Between The Image and The Word

Between the Image and the Word
Theological Engagements with Imagination,

Language and Literature
Trevor Hart
Ashgate Studies in Theology,
Imagination and the Arts
Series Editors:
Jeremy Begbie, Duke University and University of Cambridge, USA

Trevor Hart, St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, Scotland
Roger Lundin, Wheaton College, USA
What have imagination and the arts to do with theology? For much of the modern
era, the answer has been ‘not much’. It is precisely this deficit that this series seeks
to redress. For, whatever role they have or have not been granted in the theological
disciplines, imagination and the arts are undeniably bound up with how we as human
beings think, learn and communicate, engage with and respond to our physical and
social environments and, in particular, our awareness and experience of that which
transcends our own creatureliness. The arts are playing an increasingly significant role
in the way people come to terms with the world; at the same time, artists of many
disciplines are showing a willingness to engage with religious or theological themes.
A spate of publications and courses in many educational institutions has already
established this field as one of fast-growing concern.
This series taps into a burgeoning intellectual concern on both sides of the Atlantic
and beyond. The peculiar inter-disciplinarity of theology, and the growing interest
in imagination and the arts in many different fields of human concern, afford the
opportunity for a series that has its roots sunk in varied and diverse intellectual soils,
while focused around a coherent theological question: How are imagination and the
arts involved in the shaping and reshaping of our humanity as part of the creative
and redemptive purposes of God, and what roles do they perform in the theological
enterprise?
Many projects within the series have particular links to the work of the Institute for
Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrews, and to the Duke
Initiatives in Theology and the Arts at Duke University.
Art, Imagination and Christian Hope

Patterns of Promise
Edited by Trevor Hart, Gavin Hopps and Jeremy Begbie
An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste

Joeri Schrijvers
Christian Theology and Tragedy

Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory
Edited by Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller
Theological Engagements with Imagination,
Language and Literature
Trevor Hart
University of St Andrews, UK
© Trevor Hart 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Trevor Hart has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Hart, Trevor A.
Between the image and the word : theological engagements with imagination, language,
and literature / by Trevor Hart.
pages cm. -- (Ashgate studies in theology, imagination, and the arts)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-1369-7 -- ISBN 978-1-4724-1370-3 (pbk) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-1371-0
(ebook) 1. Incarnation. 2. Imagination--Religious aspects--Christianity. 3. Language and
languages--Religious aspects--Christianity. 4. Theology in literature. I. Title.
BT220.H24 2013
230--dc23
2013008987
ISBN 9781472413697 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472413703 (pbk)
ISBN 9781472413710 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781472413727 (ebk – ePUB)
IV
Contents
Provenance of Chapters vii
Introduction 1
1 Between the Image and the Word 13
2 The Promise and the Sign 43
3 The Economy of the Flesh 75
4 The Grammar of Conversation 97
5 Cosmos, Kenosis and Creativity 119
6 Unauthorised Texts 139
7 Unseemly Representations 161
8 Unfinished Performances 187
9 Unexpected Endings 209
10 The Substance of Things Hoped For 229
Index 251
To my parents
Geoffrey Edward Hart and Julia Margaret Hart
and in memory of my grandmother
Winifred Elliott (1915‒2007)
Provenance of Chapters
With the exception of Chapter 1, the pieces in this volume are based upon or
contain some material from the following among my previous publications,
though most have been rewritten or expanded and developed for the sake of their
appearance here:
‘Calvin and Barth on the Lord’s Supper’ in Neil B. MacDonald and
Carl Trueman, eds, Calvin, Barth and Reformed Theology (Milton Keynes:
Paternoster, 2008), 29‒56; ‘Lectio Divina’ in Robert MacSwain and Taylor
Worley, eds, Theology, Aesthetics and Culture: Responses to the Work of David
Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 126‒40; ‘Migrants Between
Nominatives’ in Theology in Scotland 6:2 (1999); ‘Tolkien, creation and creativity’
in Trevor Hart and Ivan Khovacs, eds, Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature and
Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007); ‘Poetry and Theology in
Milton’s Paradise Lost’ in Nathan MacDonald, Mark Elliott and Grant Macaskill,
eds, Genesis and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 129‒39;
‘Cain’s Byron: A Mystery – On the Inscrutability of Poetic Providence’, The Byron
Journal 37:1 (2009), 15‒20; ‘Goodly Sights and Unseemly Representations:
Transcendence and the Problems of Visual Piety’ in Stephen C. Barton, ed.,
Idolatry: False Worship in the Bible, Early Judaism and Christianity (London:
T&T Clark, 2007), 198‒212; ‘The Sense of an Ending: Finitude and the Authentic
Performance of Life’ in Trevor A. Hart and Steven R. Guthrie, eds, Faithful
Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 167‒86;
‘Unexpected Endings: Eucatastrophic Consolations in Literature and Theology’
in Trevor Hart, Gavin Hopps and Jeremy Begbie, eds, Patterns of Promise: Art,
Imagination and Christian Hope (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
Chapter 4 was previously published as ‘Imagination for the Kingdom of
God? Hope, promise, and the transformative power of an imagined future’ in
R.J. Bauckham, ed., God will be all in all: The Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999) and is reproduced by kind permission of T&T
Clark, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Introduction
The central contention of Christian faith is that in the incarnation the eternal Word
or Logos of God himself has taken flesh, so becoming for us the image of the
invisible God. In a wholly distinct but analogous manner our humanity itself is
lived out in a constant toing and froing between the economies of materiality and
immateriality. Imagination, language and literature each have a vital part to play in
brokering this hypostatic union of matter and meaning within the human creature,
making of the flesh more than, as flesh alone, it is or can account for. Through
a series of studies approaching different aspects of these two distinct dialectical
movements (in the incarnation, and in the dynamics of human existence itself)
this book pursues an understanding of each which will benefit from its deliberate
juxtaposition with the other, convinced that, while they are neither to be confused
nor mixed, within the Trinitarian economy of creation and redemption these two
occasions of ‘flesh-taking’ are nonetheless inseparable and indivisible.
Over the past 12 years, much of my personal research has been bound up
with the activities of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the
University of St Andrews. During that time I have found myself returning again
and again to certain core issues to do with the centrality of the imaginative as a
vital condition of so much in the distinctive texture of Christian faith and theology,
and of the wider human world against which such faith and theology stands out
for consideration. This book is the first of several that will appear in due course
arising directly from this period of consolidated and sustained attention, much of
it carried on in close conversation with colleagues and research students within the
Institute or during its regular conferences, colloquia and other events. The focus
for this particular volume is a cluster of issues arising at the intersection between
Christian theology, human language and literary imagination. Although most of
the pieces were originally written for and published in quite distinct contexts, I
have become increasingly aware of an identifiable convergence of concerns and
insights between them such that the organic whole which now exists is considerably
more than the sum of its originally individual parts. The provenance of the various
chapters inevitably results in occasional repetition of points, though I have sought
in the process of redrafting and expanding materials to reduce these to a minimum,
and to incorporate cross-references where possible to reinforce the overall unity
of concern and focus.
The theological themes attended to in the book include the nature of religious
language, the category of sacrament, redemption, the doctrine of creation,
theological anthropology and eschatology; but the central theme that holds the
entire collection together is the vital significance of the incarnation of the eternal
2 Between the Image and the Word
Son or Word as the man Jesus Christ. It is to Christology, and in particular to

the classical Christology of the creeds, that I have turned again and again in this
volume to provide a perspective from which to view a range of different theological,
religious, linguistic and aesthetic concerns. I have done so out of a conviction that
this event, which Christians hold to be the singular epiphanic point in the drama
of God’s dealings with humankind, affords some new and imaginative ways of
approaching some rather tired and well-worn questions. The intellectual traffic,
though, does not all move in one direction, as though Christian theology possessed
all the answers, regardless of the provenance or natural territory of the questions.
Across the volume the situation is rather that of a constructive exchange and
convergence of insights, with theology having much to learn from careful work
in linguistics, hermeneutics, cultural theory, literary studies and other relevant
disciplines. For a Christian theologian, though, it is finally God-talk ‒ and God-
talk as shaped decisively by the doctrine of the incarnation ‒ that lies at the heart of
whatever distinctive contribution to intellectual conversation theology may have
to make, and that resists its reduction to any other form of discourse. This centrality
is reflected here, albeit, I hope, with appropriate generosity and intellectual
humility shown towards others who think differently or have contributions of a
quite different sort to offer.
Imagination, language and literature are categories woven unevenly through
the entire volume, with the particular focus of concern being now on one and
now on another, but all three eventually making some appearance in most if not
all of the chapters. This is hardly surprising, with literature being a product of
language and imagination, imagination relying upon language for its articulate
expression, and the uses and development of language in its turn being dependent
upon our capacity for acts of imaginative poiesis. Nonetheless it is the category of
imagination which makes a salient appearance in one way or another in all of these
pieces, and so serves to unify the collection, and it makes sense to say something
about this category in particular before proceeding any further.
In his book Poetics of Imagining Richard Kearney suggests that part of
our problem with identifying imagination may be that we are simply too close
to its power, too bound up with its manifold activities, to be able easily to step
back and observe it at work. ‘Might we not say of imagination’ he muses, ‘what
Augustine once said of time – we think we know what it is but when asked we
realize we don’t?’1 Yet it is vitally important that we stop and ask and consider,
precisely because imagination is so pervasive a feature of our existence, so
close, as Kearney suggests, to the heart of our existence. In fact, a significant
interest in the nature and functions of human imagination has been apparent in
scholarship published over the past 50 years or so. Not all of this interest has
1
Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Postmodern (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 1.
Introduction 3
been of a theological sort of course, though some certainly has.2 As one survey of
the relevant territory notes,3 the topic ‘sprawls promiscuously’ over a wide range
of human intellectual concerns including the philosophy of mind, psychology,
aesthetics, ethics, hermeneutics, poetry and literature, and most of the natural
and social sciences, as well as theology. The teeming prodigality of allusions to
the imaginative in contexts as far apart as virology, the construction of economic
models, the interpretation of dreams and the critical appreciation of Shakespeare’s
sonnets points, though, I suggest, not to a pathological carelessness in the use of
an admittedly flexible and slippery term, but to something (or more likely some
set of things related by family resemblance)4 which, while difficult to pin down
in any definitive way, is nonetheless identifiably shot through every cell of our
distinctively human engagements with the world like so much DNA. In other
words, the quality of things or activities to refer to which we instinctively reach for
the word ‘imaginative’ and its cognates crops up wherever we choose to look, even
though the imaginative element may actually look quite different (or appear to be
implicated in different sorts of things) as we encounter it in different instances.
But we shouldn’t exaggerate the differences, as if usage renders the
vocabulary of ‘imagination’ endlessly adaptable, a wax nose to be fashioned
2
A representative selection of significant monographs focused explicitly on
aspects of human imagination as such must suffice here both to substantiate the point
and to provide the interested reader with a starting point for further study of the
subject: Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth
in Religion and Theology (London: Routledge, 1999); David Brown, Tradition and
Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); David
Brown, Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd
ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000); Garrett Green,
Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1989); Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987); Gordon Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981); Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination
(London: Routledge, 1988); Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to
Postmodern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Daniel Nettle, The Strong
Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mary Warnock, Imagination
(London: Faber, 1976).
3
See Leslie Stevenson, ‘Twelve Conceptions of Imagination’, British Journal of
Aesthetics, Vol. 43, No. 3, July 2003, 238‒59. See 238.
4
The principle of the ‘family resemblance’ model of identification or ‘likeness’ is
the recognition that things can be quite closely related to other things without having any
single feature (or ‘essence’) in common with all of them to which the use of a common term
(e.g. in this case ‘imagination’) refers. Rather than seeking any single attribute, or even
specifying some set of necessary and sufficient qualities which all examples must manifest
in order to qualify as instances, this approach is willing to think instead in terms of a cluster
of attributes which can be seen to attach in different degrees and ways to different members
of the relevant ‘family’.
to fit any face we choose. It doesn’t, and it isn’t. In fact, after a very thorough
consideration of examples, Leslie Stevenson identifies just 12 discrete members
of the relevant linguistic and conceptual family: 12 basic ways, that is to say, in
which the term ‘imagination’ is typically used in day to day writing and speech,
and 12 corresponding ‘things’ or sorts of things to which that language refers
us.5 What produces the intellectual promiscuity to which Stevenson properly
refers us, therefore, is not an infinitely protean aspect of the conceptuality itself,
but rather its remarkable capacity for migration from one sphere of intellectual
concern to another, crossing striking distances and surviving some apparently
inclement conditions in the process.
Imagination, then, seems to be a pervasive feature of our humanity, which is to
say, in theological terms, of the sort of creatures God has made us and calls us to
be. No matter where we slice it and put it under the microscope for observation,
humanity turns out to have an imaginative element embedded in its molecular
structure. So much so, in fact, that Kearney insists that ‘we wouldn’t be human
without it. … (B)etter to appreciate what it means to imagine’ is thus, he suggests,
‘better to understand what it is to be’.6 That’s a philosopher’s judgement. But,
if it is even close to being true (and it is based on a very thorough and careful
study of the phenomenon), it clearly warrants careful theological attention to the
phenomena of the imaginative.
A distinction might usefully be drawn between this broader account of the
imaginative in human life which recent scholarship has produced, and much more
specific and focused uses of the term ‘imagination’ to refer to certain creative and
artistic activities of which human beings are capable. The point of drawing the
5
Stevenson’s list of ‘the most influential conceptions of imagination’ is as follows:
(1) The ability to think of something not presently perceived, but spatio-temporally real.
(2) The ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the spatio-temporal
world. (3) The liability to think of something that the subject believes to be real, but which
is not. (4) The ability to think of things that one conceives of as fictional. (5) The ability
to entertain mental images. (6) The ability to think of anything at all. (7) The non-rational
operations of the human mind, that is, those explicable in terms of causes rather than
reasons. (8) The ability to form perceptual beliefs about public objects in space and time.
(9) The ability to sensuously appreciate works of art or objects of natural beauty without
classifying them under concepts or thinking of them as useful. (10) The ability to create
works of art that encourage such sensuous appreciation. (11) The ability to appreciate things
that are expressive or revelatory of the meaning of human life. (12) The ability to create
works of art that express something deep about the meaning of life. See Leslie Stevenson,
‘Twelve Conceptions of Imagination’, 238. We need not suppose that this list is exhaustive
(Stevenson himself makes no such claim) or that a different taxonomy might not be
provided. But this list goes some way towards mapping the ‘grammar’ of imagination, and
shows that there are clear patterns (and clear limits) to the circumstances of the concept’s
use. For a different way of carving the same joint see Trevor A. Hart, ‘Transfiguring Reality:
Imagination and the Re-shaping of the Human’, Theology in Scotland 8:1 (2001).
6
Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, 1.
Introduction 5
distinction, though, is not to warrant any separation between the two, but precisely
to draw attention to the fundamental connections that exist between a host of fairly
mundane everyday dispositions and activities which we all participate in as human
beings (expecting, planning, exploring, fearing, hoping, believing, remembering,
recognising, analysing, empathising, loving, conjecturing, fantasising, pretending
and so on) and more specialised activities of a self-consciously creative and
imaginative sort. Judgements we make about these latter ways of thinking and
acting cannot, therefore, easily be disentangled and isolated from their context
within the wider jurisdiction of the imaginative.
This leads to a further clarification which may perhaps be instructive: Older
discussions of our theme often proceeded in terms of a faculty psychology
which spoke as though ‘the imagination’ were a discrete human organ or part
to be set alongside others (the will, the reason, the conscience, and so on) each
having its own distinctive sphere of responsibility. Such hypostatisation fostered
the notion that the products of ‘the imagination’ were of a very specific sort,
readily distinguishable and separable from the products of other faculties. That’s
not how the language of imagination is used any more, in part precisely because
authoritative studies of the phenomenon have recognised just how widespread and
integrated our ‘imaginative’ engagements with things are. Imagination is better
thought of as a way of thinking, responding and acting across the whole spread
of our experience, not some arcane ‘thing’ with a carefully specified and limited
remit. And an imaginectomy would render us incapable, therefore, not just of
certain artsy activities we might (or might not) make do or be better without, but
of much (possibly most) of what makes us human at all. The imaginative is the
psychical equivalent not of our appendix (which, when it becomes troublesome or
painful, we can simply cut out and flush away without loss) but the blood supply
which circulates things (both good and bad) around our entire body. The question
facing us, therefore, is not so much whether we shall be imaginative as human
beings, but how we shall be so.
Viewed in this light, the plea for careful theological consideration to be afforded
to the imaginative appears both more substantial and more urgent. For now it
occurs not as a call for theologians to take interest in and attend to something
entirely proper (possibly even useful and interesting) but nonetheless peripheral to
human existence as such. Instead, the plea to take imagination seriously is nothing
less than a summons to reckon with something lying close to the core of what
it is to be human, a feature of our humanity that shapes our essentially human
responses to others, to the world and (we may reasonably suppose) to God. This
being so, Christian theology can hardly afford not to get to grips with and afford a
proper place to imagination as it attempts to make sense of what it is to be human
in the world God has made. For it seems that God has made us imaginative beings,
and placed us in a world which calls forth from us responses of an imaginative
sort if we are to indwell it meaningfully and well. Life itself, let alone ‘life in all
its fullness’ is from top to bottom, from beginning to end a highly imaginative
affair. The sooner theologians take imagination seriously the better, then, because
anything less is a blinkered denial of what learning across the range of disciplines
is telling us is a vital component of the human condition. Apart from anything else,
this means that it is a central part of that ‘flesh’ which, according to Christian faith,
the Son of God came into the world to make his own, in which he lived, suffered
and died, and which he raised from death and exalted to the Father’s right hand.
So, the plea to take imagination seriously, and an insistence upon hearing
and getting to grips with what wider studies have to tell us about the imaginative
dimensions of our own humanity, is certainly not a bid to allow the particular
concerns of Christian faith and theology to be constrained or determined by some
inherently ‘non-theological’ agenda or set of categories. It is precisely to allow
the specific insights and the distinctive claims and concerns of theology to emerge
more clearly as we think them together with broader patterns of understanding.
In short, only when we have a clear idea of what the imaginative looks like
and is capable of (as borne witness to by the best of human learning in other
disciplines) shall we be able to appreciate where the distinctiveness of a Christian
understanding and appreciation of it may lie, and what precise shape that might
take. Continued refusal or failure to reckon with it at all in theological terms can
only place unnecessary and dangerous constraints on our understanding, and
thereby finally on our living and on our ministry and mission as those called to
share in Christ’s renewed humanity in the world. For, if imagination is indeed
basic to our creatureliness and to our living as human beings, then we have reason
to suspect that life in all its fullness may involve more, and not less of it.
The task of working out all the entailments of this suggestion in detail is
one reserved for another volume, but hopefully the theological engagements
undertaken in this book will at least break some of the relevant ground and
identify questions for further investigation. The opening chapter deals with the
nature and status of human language as applied to God. It begins by revisiting the
discussion of analogy, engaging with Aquinas’s classic treatment of the subject
in the Summa Theologiae and more recent works such as Janet Martin Soskice’s
illuminating study of metaphor and its place in Christian discourse about God. The
focus then moves on to consider T.F. Torrance’s suggestion that theological terms
should finally be stripped of their imaginative ‘flesh’ and drawn into an essentially
‘imageless’ relation with the truth of their presumed referent. The chapter argues,
contrariwise, that this is neither possible nor doctrinally warranted as an ideal
in Christian theology. Using Christological paradigms, it is maintained that the
status of the verbal image, albeit necessarily broken and always made new by
its application to the reality of God’s being and life, is nonetheless such that the
‘flesh’ of the relevant image (in a manner analogous to the flesh of Christ ‒ God’s
own ‘enfleshed Word’) remains securely in place and plays a far more positive
and permanent role in that revelatory economy within which our knowing of God
occurs than Torrance’s advocacy of the ‘pure concept’ allows.
The category of sacrament has been appealed to variously in Christian
treatments of aesthetics (for example by David Brown, Frank Burch Brown and
Richard Viladesau), often as the presumed locus of a divine presence rendered
Introduction 7
accessible through an aesthetic encounter with natural or cultural phenomena of

one sort or another. Concentrating on the accounts of the Lord’s Supper provided
by John Calvin and Karl Barth, Chapter 2 presents an alternative vision of the
category of sacrament as such, understanding it as a concrete form of divine sign-
giving centred on the promises of God fulfilled and renewed in the life, death and
resurrection of the incarnate Son of God. In the incarnation (and only subsequently
in the eucharist) it is argued, God placed himself decisively and once and for all
in the ‘order of signs’ (de la Taille) in a manner entailing a radical accommodation
to our creaturely condition. The ambiguity of the sign, though, as well as fitting
the essential mystery of an encounter with the reality of a God who remains
wholly other in his self-giving, also preserves the freedom of God to give himself
in a particular rather than an indiscriminate manner. Sacramental presence and
action understood as an act of divine signification is thus properly earthed in the
central sign of the incarnation, and to be understood within the scope of a biblical
doctrine of election. Continuing the argument of chapters 1 and 2, the first part of
Chapter 3 responds in a critical but constructive and appreciative manner to the
contention made in the recent work of David Brown that God may be experienced
through an encounter with ‘mystery in words’ in the poetic image. Christology,
and particularly the claim that in Christ God himself has ‘taken flesh’ is, it is
maintained, a more satisfactory theological ground than sacrament both for a
theological epistemology and for a theologically informed account of poetics. The
second part of the chapter picks up constructively on some of the key themes in
Brown’s discussion, to do with mystery and semantic slippage, and explores these
further in light of the central Christian doctrines of the resurrection and ascension.
The natural implication of these doctrines (according to which the Logos remains
‘enfleshed’ rather than resuming some putative discarnate state after 30 years
‘trapped in the body’), it is argued, is that the fundamental density of the sign
and its resistance to final closure or definition should be understood as a potential
enrichment, intrinsic to the blessing of our creaturely condition as embodied
beings, and not as a frustrating function of the fall eventually to be overcome
by a divinely over-determined hermeneutics. The central ‘revealed’ symbolics of
the Christian tradition itself, it is suggested, actually points us in a quite different
direction ‒ one in which the ‘Logos asarkos’ enjoys no natural privilege, in which
embodiedness is a basic condition of human creatureliness as such rather than a
temporary predicament to be endured, and in which ambiguity and the demand for
interpretation certainly involve the willing risk of loss and self-emptying and yet,
paradoxically, prove also to be the kenotic mode through which alone a world full
of wonder, mystery and awe comes to us.
Chapter 4 explores the grammar of our imaginative encounters with ‘otherness’
in pursuit of what Jürgen Moltmann calls a ‘community of difference’ ‒ i.e. one in
which otherness is taken fully into account and made the object of unconditional
acceptance rather than mere ‘tolerance’. Drawing on a model of conversation
elaborated by political philosopher Michael Oakeshott and on J.R.R. Tolkien’s
account of the epistemic status of ‘secondary belief’, the suggestion is made
that a distinctly Christian theological engagement in inter-cultural and inter-

disciplinary conversation should be one which is always willing to risk itself
through imaginative (and practical) strategies designed to engage with the other
as other, to empty itself and risk its own loss or demise, trusting that only in
doing so, paradoxically, can it fulfil itself and be true to its particular identity. The
Christological theme of kenosis or ‘self-emptying’ carries forward from Chapter 4
to Chapter 5, applied now to the question of human ‘creativity’ understood within
the context of a doctrine of divine creation and the unique prerogatives of God
entailed by that doctrine. Without compromising those prerogatives in any way,
the chapter nonetheless follows a tradition within Jewish and Christian theology
which understands God’s creative action ad extra as essentially and deliberately
incomplete, and as soliciting or conscripting human action as part of a wider
creaturely participation in God’s own continuing trinitarian engagement with
the world as a creative project. Drawing on Dorothy L. Sayers’ play The Zeal
of Thy House and Tolkien’s Elvish creation myth Ainulindäle, and conversing
with Jewish theological traditions such as tikkun olam and zimsum, the chapter
offers a Christologically-focused argument for thinking of God’s own creativity
as kenotic in more than one sense, and for understanding human creativity for its
part as a sharing in the dynamics of Christ’s own creative human response to the
Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. This, it is suggested, places human artistry
on a more secure theological footing in principle than it has sometimes enjoyed;
but ‘creative imagination’ must be understood as referring to a far wider spread
of human responses to the given world, of which artistry may perhaps furnish a
fitting paradigm.
The Jesuit writer Richard Viladesau has suggested that, notwithstanding the
quite different expectations attaching to works of artistic imagination on the one
hand and the more standard outputs of the church’s acknowledged theologians on
the other, works of art may nonetheless function as ‘texts of’ as well as ‘texts for’
theology. Meanwhile from a Protestant perspective, Paul Fiddes speaks instead of
a constructive dialogue on territories of shared concern between Christian doctrine
and works of the literary imagination, the former moving ‘from mystery’ towards
conceptual clarity, and the latter ‘towards mystery’. These claims are explored in
Chapter 6 with particular reference to John Milton’s poetic epic Paradise Lost
and Byron’s provocative drama Cain: A Mystery, concluding that literature may
indeed function as a form of theology precisely as literature, and may even be
better suited to deal with some theological issues than its more systematic and
dogmatic counterparts. Much of the art most central to the tradition of Western
Christianity prior to the Reformation was cast in the form of the visual and plastic
as distinct from the verbal image. Chapter 7 explores some of the theological issues
attendant upon the practice of what David Morgan refers to as ‘visual piety’ –
i.e. the production and use of visual and plastic art in contexts of a devotional and
liturgical nature. In particular, it considers the claim made forcefully by some of
the Reformers, that such use either constitutes or else risks the descent into some
form of idolatry in which the relationship between signifier and signified collapses
Introduction 9
for all intents and purposes. Postmodern exaltation of the image over ‘reality’
may, it is suggested, suffer from a similar problem, although the post-structuralist
resistance to the notion of absolute presence might also be interpreted as an echo
of the apophatic impulse inherent in Christian uses of images of any and every
sort. Calvin’s measured response to the issue is considered, and the chapter ends
by suggesting the need to go beyond Calvin to a more thoroughly Chalcedonian
account of the nature and capacities of images to function in contexts of visual piety.
It is one of the features of most works of literary imagination that they re-
present the often messy realities of life under the guise of some imaginative
pattern or form in terms of which sense may be made of them. Works of fiction
in particular have typically progressed toward some climatic point (perhaps
more than one), and then found a resolution of sorts by ending in an aesthetically
satisfying manner. Life, as has often been observed, is mostly quite unlike that,
and although the Christian tradition and other religious patternings of life have
been and are concerned with questions of living well and dying well, it remains
the case that the ‘end’ of particular human lives in this world is only rarely a ‘good’
ending in this sense. All too often, the end, when it comes, comes unexpectedly, far
too soon for matters to have been resolved, bearing analogy rather to vital pages
having being torn from an as yet unfinished story than to the well-crafted sense
of an ending. Pursuing the literary analogy a little further, the lives of too many
of our fellows are more like bit parts in a drama than well developed and rounded
characters, a matter of moral and eschatological rather than poetic concern. The
aesthetic disquiet at unsatisfactory endings or incomplete performances, though,
resonates deeply with religious and theological sensibilities, and with the desire
for an adequate eschatological accounting for the ‘ends’ of those who pass too
quickly and often cruelly from the world’s stage. Chapter 8 explores this theme
in constructive conversation with the theological perspectives on human endings
offered respectively by John Hick, Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann. Maintaining
the eschatological turn, Chapter 9 tackles the contested question of Christian
faith’s relationship to that most elevated of literary genres, the tragedy. It has
been insisted, by advocates of the tragic and theologians alike, that the milieu of
Christian faith is inhospitable to genuinely tragic vision. Drawing on accounts
of tragedy offered by Iris Murdoch, George Steiner, Terry Eagleton and others,
and on theological perspectives from Donald Mackinnon and Alan Lewis, this
penultimate chapter appeals to Tolkien’s notion of the literary eucatastrophe to
argue that, within the peculiar structure of the paschal triduum, the insights of
tragedy and the gospel hope in ‘the death of death’ resonate and complement one
another in a vital manner, rather than constituting mutually corrosive visions.
Chapter 10 closes the volume by concentrating on the peculiar nature and structure
of eschatological imagination as such. Taking its point of departure from a key
incident in Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, it explores the phenomenology of hope
as an imaginative disposition helpfully mapped in secular discourses by Ernst
Bloch, George Steiner and others. In light of this secular account, the chapter
contrasts it with the distinctive transcendent grammar of Christian hope, entering
into a close critical dialogue with Jürgen Moltmann’s sustained theological account
of hope as ‘imagination for the kingdom of God’.
A volume of this sort inevitably incurs a significant number of intellectual
and personal debts in the writing. Scholarly work of any serious sort is always a
shared enterprise as well as an individual venture, and because this book draws
on material drafted over a number of years, the debts are too numerous to count,
let alone mention. Most of those without whose friendship, collegiality, support
and intellectual stimulus it would not have seen the light of day must therefore
take their inclusion in a general, but nonetheless heartfelt, expression of gratitude
as read. A few specific mentions, though, are warranted. First, I am grateful
to the University of St Andrews for granting me a period of research leave in
the academic session 2009‒10 during which much of the work for this and a
companion volume7 was undertaken. Next, thanks are due to the University of
New South Wales for inviting me to deliver the New College Lectures for 2008;
to Wheaton College in Illinois, where I delivered a paper on imagination and
evangelism; and to Professor Yang Huilin of the Department of Philosophy and
Religion at Renmin University in Beijing for an invitation to participate in an
international seminar on ‘Scriptural Reasoning and the Grammar of Theological
Thinking’ in Beijing in August 2012, and to deliver a keynote lecture at Renmin
University’s Summer Institute in Souzhou during the same trip. Material originally
prepared for each of these academic contexts has found its way into this book in
one form or another. The taught masters and research students in the Institute
for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in St Andrews have provided a constant
stimulus for my reflection on issues treated here, and I have learned a great deal
from supervising or examining their work, and from our conversations in the
weekly Friday research seminar. Similarly, the collegiality and conversation
provided by my colleagues in the Institute over the years (most notably Jeremy
Begbie, David Brown, Steve Guthrie, Gavin Hopps and Michael Partridge) has
been a constant source of fertile exchange and constructive criticism which has
undoubtedly led to the enhancement and enrichment of the ideas developed
here. No doubt I could have learned much more from them than I have, and any
remaining deficits must certainly be owned as part of my individual contribution
to the work. It is to be regretted that academic life generally provides far fewer
opportunities for this sort of exchange today than it once did, and I count myself
grateful, therefore, for the genuine sense of intellectual community afforded by
the Institute and its activities since its inception in 2000. I would also like to
pay tribute here to the staff at Ashgate for the usual efficiency with which they
have produced the book, and their willingness to publish it quickly during a
period when the demands of the current government audit of research in British
universities might have delayed its appearance inordinately. Lastly, my thanks are
due to the Rector and domestic staff of St Paul’s School, Darjeeling, where the
7
Making Good: Creation, Creativity and Artistry (Waco, TX: Baylor University
Press, 2014).
Introduction 11
final drafting and editing of several chapters was completed in January 2013, and
to my fellow travellers from the Diocese of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane
whose company on this trip to north India, together with the inspiring views of the
Himalaya available from my temporary office, has made an otherwise stressful
and irksome task altogether more bearable, and with whom I look forward to
celebrating the completion of the manuscript.
Trevor Hart
St Paul’s School, Darjeeling
28 January 2013
Chapter 1
It is apt to remind ourselves at the beginning of a book bringing Christian theology

