The Medium of Salvation
By: John Thomas
Tags: Spirituality, Christianity, Culture, Social Media, Religion

What is God’s preferred medium for communicating grace?

Photo by Samuel McGarrigle on Unsplash

Since its inception earlier this millennium, there has been a steady stream of skepticism regarding social media. People have questioned what value, if any, various platforms bring to the lives of individuals and to society in general. However, that skepticism has gained new impetus this year, culminating in each of the four Big Tech firms coming under investigation at both the state and federal levels. That investigation is in addition to former Facebook president Christ Hughes’ article in the New York Times last spring in which he stated it was time to break up Facebook, and Senator Josh Hawley’s speech at the Hoover Institution and subsequent proposed legislation aimed at outlawing some of social media’s more addictive features.

Hawley’s work in particular, and that of Tristan Harris at the Center for Humane Technology, are of interest because they seek to tackle the social media economy’s lurid incentive to keep users’ eyes glued to their screens and address the potential harmful side effects of heavy social media usage.

As a Christian my sympathies are drawn to the moral aspect of their work. However, while my hesitations with social media include a concern for the mental health of users, especially the young; they extend beyond that issue. As a community, Christians, from the most famous mega-church pastors, down to everyday believers, have been quick to adopt social media. Many are enthusiastic about the potential it has to reach the unreached and the lost more quickly than traditional outreach methods. But, as more and more criticism about social media is voiced, perhaps it’s time to ask if the church has been too quick to hitch its wagon to this particular medium.

Many are familiar with Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan and his prophetic words, “The medium is the message.” Any time a new medium is introduced, it changes the way we communicate with each other and engage the world. Rod Dreher in the Benedict Option put it this way, “the changes a new medium cause in a culture are often more important than any information carried through that medium.”

Social media is no exception to this idea. Those who use it are being changed in numerous ways. Consider the following three ways social media as a medium is changing people:

On social media, users sit on the seat of judgement, everyday deciding whether thousands of quotes, tweets, and images are worthy of their likes and hearts. That attitude of criticism and judgement then seeps into how they approach all mediums, including the medium of God’s written word. Social media is temporal and distracting, the shelf life of the average tweet on Twitter and post on Instagram are just a few seconds before users move on to the next one. That has reduced the amount of attention users give to anything, and because of the mindless nature of the medium, the result is feeble attempts at “multitasking.” Dreher put it well when he wrote, “Social media divides our attention with the razor’s edge efficiency of a sushi chef.” Social media is extremely random and disorderly, it causes us to be scattered. The content users encounter on social media has no rhyme or reason, the random thoughts of random people. And so is the way people engage that content, at random times, on a whim.

All three of those effects on users are antithetical to the gospel. We are not to judge lest we be judged (Matthew 7:1), the gospel is eternal not temporal (Psalm 119:89), and the gospel is a perfectly ordered theological truth (1 Corinthians 14:33), not a mishmash of thoughts and ideas.

When Christians take to social media it is implied that they agree with the message of the medium, it’s inherent judgementalness, its temporal nature, and its disorder. Proclaiming Christ on social media subjects him and the salvation we have in his name through those same filters. It puts Christ and the gospel on the same level as the spaghetti dinner our friend from third grade made last night. We might be able to communicate the truth about Jesus on social media, but the medium, by its very nature, cannot communicate his worth. If we tweet, Jesus is Lord, there are many people who might assent to that notion intellectually, but it has no more bearing on their life than any of the other 350,000 tweets launched into the twittersphere per minute.

The Medium of Salvation

Consider the parable of the tenants that Jesus told in Matthew 21 where the vineyard owner builds his vineyard and then gives it to others to work. First the vineyard owner sent his servants to get the fruit. The tenants beat one, killed another and stoned a third. Eventually the vineyard owner sends his son thinking, “they will respect my son.” We see in this parable that the vineyard owner understands that by sending his son he is communicating something new to the tenants.

God too, by sending salvation to us through the medium of his Son, the word become flesh, is communicating something to us. God is communicating how serious he is about sin and the depth of his love for us. Author and professor Robert Inchausti caught on to this application of McLuhan’s maxim in his book, Subversive Orthodoxy. Of McLuhan’s statement, “The medium is the message,” Inchausti claims, “… [it’s] another way of saying the word became flesh.” In this way God’s chosen medium of communicating salvation to his people is incarnationally.

We might be able to communicate the truth about Jesus on social media, but the medium, by its very nature, cannot communicate his worth.

Today many involved in outreach and evangelism are enthusiastic about the potential social media has to reach the unreached and lost more quickly. But on social media our message becomes a throw away gospel, something to look at for a few seconds, like or not, and then move on to the next quote or image. It has no power to bring about change. In order to do that we need to utilize the same medium God used, an incarnational life.

Social media is changing the way people communicate and engage reality in ways that are antithetical to the gospel. Furthermore, social media is limited in that it cannot communicate the depth of God’s grace or how infinitely valuable Jesus is. The only thing that can effectively communicate that is a life transformed by the gospel, a life devoted to growing closer to God in His word and in prayer. That doesn’t take five seconds, it takes a lifetime, and it is worthy of our full devotion. We need to consider what we are doing when we subject our supremely glorious and valuable savior to a medium that undermines key tenants of his message. Are we planting seeds of faith, or are we heralding our King in a manner unworthy of the gospel?

John Thomas is a freelance writer. His writing has appeared at Desiring God, Christianity Today, and Christ and Pop Culture. He writes regularly at Soli Deo Gloria.