A History of the Word through an “Ongian” Lens

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Brian T. Hartley
Greenville College, IL

Using a model articulated by Walter Ong, this essay suggests that technology has shaped worship and preaching through three stages of history—oral, typographic, and, now, an electronic culture. Each perceives “the word” differently, and reminds us, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, that “the medium is the message.”

Worship involves the use of the senses, though at the time we may not be fully aware of it. As one moves through history, however, there has been a rearrangement of the priorities of the world of sense, what Walter Ong calls the “sensorium.” That rearrangement has moved through three stages, beginning with (1.) the oral culture of the ancients, developing into (2.) the typographic culture made possible with the introduction of the alphabet and, later, taking on a much more powerful presence with the invention of printing, and, finally, (3.) in the last century-and-a-half moving into an electronic culture which links humanity together into what Marshall McLuhan described as “the global village.” These three movements have not tended to cancel each other out, but, rather, have built upon each successively, with the result that today all three types exist, at least at some level. At the center of this revolution stands the word, the primary metaphor with which the Christian tradition has operated.

Oral Culture

“The ears are the only organs of a Christian” --Martin Luther

In the ancient world, the word functioned as event. In an oral culture, “the word is something that happens, an event in the world of sound through which the mind is enabled to relate actuality to itself,” (Ong, 1981, p. 22). Because of this “event” orientation, words, themselves, were understood as something mysterious, bearing a power all their own, and, because there was an inability to look things up, the past was always present in a very real and concrete way. In this culture, the epic poets emerged as the high priests of the word who re-created the presence of God by means of the combination of words and the spinning of tales.

When one encounters the Hebrew prophets, one is brought face-to-face with this ancient understanding of words and their inherent power. The Hebrew dabar (“word”) connotes something active and alive, behind which there exists a living God. That inherent power of the word allowed the prophet to begin his utterance with the formulaic pattern, “Thus says the Lord.” The power did not reside in the prophet, but in the words which he spoke which had an existence all their own, inseparable from the giver of the words.

By the time the Bible came to be written down, this oral understanding was living side-by-side with the age of script, made possible through the invention of the linear alphabet around 1500 B.C.E. For the first time, words were not understood as sounds traveling through time, but had a separate objective existence on the page. Whereas before, words had partaken of the mystery of the larger creation—what Jacques Ellul describes as “being multicentered and flowing, evocative and mythological” (Ellul, 1985, p. 46)—now by means of the alphabet there existed the possibility of a sense of order and control. Formal logic became possible in this new setting and a subtle, but important shift took place from the priority of rhetoric to the principles of grammar.

The Bible, then, partakes of elements of both the oral and the written. In the earlier materials, such as the earliest sections of the Hebrew Bible, one catches a glimpse of a world where orality and narrative are the dominant genres. In later Biblical materials, such as John’s gospel or the later epistles, this sense of the word as something on a page is beginning to emerge and create a different frame of reference. One can understand something of the difference by examining the predilections of two contemporaries, Augustine and Jerome. The former emerges as a thoroughgoing oral man, trained as a professional rhetorician, even when he deals with the written word. The latter, however, is one of the early textual critics, who sees his task as that of restraint and definition.

The result of the emergence of the text is that reference now shifted from the ear to the eye and symbolic meaning was viewed with disfavor. The illusion began to emerge that one could understand a text “literally,” without much reference to context. This was reinforced with the emergence of type in Western Europe in the 15th-century, in the process that is commonly known as the invention of print. Ong suggests that this was the point at which there occurred “a widespread reorganization of the sensorium favoring the visual in communication procedures, that is favoring the visual in association with the use of words,” (Ong, 1981, p. 50). A subtle shift took place from the priority of hearing to that of seeing.

Though icons had functioned and flourished throughout the early and medieval church, they had tended to be standardized for the purpose of directing to the believer’s mind the stories associated with them. For instance, the picture of Jesus in the catacombs as a shepherd was a standard depiction meant to bring to memory Jesus’ own description of himself as the good shepherd in John’s gospel. For a culture in which literacy would have been rare, the picture or icon (such as the familiar stations of the cross) allowed the worshipper to enter into the familiar Biblical stories, for it was the hearing of these stories that was primary. In the fourth century, Ambrose of Milan could say, “Everything we believe, we believe either through sight or hearing . . . Sight is often deceived, hearing serves as a guarantee,”(Ong, 1981, p. 52-53). With Gutenberg, this understanding of the sensorium was to be challenged and, eventually, defeated.

