AWAKENING THE EVANGELICAL IMAGINATION
Andrew Greeley -- writer, professor, Roman Catholic priest -- notes the irony of the recent Evangelical infatuation with allegory and film.

And it seems to me that the evangelicals slip dangerously close to Catholic idolatry when they embrace a wondrous allegory as a summary of the biblical story. Jesus is not and never was a lion like Aslan in the film. To interpret him as a lion is to go light years beyond literal, word-for-word inerrancy.

The evangelical enthusiasm about the sufferings of Jesus in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ" put them one step away, it seemed to me, from importing crucifixes and Stations of the Cross into their churches.

I'm afraid the enthusiasm for both films shows just how seductive the Catholic temptation is. We delight in pictures and stories and allegories and symbols and signs because the appeal to the whole human person and not just to the rigid, rational mind.

There are certainly risks in this Catholic imagination, superstition and idolatry among others — though it does make the world a warmer and a more human place.

It seems to me that Greeley must be familiar with only a certain Reformed stream of Evangelicalism. As a child I was aware of Christians who thought that religious pictures and fantasy stories were more the work of the devil than Jesus, but that wasn't at all my experience with the people in our church. We were more concerned about being too extreme in any given area. The problem with Catholics wasn't that they had statues and beads -- but that they got carried away with them -- paid too much attention to them. Of course, you could never be too extreme when it came to the Bible itself. And that's what made us Evangelicals. (via)