Lost without Translation

When I was first sent as a missionary to Austria I was almost immediately invited to a theological commission meeting for churches in Central Europe.  This seems like a great idea until I realized that in the commission meetings everyone spoke German.   Suddenly my PhD didn’t really mean a whole lot.  Even when I could understand what the discussion was about, I really couldn’t say anything.  And if I did say anything I sounded like a five-year-old because that was about the level of my German at the time. Without the language all your knowledge, all of your insights, and all of your experience is locked up inside of you and it cannot be communicated.  

It is no different when we come to the cultural realm of digitally mediated relationships.  It is a realm and a culture with its own language.  It is a visual language, and an aural language. It is a language with its own forms and grammar.  And if you don’t communicate in that language then you can’t be heard, or you will seem like a metaphorical five-year-old. Even if you have a PhD. 

My own podcast efforts are a pretty good example.  The content is good.  But I haven’t learned how to speak the aural language of the medium, and I don’t yet really understand the forms and grammar.  So my podcasts do not sound good.  What am I going to do?  In this case I don’t have time to learn to use the tools to bring the quality of my podcasts to where they need to be.  So I’ve hired an expert.  And experts are available on sites like fiverr.com and others for a reasonable cost. You can hear the problems I’m trying to overcome. https://interfaith-encounters.simplecast.com

On the other hand, learning to speak the visual language of the new media fascinates me.  And I have spent considerable time trying to learn it.  I’m getting better.  But I didn’t learn German in just a few months, and it is foolish to believe that I will learn the visual language of the new media in just a few months. But we're getting there: But I’m getting there: https://www.youtube.com/c/InterfaithEncounters

People with PhD‘s tend to look down on those they see as mere technicians. But the scriptwriter, the cinematographer, or the audio engineer has had to work every bit as long and hard and master every bit as great a body of knowledge as anyone with a PhD in theology, history, psychology, or math. And we need them, because without them we cannot translate our insights into the language of contemporary society. 

And when they become partners with theologians the result can be spectacular. More importantly, if theologians don’t want to be their partners then we will  lose our voice, as we have been losing it steadily for the last century. 

The same thing is true of the English language spoken between generations.  And I don’t just mean the mastery of a few idiomatic terms. There is been a good deal of research done on how people respond emotionally to certain words and phrases, depending on their generation. I have a doctoral student doing just this kind of research now and her bibliography runs to dozens of contemporary works dating to the 1990’s. 

What is notable is that words and phrases that create a positive emotional response in the baby boomer generation can create a profoundly negative response among Millennials and Gen Xers. They are as powerfully discriminatory as sexist and racist language.

This means pragmatically is that a lecture, or Sunday school lesson, or a sermon that has a strong positive impact for one generation can have a strong negative impact on another generation. And this is not necessarily because of the content. It is simply because of the selection of words and phrases used to convey that content.  The difference can be even more dramatic if the two generations are also raised into different cultural environments, for example the environment that exists entirely outside the church and the environment that exists inside the church. 

This does not mean that the situation is hopeless. It simply means that we must attend to the way we appear to others, whether it is visually, linguistically, or aurally. 

Living and working in Austria it became paramount for me to learn German. Just as living and working in Malaysia it became paramount for me to learn Malay.  I now regard it as paramount to learn the visual and aural language of contemporary culture and society.  Because grownups don’t pay attention to five-year-olds, however otherwise precocious. 

Reason vs Science and COVID-19

That which is reasonable isn't necessarily scientific, and is frequently untrue. 

Should America be locked down? More and more reasonable voices say no. And they have their reasonable advocates. The problem is that reason in this case isn't scientific, just as a reasonable hypothesis can be totally false.

For example. Given all we know about the relationship between disease and death we can reasonably say that there are usually multiple causes of death, and frequently multiple diseases involved. This leads to the reasonable hypothesis that the COVID-19 disease caused by the corona virus may not be any more fatal than the seasonal flu; that it is simply one of many co-morbidities involved in the deaths of those who have it. And it reasonably follows that drastic steps taken to halt its spread are ill conceived. 

