The Vincennes Zoo and the Importance of Images on the Contemporary Generation

Yesterday morning we took a family outing to the zoo just east of Paris in the Vincennes Woods. It was fun watching the kids enjoy the variety of creatures. We got to see red and pink flamingos, zebras, monkeys, penguins, etc. The kids already had seen these creatures in Baby Einstein videos, so they already knew what many of them were.

The diversity in the form and colors of the creatures was another reminder of God's creativity.

Yesterday afternoon while waiting for the bus, I continued reading William Dyrness' book Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue. I was struck by the following two paragraphs of exhortation and warning in his lengthy introduction (pp. 20-21):

In addition to the theological grounding for the importance of image (something explored in chapter 4), there is another important reason to pay attention to the visual arts. 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. Actually, this is a theme that has deep roots in the Christian tradition. As St. Augustine put it, what you enjoy (love!) is more important than what you know! Critiquing contemporary culture has been a favorite pastime for Christians since the Reformation. It is too easy to forget that our contemporaries, whatever their weaknesses, are human and still bear the image of God, and since they indwell an ordered world that God made, they still have an intuition of trust and a moral sense (whether they admit these things or not). But the way into these sectors of their lives is, more often than not, through aesthetics--art, drama, and music. These dimensions of life provide the key to unlocking the heart of the generation reaching adulthood--the aesthetic life and pursuit of the inner world comprise the emerging disposition of this era.

This means that we must think not only about words and truth, however congenial this discourse may feel to those of us raised within the walls of traditional churches. It is true that the Protestant imagination has been nourished uniquely by the spoken and written Word, and therefore, we tend to think that everyone mst be spiritually and morally nourished in the way that we (and our forebears) have been. Surely these verbal means are of critical importance. But our children and their friends have been raised in a different world; they are often uninterested in our traditional word-centered media. Instead, they are looking for a new imaginative vision of life and reality, one they can see and feel, as well as understand. And their attention span is notoriously short! We, of course, believe that the Bible and the Christian tradition are primary resources for a recovery of vision. But we must listen carefully to this generation and reread Scripture in light of their dreams and fears. Then perhaps we will present the gospel and plan our worship in ways that respond to their quest and reintegrate word and image. It is possible that we might actually win the battle of words but lose a battle of images. And losing that battle could well cost us this generation.