Visible Signs

Protestantism may be perishing for lack of adequate religious symbols. So writes Quaker Author Douglas Steere, professor of philosophy at Haverford College, in the current issue of the quarterly Religion in Life.

The first Protestants, Steere says, deliberately swept away many of the outward forms of Christianity. Emphasis on visible authority and external practices had brought the Roman Catholic Church, they thought, to Pharisaism and travesty; they hoped to avoid the same pitfall by stressing an inward spirituality. Instead of relying on liturgical formulas and the "outward priestly act of the sprinkling of holy water," they hoped to permeate each moment of everyday life with devotion to God. "One could meditate on Bible verses as one shoed a horse, or patched a pair of trousers, or planed a door." But over the centuries, says Steere, the inward spiritual drive seems to have shriveled up and "ebbed away in all but a few Protestant groups."

All at Once? Protestantism needs its own external signs and symbols, but what, he asks, shall they be? "What is the symbol of Jesus Christ in a non-feudal world? Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises focus around Christ as a feudal Lord or earthly King and military Leader, requiring a soldierly bodyguard who in blind obedience will lay down their lives to defend Him. Dostoevsky presents a symbol of Christ as the silent Visitant whose burning love will take nothing less than inwardly free men as his companions . . . Is it to be the Jesus of the Nazareth workshop, the Christ of Emmaus, the Jesus of Bethany with his beloved friends, or the Christ on the cross, a bleeding and suffering Redeemer? Or is it to be all of these at once?"

The problem becomes especially sharp, Steere argues, when Protestants undertake to cultivate a devotional life--"whether it is the framing of a liturgy for corporate worship, or a set of retreat exercises, or instructions for private prayer." To the free church congregations, for whom sacramentalism or the priest's role is not central, old liturgical molds are as irrelevant as the "Gothic church, which was built to focus all upon the choir and ultimately upon the dramatic stage of the Mass table, where Christ is believed to be literally materialized and made present. But if we admit this irrelevancy, we have not yet found its equivalent."

Nearer to the Threshold. It is not likely, Professor Steere notes dryly, that the situation will be remedied by a "representative committee on Protestant symbols." "Only those who have felt the central fire of the molten sun can capture its radiance in symbols that will focus the longing of others. It will come out of deeply moved souls who have felt and known our need, our poverty . . ."

Nonetheless, Steere notes "certain incalculable assets which Protestantism's character and temper give it in the inward renewal it longs for: 1) It is free to criticize itself and to seek the truth, wherever that may lead it. 2) It is not inseparably bound in its confrontation of Jesus Christ to the historical formulae of any particular historical period or culture. 3) It is in principle a laymen's movement . . .

"In spite of every surface indication to the contrary, there are prophets among us who see our catastrophic cultural situation in the West as bringing us nearer and nearer to the threshold of an age ... of Christian laymen permeating the world with an inward spiritual religion which would touch each mode of its life."

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