To move beyond reason to science we would now need to test this hypothesis. The obvious test is to expose a large population to the corona virus and then see if mortality rates are significantly above normal. Of course we would need to control for other factors as well: things such as available health care interventions, overall health of the population involved, and of course population density, climate, and patterns of social interaction. But it could be done.

The problem, and this has always been the problem for epidemiology, is that the only definitive experiments must be run in real time on real humans. And that means that the if the reasonable hypothesis turns out to be wrong a lot of real people die unnecessarily. This is why when human lives are at stake epidemiologists recommend public policy based on the worst-case reasonable hypothesis. In this case the hypothesis that a disease such is COVID-19 is likely to be the leading cause of death, increasing greatly the risk of death, and not merely being on of many factors. 

And we've been here before. Stringent measures to reduce air pollution, the banning of smoking indoors, the removal of potential carcinogens from food, the imposition of mandatory vaccinations, requiring seat belts and airbags in autos, and a thousand others public policies flew in the face of reasonable hypothesis concerning causes of death from smoking, cancer, disease, and auto accidents. Whole industries labored to produce reasonable hypothesis to maintain the status quo. And these policies that we now take for granted were the implementation of the worst case hypothesis long before full data was available. They were, quite frankly, experiments on human populations. They happen to be experiments that have uniformly shown that their hypothetical basis was accurate. 

But they haven't just saved lives. They have been the basis for a robust economy. Because there is nothing more valuable to an economy than human lives. Only humans, when they have enough, immediately begin to imagine new things to want. And that includes humans "sheltering in place." Like our deep ancestors hunkered down in a cave against lions and the cold we stand apart from our primate cousins in that we want entertainment and we love to create. From chalk art on sidewalks to YouTube videos to home-knitted sweaters to electronic concertos (even now being written) to cures for diseases we haven't stopped wanting or creating just because we're currently in the cave. 

And what that means, or so I reasonably hypothesize, is that what we'll see in the future isn't a ruined economy, but a changed economy. We are learning to want different kinds of more than we already have. And we'll discover some things we thought we desperately wanted are not all that important. But of course the results aren't in from the only experiment that can test my ideas.

Offering Reasonable Hope

A number of years ago I was asked to sit in on the United Nations conference studying near earth objects, or NEOs.  The purpose of the conference was to discuss how people should be alerted if there was the possibility of one of these objects striking the earth. Two moments in the conference really stood out for me. 

The first was a short talk by a gentleman who specialized in communicating danger to the public.   He said, and I believe he is right "no one understands risk communicated in percentages. If there’s a chance of rain just tell people to take an umbrella." 

The second memorable moment came at the end of the first day. I was sitting at the back of the room being quiet while all the officials and scientists talked. Then one of them noticed my presence and asked me who I was and why I was there. I answered that I was a guest of one of the organizers and was just observing. Then I said that I was a teacher in a theological school. He quickly shot back, “A theologian. Good. We need a back up plan.“

This may be a little hard to take for those of us who are religious leaders.  But the reality is that in some situations we really are just the back up plan. Indeed, in contemporary society, God or an appeal to God is almost always just the back up plan.

In the face of a crisis Christians have had traditionally two things to say. One is that God is all powerful. “Expect a miracle.“  Second the second is that God is all loving. “His eye is on the sparrow so I know he watches me.” 

The first message comes across these days as the claim that God is like the Wizard of Oz. Too bad that curtain has been pulled back and the claim no longer has  any practical credibility.  That God is all powerful by definition is a theological fact.  But even taking the experience of the Christian community as a whole through time God’s deployment of God‘s power is utterly unpredictable. But then God, and God’s revelation warns us of this. God makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike.  

Within the natural realm that reality encompasses our bodily existence. In this world there is no Divine reward for good or punishment for evil. The wheels of justice may grind finely, but boy do they ever grind slowly. And if God does not deploy God’s power on the basis of morality, then on what basis can we imagine that it is deployed? "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” is a claim based on faith, not observable evidence. 

