Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

“Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness”: Spiritual Interpretation, Faithful Witness and the Mass-Mediated World.

Introduction

This study of the Ninth Commandment of the Decalogue is both an interpretation of the Commandment against bearing false witness and an exercise in what can be called “spiritual interpretation.” The value of this essay for readers could lie both in helping to raise consciousness in the Christian community about a pre-modern (or postmodern) way of interpreting the Bible and in helping readers interpret the Ninth Commandment against bearing false witness. This essay intertwines, therefore, its subject, the Ninth Commandment, with its method, spiritual interpretation.

The subtitle of this essay, “The Clash of Witnesses” plays on Samuel Huntington’s widely read study of modern world-cultures, Clash of Civilizations: remaking of the world order1. In this book, the Harvard professor of international relations identifies several different cultural “worlds,” with very different religious and ethical traditions. Each cultural “world” orients its members toward reality differently, and at levels of which they are hardly aware.2 In this essay, however, I focus on clashing “worlds” within our own western, North American and western European cultures. For Christian believers the first, normative and true world is reality as disclosed by Christ and affirmed in Christian faith. But each believer lives in his or her own human, cultural worlds, also. One goal of this essay is to remind believers that each Christian, and the Christian fellowship as a corporate body, receives the witness of Jesus’ revelation and also the competing and reinforcing witness to other “worlds”, other “pictures” of reality. from the testimony of their own immediate experiences, their life-style group, and from the mass media. Christians thus live in a “clash of civilizations.”

For purposes of illustration, I focus especially on one such competing world: the “world according to the mass media.” My analysis of the “world” witnessed to by the mass media illustrates only one of the “worlds” that competes for our attention and allegiance along with the witness of Jesus Christ. Another such world is each individual’s immediate sense of the world through his or her body, his or her “five” senses.3 A second world we each live in is the shared “space” of each person’s own life-style group.4 A third world is that presented to us through the mass media —news magazines, TV, films, the Internet and radio.

Thus we live in the clash of several worlds. These “worlds” differ from each other and they may reinforce each other. In fact, as we exist in these three different worlds of immediate experience, group attitudes and the mass media, we negotiate an ongoing crosscheck of the truth of the witness of each of them. An elderly person’s physical frailty “gives the lie” to mass mediated ads populated by young singles brimming with health, disposable income, free time and having lots of fun. The elderly handicapped person knows from his or her own immediate and group (a nursing home, for example) experience that “the real world” does not consist only of healthy, retired nomads camping at exotic places and having lunch in nice restaurants. A gay person’s individual and subculture challenges, and implicitly criticizes the mass-mediated culture, which largely (though less and less exclusively) “presents” the world as consisting only in heterosexual relationships. The 55 year-old unemployed man or woman knows, from his or her group experience, that politicians’ mass- mediated promises to increase employment for everyone is unreal and self-serving. And, mass- mediated advertisements can challenge poor individuals’ immediate experience. Seeing people in the mass media having access to medical care, police protection, free schooling, they critically assess their immediate and group experience of lacking these blessings.

The Christian’s daily, group and mass- mediated “worlds” can challenge his or her Christian world –view. The suffering the Christian sees in the mass media, in his own life-style group or in his or her immediate life challenges basic Christian claims about reality, e.g., that God is governing human history wisely and that God is both all- powerful and all- loving. Our “worlds” can challenge each other as well as confirm each other.

This essay’s major claim is that at the center of Christian faith is a witness. This witness is an affirmation about what is ultimately real, true and good. We can name this “the Bible’s witness.” But more accurate is to call it the Bible’s witness to Jesus’ Christ, who witnesses to the nature of God as Creator, Redeemer and Perfecter of the world. In the Bible we also find another reference to “witness.” That is the witness that the People of Israel and Christian disciples should make to God. Thus, the Ninth Commandment’s prohibition of false witness implies that there is a true witness. The New Testament witness to Jesus Christ redefines “true witness” and defines the believers’ responsibility for giving “true witness. “ These are the key ideas of this essay.

This essay thus begins with the Ninth Commandment, but allows the method of spiritual interpretation to lead to Jesus Christ, the true and faithful witness. Thus this essay is also about a method of reading the Bible that helps us fully appreciate potential meaning of the Ninth Commandment. The relevance of these themes for Christians today is that we are called to be witnesses. We can only be witnesses, however, if we understand Jesus’ witness, and we can only understand Jesus’ witness if we read the Bible in a way that yields the full meaning of the Decalogue. The partristic and medieval tradition of “spiritual interpretation” allows this. So this essay must also be about spiritual interpretation. Therefore, this essay makes hard demands on the reader. It is about the Ninth Commandment and it is about a way of reading the Bible that yields a meaning of the Ninth Commandment that leads to Jesus Christ as the Faithful Witness and to the task of the Christian community to give witness to God, the Holy Trinity.
Historical- Critical Method and Spiritual Interpretation

Before we compare and contrasts the “worlds” witnessed to by the modern mass media and Christian faith, therefore, we want to explain “spiritual interpretation. Our method will be comparison and contrast. We contrast and compare the modern way of reading the Bible, the historical-critical method, with the early church’s method of spiritual interpretation. Why do we make this comparison? Because the modern way of reading the Bible5—the historical-critical approach —does not aim at nourishing Christian faith, as did the early church’s “spiritual interpretation.” Therefore, the culturally dominant historical-critical method does not help Christians cope with the “clash of worlds” which is their daily experience, nor does it lead them to their responsibility to give witness to God in Christ.

To get some distance and freedom from the culturally dominant way of reading the Bible, we need to remind ourselves what the historical-critical approach tries to accomplish. Grasping this, we will see that the modern academic approach to scripture helps believers very little in the “clash” of witnesses in which believers live their real lives. Getting some distance from the modern, standard way of reading the Bible helps free Christians today to rediscover an older way, “spiritual interpretation” and may help them live into their duties as a Christian today.

Modern Biblical Interpretation: Historical-Critical Method

Beginning in the eighteenth century the methods of historical-critical interpretation gradually replaced the method of spiritual interpretation that characterized the church’s way of reading the Bible for fifteen hundred years. The transition was radical; today, most college-educated Christians think that the historical- critical method is the only responsible, i.e., the only intellectually respectable way, to read the Bible.

In recent years, the edging out of patristic and medieval styles of spiritual interpretation by historical critical method has come under ever more intensive scrutiny. This essay, in fact, is a minor example of such critical scrutiny. Increasingly, many modern Christian scholars and educated laity wonder if something essential to Christian understanding, Christian faith, and therefore also to Christian action and spirituality, was lost from view by the triumph in universities and theological seminaries of historical-critical methods of studying the Bible.6 Biblical studies, therefore, are in a state of transition, critically examining the modern phase of historical critical scholarship and its impact on the worshipping and believing Christian community. Part of this critical reevaluation includes how to retrieve the riches of spiritual interpretation without rejecting the results of historical critical method.

