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Symbol and ritual in
a post-modern world
Simon
Hattrell examines our connection with a post-literate
and post-modern culture.
If we use C.S. Lewis as a model, one way would be visual
and intuitive, the other linear and cognitive. An
Episcopalian priest from the USA, Dennis Hollinger, says
that 'In the postmodern world, symbol and ritual are
powerful forms of communication and can be vital tools in
Christian apologetics. It may well be that CS Lewis's
greatest appeal to the postmodern mind will not be through
Mere Christianity, Miracles or The Problem of Pain, but
rather from the Chronicles of Narnia or his science fiction
trilogy. These books give a symbolic portrayal of the
Christian life world appealing to beauty, symmetry and
wholeness of life'. 1
Storytelling, visual communication, architecture
2, painting, dance and other art forms are being
rediscovered in a church longing to communicate to a
post-literate age. 'Everything in the service needs to
preach', says Generation X church leader Mark Driscoll,
'architecture, lighting, songs, prayers, fellowship, the
smell - it all preaches. All five senses must be engaged to
experience God.' 3
Lewis has been hailed as one of the greatest and
most articulate apologists for the Christian faith of the
twentieth century. His rational discourse beautifully
described the Christian faith as intellectually defensible
and satisfying. However, had Lewis brought to Christian
apologetics only his skills as a logician, his works would
not have been as effective. He tempered his logic with a
love for beauty, wonder, and magic. 4 His
conversion to Christ not only freed his mind from the bonds
of a narrow stoicism; it freed his heart to embrace fully
his earlier passion for mythology. He understood both the
heart that yearns for God and the mind that seeks to know
him.
Christians often find it difficult to respond to
the growing power of the New Age in all its many
combinations and permutations. Gerard Kelly (1999:101), who
visited us here in Tasmania in 2003, has strongly suggested
that we need to recover a symbolic and visual vocabulary.
People who are slowly gravitating toward some form of New
Age spirituality sense within themselves a spiritual vacuum
and turn toward the only venue that seems to be speaking
their language. How tragic that people find little sense of
mystery in Christian circles, and any intuitive sense of the
transcendent is dismissed as non-objectifiable and
non-verifiable. The church has done little to address this,
which is ironic, because in the Middle Ages, Christians held
a view of the universe as a place teeming with life and
meaning and purpose.
Lewis certainly helps us address our fears and
fashion a more effective response that strikes more closely
at the root of the problem. What a wonderful opportunity the
Narnia Chronicles film series is giving us to connect with
those who are open to the spiritual world. We have to speak
the language that people speak today and if that means
couching our message in a non-rational, non-propositional
approach so as to win them, this is consistent with Paul in
1 Corinthians 9:19-23 5.
1 Dennis Hollinger 'The Church as Apologetic-
a Sociology of Knowledge Perspective' in Christian
Apologetics in the Postmodern World, T. R. Phillips & D.
L. Okholm (Eds), (IVP, Downers Grove, 1995) 190.
2 'The inquirer needs to be immersed within a
space that bespeaks the Christian faith. The very narrative
of faith which we seek to know and to live is symbolically
expressed in our space. We take the ordinary aspects of life
- stone, wood, windows, tables and chairs - and form them
into voices of the Christian mystery. Space becomes the
visual image of the connection between the known and the
unknown.' -R. E. Webber p108.
3 Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Fellowship,
Seattle. Read more here
4 'In my view...I do not think the resemblance
between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience
is accidental. I think that all things, in their way,
reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. 'Reflect'
is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is
not (not necessarily and by its own nature. God can cause it
to be such a beginning) a beginning of, nor a step towards,
the higher life of the spirit, merely an image'. C.S. Lewis,
Surprised by Joy (London, UK: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 159.
5 'Though I am free and belong to no man, I
make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as
possible... I have become all things to all men so that by
all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the
sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings'.
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