Typographic Culture

“Not only did printing eliminate many functions previously performed by stone figures over portals and stained glass in windows, but it also affected less tangible images by eliminating the need for placing figures and objects in imaginary niches located in memory theaters. By making it possible to dispense with the use of images for mnemonic purposes, printing reinforced iconoclastic tendencies already present among many Christians.” --Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution

The key impact of print is its ability to order and control. The word type (from the Latin typus) means “the mark of a blow, a stamp, print or footprint, the product of pressure,” (Ong, 1981, p. 96). Type was, thus, something set, placed into rigid lines. Everything was then locked up with the aid of quoins—wedges which put the whole assembly under internal pressure and could be manipulated with a key. This typographical world was one of compression, “locked-up chunks of metal and wood,” (Ong, 1981, p. 97).

The result was a kind of spatialization of sound which favored the visual over the oral with regard to words. Alphabetic typography linked visual perception to verbalization in a way previously unknown. This created an illusion which became a hallmark of Renaissance and Reformation hermeneutics. We begin to hear interpreters speak of the “literal meaning” of words or a phrase. Anyone who has worked closely with language knows that it is multivalent and highly dependent on context. But with such clear and distinct letters in a fixity of space, there developed a kind of visual chimera of something that can be pinned down, quite literally.

A revolution in the way people made sense of their world, writing and print created the isolated thinker, the man with the book, who literally could hold the word in his hands. Words came to be seen as something objective, disconnected from their human context. Elizabeth Eisenstein points out that “gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or an academic skill. Instead, they could swiftly achieve mastery on their own, even by sneaking books past their tutors,” (Eisenstein, 1983, p. 34).

The whole setting of worship underwent profound changes. In many cases, newly reformed churches were literally stripped of their furnishings. The underlying reason for this iconoclasm had to do with a fundamental insight of Luther and the reformers after him that the Christian was passive in worship, as in salvation—totally dependent upon God. Luther’s understanding of the origin of language in the “bottom of the heart” was, “nothing less than a rejection of the traditional understanding of the intimate connection of vision and emotion and a statement of the primary connection of language to the human affections,” (Margaret Miles, 1985, p. 101).

Luther argued against violent iconoclasm, but oftentimes to no avail. Statues were defaced or destroyed, windows were smashed, and walls were whitewashed. As Margaret Miles has suggested, “sixteenth-century people destroyed images not because they loved them too little or were indifferent to them but because they loved them too much and found themselves attached to them,” (Miles, 1985, p. 107). Ridding themselves of images allowed them to “picture” themselves in new ways and eventually would lead to the disruption of traditional social and spiritual hierarchies.

For Protestants, “the reading eye became the ancillary of the hearing ear,” (Miles, 1985, p. 123). Henceforth, if eyes were to be engaged in the act of worship, it was primarily in the act of reading. Instead of the word being something that was associated with hearing, it came to be understood primarily as something that could be confined to a book. Centuries later, this would lead to churchgoing itself being replaced for some by the Sunday paper, the pulpit being ultimately displaced in a number of cases by the periodical press (Eisenstein, 1983, p. 93).

The primary monuments of the Reformation are typographical. In the English tradition, Thomas Cranmer was able to take the multiple liturgical traditions and compress them into one book, the famous 1549 (and later 1552) Book of Common Prayer. Even today, Anglicans are best known for their adherence to “the book.” This, plus the better-known Bible of 1611, variously known as the King James or Authorized Version, were to have more impact on the English-speaking world than any other monument from the first two centuries of print.

When John Wesley finally resolved to ordain ministers for the American colonies, he gave to them printed documents as his legacy. These books included a collection of his sermons, the Methodist Discipline, and his “Sunday Service,” an abbreviated version of the liturgy to be found in the Book of Common Prayer. As circuit riders fanned out into the American frontier, they brought with them books—oftentimes at least the Bible, a hymnal, and the Discipline. These books provided chaotic frontier communities with a sense of order. Printing provided the structure by which immigrant Europeans could organize even the “primitive” American backwoods.

A fundamental difference in the conception of God had also been wrought. By the 18th-century, God had moved from being a speaker to being an architect, “a manipulator of objects in visual-tactile space,” (Ong, 1981, p. 73). If God’s word could be confined to a book, perhaps God could be tamed as well. The worship that emerged in this context tended to be stately, orderly, and word-oriented. Neil Postman has described the characteristics of this culture as detached, analytical, devoted to logic, and abhorring contradiction (Postman, 1986, p. 44ff.). This was reflected in all aspects of the worship service: the sermon, the hymns, and the liturgy. All of these gave priority to the objective nature of God and the rational use of the mind. For instance, the verses of a hymn had a logical sequence that built concept upon concept until a coherent idea of the person or work of God would have been set forth. Sermons normally averaged between two and three hours in many Puritan congregations where the preacher would meticulously develop a text in what, ironically, came to be called “Puritan plain style.” The words of consecration which before had been uttered in Latin (oftentimes unfamiliar and somewhat mysterious to the parishioners) behind a screen as the host was held aloft, now gave way to liturgy pronounced in the common tongue available to individual parishioners in their own copies of the Book of Common Prayer. Perhaps it was true what the ancients had said, “Verba volant, scripta manent”—words fly away, what is written stays put.

