A living word: Worship, word and ethics in an image-oriented culture

The ancient debate concerning the value of artistic images has found a new expression in contemporary debates over forms of worship in the Christian Church. I believe that recent conflicts over the appropriateness of "seeker-sensitive" churches and "contemporary" worship are rooted in the discord between styles and traditions of worship originating in the literary culture of the printing-press era and the "contemporary" attempts by churches to meet the new media generations at their level.;The primary focus of this project is an analysis of the dramatic shifts that have taken place epistemologically as Western culture has shifted from a print-oriented culture to a media-dominated one and an examination of how that shift has effected the worship of the church negatively and positively.;I argue, using Alasdair MacIntyre's system of virtue ethics, that worship is primarily an ethical task that forms the character of Christians through its practice. I then look at the work of both Jacque Ellul and Neil Postman, who are both critics of the image-orientation of postmodernity. I argue, contra-Ellul and Postman, for a cautious integration of the media culture into the worship of the church. I point to a contemporary theological debate that has gone on between David Wells and Richard Mouw as an example of the conflict that is currently taking place between those who want to re-elevate the place of the Word and those who proclaim more optimism both in the nature of the mediums to positively effect worship and in the people of the culture to truly become the people of God. The conclusion includes a brief look at the iconoclastic debates of the seventh ecumenical council and argues that the Eastern Church fathers' defense of iconography as incarnational can be "re-traditioned" by us as the basis for defending a cautious use of the image in worship.