In an odd twist of fate my grocery delivery mixed up my wife's Christmas card order. What to my wondering eyes should appear, but an overly sappy Santa commanding us all to "believe in the magic of Christmas." At first I nearly chucked them. But then I looked closely at Santa, and it occurred to me that the whole card was in jest. Should we not take this command as a kind of joke?
You may wonder whether this is just another bit of bah-humbuggery here. Don't get me wrong, I have on occasion secretly longed to shimmy into a tightly tailored Santa suit in order to steal the consumer core from Christmas. Isn't this the moral of Dr. Seuss's the Grinch? Only by stripping away the stuff of Christmas can we ever be merry. In many ways this is the quiet justification of all Scroogish tails which we tell at this time of year. But I don't think this is really what my "believe in the magic" Christmas cards are saying.
Isn't the best way to say Merry Christmas today to take the sappy consumer infatuation with some ephemeral state of bliss to its absurd limits? Isn't it precisely as we accept the total stupidity of Christmas as it mistakenly arrives on our doorsteps each year that it might mean something completely else? Maybe in the joke there is freedom to laugh precisely in the command to believe. On the one hand we accept that the stuff of Christmas makes belief impossible. On the other, that only in the acceptance of the impossibility of belief (implied by the command) do we come close to what Christmas might be about. Or as Luther puts it, “If they should poke their heads into heaven… they would find no one but Christ laid in the crib… and so would fall down again and break their necks.” Of course, this also leaves open the atheist possibility that it is all just a bit of magic, in which case the theologian and atheist alike can laugh at the joke, whichever way they choose to take it.
One approach to the question of theological education online can begin with Google’s mission statement: “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This is not simply the ambition to amass a vast information stockpile in the spirit of the library of Alexandria any more than it is the continuation of the Enlightenment “dare to know.” Rather, insofar as “the world’s information” is presented as an organizational problem, Google’s universality is located in its ability to provide useful access. Google begins in a skeptical critique of information, and locates the solution in the search engine. What I will explore in this paper is the relation of Google's understanding of universal access to the return of the scroll in the far right bar of our computer screens. Implicit to this account is the recognition, noted by Roger Chartier in his Forms and Meanings, that the only real parallel to today’s digital “revolution in the media and forms that transmit the written word... [is] the substitution of the codex for the volumen - of the book composed of quires for the book in the form of a roll” (p. 18). In other words, one way to understand the return of the scroll today is to look back to the rise of the codex roughly 1700 years ago. Here’s where a theological interest arises because Christians chose the codex over the scroll in a countercultural way a few hundred years earlier than the Greco-Roman culture it grew within. Although scholars have struggled to explain just why early Christianity so staunchly chose to go against the bibliographic grain in this regard, one reason rises to the fore: the universal nature of the Christian message itself. What we find is that Christianity is intimately tied to the process of binding codices, and, in this sense, the printing press only further radicalized this impulse. It’s in this light that we can gain an intriguing theological insight into information technology in the West, and the way it’s changing in today’s digital medium. Although useful universal access is at our fingertips, it arrives in an unbound way.
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Timothy Stanley