In any case the identification of an event as a miracle isn’t a claim based on a direct relationship between the event and God’s use of God’s power. The claim of the miraculous is based on the faith claim that God loves us and that God is the power behind all the powers of the earth.  It is made on the basis of the deep insight through faith that God loves God’s creation and God's creatures.  The claim that a friend was cured of cancer is a miracle, or that a child was conceived when it seemed impossible is a miracle, are witnesses from my faith, not my study of medicine. 

But this gets us to the second important claim that we as Christians make about God. God is Love.  And thus we are encompassed by God’s love.  The real problem is how to make this claim credible to others. In our time this requires that we offer reasonable hope rather than irrational or unreasonable claims.  

And the reasonable basis of Christian hope is not difficult. Clearly, against all odds, humanity in both the physical and moral sense has emerged within the natural world.  We have emerged as a species capable of understanding the order of nature and intervening on our behalf and behalf of other creatures for the good. And equally against all odds the natural world of which we are a part turns out to be predictable.  And it becomes more and more predictable the more and more we understand its complexity.  And the more we understand its complexity the more we can appreciate our human ability. And the more we can create tools that can effectively do good in the midst of that complexity. 

I’d like to say that the long odds make this a miracle, but that would make winning the lottery by betting on a single number a miracle as well. In short its an evangelistic dead end that puts Christian claims in the same category as those of gamblers who claim to have a system to beat the slots. 

What makes our situation amazing, wonderful, humbling, and indeed miraculous is the reasonable claim that our world springs from God’s love. This does not mean that we must somehow claim that God has been busy tinkering with evolution, in a sense loading the dice in one direction or another. That’s even worse than the gambler’s system; it is God cheating against God’s own rules in a way that undermines the stewardship of creation God assigned to humans. 

Worse, it becomes just another claim to be debated among scientists. It bears no relationship to the fundamental witness of Christianity that God incarnate came among us, ministered to us, died on the cross out of love for us and was resurrected from the dead. It is this witness alone that makes clear to the eyes of faith that God, who from a place outside of space and time created our universe, created it out of love and continues to love us beyond our death and non-existence in this same universe. It is the witness that God, as God, is all encompassing Love. 

Reasonable hope is offered in the claim that if you enter into the community of faith, if you cultivate an understanding of God‘s love among those who have sought to understand that love through the millennia, then you will begin to have true insight into the fact that God loves you and God loves the world. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.“ Evangelism is not an invitation to believe. It is an invitation to join the community that over long eons has learned hope from its constant engagement with the Spirit of Christ. By our constant effort to live into eternity through Christ we know what scientists and gamblers cannot know because they haven't made the effort. 

Anything else we offer as a Christian community will ultimately be unreasonable, and indeed beyond the scope of our competence. 

Yet for those seeking hope our invitation is utterly reasonable. If you seek knowledge you join the community of scholarship. If you seek power you join the community of the rich and powerful. If you seek wisdom you sit in the councils of the wise. If you seek hope you join the community for whom the cultivation and spread of hope is and always has been the sole concern. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” That is the Gospel, that is reasonable hope. 

Science not Sacrifice

Recently Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of the state of Texas suggested that he, and by extension other “Sr. Citizens” should be willing to risk infection and COVID-19 rather than sacrifice the country and its economic prospects. And thus by extension the lives of children and grandchildren.

He got pretty beat up for it. But for the wrong reasons.

Religious people took him on for the implied suggestion of the sacrifice of the lives of the elderly to save the economy. That was my first response but it was misguided. Gov. Cuomo said there didn’t need to be a tradeoff between public safety and the economy. A good tweet but not backed up by an actual strategy. On the sentimental side folks said that children and grandchildren would rather have parents and grand parents than a quick return to economic prosperity. I’d like to think so myself but its not an evidence based assertion. 

And that’s what is really wrong with Mr. Patrick’s suggestion. Instead of acting on evidence he is suggesting that decisions be made on the basis of the Christian religious concept of sacrifice. By turning policy decisions into decisions about who should sacrifice he turns what should be a rational scientific discussion into a journey into sentimentality. And by turning to the Christian religious concept of sacrifice he makes political decisions into personal decisions and commitments. 