Electronic Culture

“A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God” --Neil Postman, Technopoly

The shift from print-based culture to electronic communications is as epoch-making as either of the two previous cultural changes. That change, however, Sven Birkerts suggests “is still being delivered slowly, piecemeal, by way of the entrenched agencies of print. This circuit-driven renovation is happening in every sector, on every level, and the momentum will not slacken until the electronic web has woven itself into every potentially profitable crevice,” (Birkerts, 1994, p. 193).

One result in our churches is that there are severe sensoria and generational differences when it comes to an understanding of worship. Because of the impact of print, sermons changed to suit the requirements of the new literary form. Whereas rhetoric in an oral context may have depended upon repetition and circumlocution, congregations from only a generation or two ago understood discourse as “links in a chain, leading the listener irresistibly to an appreciation of the speaker’s main ideas,” (Bernard Reymond, 1993, p. 21). As Postman and others have pointed out, preachers a hundred years or so ago designed and delivered their sermons in the style of printed texts. This remains the expectation of the older generation in many of our churches.

The advent of the electronic media, however, has had an enormous impact on younger generations in the pew—none more so than television. Bernard Reymond cites at least four different effects: 1.) pictures on television are becoming more important than reality; 2.) because television gives precedence to images and sound effects at the expense of the spoken word, the Christian today is much more conscious of the total setting and the overall ambience of the place of worship; 3.) people tend to talk and act as if they were in front of an invisible camera; and, 4.) our ability to sustain interest and attention is affected by the “flash” cutting techniques of television, whereby a real happening is represented on our screens by a series of rapidly changing shots and images, highly-charged and often repeated in different sequences.

One response by Christians has been to simply buy into the medium, reduplicating its approach in an attempt to “spread the gospel.” Reymond dubs this a “rhetoric of bad faith,” an approach best represented as: “a series of audio-visual clips whose real message is hardly capable of bringing any audience into touch with God, but is much more clearly intended to keep the viewers hooked, and to solicit gifts of money from them to ensure that the programme goes out each week. The usual ‘coming up next’ of the other programme presenters becomes, in their mouths, ‘send us the money we need in order to keep on transmitting this stuff,’” (Reymond, 1993, p. 26). The danger of this naïve use of the medium is that the gospel simply becomes a means of salvation that appears under the guise of entertainment. Oftentimes, it simply distracts or, at best, reinforces what the listeners already believe.

Thoughtful Christians are beginning to recognize that communication is more than simply the use of words. Walter Ong’s understanding of the “sensorium” can be helpful here as we come to understand that meaning is conveyed through smell, sound, gesture, color, and rhythm. To think that we are not changing the message when we use a different medium is to not recognize the power of the medium to shape even the content to its own mold. Even a subtle change, such as the movement of words being read individually on a page to those being flashed onto a wall or screen, signals a significant shift in how the “word” is conceptualized.

This movement from one medium to another also means exchanging one understanding for another and, when this happens, something is inevitably lost. Susan White, a liturgist, expresses grave concern over the loss of mystery in the advent of the messianic age of technology and technique: “Mystery, once the experience of that which was impenetrable and awesome, has become simply something to be uncovered, defined, and manipulated. Such important theolo-liturgical concepts as time, judgment, death, retribution, and sin have been irrevocably altered within the human imagination, and the idea that there is a ‘technological fix’ to any problem is deeply embedded in our corporate consciousness. There is loose in the world a pervasive sense that it is technology which provides the legitimating myth for the choices made by individuals, communities, and nations,” (Susan White, 1995, 175-176).

Whether God is reduced to an image, a box, a book, or a machine, what all of these culturally-conditioned paradigms have in common is the desire to exert control over the One whom Christians proclaim is uncontrollable. These shifts in technology remind us that our experience of God is neither simply of the nature of the mind or of the feelings, but that worship and preaching, at their truest and best, engage all of the senses. When this happens, instead of closing down our understanding, they open up fresh possibilities for our encounter with a cruciform and incarnate God, whose gospel is life-changing in the midst of a control-oriented and experientially-obsessed culture.

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Bibliography

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Ellul, Jacques. The Humiliation of the Word. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

--------. The Medium is the Message. New York: Random House, 1967.

-------- and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World. Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Miles, Margaret. Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.

--------. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1986.

--------. Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Reymond, Bernard. “Preaching and the New Media.” Modern Churchman, new series 34.5 (1993): 19-29.

White, Susan. “Liturgy and Technology,” in Liturgy in Dialogue. Paul Bradshaw and Bryan Spinks, editors. New York: Liturgical Press, 1995. 177-202.