As I have been studying this phenomenon of the World Wide Web, I renew the question of why Jesus never talked about writing Gospels. It seems there is something very limiting about what writing does to a complex subject. It tends to break life phenomenon into "pieces" which really don't exist apart from one another.
The idea of grace vs works becomes a debate rather than two poles in dialogical tension when the dissection of conventional writing has cast its hue over the concept. It is cumbersome to redefine and retrace our steps to do qualifying of our "written concepts". The emergence of hypertext makes it much easier to continue to "branch out" a written concept or idea, and to provide some meat to an idea by pointing to different contexts in which this idea is discussed in another way, or illuminated in a different way.
Since the first century had no World Wide Web and hypertext, the written literature approaches may have seemed to Jesus to have too much tendency toward "encapsulating" truths which needed the illumination of live bodies and face to face embodiment to effectively communicate.
It seems to me that electronic hypertext creates the possibility for a wider, more complex, multidimensional approach.
This is not to say that it is automatically and inherently broadening. Just as in any application or media, the way is open to use the medium for shallow purposes, or to utilize the lowest common denominator. The mass of links represented on the WWW add to the already suffocating level of "infoglut", with links to provide one with what often turns out to be hours of fruitless "surfing".
Back
to Theology Paper where you left
Back
to New Media Communications Home Page
Back
to Index for this Theology Paper
Send
Me Comments, Suggestions, Resources or links to resources for this study
