ABSTRACT
Both earlier in the last century in academic circles and in much popular thinking today there is a conceptual opposition between reality and the symbolic. Bevan (1938, p. 296) said: ‘We must always go on trying to make our conceptions less symbolic, more precisely correspondent with Reality’. This leads to the common statement ‘It is only a symbol’. Symbol and reality are opposed. But this position is being challenged. The work of psychologists, such as Jung, anthropologists, such as Victor Turner and Mary Douglas, of philosophers, not least Susanne Langer, and of theologians such as Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner and Louis-Marie Chauvet has resulted in a re-evaluation of this approach to symbols. In many of the Protestant Churches there has been a rediscovery of the sacraments, and a reorientation towards a positive evaluation of the use of symbols.
