The Cross and a Statue

I wonder sometimes, whether I’ve gone off the deep end; I find myself criticizing stuff like this so often.  There are so many things that get under my skin; I’m a very happy and fairly contented person, really I am.  It’s just when I see things like this I want to crawl under a rock.

Shawn pointed this out to me earlier, but then I ran across a post on the matter which prompted this short reflection.  Pastor Dan from Street Prophets commenting on this monument located in San Diego, wonders what role history plays in our determining tthoughts on these kinds of issues?  Every symbol/image displays historical and present cultures colliding.  This is a great question and one not easily answered – but he came close when he said something that sounded almost Quakerish,

“The trouble is that we’ve come so far so fast that we’ve out-stripped
the lifespans of our cultural artifacts, or their social signification,
anyway.”

Many of these things have lost social significance, but I don’t think that the cross and the statue are two of those things.   The thing is that we are always redefining symbols and borrowing themes from the past.  We do this in hopes of transferring some kind of message to the onlooker, evoking some response.  The idea or meaning behind the image to the left is not hard to  get at, in fact it’s overly simplistic.

A helpful question that Pastor Dan asks is, “So does it do more violence to call for the complete removal of the
cross than it does to seek some kind of compromise that allows it to
stay?”

Knowing that I tend to be critical I want to learn from this last question, how can the church meet a compromise in this situation? Can it? If so what might it look like?  My tendency is to want to remove this all together – is there some way we can redefine this so we don’t have to resort to such a response?

technorati tags:christian politics, God and Country