The historical-critical method is in reality a set of methods. However, one goal underlies all the methods: to ground the biblical text in the historical setting, the space and time, in which that text was created. In other words, the accepted goal of studying the Bible is the same as the study of any ancient literature: to use knowledge of the historical setting of the text explain the text itself. The goal of all the methods is to explain the text as a product of its historical setting. A biblical text is “understood, “ according to this approach, to the degree its worldly causes or sources are identified.

Obviously, studying the general history, the sociology and social psychology of groups that may have influenced biblical writers is essential to explain how the biblical texts are grounded in, i.e., are a product of these times and places. Helpful to this historical study is also archeology, especially the archeology of towns and cities mentioned in the Bible itself.

Studying the history of religions contemporary with biblical religion is also essential. This helps the historical critical scholar compare and contrast contemporary religious beliefs, practices, rituals with those reported in the Bible. One possibile goal is to show that religious practices of contemporary religious communities influenced, i.e., were one of the causes of, religious beliefs and practices reported in the Bible.

Another method of historical-critical study of the Bible is text criticism. Our modern editions of the Bible are translations of many ancient manuscripts containing texts that have been declared by church bodies as canonical, i.e., authoritative for the Jewish and Christian religious communities. When more than one ancient manuscript of a particular “book” of the New Testament or Old Testament, or a part of these books, exists, scholars compare them and try to decide which was “earlier” than the other, which may contain scribal errors, etc. Textual criticism is historical criticism because it tries to determine which texts preceded other texts in time and to explain the human causes of differences in texts.

Another historical-critical method is source criticism. Source criticism, as the name suggests, aims at determining what texts served as sources for the biblical texts. An example of source criticism of the New Testament is trying to determine what texts lay behind Mathew, Mark and Luke, given that the three Gospels contain much common material. Another example is the distinctions between four different sources of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament). A classic result of this source criticism was the identification of four sources for our Old Testament Pentateuch: J (the Jahwist); D (Deuteronomic) E (Elohist) and P (Priesly) sources.

Closely connected to source criticism is redaction criticism. A redactor is an author who changes a text that he or she receives. Redaction critics attempt to understand how the author of the Biblical books may have altered texts they received. Thus, most historical critics believe that the authors of Matthew and Luke had the material of the Gospel of Mark available. Redaction criticism attempts to figure out how the authors of Luke and Matthew changed this Markan material.

Another kind of historical criticism is form criticism. This approach identifies typical kinds of texts in the Old and New Testament, e.g., letter, hymn, narrative, parable, sayings, moral teaching, apocalyptic. The study of these genre or forms of writing also aims to uncover how the early Christian community used the biblical material in their daily life.

A more recent kind of historical criticism is rhetorical criticism. Rhetorical criticism is an example how methods of literary criticism used outside of biblical studies can influence biblical studies. For rhetorical criticism, like structuralist criticism and reader-response criticism developed first outside of biblical studies and then were adopted by biblical scholars. These methods are part of the shift of biblical studies beyond exclusive use of the historical-critical method.

Rhetorical criticism departs from historical criticism to the degree it does not try to uncover the historical setting “behind” the text, i.e., the historical factors which “caused” the text. Rather, rhetorical criticism focuses on the texts themselves, as a self-enclosed literary “worlds.” 7 The rhetorical critic of the New Testament, for example, attempts to discern how the author uses literary techniques to involve the reader in specific ways. For example, the author of Mark’s Gospel is thought to have presented the disciples as egregiously slow-witted and spiritually dull in order to “invite” the reader to “identity with” them. This identification can involve feeling superior to the disciples (the intended reader knows more than the disciples do) , but also by taking their side, as followers of Jesus. Another example rhetorical criticism applied to the Gospel of John highlights how the author presents Jesus’ deeds as “signs” of Jesus’ divine Sonship and also lets disciples repeat the theme of “come and see.” Combined, these two features draw the reader into viewing the deeds of Jesus as signs which the reader are to “see” and respond to in faith or by rejection. Rhetorical criticism thus tries to describe the writing strategies of the presumed author of the biblical text being studied.

Thus, the goal of historical- critical methods is to determine how the biblical texts are anchored in, embedded in, produced by their authors in their time and place. The goal is to show, so far as possible, how the biblical text is a function of the time and place in which it was produced.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these historical critical methods of interpreting the Bible increasingly dominated theological education and university study of the Bible. College students were confronted with this approach in college courses in the Bible. These methods were almost exclusively applied in seminary courses on the Bible. Parish clergy were expected to mediate the results of this approach to their parishioners in Christian educational programs and in their preaching. An academic elite, scholars trained in the historical sciences, thus undertook a major educational project in relation to the Christian community.

However, many Christians were highly suspicious of it. Indeed, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century the interpretation of the Bible became the battle field between the contending parties of “liberals” and “conservatives.” Especially those conservatives who had accepted the early modern theory of literal inerrancy (the view that the Holy Spirit dictated the text to the biblical authors and therefore each verse was like a scientific statement of fact to be literally interpreted) felt deeply threatened by the methods and results of historical- critical methods.8

Beyond the general human tendency to resist change, a deeper spiritual reason undoubtedly lay behind this traditionalist resistance to historical-critical interpretation of the Bible. Historical-critical methods share a methodological premise with the modern discipline of historical method, of which they are one example and application. That assumption is also shared by the natural sciences, even though modern historical science distinguished itself from the natural sciences as one of the human sciences (Geisteswissenchaften) over against the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Grasping the fatal problem of the historical-critical approach is important for understanding why Christians today need to recover the earlier approach of “spiritual interpretation.”

This premise, shared by all modern sciences, whether human science or natural sciences, is that a true, valid and “ intellectually responsible” explanation or interpretation must refer exclusively to this- worldly causes. Only interpretations (human sciences) or explanations (natural sciences) count as “scientific” (that is, intellectually responsible) if they ground the interpretation or explanation in some factor/s in this world.

For example, the modern historical -critical biblical scholar would break the rules of “scientific” interpretations were he or she to affirm that the risen Christ appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus. The historical-critical interpreter is permitted by the rules of his/her discipline only to say that Paul believed/thought/was convinced that the Risen Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus. In other words, where biblical texts claim that God speaks or acts, the historical critical scientist is required by the (often undeclared) rules of his/her method to say that the biblical author/redactor being believed or thought that God spoke or acted. The historical-critical scholar is not permitted, by the rules of his/her method, to “leave the ground” of this world. All causal or explanatory factors must be something in this world.

Thus, in the discourse of historical critical scholarship, religious claims replace theological claims. What biblical authors or actors appear to have believed or thought (their religious beliefs) are the only legitimate subject of study. God cannot be referred to as an actor or agent in human history. Thereby, biblical scholarship, according to the methods of historical criticism, becomes human -centered and secular: this world and human beings are the bases of explanation, even when reference is made to God.

