“The Bible is not an extraterritorial entity that has been dropped into our world from another; it is part of our world.” — Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks
Words matter immensely. Law and theology, team sports and romantic relationships all depend at many junctures on the idiosyncrasies of language. But, important as they are, a narrow focus on words can create a false impression that in the arena of conversation, words are the agents at play.
What is the substance, or essence, or proper content of a conversation? Crucially, the subject in question is not precisely a thing, but an action. While one may speak idiomatically of “having” or “holding” a conversation, this phenomenon can only be taken literally in the most transient sense. A conversation is not a possession or object. It is a momentary phenomenon, and as such is most helpfully understood as inextricable from the moment, bound up in its context.
This fact has obvious importance for the embodiment of conversation. As McLuhan points out, the content delivered through a medium is that which is obvious and the medium itself is that which is invisible. As a medium, conversation as such does a lot more than the given content of any one conversation will disclose. Hence the important social function of small talk, which, despite its strict content often being banal at best and tedious at worst, is nonetheless a significant mechanism for establishing rapport and dressing an interaction with prefatory context critical for more personal, intimate, profound, and therefore riskier conversation. So, often the proper “content” or, again, essence of conversation is the act itself, the medium, rather than the transcript.
Naturally, conversation can be used to describe more than just the interaction of one individual with another. Conversations grow in dynamism and complexity as additional parties factor in, but conversation can further grow across time as well. At some point along this scale upwards and outwards, the term “discourse” might be more appropriate, but surely this terminological shift would not erode the essence already described. History is no less embodied than the present. One might well argue that, in fact, the present is the summative embodiment of all preceding history, and therefore the embodiment of the past and the present are identical. Regardless of any abstract implications, it remains concretely true that, like the medium of conversation between any two friends or strangers, the medium of discourse across history in its infinitely various moments has an affinity for disappearance, concealing from immediate observation the substantive content of circumstances social, individual, and otherwise historically contextual.
Take, for example, the interplay of such factors in the Protestant Reformation. This example is indispensably relevant to the ongoing failures within the present state of discourse around it to escape the pit of disembodied, objectivist analysis. That is, in discussions of Protestant-Catholic or Protestant-Orthodox disagreements, the bare facts of theology and doctrine are generally pitted against one another without regard for the substance of the context. The language itself is substantive by virtue of theology and philosophy’s inseparability from semantics, and the context is therefore substantive by virtue of language’s dependence upon culture, era, and personality. One cannot assess, say, Martin Luther’s theology in the abstract — disembodied, as if immediately present to the observer. The theology can only be understood as mediated, that is, articulated, by the man, who was inextricably a product of both the grand facts of history such as a language as well as the minutia of his subjective experience, emotion, limitations, and the like.
Like any other historic occurrence, the Reformation is simply too multivariate to scrutinize without some compression into a lower-resolution map, which necessarily entails selection for relevance. However, this non-identity between the image and the moment itself should not be allowed in a thorough analysis to collapse into the aforementioned cutting of all threads except for the extracted, isolated verbal content of the debates themselves. The Lutheran Reformation in Germany cannot be understood accurately, even at low resolution, without consideration at least for the interplay of language, nationalism, and the press.
The Reformation could not have happened without the technological medium (invisible) of the printing press. Luther himself said, “Printing is God’s latest and best work to spread the true religion throughout the world.” The press is not an accidental feature of the Reformation, but in fact its technological essence. This has been hinted at in recent observations that Protestantism and literacy have a historic correlation, but indeed one may go further to say that the theological imperative of a very literate kind of familiarity and devotion to the Book is impossible and incoherent without the technological empowerment as prior. As the printing press extended the self, so the self tapped into both new powers and new responsibilities. “My conscience is captive to the Word of God” — such captivity could only have global resonance in light of the proliferation of the written, or printed, Word, and the tools to access it. Therefore, the Reformation emerges as an adapted religious expression of technological change.
The press is closely linked to the linguistic friction that sparked the Reformation. Proto-Protestants like Wycliffe were at the center of Medieval debates about the sacrality of Latin against the necessity of vernacular liturgies and scriptures, Latin being bound up with the same exclusivity as literacy and the Sacraments in this period. But, as mentioned, language is itself the medium of thought, and therefore a necessary vehicle for theology and philosophy. Just as the Great Schism of 1054 cannot be understood apart from the Greek-Latin divide, so the Reformation cannot be understood apart from the Latin-vernacular divide. It is little wonder, then, that Luther chose to name his translation of a certain neo-Platonic mystical treatise, the Theologia Germanica, the “German Theology.” As Bainton notes, this choice was somewhat political, as Luther wished to demonstrate that the German culture and people had unique contributions to offer to the Romanized world of theology.