This is a common move in contemporary US political culture, but it draws on the wrong portions of our cultural inheritance.

A state, and a nation, cannot long survive when it replaces rational decisions about public policy with opportunities for sentimental personal decisions based on quasi-religious concepts of sacrifice. This is one of the reasons the US founding fathers kept religion out of government and focused on the common good. And that Enlightenment culture of rationality is the culture we need right now. 

The science of epidemiology demonstrates that epidemics spread through a population until all those who are too weak to resist the disease die and the rest develop immunity, or the virus is so isolated it isn’t readily transmitted. How much of the population is affected directly depends on how easily the disease is transmitted and how quickly immunity is developed. The science says that the most lives are saved, not just elderly lives, when the spread of the disease is slowed as much as possible. 

And economics tells us that the basis of any economy is healthy workers producing goods and services that healthy customers can buy. A decrease of even 1% of the population hurts an economy badly. And if that decrease is accompanied by spikes in unrecoverable medical costs, distortions in production and consumption, long term lost productivity, and a failure in confidence in the government to save lives it is even worse. Mr. Patrick didn’t factor any of these into his policy ideas, focusing instead on his utterly irrelevant personal willingness to sacrifice. 

It isn’t the task of government, or government officials, to offer citizens a way to construct meaningful lives. It is, if I may quote the US constitution. “To establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Ultimately Mr. Patrick, or indeed any of us, may wish to find meaning through our willingness to serve larger aims than our personal health or prosperity. Religion may well guide our understanding of those larger purposes. Or we may find those purposes in our larger social world. But let’s keep that out of policy making in a time of crisis. We need science, not sacrifice. 

The Religion of Human Sacrifice - Good to Go in Texas.

On March 19th Gov. Gregg Abbott (corrected to add: suspended the Texas Open Meetings act) and declared a ban on meetings of over 50 persons state wide. He then noted in a TV interview that it didn’t include religious bodies because he wanted to protect their religious freedom. https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/gov-abbott-freedom-of-religion-means-churches-not-in-covid-19-order-but-many-making-changes/amp/

This is a completely bogus reading of the meaning of religious freedom. We do not offer religious freedom to people who practice human sacrifice. And letting religious groups hold large gatherings that create vectors for the spread of the corona virus will be followed inevitably by an increased numbers of deaths, an overstressed hospital system, and then even more deaths. It is apparently Gov. Abbott’s affirmation of human sacrifice as a legitimate religious option in the State of Texas.

I note as well that this effectively allows religious groups to continue to hold open meetings to promulgate and organize their political agenda while preventing all others from doing so. It is yet another attack on political freedom of all except Abbott's religious allies.

Finally, I note that in the interview Gov. Abbott referred only to churches, not to mosques, temples, synagogues, gurdwaras, and other religious groups. Apparently religious freedom in Gov. Abbott's world is religious freedom for Christians only. Or maybe he just doesn't realize how religiously diverse his state really is.

Religious people need to reject this immoral, inhuman, unconstitutional, and anti-Christian understanding of religious freedom. We need to stand for the freedom of our fellow humans to live, and to live in safety. That is the single overriding freedom of a nation that claims to live “under God."

Do Muslims Worship the Same God as Christians? 

Lets take a look. 

Does Islam Teach Muslims to Lie?

For a number of years Islamophobic politicians and pundits have been saying the Islam teaches that Muslims can lie to non-Muslims. In this short video I suggest we look at the facts.

Women in Islam

All too often I'm asked about the status and role of women in Islam. 

There is a lot to be said, and in my book Muslim Faith and Values Muslim women speak with their own voice. Here I want to point out a much bigger context that Christians often forget.

The Islamic State in the Modern World

Part 2 of my introduction to the Islamic State - now focusing on the modern development of the idea.

Just What is the Islamic State?

The Islamic State, part 1. What Christians (and others) need to know.
For more videos on Muslim Faith and Values: A Guide for Christians visit Interfaith Encounters on YouTube

Science, Subjectivity, and Life after Death.

