Seminar in theology: The image of man, the image of God and the role of imagination
(Garrett Green)
The ancient Greek poet-philosopher Xenophanes remarked that the gods of the Ethiopians are snub-nosed and black while those of the Thracians are blue-eyed and blond, thus indicating for the first time the intrinsic parallels and correspondences between images of the human and images of the divine. The Reformers Calvin and Luther were likewise quite conscious of the role of human imagination in the formation of religious conceptions, and characterized human nature - in particular the human heart - as a Afactory of idols. Modern thinkers, especially since Kant, have worked out the basic functions of imagination - Kant called it Einbildungskraft - including its application to knowledge in general and to epistemology, and creative models and metaphors have assumed a central role in contemporary philosophy of science as well. Especially in Romanticism and German Idealism, the significance of the power of image building for religious convictions was widely discussed. The ways in which convictions and conceptions arose historically or psychologically, of course, still does not tell us whether they are true or false; the question of origin must be distinguished categorically from the question of validity. Thus Hegel undertook to translate the internal contents of religion into a philosophical terminology and thereby to justify it, by discarding its external form as mere pictorial imagery (the Aufhebung, or sublimation, of religion). Only philosophy (Hegel`s philosophy of the Absolute) is able to show whether or not the contents of religious concepts and images are true. After the collapse of Hegelian philosophy, the philosophers of the Hegelian Left, especially Ludwig Feuerbach, held fast to the observation that the human imagination is implicated in the genesis of religious ideas; yet for Feuerbach (in contrast to Hegel) that fact also showed that the process must therefore be constituted by illusions. He thus formulated the critical theory that it was not God who created human beings according to his image but rather that humans had created God in their image.
If the question of the real truth of religious beliefs can no longer be unequivocally proved or refuted by means of a philosophical theory, there emerges the problem of an irreducible multiplicity of perspectives: under the conditions of (post-) modernity, even the Absolute can be approached only from the standpoint of different hermeneutical perspectives, each of which must acknowledge and take responsibility for its own presuppositions and premises. From the external perspective of philosophy of religion, religion and images of God appear to be products of human interpretation: man creates God in his own image. This position, exemplified by such writers as Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, has been dubbed the hermeneutics of suspicion by Paul Ricoeur, who opposes it to a hermeneutics of trust. From this perspective, believers understand themselves to be created by God, and this internal perspective is also the one adopted by theology.
This situation thus poses a double challenge for theological
discourse. On the one hand, religion is to be understood as a
human phenomenon, and historical and psychological presuppositions,
such as the role of human fantasy in generating images of God, may not
be denied. On the other hand, however, it must demonstrated
whether and how one can nevertheless assume that it is not only a
matter of human fantasy and interpretation but that they are also in
some way true and appropriateCin other words, that it is a matter,
theologically stated, of the revelation of God. Karl Barth, most
notably, has shown that in such a case it is by no means a matter
simply of the achievements of human knowledge, for that would
contradict the sovereignty of God, making him into a mere object and
artifact of human knowledge. This movement, rather, must proceed
from God himself as active subject, who uses the religious images of
man as the means by which he reveals himself.
During the seminar, we will therefore examine the following problems
and discuss the contributions of participants.
- Which relation can be established between the ban on visual representations of God, the destruction of religious art (during the Reformation), concrete images of God and pictures in the history of art?
- In which ways do visual representations (e.g. icons) differ from representations in language (e.g. metaphorical depictions of God)? Why is it the case that both are so controversially evaluated in the bible and in theological discourse?
- How can religion be understood as a product of human imagination and still as being based on the revelation of God?
- What can we infer from religious images with regard to human beings? What can the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud) contribute to the understanding of religion and what are the limits of this approach?
Participants
Recommended Reading:
- Garrett Green 1998: Imagining God. Theology and the Religious Imagination, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
- Kapitel VI. „Metaphor, Symbol, and Analogy“ in: Dan Stiver 1996: The Philosophy of Religious Language. Sign, Symbol, and Story, Oxford: Blackwell, Seite 112-133
- Artikel „Bild“, „Bilderkult“, „Idolatrie“ usw. in einschlägigen Lexika (RGG4, TRE)
- Paul Avis 1999: God and the Creative Imagination. Metaphor, Symbol, and Myth in Religion and Theology, London: Routledge
- David J. Bryant 1989: Faith and the Play of Imagination. On the Role of Imagination in Religion, Macon: Mercer UP (Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 5)
- Garrett Green 2000: Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination. The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity, Cambridge: University Press
- Karl Barth 2007: On Religion. The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion, hrsg., übersetzt und eingeleitet von Garrett Green, Edingbourgh: T&T Clark
- Rolf Rendtorff 1999: Was verbietet das alttestamentliche Bilderverbot? In: Bernhardt, Reinhold/ Link- Wieczorek, Ulrike (Hgg.): Metapher und Wirklichkeit. Die Logik der Bildhaftigkeit im Reden von Gott, Mensch und Natur. Göttingen. S. 54-65
