“Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything,

that is how the light gets in.”

Leonard Cohen

 

BROKEN SYMBOLS

“Broken symbols are symbols that are recognized as symbols. Religious symbols refer to the ultimate or the transcendent. They use finite, worldly images to invoke something beyond. Religious symbols are stories, rituals and practices that drive us beyond the symbol to ultimate meaning… The danger in dealing with symbols is that sometimes the symbol, rather than the reality to which the symbol points, becomes the object of worship or loyalty. It is good that a symbol is broken, then, so that the meaning of the symbol is no longer imprisoned in the symbol. The symbol points beyond itself to a reality that cannot be contained in the symbol”

Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith

 

Mistaking the symbol for the reality to which it points is the primary error of biblical literalism. By reifying the symbolic content of scripture, and the subsequent “stories, rituals and practices” of the Church, literalism deprives the symbols of their “symbolic content”. In other words, the symbol ceases being a symbol. It no longer points to a transcendent reality, whose truth can only be expressed symbolically. Instead, the symbol is interpreted as a proposition of fact whose meaning lies in its historicity.

 

This “imprisons” the meaning of the symbol in the symbol itself. The symbol has ceased to be symbolic, it has lost its context, its “transcendent” referent.

 

When religious symbols are understood as “facts” they are robbed of their meaning, their ability to evoke novel insights into the nature of the ineffable. Biblical literalism is the “imprisonment” of the symbol, by refusing to acknowledge the symbolic nature of its own content. Thus, the symbol remains perpetually “unbroken,” not being able to enact its transcendent function. Subsequently, the symbol is mistaken for that which it symbolizes! It would be analogous to one mistaking the map of a territory for the land of which it is a symbolic representation. There is a Confucian proverb that states: “When the wise man points to the Moon, the imbecilic examines the finger.”