![]() Truth is represented largely through visual symbols. Church is a place for religious contemplation through the use of the eyes. An Orthodox worshipper does not come to church to listen to intellectual sermons. Perhaps the most important thing that I learned was the ability to approach truth without depending on the analytic tools of the 18 th century Enlightenment. I learnt many things through this exposure to a different cultural form of Christianity. One of the privileges of my own theological formation was to spend 10 months among the Orthodox in Greece and elsewhere. Teaching about symbols and the way that they can communicate truth to us in the Bible and elsewhere, is, I believe, a vital part of Christian formation. We are not required to follow the ancient writers in their ideas about the nature of the universe and the precise physical location of the Risen /Ascended Christ. The important issue for us now is to help our fellow Christians to know that there are alternative understandings to the notion of Jesus literally ascending into a cloud. Factual statements we call scientific represent a genre of discourse which only works in certain settings. Quite often, the language of symbols is used to evoke truth and divine reality which defy the use of words. ![]() Liberal Christians want to affirm that the language about God and his self-revelation is not always told in the language of historical fact. Such dogmatic assumptions and beliefs by a whole swathe of conservative Christians will lead to an insistence that the story of Jesus ascending into the sky (like Elijah before him) has to be believed as a physical event in front of eyewitnesses. Binary ways of thinking seem to be built into the conservative approaches to the Bible. I have not come across any conservative teaching which explores a more nuanced way of approaching the issue of symbols in Scripture. It has to be either literally true or false. Some conservative teaching about the Bible seems to force the young person to believe that there is no other of dealing with symbolic language. In using it we are not committing ourselves to a belief that heaven is somewhere above the clouds. Young minds can, I believe, cope with the insight that says that symbolic language is a distinct way of communicating truth. We also need to explore the heavily symbolic language of other parts of the Bible, including the Book of Revelation. This event, told in profoundly symbolic language, cries out for interpretation so that we can make some sense of the text and what it is trying to tell us. We have recently been celebrating the feast of the Ascension. ![]() Leaving symbolic language to interpret itself without any explanation is a recipe for confusion in a young mind. ![]() One of the important tasks for a parish priest, or anyone involved in Christian instruction, is to help a learning group, like a confirmation class, to deal with symbolic language. ![]()
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