But the technology is changing again, and as interested parties fulminate against "piracy," they no more discern the signs of the times than did the nineteenth-century impresarios who feared that the Edison cylinders meant that no one would ever attend live music concerts again. If we cling to models from an obsolescent social structure, our desperation portends only inevitable catastrophic failure. If we risk ventures that derive their coherence from the plate tectonics of contemporary information flow, and if we gauge our plans by the ways that change seems to be happening, and if we don't pre-fossilize our plan with over-investment, we have at least a chance of taking part in a productive change in theological pedagogy.
The times are changing, and the model of intellectual property that derives from circumstances where only a few people had available the capital to underwrite the mass reproduction of information--that model of intellectual property no longer functions. Interested parties may keep it alive in a declining state of vitality, but the circumstances that supported the model no longer obtain. It's over.
Theological educators? We enter the picture less as holders of intellectual property--though that's a relevant consideration from which we need to wean ourselves--than as stewards of the mysteries, called to make known the gospel, with an eye open to where we should stand on Mars Hill and how much it costs. Some of us will reverently watch the death throes of nineteenth-century copyright law, chipping in to pay for life-support machines; others will concentrate on learning to imagine a different world of information sharing.
We can usefully take Napster as a model for that new world of information sharing--a plausible move, granted that it is arguably the most successful internet application ever released. Napster had tens of millions of users within months of its first appearance online, and has instigated fundamental changes whose outcome still isn't clear. What does the staggering éclat of Napster have for theological educators?
It suggests the possibility of a Disseminary, a common effort to put as much theological sustenance at the disposal of as many people as possible. It suggests that a Disseminary can serve the mission of theological education by raising the tide of theological literacy among its students and among interested bellievers (and non-believers). A Disseminary sets out as rich a banquet of theological wisdom as it can manage to offer, without trying to set standards for who consumes it, how well, when, how often, or... anything.
The institutional agility of a Disseminary derives from learning a few simple lessons from Napster. For instance, Lesson One--