We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
In the biblical text, there seems to be a problem with making images. Why do you think that’s the case?
9 comments:
My take is that a picture always needs to reduce reality in order to make it (re)presentable. Making images of God, especially in combination with our narrow understanding, puts a high risk on not only our reception, reduction and relationship to the living God but also others.
In addition making images seems to be closely related to creating. This would mean, that we created our own God (cf. Romans 1) and hence take a position equal or even higher than God.
Lukas,
Thanks. Interesting reply. What would you think of the possibility that a picture could actually augment (increase) reality and therefore not reduce it?
Yes, it does augment reality to the "gentle reader" (whatever word is appropriate for images) as does music and other arts. Nevertheless I would situate it in the previous comment:
...puts a high risk on not only our reception, reduction or augmentation and relationship to the living God but also others.
This means, that I see a high risk in making images even though they might augment reality. The augmentation might be as wrong as the reduction and therefore dangerous and forbidden.
Lukas,
Good point about the reduction and augmentation being potentially problems. I hope today's post addresses something of that.
What about verbal reductionism?
Sisyphos, I think that the same principles/guidelines/rules apply to making images using your words and using arts.
Greg, that means that you would support stories that show images of God, crucifixes in churches or around the neck and "The Passion" since they all do not try to establish who God is, but tell of what he did in history.
Sisyphos,
Thanks. Seems to me that there is a problem of verbal reductionism, but this is almost inescapable in that a fullness is unachievable. There could be a verbal augmentation that would be potentially fitting, while nevertheless missing completeness.
Lukas,
Yes, and images of many other types as well. That's not to say they don't all have their limitations, but this being the case would not necessarily mean they are negative, defective, or illusory.
Plato comes to mind here. Think about his condemnation of images because they are understood to be copies of what is already a copy.
Believing as we do that God is the Creator of a real and intentional world, we don't want to be inadvertently following Plato.
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