into conversation with imagination, language and literature that the participants
in the conversation are ones naturally rather than unnaturally yoked. This is
true quite apart from questions of the peculiar content of theology itself or the
theologian’s responsibility to engage constructively and critically with a range
of different human disciplines and practices stretching beyond the usual suspects
of philosophy, history and the natural sciences. Christian theology itself, I am
suggesting, by virtue of the nature of its proper and primary object (the God made
known in Jesus Christ) and its own nature as an activity shaped and determined
by that same object, is closely and necessarily wedded to acts of imaginative
human poiesis.
Imagination, Meaning and Reality
Let us be quite clear about this: we are not speaking now only of those moments
where faith, in its attempt to articulate and express itself most fully and clearly,
finds itself compelled to burst explicitly and unashamedly into full-blown poetry,
to harness the resources of story-telling, or to trespass imaginatively into other
worlds the forms of which bear little direct or obvious resemblance to our own.
This sort of thing is rife, of course, both in Scripture and in the tradition of the
church across the centuries, and, if it is to be faithful to the witness to either of
these, theology itself cannot wholly eschew self-consciously imaginative forms.
But my point here embraces the whole spectrum of what theology does, rather than
what might be deemed by some to be occasional and necessary lapses into more
poetic and less precise and scientific modes of engagement. No doubt there are
more and less poetic forms of theology, some better suited to particular subjects
and contexts than others. But my claim here is that all theology, no matter how
‘scientific’ and precise its aspiration or achievement, is nonetheless also ‘poetic’
and contingent upon acts of deep human imagining from the outset.
The etymology of the verb theologein must not be permitted to mislead us at
this point. Even the most rigorous and tightly defined uses of words and ideas (the
usual connotations of logos in theology and elsewhere) that we are capable of as
human beings are inseparable from and dependent upon prior and continuing acts
of imaginative poiesis.1 Among Christian writers on the subject, none has seen this
point more clearly than C.S. Lewis, writing now in his professional capacity as a
philosophically trained literary critic rather than as Christian apologist, though
his theoretical insights in the one field shaped his practice in the other from first
to last.2 Reason, Lewis observes, can only function if it has something to reason
about, otherwise it is empty, and he follows Kantian precedent in ascribing to the
logically prior and occult activities of imagination the responsibility for furnishing
the relevant materials.3 What imagination supplies, Lewis suggests, is not just a
cornucopia of material objects to be experienced, but the webs of relationship
within which these objects are situated and in terms of which we are able to
‘make sense’ of them. Imagination, he insists, is thus not the organ of truth but
of meaning. And, since ‘meaning is the antecedent condition both of truth and
falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense’,4 imagination is evidently
a necessary if not a sufficient condition of all our most carefully reasoned and
rational engagements with the world. Having made this most fundamental and
vital point, Lewis then proceeds to concede that imagination functions at a ‘lower’
level than reason, which he supposes must be appealed to finally as the arbiter of
truth. This, though, hardly seems to go far enough in its efforts to rehabilitate the
profile of imagination. After all, when one turns to consider some of the activities
1
Undermining the dichotomy commonly supposed to exist between evidence-based
and ‘rational’ procedures on the one hand and the spheres of operation of imagination on the
other has been an important contribution of recent theory, reinforcing the observation made
more than a century ago now by the Scots poet, novelist and preacher George MacDonald,
that imagination, far from needing to be rendered subservient to reason or even maintained
in a perpetual critical dialectic with it, actually furnishes the logical and linguistic conditions
under which reason alone may perform even its ‘coolest’ tasks. See George MacDonald,
A Dish of Orts (Whitehorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996), 11‒15. (The relevant essay was first
published in 1867.) Cf., e.g., Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: the Bodily Basis of
Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1987), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and
its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
2
For a helpful discussion of the connection between these two strands of Lewis’s
literary output see Michael Ward, ‘The Good Serves the Better and Both the Best: C.S.
Lewis on Imagination and Reason in Apologetics’, in Imaginative Apologetics, ed. Andrew
Davison (London: SCM Press, 2011).
3
The key text is ‘Bluspels and Flalansferes’ in C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other
Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 135‒58. Cf. Kant’s discussion of the
transcendental and empirical imagination in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A115‒30. Kant’s concern is with
the formation of the Objekt of knowledge in perception and its subsequent classification and
retrieval, whereas Lewis concentrates specifically on the role of language in shaping and
reshaping meaningful wholes for our indwelling. In other respects, though, their accounts
are consonant.
4
Lewis, 157.
Between the Image and the Word 15
typically associated with ‘reasoning’ of the sort Lewis clearly has in mind, a
moment’s reflection reveals them to be in reality themselves activities of a highly
‘imaginative’ sort, trespassing far beyond the immediacy of the empirically given.
Devising experiments, testing, theorising, calculating and so on are clearly very
different sorts of activities from daydreaming, fantasising or constructing artistic
alterities (let alone the deliberate construction and perpetration of falsehoods),
but they are activities, nonetheless, which are not only contingent upon prior acts
of an imaginative sort, but continue to rely upon our capacity for imagination at
every point. Unless we choose arbitrarily to define our terms in ways that posit an
artificial antithesis, it seems that we must reckon with a much more perichoretic
relationship than even Lewis permits between the imaginative and what we hold
to be our most reliable and ‘hard-edged’ encounters with reality.
This is true, we might observe, of our intellectual engagements with objects
of all sorts, but ‒ in one of the great ironies to be grappled with in these matters ‒
it is especially true at the cutting edge of such engagements, those frontiers of
knowledge where established patterns of language and conceptuality let us down
(precisely because we are confronted with something genuinely new for which
we possess as yet no intellectual or linguistic currency). In situations like these
we are driven to acts of catachresis, bending and extending the natural range of
our language through the undeniably poetic devices of analogy and metaphor,
teaching our old words new tricks in order to fill the gaps in the lexicon,5 and,
by effectively adjusting or accommodating our language to the structures of the
world in this way, granting ourselves enhanced epistemic access to it.6 Thus, there
are poetic fingerprints to be found all over the precise and technical vocabularies
of the sciences, in talk about electromagnetic fields, sound waves, particles of
light, genetic codes and pre-programmed motor responses for instance. The
glow associated with poetic origination may long since have dulled with use,
of course, but in each case we can see how an eye for metaphor and acts of
imaginative creativity are as vital to the advancement of scientific understanding
as any intellectual or practical skill. Here the poetic and the heuristic impulses
appear naturally to stand and fall together rather than necessarily tugging in
opposite directions.7
In the particular case of Christian theology the shortfall of our day-to-day
utterance with respect to its putative object is even more daunting than that
confronting us at the limits of empirical exploration and (much more frequently)
5
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (London:
Oxford University Press, 1969), 68.
6
See on this Richard Boyd, ‘Metaphor and theory change: What is “metaphor” a
metaphor for?’, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
7
See, e.g., Johnson, 98, 157 et passim, Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor:
Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny and
others (Toronto and Buffalo: Toronto University Press, 1977), 246.
the stubborn resilience of so many day-to-day realities that will not be measured,
weighed or reduced to the terms of any convenient calculus (the gnawing anxiety
caused by a delayed medical diagnosis; the sacramental charge of an unexpected
smile; the veil of mystery that remains intact even amidst a lover’s passionate
embrace). Here too, therefore, we must insist upon a vital symbiosis rather than
a putative opposition between the logical and the poetic, the word/idea and
the image.
The poetry of R.S. Thomas is perpetually haunted by questions of God’s
presence and absence, and of the capacities and incapacities of human language
in the face of one who is, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, ‘wholly other’, yet closer
to us than we are to ourselves. In ‘The Gap’, the poet imagines God himself
contemplating the dictionary of human speech, the glaring blank alongside his
name a convenient index of the gulf remaining between them. Rather than tolerate
any attempt to scale the heights of divine mystery and place him under the arrest
of lexical definition, this God chooses instead to define his own name, making
‘the sign in the space/on the page, that is in all languages/and none; that is the
grammarian’s/torment …/… and the equation/that will not come out’.8 When
God places himself within the order of signs, the poem suggests, matters are far
from straightforward, the accommodation being as much a matter of judgement as
of grace, and leaving God’s mystery and freedom unscathed, veiling his elusive
reality even as it shows it.
When it comes to the logos concerning Theos, in fact, for reasons bound
up directly with what is widely held to be true of this God, we are necessarily
reliant on language of a poetic sort. This is widely acknowledged in discussions of
religious language, but its implications are not always taken fully on board or kept
sufficiently in view in the wider task of doing theology.
Analogy, Meaning and the Incomprehensible
One classic discussion of the status and force of human language used to speak of
God is that provided by Thomas Aquinas in the opening chapters of the Summa
Theologiae.9 Aquinas is on the whole more positive about the wider circumstance
than R.S. Thomas’s poet, yet his account remains a very measured and carefully
qualified one, and certainly provides little encouragement for those who would
wish to pin God down on the basis of any sort of lexical logic-chopping attempted
‘from below’. According to the claims of Christian faith itself, Aquinas reminds
us, the uncreated and infinite reality we know as ‘God’ by definition transcends
R.S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945-1990 (London: Phoenix, 1995), 324.

8
The relevant discussion is in Summa Theologiae, 1a. Q. 12‒13. For text see
9
Herbert McCabe O.P., ed., St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae (1a. 12‒13), St Thomas
Aquinas Summa Theologiae, vol. 3 (London: Blackfriars in conjunction with Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1964).
the created and finite world inhabited by his own creatures, and as such can, in
the strictest sense, neither be comprehended by creaturely minds as such nor
spoken about in terms of the meanings attaching ordinarily to our discourse.
Here it becomes necessary at once to lodge a significant disclaimer, and to notice
something that is perhaps not often enough noticed about Aquinas’s account. God
being God, he insists, it is quite impossible that any created mind should see the
essence of God by its own natural powers.10 The key phrase here, though, is ‘by its
own natural powers’, and Aquinas proceeds to affirm at once that, when the soul
is finally freed from its present entanglement with material things by death, and
by virtue of an act of divine grace uniting the soul directly to God, knowledge (or
‘seeing’) of God’s essence will indeed be possible even for creaturely intellects.
This, indeed – the enjoyment of the so-called ‘beatific vision’ – is Aquinas’s firm
eschatological hope, and all that he says subsequently about what our minds and
our language are capable of in the meanwhile is set consciously in apposition
to this hope, as something by comparison ‘so exiguous as to be hardly worth
discussing’.11 While ever we labour in a human ‘nature’ in which soul and body
are inexorably intertwined, Aquinas insists, our forms of creaturely knowing
and our language alike are constrained by the limits of that which also exists in
close conjunction with corporeal objects and whatever can be known through a
process of logical abstraction from the same. God, being infinite, clearly cannot be
known in this way, and thus while God may from time to time grant individuals a
miraculous glimpse of his ‘essence’ in this life, our natural epistemic and linguistic
capacities, being hopelessly wedded to the senses, are bound to fail in any attempt
to encompass it.12
The categories used by Aquinas in Question 12, of ‘knowing’ or ‘seeing’ God’s
‘essence’, are ones unfamiliar to us today, and Herbert McCabe suggests helpfully
that the force of his point would come across rather more clearly if he had said
instead that in this life we do not actually know what ‘God’ (or any creaturely
term applied to God) really means, and are thus compelled to use words to mean
more and other than we can ever understand. We cannot get either our heads or our
words around the reality of this God, because his reality is literally mind-blowing
and lies well beyond the natural range of any language suited to the dealings we
have as human beings with the world around us. But, Aquinas observes, that is
actually the only sort of language available to us as human beings.13 The fact that,
paradoxically, notwithstanding all this we are able to speak meaningfully about
God and thereby obtain some appropriate grasp on his reality lies in part at least,
10
1a. 12, 4. See McCabe O.P., ed., 15.
11
This point is made by Herbert McCabe in an editorial appendix on ‘Signifying
Imperfectly’, in ibid., 104.
12
See esp. 1a. 12, 4 and 1a. 12, 11.
13
‘Non enim possumus nominare Deum nisi ex creaturis, ut supra dictum est.’ 1a. 13,
5. McCabe O.P., ed., 64.
Aquinas suggests, in the plasticity of language and its capacity to be redeployed

in imaginative ways.
Words coined originally to speak of one thing can be taken up and made new,
their semantic patterning modified and stretched creatively so that they come to
refer fittingly to other, quite different things, enabling us to talk and therefore
to think about them. If, as Aquinas readily acknowledges, this sort of thing is
basic to the ways in which we expand and order our knowledge of the world
itself, straddling the interstices and simultaneously plotting the (sometimes far
from apparent) connections between different creaturely realities, in the case of
our knowing and speaking of God who is, Aquinas reiterates, ‘more distant from
any creature than any two creatures are from each other’, it is clearly essential to
the circumstance.14 In this case above all others, univocal predication (a particular
word or phrase used more than once and bearing exactly the same sense on each
occasion) is not an available option, and if we are to avoid the hermeneutic
emptiness of utter equivocation, therefore, we are bound to rely instead on the
imaginative stretching of our terms to bridge the gap.
God, Analogy and Metaphor
Aquinas identifies different forms of this stretching in our talk about God. In
doing so he puts his finger on and seeks to account for something that most
Christian readers would almost certainly concur with; some human terms, we
tend naturally to suppose, apply to God more fully and properly than others, so
that there is apparently less of an imaginative stretch involved in referring to
God as good or wise than there is in calling him a shepherd, let alone a rock or a
lion. This, Aquinas tells us, is because the former terms apply to God by way of
analogy, whereas the latter are merely instances of metaphor.15 How, then, does
he account for the difference between the two?
Words that refer analogically to God, Aquinas argues, refer to non-material
qualities (‘perfections’) which God actually possesses in common with his creatures
(though he possesses them, Aquinas reminds us at once, in a manner befitting his
own eternal and infinite nature and which thus far outstrips our intellectual and
imaginative grasp). We know that these perfections are possessed by God (though
not how he possesses them), Aquinas contends, because we find them present in
his creatures and, he maintains, the transcendent ‘first cause of all things’ must
itself first possess whatever perfections it duly imparts to its creaturely effects.16
1a. 13, 5. ibid., 63. This observation arises as the premise for one of the arguments
14
in contrarium, but Aquinas’s responsio endorses it as a ground for rejecting univocal

predication, while denying that equivocation is the only logical alternative. Cf. ibid., 67.
15
See the discussion of this difference in 1a. 13, 3 and 6.
16
See, e.g., 1a. 13, 2: ‘Any creature, in so far as it possesses any perfection, represents
God and is like to him, for he, being simply and universally perfect, has pre-existing in
Presuming this to be so, of course, such qualities (being, goodness and wisdom
are some of Aquinas’s chosen examples) belong primarily and properly to God
and only secondarily and in a derived way to creatures. Furthermore, the meaning
of the relevant terms (what Janet Soskice calls their natural or proper ‘domain of
application’)17 is for Aquinas centred precisely on their applicability to God rather
than on our more familiar uses of them.18 In calling God ‘good’, therefore, he
insists, we are actually involved in literal rather than figurative speech. The way
in which the term applies to God (its modus significandi) is going to be vastly
different from the sense it bears in the statement ‘Thomas is good’, and in this life
we cannot know precisely what it means to speak of God as good; but, for reasons
just indicated, it will involve no trespass beyond the term’s primary and proper
domain of application. So, by definition analogy is quite different from univocal
predication but it is, Aquinas insists, a form of the literal rather than a figurative
use of words.19
How, then, does all this differ from a metaphorical use? According to Aquinas,
in several basic respects. Both involve the semantic stretching of terms across
difference, but otherwise they are themselves quite different from one another.
To begin with, Aquinas argues, the primary and proper domain of application of
the words we use metaphorically of God is limited to creaturely realities,20 so that
the trajectory of meaning travels, as it were, identifiably from below to above and
words are compelled to operate well beyond their natural comfort zone and to do
work quite other than that for which they were designed. Here, we might say, the
domain of application of the relevant terms is not only stretched, it is in effect
ruptured, and words are left isolated, functioning in places where they did not
expect to find themselves and do not properly belong. Secondly, therefore, Aquinas
holds, human terms used to speak of God in this way do not name perfections God
actually possesses in common with us, but, being semantically inextricable from
himself the perfections of all his creatures.’ McCabe O.P., ed., 55. Cf. 1a. 12, 12. In these
passages Aquinas echoes the metaphysical principle first aired in the fifth century AD by
the NeoPlatonist Proclus according to whom ‘Everything which by its existence bestows
a character on others, itself primitively possesses that character, which it communicates to
the recipient’. Proclus, The Elements of Theology, trans. E.R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon,
1953), 21. For Aquinas, though, the more significant point is that such perfections exist
in creatures atypically and imperfectly, and exist in God ‘in a higher way than we can
understand or signify’. McCabe, O.P., ed., 55.
17
See Janet M. Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985), 64‒5.
18
‘… hoc dicendum est quod quantum ad rem significatam per nomen per prius
dicuntur de Deo quam de creaturis.’ 1a.13, 6. McCabe, O.P., ed., 70.
19
See esp. 1a. 13, 3.
20
‘… omnia nomina quae metaphorice de Deo dicuntur, per prius de creaturis
dicuntur quam de Deo.’ 1a. 13, 6. McCabe, O.P., ed., 68.
their flesh-laden context of use,21 only point obliquely to a ‘certain likeness’ or

‘parallelism’ (similitudo) suggesting itself between God and mundane realities.22
Presumably, if such metaphor works rather than falling flat, the similitude may be
taken to be appropriate rather than arbitrary, but the sense of ‘fit’ will nonetheless
be of a wholly different order than that involved in analogical speech. We inherit
lots of images of this sort from Christian Scripture itself, of course, which pictures
God variously as a rock, a refreshing drink, a lion, a vintner, an artist, a husband,
a woman in labour, a shepherd and many other things besides. And we might
suppose (though Aquinas himself does not deal directly with the question),
we reach intuitively for others on occasion in order to grasp or articulate some
distinctive feature of faith’s living encounter with God.
Analogy and the Apophatic Contra-indication
Despite such alleged differences, these two ways of stretching our language in
order to speak of God seem to me to fall rather closer together in Aquinas’s account
of the matter than first appearances might suggest. To begin with, the broad
structure and direction of linguistic use is the same in both cases, for, as Aquinas
readily admits, even in analogy it is true that, whatever its meaning may be sub
specie aeternitatis or from a God’s-eye point of view, ‘from the point of view of
our use of the word we apply it first to creatures because we know them first’,23
and thus only secondarily to God. Aquinas’s insistence that such reference is in
reality ‘literal’ rather than figurative makes no practical or structural difference at
this point. God is no more ‘good’ or ‘wise’ in the way that we are (and thus in any
of the senses that we attach to our use of those terms in familiar human discourse)
than God is a rock or a shepherd, and there thus remains a clear and considerable
stretching of language and imagination moving from below to above in applying
them meaningfully to him. In neither case are we able to define precisely what we
mean or cash things out fully in ‘literal’ terms; indeed, were we able to do so, the
theological resort to the poetic image with its capacity to suggest what cannot be
grasped or stated in a categorical manner would be wholly unnecessary and, we
might add, our engagement with things considerably less rich. Aquinas’s own
indications that some such clarity of vision is what awaits us in eternity need
not detain us here, other than to observe that it need not be interpreted as the
eschatological endorsement of the sort of rationalism which wants no more and
no less than it says and can define exactly – as though God were a giant, hitherto
unclassified species of moth to be pinned conveniently under glass and labelled
21
‘Thus it is part of the meaning of “rock” that it has its being in a merely material
way. Such words can be used of God only metaphorically.’ ibid., 59.
22
See 1a. 13, 3 and 6.
23
1a. 13, 6. McCabe, O.P., ed., 71. My emphasis.
at last by a nineteenth-century amateur collector,24 rather than the ultimately

unfathomable mystery, to be united with whom is to be ravaged and undone by
love, and so to lose all interest in considerations of a merely intellectual sort.
Indeed, as analogues for the beatific vision go, while certain acts of intellection
may well fit the bill, it is more likely to be those most evidently woven together in
our experience with imaginative, aesthetic, affective and moral realities (the sense
of wonder and awe attendant upon some new scientific discovery; the compelling
‘beauty’ of a newly apprehended mathematical or logical pattern; the goodness
and ‘rightness’ of responding in a particular way to an unexpected initiative of
personal self-revealing) and not the rarefied abstractions inscribed for convenient
reference and computation on the pages of the dictionary or the manual.
The other aspect of difference Aquinas identifies between analogy and
metaphor as we have seen has to do with the respective levels of similarity and
dissimilarity understood to pertain between predicate and object, and the relative
felt sense of propriety and impropriety therefore involved in conjoining them.
Appeal to something like this is also commonplace in more recent attempts to
distinguish the two linguistic forms. Whereas in the one circumstance, Sallie
McFague suggests, what is indicated is ‘profound similarity beneath the surface
dissimilarities’, in the other we point only to the slightest ‘thread of similarity
between two dissimilar objects’,25 a formulation which echoes Aquinas’s talk of
shared qualities versus mere fleeting similitudes. Consequently, Janet Soskice
suggests, from its inception analogical use ‘seems appropriate’ and ‘fits into
standard speech without imaginative strain’,26 while the relatively wayward
and risqué nature of the metaphorical is captured nicely in Nelson Goodman’s
colourful (and highly metaphorical) description of it as ‘an affair between a
predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting’.27 Where there
is metaphor, it seems, there is some evident felt sense of conflict or tension, the
conjunction between two things being ‘to some extent contra-indicated’.28
Again though, the two allegedly distinct forms evidently hold something basic
in common. In each, the relevant use of words is designed to indicate some level of
similitude apprehended in a relation characterised otherwise by non-identity and
dissimilarity between two things or circumstances, and thus, even though the ratios
of similarity to dissimilarity indicated may differ significantly, we have to do in
both cases with a use of words designed to hold like together with unlike, and one
24
What the reader may perhaps think an unduly extravagant and indulgent image was
suggested to me both by a quick scan for biblical metaphors (see Hos 5.12 in NIV) and by
stumbling inadvertently again across ‘The Empty Church’ in Thomas, 349.
25
Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 12, 15.
26
Soskice, 65‒6. Soskice’s book remains the most thorough and helpful overall
treatment of the subject available.
27
Goodman, 69.
28
Ibid.
which therefore, in McFague’s paraphrase of Paul Ricoeur, contains the whisper

‘it is, and it is not!’29 The audibility of the whisper will indeed vary with the degree
of difference we suppose to exist and, as we have seen, in this regard metaphor is
generally located at one end of a putative scale and analogy at the other. But this,
surely, is a convenient place to remind ourselves of the theological conviction that
accompanies and undergirds Aquinas’s ruminations about theological language
from the outset; namely, his insistence that the difference between God and finite
creatures is so great as to be unimaginable, and that even in the case of analogical
speech about him, therefore, in the very instant that likeness of any sort is dangled
tantalisingly before us, it is at once snatched away again to be offset and qualified
by the equal and opposite suggestion of a profound difference remaining unscathed
and unfathomed. Even here, surely, ‘from the perspective of human use’ there is
something remarkable and striking about being willing to use the same word in
both cases? God is good, we say; but being God, God is good in a way lying far
beyond our intellectual and imaginative reach, so that we cannot understand the
gravity of our own words even in uttering them. We may (and do) properly trust
that they bear some positive relation to their several mundane uses; but precisely
what that relation is, finally, we can neither know nor say.
Semantic Slippage and the Problem of Petrification
Some theologies would be inclined to widen the ontological and epistemic gap
between divine and creaturely reality even further than Aquinas himself does,
perhaps challenging in doing so the idea that any ‘qualities’ could meaningfully
be supposed to be held in common between them, or at least that we could know
them to be so by a process of logical inference. Indeed, those unwilling to follow
Aquinas’s metaphysic in tracing the perfections evident in creaturely effects to
their pre-existent type in a divine exemplar (God), will have no abiding reason to
distinguish between the analogical and the metaphorical in the precise way that he
does, and will seek different grounds for choosing to deploy some terms to speak
of God and resisting the use of others, or for granting some terms more priority
and weight than others within the patterns of religious and theological discourse.
While unlikely to collapse all our anthropomorphic images for God down to the
same level (as though to call God Father, for instance, were no more and no less
fitting or significant than to refer to him as a farmer, let alone a rock or maggots)30
such theologies will nonetheless tend to insist that any and every human term
when applied to God is, by nature of the ontological and epistemic circumstance,
McFague, 13. Cf. Ricoeur, 224.

29
Hos. 5.12, NRSV. KJV has ‘as a moth’.

30
striking and surprising in its first use at least, and thus charged with that tension
and sense of resistance generally ascribed to metaphorical utterance.31
Furthermore, in the case of our speech about God all this is bound to remain,
properly speaking at least, a permanent rather than a temporary state of affairs.
In our human dealings with creaturely things, the poetic image often petrifies,
passing eventually into more prosaic and ‘literal’ modes, its work as a tool of
exploration now successfully completed and the relevant territory if not exhausted
at least now mapped to our satisfaction. Metaphors, as it is commonly put in
the literature, eventually ‘die’, their capacity to shock or surprise (and in doing
so to draw our attention to something hitherto unnoticed) having been dulled
through the familiarity of sustained use. Such death, of course, far from being
an indication of failure, is precisely a function of the success of the image and its
ready assimilation by the wider language. So, for instance, in his discussion of this
semantic slippage across time Colin Gunton reminds us of the once metaphorical
status of the word muscle which ‘when first used presumably drew upon some of
the associations of the Latin musculus, “little mouse”. No-one now thinks of those
associations, but that is because it has been so successful’.32 Gunton describes this
as the passage of the relevant term from metaphorical to ‘literal’ status within the
language, a shift which means simply that what was once a striking and unfamiliar
use has now ‘come to be accepted as the primary use of the term’33 or, we might
say, been adopted as a use located securely within the range of the term’s primary
domain of application.
Soskice, acknowledging the importance of such diachronic developments in
the patterns of language use, yet preferring to follow Aquinas in differentiating
literal (including analogical) from metaphorical predication on the basis of
something more than usage alone, distinguishes instead between literal use and
what she identifies as ‘dead’ and ‘short-lived’ metaphors respectively. The latter,
she suggests, function within language in ways closely related to analogy, but
native speakers of the relevant language can, on reflection, readily identify that
the usage is inconsistent with the word’s ‘original domain of application’.34 An
analogy, Soskice suggests, has never possessed any ‘modelling’ or heuristic
capacity, staying at home and having led rather a dull linguistic life; whereas a
31
See helpfully on this McFague, 13. Metaphors, we ought to note, are not stable,
and do not all function on the same level. Indeed, it is precisely those that prove most rich
and fruitful in opening up territories of meaning that tend, eventually, to pass into ‘literal’
use and so surrender their metaphorical status. In linguistic terms, both ‘Son’ and ‘rock’ are
metaphors as applied to God, but the profundity and semantic excess attaching to the former
place it on a quite different level than the latter.
32
Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and
the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1988), 34.
33
Ibid., 35. Here Gunton draws on Ricoeur’s account of the relevant distinction. See
Ricoeur, 291.
34
See Soskice, 71‒4.
‘dead metaphor’, on the other hand, has had a colourful past, even if we find it
now settled down to a quieter form of existence. It is tempting at this point to
raise all manner of questions about the notion of a consistent and unchanging
‘original domain of application’ and its alleged non-susceptibility to the contingent
fluctuations of time and place. Depending on exactly where and when one enters
the relevant conversation, it might be argued, one’s sense of what counts as the
primary domain may be calibrated quite differently, and talk about muscles, and
magnetic fields or, for that matter, God as Father, Lord, and perhaps ‘good’ and
‘wise’ too35 might then, even on reflection, strike one as having something odd and
out of place about them or as entirely unsurprising and proper.
We cannot (and fortunately need not) resolve these interesting and contested
differences of understanding here. Allusion to them, though, leads us conveniently
back to my main point: Where our discourse about the phenomena of creaturely
existence in the world is concerned, words can and do shift in their range of
applications with impunity, however we may choose to describe or theorise
that shift. What was once a striking and surprising use of words becomes less
so, eventually being taken for granted as part of a perfectly natural and ordinary
way of speaking about things. But in the case of our talk about God, I would
suggest, there is a vital sense in which this process of assimilation ought never
to be allowed to happen, not entirely anyway. I say ‘ought’ because, of course,
it does happen, and in the case of lots of human terms (Father, Lord, King and
others) many Christians have long since forgotten the oddity of just what we are
doing when we use them to speak of God. But we ought not to forget it. We should
deliberately keep the relevant images alive, no matter how accustomed we have
become to their use, because, in a unique manner and to a unique extent, God
remains forever elusive and resistant to convenient classification, escaping our
grasp whenever we try to tighten up our definitions or pin him down more precisely.
To forget this, or to overlook it in practice, is both to run the risk of religious
idolatry and to miss the power of the poetic image to transform and renew the
vulgate, the breaking open of our terms on the rock of divine otherness compelling
constant reconsideration and reevaluation of their familiar meanings. To call God
‘King’, for instance, cannot leave human models of kingship unscathed, but must
be permitted to come back eventually to bite not just our political theologies
but our politics, God’s particular way of exemplifying ‘kingship’ calling its
creaturely equivalents severely into question.36 It is typical of poetic images that
35
It is not difficult to imagine a semantic (and religious/theological) past where
these two terms and other alleged instances of analogical use were ones the application
of which to God had once fallen fairly clearly outside rather than comfortably within their
established domain of use, and where this fact was reflected in the ability of native speakers,
on reflection, to identify a certain sense of disturbance at their theological application. That
they apply to God naturally or properly is a metaphysical claim, and a controvertible one
at that.
36
I am indebted to my colleague Richard Bauckham for suggesting this example.
their juxtapositions of like and unlike transform our understanding of all relevant
terms in the relationship. In the case of God and God alone, though, we might
properly insist, such mercurial otherness is not just de facto but de jure, a feature
of who and what God himself is in his proper relationship to the world. Here, the
‘split-reference’, the mysterious and fluid interplay of ‘it is’ and ‘it is not’ which
Ricoeur identifies as the very hallmark of the truthful poetic image37 remains and
must remain identifiably in play, our refusal to resolve or reduce it into other,
more secure, ‘hard-edged’ and intellectually manageable forms of thought and
speech having received, we might suppose, the highest possible warrant. For
Christians, discourse about God and with God, in liturgy, theology or elsewhere,
is bound finally to remain a matter of the image, precisely in order to be faithful
to the peculiar way taken by the divine Word in God’s address to us.
The Object and the Mode of Knowing
To allow the images which function at the heart of Christian theology to petrify
and so subject to precise determination would in practice be unfaithful to the very
nature of the object we are seeking to know and to speak of, and thus, ironically
perhaps, result precisely in a highly unscientific approach to it. This point is made
forcefully in the writings of T.F. Torrance, who reminds us repeatedly that in
all properly scientific and objective procedure it is the nature of the particular
object itself which must prescribe the relevant mode of knowing, and thus the
form and the content of whatever knowledge arises.38 This, he insists, is no less
true of our knowledge of God than our knowledge of anything else, though its
precise implications will obviously vary from field to field. Where our knowledge
of God (theo-logein) is concerned, Torrance insists, one particular implication is
that in any true statements we make our words are bound to possess and retain
a fundamental density and resistance to precise determination, remaining fluid
in their mode of signification. Theological language, he urges, is paradeigmatic,
never precisely descriptive; it points beyond itself to God rather than attempting
to picture him.39
Torrance privileges spatial metaphors in his articulation of this, picturing our
words as physical tools, having a ‘side’ that faces us as we handle and deploy them,
and a ‘side’ turned appropriately to make contact with the object. Theological
statements, he acknowledges, must, to be sure, ‘be closed on our side, for we
have to formulate them as carefully and exactly as we can’, but on God’s side
they must remain ‘open (and therefore apposite) to the infinite objectivity and
37
Ricoeur, 224.
38
See, e.g., Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (London: Oxford University
Press, 1969), 13f. et passim. Cf. Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (London:
SCM Press Ltd, 1965), 53‒4.
39
Torrance, Theological Science, 20.
inexhaustible reality of the divine Being’.40 Only thus can our words possess an
appropriate transparency, enabling us to look through them, rather than at them,
and permitting our minds to ‘come under the compulsion of the Reality we seek
to understand’,41 rather than forcing it in a Procrustean manner into verbal and
intellectual boxes already conveniently at our disposal. ‘It is important to see that
open concepts are not irrational because they are open’, Torrance writes, ‘for to be
open vis-à-vis the eternal God is the true mode of their rationality, prescribed for
them by the nature of the divine Object of knowledge – they would in fact be most
imprecise and inaccurate if they were not open in this way’.42 To seek to over-
determine our meanings at this point, then, to insist on hard and precise modes of
speaking, or even to permit inadvertent hardening through the familiarity of use
would be a wholly inappropriate way of proceeding, irrational rather than rational
and, in theological and religious terms, tantamount to idolatry. The inadequacy of
the terms we use in this context is essential to their truth, Torrance urges,43 rather
than compromising it.
In similar vein, Colin Gunton observes that the indirectness and elusiveness
of metaphor, holding together quite explicitly the affirmation that ‘it is’ with the
vital qualifier that, even so, ‘it is not’, grants it an epistemic modesty befitting
‘a primary vehicle of human rationality’ and superior to the hard-edged and
‘pure’ concepts which would, in effect, finally deny reality any abiding mystery
or capacity to resist our attempts to wrestle it into submission.44 Both Torrance
and Gunton would, I think, see due intellectual humility (and hence the demand
for openness, indirectness and imaginative semantic surplus in our speech and
thought) as proper to all properly objective knowing, and a vital counterpoint,
therefore, to whatever efforts in the direction of the precise determination and tight
definition of terms may legitimately arise in our dealings with creaturely things
too. Only thus can we both ‘fix’ meaning sufficiently to think and speak and write
in a coherent manner about things at all, and yet, at the same time, allow reality
to enforce constant modifications and adjustments to those meanings, rather than
leaving them ‘fixed’ in some once and for all manner and thus blind and deaf to
further insights and discoveries.45 But it seems reasonable, nonetheless, to suggest
that in the case of God in particular, and in some sense uniquely, the whisper ‘it
is, and it is not’ demands to have the volume cranked up to 11 on a regular basis
40
Thomas F. Torrance, God and Rationality (London: Oxford University Press,
1971), 186‒7.
41
Ibid., 187.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid., 187‒8.
44
See Gunton, 39.
45
On the metaphorical ‘fixing’ of meaning and its implications see ibid., 45. For the
same basic point cast in other terms, cf. Torrance, God and Rationality, 19.
in order to prevent us from collapsing into an inappropriate, impious and irrational