In a recent article about the nature of consciousness the author Jesse Bering asserts that the mind is created by the brain, and that therefore when the brain quits working the mind is gone. Then going further Dr. Bering states that "the dead are inanimate carbon residue." (SA Mind, 19(5) 34-41, Oct/Nov 2008) This is a relatively common view among scientists, and is reflected in numerous articles related to the one above. 

But there is a problem with this assertion. Dr. Bering notes that the dead are remembered and thus have at least an objective existence that carries on within the minds of those who knew them. Which reminds us that the "self" is always and only a social self. It exists within a matrix of minds. While it may most strongly identify with and be identified with a particular body this experience itself is mediated by society and shaped by culture. The actual embodiment of the self is much broader than the brain and its associated body. 

The social nature of self-hood is well recognized in most cultures. This is why although their pictures of an "afterlife" are naturally anthropomorphic, the concept of an "afterlife" is not necessarily naive. While the "hungry ghosts" of Chinese myth may seem like a mere superstition they are in fact imagined as acting out a role in interpersonal relationships just like the role a person in their condition would act out. And their actions are really taking place in the fearful, vengeful, spiteful, hateful minds of those who knew them because they are experienced as causing fear and anxiety. Is it really naive to ascribe to them subjectivity and agency? 

How else would one imagine them? Why is ascribing such subjectivity and agency to them different from ascribing it to an embodied person sitting across the table and behaving in ways that have the same effects? The human brain is the body of many selves. Projecting them into other brains is a useful exercise but it is impossible to verify whether it is an accurate representation of reality. We know what people are doing in our mind, we're only guessing what they are doing in theirs.

There are roughly three ways that cultures have more thoughtfully (albeit in thoughtful myths) expressed the reality that those whose bodies have died go on living. That most familiar to Christians asserts that the self, having put away one body, inhabits another body especially created for the new environment of God's Reign. I'll reference II Corinthians and I Thessalonians for those who care to read the efforts of Paul to describe how a self remains embodied when its original body is gone. 

Many indigenous religions believe that the self is diffused into nature and its community. The people and their environment then become its embodiment and the realm in which to observe how whatever remains of its subjectivity is acted out. (The worldview of the Iban, whose culture I had a chance to study are only one example.)

And then there are the religions (Hinduism and Buddhism we know best) that build a picture of life after death in terms of karma, or more generally a network of causality that may or may not condense into a new living creature that embodies the old self. But regardless, the self endures in its power as a cause of effects yet to happen.

(As aside: these three frameworks are not mutually exclusive.)

In none of these three frameworks is the self simply disembodied. But neither is it imagined as having ceased. Because it is self-evident that it has not. So long as the dead person continues to have an effect on the living then surely it is reasonable to ascribe the cause of those effects to that person. 

Of course if one believes in God as understood in the Western traditions (which is in no way dependent on belief in an afterlife) then it is God who is the ultimate embodiment of all selves. Whether they are objects remembered or subjects given agency will depend on how God's nature is interpreted. 

Religion is often thought to be a naive and now outdated response to the environment driven by human evolution, both biological and social. Yet in the same volume on The Mind in which Dr. Bering wrote other neuroscientists noted that the relationship between brain and mind remains largely unknown and even lacks a robust theoretical framework through which such knowledge might be pursued. The direction of cause and effect in that dialectic is not uni-linear. What is naive is believing that the dead are merely "an inanimate carbon residue." So maybe there is wisdom in a broader dialogue between science, religion, and philosophy.

Theological Education and Emerging Anthropologies

The central message of the gospel is that God incarnate in Jesus Christ makes possible the restoration of our humanity.

How that message is received, understood, and articulated within each culture will depend upon that culture’s understanding of what it means to be human. While the understanding of what it means to be human may be placed in religious context, understanding a culture’s anthropology as more important that understandings its theology for communicating the gospel message. 

As importantly, it is in the anthropology of a culture that we will find God revealing God’s self within the culture. In the order of creation narrated in scripture God reveals to the first humans the natural order that includes themselves, their relation to that order, and their relationship to one another before God reveals God's own nature. Natural revelation, both in relation to the non-human and social orders precedes the special revelation by which God reveals specifically what it means to be human in relation to God.

