The Word spoken...

I went to see Jim Carey's "A Christmas Carol" and was inspired to re-read the book. The movie seemed to be undecided whether it was to be a literal interpretation of the original Dickens story or something new (and Jim Carey-ish.) A good movie but not the same as the book. I've been thinking a lot about the debate between the print and new media in religion.

The peoples of the Book (Muslims, Jewish and Christians) have an text centered faith rooted respectively in the Koran, Tanakh, and Christian Bible each sharing significant Torah traditions. I'm interested (at present) in my research with Christian protestant evangelicalism and its use of information. In this theological tradition, there is an idea of a "received text" that is divinely inspired and canonically fixed (the church believes it was now closed and could no longer be edited, or added to.) There is also the belief in the inherent power of the words of scripture. This dominance of the text is strongly evident in the evangelical church where even decorative features in churches tend to be "text heavy." Information = written text. There have been challenges to this idea. I think back to the use of stained glass windows during the middle ages to educate and inspire largely illiterate church goers in the stories of Scripture. I remember reading some years ago (1985, I think) Frankie Schaeffer's book " Addicted to Mediocrity" where he challenged evangelicals to take the creative arts seriously as a form of faith expression capable to educating, inspiring and evangelizing. Time has moved on and we now live in a multi-media rich environment, often amateur driven. Faith is being expressed in these forms. Will spoken word begin to take predominance over the written text? It is happening with other forms of written communication (i.e. newspapers). How will this substitution in form change the evangelical theology around the primacy of the text? What about other forms of visual media? One of the first tasks of Christian missionaries among new people groups was literacy training. Besides aiding community development, teaching literacy also meant people could read the Bible. It was an essential part of faith development. Now one sees the widespread use of video dramatization of the Bible for evangelism.

So my question of the day: if the Bible was being created today, would God have used multimedia or is there something about written text?