Resistance to the gradual legitimization and domination of historical- critical method in biblical interpretation in both the secular and church academic worlds has its deepest spiritual roots in the often unarticulated awareness by believing Christians that, in the hands of the historical-critical scholars, the Bible was treated as human words about religious matters, not as God’s Word in and through human words. Biblical study, in the iron rules of historical-critical method, became human beings (modern scholars) talking about the religious beliefs of other human beings (the biblical authors). The shift to the historical critical approach left God, as an actor in human life, out of the picture.9

One should ask, if historical-critical approaches to the Bible run so counter to basic Christians intuitions that God is an agent in history, how did this approach ever obtain such dominance in the church, especially the Protestant churches? Three plausible reasons occur to me. First, history, or “the historical approach” was a controlling intellectual category in since the eighteenth century in the West. Dynamic categories of development replaced static categories in every intellectual field.10 Christian scholars could present themselves as intellectually responsible and comprehensible, especially in secular university professional settings, if they shared this historical approach. Second, both Christianity and Judaism believe that God both created the world and acts in it. Therefore, history as the space and time of this world in which God acts, is a central theological category. This would be a theological legitimization of the historical critical method in biblical studies: Christianity takes history seriously. Finally, every intellectual approach or method seeks to shed light on its subject of study. Historical methods in fact did and do shed great light on the biblical texts. The historical- critical methods help anyone understand the texts better.

Whether the historical- critical methods should be the only methods for the Christian church is quite another matter. The development of other approaches, e.g., rhetorical criticism, in academic circles, suggests that the days of historical- critical domination are ending.
Spiritual Interpretation

Using R.R. Reno’s exposition of spiritual interpretation as a guide11, I will summarize this ancient approach by stating three principles.

First, spiritual interpretation (Patristic-Medieval interpretation) assumes that Jesus Christ is the key to understanding the Bible. That is, spiritual interpretation assumes that everything in the Bible in some way or other points to Jesus Christ as divine Savior and God’s revelation; Christ is the center of the Bible. This witness of the Bible to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior can be direct or indirect. It is direct when, e.g., in the Gospels, Jesus’ teaching and deeds are presented. It is indirect when Old Testament language, history, stories or persons can be seen, in the light of the New Testament, to anticipate, point to, refer to, Christ.12

The basis for this assumption are those places in the New Testament where Jesus explains to his disciples that the whole Bible points to him, his identity, his teaching and his saving deeds. A key text is the story of the Risen Christ walking with Cleopas and another disciple on the road to Emmaus. “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he [the Risen Christ] interpreted them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” (Luke 24:27; see also Luke 24:44-49). That is, the Risen Lord told the disciples that all of Scripture, including all the writings of the First Covenant, the Old Testament, really were about him. As Reno points out, the disciples’ eyes were opened to Jesus’ true identity only after they had broken bread with the “stranger” whom they had invited to stay with them. In the act of braking bread (the Eucharist) their eyes were opened to how the Bible truly was about Jesus’ sacrificial death that they had just celebrated in the breaking of bread.

This Lukan story is also important for pointing to a second basic principle of spiritual interpretation. Luke’s story of disciples on the road to Emmaus does not really conclude with the disciples’ eyes opening after they broke bread with Jesus. The two disciples go to the other disciples and report what had happened to them. Then Jesus, the Risen Christ, appears to them and repeats his teaching, this time to the eleven remaining disciples, that all his words, and everything “written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” (Luke 24: 44-47). Thus, Jesus himself gives to all the disciples the basic interpretative guideline for reading the Bible: the whole Scripture witnesses to Jesus as the Christ.

However, and this second key principle of spiritual interpretation, true interpretation of Scripture (all of Scripture witnesses to Christ) is not an end in itself. Scriptural interpretation has a goal, purpose and horizon that lie beyond the circle of the disciples. This way of reading the Scriptures is for the sake of mission, for the sake of preaching “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (Luke 24:47-49). Jesus then instructs the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until the Father sends the Holy Spirit to empower them for their witness. In other words, the witness of Scripture (all of Scripture witnesses directly or indirectly to Jesus as the Christ) is for the sake of the disciples’ witness to the nations, i.e., their Spirit-empowered proclamation in word and deed to Jesus as Savior and Lord.

The third key aspect of spiritual interpretation, very nicely brought out by Reno, is its limitless horizons, its character of remaining a “work in process.” The Bible presents the reader with a veritable infinity of words, persons, stories, descriptions, and events. How each of these connects with other words, images, stories, etc. to point to Jesus Christ as Son of God, Lord and Savior is by no means obvious. Indeed, often it is extremely obscure, even impenetrable. Each reader is therefore required and expected to search the Scriptures and make his or her own discoveries. Like much contemporary art, the text of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, does not do all the work for the reader. The text does not explicitly tell the reader how it points to Christ. Like the viewer of contemporary art, the reader of the Bible is required and expected to work hard, to rise through the “flesh” of the words and historical stories to search for the spiritual meaning, i.e., how an Old Testament person, word or event leads the reader toward Jesus as the Christ.

Like a modern artist, the Bible’s author (God, or the Holy Spirit) does not do all the work for the viewer/reader. When an (impatient, frustrated modern) person stands before a modern work of arts and says to him/herself “what the hell is that supposed to be?” the modern artist would probably say, “you are asking the right question. In fact, what my work of art “is supposed to be” is a joint effort between me, my work, and you, the viewer.13 And the reason the text of the Bible, as witness to Christ, is often so obscure, difficult and opaque, is that the Scripture is to be a means the Holy Spirit pushes the believer into development and deepening of his or her faith. The Christian Bible student is supposed to struggle for new understanding; the life of faith is not complacent resting in printed certitudes but ever-growing understanding of the living Lord. Lively growth, bearing fruit, is the goal of spiritual interpretation.

We conclude this brief discussion of spiritual interpretation by contrasting historical critical interpretation with this patristic-medieval interpretation. In the first place, the goal of spiritual interpretation is to draw the reader through the flesh of scripture (the words, the historical descriptions, the individual figures, the literal/historical sense of the words) to the spiritual meaning, which is Jesus Christ. Bible study is not to revert the reader back into the past and into this world, but to move the reader deeper into union with Christ. Bible study is a continuation of baptism, at the level of the mind and imagination. Spiritual interpretations definitely God-oriented.

Historical-Critical interpretation, by contrast, intends to ground the biblical text in this world, to show the world behind the text, to revert the reader into the past. The methods of historical- critical method are all fashioned to do this in different ways: to show how the text evolved from writer to redactor; to try to surmise what actual historical event might have underlay the great events of Israel’s history or Jesus’ teaching and actions. The purpose of historical critical methods is to ground the text in this world, in the space, time, geography, psychology, language, etc. of its authors.

