Editorial: The Image on Impact

To study religious imagery is to discover a good many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our theologies. Metaphor outruns reason; where theology attempts a coherent and defensible statement of our relations with the universe, metaphor produces indefensible and incontestable flashes of insight. The final chorale in Bach's motet Christ log in Todesbanden begins with a particularly unnerving image:

Hier ist dos rechte Osterlamm,

davon Gott hot geboten, dos ist

hoch an des Kreuzes Stamm

in hei[beta]er Lieb gebraten.

The German habit of putting the verb at the end of the sentence causes the stanza's accumulation of pious detail to turn suddenly utilitarian and shocking in the last line; a literal translation can give some idea of it. Here is the true Easter Lamb, whereof God has commanded, which is, high on the cross's stem, in hot love roasted. "Hei[beta]," in the context, means something more like "ardent" than "hot" would mean to a speaker of American English -- but there are advantages to a narrow vocabulary: there is no absolute distinction between the meanings.

The image of the Lamb of God broiled on a spit, as for souvlaki, is outrageous for any age; in our own age it is unimaginable coming from anyone but a mocker. But for a long time believers produced images like this in all seriousness. Such images are the foundation stones of the Bible: the binding of Isaac, the prophets' equation of idolatry with adultery, the New Testament's "this is my body, this is my blood." In the devotional and mystical texts deriving from the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, the images have multiplied with a profusion that is sometimes hot in every possible sense: God as lover, Jesus as mother, the Torah as the skin of God. Such images arise wherever religion touches the whole personality. They cannot be suppressed without arising in a new place. Their very outrageousness breaks the bounds of decorum; beyond those bounds there remains only intimacy with the divine.

Modern liberal theologies have moved strongly away from images of this kind. Absorbed in the analysis and rectification of damaging power relations, intent on recasting the biblical demand for a just society in contemporary terms, liberal theologians have often shown a generalized aversion to metaphor, or a need to control it. Violent images have been especially criticized as dangerous survivals of patriarchal and authoritarian social forms, whose power is not yet broken and which must therefore be disabled even at the imaginative level. Yet the imagination cannot always manage this self-crippling task. Within every intimacy --whether with the divine or the human other -- the potential for violence is present and must be confronted. Even if we confront it in order to refuse it, we must still understand its origins in the entanglement of power and helplessness, mutuality and dependency, solace and anguish, in all our ordinary relations.

The contributors to this collection are all firmly situated within liberal traditions: Jews and Christians who mistrust fundamentalist certitudes and who understand both social and theological change as religious imperatives. But many of them also dissent from certain habits of liberal theology, including its incomprehension of troubling images. In these essays they begin to redefine the terms on which we can think of the uneasy relations between religion and violence.

J. Denny Weaver establishes how high the stakes are: he considers the effect of the image of the dying Christ on the politics of crime and punishment. Weaver contends that traditional atonement theology, which casts the substitutionary death of Jesus as a satisfaction of God's honor, has sanctioned retributive justice at the expense of social justice. Through a new reading of the image of Christus Victor, Weaver proposes a christology that may be structurally immune to collusion with institutional violence.

In her challenging correspondence with David R. Blumenthal, Julie Shoshana Pfau subjects theological reasoning to the rigorous scrutiny of private life. Blumenthal's Facing the Abusing God (1993) suggests that we must understand God alternately (not simultaneously) as abusive parent and as object of trust and worship. Pfau's discomfort with this unresolvable tension leads to a strongly worded exchange and an extremely candid view of the ways we construct our working theologies.

Alicia Ostriker's poem-for-performance, "Jephthah's Daughter," anatomizes the profoundly disturbing narrative of misplaced sacrifice in Judges 11. As she faces the bitterness and grief of a wholly unnecessary death, as reported in the laconic biblical narrative, Ostriker considers the ambiguities of collective mourning and the tensions of the human bond with God in a ritual drama that is harrowing, wry and cathartic.

The image-maker's view of the image tends to be very different from the theologian's. Barry Moser's unsparing illustrations to the Caxton Pennyroyal Bible compel the reader to confront the darkness and difficulty of the biblical text. In "Blood & Stone: Violence in the Bible & the Eye of the Illustrator," Moser argues that the representation of violence may be integrative rather than destructive, and that the extraordinarily difficult legacy of biblical imagery can neither be fully accepted nor fully erased.