form of ‘rationalism’.46
By-passing the Image in Pursuit of the Logos
Given Torrance’s own inevitable reliance on figurative uses of language in

writing about all this (‘open’ meanings which permit us to ‘look through’ words
rather than ‘looking at’ them, or in which words are permitted to ‘point beyond’
themselves, functioning as ‘tools’ rather than as ‘pictures’, etc.) it is interesting
to note his general reluctance to grant the imagination much positive place in
Christian theology. Of course, he admits, at one level the use of ‘images’ drawn
from the world of things familiar to us is inevitable in our talk about God if we
are to think or say anything about him at all. As we have already seen, though,
for Torrance, while such images are clearly ‘adapted to’ our capacities as human
knowers (‘closed’ on our side) so that ‘we may have some hold in our thought
upon (God’s) objective reality’, they are equally certainly not ‘fitted to’ the reality
of God himself, which remains transcendent and elusive, far beyond the reach of
any attempt to picture or describe it.47
While agreeing with the insistence of Anglican theologian Austin Farrer that we
cannot discern the reality of God ‘except through the images’, therefore, Torrance
nonetheless demurs strongly from Farrer’s further elucidation of the same point,
according to which ‘We cannot by-pass the images to seize an imageless truth’.48
On the contrary, Torrance argues, although we certainly cannot by-pass the images,
what must be recognised and underscored is the fact that in this particular context
such images do not actually work by ‘imaging’ at all (since the God to whom they
point is not capable of being imaged). In this sense, therefore, precisely what must
be said is that the ‘truth’ we apprehend (and the way in which we apprehend it) is
‘imageless’, and to forget or deny this is bound to end in some form of idolatry.
This leads Torrance quickly into seemingly paradoxical talk about ‘images that do
not actually image’,49 and although faithfulness to biblical language and practice
compels him to retain the vocabulary of the image, he gladly exchanges it on
a regular basis for the less potentially troublesome talk of ‘concepts’ which, he
urges, are closely related to images, but have been stripped down and purged of
any concrete pictorial content, so that they can function now in a purer, more
abstract, more precise and ‘imageless’ manner. At this point, Torrance appeals in
what he takes to be a biblical (and subsequently a Reformed) manner to the pattern
46
On ‘rationalism’ in the relevant sense see Gunton, 1‒25.
47
48
See Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1948), 110. For
Torrance’s discussion see Torrance, Theological Science, 19.
49
of auditory rather than optical experience, and to the vital qualification of the one
by the other in biblical and theological understanding of our talk about God.
In the biblical tradition image and word belong together, and it is through word
that the images are made to signify or indicate that to which they point. It is this
powerful element of word that makes us look through the images and hear past
them to what God has to say, and so to apprehend Him in such a way that we do
not have and are not allowed to have any imaginative or pictorial representation
of Him in our thought.50
Thus, on the one hand, in this context pictures without words are paradoxically
‘blind’, denying us of ‘eyes to see’, as it were, precisely because we lack the
accompanying ‘ears to hear’. But, Torrance suggests, words without pictures
are not empty. Not always. We must not identify the conceivable (let alone the
rationally compelling) with states of affairs that we can ‘picture’ he insists, citing
Frege’s work on symbolic logic in support of his case. The pure concept, stripped
of all the distracting clutter of perceptibility, emancipated from the inevitable
opacity of the flesh, functions ‘imagelessly’ to penetrate successfully into deep
regions of logic lying far beyond and corresponding to nothing that we can picture
for ourselves.51
Imagination, Reason and Rationalism
I shall suggest momentarily that these may not be either the most obvious or the
most helpful terms in which either to affirm what Torrance apparently wishes to
affirm or to deny what he wants to deny about the nature and functioning of our
talk about God. First, though, it is worth noting the ostensible parallels existing
between his chosen terms and those associated with various forms of what
Gunton refers to as ‘conceptual rationalism’.52 Arising in different guises across
the centuries from Plato’s Republic to the thought of G.W.F Hegel (1770–1831),
the hallmark of this philosophical tendency, Gunton observes, is its insistence
‘that meaning and truth are successfully conveyed only by means of concepts of
an intellectual kind which have been purified as completely as possible from all
imaginative or pictorial content’, resulting in an over-valuing of abstract logical
connections between ideas, and a relative denigration of everything else.53
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821–31), Hegel presents a
version of this in which he distinguishes sharply between the place of Vorstellungen
(‘representations’) and Begriffen (concepts) in religious and theological
50
Ibid.
51
Cf. Torrance, God and Rationality, 23.
52
See Gunton, 16ff.
53
Ibid., 17.
engagements with the reality of God.54 Religion is necessarily full to the brim
with Vorstellungen, the ‘sensible forms or configurations’55 in and through which
truth is clothed for us in flesh, presented under the guise of concrete particulars
and the relationships between them (pictures, stories and the like) so that we may
apprehend and grasp it readily. But this is a preliminary and provisional state
of affairs as regards our dealings with the truth, and things cannot remain thus.
Precisely because they are reliant on imagination and representation in this way,
Hegel argues, religious traditions cannot themselves penetrate to the universal truth
of things, but remain trapped at the level of historical and material particularity,
weighed down, as it were, by their complicity in the forms of the flesh, and
prevented from any ascent beyond its regions. Thus, for Hegel, precisely what
must occur is for the imaginative concretions (images, stories etc.) of religious
doctrine to be ‘elevated and transmuted into more adequate conceptual form’,56
the imaginative flesh being in effect stripped away so as to reveal the intellectually
pure and logically precise skeletal framework of Begriffen.
At first blush the parallels between Hegel’s account and that developed by
Torrance are quite striking and can hardly be overlooked, even though closer
inspection will at once reveal significant differences between their respective
theological concerns and projects. Hegel, for instance, participates unashamedly in
that intellectual prejudice according to which whatever relies upon or is complicit
in the realm of the particular (historical, material) has by definition a strained and
problematic relationship to the truth of things and must, like the Platonic soul
of old, finally be released or redeemed from its entanglement with the kosmos
aisthetos in order to discover its true place in the realm of pure Ideas or Forms
(kosmos noetos). Torrance has no truck with any such dualism, being committed
in a way that Hegel is not to the fact and thus the radical particularity of the
incarnation,57 that event in which, according to Christian faith, God himself ‘took
flesh’ and made the contingencies of historical and material existence his own in
order to redeem them from within and to give himself to be known in and through
54
See, e.g., G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion vol. 1, trans.
R.F. Brown, Peter C. Hodgson, and J.M. Stewart (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1984), 396ff. For a full discussion see further Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975), 465‒533.
55
A more familiar term, Hegel notes, is simply Bilder (‘images’). See Hegel, 397.
56
Gunton, 22.
57
For Hegel the doctrine of the incarnation is to be understood as a pictorial
representation whereby the universal truth that ‘(t)he divine nature is the same as the human’
is imaginatively mediated and grasped at a lower level than its philosophical realization.
See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1977), 459‒60, 475. For a helpful account cf. Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study
of Continuities in Christology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983), 40‒43.
them.58 Indeed, for Torrance it is precisely the truth articulated in the Nicene
doctrine of the homoousion, the consubstantiality of the incarnate Son with the
Father, which both permits and compels us to deploy certain human terms in our
thinking and speaking about God at all, grounding those same terms ‘objectively’
in God.59 But when it comes to the question of the precise epistemic force of that
particular flesh which the divine Son made his own (let alone any other instance of
creaturely reality falling outside the hypostatic union), when he enquires, in other
words, about the significance which the particular shape and substance of this flesh
has for the content and shape of our thinking and speaking about God, Torrance’s
case leans much further in the direction of Hegel’s, in phraseology at least, and
generates an apparent tension in his thought.
Imagination, Imagelessness and Invisibility
For Torrance, the ‘flesh’ or humanity of Christ is absolutely indispensable as a

starting point for theology, being precisely a vital divine accommodation to our
human ways of knowing. Furthermore, Torrance insists, this flesh can never be
circumvented or set aside as though it were a mere external creaturely vehicle
for an inner divine content which can be grasped and held onto without it. The
particular humanity of the man Jesus Christ is eternally ordained to be ‘God’s
language to man’, and we cannot, Torrance insists, know God without paying
constant and careful attention to it.60 Yet we must reckon with the paradox that even
here where he makes ‘flesh’ his own, God is nonetheless known precisely through
the signifying mediation of that which is ‘not-God’ (the humanity of Jesus),61 and
if we can and must not seek to ‘get behind the back of’ this logos incarnatus in
order to know God in some direct and unmediated way, nor, therefore, must we
ever mistake it for the proper object or final destination of theological knowing.
The concrete human form upon which our knowing depends here, even though it
may and must be acknowledged and confessed as God’s very own ‘flesh’, must,
in other words, like all those other creaturely forms of thought and speech which
58
This doctrine, Torrance insists, constitutes the very ‘antithesis of any radical
dichotomy between intelligible and sensible worlds. It is the doctrine of the coming of God
into our human existence in space and time, and his affirming of its validity in relation to
himself as Creator and Redeemer. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 52.
59
See ibid., 39. Cf. 52.
60
Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 129‒30.
61
Here Torrance follows Barth who puts the matter thus: ‘What if God’, he enquires,
‘be so much God that without ceasing to be God he can also be, and is willing to be, not
God as well (?)’. Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in Christian Religion,
Vol. 1, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 136.
prepare the way for and duly follow on from it,62 nonetheless be and remain ‘open’
on its far side, the side which is turned and points us towards the eternal Being
of God himself.
Even within the dynamics of the hypostatic union, in other words, for Torrance
the flesh of the incarnate Son cannot function in such a way as to become the
logical terminus of our knowing and speaking about God but must, like any other
creaturely reality, become ‘transparent’, functioning precisely ‘signitively’ rather
than ‘eidetically’,63 merely pointing our gaze in the right direction rather than
providing any picture or mimetic approximation to the Being of God.64 Here,
scandalously perhaps, we must insist that not just our vulgar human terms but
even the humanity of God himself is, in and of itself and as such, inadequate and
possessed of a certain inevitable and vital impropriety with respect to the task of
making God known.65 In as much as Jesus’ humanity is ‘not God’, it participates
in the inherently ambiguous condition of the sign, and if it is to function thus it
must, in the very process of being assumed or appropriated within the enhypostatic
movement of the incarnation, also be broken open and transfigured, acquiring a
tantalising surplus of meaning far beyond anything it ordinarily possesses, its very
brokenness and open-endedness permitting it, within the Trinitarian dynamics of
divine self-giving, to refer us beyond itself to that which it is not.66
Here, though, what Torrance certainly shares with Hegel – namely a deep
suspicion of the intellectual contributions of human imagination and its products,
and a self-conscious elevation within his theological method of the ‘pure’ concept
62
Torrance speaks of Israel’s history as the divinely furnished matrix for interpreting
the person and work of Christ, the divine Word being here already ‘on the road to becoming
flesh’, and providing conceptual tools for its own proper articulation. See, e.g., Thomas F.
Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd, 1992), 1‒23.
63
Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 19‒20.
64
For Torrance, any denial of this would amount to a serious compromising of the
insights of Chalcedonian Christology, according to which the two ‘natures’ of the incarnate
Son are inseparabiliter and indivise, but equally vitally inconfuse and immutabiliter. See
ibid., 130.
65
Ibid., 31. According to classical christology, of course, Jesus’ humanity is
anhypostatic, having no existence ‘in and of itself and as such’ but only in its ‘personalising’
union with the eternal Son. Thus any attempt to abstract from the particularities of its case
are, strictly speaking, irrational. Precisely for this reason, even the particularities of Jesus’
humanity serve as much to veil or obscure the deeper reality and meaning of the incarnation
as to reveal it, if they are attended to in terms proper to empirical observation and modes of
analysis proper to the human sciences alone.
66
Torrance’s account of the signitive relation thus concurs with Barth’s notion of
an analogia fidei rather than an analogia entis. See below, 38–9 There is also a parallel
with Aquinas’ insistence that terms used analogously of God merely point us toward God
rather than granting us any comprehension of their meaning as it pertains to his essence;
for Torrance and Barth, though, the analogy arises strictly within the context of revelation,
whereas for Aquinas its source is one rooted firmly in creation and our capacity of reasoning.
and its allegedly ‘imageless’ and superior way of referring – generates some
friction and seems finally to exist in tension with, if not to tug in a rather different
direction from, the core Christian claim that the communication of divine meaning
involves a radical, irreducible and (as Torrance himself is so often at pains to
remind us) permanent act of enfleshing.67 Visibility is, whether we like it or not,
one of the characteristics of the flesh, and we cannot strip it away to the point
where it ceases to be noticed without removing it altogether, thereby effectively
reversing the direction and the accomplishment of incarnation. Torrance, as we
have seen, is quite emphatic that the humanitas Christi is both the starting point
and a permanent abiding condition for our knowing and speaking of God, and
insists that we cannot (and must not attempt to) go behind the back of it in a
bid for some unmediated encounter with divine reality. But his talk of an ideal
of ‘imageless’ conceptuality, of ‘images which do not image’,68 of words which
function adequately without pictures,69 of the purification of the image by the
accompanying word so that visual content falls away to be replaced by an acoustic
relation,70 all conjures up a vision of a form of ‘transparency’ which may finally
become difficult in practice to disentangle from invisibility, in which case the
significance for Christology of the particular shape and content of the ‘flesh’ of
Jesus (the specific things that he does and says and suffers in his ministry as the
gospels record these for us) is at risk of being attenuated in a problematic manner.
Incarnation, Particularity and Dialectic
Richard Bauckham identifies just such relative lack of attention to the particularity
of Jesus in the Christology of some of the same patristic theologians whom
Torrance so admires, and contrasts it with the particularising emphasis of the New
Testament writers.71 The danger here, Bauckham suggests, is that while formally
insisting upon the centrality of the ‘full humanity’ appropriated by the eternal
Word or Son in grounding and mediating all our knowing of God, in practice
what occurs is that the humanity becomes insufficiently opaque to permit any
imaginative purchase upon it whatever, the mind’s eye not ‘going behind the
back’ of the logos incarnatus of course, but nonetheless effectively passing
straight through the particulars of his story to a very high level of conceptual
abstraction without encountering much resistance or interference. Unlike Hegel,
The presence of Jesus’ risen and ascended body (as part of his full sharing in our
67
nature) at the right hand of the Father is basic to Torrance’s theology of the Priesthood
of Christ. For a full elaboration see Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection
(Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1976), 106‒58.
68
69
Torrance, God and Rationality, 23.
70
Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 20.
71
See Richard Bauckham, ‘Christology Today’, Scriptura 271988: 20‒28.
Bauckham insists that universal significance can be had here only in and through
(and not despite) the concrete particulars of the incarnate economy, and that the
conceptually precise doctrines of incarnation and trinity must therefore always
be held closely together with the biblical stories about Jesus and not permitted in
practice to become an abstract substitute for them.72 This does not mean, of course,
that the conceptual precision afforded by doctrines can be abandoned in the name
of some Neo-Ritschlian eschewal of ‘metaphysics’. To do this would be to fall into
the precise trap from which Torrance would rescue us, collapsing everything down
to the level of a set of opaque historical and creaturely meanings in which the story
of Jesus refers us to itself but never refers us beyond itself in an epiphanic manner
(i.e. so that it may speak to us appropriately of God). Instead, we might say, the
lesson to be learned from Christology, and applied more widely by extension
from what we learn there, is that the levels of image (eikon) and idea/concept
(logos) must constantly be held closely together, generating meaning precisely
and only as they are maintained in a dialectic where each is constantly qualified
and rejuvenated by the other. The eternal Word takes flesh and tabernacles with
us, becoming for us (by all that he is and says and does and suffers) the very image
and likeness of the invisible God; but this is an image which functions only as
faith is granted ears and eyes to penetrate beyond (without ever letting go of) the
level of what is presented to it at the level of flesh and blood, and attempts to
make sense of it in terms and categories proper to that level alone are therefore
bound to fail. What we are dealing with here (to pursue the Christological point
further) is not a stripping away or attenuation of the flesh, but a transfiguration
and quickening of it in which it is appropriated by God and granted a depth and
surplus of meaning which, in and of itself, it can never bear. But it is difficult to see
how talk of ‘imagelessness’ and the elevation of the ‘pure concept’ (if such a thing
exists) can secure this rather than risking its loss, in the Christological context or
anywhere else.
Apophaticism, Images and Concepts
Are there, then, more helpful ways of saying what Torrance apparently wishes
to say? It seems to me that there are, and that they will entail the redemption
of the imaginative (and hence the ‘image’) from the purgatorial secondary state
into which he typically casts it. We should remind ourselves first of Torrance’s
over-riding concern which, despite his direct echoing of Hegel’s exaltation of the
concept in theology, is in reality quite different from Hegel’s own. For Hegel,
Gunton suggests, the strict differentiation and disentanglement of concepts from
their imaginative counterparts was to be undertaken in the conviction that the
72
Ibid., 23‒4. On the relationship between universality and particularity in theology
see helpfully Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the
Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. Chapter 5.
former would, once purged of fleshy impurities, be capable, in principle at least,

of offering up for our contemplation reality ‘as it is’, directly and without error.73
For Torrance, on the other hand, it is a fundamental mistake to suppose that the
reality of God could ever be known in this way, and the concept is to be preferred
to the image precisely because it is less likely to get in the way of our knowing of
God by obtruding itself as an opaque entity which we look at rather than looking
through. For Torrance, we might say, there is an inherently apophatic impulse74
in all our thinking and speaking about God, and concepts are precisely a means
of acknowledging and preserving this circumstance rather than escaping from
it in some rationalist manner. Concepts too, therefore, although they exist at a
higher and ‘purer’ level of our intellectual engagement than ‘images’, are, on this
account, nonetheless kenotic in nature, referring us beyond themselves in the very
instant that they present themselves for consideration. We might put the same
thing in literary rather than theological terms: for Torrance, concepts as well as
images must finally be concluded under the rubric of the poetic whisper: ‘it is, and
it is not …’.
To suggest this, though, is to raise again the need for a more nuanced account of
the relationship between concept and image, imagination and reason than the blunt
distinction so often posited. This is something that Torrance himself would almost
certainly eschew, but which seems to me to be both warranted and worthwhile. It
affords us, I shall argue, a way of maintaining an appropriate apophatic humility
in our theology without, in the process, compromising or attenuating in any way
the significance of the claim that the Logos of God is, as far as we are concerned,
always an enfleshed Logos and never a logos nudus.75 The flesh is always present,
and always significant, though its significance varies as we attend to it in different
ways and for different purposes. In a directly related manner, I suggest, it is a
mistake to suppose the existence of two distinct tiers of intellectual engagement,
one in which the imagination is permitted to function freely (the sphere of the
‘image’) and another from which it can and must be excluded at all costs in the
interests of some alleged ‘conceptual purity’. No such purity (if by that is intended
Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 22‒3, 38.

73
By ‘apophatic’ in this context I intend not the sort of radical undercutting of the
74
status of theological statements which denies them any purchase whatever upon the reality
of God and ends thus in a form of devout agnosticism or a mystical experience which
eschews the cognitive altogether, but rather the constant acknowledgement that even the
most carefully formulated and precise uses of language about God are inadequate and fall
short of defining or comprehending his reality even as they are taken up and made new
within the dynamic event of revelation itself.
75
This seems to me to be the epistemic significance of the doctrines of resurrection
and ascension (where the incarnation is affirmed as a permanent state of affairs in the divine
economy rather than a merely temporary manifestation), and the pursuit of a Word whose
flesh has been rendered practically invisible in the process of our knowing and speaking
inevitably calls it into question.
precisely purity from all traces of the imaginative) is possible, as Torrance’s own
favourite philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi, recognises in his unashamed
reference to the importance of the ‘conceptual imagination’ in the natural sciences,
mathematics and elsewhere.76
What Polanyi’s phrase admits is that even concepts and precisely honed logical
abstractions of the sort to which Torrance aspires for theology involve us in an act
of ‘imagining’ something, holding something in our mind’s eye (though the visual
connotation of this metaphor itself is misleading and demands qualification)77 in
order to look ‘through’ it, no matter how thin or vague that something may itself
be. Indeed, the very act of ‘looking through’ an image, permitting layers of ‘visible’
content to become epistemically transparent rather than remaining opaque, is an
act of a highly imaginative sort rather than one from which imagination has been
or ever could be purged. The attempt to ‘imagine nothing’ is self-defeating, since
in imagining ‘nothing’, we are inevitably imagining something, even though the
something in question may well be ‘nothing’ (which we generally picture in terms
of absence, empty space, a vacuum, or whatever). Rather than mistakenly seeking
to escape from the imaginative (and the ‘images’ it produces) into some putative
imagination-free zone populated by ‘pure concepts’ (defined precisely by their
‘imageless’ nature), therefore, we should reckon instead both with its inescapable
presence and with the remarkable variety of ways and levels in and at which it
performs its given tasks, and thus the wide variety of its products, all legitimately,
but in certain respects unhelpfully, concluded under the rubric of ‘the image’. The
image, it turns out, is no one trick pony, but can be and do very different sorts of
things, sometimes even managing more than one at once.
Pictures and Images of Other Sorts
Despite his broad-brush disparagement of the image in relative terms, Torrance’s

position leaves scope for accommodating this important recognition, since, even
though he often overstates his case, it is in fact to particular sorts of imaging
relation that he directs his approbrium. In particular, it is to that sort of imaginative
activity in which we ‘picture’ something in quite concrete terms, or allow one
76
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 46.
77
A mental ‘image’ (if we take this now to refer to any product of acts of imagination)
may not be visual at all, but aural, or related to others of our five senses. I can imagine
a taste or a sound just as readily as something ‘seen’. In this sense, of course, appeal to
experiences of audition (in relation to the theological category of a ‘Word’ which speaks
to us) may equally be an appeal to an ‘image’, albeit one of a distinct sort to those which
Torrance refers using the term.
thing to serve as ‘a picture of’ something else.78 A physical picture, of course, is

precisely something that we are intended to look at and attend to in its own right,
even when doing so is meant precisely to stimulate our thinking about something
or someone or somewhere else (e.g. in the case of a representational painting or
drawing or a photograph). The relation ‘x is a picture of y’, then, brings with it
certain attendant experiences and expectations, among which we might list a high
degree of visual stability (the picture is generally relatively static, and its content
does not change), an expectation that it contains a high rather than a low level
of representational force (in some identifiable and proper sense we expect it to
‘look like’ that which it pictures for us, though this may not always be via any
straightforward attempt at visual simulation), and a capacity to be attended to as an
object in its own right (its ‘kenotic’ aspirations are limited ones; we are expected
to look at it, and can do so, indeed, for purposes wholly other than attending to
it as ‘a picture of’ something else). We can see at once how these expectations
are hugely problematic if transferred into the context of theological imagining,
resisting any notion of transparency or openness of the sort which Torrance insists
is so vital, clamouring for our undivided attention, and accompanied by a strident
and deafening declaration that ‘it is’ which all but drowns out any remembrance
of the fact that ‘it is not’.
But not all ‘images’ are of this sort. Mental images, for example, even when
they are vivid and as concrete as we can possibly make them (when, for instance,
we are trying recall precisely how something looked or picture (sic) how it might
look) are far more fluid and prone to spontaneous modification than we should often
like; and, as Gilbert Ryle points out, despite the way in which we speak of it, the
‘mental image’ is in any case not really a thing in its own right at all, not something
we can ‘look at’, but precisely a way of thinking about something else.79 Mental
images, we might say, even when we want them to perform a ‘picturing’ function,
have a built-in (and sometimes frankly infuriating) openness and transparency,
resisting our attempts to firm them up and close them down. Unlike their physical
counterparts, therefore, they are by nature suited to precisely the sort of breaking
and chastening which Torrance advocates, though such breaking and chastening
depends precisely upon their place as imaginative constructs rather than betraying
it.80 They do not, if we treat them in this manner, cease to be images, but become
images of a different sort, functioning now in a quite different way, enabling us to
think about things in a quite different way and at a wholly different level. Indeed,
78
See, e.g., his insistence that in theology, as in mathematics, we must not identify
‘the conceivable with the picturable’. Torrance, God and Rationality, 23. Cf. his allusion
to ‘the fatal mistake of treating … images as pictorial representations or reproductions’ in
theology. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 51.
79
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin, 1963), Chapter VIII. Cf. the
discussion in Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (London: Methuen, 1972).
80
On the differences between mental, verbal and physical images, and their
significance vis-à-vis the danger of ‘idolatry’ see further Chapter 7 below.
if Ryle is correct, we cannot ever prescind wholly from the territory of the image
without ceasing to ‘think about’ anything at all. We need something, no matter
how ‘thin’ or transparent or chastened, to latch onto and work with if we are to
apprehend anything at all. In Torrance’s chosen terms, concepts must be ‘closed’
on our side, even if they are radically broken open on God’s side. The ‘flesh’
assumed by the divine Word may and must indeed be chastened, transfigured and
made anew if it is to be epiphanic, but it cannot be stripped away or rendered
completely invisible. Crucifixion is followed not by the absence of the flesh, but
by its resurrection and ascension to the Father’s right hand, where it abides in its
vital mediating and priestly role.
Certain sorts of verbal image, too, contain an inbuilt resistance to being
dragooned inappropriately into a ‘picturing’ role. Thus, as we have already seen,
it is part of the nature of metaphor to function obliquely rather than directly,
speaking of one thing in terms suggestive of another,81 but with a high quotient of
‘contra-indication’ kept constantly in play,82 and a flickering interplay sustained
between the tantalising suggestion that ‘it is’, and the sober and equally vital
acknowledgement that ‘it is not’. Again, we might say, such images are already
broken and chastened by nature, and lend themselves well to further acts of
imaginative asceticism where appropriate. Here again, though, it is not by the
absence of ‘images’ that the relevant theological concerns are safeguarded, but
through acts of responsible theological imagining in which images themselves
are modified and (if we prefer) ‘purified’ so as to fulfill a particular epistemic
purpose. If it is one (widely acknowledged) function of imagination to set us free
from the given constraints of the empirical, it is certainly another of its functions
(though much less widely recognised) to liberate us from pictures by which we
might otherwise, as Wittgenstein puts it in a closely related discussion, be ‘held
captive’ in inappropriate and damaging ways.83 In theology, as elsewhere in our
dealings with reality, it is precisely the broken or chastened image which, Colin
Gunton suggests, opens us to the world and permits the world in its turn to enforce
changes in the meanings that our words bear. Thereby, in a manner that has nothing
whatever to do with a precise ‘picturing’ relation, our speech and thought becomes
appropriately and adequately ‘world-shaped’ (or in the case of theology, ‘God-
shaped’).84
81
Soskice, 15.
82
Goodman, 69.
83
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with
a Revised English Translation, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2001), 1. §115. Wittgenstein’s point has to do with one particularly unhelpful
‘picture’ of how language itself is related to reality, i.e. as though it in its turn in some sense
pictured the things it speaks of.
84
See, e.g., Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 45‒7.
That all this occurs in the case of our God-talk only by virtue of what Karl
Barth calls an ‘analogy of faith’ rather than an ‘analogy of being’85 may readily be
conceded (though doubtless not all readers will feel the need to go this far). Barth’s
point is that a correspondence between the act of God’s knowing and speaking
of himself and human knowing of him arises only within the event of revelation
itself, and only thus (and within this dynamic relational context for as long as it
perdures)86 is any human language granted the capacity to bear witness to the
reality of God’s own life and being and action. Put more simply, God himself must
speak in, with and through our human speech-acts about him if the relevant terms
are actually to speak truthfully, and only within a personal relationship of faith
and obedience can we begin to grasp dimly what these terms now come to mean.
Otherwise they remain opaque, veiling the divine reality rather than revealing
it, and leaving us only with the natural and mundane capacities of human language,
with its established trajectories of vocabulary and syntax. Lest all this seem unduly
technical and complex, it might be observed that some such supposition lies
behind the fairly common Christian practice of praying and invoking the Spirit
before embarking upon readings of Scripture (or, for some, the task of theological
interpretation or construction). Were it simply a matter of matching biblical
words to the patterns readily traced in the best lexicons and grammars, no such
deliberate petition would be thought necessary (as distinct from a mere habit or
polite formality). Bruce McCormack suggests that it was Barth’s adoption of ‘the
ancient anhypostatic-enhypostatic model of Christology’ in 1924 that undergirded
this new emphasis in his understanding of theological language.87 Human terms
used of God (like the humanity of Jesus itself) lack any independent hypostasis or
substance apart from the act in which God supplies this lack by appropriating them
and taking them up into his own speaking. Quite apart from the historical point,
the conceptual links between the two circumstances remains illuminating. The
greater the emphasis upon divine otherness with respect to the creature, the more
needful some such consideration seems to be. Nevertheless, if genuine analogy or
signification of any sort (rather than sheer equivocation) is to be admitted, then
the fleshly term in that analogy (the flesh of the signifier) must remain within our
grasp and clearly within our sights rather than being erased.88
See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. 1/1, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Edinburgh:
85
T&T Clark, 1975), 243–7. For a helpful brief elucidation of the idea see Bruce McCormack,
Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, Its Genesis and Development 1909–
1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 16‒19.
86
For Barth the relevant analogy never passes over into human hands or control, but
depends continually upon the gracious action of divine self-giving. It is thus a function of
revelation as a particular Trinitarian event.
87
McCormack, 19.
88
An issue which we cannot consider fully here but which merits mention, is that of
the nature and scale of the relevant transformation of our terms in the ‘analogy of faith’.
Barth’s tendency is to suggest that, prior to the divine appropriation of our language, no
Image, Iconoclasm and Revelation
Two further points demand our attention before we draw this opening chapter to
a close. First, the rehabilitation of the category of the image proposed here does
nothing to compromise the concerns lying behind that ancient biblical injunction
which, admittedly, sought the wholesale removal and subsequent avoidance of
‘graven images’ rather than their redemption.89 To begin with, this radical surgery in
the tissue of the Hebrew cult was occasioned by the selfsame theological impulses
we have sought carefully to preserve, elevating the wider biblical account of
God’s relationship to the world for which God is and remains radically other than
whatever he has created, and uncircumscribed by any of its forms or processes.90
Yet the same Old Testament which at this defining moment of Israel’s history
urged the abandonment of material representations of God, elsewhere encourages
and fuels an abundant and diverse poetic ‘imaging’ of him on more or less every
page (as king, shepherd, warrior, rock, lion, strength and shield, light, and so on).91
So, the notion of a blanket biblical prohibition on all images in our dealings with
God makes no sense at all. And both verbal and mental images too, we have seen,
are susceptible to treatments which quickly render them unfit for religious and
theological service. But images of this sort, of course, are not so easily expelled
from the sanctuary or, I have suggested, from that systematic reflection which
begins and remains securely earthed in what happens there. Indeed, the pervasive
and central role played by verbal images, and their inextricability not only from
the substance of Scripture itself but from the life of faith and the encounters of
prayer and worship, seem to me sufficient to render the banishment of the image
from theology inherently undesirable as well as impossible. If theology is in any
sense to be held accountable to all this, then some such images at least seem
bound to accompany it in some form no matter how far theology travels out from
its biblical/liturgical starting point, or how often those images may have to be
such analogy exists (rather than claiming that our language in and of itself lacks any created
capacity to point us to God). If, though, this emphasis is pushed too far, it seems to entail
the idea that the relationship between the meanings attaching ordinarily to our terms and
images and those which they acquire through their chastening and making anew in the
analogy of faith is equivocal rather than analogical or metaphorical, which presents its own
set of serious theological concerns. If what we ordinarily mean by ‘goodness’, ‘love’ etc.
has no proper relationship to the meanings obtaining when such terms are taken up into the
act of revelation, then we quickly find ourselves in a quite peculiar theological territory.
It would seem more satisfactory to indicate that such terms bear a particular surplus of
meaning which cannot be apprehended by the creature apart from the context of divine
speaking and the response of faith and obedience.
89
Exodus 20:3‒5; Deuteronomy 27:15.
90
So, e.g., Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology. Vol 1. The Theology of Israel’s
Historical Traditions, trans. D.M.G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 212‒19.
91
Cf. Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in its Ancient
Near Eastern Context (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1995), 15.
broken and made anew on the journey. Again, despite the superficial attractions
of expulsion (and notwithstanding apparent biblical precedent for the same),
what really matters here is best secured, I would contend, not by the absence of
images, but by their continual imaginative chastening and ‘making new’ within the
dynamics of divine self-revealing and prayerful response.
Mention of the rich stock of images supplied by Scripture and their abiding
importance for theology leads conveniently to my final point in this preliminary
discussion of the relationship between word and image in theology, one which,
for many readers, has no doubt haunted much of our discussion to this point and
must now be flushed out and tackled directly. All this talk of Christian theology as
bound up irrevocably with acts of imaginative poiesis, as being in large measure,
indeed, an image-constituted and image-constitutive set of activities will, for some
readers, seem to carry with it the implication that the substance of the faith is in
some sense ‘made up’, that it begins and ends in acts of sheer human construction
and invention rather than acts of divine revelation, as if the God of which theology
speaks were, in large measure at least, as we would tend to say, a mere ‘figment of
our imagination’. There are, of course, theologians and theologies for whom this
is indeed both a basic supposition and a positive rather than a negative judgement,
and to whose names the explicit appeal to imagination in theology is often tethered
in an unfortunate manner. So, for example, Gordon Kaufman92 presents revelation
and imagination as logically opposed sources for theological endeavour, and urges
the latter as the only honest strategy for an age in which (he suggests) the idea of
God stepping in to make himself known is no longer tenable.93 Thus the God of our
religious and theological utterance is, in the words of another writer on the subject,
the ‘primary human Artifact’,94 a projection of our inner reality onto the clouds
rather than in any sense an objective reality breaking in from ‘beyond’ them.
There is much in Kaufman’s analysis of the structure of theological engagement
that I find both persuasive and compelling, but this fundamental dichotomy
between imagination and revelation is misleading and wholly unnecessary, and
those who are less confident than Kaufman himself about the absence of God from
the sphere of human knowing may safely choose to ignore it, premised, as it is, on
a culturally familiar but entirely unwarranted identification of the imaginative
with the purely imaginary. It is not my purpose here to argue the case for the
abiding importance of revelation as a theological category, but simply to insist
unequivocally on something which others have argued persuasively and at much
See Gordon D. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept

92
of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), esp. 21‒57, 263‒79. An essentially similar
approach is found in McFague.
93
Kaufman, 30.
94
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 181‒243.
greater length,95 namely, that an account of religious and theological engagement

cast in terms of the categories of the imaginative is entirely compatible with an
appeal to the dynamics of revelation, having to do chiefly with questions about the
forms our knowing takes and must take, and not its ultimate source or epistemic
warrant. This is a simple point, but one well worth making because of the unhelpful
connotations still clinging to the word ‘imagination’ and its cognates.
I have already spoken of the need for human images of God to be laid hold of
and broken open and transfigured by their appropriation by God, and their being
drawn into a wholly new semantic context (to ‘mean’ now with respect to a divine
rather than any creaturely object) sustained by the act or event of revelation. We
might put the same point another way. God, we may reasonably suppose, is just
as capable of taking our imaginations captive as he is of engaging our ‘hearts’,
‘minds’ and ‘wills’ (in so far as these may legitimately be disentangled from the
texture of imagination itself), and may give himself to be known by appropriating
human activities and outputs of a highly imaginative (as well as a relatively
unimaginative) sort. Indeed, if our account of revelation is informed at all by
the actual forms which Christian Scripture takes and the sorts of reading it most
naturally demands of us, then we appear to have good reason for insisting that
this is precisely what God has done and continues to do, engaging us through
texts and practices explicitly and unashamedly imaginative in nature, as well
as demanding further acts of tacit but genuine poiesis in our more systematic
theological reflections and constructions. For the sake of consistency we may refer
to Torrance again at this point, according to whom, ‘In all theological knowledge,
a proper balance must be maintained between the divine Subject and the human
subject’ since theological knowledge ‘is after all a human activity’ and ‘(i)f the
human factor is eliminated, then the whole is reduced to nonsense’ but, he adds,
‘unless the divine element is dominant, then man is in the last resort thrown back
upon his own resources, and an impossible burden is laid upon him’.96
If we maintain a precisely balanced and carefully ordered account of this sort
in which both the fully divine and the fully human aspects of revelation are taken
fully seriously, but the parabolic dynamic of revelatory action is understood to
move first ‘from above to below’ and only then ‘from below to above’, we may
in a perfectly proper sense speak of theology as a human practice of ‘imaginative
construction’97 and even of God as ‘an imagined object’,98 without for one
moment abandoning the vital claim that such imagining properly arises from
and is informed, constrained and constantly reshaped by a reality lying beyond
95
See, e.g., Tony Clark, Divine Revelation and Human Practice: Responsive and
Imaginative Participation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008), Bruce McCormack, ‘Divine
revelation and human imagination: must we choose between the two?’, Scottish Journal of
Theology 37, no. 41984, 431‒55.
96
Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction, 27.
97
Kaufman, 263f.
98
Scarry, 184.
ourselves, one our continued engagements with whom break open and ‘force
new meanings’ upon the very words and images he has himself given to us as
appropriate ways in which to think and speak of him. In this sense, it seems to
me, Austin Farrer’s claim that ‘(D)ivine truth is supernaturally communicated to
men in an act of inspired thinking which falls into the shape of certain images’99
is basically correct, however we may wish to gloss it and whatever we may wish
to add by way of disclaimers. It follows, of course, that appeals to ‘revelation’
therefore provide no easy escape (should anyone desire it) from the particular
challenges and demands of the sort of ‘poetic logic’ with which, I have argued in
this chapter, theology, in its dealings with a God who is wholly other and thus can
only be spoken and thought of under the guise of things that he is not, must grapple
from beginning to end. Whether we attend to the divinely furnished images of
Scripture, the concrete self-imaging of God in the flesh, or the myriad ways in
which these have been taken up and responded to in the varied forms and patterns
of Christian tradition across the centuries, theology is intrinsically and necessarily
a ‘poetic’ set of practices in the proper sense, and one in which the imagination is
and must be kept constantly and identifiably in play.
99
Farrer, 57. Not all biblical images, of course, carry equal weight within Christian
tradition, and some serve within the canonical pattern and subsequently in the work of
theological interpretation and construction to inform our understanding of others.
Chapter 2
The Promise and the Sign
Embodiment and Meaning
The previous chapter dealt with aspects of the relationship between the image and
the word/idea in theology, or, more precisely, with different ways of using words
in religious and theological contexts – the more identifiably ‘poetic’ uses of the
concrete verbal image on the one hand, and the more precise, hard-edged and
carefully defined use of concepts on the other. Words, though, are not the only sorts
of things laden with significance for us as human beings. Indeed, words typically
have their meanings bound up inextricably with their use in particular contexts
of intention and action, and in association with material objects of one sort or
another; and, while objects and actions, for their part, generally have significance
bestowed upon them by some linguistic context, their significance cannot often be
cashed out at the level of verbal meaning alone. We need not concern ourselves
greatly with precise claims about the percentages of communication relying on
paralinguistic cues to recognise the validity of the basic point. That the same
words are capable of meaning quite different things depending on the context or
the precise inflection of their utterance is something we are only too aware of. And
we know, too, that there are some bodily performances which transform verbal
meaning, and others – the pat on the back, the embrace, the smile, the grimace –
the significance of which seems more or less independent of words, no matter how
remotely situated. Conversely, as Elaine Scarry notes, our bodies are also capable
of shutting down our capacity for and receptivity to meaning altogether, certain
thresholds of pain serving effectively to close down the circuits of signification
and compel our curvation in upon ourselves.1 This might be thought to be ironic
for Christians, given that the object and action held to be most significant of all by
Christian faith is an instrument of torture, and the immolation upon it of a human
body in excruciating pain. Be that as it may, Christian theologians are also bound
to reflect upon the peculiar significance of our circumstance as creatures whose
existence more broadly holds together within itself the bodily and that sphere of
meanings and values which transcends materiality alone, and constantly mediates
the realities of the one to and through the other. As C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape
expresses the matter to his diabolic nephew, ‘Humans are amphibians – half spirit
and half animal. … As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals
1
See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 45–69.
they inhabit time’ and, we might add, space.2 Artist and poet David Jones puts
the matter less colourfully, but with equal force, referring to the human creature
as a ‘sapiential mammal’, uniquely fitted within creation for acts of sign-making
and sign-giving, and disposed towards the gratuity and intransitivity of Ars.3 We
may wish to dispute the slightly dualistic categories in which Lewis and Jones
respectively unpack their descriptions, but the basic point is clear enough: when
it comes to meaning, matter matters, even though it is not all. That it should be
thus ought hardly to surprise the Christian whose faith centres around the claim
that God’s own Logos communicated himself finally and fully by becoming flesh
and, in the resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Father, remaining
enfleshed for our sakes.
The point at which this is most explicitly and fully acknowledged in Christian
theology, perhaps, is in its doctrine of the sacraments, held by almost all Christian
traditions to involve dominically sanctioned embodied actions charged with a
peculiar significance in relation to union of the believer with the crucified, risen
and ascended humanity of Christ. While sacramental theologies may sometimes
understand the ritual elements and actions themselves as little more than a helpful
visual aid for realities more conveniently and efficiently captured in verbal
terms alone, it seems more fitting to a Christian theological anthropology rooted
in the doctrine of the incarnation – and, additionally, more in accordance with
what many secular accounts have to teach us about the complexity of our human
circumstance as makers of and participants in meaningful constructs of one sort
or another – to suppose that this provision of explicitly material and kinetic
means of signification is both a form and a convenient index of the full extent of
God’s gracious accommodation to our distinctly human modes of knowing. In
this chapter, I will explore this claim by focusing on just one (though arguably
the most obvious one) of the catholic sacraments, considering and comparing the
eucharistic theologies of two Reformed theologians, John Calvin and Karl Barth,
each of whom construes the fundamental circumstance in the Lord’s Supper4 as
one of divine sign-giving. Calvin’s views on the subject are easily accessed, but
Barth’s less easily so, since his developed account was to have formed part of
the incomplete and fragmentary fourth volume of Church Dogmatics (henceforth
CD) extant at the point of his death in 1968. Furthermore, as is well known, Barth’s
views on the sacraments had undergone a significant shift late on in his career as
a result of the influence of his son Markus’s exegetical work on the doctrine of
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1941), 44

2
See the essay ‘Art and Sacrament’ in David Jones, Epoch and Artist (London: Faber
3
and Faber, 1959), esp. 143–51.

4
In this chapter I shall refer variously to the ‘Lord’s Supper’ and the ‘Eucharist’,
partly to conform to the use of the writers being studied. I shall, though, use Eucharist
and its cognates as my default, not to indicate any specific theological agenda or liturgical
preference, but simply in order to benefit from its convenient possession of an adjectival
form.
The Promise and the Sign 45
baptism.5 Barth recognised the problem facing his readers, but in the preface to the
published ‘fragment’ of CD 4/4 (in its extant form on baptism, but his treatment of
the Lord’s Supper was to have formed ‘a conclusion and a crown’ to this chapter)
surmises that – on the basis of what the fragment actually contains – ‘intelligent
readers may deduce … how I would finally have presented the doctrine of the
Lord’s Supper’.6 The task is less simple, though, than Barth himself suggests,
and the results of such reconstruction, even when accompanied by the author’s
own mandate, must inevitably be tentative. There are, to be sure, scattered and
suggestive references to the Supper to be attended to in earlier volumes, and a
handful in the posthumously published ‘lecture fragments’ on the Christian life7
(which would have found their way eventually into the text of CD 4/4 had Barth
survived). But of Barth’s developed view there is no substantial version available.
To ascertain its contours we shall thus be forced precisely to rely on imaginative
inferences and extrapolations from the late direction of his wider thinking about
the sacraments, and his decision to situate his discussion of them within a part-
volume on Christian ethics as ‘the free and active answer of man to the divine
work and word of grace’.8
Issues in Eucharistic Theology
Before embarking on a reading of Calvin and Barth, it may be helpful first perhaps
to provide a theological framework to guide and inform the task, by attending to
some issues central to eucharistic theologies as such rather than any eucharistic
theology in particular.
The Presence and Action of God
Rowan Williams observes that the Eucharist is fundamentally an event of

meaning-making which involves both God and human beings in activity of one
sort or another.9 There is nothing contentious about such a claim. Whatever else
we may wish to say about the nature of what happens here, it is clear enough that
it involves the use of symbolic objects and actions. This is acknowledged in the
5
Markus Barth, Die Taufe ein Sakrament? (Zollikon, Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag,
1951).
6
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/4 (The Christian Life, Fragment), ed. Geoffrey
W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1969), ix.
7
Eventually published as Karl Barth, The Christian Life, Church Dogmatics IV/4
Lecture Fragments, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981).
8
Barth, CD IV/4, ix.
9
See ‘The Nature of a Sacrament’ in Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 197–208.
ancient description of the bread and the wine as ‘signs’. But very different things
have been made of and intended by this, not least since the Reformation when talk
of the Supper as essentially ‘symbolic’ came to be associated in particular with
a reductionist account of its significance. The most basic question in eucharistic
theology, therefore, concerns whether, where and how in this event God himself
is held to be present and active under, with and through empirically observable
human activities.
At one level these activities lend themselves perfectly well to analysis in terms
proper to what today we number among the ‘human sciences’ (especially semiotics,
ritual theory, dramaturgy and the sociology of knowledge). Considered thus, the
Eucharist is a ritual performed with specific material objects – bread and wine – in
which those same objects are symbolically re-ordered through a distinctive act of
human meaning-making. The precise actions performed in this ritual may vary
(sometimes significantly) in their particulars and they are interpreted in a variety
of ways; but the actions and the understandings of them conform broadly to an
identifiable template modelled on the words and actions of Jesus at the supper
he shared with his disciples on the night before his death. ‘In these acts’, writes
Williams, ‘the Church “makes sense” of itself, as other groups may do, and as
individuals do’.10 Having said this, the question which remains to be answered is
whether there are other levels at which an account of the Eucharist’s reality must be
given in order to appreciate its full significance? Is there, that is to say, something
more than a human act of meaning making occurring in its midst, something
which transcends the reach of day-to-day empirical or theoretical description and
demands a properly theological vocabulary? In short, is God involved here, and
if so how?
Perhaps, though, we need to reformulate and sharpen our question further still,
and ask instead about the peculiar mode of God’s presence and activity in the
Eucharist.11 Few theologians are likely to concede that God is absent or inactive
altogether from any human context or activity in the world he has made. Thus
Williams insists that ‘the meaning of our acts and relations rests, moment by
moment, on God’s creative grace’.12 There is at least a general presence of God to
be reckoned with at all times and in all places, holding the created cosmos in being
and drawing it towards its creaturely goal. If the psalmist discovered God present
even in the depths of Sheol (Ps. 139:8), then it is surely unlikely that we shall find
him to be absent from eucharistic worship. Furthermore, Williams continues, ‘the
sacraments are performed, in obedience to Christ, by those already caught up in
God’s work, those who have received and live by God’s promise’.13 The meaning
of the Eucharist, in other words, whatever theological view of it is entertained,
Ibid., 205.
10
See on this, helpfully, Donald M. Baillie, The Theology of the Sacraments and
11
Other Papers (London: Faber, 1957), 97f.

12
Williams, 205.
13
Ibid.
could never be ex opere operato in the strictest of senses. On the contrary, the
significance of what is done here is essentially contingent and ‘kenotic’, referring
us away from itself to that which it signifies; namely, the prior and promised
redemptive work of God in Christ and the Spirit. Apart from this wider pattern of
divine presence and action in the world, what is done makes no sense – or at best
arbitrary sense which is no longer really Eucharist at all.
But we must press the matter further and more precisely. Is there, we must ask,
a peculiar and distinctive mode of God’s presence and activity to be identified
within the Eucharist? Does God promise to do something special as and when
bread and wine are taken within the Church and certain things done with them
(as for example, it might be supposed that God does when Scripture is read and
the Word is preached)? And, if so, what is this special something, and where does
it occur? It is at this stage of the discussion that some views of the Supper have
parted company with the mainstream.
Some theologians have been eager to draw the line after an affirmation of God’s
wider presence and activity, preferring to construe the Eucharist itself as constituted
by a series of distinctly human actions and dispositions. Acknowledging that God
is present and active as Creator here as everywhere, and that the meaning of what
happens here is utterly contingent upon God’s prior and promised work in which
we are caught up (so that the Supper certainly cannot be seen as an autonomous
act), such a view nonetheless understands the Supper as such as something that we
do rather than something that God does (albeit something that we do in response
to God or as an expression of faith in God). So, for example, the Swiss reformer
Zwingli14 interpreted the Lord’s Supper precisely as an activity of human meaning-
making, in which bread and wine (following Jesus’ lead at the Last Supper) are
invested by faith with symbolic value as signifying Jesus’ body and blood, and the
wider eucharistic action signifies or expresses the faith of the believing community
in Jesus’ redeeming sacrifice on the cross. The essential meaning of the Supper, on
this view, lies in its nature as a symbolic response of eucharistia (thanksgiving) for
what God has done in Christ, an act of human faith and obedience.
Most traditions, though, have understood things rather differently than this,
even if they have sometimes struggled to say precisely how. Something happens
here, they have held, which cannot finally be accounted for in human terms alone.
To make sense of it, talk of human symbolising requires to be supplemented by
recognition of an accompanying divine sign-giving and -making. This alone grants
the eucharistic objects and actions the significance which they have but could
never otherwise acquire, as the symbolic means of our sharing more fully and
more deeply in Christ, in his offering of himself to God in his life and his death on
the cross. Beyond this baseline of agreement, particular interpretations of how all
this should be thought of or expressed again part company and travel in radically
different directions. But there is concurrence at least that the ‘all this’ to be made
sense of involves a special, and not just a general, presence and action of God,
14
See, e.g., his Commentary Concerning True and False Religion (1525).
and that this special presence and action is in some way focused upon the physical
elements of bread and wine, and what is done with these – taking, breaking, eating,
drinking, and so on.
It is important to keep this talk of divine action central, since theological
discussions of ‘sacramentality’ sometimes proceed as if their proper concern
were with the intrinsic capacity of certain material realities to put us in touch with
‘spiritual’ realities, or with ‘the divine’, or ‘the transcendent’, or God. Quite apart
from the problems involved in presuming easy or natural identification between
any of these latter terms, there is already a prima facie problem in thinking and
speaking as though creaturely realities (material or otherwise), being finite and
fallen, could have any natural capacity in and of themselves to be the bearers of
divine meaning. That they may themselves be granted such a capacity by God’s
acting upon and through them (and upon and through us in our correlative activity
of response) is, of course, another matter. Indeed, this is the only basis upon which
faith and theology could be possible at all. But even then, we must reckon with
the claim that such capacity is not bestowed upon these objects in isolation or as
a permanent endowment, but only within the particular actions into which they
are assimilated. We must therefore be rather more careful how we speak of such
things than theological talk about ‘sacramental’ this, that and the other (or about
the ‘sacramental principle’ in Christian theology) sometimes appears to be.
The Presence of Christ and the Elements
Discussions of ‘eucharistic presence’ have in fact generally spoken not so much

about God’s presence, but about the presence of Christ in relation to the bread and
wine. We may note several things about this: (1) The two names are not simply
synonymous in the eucharistic context, since it is the risen and ascended humanity
of Christ that is in view here; (2) despite this, the pattern of orthodox Christology
does permit the substitution of the name ‘Christ’ for the name ‘God’ (since in
Christ it is God with whom we have to do), and talk about the presence of Christ
may therefore legitimately perform more than one function in this context; (3)
Christ’s humanity is, therefore, the humanity of God and a further mode of God’s
own presence in the world; (4) For the humanity of Christ to be ‘really’ present in
the eucharist, a special presence and activity of God as such must be presupposed;
(5) Christians also believe that Christ is ‘really’ present in other contexts15 – in the
preaching of the Word for example, indeed ‘wherever two or more are gathered’
in his name – but while these various modes of his presence are clearly analogous
to one another, it has generally been considered important to differentiate them,
thereby recognising the peculiar modes of presence and activity of God proper to
different contexts; (6) different ways of thinking about the relationship between
God’s mode of presence ‘in’ or ‘to’ the humanity of Christ in the incarnation and
15
See, helpfully, Edward Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist (London: Sheed and Ward,
1968), 43.
‘in’ the eucharistic elements and actions16 result in quite different accounts of what
is effected through the sign.
In the above I have made a particular point of twinning the terms ‘presence’
and ‘activity’ whenever speaking of God’s involvement in the Eucharist (or
anywhere else). This seems to be important for a number of reasons. First, it
reflects a fundamental biblical concentration upon God’s activity as the way in
which God’s character (the Bible does not really deal in anything equivalent to
the later philosophical categories of ‘being’ or ‘nature’) is apprehended. Second, it
encourages us to recognise that when God is active, he is also ‘present’ in the midst
of his own action, and not functioning via remote control from some distant ‘place’
(and therefore, in effect, absent); and correspondingly whenever God is present he
is active and not to be thought of as a static ‘substance’, exposure or proximity to
which he alone is in some sense transformative of human existence. Thus, if we
suppose that the Eucharist is a context in which we are granted ‘communion with’
or (as some traditions have expressed it) ‘participation in’ God, then this is not by
virtue of God simply ‘being’ in the same place as us (or ‘in’ the physical elements
which we ingest), but because God is himself doing something distinctive to
bring such communion about, acting upon us, and with us and through us. As
Schillebeeckx notes,17 the ancient church adhered to a model of God’s relationship
to this-worldly realities which was inherently dynamic and made sense of the
Eucharist in these terms; but this tended to be obscured later by the borrowing of
philosophical terms concentrating attention upon the abstract and the inert.
Whatever terms we choose, though, it may help us to think of what occurs
in the Eucharist (unless we opt for a purely human account of its meaning) as a
dynamic appropriation by God of the elements of bread and wine and the actions
which we perform with them, lifting them up beyond the level of their own
intrinsic capacities and charging them with new significance. Thinking about the
eucharistic presence of God in this dynamic way evokes obvious parallels with
God’s appropriation of human flesh in the incarnation itself and his appropriation
of human language in preaching and other contexts in which Scripture is read and
interpreted. It may thus offer a more congenial model for Protestant sensibilities
than is suggested by the language of bare ‘presence’ alone. Another benefit of
insisting upon a dynamic conception of presence is that it reminds us that it is
precisely in actions (God’s and ours) that the bread and wine are symbolically
re-ordered. To think and speak of God’s presence in the ‘elements’ as if they
remained inert on the table throughout, therefore, is to misplace the centre of
16
For a helpful discussion of the problems associated with the preposition ‘in’, and
its association with an Aristotelian ‘container’ notion of space, see Thomas F. Torrance,
Space, Time and Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). For a full treatment
of modes of divine presence and absence in Christian theology see Infolf U. Dalferth,
Becoming Present: An Inquiry into the Christian Sense of the Presence of God (Leuven:
Peeters, 2006).
17
Schillebeeckx, 67–8.
symbolic gravity. At its best, eucharistic theology has always insisted that it is
the bread and wine as they are set apart, taken, broken, poured out, received and
consumed which are the focus of what God does here. Again, a suggestive parallel
lies in understandings of the incarnation which treat it as an essentially timeless
conjoining of two natures rather than a history of struggle, filial obedience and
self-offering, or the sort of bibliolatry which treats the Bible almost as an object to
be venerated, forgetting that its meaning for faith is tied to the human activity in
which it is read and made sense of. Eucharist, like incarnation and proclamation,
is a dynamic event on God’s part and on ours.
Eucharistic Modification
A further question to be faced concerns the implications of all this for the creaturely
realities involved. After all, many eucharistic liturgies refer unashamedly to the
bread ‘becoming’ Christ’s body, and the wine his blood, so that, in some sense, in
receiving the creaturely elements we are at the same time ‘receiving’ Christ and
him crucified. Does this mean that the bread and wine are somehow changed, that
the reality which confronts us in them is different in the midst of the eucharistic
celebration than it was before it? From very early in the church’s history, it seems
that theologians have felt compelled to insist that some such change must be
recognised. Schillebeeckx cites the fifth century bishop Theodore of Mopsuestia
(c.350–428) who, on the basis of Christ’s words of institution, insists: ‘Christ did
not say “This is the symbolum of my blood”, but “This is my blood”, a change
of the wine takes place.’18 Many have followed in this basic insistence, and for
essentially similar reasons. Hence debates about the Eucharist over the centuries
have tended to centre on analysis of the words Jesus used in referring to the bread
and the wine, and the precise implications of those words.
While, though, consideration of a ‘change’ in the bread and wine may begin
here, it cannot end here, as if only on the basis of a crudely literal and pedantic
interpretation of Jesus’ words can the notion of change be made sense of and taken
seriously. If we ask whether, in the context of the eucharistic celebration, what
confronts us in the bread we take and eat and the wine we drink is ‘merely’ bread
and wine any longer, then any who subscribe to some notion of God’s presence
and activity here are bound to resist this suggestion, and to admit at least that
there is now, and for the moment, ‘something different’ or ‘more’ to be said of
the bread and wine than this. They may well wish to insist that there is nothing
less than bread and wine here, but they will accept that there is something more.
For, they will recognise that, when something is appropriated by God and taken
up into his activity and purposes in a manner that was not true of it before, we
can and must say that its ‘reality’ (that which is true of it) has in some way been
modified and enlarged. Again, we may note that directly parallel issues have
arisen in discussion about the humanity which the Son of God assumed in the
Cited in ibid., 67.