Second, the texture of spiritual interpretation is unfinished, very individual as well as corporate, is always an unfinished symphony. The Christian community, as a corporate body, and individual Christians in every age work at reading the Bible to discover how each biblical event, personage, even each word, points to Christ. This is an unending task, because in this life, we are in via, underway, pilgrims, looking forward. By contrast, the drift of historical- critical interpretation aims at closure. Granted, historical judgments, e.g., whether John’s Gospel was composed in Ephesus or not, is never finally settled; new information is always possible to upset an “assured result of scientific study.” But the goal, in principle, is scholarly consensus; an assured result of scientific study. If the test of spiritual interpretation is an eternal truth, i.e., a truth about Jesus Christ as the Eternal Word of God, the goal of each of the methods of historical-critical is some assured result that will “stand the test of time.”

A final difference is that spiritual interpretation is for the ordinary Christian. Every believer is supposed to search the Bible and try to discover how any particular story, person, word; image deepens his or her grounding in Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life. In relation to Scripture, spiritual interpretation expects each believer to think, to search, to wonder, to ponder, to struggle, to discover. Everyone should have a go at, according to his or her time, intelligence, imagination, resources.

Historical -Critical method, on the other hand, is the work of academically trained experts. One must be a scholar, have earned a Ph.D. to show that one will play according to the rules of the academic standard of “scientific study.” The number of the scholar’s publications “in respected journals” is the normal measure of the scholar’s merit carried out by colleagues in the process of academic career advance. In the Christian church, the seminary-trained parish clergy person is/was supposed to mediate the results of historical-critical study to the ordinary “person-in- the pew.” Since the results of historical-critical method, for reasons already mentioned, is very unhelpful to the preacher, he or she typically ignores what he has learned about the Bible in Seminary and turned to psychologists like Karl Jung or Karl Rogers, to current films, or to his or her own “story” to illuminate the text. Historical-Critical method was an elite operation; spiritual interpretation in principle is for every believer
Spiritual Interpretation of “Witness”

Having this description of spiritual interpretation in hand, let us make an amateur effort to apply it to the Ninth Commandment. In the Old Testament, the word and concept of “witness” has basically three references. Three realities can serve as a witness: Yahweh, natural things and human beings’ personal testimony.

In the Ninth Commandment, the reference is obviously to a human being called to be a witness in a court process. But this is by no means the only or even the most common way “witness” is used in the Old Testament.

In a Genesis story of Jacob and Laban’s covenant, God as divine witness and a heap of stones as an earthly witness are described. Genesis 31 reports the personal confrontation between Laban and Jacob and the covenant they made with one another. This covenant involved a demarcation line between the two families. Jacob and his family gathered stones, and Jacob set a stone, a pillar as a “witness” to this covenant. Laban named this heap Jegar-sahadutha (Aramaic “heap of witness”), but Jacob called it Galeed (Hebrew: “heap of witness”). And Laban warns Jacob that if Jacob violates the terms of the covenant, that “God is witness between you and me.” (Genesis 31:50-51). Here both natural things (stones) and God are witnesses.

Joshua 22:24 tells the story of the Reubanites’ and Gadites’ altar. Initially, the other tribes of Israel thought this altar was a place for separatist worship, thus a violation of Yahweh’s will for one center for worship. The priest, Phinehas, was sent to intervene. He was told that this was not an altar for separatist worship, but was “an altar of witness” to the Reubanites’ and Gadites’ loyalty to Jawheh. The altar was, in fact, called “witness,” for “it is a witness between us that the Lord is God.” (v. 24) Here, as in the story of Laban and Jacob, a stone altar serves as a witness.

In the book of Jeremiah, the people promise to accept and obey the message that God sends them through the prophet. They swear to Jeremiah, that they will call upon God as “a true and faithful witness between us.” (Jeremiah 42:1-5) Also, the prophet Micah threatens his listeners that God will be a witness against them. (Micah 1:2), and Job affirm, “my witness is in heaven.” (Job 16:19). In these passages, prophets call upon God to witness their carrying out of their prophetic office.

In the two statements of the Ninth Commandment, in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, the reference is clearly not to God or to any natural object, but to a person giving evidence in a court trial. The assumed context is a judicial process in which the witness of others is used as evidence to determine guilt or innocence. The Commandment prohibits giving false witness; and by implication, positively commands giving true witness. The moral requirement not to lie in giving evidence is repeated several times elsewhere in the Old Testament, e.g., Proverbs 12:17. Here the theme of witness has at least two aspects. One is the moral requirement to speak the truth, to “tell it like it was.” The second aspect is the moral one: doing justice. Telling the truth, not giving false witness is for the sake of doing right, protecting the innocent and identifying the guilty.
Reality and Witness

We should, I think, consider very carefully both aspects of this Commandment, the disclosure of what really happened, and the moral issue of doing justice. The first can be called the ontological side of true witness; the second the moral side. The first is the basis for the second. The ontological side, giving testimony to what is real, supports and enables the moral side, doing justice. These two dimensions of the Ninth Commandment imply a particular way of construing reality, a construal that clashes with modern agnosticism about truth.

In the Bible’s witness to reality “truth must out.” This “must” is both ontological and moral. The ontological side of the “must” is that reality, both God’s being and the world’s, have an intrinsic capacity or impulse to “make itself known.” Two striking passages from Luke’s Gospel come to mind immediately. One is Luke 8: 17 “For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light.”14 A second passage, Luke 19:40 presents a statement of Jesus in the context of his entrance into Jerusalem and the disciples’ praise of God. Told by some Pharisees that Jesus should silence his disciples, he responds, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” We should note that this passage, like the verses referred to in note 11 above, concern the disciples’ witness to Jesus.

A whole “ontology” or view of reality is implied here. The Bible’s view of reality is that what is real “makes itself known; can be known.” Reality has an intrinsic capacity to “out” itself. However, and this is the moral aspect, when no one is present to receive reality’s self-testimony and when justice is at stake, humans ought to speak the truth, because God has witnessed what happened and humans are responsible to God for telling the truth and doing justice. 15

Christians may take this “truth-telling” nature of God and God’s creation for granted. But modern philosophy of science does not. Immanual Kant’s teaching that the human mind cannot know things in themselves, and that God can, at best, be a working hypothesis to legitimate moral seriousness, has established a platform principle for modern theories of scientific knowledge, if not human knowledge in general. For this modern view, not only does reality not speak for itself but also the human mind cannot grasp reality as it is. Increasingly, modern theories of science say that human knowledge, e.g., the models and paradigms humans use in the natural sciences, do not give voice to the world as such. The models and “laws” conceived by scientists are useful fictions , whose “truth value” is measured by their use in controlling the physical world. The implications of this modern agnosticism, this modern belief that we can’t know reality, has its implications in legitimating the natural sciences in relation to the human project of mastery of nature, and in elevating epistemological and moral relativism to both a necessity and a virtue.

