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Hieroglyphs of the Church

© Blake Atwood

I could write a paragraph or more attempting to convince you that we live in an image-based society, or I could ask you to perform one basic task through which you will be able to see for yourself how image-based we of the postmodern techno-saturated western world truly are.

Minimize your browser window. Minimize the other programs you may have running. Look at your desktop. Open a folder or two. Look at what you see. We communicate through our computers with hieroglyphs. What more is an icon but a graphical representation of an assumed knowledge by the end-user?

We like images:

According to this article, the production studios at Universal made 518.4 million dollars, and this was just for the summer of 2001.

According to this CNN article the behemoth located in Redmond is putting up 500 million dollars simply in advertising money for their forthcoming game console, the X-Box. The article provides many more examples of the ubiquity of the console gaming industry, where interactivity, connectivity, and image immersion merge into an engrossing experience.

The very building blocks for a user-friendly operating system was the creation of a gooey, or GUI, the graphical user interface.

So I've belabored the point. We live surrounded by images.

Let's talk about words. Since humanity learned to speak, we mainly passed on knowledge and folklore through the oral tradition. When Chaucer's Canterbury Tales first arrived on the public scene, it was seldom read by an individual, but much more often read to an audience. Since the invention of the printing press, since authors began to use less Latin and more of their respective vernacular languages, essentially since the Age of Reason dawned on humanity, we have acquired knowledge through the written word.

The shift was immense when we moved from the oral tradition to the written. The shift from the written to the image-based seems even more extensive, even though this is what Leonard Sweet might call an "ancientfuture" item. We're going back in history by attempting to represent our words in images, but we are using this capability to enhance communication for the future.

The ways in which we process this image-based knowledge, interpret it, and pass it on to other generations are vitally important. This importance is doubled when we speak of it in regards to Christianity. After all, Christianity is a "religion of a Book."

Leonard Sweet, in an article entitled "Church Architecture for the 21st Century," makes an interesting point. "The screen (used from visuals at a church) is the stained-glass window of the postmodern age. It is where the stories of the faith are taught and told."