18
incarnation. This humanity, it has traditionally been insisted, is certainly not less
than fully human by virtue of its assumption, but its ‘reality’ is unique by virtue
of its unique relationship to God, and if we overlook this difference and insist
that it is ‘mere’ humanity like any other, then we miss all that matters most about
it. Analogously, human words (written and spoken) are, in being laid hold of by
God when Scripture is read and the gospel preached, no less human than they
were before; yet we attend to them expecting to hear the Word of God in and
through them. So, whether or not we get hung up on particular terminology, the
recognition of a particular and peculiar presence and action of God in relation to
the eucharistic elements does seem to compel an acknowledgement that there is
now something other and more to be said about them, and hence that something
about them has indeed changed.
As the Western Church sought to underwrite this acknowledgement in the
Middle Ages it did so by borrowing terms from Aristotelian philosophy. We can
see easily enough how its application of these terms was intended to safeguard
both the profundity of the change that occurs to mere bread and wine and the
fact that these things remain (perceptually at least) the same as they were before
in the midst of the divine action. The medievals expressed all this, though, by
saying that the ‘substance’ (the underlying essence of the thing) of the elements
had changed, while the ‘species’ or ‘accidents’ (the particular qualities manifest
to our senses) remained the same. Since, in terms of the philosophy upon which
they were drawing, a given thing could only be one sort of thing (possess one
substance or nature) at once, theologians were driven to suggest that that which
had once been bread was actually now bread no longer, but had been changed
into the substance of the body of Christ, and the ‘substance’ which had been wine
was correspondingly now the blood of Christ.19 As well as focusing attention
unhelpfully on the physical elements as such (rather than their situation within a
symbolic action) these technical claims travelled far beyond the simple profession
of faith that the Eucharistic bread and wine are transfigured by their assimilation
into God’s purposes. Rather than their creaturely ‘reality’ being enhanced, the
medieval doctrine effectively displaces that reality altogether, transmogrifying it
into something else which now confronts us in its place.
19
Cf., e.g., Aquinas’ insistence: ‘Now, what is changed into something else is no
longer there after the change. The reality of Christ’s body in this sacrament demands,
then, that the substance of the bread be no longer there after the consecration’ (Summa
Theologiae, 3a., Q.75, Art. 2). The same point is reaffirmed in an anathema approved by
the Council of Trent on 11 October 1551: ‘Should anyone maintain that, in the most holy
sacrament of the Eucharist, the substance of bread and wine remains (in existence) together
with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and should deny this wonderful and unique
changing of the whole substance of bread into the body and of the whole substance of wine
into the blood, while the species of bread and wine nonetheless remain, which change the
Catholic Church very suitably calls transubstantiation, let him be excommunicated’ (cited
in Schillebeeckx, 38).
The intentions of this notion of ‘transubstantiation’ (which was adopted by

the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, endorsed and clarified by major medieval
theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, and duly reaffirmed in the sixteenth century
by the Council of Trent and again in the 1960s by Vatican Council II)20 may
have been commendable, but its way of articulating things was clearly highly
problematic. In particular, its language, inevitably suggesting to the theologically
unsophisticated that Christ’s actual flesh was now physically present on the altar,
and about to be bitten by human teeth and swallowed, reinforced all manner of
popular misperceptions and superstitions concerning what was taking place.21
If, though, we return to the theological concerns lying behind the doctrinal
formulation, Schillebeeckx is surely correct to claim that the gap between Catholic
and mainstream Protestant understanding is less wide than first appearances
suggest? Most traditions, following such clues as exist in the New Testament,
have wanted to insist that when God appropriates bread and wine in the Eucharist
what he does with it (and with us as we take and bless and share it) involves
‘uniting us to Christ’ in some redemptive way.22 This being so, it seems reasonable
to say – along the lines indicated above – that to the ‘reality’ of the bread and wine
is added now a new determination in relation to Christ’s body and blood (effective
metonymy for his humanity in its entirety),23 even though this is not visible
20
See Austin Flannery, ed., Vatican Council 2: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar
Documents (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 104.
21
The doctrine was not responsible for introducing this crude realism. It was already
extant in the eleventh century as the case of Berangarius of Tours shows. Forced to recant
his original adherence to a careful distinction between the physical ‘signs’ of bread
and wine and the ‘spiritual’ reality of sharing in the body and blood of Christ, in 1059
Berangarius signed a statement including the words ‘the true body and blood of our Lord
Jesus Christ … are sensibly … handled by the hands of the priests and broken and crushed
by the teeth of the faithful’. See on this, Alasdair Heron, Table and Tradition: Towards an
Ecumenical Understanding of the Eucharist (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 1983), 94–5.
While his own view of the matter was anything but crude, even Aquinas endorsed the
rejection of Berangarius’ original distinction as heretical (Summa Theologiae 3a., Q.75,
Art. 1) and the doctrine of transubstantiation did nothing to qualify more unfortunate
and macabre interpretations among the masses of the ‘physical’ handling and chewing of
Christ’s actual body in the sacrament.
22
The New Testament does not contain a developed theology of the Eucharist, but
it is clear that both Paul and John understand the eating and drinking which occurs there
within the context of a theology of the union of the believer with Christ. Each understands
union with Christ’s humanity as central to human salvation, and sees the eucharist as a vital
(if not absolutely necessary) means whereby our active sharing in Christ is sustained and
deepened. See, for example, 1 Cor. 10–11 and John 6:47–58, and Heron’s commentary on
these passages in ibid., 34–53.
23
Heron, following Betz, notes a tension in the New Testament’s emphasis, observing
Luke’s and Paul’s form of the ‘words of institution’ : ‘This is my body, … This cup … is the
new covenant in my blood’ (see Luke 22:19–20; 1 Cor. 1124–25). This formulation, Heron
and leaves their physical reality unscathed. Were we to set the specific terms of
Aristotelian metaphysics aside, and take the word ‘substance’ simply in its more
ancient, non-technical sense of ‘the underlying reality’ (sub-stantia = ‘that which
stands beneath’) which confronts us in a thing, then as Schillebeeckx indicates,
talk of a ‘change of substance’ is no more or less problematic as such than our talk
of a ‘change of reality’ or, if preferred, an enhancement or enlargement of it.24 But
‘substance’ talk is probably too heavily stained by its history of use to be helpful in
constructive eucharistic theology today. It is, in any case, the language of another
era, and it generally makes sense for theologians to seek contemporary ways of
articulating the basic issues at stake. When we turn, shortly, to consider Calvin we
shall see that he recasts the terms of the discussion, setting substance largely aside
and accounting for what occurs in the Supper instead in terms of the alternative
category of figuration.
Summary
To recapitulate, then, we have seen in this section that central to historic discussions
about the Eucharist are questions: (1) about God’s dynamic presence in the midst
of the event; (2) about the outcomes of this divine activity (uniting participants
with Christ); (3) about Christ’s own ‘presence’ by virtue of this union; and (4)
about the nature of the reality which confronts us in the bread and the wine as
they are appropriated by God’s action. These are by no means the only issues, and
we shall see that Calvin and Barth attend to others also; but these are the chief
issues which have preoccupied the Church’s discussion, and our rehearsal and
clarification of them should furnish a helpful background against which now to set
their particular accounts.
Calvin – Bread and Wine Trans-figured
Calvin follows Augustine and Aquinas in linking the sacraments to our propensity,
as embodied creatures, for sign-making. This, he recognises, is central to our
attempts to make sense of and to represent for ourselves the reality confronting
us in the world, and in particular those aspects of it which transcend the limits of
suggests, points to the whole humanity of Christ in its history from birth to resurrection as
the content of that ‘new covenant’ with which faith is effectively united in the sacrament.
The versions in Matthew and Mark, with their disentangling of body and blood, draw
attention rather to the death of Jesus on the cross as such. Both emphases, Heron notes,
should be permitted to resonate through our liturgies and our theology, and it is important
to remember that ‘body and blood’ do indeed refer not just to the sacrificial death of Jesus,
but to his whole life offered in obedience to his Father for our sakes. See ibid., 13.
24
See Schillebeeckx, 73–4.
sense perception as such. Hence Aquinas writes, ‘it is connatural to man to arrive at
a knowledge of intelligible realities through sensible ones, and a sign is something
through which a person arrives at knowledge of some further thing beyond itself.
Moreover’, he continues, ‘the sacred realities signified by the sacraments are
certain spiritual and intelligible goods by which man is sanctified’.25 If, then, we
are to ‘know’ or engage with these same realities, it will inevitably be through the
mediation of physical signs such as the water of baptism and the bread and wine
of the Eucharist. Calvin concurs, drawing attention to the fact that the ‘signs’ in
question are not just the material objects themselves, but the wider ‘ceremonies’
or actions in which these objects are taken up.26 ‘Here’, he writes, ‘our merciful
Lord, according to his infinite kindness, so tempers himself to our capacity that,
since we are creatures who always creep on the ground, cleave to the flesh, and, do
not think about or even conceive of anything spiritual, he condescends to lead us
to himself even by these earthly elements, and to set before us in the flesh a mirror
of spiritual blessings. … because we have souls engrafted in bodies, he imparts
spiritual things under visible ones. Not that the gifts set before us in the sacraments
are bestowed with the natures of the things, but that they have been marked with
this signification by God’.27
Divine Sign-giving
From this, though, it emerges at once that while the sacraments may be understood
at one level in terms of a wider semiotics, the fundamental thing about this
particular sign-giving or -making is that it is a matter of God’s own gracious
action in accommodating himself to our condition. Calvin insists that the relation
of signification, through which in the handling of material things ‘spiritual
realities’ are genuinely bestowed and received, is in an important sense arbitrary
rather than natural: the bread and the wine have no intrinsic relationship to that
which, in this context alone, is offered and received through them. It is a matter of
convention peculiar to their use within the Christian community.28 But this is, as it
Summa Theologiae, 3a., Q. 60, Art. 4.

25
Institutes IV.xiv.19 in John T. McNeill, ed., Calvin: Institutes of the Christian

26
Religion, ed. John Baillie, John T. McNeill, and Henry P. Van Dusen, The Library of
Christian Classics, vol. XXI (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1295–6.
27
IV.xiv.3, ibid., 1278.
28
It is true, of course, that bread and wine as such do have a certain natural
correspondence to ‘flesh’ and ‘blood’ in their simple physical properties, and Calvin
acknowledges that it is through ‘a sort of analogy’ that we are led from the physical to
the ‘spiritual’ things involved in the eucharistic action. See IV.xvii.3, ibid., 1363. So the
association between these ‘signifiers’ and that which they signify is not ‘arbitrary’ in quite
the sense ascribed in modern semiotics by Saussure to the linguistic sign (Ferdinand De
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Peter Owen Ltd, 1959), 68). But the
relationship of these everyday realities to the particular body and blood of Christ (and
were, a divine rather than a merely human convention, resting firmly upon God’s
determination of the signs rather than the ‘symbolific’29 activity of the Church
alone. The signs, we might say, are more securely spoken of in this particular
context as given and received rather than ‘made’;30 given by God, not just once
in the dominical ‘institution’ of the Supper, but again and again wherever it is
celebrated, the efficacy of the signs being contingent on the ‘miracle’ of God’s
repeated renewal of the signifying relation. What happens in the Supper, therefore,
is no mere sociological phenomenon, but the gracious approach of a holy God to
sinful creatures, condescending to furnish the symbolic means of their reciprocal
approach to him.
Calvin does not deny the importance of human activity in the ceremony,
but he does set it decisively within the context of a logically prior divine action
which under-girds ours and makes it meaningful. Thus, a sacrament may helpfully
be defined as ‘an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the
promises of his good will toward us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith;
and we in turn attest our piety towards him’.31 ‘In one place Chrysostom therefore
has appropriately called (the sacraments) “covenants”, by which God leagues
himself with us, and we pledge ourselves to purity and holiness of life, since there
is interposed here a mutual agreement between God and ourselves’.32 There is a
dual dynamic of activity in the ‘sign’ (which, therefore, is complex, signifying
more than one thing), but God is finally responsible for all that happens, and the
preponderance of ‘doing’ is in any case located by Calvin in the God-humanward
direction rather than the reciprocal response elicited from the human side. Thus
God manifests himself through the signs,33 draws us to himself,34 increases,
nourishes and deepens faith,35 grants assurance,36 and confirms or seals the content
therefore their further analogical correspondence as ‘food for the body’ under which ‘food
for the soul’ is actually given and received in the Supper) is arbitrary inasmuch as it rests
wholly on the decision and action of God.
29
The term coined by Susanne Langer to refer to the peculiarly human mode of
meaning making through symbols of one sort or another. See Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy
in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1956).
30
This is not to deny that, in an important sense, human ‘making’ of meaning is
essential to what occurs. It is simply a way of insisting, as Calvin does, that the priority of
action lies with God, into whose activity humans are duly drawn as responsible participants,
but apart from whose activity no sense can be made of the eucharistic sign and what it
effects.
31
IV.xiv.1, McNeill, ed., 1277.
32
IV.xiv.19, ibid., 1296.
33
34
IV.xiv.13, ibid., 1288.
35
36
of his promise pertaining to our redemption.37 There are other, more specific
things which Calvin holds are ‘shown’ and ‘executed’ in the sign of the Supper,
and we shall consider these duly. But this list is sufficient to indicate already the
nature of the event as one in which God is definitely and pre-eminently involved
from first to last, and any ‘power’ attaching to the eucharistic signs is God’s own
power through his presence and activity in the Spirit, appropriating the bread
and wine as his ‘instruments’.38 Indeed, ‘the sacraments properly fulfil their
office only when the Spirit, that inward teacher, comes to them, by whose power
alone hearts are penetrated and affections moved and our souls opened for the
sacraments to enter in. If the Spirit be lacking, the sacraments can accomplish
nothing more in our minds than the splendour of the sun shining upon blind eyes,
or a voice sounding in deaf ears’.39
Faith Alone Participates in the Sign
The appropriate mode of apprehension of and correspondence to the Spirit’s work,

here as elsewhere for Calvin, is faith. Thus, he insists, only those who eat and drink
in faith truly receive what is offered to them. While the offer is indiscriminate and
the table open, unbelief stops short at the level of a merely physical participation,
the bread and the wine being for it ‘cold and empty figures’,40 opaque rather
than transparent, and devoid of that divine signification which, for faith, renders
sharing in them an actual sharing in the body and blood of Christ. Where faith is
lacking, therefore, bread and wine remain merely bread and wine, and Calvin is
emphatic that a careful distinction be drawn at every point between the physical
signs and that which, under God’s appropriation, they signify for faith. In a manner
directly parallel to orthodox prescriptions concerning talk about the incarnation,
he insists that while there is indeed a real union between signifier and signified (or
the ‘matter’) whereby the latter is genuinely shown and genuinely ‘present’ to be
received in faith, nonetheless, ‘they are not so linked that they cannot be separated;
and … even in the union itself the matter must always be distinguished from the
sign, that we may not transfer to the one what belongs to the other’.41
There are twin errors to be avoided here Calvin urges, following Augustine.42
First, we may confuse what is proper only to the matter with what is proper to the
physical sign, and thereby ascribe to the signs in and of themselves some beneficial
power to be availed in the mere act of physical eating and drinking. This extols
the signs immoderately, and obscures the ‘mysteries’ to which they properly refer
us, missing what is really important. The other danger, though, is that we shall
37
38
IV.xiv.17, ibid., 1293. IV.xiv.12, ibid., 1287.
39
40
41
IV.xiv.15, ibid., 1290.
42
IV.xvii.5, ibid., 1364–5.
separate the sign from the matter, breaking the relation of signification, and failing
to appreciate that ‘by the showing of the symbol the thing itself is also shown’ and
received.43 One is, as it were, a form of eucharistic Eutychianism, and the other its
Nestorian equivalent.44 Both result in a damaging of the proper relation of ‘union
in distinction’ and ‘distinction in union’ between sign and matter, and both end
up in a fascination with the signs as such, prohibiting them from performing their
essential figurative function of lifting our hearts up to heaven45 to apprehend Christ
who is, nonetheless, truly exhibited in them, truly ‘present’, and truly given and
received when we eat and drink in faith. Accordingly, Calvin rejects the theology
of transubstantiation and the associated practices of venerating and reserving the
sacramental elements.46 This robs the bread of its integrity as bread, confuses the
two realities within the signifying relation with one another, and effectively denies
the need for faith (since Christ is de facto present as the bread and wine which are
physically consumed).47 He is equally concerned, though, to reject accounts of
the Supper which turn the bread and wine into the stage props of a merely human
symbolising of faith in Christ.48 Of course what is said and done in the Supper is
a profession of faith, but this aspect must be acknowledged as secondary to faith’s
place as the mode in which we receive from the hand of God all that he offers to us
through the mediation of the bread and wine; that is, Christ and all his benefits.49
For it is indeed Christ (and not our faith), Calvin insists, who is the true ‘matter’
or ‘substance’ signified in the Supper, and while figuration is necessarily involved
in the ceremony, we should not suppose that Christ is offered or received ‘only’
figuratively. Thus ‘the godly ought by all means to keep this rule: whenever they
see symbols appointed by the Lord, to think and be persuaded that the truth of
the thing signified is surely present there’.50 Otherwise, we accuse God of being a
deceiver, offering to us only ‘empty symbols’.
Signs and Words
Before exploring further Calvin’s understanding of the presence of Christ in the

Supper, we should note again the importance which he ascribes to the event of
the Supper as a whole (and not just the bread and the wine) in this regard. It is the
‘ceremony’ as such which constitutes the wider ‘sign’ within which the particular
signifying power of bread and wine is located. And the ceremony is, of course, a
43
IV.xvii.10, ibid., 1371.
44
Calvin does not draw out these Christological analogies, but he can hardly have
been unaware of them.
45
IV.xiv.5, McNeill, ed., 1280; IV.xvii.36, ibid., 1412.
46
See IV.xvii.13–15, ibid., 1373–8.
47
48
See IV.xiv.13, ibid., 1288–9.
49
50
synthesis in which objects, actions and words are juxtaposed and related to one
another. So, while Calvin insists that the material signs are vital, he also refuses to
detach their meaning from the accompanying immaterial symbolics of narrative.51
The bread and wine are ‘seals’ and ‘confirmations’ of a promise already given, and
make sense only when faith apprehends them as such. There must therefore always
be some preaching or form of words which interprets the ‘bare signs’ and enables
us to make sense of them, and the ‘faith’ which apprehends them, while not mere
intellectual assent, has nonetheless a vital cognitive dimension.52 ‘Augustine calls
a sacrament “a visible word” for the reason that it represents God’s promises as
painted in a picture and sets them before our sight, portrayed graphically and in
the manner of images’.53 This does not, it should be noted, reduce the elements
to dispensable visual aids, as if the essential meaning of the Supper could be
conveyed equally well in their absence. Calvin’s choice of similes is helpful here.
Certain sorts of images (in our day we might cite photographic as well as painted
images) may well require some verbal context before we can make appropriate
sense of them,54 yet when viewed in this context they undoubtedly possess a power
or force of their own which transcends the limits of meaning to which words alone
may take us. So, too, Calvin insists (exchanging images) ‘as a building stands and
rests upon its own foundation but is more surely established by columns placed
underneath, so faith rests upon the Word of God as a foundation; but when the
sacraments are added, it rests more firmly upon them as upon columns’.55 Faith,
then, is more surely established, more firmly founded through God’s appropriation
of tangible things as bearers of his meaning, and by them he ‘attests his good will
and love toward us more expressly than by word’.56 Again, this seems to be due not
just to a certain ‘dullness’ on our part, but to our very nature as embodied beings
in a world where meaning is finally bound up with physicality. ‘Because we are of
flesh’ these things ‘are shown us under things of flesh’,57 there being a surplus of
meaning which supervenes upon the narrative and is available only through these
accompanying physical signs. Calvin, like many other commentators, terminates
his consideration here, stopping short of potentially fruitful reflection on the further
dimension of the ‘drama’ of the Supper, that is, the equally symbolic actions in the
performance into which the bread and the wine are taken up.58
51
See IV.xiv.3–4, ibid., 1278–9. Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a. Q.60. Art. 6–8.
52
53
54
In viewing the photographic image, Susan Sontag suggests, ‘Only that which
narrates can make us understand’. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin,
1979), 23.
55
IV.xiv.6, McNeill, ed., 1281.
56
IV.xiv.6, ibid.
57
IV.xiv.6, ibid.
58
See IV.xvii.43, ibid., 1420–21.
Signification, Metonymy and the Presence of Christ
As we have been seeing, at the heart of Calvin’s understanding of the sacrament of

the Supper there lies a careful account of the working of signs, and it is these same
terms that he develops in his theology of eucharistic presence. There are, he tells
us, three factors to be taken into consideration in the Supper: ‘the signification,
the matter that depends upon it, and the power or effect that follows from both.’59
The ‘signification’ is the physical sign, together with its narrative context (‘the
promises, which are, so to speak, implicit in’ it). The ‘effect’ is redemption, the
continuing transformation of our lives through the communication to them of
Christ’s own life lived before his Father. The ‘matter’ is that which the signs signify,
that beyond themselves to which they refer and ‘unite’ us as we follow or indwell
the signifying relation. And the matter of these particular signs is Christ’s own
humanity together with all its ‘benefits’. Here it becomes apparent that Calvin’s
understanding of the Supper in Book IV of the Institutes is founded firmly on the
Christology and soteriology already expounded in Books II and III, especially
his echoing of the biblical and patristic insistence that incarnation and atonement
are organically united, and Christ’s whole incarnate history from conception to
ascension part of that which he offered for us once for all and now offers to us
as the ‘substance’ of our salvation.60 It is clear that Calvin understands the ‘body
and blood’ of eucharistic symbolism in this way as metonymic reference to the
whole Christ, and while he certainly follows the Western tradition in placing due
weight on the death of Jesus he does not limit the significance of what is signified
to this. What is set before us in the eucharistic signs is the truth of the union of
our own humanity with Christ’s whereby all that he has and is becomes the root
and source of our redemption. ‘This’, Calvin writes, ‘is the wonderful exchange
which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that, becoming
Son of man with us, he has made us sons of God with him; that, by his descent to
earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality,
he has conferred his immortality upon us; that, accepting our weakness, he has
strengthened us by his power; that, receiving our poverty unto himself, he has
transferred his wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon himself
(which oppressed us), he has clothed us with his righteousness’.61
For Calvin, then, the eucharistic signs refer us away from themselves to Christ.
Our participation in their symbolic meaning, though, is no mere ‘calling to mind’
of Christ’s saving significance. By virtue of the Spirit’s action and of our response
in faith, it is itself a mode of sharing in that significance and being transformed
by it. As we eat and drink, so, under the symbols, Christ ‘really’ offers his ‘body’
59
60
See further Trevor Hart, ‘Humankind in Christ and Christ in Humankind: Salvation
as Participation in Our Substitute in the Theology of John Calvin’, Scottish Journal of
Theology 42, no. 1 (1989).
61
IV.xvii.2, McNeill, ed., 1362.
and ‘blood’ to us and we receive and are ‘fed’ by them.62 In other words, the
mysterious organic union of believers with the humanity of Christ is actually
realised and deepened through this ritual performance, and the sanctification of
our sinful and weak humanity duly furthered. This ‘flesh and blood’ communion
with Christ in the present moment presupposes that Christ is himself ‘present’
to us in some sense, and Calvin insists that it will not suffice to suggest that this
presence is of the same sort as his wider presence in the Spirit.63 Something more
and specific is going on here which compels us to speak of a distinctive eucharistic
mode of Christ’s presence to us and ours to him. Calvin is emphatic, though, in
his rejection of various medieval attempts to account for this in terms of a local
physical presence in the elements of bread and wine.64 This is not because he
thinks such an account too incredible to take seriously, but because it compromises
a proper understanding of the incarnation and the nature of Christ’s risen and
ascended humanity. Christ’s body, he argues, remains in its risen and ascended
state finite and subject to ‘the laws of common nature’;65 to predicate of it some
capacity for eucharistic ubiquity contradicts this truth, and effectively loses sight
of the difference between Christ’s deity and his humanity, resulting in a form of
post-resurrection docetism.66 If we take Scripture seriously, we find that Christ’s
humanity is ‘in heaven’ at the right hand of the Father, from where we are to await
his return in glory and for judgement.67 It cannot, therefore, also be physically
present in the bread and wine of the Supper. This being so, we must make sense
of the ‘presence’ of Christ in such a way that it acknowledges his simultaneous
‘absence’ (located spatially in heaven). This, Calvin admits, is in its way no less
remarkable a claim than that entailed in the doctrine of transubstantiation, and
entertains a ‘miracle’ no less challenging to the bounds of day-to-day common
sense. The difference, he suggests, is that it is a miracle consonant with and even
required by the witness of Scripture concerning what occurs in the Supper.
The eucharistic union of believers with the humanity of Christ is, Calvin insists,
a mystery which the mind cannot comprehend,68 something to be experienced rather
than understood or analysed.69 It is for this very reason that God accommodates
himself to the limits of our reasoning, and furnishes an essentially imaginative
mode in which we may approach and partake of it, showing the ‘figure and image’
of a mystery ‘by nature incomprehensible’ in visible signs.70 The signs function
to assure us of the reality of Christ’s body and blood once offered for us and now
62
IV.xvii.10, ibid., 1371; IV.xvii.32, ibid., 1403–4.
63
64
See IV.xvii.12f., ibid., 1372f.
65
66
67
IV.xvii.26–9, ibid., 1393–40.
68
69
70
offered afresh to us, ‘as if we had seen it with our own eyes’,71 though of course
we have not, and the mode of presence remains elusive. This though is no mere
token of something in reality absent, like a tattered photograph of a loved one kept
in a wallet. For, Calvin insists, the signs are themselves the mode of Christ’s actual
presence to us, the ‘truth’ or reality of what is signified being ‘inseparable from
the sign’.72 The symbols ‘represent’ Christ to us,73 but they do so because they are
themselves as it were, the form of Christ’s own presence in absence, so that as we
share in the sign we actually share in Christ himself. Thus Calvin expounds the
meaning of Jesus’ words at the Supper, ‘This is my body’, precisely through an
appeal to linguistic trope. It is, he argues, metonymy, the substitution of a part to
represent a larger whole (as ‘the White House’ is used in news bulletins to refer
to the machinery of American government) to which the part properly belongs.74
In the Supper, the bread (and wine) ‘not only symbolizes the thing that it has been
consecrated to represent as a bare and empty token, but also truly exhibits it’ by
virtue of a divine determination uniting it, and us through it, to Christ’s humanity.
The appropriateness of the metonymy lies, therefore, not in any natural relation
between bread and the humanity of Jesus, but in a miracle by which the Spirit
‘truly unites things separated in space’ and ‘Christ’s flesh, separated from us by
such great distance, penetrates to us’ as we take and eat and drink.75
The Incarnation and Imaginative Trans-figuration
It is vitally important to note, though, that Calvin does not understand the believer’s
union with Christ as established by the Supper and its signifying relation alone.
On the contrary, this union (the ‘fraternal alliance of the flesh’ as Calvin calls
it) rests on the sharing of the Son in our humanity by virtue of the incarnation,
and it is on this basis that he is ‘truly’ for us the ‘bread of life’ and we partakers
of his ‘flesh’.76 But his objective ‘once for all’ healing of this same ‘flesh’ through
obedience and sacrifice remains to be applied to us in the course of our Christian
living, and the Supper is a central mode (though by no means the only mode) of
this existential participation. ‘Therefore, the sacrament does not cause Christ to
begin to be the bread of life; but when it reminds us that he was made the bread of
life, which we continually eat, and which gives us a relish and savour of that bread,
it causes us to feel the power of that bread.’77 The other thing to note here is that for
Calvin the union established between the eucharistic signs (and thereby believers
who partake in the wider ‘sign’ of the ceremony) is precisely with the humanity
71
IV.xvii.1, ibid.
72
73
74
75
76
See IV.xvii.4, ibid., 1363.
77
of Christ. For Calvin this is vitally important, for to deny it, and to posit some
direct rather than indirect relation between the signs and God, would effectively
be to short-circuit Christ’s role as mediator, and thus himself a signifier whose
significance cannot be grasped immediately nor cashed out in the terms of any
symbolics, but only indwelt by the divinely engendered fragility of faith. Instead,
Calvin’s understanding reinforces this theology of Christ’s continuing priesthood,
since the Supper is precisely a means of its being realised in practice, uniting us
to his ‘flesh’ through which alone we may approach the Father with a confidence
that has little to do with intellectual certainty. While, therefore, there is a clear
analogy between the ‘materiality’ of God’s dealing with us in the Supper and in
the incarnation, the analogy needs to be handled very carefully indeed. The mode
of God’s presence in the bread and wine is different, more indirect even than his
presence in Christ, and the sacrament, therefore, should not (for Calvin at least)
be thought of as ‘extending’ the incarnation in any way. It does not ‘extend’ it
(as if the bread now performed the same role as Christ’s flesh once did) but is a
symbolic form whereby the incarnate Christ himself, risen and ascended at the
right hand of the Father, makes himself present to us and grants us a participation
in his own redeemed humanity.78 The ‘presence’ of Christ, therefore, is realised
through an appropriation by God’s Spirit of the sign’s capacity to trespass beyond
the boundaries of actual physical presence, and while Calvin is careful to avoid
any suggestion that faith partakes of Christ ‘only by … imagination’79 (we might
better render this ‘in a merely imaginary way’) it is clear that his understanding of
what occurs in the Supper is, from first to last, articulated in terms of ‘poetic’ logic
and God’s active appeal to our nature as imaginative creatures.
Barth – Signification, Revelation and Response
As James Buckley has noted, during the 1930s when Karl Barth was writing his
Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, he expressed profound disquiet
about the tendency in modern theology to found theological description upon
general, non-theological discourses, seeking the meaning of the Church and its
practices (for instance) in some accidental modification of normative human
community, its rituals and symbols.80 The key phrase here, though, is ‘found
theological description upon’. For in this same period Barth was working on the
first volume of his Church Dogmatics, and here he was entirely happy to cast his
fleeting account of the Lord’s Supper in the terms of a wider model of signification.
In doing so, though, he did not permit secular discourse to lay down the rules for or
determine the limits of his description, let alone appeal to it for external intellectual
78
On the Eucharist as an extension of the hypostatic union see Schillebeeckx, 68.
79
IV.xvii.11, McNeill, ed., 1372.
80
Buckley, ‘Community, baptism and Lord’s Supper’ in John Webster, ed., Cambridge
Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197.
warrant. Instead, he borrowed such aspects of it as lay usefully to hand in order to