This is ratified by the Incarnation, through which we learn that we cannot know God as God until we are restored to our true human selves by God incarnate as a human. Jesus' teaching and works, which focus entirely on restoring humanity, are one with his self-hood: making it possible to grasp that God is love. The disciples that would worship Jesus as the Christ would first know him as a human, and will naturally articulate the meaning of his divinity in terms of their how culture's understanding of humanity.

Because of its long history within the family of cultures called “The West,” and its formative role in shaping those cultures, the Christian theological interest in anthropology has primarily been in articulating the anthropology presumed to be found in scripture and continued in Western culture. Understanding how cultures outside the West construct the human person has primarily been a problem for missiology. And typically missiologists have been concerned with how the gospel addresses and reforms the presumed-to-be-inadequate anthropologies of those cultures.

The distinction between a supposedly normative Christian theological anthropology arising from what is sometimes called a “Christian” worldview and those anthropologies found in the diversity of non-Western cultures engaged by the gospel has always been problematic.

The central truth of Incarnation cannot help but be articulated within a particular culture’s anthropology, including those of 1st century Palestinian Judaism and later Greece and Rome. There is no identifiable Christian anthropology apart from that of the cultural environment into which Jesus was born and the first cultural environment into which it spread. Unless we take the fact of his birth as validating that worldview as normative and universal, which itself has little support in scripture, theological anthropology is inevitably a form of contextual theology.

Unfortunately the bitter fight with modernity waged by Christian evangelicals has led them to normalize this contextual theology and thus defend what they call a "Christian worldview." The superficial resemblance of this worldview with those of other non-modern cultures has then bolstered their claims that the so-called "Christian worldview" is actually universal, with modernity representing a dolorous deviation that must be corrected.  It is an approach as misguided as that of theologians in the liberal tradition that assume the ultimate universalization of the modern.

We now find that the anthropological consensus in Western culture is dissolving under the impacts of: 1. Growing cultural diversity in Europe and North America, 2. Rapid advances in the scientific understanding of the human person and, 3. Technological advances that introduce new possibilities for engagement among humans and between humans and machines. Moreover the process of globalization of Christianity, recognized as having taken place from the beginning, and which is now accelerating, challenges all claims from the West to possess or ever have possessed a normative anthropology. Global Christianity has multiple anthropologies, and from within each the gospel of God incarnate is necessarily understood in different ways.

This means that for theological education the missiological challenge to identify and relate the gospel to a diversity of cultures has become a central feature of the ministry of the church, and thus the pastoral leaders of the church. Standard curricula that place missiology or mission studies as a peripheral concern while continuing to privilege Western forms of theological anthropology are becoming increasingly ineffective in preparing men and women for ministry. Instead students need to be taught to analyze both their own culture and other emerging cultures (not least that of the emergent 2nd Machine age) in order to understand the fundamental meaning of Incarnation and how it is leads to the restoration of the fullness of human life.

Indeed, to go further, we must realize that a concern with philosophical theology, metaphysics, and systematic theology are  a product of a particular western and now modern cultural context, and indeed more specifically the culture of the intellectual elites who early on took control of the Christian church and imposed their particular interests on its theological endeavors. Which isn't to say they are irrelevant. They coincide with the cultural values of the rising educated middle class within which Methodism made its home in the 20th century and were thus a legitimate form of inculturation.

But even that culture is changing, and theological education must reckon with those changes or grow irrelevant.

In short, today and in the foreseeable future missiology as the basic inquiry into cultural context and how it influences the gospel need to take precedence over other forms of inquiry in seeking to articulate the meaning of the gospel in any and every particular place and time. They are the foundation of a theological education, for they alone provide a basis for comprehending how God's self-revelation in nature and society prepares for  God's special revelation in the contemporary world of ministry.

