Marshall McLuhan and Jesus Christ as the Primordial Medium

This article examines the significance of the Incarnation of Christ for the development of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. McLuhan’s Catholicism was already a topic of debate in the 1960s and 1970s, albeit often in a less than favourable manner. More recently, however, scholars in the English-speaking world have approached McLuhan’s religious convictions and their possible influence on his media-theoretical work in a more nuanced way. Building on this research, the article argues that McLuhan’s understanding of media and their effects, summarized in the famous phrase “The medium is the message,” can hardly be separated from his belief in the Incarnation, which has often been neglected by German scholars. If one takes a closer look at a variety of sources, such as letters and essays dating from the 1930s onward, it becomes clear that McLuhan considered human creativity to be the result of the total remaking of human nature by the “medium of all media,” that is, God incarnate, and that it is precisely these Christological and anthropological principles that underlie his media theory.