articulate something about the structure of God’s engagement with humankind, an
engagement which, Barth asserted unashamedly, begins and ends unambiguously
with God himself. The Lord’s Supper, he insisted, is one example of the wider
pattern of that divine sign-giving in which the dynamic of revelation consists.81
Signification and Analogy
Like Calvin before him, therefore, in his writings prior to the late 1950s Barth
appeals to the logic of signification as a way of thinking about what occurs in
the Lord’s Supper. More explicitly than Calvin, though, Barth employs this same
scheme in order to make sense of the wider pattern of God’s revelatory dealings
with the world, of which the sacraments are a part. When the God who is wholly
other than the world gives himself to be known in the world, Barth argues, it is
through the appropriation of this-worldly objects, events, relations and orders, all
of which are wholly other than himself, but all of which are duly drawn into a new
relationship with him whereby they are granted the capacity to ‘mean’ something
radically new and unexpected. These creaturely phenomena are granted a ‘special
determination’ whereby ‘along with what they are and mean within this world …
they also have another nature and meaning from the side of the objective reality
of revelation’.82 The physical entities are in and of themselves incapable of such
signification, but are laid hold of by the Word of God in his speaking to the world.
The essential arbitrariness of the signs is thus a vital correlate of Barth’s denial of
any analogia entis between God and his creatures.83 For their part, the ‘signifiers’
(the things appropriated) must be set in a new, transcendent relation in order to
function as ‘signs’; and in order to apprehend and follow their new meaning
we, too, must be lifted up beyond our natural capacity as knowers to behold them
now ‘from the standpoint … of transcendence’.84 Furthermore, neither of these
occurrences (which are not once for all, but, in God’s faithfulness, constantly
repeated and renewed) grants either the signifiers or ourselves any enduring
capacity apart from God’s gracious appropriation and activity. Revelation is
always, for Barth, an event (Ereignis), a happening. Thus ‘the activity of the sign
is, directly, the activity of God Himself’.85 ‘The given-ness of these signs does
not mean that God manifest has Himself as it were become a bit of the world’ or
81
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F.
Torrance, trans. George Thomas Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1956), 229.
82
Ibid., 223.
83
On the relationship between Barth’s account of the Supper and his doctrine of
analogy see Paul D. Molnar, Karl Barth and the Theology of the Lord’s Supper (New York:
Peter Lang, 1996).
84
Barth, CD I/2, 223.
85
Ibid., 224.
placed himself at general human disposal.86 The Church is bound by these signs,
called to return again and again to these particular words, events and things as she
seeks an encounter with the living God who has met her in them before. But God,
Barth insists, is not bound by them.87 They are no magic lamp which we have
only to rub in order to conjure up his presence. God remains free in his Lordship,
and the signification of his presence and action remains elusive should we try
to pin it down for inspection. Yet he has graciously committed himself to these
signs and promised to renew his communion with us as we seek him here in faith
and obedience.
Hypostatic and Sacramental Union
At the very heart of this economy of divine sign-giving, of course, lies the history
of the man Jesus Christ whose humanity is in its entirety ‘taken up’ by God as
the ultimate ‘sign’ of his own reality. Here, most obviously and most vitally, God
lays hold of creaturely reality and makes it his own, establishing it in a new and
unprecedented relationship whereby it serves as a marker of God’s own presence
with us, Immanuel. The structure of the incarnation, as it were, parallels and
adapts itself to the structure of signification: that which is ‘not God’ is reordered
within the scheme of things and becomes for us a sign (for those granted eyes
to see and ears to hear) of God present in our midst. Thus, Barth admits, ‘the
humanity of Jesus Christ as such is the first sacrament’.88 But Barth already knows
that he is on dangerous ground here, lest the nature of the relationship between
God and the humanity of Christ in the incarnation be confused with other divine
‘appropriations’ of worldly phenomena.89 There is a radical difference which renders
the incarnation unique, and relegates all other divine sign-giving in comparison to
a secondary and derivative status. For here, as nowhere else in human history, God
relates to creaturely reality by becoming it, establishing an absolute hypostatic
identification between himself and the creature. Jesus’ humanity functions as a
sign (in the strictest sense the sign) of God in the world because Jesus himself is
the form which God takes humanly in history, the Word who has ‘become flesh’
for our sakes. But this relationship of ‘hypostatic union’ is unique, and does not
pertain to any other God-given sign. ‘It happened only once. It is not therefore
86
Ibid., 227.
87
Ibid., 224.
88
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F.
Torrance, trans. T.H.L. Parker et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 54.
89
See, e.g., his discussion in 1955 of the ‘temptation’ of drawing this comparison. ET
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance,
trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 54–5. By the end of the decade
the cautious and almost grudging acknowledgement that the parallel may nonetheless be
an illuminating one for understanding the Supper had given way to an abandonment of it.
the starting-point for a general concept of incarnation.’90 Yet this act of ‘primary
objectification’ on God’s part is itself the basis and meaning of all other divine
signifying (acts of ‘secondary objectification’ as Barth refers to them). The content
of this particular and unique sign, we might say, becomes the substance or ‘matter’
(to use Calvin’s term) of all the other signs through which revelation occurs. As
such, it both calls into question any assumption that other creaturely realities are
in themselves capable of directly bearing ‘divine meaning’ (and thus contradicts
rather than offers warrant for general ‘principles’ of sacramentality in Christian
theology) and nonetheless offers hope that, in God’s gracious accommodation
of himself to our capacities, they might come to serve as secondary and indirect
signs. ‘He and no other creature is taken up into unity with God. Here we have
something which cannot be repeated. But the existence of this creature in his unity
with God does mean the promise that other creatures may attest in their objectivity
what is real only in this creature, that is to say, God’s own objectivity – so that to
that extent they are the temple, instrument and sign of God as He is.’91
When, 25 years or so after writing these words, Barth began to espouse a very
different notion of Baptism and Lord’s Supper, the change in his thinking may in
part have been due to a deepening conviction that this (for him vital) distinction was
too easily and too often overlooked and these ‘so-called sacraments’ mistakenly
vested with attributes and propensities proper only to the humanity of Jesus. That
the unio hypostatica and the unio sacramentalis must be carefully differentiated
was something he insisted upon from the outset (the man Jesus Christ, he notes
bluntly, is identical with God whereas the bread and wine of the Supper are not),92
but he came eventually, as we shall see, to deny the unio sacramentalis altogether.
For the later Barth the Lord’s Supper was no longer to be identified as a place
where God appropriates creaturely realities to serve extraordinarily as bearers of
divine meaning, lifting us up to know him more fully through our participation
in the signifying relation. It is certainly an event of signification, and a divinely
‘given’ one since Jesus himself instituted it. But the signification requires no
peculiar divine action to establish or sustain it, and its ‘matter’ (that which is
signified by it) is to be identified elsewhere than in Christ as such. Before shifting
our attention to this late version of things, though, we must first trace more of the
pattern of Barth’s earlier thought about the Lord’s Supper. The evidence for this is
patchy and fragmented, and will involve us in making occasional inferences on the
basis of things he has to say about ‘the sacraments’ more generally.
The Word Takes Flesh
As we have seen, for Barth the Lord’s Supper is to be understood in terms of

a wider pattern of divine sign-giving whereby God grants us knowledge of and
90
Barth, CD II/1, 54.
91
Ibid.
92
Barth, CD I/2, 162.
communion with himself. Chief among the phenomena appropriated by God to

serve as signs is human language in both its written and spoken forms, but in the
Supper and in Baptism we are confronted with elementa, ‘elements of a spatially
extended, corporeal nature’ which duly become the bearers of divine significance.93
Barth plays down any suggestion that we are dealing with an essentially different
mode of divine engagement here though, insisting upon the parallels between the
various sorts of signs94 and avoiding the notion that the bread and wine in the
Supper are significant in their inert physicality. That they are tangible signs is
certainly important, but Barth reminds us that ‘the spiritual, historical and moral
being of man is also steeped in the elemental sphere, in the cosmos of corporeality,
in an ultimately inextricable unity with his natural being, of which it is the counter-
part’.95 Furthermore, the signifying force of these elementa resides not in their
physical manifestation as such, but in their deployment within the context of an
actio sacra, an action in which body, soul, spirit, mind and will are all engaged.
So, while Barth does not make the point explicitly, we cannot doubt that he sees the
accompanying words of the Supper (which are, he reminds us, themselves part of
an action, and though not tangible nonetheless sensible signs, audible in nature)96
as inseparable from the physical elements as part of the wider liturgical drama in
which meaning is realized. Following Heinrich Vogel, though, he acknowledges
that the supra-linguistic dimensions of this dramatic sign do have their own
irreplaceable force, asserting clearly, ‘and with relatively greater eloquence than
the word in the narrower sense can ever do, that the iustificatio or sanctificatio
hominis, which is the meaning of all divine sign-giving, does not rest upon an
idea but upon reality, upon an event’.97 The physical and active dimensions of
the Supper, therefore, are not incidental but vital, for they go further than words
can in driving home the truth which lies at the centre of the Christian gospel – Et
incarnatus est.
In the Lord’s Supper, just as in preaching, Barth maintains, mundane realities
are laid hold of by God in such a way that while at one level they are ‘simply and
visibly there’, at another they receive a new ‘form’ from the Word of God, and
can no longer be regarded as ‘mere’ bread and wine. In the eucharistic context
they acquire a new designation as nota a verbo Dei insculpta (a sign inscribed by
the Word of God),98 a designation accompanied by a new capacity alien to their
nature as such, but leaving it intact. This new capacity has to do with their role as
instruments of God’s purpose to justify and sanctify human beings, applying what
Ibid., 230.
93
See, e.g., Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3/2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and
94
Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 737f.
95
Barth, CD I/2, 230.
96
Ibid., 229–30.
97
Ibid., 230.
98
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F.
Torrance, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 88–9.
was done once for all in Christ to believers in the here and now. This much they
have in common with all divinely ordained signs,99 but the four-dimensionality of
the Supper does this in its own way. ‘It is … a question of (believers’) nourishment
by Him. It takes place in the fact that, as often as they here eat and drink together, He
proffers and gives Himself to them as the One He is, as the One who is absolutely
theirs; and conversely, that He continually makes them what they are, absolutely
His.’100 Of course one might also speak analogously of Christ ‘offering’ himself to
us whenever the Gospel is proclaimed; but again, the ‘eating and drinking’ of the
bread and wine do this in their own peculiar way which outstrips the reach that
words alone possess.
The Presence of Christ and the Supper
This brings us to the question of ‘presence’. While he rejects the Roman Catholic
doctrine of transubstantiation and variations upon it, Barth insists that the
‘becoming’ in which bread and wine are appropriated as signs is no less ‘realistic’
than what was intended by that doctrine.101 The action of the Supper is therefore
no merely human action, but one over which Christ himself presides, to which
he invites us, and in which he ‘proffers and gives Himself’ to us anew for our
conscious reception.102 Indeed, the Supper makes no sense, Barth suggests, apart
from the presupposition that ‘the One whom we remember is Himself in action
now, to-day and here’.103 Whereas for Calvin the Spirit mysteriously transgresses
the boundaries of space, uniting the eucharistic signifiers to the humanity of
Christ which is in heaven, Barth indicates rather that the Christ who is present
and active is the Christ of the gospel accounts, the one who ‘overcomes the barrier
of his own time and therefore historical distance’; and the ‘action’ in which he is
present is ‘His then action’ which, though historically particular, transcends the
limits of its own time and breaks into our present.104 Barth too, though, appeals
to spatial metaphor in his theology of presence, not in relation to the eucharistic
event specifically, but in his account of the wider Pauline claim that Christians
are ‘in Christ’ and Christ reciprocally ‘in’ them. This language, he suggests, while
having an extended metaphorical range (Christians live their lives after the pattern
of Christ’s humanity, and that pattern is duly formed in them) has a logically prior
and determinative ‘local’ sense in which ‘the spatial distance between Christ
and Christians disappears’, ‘Christ is spatially present where Christians are,
and … Christians are spatially present where Christ is, … not merely alongside
99
Barth, CD I/2, 230.
100
Barth, CD IV/2, 703.
101
Barth, CD I/1, 89.
102
103
Ibid., 112.
104
Ibid.
but in exactly the same spot’.105 Such talk, Barth insists, suggestive as it is of a
perichoretic transgression not just of the boundaries of time and space but also the
boundaries separating Christ’s particular humanity from ours (without breaching
the integrity of that particularity) must not be demythologised.
This strong, ‘realistic’ notion of Christ’s wider presence in the Church helps us
to make sense of Barth’s passing observation about the Supper that in it Christ is in
some sense ‘present without needing to be made present’.106 This acknowledgement
sets the Supper in a wider context and relativises the emphasis laid upon it as such
(the union of Christ with the believer is certainly not dependent upon eucharistic
participation). But Barth traces a link between the two, and seems content to admit
that there is nonetheless a special or peculiar moment to be identified in this God-
given sign in which the wider ‘presence of’ or ‘union with’ Christ is, by virtue of
a distinctive divine activity perceptible only to faith, realised and reinforced in
particular lives and in the Christian community. Here, ‘In the work of the Holy
Spirit there takes place … in a way which typifies all that may happen in the life
of this people, that which is indicated by the great touto estin, namely, that unity
with its heavenly Lord, and the imparting and receiving of His body and blood, are
enacted in and with their human fellowship as realised in the common distribution
and reception of bread and wine’.107 This realisation of the believer’s union with
Christ through the sign of the Supper is ‘impossible’ from the human side, but ‘on
God’s side it is not only possible but actual’, taking place ‘in the gracious act of
the gracious power of the Holy Spirit which co-ordinates the different elements
and constitutes and guarantees their unity’.108 While, therefore, Christ’s union with
and indwelling of the believer is a wider phenomenon pertaining to the whole
Christian life, Barth indicates here that the Supper plays a distinctive and central
role in realising it,109 and that what occurs has to do with the Spirit’s ‘co-ordinating’
or ‘uniting’ of the earthly and the heavenly, so that the one may serve appropriately
as a sign and mediator of the other.
The Supper as a Sign of Response
In the last two decades of his life Barth’s views on Baptism and the Lord’s Supper
underwent a profound shift. The roots of this shift lay primarily in considerations
of exegesis, most notably the influence of a book on Baptism published by
Barth’s own son, Markus.110 Barth was persuaded by the argument of this work
that the notion of ‘sacrament’ as it had arisen in the early centuries of Christian
105
Barth, CD IV/3/2, 547.
106
107
Barth, CD IV/3/2, 761.
108
Ibid., 762.
109
See, e.g., ibid., 901 where he refers to it as a ‘repeated and conscious’ appropriation
by the Church of that which is offered.
110
Barth, Die Taufe ein Sakrament?
history was lacking in adequate biblical basis. Linking the New Testament’s
occasional use of mysterion in an unwarranted manner to the events of Baptism
and the Supper, it resulted in a decisive relocation of the centre of gravity in the
Church’s understanding of them. Mysterion (sacramentum), Barth tells us in his
own eventual account of the matter, in the New Testament ‘denotes an event in
the world of time and space which is directly initiated and brought to pass by
God alone, so that in distinction from all other events it is basically a mystery to
human cognition in respect of its origin and possibility’.111 In the sub-apostolic
Church an understanding developed of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in these
terms, as ritual participations in an activity of God which in themselves afford a
share in salvation to participants. ‘Baptism and the Lord’s Supper now (for the
first time) began to be regarded as cultic re-presentations of the act and revelation
of God in the history of Jesus Christ, and consequently as the granting of a share
in His grace.’112 This idea, Barth argues, was borrowed from parallel rituals in the
religions of Asia Minor and, more importantly, obscures rather than illuminates
the Bible’s teaching about the Christian rites, a case which he then argues at length
in relation to Baptism.
As we have already noted, no parallel argument was ever developed concerning
the Lord’s Supper, and very few positive statements indicating the shape of
Barth’s revised view of it are extant. Those that are, though, indicate clearly
enough that the same basic concerns that mark his account of Baptism pertain
here too, and it is therefore legitimate to extrapolate from them the broad shape
his developed account would likely have taken had he survived to produce it. The
things that are not true of Baptism, he indicates clearly enough, are not true of the
Supper either. Thus, he writes, ‘Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not events,
institutions, mediations or revelations of salvation. They are not representations
and actualizations, emanations, repetitions, or extensions, nor indeed guarantees
and seals of the work and word of God; nor are they instruments, vehicles,
channels, or means of God’s reconciling grace. They are not what they have been
called since the second century, namely, mysteries or sacraments’.113
Central to Barth’s theological concern about wider sacramental understanding
and practice (concern which the new exegesis enabled him now to resolve in
relation to Baptism) was an unhealthy emphasis upon the rites themselves as if
human performance of and participation in them was essential to and guarantee of
the benefits of salvation.114 This both detaches the signs from their proper relation
to what God has done for us in Christ and neglects the need for a wider and radical
discipleship as the form of the outworking of that same redemption. As we have
seen above, his earlier appeal to the category of the sign sought precisely to avoid
the former error. The Supper refers the believer beyond itself, empties itself out
111
112
Ibid.
113
Barth, CD IV/4 Lecture Fragments, 46.
114
See, on Baptism in this regard, Barth, CD IV/4, 71.
in the interests of directing faith to Christ, the real and only source of salvation.
To collapse the structure of the sign, thereby confusing the signifiers of the rite
with that which they signify, is effectively a form of idolatry. But if the Supper is
nonetheless spoken and thought of as a time and place where God himself is active
in applying to us the benefits of what he has done objectively and once for all in
Christ, and if the signifying force or ‘meaning’ of the event (the ‘matter of the
sign’ in Calvin’s phrase) lies in our being united to Christ, then there is always the
danger of such misunderstanding occurring. If God ‘does something redemptive’
here, then an ex opere operato view of the rite will no doubt always be lurking in
the shadows waiting for an opportunity to emerge.
What Barth’s rejection of the category of ‘sacrament’ did was effectively to
liberate his understanding of the Supper from any such danger. For now he bluntly
denied that God was at work in this event mediating or applying the benefits of
salvation. Furthermore, the meaning of the Supper, while certainly related to the
objective fashioning of salvation for us in the humanity of Christ and its day-
to-day application to us through our mysterious ‘union’ with him, did not lie in
divine action as such, but elsewhere. ‘With all that the community of Jesus Christ
and its members are and say and do, (Baptism and the Lord’s Supper) belong to
something that God has permitted and entrusted and commanded to Christians,
namely, the answering, attesting, and proclaiming of the one act and revelation
of salvation that has taken place in the one Mediator between God and man, …
they are actions of human obedience for which Jesus Christ makes his people
free and responsible. They refer themselves to God’s own work and word, and
they correspond to his grace and commands.’115 In other words, there is not a dual
dynamic in the sign of the Supper, as Calvin had insisted, and as Barth had himself
earlier accepted, but only a single movement. The meaning of the sign lies not in
God’s movement towards us in his Son, but in our reciprocal and corresponding
movement towards God in faith and obedience. Instead of being secondary, this
human movement now becomes primary and, indeed, the sole meaning of the rite.
Of course it presumes the prior and subsequent activity of God, without which it
would not be possible or meaningful, since here faith looks both backward and
forward and offers thanks for God’s grace and faithfulness, centred upon the death
of Christ to which the bread and wine testify.116 But their role is precisely to serve
as signs of our testimony and response to this self-offering, and not as divinely
given signs of the offering in which faith is laid hold of by God, united to the
offering and thereby nourished. Such ‘union’ occurs, but it occurs elsewhere,
in the wider pattern of Christian living and the communication of Christ to the
believer by the Holy Spirit. While there is a ‘strict correlation’ between this divine
action and the human action of the Supper, there is also a ‘no less strict distinction’
to be observed which locates the meaning of the Supper decisively in the latter
Barth, CD IV/4 Lecture Fragments, 46.

115
See, on Baptism in this regard, Barth, CD IV/4, 134.

116
rather than the former. The Lord’s Supper is a ‘distinctly human action’,117 an
ethical event, and not a mystery in which God gives himself to be known. It is, as
Barth tells us in one of the few positive statements on the subject dating from this
period, ‘the thanksgiving which responds to the presence of Jesus Christ in His
self-sacrifice and which looks forward to His future’.118
Of course Barth does not deny the presence and activity of God in the Supper
in any absolute way. But he limits it to that general presence and activity which
undergirds all human action and which alone sets faith free to make a responsible
response of thanksgiving.119 Here his second concern about sacramental practice,
its tendency to encourage an antinomian reliance upon mechanistic ritualism
detached from a life of faith and obedience, comes to the fore. The human action
of the Supper is not merely the outward form of some secret, mysterious thing
that God does, but a fully responsible moral act, corresponding to God’s prior
and promised activity in Christ and the Spirit. Indeed, Barth suggests that if
the Supper is ‘basically a divine action’ then it becomes difficult for us to take
it seriously as a human action at all.120 This does not seem to follow at all, not
least given some of Barth’s own earlier statements about the Spirit’s work in co-
ordinating divine and human activities.121 What he is seeking to avoid, though, is
any notion of eucharistic action as a merely mechanistic human performance by
and under the guise of which God is compelled to do something for our benefit.
That wholly misses the significance of its ethical dimension. Again, this danger
too is circumvented if, on other grounds, the claim that God is present and active
in some special eucharistic manner is set aside, and the Supper seen instead as
essentially and distinctively a human action, significant of human response and
only indirectly of the divine initiative which calls it forth and renders it possible.
This view, of course, risks falling prey to a different danger – that of Pelagianism
and perfectionism. But, Barth observed, perfectionism was not the problem
confronting the Church in the context in which he wrote, an acknowledgement
that it was not exegesis alone which lay behind his ready and relieved embrace of
a new view of the ‘so-called sacraments’.
Indeed, the main issue attaching to Barth’s late view of the Lord’s Supper
is that he did not yet appear to have engaged in the sort of careful exegetical
work that would enable him to sustain it. The impression one gains is that, under
the influence of Markus Barth’s exegesis he arrived at a new understanding of
the nature of Baptism and the way God works in and through it. This duly led
him to reject its status as a ‘sacrament’ in the traditional sense, and to revise his
understanding of (effectively to abandon) the category of sacraments as such. On
the basis of this revised understanding, he posited (but never developed) a parallel
117
See, on Baptism in this regard, ibid., 143.
118
Ibid., ix.
119
See, on Baptism in this regard, ibid., 105–6.
120
See, on Baptism in this regard, ibid., 106.
121
See, e.g., Barth, CD IV/3/2, 762.
revised understanding of the Lord’s Supper, as yet lacking the sustained exegetical
base which would grant it support.
By Way of Conclusion
There would seem, though, in principle to be no reason to make such a lateral

move from Baptism to the Supper. In his reflection on the subject Alasdair Heron
argues that ‘the sacraments’ ought never to become an independent subject of
theological interest. Otherwise we may proceed from some generic definition of
what a ‘sacrament’ is (about which the New Testament knows nothing whatever)
and then proceed to ‘squeeze the Eucharist, baptism, and perhaps other things as
well into that framework’.122 Barth’s suggestion that one might deduce ‘the sorts of
things’ he would have wanted to say about the Eucharist from the things he actually
said about baptism (and understand both in terms of his rejection of a presumed
notion of ‘sacraments’) suggests that he fell into this very trap. There seems to
be no reason why one might not in theory hold quite radically differing views of
the nature of God’s involvement in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper respectively,
especially if one were to begin, as Heron insists we must, not with an a priori
notion of what a sacrament is, but with the New Testament’s distinctive account
of each. The only satisfactory basis for a revised account of the nature of the sign
of the Lord’s Supper, that is to say, will be precisely an exegetical one, akin to that
which led Barth to a new view of Baptism. A theology of ‘the sacraments’ ought
not to be permitted the sort of a priori role which he appears to have granted it.
In due course, but long after his father’s death, Markus Barth published another
work which offered just such an exegetical basis.123 The focus of his consideration
was John 6, and Jesus’ discourse on the ‘bread of life’. This passage does, indeed,
seem to lie close to the exegetical heart of the matter, and to be central, therefore,
to any attempt to weigh the relative merits of Calvin’s and Barth’s (later) view of
the Supper.
To go back to where we began this chapter, the central question at issue in
eucharistic theology concerns whether, and if so where and how, God is peculiarly
present and active in the Supper’s midst. Historic debates have centred (perhaps
unhelpfully) around Jesus’ words at the last supper with his disciples. Taken in
themselves, though, these words hardly bear the weight that has traditionally
been placed upon them. Only one of the three synoptic accounts of the supper124
indicates that this was a practice which Jesus expected his disciples to repeat,
and ‘do this in remembrance of me’ might suggest that what was intended was
simply a symbolic way for the community regularly to call to mind Jesus and
Heron, 56.
122
Markus Barth, Rediscovering the Lord’s Supper (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock,
123
2006).
Luke 22:19.
124
the significance of his death for others. Nothing in the passage (or its parallels in
Matthew and Mark) warrants an insistence that this is to be a locus of peculiar
divine activity, let alone some of the things claimed over the centuries concerning
what happens to the bread and the wine. The earliest New Testament testimony
to the supper is 1 Cor. 11:23f. which supports Luke’s account of Jesus instituting
a normative practice for the community, but describes its purpose in a way which
initially seems to support Barth’s rather than Calvin’s account. ‘For as often as you
eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.’
The emphasis here, that is to say, is ostensibly upon human rather than divine
action, and more specifically faith’s testimony, keeping the cross-centred identity
of the community clearly in its own view and that of the world.
In the wider context of chapters 10 and 11, though, Paul introduces notes of
caution about the Supper which at the very least indicate that the early Church
took its approach to it very seriously indeed.125 There is a certain sense of
‘sacrality’ about it which means that one may approach it ‘unworthily’ (11:27),
and by doing so ‘provoke the Lord to jealousy’ (see 10:22). Such sentiments are
not incompatible with an interpretation of the Supper as an occasion on which
the Church symbolically represents and reflects upon its identity as a community
rooted in its unity with Christ. They are perhaps more likely, though, if this same
unity is understood as being somehow at stake in the event itself. The latter
suggestion is reinforced by Paul’s specific claim that ‘whoever … eats the bread or
drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body
and the blood of the Lord’ (11:27, my italics), a statement which duly urges a more
rather than less ‘realistic’ reading of 10:16, ‘The cup of blessing that we bless, is it
not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break is it not a sharing
in the body of Christ?’ Such words, like Jesus’ own in the synoptic accounts, can
be read as ‘merely poetic’, indicating a purely human act of signification; but the
wider context raises questions about the adequacy of reading them in this way.
It is John 6:32–59, though, that arguably furnishes the most awkward material
for the sort of ‘neo-Zwinglian’ view advocated by Barth. If one subscribes to an
interpretation of the chapter which sees no deliberate eucharistic allusion, then the
awkwardness here dissolves. But if one accepts that Jesus’ words in this passage
constitute a Johannine reflection on the Supper, then what emerges is a more
solid biblical base for a view of it as a place where God is active in nourishing
and deepening believers’ union with Christ, as well as believers being active in
receiving Christ in faith and obedience. ‘Unless you eat of my flesh and drink
my blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood
have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food
and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in
me, and I in them’ (6:53–7). When read as commentary upon the Supper these
words situate our understanding of it firmly within John’s wider theology of union
with Christ, and appear to indicate that the eating and drinking entailed by it is of
125
I am indebted to my colleague Richard Bauckham for this observation.
peculiar significance for the believer’s day to day ‘remaining’ in that union. Faith
itself has no control over this; the bread from heaven is given by the Father (6:32),
and it is Jesus himself, the divine Word who has been ‘made flesh’ (1:14), who
now offers (as he once offered) his flesh and blood for our participation via the
sign of eucharistic eating and drinking (6:51–2).
Approaching Scripture as canon, such a reading provides warrant for a more
‘realistic’ interpretation of Jesus’ words at the last supper and Paul’s statement that
our eating and drinking are a participation in the body and blood of Christ. If we
adopt such readings, then we shall understand the Eucharist as a divine, and not
merely a human act of meaning-making, and thus be inclined towards Calvin’s
rather than Barth’s final account of the matter, seeing in the sacraments more
widely a further gracious accommodation by God to the condition of creatures
who, called to dwell simultaneously in the perichoretic spheres of body and soul,
can know and enjoy fellowship with God only by his active participation in the
order of signs.
Chapter 3
The Economy of the Flesh
Thus far I have argued that Christian theology is inexorably wedded to

the economy of the image due to the nature of its proper object, and that
God’s revelatory engagement with us takes place through acts of gracious
accommodation in which God enters the material ‘order of signs’ within which
our distinctly human creaturely existence and response are played out. In the
present chapter my concern will remain with this theme of the flesh, and its
capacity to bear significance and thus become more than whatever, as flesh
alone, it is or has. In particular, I return to the subject of language (not explicitly
‘religious’ language alone, but language as such), and the claims made in
the recent work of my colleague David Brown1 regarding the ‘sacramental’
power of the poetic image as such to draw us – through a sustained dialectic
of mystery and meaning – into an encounter with the God who lies at the heart
and the root of all creaturely mystery and meaning. I trust that readers will be
able readily to discern the respect and esteem in which I hold Brown’s work;
but, notwithstanding a fruitful sharing of theological concerns, we do differ
on some questions of method and substance, and I hope that an attempt here
carefully to expound and respond to some of his arguments will provide an
opportunity to point to some alternative ways of addressing those concerns,
and thus perpetuate a fruitful and enjoyable conversation. Towards the end of
the chapter, following on from Brown’s concentration on the inherent depth and
mysteriousness attaching to certain uses of words, I will offer some theological
reflections on linguistic indeterminacy, and its relationship to the divine ‘flesh-
taking’ in the incarnation and our place in the world as embodied (and fallen)
creatures. First, though, to Christology itself.
The Word Which Always Takes Flesh
According to the testimony of the fourth evangelist, the Word which was in the
beginning ‘with God and … was God’, in the fullness of time ‘became flesh’ and
dwelt in our midst, thereby giving himself up, as the author of 1 John has it, to be
‘seen with our eyes … and touched with our hands’ as well as heard.2 The fact of the
incarnation, it appears, eschews any neat or convenient bifurcation between word
1
See especially David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through
Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2
See Jn. 1:18; 1 Jn. 1:1.
and image, and furnishes prima facie theological warrant at least for exploring the
claim that the verbal image (words which, in David Brown’s phrase, are ‘nearest
to the visual’ in their way of working)3 might bear particular significance in our
encounters with this same God through the mediations of language, wherever and
however such encounters may be understood as occurring.
Indeed, the encounters with God to which Christian faith testifies, focused
supremely here in the inhomination of the eternal Son, but identified also in
the reading and interpretation of Scripture, in sacraments and other liturgical
action, and more widely amidst our multiple engagements with the phenomena
of a shared world, are always mediated at some point and in some manner by
a concomitant presentation of ‘flesh’. This is part and parcel of what poet and
painter David Jones refers to as a ‘predicament of being human’,4 the fact that our
distinctive creaturely circumstance is one straddling the spheres of the material
and the non-material,5 holding them together and mediating the realities of the
one to and through the forms of the other. For creatures of this sort, in other
words, matter matters. It is not incidental, but modifies and shapes and grants
distinctive texture to our engagements with non-material realities (whether these
be creaturely, or divine). The flesh, far from constituting an inconvenient conduit
for the transmission of essentially ‘fleshless’ ideas or feelings from A to B (ideally
without either significant loss or pollution),6 is itself complicit in and contributory
to the meanings we discern and make and share together in the world as God has
created it, and as the sort of creatures he has made and calls us to be.
The wider claim here is not a peculiarly Christian or even a peculiarly
theological one of course; but it assumes particular significance and gains far
deeper resonance when situated adjacent to Christian faith’s most fundamental
and distinctive claim – namely that God’s own Word addressed to humankind is
never a logos asarkos, but from first to last an enfleshed word, a claim which I
take the doctrines of the resurrection and ascension to be intended emphatically
to underline.7 The incarnation is no mere expediency or temporary theophany, but
3
Brown, 132, cf. 20.
4
David Jones, Epoch and Artist (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 166.
5
For reasons bound up directly with issues raised by Brown and treated in this
chapter, I prefer ‘non-material’ or ‘non-corporeal’ here over ‘spiritual’, popular use of the
latter term nowadays tending to blur the distinction between that which has identifiably to
do with manifestations of God’s Spirit (i.e. pneumatikos in the Pauline sense) and realities
of other sorts. See Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the
Letters of Paul (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 28–32.
6
As, for instance, in some forms of modern idealism, and aesthetic theories shaped
by them. See further Trevor Hart, ‘Through the Arts: Hearing, Seeing and Touching the
Truth’, in Beholding the Glory, ed. Jeremy S. Begbie (London: Darton, Longman and Todd,
2000), 8–15.
7
In light of the patristic distinction between a logos endiathētos and a logos
prophorikos in the divine life, questions about the inseparability of thought from language
The Economy of the Flesh 77
an abiding reality within the triune life of God, flesh situated now at the Father’s
right hand for all time, and mediating any and every approach we care or dare to
make to the throne of grace.
The cross-over between distinctly theological claims of this sort and wider
theories about human language and its workings seems to me to be potentially
very rich. Such cross-over lies at the heart of the volume with which we are
concerned in this chapter, though direct treatment of the doctrine of the incarnation
as such is rather more slender there than one might expect. There is, I shall suggest
duly, a clear Christology in the book, but the incarnation is not its primary focus.
Consistent with Brown’s approach in the two preceding volumes, it is the category
of ‘sacrament’ instead (in its by now familiar extended sense) that for the most part
structures and informs the exploration undertaken.
It is true of our human words too that they cannot eschew the flesh but must
ever assume it and remain incarnate within it, whether that be the actual material
substance of acts and outputs of utterance and inscription, or the mental images
which present themselves (mostly unbidden) to the mind’s eye, as words bear
meanings reaching beyond their own immediate sensory form and location. At
one level Brown’s concern is identifiably with the ‘sacramentality’ of words
in this wider sense, quite apart from any specifically religious or theological
consideration – viz., with their nature as signs marrying the material and the non-
material dimensions of creation (what the creed refers to as ‘things visible and
invisible’). But, as in earlier volumes, his concern is finally always with questions of
a more ultimate sort, and with a definition of ‘sacrament’ which lies closer, at least,
to its more precise ecclesial domain of use, tracing a positive organic connection
between the two. Could it be, he asks, that the phenomena of speech and writing
as such (words uttered and written, heard and read), or certain sorts of things
done with words, might themselves (i.e. quite apart from and prior to questions
or claims about their appropriation by divine acts of revelation) be or become the
occasion for or constitutive of experiences of a distinctly ‘religious’ sort or ‒ less
anonymously and impersonally phrased ‒ an encounter with the generous God
who is everywhere present and always desirous of being known?8 Brown’s answer
to the question is, as by now we might expect, a positive one. In particular, he
argues, the power of acts of verbal poiesis to make mystery and meaning ‘rhyme’
in our engagements with the world9 puts us in a place experientially where such
and the entanglements of language itself in the world of matter compel further reflection,
perhaps, on the coherence of the image of a logos asarkos as such ‒ i.e. a divine word or
thought formulated already within the immanent dynamics of the divine life (remaining as
yet to be expressed ‘externally’) not thoroughly implicated, at least by way of anticipation,
in the creaturely and historical order. See G.L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London:
S.P.C.K., 1952), 123.
8
Brown, 110.
9
‘Metaphors do after all both affirm something to be the case and yet refuse complete
identification and closure.’ ibid., 22.
an encounter is at least far more likely, albeit not inevitable. Thus, consistent with
his broader conviction that ‘revealed religion builds on natural religion rather than
wholly subverts it’,10 Brown attends to wider insights from the side of poetics to
help the Church understand both how those outside its boundaries may yet be
granted an experience of God without necessarily ever darkening its doors and,
equally importantly, how its own peculiar uses of and engagements with words
(especially poetic words) in liturgy, preaching, prayer, the reading of Scripture,
hymnody and so forth, might be rendered more fully fit for purpose than they so
often are.
Metaphor, Modesty and Mystery
As the title of his book proclaims, it is with ‘mystery in words’ that Brown’s
proposals concerning the sacramental capacities of language are most closely
bound up. As he acknowledges, all words have a charge of mystery clinging to
them, though we often forget or choose to ignore the fact.11 In so far as words
have to do with reality, not remaining trapped within self-defining and tautological
systems of meaning (as ‘some form of internal play’),12 but pointing to and
suggesting that which transcends and resists capture or containment by them, they
experience what can be construed either as a shortfall or a surplus in semantic
terms, depending on the perspective adopted. Thus, even our most prosaic and
precise use of words is haunted in some measure by an inability to speak the world
fully into presence for us.
The religious overtones of the language of semantic ‘presence’ are familiar
and anything but accidental. ‘The age of the sign’, Derrida claims, ‘is essentially
theological’.13 For its part the strategy of ‘reading without end’, of abjuring
finalities of meaning is, George Steiner reminds us, a defining feature of the
religion of Judaism, and he traces deconstruction’s ‘crisis of the word’ directly back
to a religious (and in itself wholly proper) impulse to venerate the transcendent
and inviolable status of the ‘holy text’.14 Mistaking elusiveness for absence,
though, or perhaps secretly preferring the narcotic of the textually secondary
and semantically penultimate to ‘the often harsh, imperious radiance of sheer
presence’,15 deconstruction ‘dances in front of the ancient Ark’ in a manner that is
‘at once playful … and in its subtler practitioners … instinct with sadness. For the
10