Closely connected with the biblical idea of God as witness and of the creation as capable of witness, is the theme of God’s justice and judgment. Justice is each person receiving what is due him or her. Doing justice is based first on God’s knowledge of the truth about each person and the human obligation to act in accord with what is true about each person. Divine judgment is, therefore, really not about God arbitrarily meting out punishment and reward but about God acting according to God’s nature in relation to things as they really are and to events as they really happen in God’s world. Justice and judgment, such important themes in Scripture and human life, concern reality and truth before they concern divine or human will.

The confidence that God will make manifest his grace and judgment, based on His witnessing of what is happening in His world, has another important effect. This knowledge and confidence gives Israel hope that God will vindicate the righteous and fulfill His promises. God is “true” for the Old Testament (and the New Testament) not primarily in the Greek metaphysical sense of that unique Being who is a se, of itself; the really real. The first and primary meaning of “truth” in reference to God is that God is a being who is true to His Word, who will fulfill His promises and will bring to light what really is, even if humans wish to hide.

The New Testament: Jesus, the True Witness

The Ninth Commandment prohibiting false witness was the start of a journey into deeper and deeper truths about reality, morality, justice and judgment. But we have already seen along this path that for the New Testament, the theme of true witness culminates in the Person of Jesus Christ. Spiritual interpretation of the Bible’s theme of giving true witness, therefore, naturally moves toward the figure of Jesus, the faithful witness.

The Fourth Gospel highlights this theme more explicitly and fully than anywhere else in the New Testament. We will focus this spiritual interpretation of witness, therefore, on the Gospel of John. The key chapters are John 14-16, Jesus’ so-called Farewell Discourses to the disciples. In the next paragraphs, we will try to identify the several strands of the witness theme in these three chapters.

The Johannine word for “witness” is marturein, (marturein) from which, of course, comes the word “martyr.” The theme of witness is explicit in John 15:26, where Jesus tells the disciples, that “when the Paraklete [the Holy Spirit as Advocate] comes, which Jesus will send from the Father, the spirit of truth, he will testify concerning me.” And, Jesus adds, “you are also to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.” (John 15: 26-27).

These verses speak of two kinds of witness: the Holy Spirit’s witness and the disciples’ witness. However, the Holy Spirit witness is “testifying on my [i.e., Jesus, the Word] behalf.” This means that testifying means, “to make Jesus known, ” to testify to Jesus as the Word of the Father, i.e., the One sent from the Father. Thus, the witness of the Holy Spirit is not a neutral presentation of Jesus, but one which “proves the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment; about sin because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the father and you will see me no long; about judgment, because the rule of the world has been condemned. “ (John 16:11) The witness of the Holy Spirit, and of the disciples, is to the full meaning of Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

Thus, in chapter 16, the Holy Spirit’s witness is not about Himself, but about what the Spirit has received from the Father. Jesus says, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” This statement draws Jesus into the circle of witnesses. For the Holy Spirit’s witness has no other content than that of the Son. The Spirit “will take what is mine and declare it to you.” In this sense, the witness of the Holy Spirit “glorifies the Son”, i.e., makes known the inherent status and significance of the Son.

This inherent significance and status of the Son, however, is nothing less, than that Christ is sent by the Father and makes known to the world what the Son “has learned from the Father.” Just like the Holy Spirit, so also the Son has “made known to you [the disciples] everything that I have heard from my Father.” (John 15:15). So Jesus is also a witness; Jesus makes the Father known. This making known by Jesus of what the Father has given him is Jesus’ glorification of the Father, which comes to its fullest “when I am lifted up.”, i.e., in Jesus’ death on the cross.

But Jesus’ witness , and that of the Holy Spirit, to the disciples is the basis for the disciples’ having a special status in God’s plan of salvation. Because the disciples have received Jesus’ witness, i.e., have “seen” Jesus and believed that Jesus is the One whom the Father has sent, the disciples are “friends” not just servants. For servants are told what to do without any explanation of why. Friends, by contrast, are those who are told the grounds and reasons for what another tells them to do. The disciples’ witness culminates in their being witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. (Acts 2:1-22.) The Pentecost story in Acts 2 includes the descent of the Holy Spirit that enables them to give witness to Jesus in all the languages of their hearers.

We can summarize this complex, interwoven theme of witnessing as follows. The Father makes known His will and purposes by sending Jesus, the Word made flesh, whose role is to give testimony in word and deeds, about the Father and thus to glorify the Father. When the Son leaves this world, because sinners betray and kill him, another comes to give witness, the Holy Spirit. But the content of the Spirit’s witness is the witness of the Son, Jesus Christ. The disciples are enabled to also be witnesses. This possibility is based in Jesus’ testimony to them of all He has received from the Father and upon the action of the Holy ‘Spirit, who speaks on behalf of the disciples (is their advocate) and leads them into all truth.

At the center of this Johannine “witness” theme is Jesus. Jesus is the true light, the Word of God made flesh. Jesus’ whole ministry, his teaching and actions (which are signs), witness to the Father. John the Baptist is also a witness, but not in the same sense as Jesus . John the Baptist is not the light, but a witness to the light. Jesus witnesses not to himself, but to the Father. The Holy Spirit witnesses to Jesus, and empowers the disciples to do the same. In this sense, Jesus is “the faithful witness.” (Revelation to John, 1:5)

Our method of “spiritual interpretation” has taken the theme of witness as presented in the Decalogue and connected it to the theme of “witness” in the New Testament, specifically in John’s Gospel. Thus, according to this spiritual interpretation, the Ninth Commandment is ultimately about Jesus, the one who gives “faithful” i.e., true witness. And Jesus’ witness is not primarily about actions done by human beings. Jesus’ witness is making known the reality of the Father on earth, a making known of truth that convicts of sin, righteousness and judgment. Only in the light of the truth of God and God’s world, are the disciples able to become be witnesses and to fulfill the Ninth Commandment by giving true witness.
Media Reality and The Light of Christ

In our section on the New Testament, we argued that bearing true witness, which the Ninth Commandment implicitly commands, has a global and ultimate meaning. If the assumed context for the Ninth Commandment in the first Covenant is the “court room,” the context in the New Testament comprehends the whole world. In the New Testament, the ultimate witness is Jesus Christ; Christ is the light and truth. Christ’s witness is to the Father, i.e. the Father’s righteous and loving nature and the Father’s saving purposes for humankind. Jesus as the true witness is the true witness to saving truth. Thus, Jesus’ witness, and the disciples’ witness testifies to “the world according to God. “ But in their earthly pilgrimage, believers also have to come with other testimonies to other worlds.

