The Lamb and the Dove – Powerful Symbols

[The pictures are missing. Temporarily I hope.]

The pictures in the upper corners of this site of the Lamb and the Dove are significant to me because they refer my mind and heart to what are to me very fundamental theological and philosophical convictions.

[Here are the pictures: the Lamb and the Dove]

The Dove represents the Spirit of God,
who is the Spirit of Christ,
who is the Spirit of all Goodness and all Truth,
the power of all moral and metaphysical reality.
The Spirit is the character, the present, active, effective
Personality of God.
With all our needing we need this.

The Lamb represents the Christ,
the Savior,
the Incarnate and Atoning God,
the Author of and Victor over and for the human race.
With all our needing we need this.

These are the realities that underlie and inner-gird all truly Christian and truly human fulfillment of human life and calling.

I do not require or ask that a person demonstrate understanding of – or convictions about – these things in ways congruent to my own personal understanding of them. That is NOT the criteria I use in judging any public figure (or any personal acquaintance). God sees hearts; I do not.

But the Spirit – through the Scriptures and through the life of Christ – does ask us to judge and respond to behaviors, and to the consequences of human choices. That’s a big part of why this blog exists.

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The pictures and their captions link to pages that have a few Scriptures and quotes that make more explicit the meanings of these realities. Those pictures and quotes are very meaningful to me, and very significant as to the underlying convictions and purposes of this blog.

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The pictures, and the quotes, also illustrate a few other principles:

1. These are traditional images and (mostly) ancient quotations – that show my conviction that we can honor and learn from tradition, not only but especially from the ancient tradition that is the Bible.
2. Much benefit can come to us from appropriate use of symbols.
3. But symbols are never fully adequate, and should not substitute, in our hearts, for the realities they represent to us. As a map is not the territory it represents, so a symbol is not the reality it re-presents.
4. Words are usually much more reliable symbols, and as such are crucially important for the development and nurturing of our personal faith-lives.
5. But even well-chosen, well-used words are never totally adequate – which is why we need various formulations of them, various stories and explanations, and, for example, a really big Bible!
6. And sometimes we need to just “be still – and know.”

Thanks for letting me ramble a bit about the symbols at the top of my site. I hope they have positive meaning for you as they do for me.

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