Theological Education and Social Responsibility

United Methodist theological schools have traditionally worked within a cultural system that assumed the value, and indeed necessity, of institutional engagement with the larger society both as a form of institutional responsibility and as a critical part of the pedagogy of preparing people for ministry in a socially engaged church. While this commitment remains unchanging, the modes of engagement must change in response to the changing cultural environments in which schools find themselves as well as the changing cultures within the churches their students will serve. 

As I suggested in the previous post, this first requires using the concept of culture as a key framework for analyzing the social situation in which a school finds itself. This doesn't displace other frameworks for social analysis, but it can help identify how to most effectively proclaim the gospel in its social context. After all, it is primarily culture that determines how societies understand themselves and adapt to their environment. Particularly in the complex cultural setting of contemporary US and global society understanding underlying cultural values and modes of influence will be critical to the faithful exercise of social responsibility. 

One aspect of this is grasping the complexity of US culture, particularly as it affects political values and affiliations. The work of Woodard in America's Nations is only one example of important contemporary efforts to map the complexity of the social terrain in which Christians bear witness. 

Another example is the rapid change and diminution in the role of traditional media in shaping the conscience of society, as well as the fragmentation of social consciousness abetted by the rise of new social media. Traditional means of shaping pubic opinion toward political decisions that accomplish social goals have greatly diminished in effectiveness, leaving institutions committed to these means without their traditional influence. In the case of the theological school this not only impacts the witness of the school, it impacts the effectiveness of the leaders they are training. 

We have seen this is the 2016 elections. In the period prior to the elections in my home state, Texas, there were an unprecedented number of political rallies opposing the election of Donald Trump and the implementation of his policies. The traditional media were flooded with messaging from churches and advocacy groups opposed to the policies of now president Trump. Yet in the end there was little evidence of impact on the final voting. Instead, as has been thoroughly analyzed, it was social media and non-traditional news that seemed to have been most effective in engaging president Trump's base and demotivating his opponents. Neither marches nor rallies, nor mainstream media blitzes seem to have been effective. 

By contrast the campaign of Beto O'Rourke for senate only two years later in 2018 used social media in combination with traditional block-walking to great effect in a near-defeat of Ted Cruz, who had been considered untouchable. This was at least in part because Cruz' campaign did not understand the emerging cultures of Texas and thus he continued to rely heavily on both the traditional media and messaging of his previous successful campaign.  

This is relevant to socially engaged theological education because schools have a responsibility to influence the emerging society of the 21st century toward Christian values, and because students need to learn how they and their ministries can be effective as change agents in society. This latter is in part an issue of ecclesiology, and thus a realm of contestation among theologians. But it is equally a matter of understanding effective communication in the wider cultural environment: a primarily missiological question that requires an understanding of how various forms of media function in different cultural settings. 

As an example: One important example of changing roles of media is a shift from messaging to conversation as a means of influencing individuals and groups. Traditional media place static messages in the public realm, repeating them almost endlessly to maintain and widen their influence. Social media allow and encourage conversation and engagement with a message. The most effective messages are not those broadcast most widely, but those which spread virally as individuals repeat them and draw their own social network into conversation. 

We have begun to understand that social media are ineffective when used as a megaphone to announce events or promulgate political ideas. They are most effective when those who seek to influence society can both initiate and shape an ongoing conversation that spreads organically through interlocking social networks. 

This is, of course, only the most basic description of how an emerging cultures influence institutional commitments to social engagement. The reality is both more complex and demands its own theological analysis. In the 19th century the debate over the "use of means" in evangelism was effectively short-circuited as Christians rapidly accepted the emerging cultural values. After all, they arose within a presumed Christian culture. Now, even as institutions and leaders must learn how to use social media effectively, the question of whether social media by its very nature promulgates values antithetical to the gospel must be considered. Again, this is a fundamentally missiological question with its own tradition of inquiry.

While the current cultural landscape can seem daunting the basic questions that need to be ask are familiar to Christians engaged in witness in new and complex cultural settings. Where in emerging or newly encountered cultures do we see the work of God in manifestations of God's Reign? Where do we find hostility to that reign that must be transformed by love? Such questions must not only be addressed to contemporary society, but to the means by which society engages in its own transformation. Only as we answer these questions can theological schools become effective agents of change.