Christian Symbol and Ritual
Bernard Cooke
Number of quotes: 5
Book ID: 56 Page: 7
Section: 2E,2E6
However, it seems that one can go even further and say that the root of all symbolism in human experience and expression is the fact that we humans, because we have physical bodies, necessarily exist symbolically.There is nothing we know that we do not know through our bodily powers of perception.
Quote ID: 1244
Time Periods: 27
Book ID: 56 Page: 8
Section: 2A6
Rituals and symbols without bodies just don’t make sense. This was so clear to medieval writers that they argued that only embodied humans need symbols and rituals. Angels, demons, and even animals don’t have them and don’t need them. Angels and demons perceive things directly; they don’t need the intermediaries of the senses.
Quote ID: 1245
Time Periods: 27
Book ID: 56 Page: 21
Section: 1A,2A
Rituals not only celebrate the deepest values of a culture, they also create, maintain, and legitimize that culture. Part of the process of legitimization necessarily entails the negotiation of power within a society, so that important rituals and symbols in every society are essential for maintaining the power structures of that society.
Quote ID: 1246
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 56 Page: 21/22
Section: 1A,2A
Rituals and symbols constantly create and re-create power structures within a society by continuously negotiating the legitimizing of power within the group or society. On the one hand, leaders of the rituals certainly lead because they have power, and the rituals constantly remind others of their power. On the other hand, participants in rituals by their continued participation grant that power to the leaders. If and when participants no longer participate in the ritual or acquiesce to the leadership in the ritual, then the leadership simply ceases being leaders.. . . .
Christian rituals are no exception to this dynamic.
Quote ID: 1247
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 56 Page: 44
Section: 2A6
This, then, is what constitutes Jesus’ “institution” of the Christian sacraments. He did not begin and he did not mandate the rituals themselves that emerged in the early church. But because those rituals are memorials of his life and death and resurrection, they require that he lived and died and rose. He did not establish these memorial rituals; he did that which they remember and thereby introduced a new meaning into human life.
Quote ID: 1250
Time Periods: 2
End of quotes
Start typing name in text box, or
double click a name in a quote
and then click in this box to open the list.