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The Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound by Stephen Webb Brazos, 2004 244 pp., $24.99, paper |
No preacher in my Baptist childhood ever rendered temptation more vividly than Garrison Keillor did one Saturday night with a story about a frozen pump handle. The icy arm was a summons, a frosty whisper, to children to press their tongues on its dangerously alluring length. Stephen Webb's The Divine Voice can be read, I think, as an exploration of the temptations of speechlessness. That sounds odd, because as Walker Percy has pointed out, we fear nothing quite so much as silence, especially on stage: "The escalating terror of such silence is a public phenomenon: five seconds of such silence is a very long time, ten seconds is almost intolerable."1 Still, wordlessness can be seductive. Saying nothing feels like a refuge, even from God, who (we can't help thinking) ought to be more sympathetic with us who are slow of speech and of a slow tongue.
But Webb's book turns us away from the frozen pump handle of wordlessness. He searches out a "theo-acoustics," a theology of sound heavily indebted to Walter Ong, the late rhetorical scholar who has done so much to recast our notions about sound.2 In works like Orality and Literacy and The Presence of the Word, Ong argued that we moderns privilege sight over sound, because we traffic in the manageable surfaces of things. Contrarily, sound confronts us with interiority. To hear is to relinquish our place as sovereign spectators and managers in the world and to position ourselves in medias res as morally obligated and mortally vulnerable hearers of the word. Perhaps the dread appeal and secret relief of speechlessness originates in our visualist disposition to stand at a remove from things. St. Paul said he believed and therefore spoke. We sometimes hope the inverse is true: if we do not speak, we need not commit.
This hope runs athwart the Great Commission, if Webb's "acoustemological" understanding of the church is accurate—acoustemology being the project of theologizing in aural, not visual terms. The difficulty of this project emerges in Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decline of Dialogue, where he points out that almost all of our intellectual terms are essentially visualist: composition entails putting objects together, implication folds objects into one another, definition sets boundaries, and so on. Indeed, so pervasive are visualist analogies for intellection that sometimes it's tempting to follow Richard Rorty's lead in damning the epistemological project altogether. But Webb's acoustemological ecclesiology doesn't (in Rortyan fashion) seek solidarity at the expense of truth, because the church admits an obligation to the divine fiat from which we came and the Christly summons by which we wend towards the eschaton.
I felt the slightest bit smug when I saw Ong's name show up early in Webb's work. After all, no one gets out of my introductory communication course without hearing Father Ong's name invoked. What I hadn't known until I read Webb is that Karl Barth had been exploring the theological importance of sound two decades before Ong got around to it. In many ways, The Divine Voice seeks to carry on Barth's theology of the word, in the stead of those second-generation proponents of neo-orthodoxy who vainly tried to ground theology in metaphysics or historiography.
Webb's own project is much more modest: to draw on communication scholarship to rehear theology, ecclesiology, and discipleship in terms of performance. God, he argues, is a public speaker, and Jesus is what God sounds like. Christ is also what we sound like when our broken resonance is redeemed and our echoes of the divine resumed. To round out his theo-acoustics, Webb traces the role of aurality in and around the Protestant Reformation, especially in the theology of Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin, echoed more recently by theologians David Tracy, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Stanley Hauerwas.
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