THE MEDIUM IS THE CONFLICT [Sat. 2-14-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Communicator—THE MEDIUM IS THE CONFLICT [Sat. 2-14-26]

 

[Remember that this column now makes no attempt to be informative or inspirational. It is only my reminiscences. Besides, I think I’ve written about Paul before. No, not the apostle Paul; the other one…]

I walked into the room to defend my dissertation, and there sat Paul! I had not thought of Paul for several years. But if I had thought about him, and someone asked, “Who’s the person you’d least like to have present when you defend your dissertation?” I would have immediately said, “Paul!”

He was close to finishing his doctorate when I started mine, at the U of Iowa, more than 50 years ago, but we overlapped for a year. We were in a couple of seminars together, and we chatted in the grad student’s lounge. Paul was firm in his opinions, and willing to express them.

Paul was good at doing theology in the time-honored academic way. You read every theologian from Irenaeus and Augustine through Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard on to Rahner and Barth and Tillich. You compare and contrast their approaches to epistemology and soteriology and all the other oligies. Then you declare which one you think best.

But I had been a campus minister for the past decade. I was well aware that the traditional method of doing theology didn’t connect with young people at all. They didn’t care at all about Kant’s “categorical imperative.” They read communications scholars like Marshall McLuhan and futurists like Alvin Toffler. In fact, they weren’t doing much “reading” at all. The electronic revolution was starting. People listened to tapes and looked at videos. It was a multi-media age.

So I wanted to do my dissertation on the interface between theological methodology and communication theory. What does it mean for experiencing God if “the medium is the message?” Well, one thing it meant was that I should do my dissertation electronically, as a movie, not as a printed tome.

That intrigued a couple of my professors, and most of my fellow students. It shocked and flummoxed most of the faculty, and one student in particular. Paul was outspoken about everything, and he was quite clear that such an heretical type of dissertation should not even be allowed in a respectable university.

It wasn’t that Paul was a bad person. It was just that we had diametrically opposed ways of doing theology. His was irrelevant, to anyone who was not a theologian, but nobody in the theological or university communities knew that yet. His method was tried and tested and approved. Mine was none of those.

And here he was, sitting there with my dissertation committee. “Paul is here for a semester,” the Dean said, “filling in for a prof who’s on sabbatical. You don’t mind if he sits in today, do you?”

Well, of course I minded, but I didn’t say so. I really never learned to say “No,” at least not in personal matters. I’ve just always gone along. If someone said “Go split some kindling,” or “Go preach at those churches,” or “Play the bassoon,” or “Let’s get married,” I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “Okay.”

Fortunately for my defense, my dissertation had not taken movie form after all. That turned out to be too complicated. But it was close. I had written a theology of narrative, by way of a collection of short stories. I was taking a narrative approach to theology rather than didactic. At least, it was print instead of electronic,which made it more palatable to respectable academics. I think something non-print might have been too much for poor Paul.

To his credit, he remained silent, save for one question: “Why?” I said, “You know why.” The other folks on the committee looked puzzled, but it seemed to satisfy Paul. He knew that, for me, the medium is the Gospel.

John Robert McFarland

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