Symbols
This week, I am diverging a bit to recap the influence of symbols on the revelation of God in art. Following are examples of the impact of symbological reality in various people’s lives. St. Patrick used the common Irish clover to help the pagan and newly-converted Irish understand the concept of the Trinity. There was oneclover plant (showing the ousia, the unity of being or essence in the divine Trinity, e.g., the unity of God), but three separate leaves on it (representing the hypostases, or Persons in the Trinity, e.g., the diversity of God), altogether giving a symbolic analogy of the Trinity.
Patrick believed that God had made the plant, the clover in that way, to image an aspect of His Being. He was also helped by the fact that the Druidic religion taught a Divine Being who had three faces or aspects (Duw-a-digon), which Patrick took as a foreshadowing of the coming of the full revealed truth.
In the same vein, Don Richardson, in his three excellent books, Peace Child, Lord of the Earth, and pre-eminently, Eternity in Their Hearts, demonstrates forcefully that God has set symbolic pointers to Himself in every pagan culture.
If we see these key pointers, we can use them as a springboard for effectively and meaningfully preaching the gospel to a pagan society. In Peace Child, Richardson discusses the difficulty missionaries had in presenting the gospel to a primitive culture to whom the greatest good was treachery. In their view, Judas was the hero of the gospel story!!! Only by realizing that the generally frequent warfare between the (naturally treacherous) tribes could only be effectively halted by the mutual exchange of hostages (the respective chiefs’ sons, generally) who lived as a peace-child, and by presenting Christ as the Peace-Child between God and man, were there (numerous!!) conversions.
Eternity in Their Hearts shows how such symbolic representations exist in every culture (they have to, because of the nature of reality), and how effective they have been, can be, and are in missions work, if we understand and use symbolic theology. I wept through this book. It restored my flagging faith in missions. I was calling friends and reading (large) portions over the phone to them.
Pastor C.H. Kang, a Chinese minister, in distributing Bible portions of the Book of Genesis as a chaplain in a mission hospital in China about fifty years ago, noticed that the ideographic Chinese written character for boatwas comprised of a combination of simple characters meaning “a vessel,” “eight,” and “person,” and thought it interesting that Noah’s Ark, the first great boat, had just eight (human) passengers: Noah and his wife, his three sons, and their wives.
He noticed that, also, the character for to create consisted of the components “dust” (mud), “mouth,” and “able to walk.” He thought of Genesis 2:7: “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed (with His mouth) into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being (not a baby, but an adult, able to walk).
Devil is “son” plus “garden” (field) plus “secret” (private), plus “alive” indicating Satan’s (an angelic “son of God” [Job 1-2, Gen 6:1-4]) secret approach to Eve in Eden. The devil radical plus “cover” and “two trees” equals a tempter, i.e., Satan tempted Eve under the cover of two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Four decades later, Pastor Kang had traced the history of Genesis up to the Tower of Babel (Gen 1-11), and traced the migration of the Chinese to their present locale in the 4,500-year-old Chinese script. He had also written a book on the subject called Genesis and the Chinese. He had led many Chinese to Christ through the demonstration of this truth.
At the time the written language of China was being formulated (BC 2500), the Chinese were a monotheistic people who worshipped Shang ti, the Emperor of Heaven. It wasn’t until two thousand years after that Taoism and Buddhism (both polytheistic cults) arose in or came to China.
Thus the Oriental alphabetic ideograms (214 radicals, or pictographs; 700 ideographs comprised of two or more simple characters united to give a new idea; and some 20,000 phonetic characters that are radicals brought together for sound rather than meaning [relatively modern]) in their earlier (radical or pictography) state parallels the history of Genesis to the eleventh chapter.
Pastor Kang and an American pathologist who served in Thailand for years, named Ethel Nelson, together wrote a book about this called The Discovery of Genesis. (Highly recommended)
G.K. Chesterton, English journalist, novelist, lecturer and scholastic man of letters was a devout Roman Catholic, and one of the few Victorian Christians who castigated and debated publicly (and with great success) the advent of evolutionary theory, rather than turning tail and hiding his head under a mound of anti-intellectual pseudo-“faith.”
He wrote the Father Brown detective stories, Napoleon of Notting’s Hill, voluminous amounts of excellent poetry, biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, and apologetical works, The Everlasting Man, Heretics, and Orthodoxy. The last three works were answers to the secularistic thought of his day, espousing over against them historic, orthodox Christianity as the only real alternative.
A deep understanding of symbols and allegory was central to his apologetic (or defense) of Christianity as Reality. For instance, one of the two major arguments in Orthodoxy was presented in a chapter called “The Ethics of Elfland,” in which Chesterton argued that the symbolism even in children’s fairy tales mirrors the pattern of reality so much (especially since even fairy tales are part of God’s created order) that one can see reality’s basic nature (i.e., general revelation) in the tales themselves.
This is just a small sampling that shows the influences of symbols and their importance on the revelation of God in Art.
For additional teaching on The Arts and Symbology check out the Worship series and the Windows to Glory series www.patreon.com/kempercrabb