Ralph Winter is a Christian producer who is receiving acclaim from Hollywood these days in light of his new movie which is released this week in theatres: THE FANTASTIC FOUR. In this series of interviews at St. Annes’ Pub he discusses the folly of the church to understand Hollywood and the serious implications of evangelical worship. According to Winter, evangelical worship is highly centralized in the content of the message, instead of focusing attention on the structure and style of the service.
A disciple of Robert Webber, Ralph Winter is keenly interested in the liturgical manifestation of the gospel in the structure and style of a service. He explains that evangelical churches are so concerned about getting their messages across through the content that they tend to miss entirely other essential elements of worship.
In a society where the visual components are so much a part of the modern world, we cannot manage to abandon a rich means of gospel revelation. Kim Riddlebarger wrote that the table serves as a symbolic demonstration of the audible gospel content. He argues that the church has substituted beauty for rhetoric. The church in the same way is compelled to proclaim a journey through Scriptures and liturgy giving proper place to both means of grace as opposed to replacing one for the other. When the body of Christ is devoid of artistic pictures of the evangel, then we are hopeless in our pursuit of dominion.
It’s Gnosticism, that’s what it is. The Church still holds to forms of Gnosticism where the “content” (spirit) is given priority over the form (body). (Obviously I’m not using “form” in the Platonic sense, but in the “form” vs. “function” sense.)We think that as long as the words are right, it doesn’t matter what the corps looks like. God’s only interested in the content, right?
Hey,
Remember me? 😉
Do you still go to #kerygma??
I can’t log on from this computer 🙁
– ares
HELLO
Adam, you hit it right at the nail. Winter commented that Catholicism has dedicated themselves more to that wholistic mentality (though I would add they hve their share of gnostic thinking in their theology).
Hey David,
I no longer have internet at the house so I do not frequent kerygma any more.