Word & Image

William A. Dyrness in his book, Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue, explores the relationship between Art and Faith and particular the visual arts and worship. One of the major themes that he explores in the book is the relationship between art and the church. He states, “when considering Protestant churches in general, while there are exceptions, it is fair to say that this tradition has had a troublesome history with the visual arts.” (11) According to Dyrness, in the Reformation word and image were separated particularly in worship. This shaky relationship between image and church still exists. Since our culture is a visual culture this raises the question whether or not Christians are able to engage culture through a visual faith. One thing is clear, “the contemporary generation has been raised and nourished by images; it has an inescapably visual imagination. Regardless of whether one considers this good or bad, for this generation, aesthetics counts more than epistemology.” (20) Moreover, Neil Postman describes the contemporary situation as follows: “We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word…. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspaper and magazines that are made to look like television screens.” (131) This insight raises serious questions for Evangelicals evangelistic efforts. Dyrness puts it succinctly when he writes:

“It is possible that we might actually win the battle of words but lose the battle of images. And losing that battle could well cost us this generation.” (21)

Thus there is a need to forge a new (and biblical) alliance between word and image in order to reach this new generation. I am curious to learn of some examples on how to do this? How do you use the visual to add power to the verbal?