarely to the totality of the scientific world, and is almost nonexistent on the horizon of the average lay person. Theologians themselves seem to be disappearing. Not only are the massive systems of a Thomas Aquinas no longer produced, but for more than three decades we have not seen a single systematic theology of the calibre of Gustav Aulen, Karl Barth, or Paul Tillich. Avery Dulles charges that 20th century theology has been largely a reaction against the corrosive influences of print culture on the faith of the Church. Barthian neo-orthodoxy sought to escape from the detached impersonality of the print medium by a revival of face-to-face oral communication as it existed in New Testament times. But that movement was fundamentally reactionary. It sought vainly to operate within a communications system – primative oralism – that no longer existed. Dulles is right in insisting 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 This article [ed.: originally published in 1987] is not an attempt to provide in any sense a genuine systematic theology. It is intended to provide a viewpoint from which to understand the workings of communication. It attempts to say what communication “is all about”, in the context of what the world “is all about”. It rejects some worldviews, and with them certain ways of using and thinking about communication. It proposes a worldview – a theological perspective – which I believe to be consistent with genuine biblical and historical Christianity, and which, if accepted by the reader, leads to certain implications about ways of using and thinking about communication."(pg 1)
Note(s)
Topic
Type
Article
Date
2011
Identifier
ISBN
DOI
Copyright/License
With permission of the license/copyright holder