The Relationship Of Visual And Verbal Elements In Worship

The following article describes how visual and verbal elements have been used throughout the history of the church, noting how the modern church has not allowed visual elements to have a significant role in worship. It goes on to describe how the visual arts can be revived and how we can learn to communicate and receive theological truths through the visual arts. In the life of the church, the visual arts have ranged from being conspicuously pervasive to being totally absent. In no period was art as central or so important as in the Middle Ages, nor, in contrast, so programmatically and theologically absent as in the Reformed tradition beginning from the sixteenth century as well as in many churches that grew on English soil. Although such extremes do not define our time, their impact has left us with considerable ambiguity about the place and role of the visual arts in the church. History sheds only partial light on the sources of this ambivalence. For the Middle Ages we can point…