Discovery of the Week: A Luther Quote

I'm reading a book called Flickering Pixels, by Shane Hipps.  It's largely an attempt at applying the media and culture theories of Marshall McLuhan to the Christian gospel.

The book isn't written from the perspective of an academic - but rather from the perspective of a former advertising executive for Porsche turned Mennonite preacher.  It uses no high-brow language, and the writing is often stumbling and the logic somewhat broken.

But, it's a great conversation starter.

This post wasn't supposed to be about that...more on it later...

In the opening chapters of the book, Hipps uses Martin Luther as an example of the kind of thinker who was shaped by the print media.  He writes about how the printed word allows our thinking to move into a different plane - it allows us to become almost hyper-rational (to the point that we can begin to neglect real-world experience in favor of logical discourse that can be, at worst, disconnected from reality.)

Here's a great quote from those opening chapters:

"You may be surprised to learn that Jesus went out of fashion in the print age.

In his translation of the New Testament, Martin Luther offered an evaluation of the New Testament.  In a section entitled, 'Which are the True and Noblest Books of the New Testament?' Luther writes, 'John's gospel is the one, fine, true and chief gospel, and is far, far to be preferred over the other three and placed high above them.  So, too, the epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter far surpass the other three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.'

Luther's reasoning was simple - anything in Scripture that tells the story of Jesus was of little value as compared to those writings that describe explicit doctrines about Jesus.  It should not surprise us that Luther, who was shaped by the printed word, would elevate these books.  John's gospel and the letters of Peter and Paul are made up of highly theological monologues or long conversations.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke, on the other hand, are characterized by short stories and parables rooted in the thought patterns of an oral tradition [as opposed to a printed-word tradition.]  Luther observed that John, Peter, and Paul provide us with a theology of Christ, while Matthew, Mark, and Luke merely provide us with the life of Jesus."

Hipps then goes on to talk about how other, more recent, technologies have begun to shift our conciousness away from "doctrines about" Jesus and back towards "stories of" Jesus.

Discuss.... :)