In this section we take a new step in our exploration of the Ninth Commandment. This step consists in contrasting and juxtaposing the world according the Christ and the world which the mass media witness to for all modern people, including Christians. For “the world according to Christ” is challenged and contested by “the world according to the media. “

The Perennial Clash of Realities

The world according to Christ and other views of “reality” have competed with one another ever since the beginning of the history of the Christian community. Already in the New Testament Letters, writers warn believers against being seduced by the worldly alternative life-styles and by the perspectives of the unbelieving world.16 Indeed, before the beginning of the Christian movement, already in the Old Testament, a major theme of the Deuteronomic history, as we saw in treating the Eighth Commandment, is the warning to the People of Israel not to be seduced by the worship and the rituals of the religions existing in the Promised Land. This, in fact, was the justification given in the Old Testament for the total destruction of the religious artifacts and even the very peoples themselves of the territories that Jahweh had promised to give to His chosen people. The danger of being seduced by alien views of reality is a basic theme of the whole Bible and has remained a permanent theme in the history of the Church. Believers are not “of this world”; and the struggle in the Christian community between the world according to Christ and alternative views of reality is a permanent one in the Church at every level, including the heart and mind of each believer.

Early in the history of the Church, some believers felt it necessary to withdraw from the great Near Eastern cities of Alexandria, Ephesus and Antioch and withdraw to the desert. This was the beginning of the Christian monastic movement. In the desert one could better free oneself from the dangers of wealth and lust, dangers that lodged in the pleasure sections, the theaters, the arenas of the large cities. One image of the city, even in the New Testament, is “Babylon” , i.e., Rome, the center of luxury and sin. Thus, the challenge for believers of trying to experience the world as disclosed by Christ within alternative, challenging, competing worldviews is nothing new.

In our day and for the foreseeable future, the electronic media will be an important source (very often helpful) for presenting the world. Some Christians are so wary of the world witnessed to by the mass media that they refuse to expose themselves or their children to the world they present. They do not send their children to public school, they have no TV in their home; they don’t see movies. They retreat from the mass mediated world into a Christian life-style enclave. My focus in this essay on spiritual interpretation and critique of historical critical method indicates my affinity to this Christian strategy. However, witness in the New Testament means turning toward the world with testimony to Christ as the truth of God and God’s world. Retreating Christians should wrestle with whether their withdrawal helps or hinders their duty to witness to the world. 17

What today, in the western world, is presented as reality, as things as they really are? What is the dominant worldview in which Christians live and move and have their being? We will address this question by focusing on the mass mediated world presented to us every day. Our method will be analysis and description.
The Mass Mediated World

If our bodily senses open us to our individual and immediate worlds, the mass media open us to another world, the mass- mediated world, the “public” world, in contrast to our private worlds. Our sense of the whole world, the world as such, “what is going on in the world, ” we get from the mass media.

The mass media are a creation of the modern technology, especially communications technology. Before the mass media, the, wandering apprentice, the traveler, the teacher or the preacher in the local community was a chief source of allegedly reliable information about “what was going on” at the national and the international level. Sometimes the teacher’s witness conflicted with that of the parish priest or pastor. But apart from the report of family members or friends who returned from journeys to “foreign lands,” which could even include the villages in the next valley, people’s immediately experienced world was the most real world, if not the only world which the world according to their faith had to deal with.

Now, however, our worlds have expanded enormously, the worlds for almost every person n the globe. The mass media have made this possible. In some cases the transistor radio is the chief or only access to the mass mediated world. But people living today are presented with a world from a wide number of mass media: TV, the newspapers, the Internet; news magazines, video and DVD films, and cell phones. The mass media pretend to be our witnesses to the “whole” world, and to tell it as it “really” is. What are the contours, the textures of this mass -mediated world?

A staged world

We come a step closer to our theme of what in our day commonly counts as “reality, “ as “the real world,“ when we note that the world which the mass media present to us is a “staged” world. A stage is a setting or space in which events or realities are presented for human viewing, hearing and experiencing. The traditional stages were in theaters, concert halls or even church sanctuaries, where rites and rituals were “staged.” Today the stage is the computer moniter, the cell phone screen; the TV screen, the DVD and video screen; the movie screen; the newspaper page and the magazine page. On these “stages” the “world” is presented to us, is put en scène. In other words, our world is staged for us by the mass media.

The theater, i.e., the space for the spectators to view what is staged, is now the living room, the entertainment center, the movie theater, the home or business office where our laptop are located, or wherever we may be when we access a picture or video downloaded onto our cell phone. The theater in which the modern world appears on stage is increasingly freed from the constraints of particular places and times. When people entered a theater they physically sensed they were moving into a space where a “world” would be staged for them. Increasingly the ordinary world is the stage on which the mass mediated world is staged.
A fictional world

A superficial perspective would be that the mass media present the external world exactly as it is. The media managers foster this impression. The hand held camera is “at the scene.” The reporters are “imbedded” with the troops. But, already in the 1960s, the perceptive Canadian communications philosopher, Marshall MacLuhan, insisted, “the medium is the message.” He meant that thinking the media were merely a clear window showing us reality as it is, is naïve. The evening news that we hear on radio or on TV is intensely “prepared”; many layers of decisions lie behind what we, sitting on our coach, munching popcorn, see. What topics to report and what topics not to report; what place in the list of reported topics, how the topics are to be reported,; who will report these events–these are matters of decisions by the “newsmakers,” in the “news industry” whom we, as news consumers, never or seldom see. The process of constructing the news is seldom discussed by the mass media.18 The events reported certainly have a basis in “objective reality.” Hurricane Katrina did devastated New Orleans; Sunnis and Shiites are blowing one another up in Iraq; the price of oil on the world market is rising. There really was a World Cup competition, and Germany was the host. But whether we hear of these events, and how we hear of them is a matter of direction and production.

Thus, a second feature of our “life world” grounded in its “staged” character. The mass mediated world is a fiction in the specific sense of being humanly constructed. We need to transcend for a moment one current sense of the world “fictional.” According to this current meaning, “fictional” means false and unreal. A novel is fiction in contrast to a scientific medical report which is “non fiction.” But the root of our English world “fiction” is “fingere”, Latin, “to form.”19 The first and root meaning of “fingere” in Latin is to stroke, as in stroking with the fingers. The second main meaning, however, is to fashion, to form, to mould, as one fashions a work of art with the fingers or builds a useful item for daily use. From this second meaning came also the Latin meanings for “fingo” of “to imagine” or “to conceive” and “to invent, fabricate and devise. “ Thus, far from denoting only “unreal” or “false, ” fictional denotes and connotes the product of human imaginative, intellectual construction.

Our main modern meaning for “fiction” as feigned, something not real, comes from the fact often written texts are invented, devised by someone. But we should hold on to the fact that our “world”, at least the “world” staged in and through the mass media is constructed for our consumption, and constructed by experts.

So central are the mass media for presenting our “world” to us that more and more people are being trained as experts in presenting sports, entertainment, political and economic, religious “events” to us through the media. These are the experts who majored in mass media or communications in college and graduate school. The construction of our mass mediated world is increasingly professional and sophisticated.

