earticle

영어

The study is to show that worship symbols might damage its purpose to express the holiness of God, when they are abused by the human will to power. The author presupposes that the essence of Christian worship is to reveal the holiness of God. All the symbols of Christian liturgy are supposed to serve that essential purpose. The author, however, suspects that such an intention might operate as a superficial pretext for the other hidden intention. It is, the author calls, ‘the human will to power,’ which means a deep desire for self-glorification through getting the self-centered power to dominate others. Unfortunately, the author argues, the liturgical symbols of Christian worship can provide one of the most dangerous opportunities for realizing the human will to power. For this critical argument, the author uses mainly two methodological approaches: a semiotic analysis and an ethnographic participatory observation. For the semiotic analysis, the author takes three stages. First, she translates the ‘holiness’ of God into the theological categories of ‘transcendence,’ ‘consecration,’ and ‘awe.’ Next, these are made to correspond to their distorted categories: exclusion, discrimination, and oppression. Lastly, the inter-relationship of the two category groups is analyzed in terms of the four semiotic forms: space, time, visual symbol, and language. The author has applied the semiotic analytic tools to observing, describing, and interpreting the actual symbolic operations of 10 Korean church worship services. The author selected the ten churches by some rigorous criteria and participated in each worship to observe it personally. The author’s semiotic interpretations of the observed and analyzed have demonstrated how seriously the worship symbols, consciously or unconsciously, serve the human will to power, distorting the holiness of God ironically in the name of the holiness of God. The study helps to discover and understand what are hidden below facial phenomena, which general sociological approaches cannot point out. The weak point of the study is that the researcher’s subjective interpretation binds it. The author must accept that criticism while defending that all studies cannot transcend their own hermeneutic horizons.