Ibid., 1.
11

Ibid., 44, 66.
12

Ibid., 46.
13

Cited in George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything In What We Say?
(London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 120.
14
See ibid., 40–49.
15
Ibid., 49.
dancers know that the Ark is empty’.16 Steiner’s own response to the putative crisis
is to revisit the mystery in words, finding here instead precisely an index of a deep,
complex and rich reality lying beyond us, irreducibly ‘other’ than ourselves, and
eluding the reach of our language. The most appropriate (indeed the only possible)
way forward for those who would continue to use and to interpret words, he urges,
is a disposition of trust, respect, and risk-taking – wagering on the capacity of
language to put us in touch with and so disclose aspects of a world which yet
remains transcendent and ultimately mysterious.17 This wager on ‘real presences’,
he argues, is itself viable only on the basis of another – the supposition (equally
unsusceptible to demonstration) of God’s own intrinsically elusive presence
in, with and underwriting it all,18 a claim distinct from but wholly consonant with
Brown’s own case in which the trajectories of significance are traced, as it were,
contrariwise – from meaning (and mystery) as we find them evident in words, in
the direction of God.
If, properly speaking, mystery attaches to any and every use of words,
nonetheless the quotient of mystery varies significantly with different uses of them.
And it is in more explicitly and self-consciously poetic uses, such as metaphor and
catachresis, where words find themselves compelled to function beyond the borders
of what Janet Soskice calls their ordinary ‘domain of application’19 and doing
work other than that for which they are ordinarily considered fit, that the quotient
of mystery is set at its highest. Such words strike us precisely as something out of
the ordinary, at first glance even improper, though (if the metaphor is a good one
rather than the mere arbitrary redistribution of predicates) the sense of impropriety
is short-lived, giving way sooner rather than later to what Ricoeur refers to as
‘the air of rightness that certain more fortunate instances of language … seem
to exude’ despite their evident peculiarity at first blush.20 Yet the putative fit is
indeed an unfamiliar one, and we generally have to live and work with it for some
time before its deeper reaches open themselves up, gradually modifying our sense
of what counts as ‘ordinary’ in the first place. The more profound and striking
16
Ibid., 122.
17
Cf. Brown, 66.
18
See, e.g., Steiner, 3, 229. For a critical response to this latter claim see Infolf U.
Dalferth, Becoming Present: An Inquiry into the Christian Sense of the Presence of God
(Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 43–8. The step in Steiner’s argument here is aided (though hardly
required) by a use of the term ‘transcendence’ to refer variously to God’s distinction from
the world and the distinction of the world in its turn from human users of language and
from language itself. The elusiveness of the relevant presence in each case is apparently
understood in terms of analogy rather than any more direct relation.
19
Janet M. Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1985), 64–5.
20
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation
of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny and others (Toronto and Buffalo: Toronto
University Press, 1977), 239.
the image, the longer it takes for familiarity to harden its surface,21 obscuring the
depths of mystery that it continues to suggest, exploration of which may well
‘reorganize our habitation in reality’.22
The words of the poet, Brown suggests, are deliberately and unashamedly
dense and open-ended, resistant to over-determination or premature closure
of meaning.23 They are so, of course, not because poets are bloody-minded or
cussed individuals, but because the texture of reality as the poetic eye grasps it is
at once deeper and more complicated than our workaday modes of apprehension
and speech ever acknowledge. The poet jolts us, causing us to ‘stand and stare’
at the world,24 to pause and look again, and again, rather than moving quickly
on, content that we have seen all and understood all. Thus, as Ricoeur observes,
the heuristic and the creative often stand and fall together in our engagements with
the world, rather than being found at opposite ends of the epistemic spectrum.25
We cannot handle such words quickly and easily. They force us to tarry with
them, to linger over them, to ‘chew on’ them,26 returning to them again and again,
and even then remaining unsatisfied, convinced that there is more yet to be had.27
Meanings, Rowan Williams reminds us, do not happen all at once but take time,28
a circumstance which the poet’s image makes palpable. The very oddness of the
poetic image draws attention to itself (to its ‘flesh’) in a manner which at first
blush may seem ostentatious, even self-important, but finally is not so. The initial
invocation to ‘look at me’ gives way precisely as we do so to a self-emptying,
pointing beyond itself to a rich surplus of meaning which is by no means its
own and which it makes no claim to fathom. The mystery at the heart of words,
we might say, is contingent on the mystery at the heart of things, on the poet’s
glimpsing it, and on the power of his image to suggest it.
This ‘kenotic’ disposition of the image, though, and its deliberate wandering
in the borderlands of mystery ought not to lead us to underestimate its epistemic
21
E.g., in the process whereby it may become ‘lexicalized’, accepted as the ‘literal’
or primary use of the term. See ibid., 290–91.
22
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23.
23
The poetic image, of course, comes in forms other than metaphor. Brown, though,
concentrates on metaphorical uses of words in particular, and we follow him in this
concentration.
24
Cf. W.H. Davies’ poem ‘Leisure’: ‘What is this life if full of care/We have no time
to stand and stare?’
25
See, e.g., Ricoeur, 239, et passim. Cf. also the account developed in Mark Johnson,
The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
26
Brown, 72.
27
A potentially ‘inexhaustible presence’. See ibid., 60–61.
28
Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (Harrisburg,
PA: Morehouse, 2005), 137.
capacities. Intelligibility and mystery, Brown insists again, belong together, and
arise together most fully and obviously in the well-crafted metaphor.29 Such images
provide us with a language in terms of which to speak and make sense of newly
glimpsed realities, new ways of experiencing the world, new ways of ‘modelling’
it. But they do so in a manner which is entirely honest about just how little, as
well as how much, it knows and can say, refusing any simple identification of its
statements with states of affairs, and complicating the kataphatic suggestion that
‘it is’ with the implicit apophatic reminder that ‘it is not’.30 In this sense, as Colin
Gunton suggests, the indirectness of metaphor is perfectly suited to the sort of
epistemic modesty that befits any ‘realist’ account of the world and our knowing
of it.31
For Brown, though, the importance of the verbal image lies not just in its
fusion of intelligibility and mystery, but in its power to provoke a sense of mystery
or to draw us into an experience of mystery in which heart and will, as well as
intellect, are fully involved.32 The mysteries to hand may themselves be purely
creaturely ones but, as we have already noted, for Brown even such experiences,
mediated through poetry, may render us in turn more receptive to or open out onto
mysteries of a more ultimate sort, the mystery from which all earthly mysteries
take their name.
The tragedy of Christianity, Brown argues, lies in its failure so often to
recognise this, overlooking the intrinsic power of the verbal images shot
undeniably through its own Scriptures, liturgies and hymns, and rushing instead
to pin definitive meanings down. In a well-intentioned but misguided effort to
get its head fully around the realities with which faith must reckon, the Church
has so often committed the sin of reductionism, missing the semantic excess with
which such words are naturally and deliberately freighted by their human and,
we might presume in relevant cases, their divine author. As a consequence, rather
than furnishing a rich imaginative habitus for faith’s indwelling and exploration,
a wooden literalism renders the images flat (insisting that ‘this is that’), their
meanings killed, shrink-wrapped and labelled for easy classification. In the words
of one Protestant poet, ‘the Word made flesh is here made word again’, and all
sense of mystery ‘impaled and bent’ on a ‘logical hook’.33
If this is at one level a malaise bound up with the intellectual dispositions
of modernity, Brown insists that, despite the congruence between mystery and
semantic indeterminacy, those postmodern initiatives which seem to want to
29
Brown, 8.
30
See Ricoeur, 255.
31
See Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality
and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1988), 39. Cf. Chapter 1 above,
18–25
32
See, e.g., Brown, 6–7, cf. 55.
33
From ‘The Incarnate One’ in Edwin Muir, Edwin Muir: Collected Poems (London:
Faber and Faber, 1960), 228.
confine us finally within the endless labyrinthine play of language are likely to
serve us little better, allowing all sense of genuine presence effectively to evaporate
or haemorrhage away instead of (with modernism) murdering in order to dissect.34
Brown’s prescription, therefore, is a deliberate rediscovery and recovery of the
power of acts of verbal poiesis within the Church, refusing to rein the imagination
in too soon, being willing to trespass beyond familiar meanings and even familiar
images, pushing further down the semantic trails to see where they may lead
us, and willing to be surprised and discomfited as often as we are affirmed and
encouraged by where we end up.35
Mystery, Order and the Logos
As we have already had reason to observe, far from being incompatible with
order or present only in inverse proportion to it (so that concern for either would
inevitably be involved in a constant tug of war with concern for the other), for
Brown a sense of the mystery of things belongs properly together with order and
each must be permitted to qualify our concern with the other. Too much mystery
or too much explanation, without this vital qualifying counterpoint, is something
to be avoided at all costs, ending up inevitably in one of the twin sand traps of
reductionism and sheer obscurantism.36 So, a due sense of mystery has to do not
with the absence of order, but perhaps with recognition of a certain complexity
of order which eludes our capacity to plot or fathom it completely, or else the
simultaneous possibility of more than one meaningful way of ordering things
within the field of perception. A dialectic may and must be maintained between
explanation (the way of affirmation) and the modesty of the way of negation. And
again the structure of metaphor, with its deliberate interplay between elements of
kataphasis and apophasis, provides a fitting medium, meaningfulness and mystery
being glimpsed together in the same moment. There is an intriguing resonance
here, too, with Kant’s account of the experience of beauty as something generated
by a dynamic ‘play’ between the understanding and the imagination which remain
locked in a sort of unresolved but intensely pleasurable tango: a sense of genuine
‘orderliness’ glimpsed in the artefact, but one the seductive particularity of which
remains finally mysterious, resisting any and every attempt to subsume it under
any concept.37
Brown, 66. On modernism’s rationalistic subjugation of the imaginative and poetic

34
in favour of literal and allegedly more reliable modes of thought and speech see helpfully
Gunton, 1–25.
35
Cf. esp. the penetrating and at times provocative discussion of Christian hymnody
in Brown, 73–109.
36
Ibid., 33.
37
‘Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object
without the presentation of a purpose.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner
The mystery attaching to the poetic image, Brown suggests, in fact has
two dimensions, being capable simultaneously of deepening and broadening
our experience, suggesting both an inexhaustibility and a deep underlying
interconnectivity as facets of the shared reality we indwell.38 The inexhaustibility
of the image has to do first with the fact we have already noted, that any image can
only take us so far and no further into that reality, always suggesting more than it
can show; but it also has to do with the polyvalence of many images, which are
capable of drawing our imagination fruitfully in more than one direction at the
same time.39 On the other hand, the image’s distinctive modus operandi is one
that points to and evokes an underlying interconnectivity between things, unifying
experience by associating the apparently unlike,40 generating new wholes where
we had never perceived them before, and thereby modifying the contours of what
we take reality itself to be. In Mark Johnson’s phrase, the poet’s metaphor so often
discloses a ‘novel order … which yet makes sense’, fusing the creative impulse
with the heuristic.41 In related vein, Owen Barfield speaks of an original semantic
unity familiar to the ancients, but which homo analyticus has long since forgotten
in his passion to classify and define, today’s acts of poesis (linguistic and other
sorts) thus being tantamount to the rediscovery of that deeper order which binds
the cosmos together.42 Such moments and experiences of recognition, Brown
argues significantly, may initiate and be taken up into experiences of a properly
religious sort, opening out onto (and opening us up to) the divine reality from
which this deep order ultimately proceeds.43
At this point, Brown’s insistence on the immanence of God not just in the world,
but in ‘the mystery at the heart of words’, is undergirded by an appeal to Christian
appropriation of the Stoic logos doctrine, and thus (his wider preference for the
category of ‘sacrament’ not withstanding) to Christology, albeit a Christology as
yet unmodified by any particular reference to the incarnation. Thus it is ‘the Logos
that permeates all of creation and so provides the foundation for things unlike to
be illuminatingly compared, as well as things like’,44 holding intelligibility and
mystery closely together. Furthermore, the poet’s play with words, by drawing
us into a sense of the world’s residual mystery draws us more fully too into that
S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), 84. Cf. also the discussion in the
Translator’s Introduction on liv–lix.
38
Brown, 46ff.
39
Ibid., 7, 49.
40
‘(P)oetry’s truth comes from the perception of a unity underlying and relating all
phenomena.’ C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), 34.
41
See Johnson, 162. Cf. Ricoeur’s observation that metaphors ‘are “appropriate” …
to the extent that they join fittingness to novelty, obviousness to surprise’. Ricoeur, 238.
42
Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and
Faber, 1952), 85–9.
43
Brown, 46–7.
44
Ibid., 72.
‘larger mystery’ of which it is part, the same ‘inexhaustible presence’ who was in
the beginning with God and was God. If we would but recognise the fact, the Logos
may still be seen ‘permeating logoi rather than being quite separate and distinct’,45
so that ‘metaphor can itself provide us with an experience of divine presence’.46
The assumption in all this appears to be not just that God is mysteriously
present, but that his peculiar mode of presence here as Logos (in the mysterious
intelligibility of things grasped by the poet and evoked in his images) is
fundamentally continuous (part of a continuum) with that created mystery and
with our experiences of the same, so that to have experienced the mystery lying
‘at the heart of words’ is in some direct sense already to have had an experience of
the divine Logos, or at the very least to have been drawn to the threshold of such
an experience, the one being in effect a natural extension or concomitant of the
other. But can and should we envisage any such continuity between aspects of the
creaturely and the uncreated source of all things? Certainly, theologies wishing to
emphasise the radical otherness of God with respect to the world, not construing
God as absent, but as, in Samuel Terrien’s phrase, an intrinsically ‘elusive presence’
in the world’s midst unless and until he chooses to disclose himself,47 are likely to
find any such suggestion highly problematic. The greater the emphasis placed on
God’s presence-as-radically-other, the more problematic the putative step up or on
from an encounter with ‘mystery in words’ to the mystery of the creative dabhar
of the Lord seems to become, related though they undeniably are and must be.
Brown’s central concern in this book is to commend to us the essential openness
and mystery of the verbal image. But if, as Aquinas insists in the Summa, God is
‘more distant from any creature than any two creatures are from each other’,48
then surely in using any of our terms to speak of this God we must reckon with
a stretching of them across difference on a scale to which even the most striking
and surprising and penetrating of mundane metaphors cannot aspire? The image
of ‘mystery’ itself, though, cannot be exempt from this consideration. If God is
indeed properly referred to as ‘mysterious’, then presumably he is so in a sense
which precisely ruptures and breaks open our more familiar uses of that term,
rather than lying comfortably within its ordinary ‘domain of application’. To
suppose that creaturely mystery is of a sort fundamentally like or continuous
(let alone identical) with divine mystery, so that our experience of the one (as
it arises in the use of words or elsewhere) naturally entails or provokes or opens
out onto experience of the other, not only raises some deep theological questions,
it also seems to risk a prescription with respect to the term’s meaning (rendering
45
Ibid., 43.
46
Ibid., 55.
47
Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).
48
Summa Theologiae 1a.13, 5. As noted in Chapter 1, while this statement occurs in
the case in contrarium, Aquinas’s responsio endorses it as a ground for rejecting univocal
predication, while denying that equivocation is the only logical alternative.
‘mystery’ itself less mysterious as it were) of a sort which Brown elsewhere

counsels us forcefully against.
Earthing the Order of Signs
In the trio of volumes beginning with God and Enchantment of Place, Brown’s
major concern is to reckon with ‘a God who is engaged with the whole of life’, and
not shackled within the boundaries of the Church.49 It is to this end that he urges
upon us the ‘reinvigorated sense of the sacramental’50 as a ‘major, perhaps even
the primary way of exploring God’s relationship to our world’,51 and repeatedly
expresses resistance to the idea that the substance of Christian revelation should
be appealed to in order to set the appropriate standards of consideration and
measurement.52 Here, though, I want to suggest that in making the case he wishes
to make about the nature and importance of the verbal image for Christian worship
in particular, a more sustained engagement with the biblical and classical doctrine
of the incarnation would actually reap considerable dividends, affording insights,
perhaps, for a wider poetics, and leaving the Church, wherever it lapses into
the sort of bloodless literalism Brown describes so well, with little excuse and
nowhere to hide – hoist clearly at the last with its own doctrinal petard.
At the close of his essay on ‘Art and Sacrament’, David Jones cites the
suggestion of Maurice de la Taille that, in the events of the Upper Room on
Maunday Thursday, Good Friday’s Victim ‘placed Himself in the order of
signs’.53 But should we not say precisely this of that logically prior act in which
God himself took flesh and in the very act of taking it transformed it, investing
it with significance stretching inexhaustibly beyond the limits of its creaturely
form? Was it not here, in the conception by the Spirit in the womb of the Virgin,
in other words, that God placed himself first and most decisively in the order of
signs, a gratuitous act of flesh-taking and meaning-making beginning with the
annunciation and opening out through all the particulars of a life lived, through
cross, resurrection and ascension, onto eternity at the Father’s right hand? Such a
claim – that the incarnation itself sees God entering the order of signs – is not of
course incompatible with talk of the Logos indwelling certain of our human logoi,
but it is a different sort of claim and, for Christians, a different order of claim with
some far-reaching implications.
49
David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid., 6.
52
See, e.g., the criticism of von Balthasar and Frei in Brown, God and Mystery in
Words, 2–3.
53
Jones, 179.
Unless we suppose the circumstance of the incarnation to be not just unique

(which, I take it, is basic to the Christian understanding of what happens here)
but wholly anomalous, it seems reasonable to enquire whether this putative act
of divine sign-giving – God becoming ‘incarnate’ as it were not just in the stuff
of human nature but thereby in the stuff of human culture too – might itself have
something important to contribute to our understanding of that which it appropriates
(and thus must presuppose) but also transforms in doing so. Just as we must allow
our understanding of our own humanity to be informed by consideration of what
it amounts to here, so, mutatis mutandis, might we not learn something too about
the nature of words and their relation to the flesh precisely by pausing to take
stock of what occurs in this singular act of divine poiesis? I realise that this could
be construed as an act of intellectual imperialism, theology wading in arrogantly
with the answers to questions no one (even within the Church, let alone outside
it) is asking. That’s not the intention here at all. I take fully on board Brown’s
insistence that Christian theology may have much to learn about all manner of
things from wider and more general discourses, and should take the trouble to shut
up and listen to find out what they are saying. But given the suggestive overlap
of categories operating here (divine and human sign-giving, words which assume
flesh) it seems to me incumbent upon Christian theology at least to ask the question
and see whether, from the resources of its own distinctive tradition, it may have
something to contribute to the conversation, if a conversation is indeed what it is.
In her discussion of the trope of metaphor, Janet Soskice describes it as
conjoining a plurality of associative networks (ones typically held to be wholly
distinct and even mutually exclusive, so that the conjunction is always striking
and surprising) through the unity of a common grammatical subject.54 What
are we to make, I wonder, of the fact that the structure of the poetic image thus
described draws tantalisingly close to the logic of hypostatic union as the Church
has traditionally articulated it, where God, for all his overwhelming otherness, is
nonetheless conjoined strikingly and surprisingly with our humanity through the
posited unity of a common grammatical subject?55 In related vein, Brown refers us
to Frances Young’s account of the way in which the apostle Paul ‘overlays’ texts
and images from the Old Testament’s distinctive witness to God with references
to Jesus, so that ‘they are all seen at once and so are seen differently’,56 both
See Soskice, 49–51, 64–6.