“World” as Consumer Product

This brings us to another feature of the mass mediated world. The world staged in and through the mass media and received by us in our homes, work places, film theaters, hotel room, or underway on our cell phone screens is a consumer product. Watching the TV news or leafing through a magazine or even watching a documentary on a CD or DVD, we may forget these are products produced by people who sell them on the market. The cost of a radio program or a TV program, or even a film on DVD is now so small that we may easily forget that the content of these media are marketed products. That means that driving the “creative construction” of our mediated world, is the profit and market share motives of some company. The artifical world of the mass media is a marketed product. 20to make a profit and to increase their market share in their particular facet of “world making.”

This close connection between the mass mediated world and business is revealed by modern language usage. At one time business meant primarily the small business of the middle class, selling products of daily use. Then the notion of big business, namely large corporations came into use,. The concept of business corporation is now joined by international, or transnational corporations, which are “global players” in the “global economy.” Simultaneously, almost all aspects of “the world” have become business. We consider it natural now to speak of “the health- care business; the “sports” industry”; the “entertainment business”; the “news industry”; the even “the art business.” The global market economy is the basic framework of our “modern world.”

It is easy to forget that the mass-mediated world is a business product. That we have to buy a radio and TV, a computer with internet access, a movie theater ticket, a subscription to a new magazine, or pay an entrance fee to a museum exhibition, is a commercial transaction often separated in space and time from using these as media. . Hence, it is quite easy to forget that our “world”, in the sense of the mass- mediated world, is a consumer package designed for, marketed to, sold on, and bought in the commercial market. Granted, we can be reminded that what is presented in and through the mass media are commercial products when we read or hear in the same media that a particular movie grossed so many millions; a novel was on the best seller list for so many weeks; that the viewing quota for a news program was such and such a percent. But the “events/world” staged in and thought the mass media are so interesting that we can be excused at the time for forgetting that these are commercial products.

A World to Enjoy

The “world” presented on the stage of the mass media and consumed in our modern theaters is a pleasing world, a world we enjoy. This is true in two senses or for two reasons.

First, the people/companies who prepare the world presented on the stage of the media in the theaters of our minds aim at a product that we will consume. On the surface, this hardly seems true, for the news constantly presents images of terrorist attacks, starving babies, train disasters and conflict between politicians, corporations and nations. Strange as it may seem, however, this “bad news” does not turn us off. Rather, we like viewing images of people suffering and fighting. This has always been true, and is true in the sphere of our personal experience, so long as we can view fighting and suffering from a safe distance, like the masses in the seventh and eighteenth century gathering to watch criminal being publicly executed. .

Of course, we do not want to suffer physical attack upon our selves and few people really enjoy being themselves part of interpersonal strife and arguing. But the world prevented to us on the mass media does not include us as parties and victims of these fights and violence but as viewers, one might almost say as voyeurs. Viewing human strife, suffering and violence from a safe distance is enjoyable; we can experience a stimulating shudder, the French would say a frisson, by seeing a corpse without an arm or a bloated, starving African baby. We each say, “O, how terrible.” These are not pleasant pictures, but we want to see them because they deliver a desirable shock.21

Also, the designers of the “world” presented as events in the media know that few people will continue to pay money for a “world” which contradicts the deepest beliefs, their aesthetic sense of beauty, their normal level of mental exertion. Therefore, they demonstrate their “objectivity” (and meet the standards of more listeners) by presenting “a balanced report.” Also, the designers of our mass mediated staged “world” know to include “happy news”; heart-warming stories and, occasionally, a touch of humor. This is why mass media commentators have repeatedly said that basically, every TV program is entertainment.

However, a second reason why the world according to the mass media is agreeable is due to us, the consumers. We select the TV news programs and we read the news magazines and newspapers that fit into our political outlook. We select the kind of novels we enjoy and the movies we like. In fact, our most immediate experience of “freedom” is in the variety from which we can choose when we want to access “the world.” The supermarket, with its ten varieties of ketchup, is like the newsstand, with its fifty varieties of specialty hobby magazines and its ten different news magazines and newspapers. We can find the media that present the world we want to see.

An Eventful World

The “world” presented on the stages of the mass media has event character. When a business rolls out a new product, it is presented on the media as a “major business event.” The World Cup is a major “sports event, ” especially in countries where soccer is popular. When CNN is on the spot presenting the invasion of Lebanon by Israel, we have a major “world news event.” When the presidential conventions are presented on TV, we have a “major political event.” What is an event?

The word derives from the Latin ex (“out from”) and venire. (“to come”). An event is something that “comes out from (something else).” The usual meanings of “event” are something that takes place, something that happens. Sometimes “event” connotes a special, an important happening. Then, “a special event” is an instance of redundancy. A secondary meaning of “event” is “outcome.” We say, “in the event of rain”, the program will be cancelled. Sometimes “event” is specifically tied to a kind of happening, as in “sports event.” Increasingly, despite these secondary meanings of “event” everything presented in the mass media has an “event” character.

From this we can discern that this world’s time and space are the dimensions within which the mass mediated world takes place. An event has a beginning and an end; and it occurs in a particular place. This means that “events” are worldly, i.e., secular in the original sense of something occurring in this world’s space and time. Like the historical critical method in relation to the Bible, the mass media ground us in this world. 22

The world presented in the mass media is “our world.” That is, the mass mediated world is never about a world to come or a world whose chief actor is God. The mass mediated world may present people acting from religious motives, like Islamic terrorists or Christians who shoot physicians performing abortions for religious motives. But on closer inspection, the media present people who act from alleged religious motives; the media does not speak about God, Himself, as an actor in the world and in history. Therefore, the “world” presented on the stage of the mass media is always this world, a world in which all explanation and interpretation involves agents and causes in this world’s space and time.

Gradually, our modern and postmodern sensibility is experiencing reality as a collection of events. I say “collection” because the mass media make no attempt to show us the interconnection, i.e., the meaning, of these events. To do so would undermine the entertainment character of the mass mediated world by making it educative. Like the items in a modern, surrealistic painting, the events of the mass mediated “world” are simply placed side by side, juxtaposed. The world presented in the theater of our minds on the stages of the mass media consists in scenes and character unconnected by any narrative line.

A Personal World

The “event” character of the mass mediated world brings us to another, closely related feature. The mass- mediated world is populated with bigger than life personages. These are public persons —actors in politics, business, entertainment. Even animals can become mass media personalities, as Bruno the bear, who occupied a key slot in the news for several weeks in Germany this summer. As I write , major figures are Zidane Zidane, a French sports hero, expelled from the final minutes of the final game of the World Cup in for physically attacking an Italian player, who allegedly insulted Zidane’s sister. Prominent in the news are the US President, at the moment visiting Germany.. Increasingly, the Pope is a media star. Constants in the news are Princess Di, John F. Kennedy and Elvis, even though all are dead (though sightings of Elvis continue to be reported in the media.)

