The World's Saving Gesture: The Line and the Circle

In a world where drivers and peoples and nations and races are making threatening and obscure gestures at each other, the church must give to the world an alternative gesture, what we are calling the Saving Gesture.

In 1991 a supremely significant historical milestone was passed in silence. For the first time, more people took their families to play in Disney World or Disneyland than to visit the sites and shrines in Washington, D.C. Parents exchanged the chance for their children to have personal encounters with the faces and places that created this country for a few giddy memories of whirling on wild rides and getting a picture with a walking, talking Mickey Mouse.

We should hardly be surprised by this. Our postmodern world is entranced with image, bored with reality. All our energies are devoted to creating style, with little concern for substance. The flat glass surface of a computer screen is not only an exemplary technological icon of our culture. It also aptly represents our philosophical convictions - it gives the illusion of depth, it dazzles and flashes and changes in an instant, but its images are one dimensional and have no lives of their own.

Postmodern Christians have more in...