This political angle adheres the factors of press and language to the third: nationalism. The press as a medium of language introduced incredible momentum for overcoming the barriers of regional dialect through linguistic standardization. This change contributed to framing the renegotiation of national identity that would come to mark the Modern Era in European history. There is no German people without German language, and there is no German unification without the unification of language. Where the preeminence of Latin had, in the context of clerical exclusivity, provided a layer of particularly ecclesial cohesion across Christendom, the ascendance of vernacular languages through popular access to literacy shifted the ground of European unity. As the principle of cuius regio, eius religio would manifest, the fractious nature of Medieval European political states would be imparted by this shift to the religious layer.
In light of these complexities and the centuries of development that produced them, it becomes difficult to construct a historical imagining of the Reformation as happening any way other than it did. This presents a challenge for the discerning modern-day polemicist in matters of theology. Questions constructed around the axis of “validity” seem to melt into category errors. The “should have happened” is increasingly obscured by any increase in data as to what did in fact happen, despite a natural expectation of the opposite. The only question that seems to matter is whether Luther was right in asserting that he could “do no otherwise.” Regardless of the moral or theological assessments one might make of his personal decisions, history refuses to bend to our expectations. It is impossible to conduct meaningful conversation on the topic while dogged by some hypothetical ideal alternate history, because such an ideal does not exist. We must, pragmatically, speak as if what happened happened, and that it could not have happened otherwise.
This overall approach has immense personal relevance as well. Diving back from the abstract-historical to the immediate sense of “conversation,” personal histories are likewise essential to the nature of discussion and interaction. One cannot understand anything that is said without understanding the language, and the language exists within a given scenario because of history. Nested within the broad, shared category of language is the personal dimension of meaning, sense, and interpretation. That is, one further cannot understand what is said in a conversation without having at least a modicum of understanding about who is saying it and why. Basic facts may be easy enough to derive contextually, i.e. based on where the interaction takes place, at what time, etc. But deeper matters will, again, require deeper rapport, and deeper rapport requires shallower matters in order for the interaction not to become too top-heavy, in which the content becomes so overbearing that the structure hidden by the medium collapses.
In practice, this means that one cannot make much of an introduction by simply launching into one’s deepest thoughts, desires, or interests with a stranger in most contexts. This deference to content at the expense of context is off-putting and presents an unpredictable and therefore untrustworthy profile. Such deference is in this way self-defeating, as the sense of unpredictability is a result and a cause of incoherence. In-depth conversation must be framed by in-depth friendship.
This means that the most important conversations about things like, say, Protestantism and Catholicism as competing systems of thought and morality, are most helpfully constructed as interactions between people rather than ideas. Much as Modernity has attempted to pit ideas against one another in the ethereal arena, the invisible “marketplace,” ideas cannot do much without embodiment. They are like ghosts, unable to touch anything on their own, and therefore unable to do much other than fray people’s nerves. They need bodies to give them articulation, to wrest them from their nebulous realm of disembodiment through language. Artificial intelligence will not do in this regard, since it is in essence an attempt at the pure disembodiment of language itself, but as such has no real relationship to meaning. Ideas are built of thoughts, and thoughts exist in minds, and minds cannot, despite our technological dreams to the contrary, be simply extricated from bodies.
All material existence is predicated on the articulations that issue from the Divine Mind. That which goes unsaid refuses to exist. It is unhelpful to pit ideas against one another as if they are autonomous creatures that may be thrown into a ring while the idle spectators merely place their bets on the winner. To do so is to pretend that what comes out of one’s mouth can be pure, unfiltered, unadulterated, factual, objective truth. But, as Lesslie Newbigin points out, even the gospel is a historical artifact — even the Word became flesh in a particular time, place, culture, era, and linguistic landscape. If truthful ideas are to have any purchase on human beings, they must themselves come into confluence with being. The Word took on flesh to save us. Consequently, truth of any degree that goes unembodied offers no salvation. To embody what we believe is true, we must overcome the illusion that the idea is free from the language, culture, and history of the one who gives it form.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. — John 1:14
Being Kindled 
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