One might speculate that the conditions of modern life deprive many people of personal, intimate relationships. Therefore, they provide a market for mega-personalities, larger- than -life individuals whose professional, marital and private dramas are presented for everyone’s daily consumption. The media make it possible for the individual, normal person to share the lives of people whom the media choose to make prominent, and or people who use to media to become and stay known. The media provide, therefore a “common” world, a world which can be shared in school, at work, at home and on vacation.

Pluralism

Despite this common world, the event character of the “world” staged for us and consumed by us in and through the mass media is a very varied, a very pluralistic world. One reason for this is its event character, itself. Located in a particular place at a particular time, events are by nature unconnected, distinct from other events. Critical students of the TV news usually observe how a news program presents radically different items, in succession, without any attempt to show the connection. The news program will report on a plane crash in Kazakhstan, then next report on the DOW Jones average; then on the current days winners in Wimbledon; then on a heat wave in Texas. The final event will often be a feel- good event; for example a brother and sister who have been reunited after forty years. The news fades with the two weeping for joy in each other’s arms.

As we flick from channel to channel on our TV, look at the available magazines on the newsstand or glance over the headlines in the newspaper, r look at the news headlines in our AOL email home page, we meet unrelated items. The world staged for us on the mass media is a heterogeneous world, a world of events that are disconnected. Our mass mediated world is a mosaic of disconnected stone, held together only by the media themselves.

An Ephemeral World

“Ephemeral” here means lasting for a brief time. This is true of the events presented in the mass media. News reports of the devastating earthquake in Pakistan, showing us as we sit in our warm, safe living rooms munching peanuts, Pakistani poor people living in tents and digging out their dead, are here this week and gone the next. Without explanation, the anchorperson no longer reports about the earthquake in Pakistan. It seems as if someone has filled the “disaste slot” in the daily news with something other tragedy.

Conclusion : Jesus’ Witness and the Mass-Mediated World

“My Kingdom is not of this world.” Jesus’ statement before Pontius

Pilate collides with all the modern “worlds” , not only that of the mass media, but also that of our social group and immediate sense experience. This contrast is not in the first place a condemnation of the “worlds” of our senses, our social enclave or of the mass media. “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and Truth. “ Our senses, by their nature, give testimony to the world of immediate experience. The mass media can be thought of reduplicating the world, shaping it by the commercial forces, and the very nature of the media that deliver their world to us. God is Spirit; the TV , the cell phone and movie camera, the cam recorder, cannot present God to our senses. 23

But beyond God’s invisibility, the contrast between the world testified to by the mass media and the Kingdom to which Jesus, “the faithful witness” testifies are the secular assumptions that lie behind our whole western society. At the level of our society’s “legitimate, responsible knowledge” every interpretation and explanation must be self-referential. Anything in the world must be explained from the world, in terms of the world. For this secular standard view of truth, even faith is a product of factors intrinsic to human individual and group psychology. Faith is how humans create their gods.

This secularism, the fundamental assumption that the time and space of this world is all there is or at least is the only legitimate basis of responsible knowledge and action, does collide with the “world” witnessed to by Christ. And this secular world is the world testified to by the mass media.24 In the world/ kingdom to which Christ witnesses, God is the chief actor, and we are invited e friends in sharing in God’s actions. Modernity rejects this assumption.

The secular world, certainly the world presented in the mass media starts within this world and stays there. One of the cardinal features of modern secularism is the assumption that humans are the chief actors. Further, modernity assumed that humans can make their own future, an emancipated, even a utopian future. In several decisive expressions, the modern quest has been to recover something authentic—authentic, foundational knowledge,(Descartes, natural scientific knowledge); authentic selfhood, (humanistic psychology); authentic (non- alienated) labor(Marxism) , authentic community (Socialism), inalienable individual freedoms (American/French Revolutions) authentic human development/education (Rousseau) ; women’s dignity/liberty. The agents of this recoverty of authenticity are the Knowing Ones who struggle to overcome the evil forces (organized religion, capitalists, authoritarian parents, the patriarchate, the repressive norms of the powerful, who have blocked people today from this authenticity. By recovering some form of authenticity and overcoming resistance to its recovery, the animating spirit of modernity believed it could free the flow of history toward a secular utopia. This modern myth of the emancipated future achieved as a human project does collide with the witness of Jesus Christ to the Kingdom of God. For in the Kingdom, God is Lord.

One of the testimonies of postmodern philosophers, however, is that this fundamental assumption of modernity is broken, has become unbelievable. Thus, the secular world and its witnesses (the prophets and agents of emancipatory liberations) are giving way to a new set of prophets testifying to the emergence of a new world, a new human situation. These prophets of postmodernity predict that we are in a new era of human development, offering a new chance and a new opportunity.

The philosophers of postmodernism say humans face a choice. One option is to continue to defend the modern myth of emancipation, to dedicate oneself to some form of “authenticity” once enjoyed, now lost, yet capable of being recovered. Or, give this up and welcome its disintegration, gladly separating oneself from the implicit violence of all modern totalist solutions to human inauthenticity. . Give up the quest for the reauthorization of the authentic and live into the new reality of radical pluralism. Accept that we cannot decide or know the difference between authentic/inauthentic; true/false; good and evil; the really real and the finctional. Move “beyond good and evil” to , indeed where abandoning these distinctions opens a new opportunity for human life. Count this, say the postmodern witnesses, not as a loss but as a chance for a new kind of freedom, not as a relapse into a negative nihilism. r

This new postmodern consciousness is fostered by the mass media, or the mass media may be the most obvious testimony to this new world. As we saw, fact and fiction are confused in this world, and consumers care less and less, for the mass-mediated world is “their” world, and an enjoyable (entertaining, at times pretty, exciting) world. The event and pluralistic world is not a connected story of recovering of authenticity toward a new and better future. The mass-mediated world is radically pluralistic, where variety is a gain for enjoyment, not sensed as a loss of meaning. In many ways, therefore, the world according to the mass media is the postmodern world analyzed, prophesied and prepared by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, and whose lineaments and textures are traced by the postmodern philosophers like Wolfgang Welsch, Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Gianni Vattimo. The prophets and seers tell us not only that the world of modernity is passing but that it is good so.

“My Kingdom is not of this world.” As modern theologian, Karl Barth never tired of insisting, God’s transcendence is his freedom to love, God’s freedom to intrude and interrupt this world (God’s world) and challenge human beings in the midst of their changing worldly self-understandings. The freedom of God, the Holy Spirit, which testifies to Christ, is free to use the languages of this world as a medium of witness to the faithful witness. Therefore, the Christian community does not , in the first place bear the burden of true witness to Christ. God, the Holy Spirit bears that responsibility. This allows the Christian community in every age to struggle to witness in word and deed to Jesus Christ the faithful witness, with a certain lightness of spirit.

The Rev. David Scott, Ph.D.

Murnau, Germany and Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

July 2006