In bringing about such mighty shifts in our manner of public and private trafficking, the internet presents our churches, religious communities, faiths and all of us with a magnificent if problematic gift. For here in one package which can seem as big as the world and as intangible as nothingness, lies the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity that the churches have seen for 500 years.

I am referring to the online revolution that has been brought into being by the development of the internet. Compared with the great historic shifts in our patterns of information exchange, the adoption of this technology has been remarkably swift. Even the creatures of Shakespeare's imagination, such as his winged messenger Ariel, would have been found sluggish by comparison, and faced redundancy from Prospero. Oberon, listening to Puck's boast of being able to put a girdle round about the Earth in 40 minutes, would have wanted to know if the web had gone down.

Or as St Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 2: 'But as it is written: eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.'

What would Puck's 'Serpent's tongue' have made of Twitter? Is social media, as some would have it, indeed the tool of the 'liar', the devil? Justin Bieber, fed up of the abuse he was getting, took a brief break from Instagram in 2016, saying: 'Instagram is for the devil. I think hell is Instagram. I'm 90 percent sure. We get sent to hell, we get locked in the Instagram server. I'm stuck in my DMs trying to get out.'

Or click back to the pedestrian but still relevant analogy of Chaucer's pilgrims, sharing their disparate lives and narratives on their way to Beckett's shrine at Canterbury. The author of The Canterbury Tales was, and is, a constant reminder that our own human journeys, individual and collective, are conducted on many plains – the geographical, the temporal and the spiritual.

Ecclesiastes tells us (1:9) that there is nothing new under the sun. 'Is there,' asks the ensuing verse, 'a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has already been done in the ages before us.'

Since 1995, the number of internet users has risen from 1.7 per cent of the world's population to 52 per cent.

If we reflect on that, and the following facts, we might well surprise ourselves by ending up in agreement with Ecclesiastes on the matter of precedents. The pattern of decline in the sales of national (printed) newspapers is little less pronounced than that of a river at a waterfall.

It's not all bad news. Michael Binyon, The Times leader writer, did a session with me at Movement Day at Westminster Central Hall on Saturday. He said readers happily pay out in their hundreds of thousands to read The Times on a tablet app such as the iPad.

The point is that in this new order, we are all publishers now.

Whether Luther really did or did not physically nail his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg 500 ago hardly matters. Like many images used to embody some fulcral moment, it has been made indelible by its own plain drama. The symbolic overtones help. A fervent man at a door. A church door. A hammer in one hand, a whole pile of complaints in the other. As much protester as Protestant. What's more, it may not be wrong.

What matters more is the known fact of Luther energetically circulating their content. In this respect he made full use of the new technology that was Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. Still regarded as being one of the most significant inventions of all time, it had already spread to more than 200 towns and cities in Europe. Such places as Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel were, in technological terms, the hotspots of the day. They were online. You could get reception. The potency of moveable type was such that it hung on and on, right into our own times.

Crucially, Luther harnessed this technology to his translation of the Bible from Hebrew and ancient Greek into comprehensible German. It was not so much that he had taken control of the word, as that he had passed it into the domain of congregations. And in the sense that the Word was now seen to be turned towards its listeners rather than away from them, the moment, literally as well as figuratively, was nothing less than revolutionary.

In Peter Stanford's illuminating new biography of Luther, which he sub-titles Catholic Dissident, he says of his subject that he shared his texts. This form of words sprang up at me as if from another language – some manner of communication given over to speed, newness and brevity. He shared his texts. He 'texted'.These texts, Stanford reminds us, were the letter and the Theses. But then, as if also aware of the strangely familiar resonance of those four earlier words, he goes on to say that Luther could not have imagined what would follow from his actions; how it would produce 'the sort of instant surge of forward momentum we might today identify with a social media storm'. 

Meanwhile the historian Niall Ferguson in his latest book, The Square and the Tower, argues that in the struggles for global power and influence, social networks have always been much more important than chroniclers fixated on hierarchical organisations such as states have allowed. In identifying two periods which he describes as 'networked eras', he makes still more explicit the resemblances between Luther's time and our own. The first he locates between the introduction of the printing press to Europe and the end of the 18th century; his second begins in the 1970s, with the gathering ascendancy of Silicon Valley.

As for the nearly 200 years in between, from the late 18th century to the second half of the 20th, these culminated in what he terms the zenith of hierarchically organised power, an epoch of totalitarian regimes and total war.

The printing press, agrees Ferguson, was justly termed a decisive point of no return in human history. In the wake of the change and upheaval that it abetted, such control as the monarchies of Europe were able to exert over the new (Protestant) sects could never be as complete as the Pope's had been.

This brings us to the question of authority; not just of who had it, and how, and why; but, more pressingly, of who has it, and how, and why.

As Binyon pointed out in his talk at Movement Day, the success of papers such as The Times in this online reformation lie on its success as establishing itself as an authoritative source in a world where we are in danger of being bamboozled by a plethora of news and information sources.

The revolution contains within itself the answers to how we handle it, because as we shall see, the question of authority lies at the heart of how we re-orient ourselves in this new world.

And this is what I will turn to in my second and final article on this next week. 

This column is an edited version of The Ebor Lecture delivered in York last month. Ruth Gledhill is multi-media editor of The Tablet and editorial adviser to Christian Today.

Follow her on Twitter @ruthiegledhill.