Increasingly, we find ourselves in cultures that prioritize the visual over everything else; where images can, for better or worse, tend to dominate the landscape of life. Engaging the challenges of a proliferation of new ways of seeing and being may suggest that we have to reassess our understanding of God, text, self, other, imagination, and the world. That which has been assumed to be real, from an Enlightenment modernist or church perspective, calls for a careful re-exploration. Whether it be reason or faith enthroned, the unreal will lead us astray in attempting to displace Christ from his rightful place. If he is the image (eikon) of the invisible God, then what is real changes everything.
Friday, October 23, 2009
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4 comments:
Definitely, Western philosophy since Plato has indeed "prioritized the visual over everything else." That Christ is "the image (eikon) of the invisible God," as you reminded us so well, seems to challenge us to learn to see things differently. Aren't the visual metaphors here some clue to a better understanding of our own fallen condition of a corrupted image of God? What was exactly lost in that imago that Christ is teaching us to see in its redeemed form? I think reflexivity itself has been affected, but I tend to dislike the way some evangelicals simply blame it on secular reason, unless we understand it in an ethical sense of moral reasoning...
Cheers,
nita
Nita,
Thanks. There is an intentional play here between image and visual, and as you put it 'to learn to see things differently.'
Maybe Christ being the image of the invisible God and us being transformed into that image is not so much about filling a lack, but a going beyond what there ever was or could have been, both in the sense of being and doing.
Thanks again, Greg! I really enjoyed your bold call to bring "being and doing" together once again! Perhaps this holistic understanding of God's image is also what we all tend to miss in the worn-out usage of God's word nowadays. I'm reading this intriguing French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, for a grad course on technology, that's why I went back to Foucault's writings on the "techniques de soi" and the "technologies de pouvoir" --his intuition is that both spiritual exercises and social policies refer us back to self-narratives and self-writings (l'écriture de soi) in the very process of self-formation or subjectivation, which varies from one age to another. Stiegler continues this kind of research and explores the way the internet and high tech resources are shaping our subjectivation. There is an interesting post on whether the web is making us dummy, as we tend to become too passive and uncritical to the huge amount of information we get from the internet every day: Internet rend-il bête ?. There is also a lot of material available in English at his website:
Ars Industrialis. I think the Word of God compels us to meditate, practice exegesis, hermeneutics and read slowly, as opposed to the browsing, clicking techniques of our fast-food subjectivation. So "image" tends to be reduced to xerox, scanned copies, which misses the very ideas of active reflexivity and meditative reflection...
Nita,
Yes, indeed for us the worn-out too often characterizes the Word of God, which on the contrary is living and dynamic.
Thanks for the mention of Stiegler and the links. Sounds illuminating. Seems like much around us, including technology, quickens our inability to recognize that image in the biblical sense is an identity and a trajectory.
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