Victory in Georgia!

Yeah!!!!! Thanks for that update Travis! It’s nice to know that at least some people aren’t being duped by over zealous control freaks.

Good point, Gaines, good point. From a distance, we’re happy, but for you there in Georgia, I feel quite badly. There are some advantages to being in wildly liberal states like NY, I suppose Even if there are a few crazy conservative cooks, no one really pays any attention to them.

I’m throwing this out there as a “clue” to some of the intellectual underpinnings of movements like the “anti-Harry Potter” in the Christian realm. Abraham Kuyper – who many respect as a brilliant Calvinist theologian – gave a speech in Philadelphia in 1899 where he asserted an antithesis between Symbolism and Revelation.

In bringing this to Merlin’s attention about 6 months ago, he was shocked that someone would see an absolute dichotomy between these 2 things. Merlin and I are both converts to Catholicism and therefore we have embraced a liturgy much richer in symbolism because we see in it, among other things, an interpretive window whereby truths can be explained.

So in our belief there is no inherent animosity between symbolism and revelation. A mythological story can express revealed truth even though the characters and events are not fully factual. In the same way, the Catholic liturgy can express the story of salvation as written in the scriptures under sacramental signs which make the revelation present.

I used the phrase “inherent animosity” because there can exist inaccurate symbolism too. (cough, cough, Dan Brown, cough cough)

The reason we never posted on this earlier was because we were both busy with other things at the time, plus I wanted to digest it more before I gave an opinion. I want to avoid bringing the Catholic/Protestant angle into this mainly because there are anti-Harry Catholics and pro-Harry Protestants. But I decided that I ought to throw it out there at this point; Kuyper reveals something of an intellectually-developed wariness of symbolism at the very least.

In his partial defense, Christianity has many times demonstrated some wariness of certain forms of symbolism, e.g., the Eastern Churches only approve of 2-dimensional holy images (ikons) whereas the Western Latin church is rich with statues from the Pieta down to the glow-in-the-dark plastic Madonna in my kids’ room.

I think that smart theological guys like Travis and Merlin would do well to do more research in the development of this idea of a perceived antithesis between symbolism and revelation and how to combat it at the roots. Possibly this might provide more convincing arguments to explain our strong feelings on this issue. Maybe John Granger could weigh in on Kuyper’s piece also.