54
According to the formulary of the Council of Chalcedon (451) Christ is to

55
be ‘recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division,

without separation … coming together to form one person and subsistence’. See Henry
Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (London: Oxford University Press, 1947),
73. On ‘person’ (hypostasis) as ‘grammatical subject’ see Rowan Williams, ‘‘Person’ and
‘personality’ in Christology ’, Downside Review, no. 941976.
56
Frances Young, ‘From Analysis to Overlay: A Sacramental Approach to
Christology’, in Christ: The Sacramental Word, ed. David Brown and Ann Loades (London:
SPCK, 1996), 50.
now ‘occupying the single space that is Christ’.57 In the resultant metaphorical
synthesis, Young observes, ‘distinctions are not removed, but a union which is
a sort of coinherence is perceived’.58 In each circumstance, unity and distinction
are understood to be maintained without loss, as one reality accommodates itself
in giving another, strikingly different, reality to be known, and our understanding
of both terms in the relationship is modified in the process. Metaphor, it would
seem, is a peculiarly apt tool for approaching the mystery of divine flesh-taking.
What, then, if anything, may be learned about the poetic image if now we shift our
perspective, and attend to Christology as such?
Whether we think in terms proper to the later, philosophically informed account
of a shared being (homoousia) between God the Father and the incarnate Son, or
follow the New Testament’s suggestion that, as Richard Bauckham puts it, Jesus
‘shares in the identity’ of the God of Israel,59 the demands of the incarnational
claim seem to be essentially the same ones. First, there must be no Ebionite
reduction of what confronts us here to the wooden ‘letter’ of Jesus’ humanity in
its empirical aspect.60 Otherwise, its true meaning dies in our hands, ceasing to
refer us beyond itself and so draw us into the rich mystery of God’s own life and
being, ‘reorganizing our habitation in reality’ in the process by transforming our
understanding of the God who gives himself to be known in this way. Of course
we may not (and may never) fully understand what it means to insist that God
himself is here present doing and saying and suffering these things, but to fail
to grasp the nettle of this insistence, settling instead for an account at once more
secure and less disturbing in intellectual terms, is precisely to miss its point and, by
surrendering the ‘inexhaustibility’ of the sign, to render Christology itself and as
such (i.e. as a discourse that presumes and insists that there is something here over
and above the ordinary creaturely circumstance to be reckoned with and accounted
for) otiose. Yet, in our bids to respect the deeper significance of Christ’s humanity,
opening ourselves to the trajectories of its kenotic reference beyond itself, there
can nonetheless be no letting go or losing sight of the particular shape which the
history of divine flesh-taking assumes. Rather, we must linger with it, return to it
again and again, seeking its universal and divine significance only in and through
the mediations of its particular concrete presentations (the actual things Jesus is
presented as doing and saying and suffering in the gospel accounts), and not in
spite of these. We must refuse to succumb to the temptation if not to abandon
the flesh altogether, nevertheless to move far too quickly to very high levels of
57
Brown, God and Mystery in Words, 56.
58
Young, 50.
59
See Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other
Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2008), 1–59, 182–253, et passim.
60
For a discussion see the essay by Stephen Sykes in J.P. Clayton and S.W. Sykes,
eds, Christ, Faith and History: Cambridge Studies in Christology (London: Cambridge
abstraction in our reckoning with it.61 As in the order of signs more generally, so
here, supremely so, in Rowan Williams words, ‘the flesh is more than it is, gives
more than it (as flesh) has’.62 But, as I argued in Chapter 1, we shall not discover
the ‘more’ either by dealing with its surface aspect alone, or by treating it merely
as a convenient stepping-stone onto something else altogether.
The verbal image, Brown suggests, is that use of words ‘nearest to the visual’ in
its mode. For its part, the economy of the divine Word in the incarnation, we might
say, is more like a verbal image than any other form of utterance, a ‘showing’
as much as a ‘saying’, and one the intractable ‘fleshiness’ of which is essential
to its functioning. It holds mystery and meaning together in a constant creative
tension, affording multiple concrete presentations that we can grasp and work
with imaginatively, while yet resisting every attempt to determine it completely,
remaining forever ‘open-ended’ on its God-ward side.63 In these respects (and
perhaps in many others remaining to be elucidated) a ‘semiotics’ of the incarnation
reinforces precisely the sorts of points Brown himself wishes to make and to urge
upon Christian readers in particular. Brown acknowledges this in passing, but in
practice makes surprisingly little of it, preferring to rely instead on the category of
sacrament to provide his theological ballast (and in doing so, inclining unhelpfully
in the direction of an account of the Word’s incarnational presence itself grounded
in terms of a notion of ‘sacrament’ rather than vice versa).64
Let me be clear. I am not here positing the need for or even the possibility of a
wider poetics founded decisively on the contingencies of divine sign-giving in the
incarnation. That is an intriguing suggestion deserving of further consideration,
but it lies beyond the scope of my particular purpose here.65 Nonetheless, for the
61
See Richard Bauckham, ‘Christology Today’, Scriptura 27 (1988): 20–28.
62
Williams, Grace and Necessity, 61.
63
So, e.g., Thomas F. Torrance, God and Rationality (London: Oxford University
Press, 1971), 186–7. See above, 25–7
64
See, e.g., Brown, God and Mystery in Words, 52. The relation is explicitly suggested
in this form in the rationale for the aforementioned collection of essays Christ: The
Sacramental Word, edited by Brown and Ann Loades. My own inclination is to suppose that,
while analogies between incarnational and sacramental presence are certainly appropriate
and helpful, they can also be misleading. The modes of divine presence alluded to in each
case remain quite distinct, and the relevant order of priority is significant. ‘Sacrament’,
at least as used to refer to Christian Baptism and Eucharist, denotes something wholly
secondary to and contingent on the reality of the incarnation itself, sacramental ‘presence’
being a communication of Christ’s humanity to the believer by faith, and only thus a sharing
in his own intimate communion with the Father in the Spirit. See above, 47–51
65
Clearly, to treat the incarnation merely as an instance (albeit a singular instance)
of a wider species of lexical phenomena would be intrinsically problematic, overlooking
all that is unique to it and makes it what it is. Perhaps, though, the act of divine flesh-
taking might be held to entail a sanctification of the peculiar structure and intrinsically
under-determined nature of the economy of sign-giving, and thus be of wider significance
precisely in the radical uniqueness of its circumstance. See below, 89–96 The greatest
Christian, it seems to me, the urgent imperative for exploring further the peculiar
way of the image and for reckoning with the likelihood that doing so may enhance
rather than detract from the quality of our engagements with God in worship,
preaching, liturgy and so on, lies finally not in any general human poetics (whether
understood ‘sacramentally’ or not) but unequivocally and uncomfortably here, in
the Church’s central claim that at the centre of our dealings with God we have
to do precisely and only with an enfleshed Word and not some other sort (if any
other sort be supposed finally to exist). That God deals with us thus when he deals
with us most centrally and decisively, that is to say, encourages faith to take more
seriously the presence (indeed the proliferation) of other ‘enfleshed words’ within
the wider economy of Christ and the Spirit, and to respect their proper nature
instead of demonstrating what Barth condemns as a ‘chronic lack of imagination’
in its reception and appropriation of them.66
Whether this encourages or provides warrant for the supposition that, apart
from such acts of divine sign-giving, something about the structure and nature
of the poetic sign itself and as such may instigate an encounter with this God, or
that ‘the experience of the divine in ordinary poetry’ might be ‘not fundamentally
different from the experience of Christ in the words of the liturgy’67 is, of course,
a very different sort of question. It is one which itself compels an ever deeper
grappling with the question precisely why the Logos who in the beginning spoke
the world into being and was henceforth ever present in its midst, nonetheless saw
fit in the fullness of time to enter it again, this time in a radically new way, taking
his place on the stage of history for an embodied performance the like of which the
world had and has otherwise never seen.
Words, Bodies and Mystery
I want in the remainder of this chapter to reckon with some rather different (though
related) theological considerations attendant upon the nature and interpretation
of language. In some clear sense language itself, as well as its particular uses,
arises within the world not just as a peculiarly human phenomenon but as the
direct outcome of human acts of making. Older theology, to be sure, speculated
about a prelapsarian Edenic Ursprache, a symbolics possessed of ‘direct divine
etymology’, given to Adam so that he might re-enact the divine mechanism of
theological obstacle to developing such a case seems likely to be the disputed issue of
the so-called analogia entis, but this must be reckoned with sooner or later in any serious
theological venture. See above, 38, 63.
66
‘(Einer) krankhaften Phantasielosigkeit’. See Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik
III/1 (Zollikon-Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1945), 87.
67
Brown, God and Mystery in Words, 3.
creation.68 In the tradition preserved by Dante, for instance, having spoken the
world into existence, God then helpfully supplies humankind with the lexicon and
grammar in terms of which sense must subsequently be made of it, a linguistic
circumstance obtaining globally down to the building of the Tower of Babel, and
surviving in some manner in the tongue of the ancient Hebrews.69 In its own rather
different way – obviously without appeal to any such divine inception of language,
and with a very different set of implications – contemporary social and linguistic
theory, too, draws our attention to a fundamental ‘givenness’ of language for any
particular participant in it, emphasising its function as an all-embracing symbolic
habitus into which we are born (we do not choose it or make it for ourselves), and
which serves in significant measure to construct and shape not just our sense of
the world as a reality external to ourselves but (since even self-consciousness is
shot through with language) our sense of ‘self’ too.70 Rather than consisting in a
tool box from which tools may freely be selected by a pre-linguistic self to express
pre-linguistic meanings, there is thus an important sense in which we are always
already in the hands of language rather than vice versa.
Nonetheless, there is more and other to be said than this. One might reasonably
offer a reading of Gen. 2 in which the responsibility invested in Adam by God
is not as the first user of a divinely donated dictionary (matching each signifier
appropriately to its pre-ordained signified), but as one invited to give a name
to each creaturely form and presence, an act of onomatothesia in which human
language itself is forged and extended – and with it culture as a distinctly human
dimension – and the process of creation extended rather than merely re-enacted.71
Be that as it may, and notwithstanding the insights of theory concerning culture’s
role as a given heritage and matrix with and within which we must each live and
work, viewed from another angle it is in any event clearly the case that, as they
arise and develop in history’s midst, languages and cultures are indeed themselves
the products of human action, and our participation in them is of a deliberate (and
thus responsible) as well as a tacit sort. We do things within and with and to the
order of signs, even if the things we can choose to do are themselves constrained by
that order, and may in turn escape the limits of whatever intentions we may have in
acting as we do. Our linguistic responses to the world, in other words, are subject
See Steiner, After Babel, 60–61. See further James H. Stam, Inquiries into the
68
Origin of Language: The Fate of a Question (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), Graham
Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 35–52.
69
See Ward, 35.
70
See Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983),
130.
71
This is the reading offered in the eighteenth century, for instance, by Vico,
according to whom Adam was granted both the capacity and the responsibility of naming
things poetically in accordance with their natures. See Giambattista Vico, New Science,
trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin, 2001), 158.
to the dictates of human will in a way that our bodily responses generally are not.
This is not, of course, incompatible with the suggestion that language (i.e. language
as such, not just some putative long-lost primal tongue) is part of God’s own
‘giving’ of a world to his human creatures. As the eighteenth-century philosopher
Hamann observes in a classic treatment of the question, within the context of
a theology of creation everything is ultimately of divine origin, and divine and
creaturely agency ought not in any case to be treated as alternative explanations,
but understood frequently as coinherent and concurrent.72 Thus, language may be
acknowledged as a fully human product without compromising the claim that,
precisely as such, both its ultimate provenance and its continuing development
and unfolding fall within the dynamics of God’s creative action. Nonetheless, such
acknowledgement introduces a distinctive new theme – viz., that this particular
gift (the human capacity for acts of signification and culture) cannot possibly be
received passively, but implicates us in conditions of responsible use apart from
which it may be experienced not as blessing but as something else altogether.
The picture is complicated further by the fact that, whatever may be imagined
to have pertained in the instance of the Edenic vernacular, we find ourselves
situated now in any case in a very different economy – one lying both east of Eden
and after Babel. The order of signs as we indwell and participate in it in history’s
midst, we discover upon reflection, is a remarkably fragile structure, being at
once indirect, unstable and plural. Semiotic theory has often cast these features of
language in an essentially negative light, identifying them as a function of human
fallenness rather than human creatureliness as such, and thus something (from a
theological perspective) to be struggled with, overcome and finally redeemed from,
rather than something to be celebrated, enjoyed and redeemed in promised new
creation of God.73 That there are direct and illuminating parallels to be drawn here
with attitudes towards the body is no accident, since it is precisely the materiality
of the sign (the necessary embeddedness of language itself in our embodied
existence) around which much of the perceived fragility clusters. An account of
the mediation (and construction) of reality as proper to the human condition rather
than accidental to it, though, points us in a rather different direction.
George Steiner observes that it follows logically from the appeal to a primal
divine donation of language that originally all linguistic signs applied ‘naturally’,
directly and easily to their referents, rather than arbitrarily as semiotics after
72
See ‘The Last Will and Testament of the Knight of the Rose-Cross’ (1772) in
Johann Georg Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, trans. Kenneth Haynes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 96–110.
73
Thus, Derrida observes, for the tradition of ‘metaphysics’ ‘The sign is always a
sign of the Fall’. Jacques Derrida, Of grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 283. See further Kevin Hart, The
Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 3–21.
Saussure typically insists.74 Thus ‘(t)he tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass;
a light of total understanding streamed through it’.75 Whatever we make of this
suggestion, it is apparent that our own linguistic circumstance is rather different,
language, as it were, interposing itself across the board ‘between apprehension
and truth’,76 and denying us the opportunity to step momentarily altogether outside
its framework in order to judge the authenticity of its mediations, any more than
we can step outside our bodies to validate theirs. At this point, then, a parallelism
between sense and sensibility holds good, each mediating reality to us in a version
shaped and edited decisively by its own capacities and categories. Perpetuating
the parallelism momentarily, the only total leap out of language, Steiner insists,
is death77 (though those who hope for the resurrection of the flesh, of course, may
properly complain that even this is to presume too much). Such indirectness of
access, though, may be construed in different ways. It may be judged negatively
and as a problem (and thus a distinguishing feature of any symbolics situated ‘after
Babel’),78 breaking our relation and preventing our immediate access to ‘reality’,
or distorting and warping such access as we have, ‘trapping’ or ‘imprisoning’ us
in its own systems. (Compare the familiar post-Cartesian suggestion that we are
in some sense ‘trapped’ in our own bodies, and cannot be sure that anything exists
beyond the testimony furnished by them.) But again, we have to enquire about the
meaningfulness of such talk (and again the parallelism of our sensory responses
to the world is instructive). Exactly what sort of reality would it be, we might ask,
that was not ‘significant’ for us in one way or another in our encounter with it? But
if significance is bound up by definition with signification – that is, with systems
of meaning-making – then a world bereft of the mediations of language is just as
impossible for us to imagine as one from which the constructive contributions of
our bodies and brains had been entirely erased. In either case, what would remain
would not be a humanly recognisable world at all. Viewed in this light, language is
what makes human experience of the world possible at all, enabling us to inhabit
reality as a meaningful environment, to extend ourselves out into reality and
‘make sense’ of it.
That language is itself also a product of responsible human activity certainly
has serious implications for reckoning with this ‘covenant’ between word and
74
Steiner, After Babel, 61. For a helpful summary of Saussure’s central positions see
Eagleton, 96–7.
75
Steiner, After Babel, 61.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid., 116. So, again, ‘Only death is outside discourse’. Steiner, Real Presences, 88.
78
So Steiner: ‘Babel was a second Fall, in some regards as desolate as the first.’
Steiner, After Babel, 61. The punishment of Babel, though, was that of the fragmentation
and subsequent plurality of human language. There is no biblical suggestion that I am aware
of that an immediate relation to the world through a wholly transparent language was ever
part of ‘unfallen’ human existence. The suggestion rather presupposes that indirectness is
a problem (a function of sin) rather than a necessary part of the human condition as such.
world, but it does not of itself undercut or fatally compromise it. On the contrary,
Colin Gunton, as we have seen, suggests that the indirectness of the linguistic
relation (as distinct from the odd notion that language somehow ‘mirrors’ reality
or provides a 1:1 mapping of its coordinates) tends in itself to engender an
appropriate humility in the face of reality, respecting its mystery and otherness
rather than squeezing it into the particular set of containers we happen to have
available to us. Here we notice the flip-side of the important recognition that
language shapes reality; reality, for its part, returns the compliment, reshaping and
‘making new’ our language as we find ourselves compelled to modify it so as better
to fit new insights, new intuitions, new thoughts. Metaphor, Gunton suggests – the
most indirect of all linguistic devices – far from distancing us from reality, is
thus in actual fact the most natural and fitting tool for a realist epistemology to
wield, ‘cutting the world at its joints’ to gain epistemic access, while at the same
time maintaining a disposition (habitus) of openness, receptivity and humility in
the face of it, eschewing the idolatrous identification of statements with states of
affairs.79 The point is a wider epistemological one, but we can hardly fail to notice
in passing that such a disposition is exactly what we might suppose fitting for
creatures in a world received consciously as a gift from God’s hand.
As well as being indirect in their relation to reality, signs are also an inherently
unstable medium of engagement with it. Far from being fixed and secure, their
meanings are slippery, difficult to pin down precisely, and prone to constant change.
Language, Steiner avers, is in reality ‘the most salient model of Heraclitean flux’.80
If, as linguistic theory after Saussure insists, meaning is not mysteriously immanent
within signs (the particular material markers inscribed on paper or uttered aloud
have no necessary connection with what they are taken to signify) but largely a
matter of cultural and historical convention (quite different signifiers may and do
evoke the selfsame ‘signified’ – horse, cheval, Pferd, equus, ἱππος, and so forth),
then the meanings of signs are in significant measure a function of their distinction
from and particular relation to all other signs within the synchronic system.
(Saussure appeals to the analogy of the ‘meaning’ a piece on the chessboard has
at a particular point in a game, something determined wholly by its relation to
other pieces on the board as identified within the given rules of the game.) Thus
the meaning of ‘horse’ is bound up with the fact that it is not ‘house’ or ‘morse’.
But the concentric circles of differentiation involved here spread out in principle
to the thresholds of the system itself, each sign in turn defining itself in terms of its
difference from those aurally or graphically proximate to it, the buck of meaning
79
See Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and
the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1988), 27–52. The image of ‘cutting
the world at its joints’ (among other things in Gunton’s account) is borrowed helpfully
from Richard Boyd, ‘‘Metaphor and theory change: What is ‘metaphor’ a metaphor for?’’,
in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993).
80
never quite stopping or settling anywhere, being ‘the spin-off of a potentially

endless play of signifiers’.81 And, if we turn to a dictionary in order to help us define
the meaning of a particular word within a given language, what we are confronted
with are more words of the same sort, words, that is to say, which themselves
come laden with questions about their own (potentially diverse) meanings. We
can look these up in the dictionary too, of course, but, absent our capacity to
step outside language as a medium, the process is a potentially endless one.82 At
this point we might naturally suppose speech to have the advantage over writing,
appealing to the speaker to clarify precisely what they mean by their words; but
this is to overlook the fact that thought itself is already mediated to consciousness
by language, and all the complicating elements of the materiality and ambiguity
of the sign (its difference from that which it ostensibly represents) are thus already
present in the speaker’s ‘inner’ formulation of utterance. Meaning, it seems, is
never fully present, never ‘pure’ or ‘immediate’, but always incarnate in the flesh
of language, and hence necessarily ‘deferred’, unarrestable in principle, flickering
ever further down the corridors of signification whenever we seek to put our finger
on it, and no matter how far we choose to pursue it.
Diachronically, too, meaning refuses to stand still for observation and
classification. Here, too, meaning is a function of ‘difference’, of the permeation
of ‘presence’ by that which is absent from or other than the sign itself and as
such.83 Language is a temporal process (the meaning of words is always ‘in a
state of being constituted’,84 constantly unfolding rather than something fixed in
amber), the sense of every word in a sentence, and each sentence in a paragraph
or a conversation being held in suspense, deferred, to be modified by what is yet
to come.85 ‘For the words to compose some relatively coherent meaning at all’,
Eagleton suggests, ‘each one of them must, so to speak, contain the trace of the
ones which have gone before, and hold itself open to the trace of those which are
coming after’.86 Furthermore, it belongs to the nature of signs as such that they
must be capable of repetition. In order to function as signs at all, they cannot be the
linguistic equivalent of the ‘single-pad’ codes employed by military cryptographers
(the point of which is precisely to resist decipherment in absolute terms).87 Yet
this very capacity for ‘iterability’ and empirical resituation, combined with the
sign’s material difference from that of which it is a sign, renders it intrinsically
vulnerable to an uncontrollable shifting and slippage in its meaning.88 Each fresh
Eagleton, 127.
81
See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism

82
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 95.

83
Ibid., 94–5.
84
Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, 26.
85
Eagleton, 128.
86
Ibid.
87
Cf. Steiner, Real Presences, 54.
88
See Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, 12.
use of a word or a phrase in language is haunted by the history of its previous uses,
so that in the strict sense the same words can never mean exactly the same thing
twice.89 But the precise context of inscription or utterance modifies the sense of
signs in other ways too, Steiner observes, each contingent circumstance invoking
a distinctive set of associations, both public and private in nature (we speak ‘at the
surface’ of ourselves, he observes, beneath which lies a wealth of subconscious
associations ‘so extensive and intricate that they probably equal the sum and
uniqueness of our status as an individual person’).90 In this sense, no particular
context of utterance or writing, hearing or reading can completely circumscribe or
‘totalise’ the meaning of signs; by virtue of their nature as signs, they are always
open to change (susceptible to what ‘befalls’ them as Derrida puts it),91 and a
surplus or ‘remainder’ of potential meaning thus haunts their every use.
For all these reasons, language is a medium shot through with levels of
‘undecidability’ or ‘alterity’, making it an unstable and in some ways a risky rather
than a secure environment in which to dwell. And the ‘hermeneutic motion’92 of
interpretation, therefore, is as vital to our indwelling of the world as the systole
and diastole of cardiac function, or the rhythm of inhalation and exhalation in
respiration. The latter, of course, are themselves signs of organic health rather than
pathological, and, although the instability of signs may bring its obvious problems
and challenges (we may wish it were otherwise), it, too, might be viewed as a
natural feature of what it means to be human in the world, and cast in a positive
rather than a negative light. In other words, the absence of any pure congruence
between the material sign and that which it signifies (and the consequent need for
us constantly to interpret and explore possibilities of alternative meaning), rather
than being construed as a distinctly postlapsarian circumstance, might instead
be understood as part of what it means to be embodied beings in a world which
refuses reduction to materiality alone – part of the ‘predicament of being human’
as David Jones has it. As Kevin Hart notes, this is really Derrida’s fundamental
point: ‘full presence’ (a meaning unmediated by signs and hence determinable in
an absolute manner) is neither a prelapsarian ideal nor an eschatological hope, but
an illusory goal.93 Presence is always elusive, yet this is not a matter of the failure
of signs to do their work (of signs in a ‘fallen’ economy), but rather a structural
feature built into language as such by virtue of its materiality. On this view, we
should no more bewail the constraints attendant upon our indwelling of systems
of signs (and hope for their eventual removal) than we should bewail those arising
from our circumstance as embodied beings situated at particular points in time
and space. The parallels are precise, and more than accidental, and those who
espouse a theology centred on the incarnation have good reason at least to applaud
89
Steiner, After Babel, 18, 24.
90
Ibid., 181.
91
See Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, 19.
92
See Steiner, After Babel, Chapter 5.
93
Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, 14.
the challenge Derrida presents to the residual Platonism of some accounts of our
relationship to language (many of which would apparently prefer to strip it of its
‘flesh’ altogether in pursuit of an immediate engagement with a pre-existent logos
asarkos, a move challengeable on Christological grounds alone).
In any case, we must not overstate the negative aspects of the circumstance.
The simple fact of our ability to communicate meaning more or less effectively
across and within languages in a plethora of everyday life contexts bears witness
to the fact that, for the most part, we have more than sufficient determinacy to
work with.94 On the other hand, again, the fact that meaning is ultimately (but
only ultimately) unfathomable, and frequently less determinate than we should
like, demands of us not just the hard work involved in acts of interpretation, but
a sense of respect, mystery and humility in the face of reality, rather than the
arrogant assumption that, with a set of state-of-the-art precision linguistic tools
at our disposal, we can capture it and pin it down definitively for inspection and
analysis. And, what from one angle appears as instability, of course, may, from
another, be construed instead as potential richness, flexibility and adaptability, the
protean capacity of language to accommodate itself to a reality which is itself
constantly on the move, permitting words, texts and utterances to speak to ever
new contexts, rather than remaining shackled to one precise circumstance of use,
again holding out the promise of an as yet unborn surplus of meaning to be had in
a world still brimming with unrealized possibility.95 Again, such richness, depth
and mystery attendant upon things is precisely what we might expect, perhaps,
in a world received as a gift from God’s hand, and not ‘givenness’ of a precise,
literal and wooden sort, a world patient in the final analysis of only one ‘reading’.
It is precisely the religious and theological significance of richness and depth of
this sort that David Brown is concerned to draw our attention to, and to this extent
at least, despite the significant differences of outlook and the critical responses
articulated earlier in this chapter, I find myself wholly in agreement, and grateful
for the signal challenges and suggestions to be found in his work.
94
As Eagleton notes, it is absolute grounds for our habitual uses of words that Derrida
and his followers are concerned to deconstruct, not determinate meaning of any sort and
at any level. (Eagleton, 144, 148.) Clearly, in practice the levels and sorts of certainty
necessitated by and available in different existential circumstances are in any case very
varied.
95
Cf. Steiner, Real Presences, 42. See further Trevor A. Hart, Faith Thinking: The
Dynamics of Christian Theology (London/Grand Rapids: SPCK/Eerdmans, 1999), 107–62.
Chapter 4
The Grammar of Conversation1
In this chapter my concern will be with the role of imagination in fostering and
enhancing community in the midst of difference. I shall also be tracing some
theological models for understanding and underpinning the ethical migration of the
particular ‘self’ into the territories of otherness, to the end of a respectful and loving
co-existence. I use the word ‘loving’ quite deliberately here, as it seems to me that it
is this notion, properly understood, that sets Christian identity decisively apart, being
itself set apart from its sickly and altogether less costly cousin, ‘tolerance’. To tolerate
one’s neighbour, let alone the alien in the midst or the enemy, is something altogether
different from loving them, though the differences would need to be spelled out in
each particular instance rather than in the abstract. And it is unconditional love for
the other, rather than mere tolerance, to which Christians are committed as the basis
of human community, for they worship a God whose very nature is love, and who
draws us unconditionally into a communion in which we love because we discover
ourselves already to be loved by him.
That initiatives fitted to furnish community in the midst of difference are
desperately required in a world which, as well as being ‘global’ and ‘globalised’
in many respects, is also paradoxically at once more plural in intellectual, cultural
and religious terms, hardly needs saying. What may need saying is that Christianity
has resources to offer precisely out of its own particularity as a tradition of belief
and practice, a tradition springing from the news of a radical transgression of the
biggest and most daunting boundary of all – that between God and the world. These
resources, I shall argue, are consonant (or at least resonate) with wider insights
concerning the nature of what Martha Nussbaum dubs the ‘moral imagination’, and
the particular merits of literature in forming and enriching our capacity for this.
Furthermore, they suggest that knowledge and communion are best fostered and
sustained not by eliding or marginalising difference or particularity, as in some
forms of pluralism or dialogue between those allied to different ‘identities’,2 but
precisely by allowing difference in all its fullness and integrity to be maintained,
shared and (within the appropriate constraints of law) practiced.
Of course, difference obtains at various levels of personal existence – between
individuals, between social and economic groups, between nations, between ethnic
1
This chapter has been reproduced by kind permission of T&T Clark, an imprint of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
2
On the nature of ‘identity’ and the origins of the contemporary concern with it see,
helpfully, Zygmunt Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2004).
groups, between religions, between civilizations, and so on. It all depends where we
choose to draw the relevant boundaries. And we must avoid reifying or absolutising
difference in unhealthy or dangerous ways. The idea of that which is ‘other’ is
susceptible to all manner of abuse socially and politically. As a social construct,
‘otherness’ has much to answer for in the long history of man’s inhumanity to
man, being grist to the mill of every form of tribalism. So acknowledgement of
the genuine and significant differences that do exist must always take place within
the context of a countervailing recognition of what is held in common (even when
that cannot always easily be specified), and the recognition of the ‘other’ first and
foremost as a fellow human being made (according to Christians) in the image and
likeness of God and heir to the covenant promises of God. Properly speaking, of
course, the category of ‘otherness’ (like that of ‘identity’) arises only against such a
backdrop, being dependent upon the logically prior apprehension of that which is the
same. The human other is identifiable as such only because the relevant difference
is shot through something easily recognisable as humanity. This chapter was drafted
during a trip to India, amidst a set of linguistic, religious, social, economic (and
culinary) circumstances utterly remote in all sorts of ways from that of St Andrews
in Scotland, despite the lingering heritage evident here and there of its colonial past.
Even in the thick of all this difference and otherness at its most intense, bewildering
and potentially threatening, though, glimpses of a shared humanity would show
through repeatedly, often in the most unexpected and surprising ways, making the
hard work of seeking a shared space within which to coexist and cooperate and
flourish both possible and intrinsically worthwhile. Yet respect and love for others,
Iris Murdoch suggests, are rooted not merely in the affirmation of self by discovering
what corresponds to it, but finally in curiosity about what is other than ourselves, and
in a healthy imaginative engagement with and response to that otherness.3 A literary
allusion already suggests itself as appropriate here: in reading a novel, we find that
we can only understand it because what it tells us about are things that in some sense
we already know and can grasp or relate to, while we only want to read it because it
tells us about things we do not already know, and which we thus find interesting and
worthwhile engaging with in a bid to enlarge the scope of our inner world.
If we are to engage concretely and constructively with ‘the alien in our midst’,
then questions arise about how best this might be facilitated. Complicating the
picture further, of course, is the extent to which difference arises already within
the limits of the individual self, such that each of us is aware of being ‘other’
to ourselves, or of having a fragmented series of ‘identities’ which, within the
substance of our inner experience, refuse to add up to a neat, coherent and
convenient single ‘I’. For the purposes of this chapter, though, I am compelled
to pass over that discussion as one to be attempted on another occasion. Here I
See, e.g., Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage,

3
2003), 214f.; Cf. her discussions of ‘attention’ and an ‘other-centred’ conception of truth in
‘On “God” and “Good”’ and ‘Against Dryness’, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on
Philosophy and Literature (London: Penguin, 1999), 287–95, 337–62.
The Grammar of Conversation 99
shall concentrate instead on the relationship between whatever ‘self’ we take to be

identified and bounded by (though not confined to) the particular human body in
its extension through time, and that which exists beyond those bounds and must
be engaged with courtesy of the body’s complex mediations.4 Later in this chapter
I shall suggest one model to facilitate a constructive, curiosity driven encounter,
especially between adherents of different religious groups, but first we must deal
further with some of the categories already touched upon.
Otherness, Curiosity and Community
In his essay ‘The knowing of the other and the community of the different’,5 Jürgen
Moltmann first suggests that ‘without knowledge there is no community, and
without community no knowledge’,6 and then proceeds to identify two distinct and
opposing principles regarding the challenge presented by this circumstance. First
there is the principle that ‘like is only known by like’, which Moltmann traces back
to Aristotle’s Metaphysics (II, 4, 1000b) and dubs the principle of analogy. In this
case, he observes, what is genuinely other cannot be known at all, and our acquisition
of knowledge about the world, the other person, or God himself amounts only to
‘the continually reiterated self-endorsement of what is already known’.7 As regards
knowledge of God, this principle supposes that the human self is already ‘divine’,
otherwise it could not recognise that divine reality which transcends it.8 Thus, an
epistemology founded on this principle reflects a monistic ontology, whether this
leads in the direction of the deification of the human knower or the reduction of God
to a projection of the creaturely imagination. In personal, social and political terms,
the conviction that ‘like is only known by like’ tends either to be indifferent towards
or anxious about that which is different (and thus forever alien) in the other, rather
than curious about or fascinated by it. It typically seeks to neutralise and domesticate
otherness, either by force (some version of exclusion, colonialism or globalisation),
or by the more humane but equally disrespectful mechanisms of a ‘dialogue’ intended
to establish a shared denominator of ‘human’ experience and outlook, and secure
homogeneous cultural expressions of the same, thus marginalising and belittling the
very things that grant particular identities their value and colour.9
4
On identity and selfhood see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992).
5
See Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 135–52.
6
Moltmann, 135.
7
Ibid., 139.
8
Ibid., 140.
9
It might also be noted that such putative ‘shared’ perspectives frequently end up
looking very much like an assemblage of fundamental and particular convictions held
by the dominant party or power group within the plural exchange, and thus amount in
The second principle Moltmann identifies is that according to which ‘other is

only known by other’ (the principle of dialectic), a model which he also credits
to Greek philosophy (Euripides, Anaxagoras), but for which he finds theological
grounds in the dialectical relationship which occurs in communion between
ourselves and the Wholly Other God. We might add, though Moltmann does not
in this context, the distinctly Christian conviction that in God himself there is
eternal communion between three persons constituted as much by their difference
from one another as by their sharing of a single nature. Triunity, in other words,
is at one level an exemplification of communion evinced in diversity, albeit
one only analogously related to the creaturely circumstance (no two creatures
are consubstantial in the manner that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are properly
confessed to be). Where creatures (and fallen creatures at that) are concerned,
Moltmann notes, our initial experience of that which is different, strange
or new is one of resistance to the self and attendant pain or suffering caused.
Genuine otherness is discerned by way of contradiction and contrast rather than
correspondence, and we quickly sense ‘the claim of the new’ and our need to
accommodate it or adjust ourselves accordingly.10 The point here, of course, is
precisely that knowledge of difference and knowledge of self/same arise together
and dialectically. Knowing ourselves, we are able readily to identify that which
differs from and resists ourselves, and become curious and wonder about the
contours of its otherness. ‘In the others’, Moltmann writes, ‘I do not look at what
is like myself, but at what is different in them, and try to understand it. I can
only understand it by changing myself, and adjusting myself to the other. In my
perception of others I subject myself to the pains and joys of my own alteration,
not in order to adapt myself to the other, but in order to enter into it’.11 It is by way
of such willing subjection and the imaginative transcendence of the established
boundaries of ‘self’ that genuine community rather than artificial homogeneity
can be established and sustained.
Exploring related intellectual territory, but carving the conceptual joint
rather differently, Richard Sennett distinguishes between two modes of human
conversation, each of which he holds to be necessary to securing an appropriate
coinherence of knowledge and community. Each begins with careful listening
to the other, since ‘(people) who do not observe, cannot converse’.12 From this
attentive beginning, a ‘dialectic’ approach, Sennett argues, sets up a verbal play
reality to a form of colonialism by stealth. Genuinely shared territories of meaning can

only be established or identified when all the differences which divide are taken fully into
consideration and allowed full play, and not despite these.
10
Ibid., 144.
11
Ibid., 145.
12
Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
(London: Allen Lane, 2012), 14, citing Balfour Browne, KC.
of opposites in the interests of a higher synthesis establishing common ground.13

Here, sameness and shared agreements are achieved, but through a process
which attempts first to allow each party to articulate its particular distinctive
convictions. The imaginative disposition demanded of participants is essentially
sympathetic, stepping into the standpoint of the other in so far as this is possible,
and identifying with the other’s perspective, viewing the world for the first time
through the other’s eyes. Only thus, Sennett’s account indicates, will areas of
genuinely shared concern and conviction be identifiable in the midst of difference.
Other life circumstances, though, demand of us a rather different imaginative
capacity and disposition in our relationship with otherness. This Sennett calls the
‘dialogic’ approach, in which difference is approached and explored and mapped
not by acts of imaginative mimesis or ‘identification with’, but precisely by
the self remaining true to itself and its centre of gravity, and viewing the other
from within that familiar perspective precisely as other than ourselves.14 This
imaginative disposition Sennett calls empathic, being the approach demanded of
the interviewer, the doctor called upon to make a diagnosis, or the man standing
on the river bank while another is drowning in the rapidly flowing waters. In each
case it is not by stepping into the other’s shoes that a relevant understanding and
response is achieved, but precisely in the self’s difference from the other. In most
circumstances, though, these prove to be not so much wholly distinct imaginative
performances as overlapping and conjoint ones both of which are needed in some
measure, and which must be maintained in the relevant proportion in a dialectical
interplay in which each informs the other.
Richard Bauckham notes the Christological parallels and resonances with
all this in his illuminating discussion of particularity and universality in the
incarnation.15 On the one hand, in taking flesh and sharing humanity with us, the
Son of God held in common with us all that is shared in our human ‘nature’ and
existence, thus identifying himself with us. Yet, since humanity does not exist as
an abstraction but only in the form of particular human lives lived, this same Son of
God embraced to the full the particularity and contingency of historical existence,
becoming the man Jesus. We would be mistaken, though, Bauckham argues, to
suppose that the redemptive significance of Jesus for each of us consists only in
whatever we happen to hold in common with him and he with us (the basis on which
feminist theology, for example, has sometimes struggled with a ‘male saviour’).
Instead, it is by virtue of a complex interplay of sameness and otherness that Jesus’
redemptive being and action is realised, his ‘universal’ saving significance being
bound up just as thoroughly with the particular and peculiar things he is reported
to have said and done and suffered as it is with his assumption of ‘humanity’ and
sharing of ‘the human condition’. Thus it is precisely the shape of his particular
13
Ibid.,18–19. Readers will notice (and need to bear in mind) the rather different
meanings attaching to ‘dialectic’ in Moltmann’s and in Sennett’s accounts respectively.
14
Ibid., 21.
15
Richard Bauckham, ‘Christology Today’, Scriptura 27, 1988.
character and personhood (whether encountered in first century Palestine or

through the narration of his story in the Church today) which, as it interacts with
others, transforms them redemptively; and the form of his identification with
some (the poor and the downtrodden for instance) differs significantly from his
identification with others (the pharisees and teachers of the law) because their
particularity demands a wholly different response and relationship.
Hermeneutics and the Form of the Personal
Theological and philosophical anthropologies in recent decades have urged upon

us an understanding of human personhood as constituted in relation. So, for
example, philosopher John Macmurray writes: ‘The personal is constituted by
personal relatedness. The unit of the personal is not the “I”, but the “You and I”.’16
For Macmurray, then, as human beings we are not isolated units who, subsequent
to some absolute given ‘existence’ and ‘identity’, choose to enter into relationships
with others. Rather, our existence and our identity is given and shaped in the
complex networks of relationships which we inhere in life, some of which are
obviously closer than others (since the networks may presumably be supposed
to extend as widely as the category ‘humanity’ itself), and some of which are
‘given’ to us at birth by virtue of biological accident, or by virtue of our immediate
social location, and others we choose to enter into, thereby modifying who we are.
Two brief quotations from theologian David Ford reinforce Macmurray’s point:
‘People are all around us, but they are also inside us. … Some of them are so
much part of our identity that they are woven into the texture of our thinking and
feeling. Their voices in us may not be distinguishable from what we habitually
say to ourselves. … To ask “Who am I?” leads straight to the other people who
are part of me. Is there any layer of self where there are no others?’17 And then:
‘We live before the faces of others. Some are there physically, others in memory
or anticipation. We have been formed face to face from our earliest days, deeper
than conscious memory.’18 Not all relationships with others are as close as this
of course, but they are nonetheless part of who we are and exercise an impact,
however slight, upon the shape of our being.
While others shape our identity in this way, however, Paul Ricoeur reminds us
of the irreducible particularity of each human person, a particularity rendered in
part by the unique combination of relationships, experiences, choices and actions
(for identity, he insists, is formed through time in a narrative sequence), memories,
hopes and the rest which contribute to a unique centre of perspective on the world
which is ‘me’ and ‘you’. No one else can occupy this same centre of perspective
16
John Macmurray, Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 61.
17
David Ford, The Shape of Living (London: Fount, 1997), 1–3.
18
David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge
as their own. It is ours. In a sense it is that which, in active relation to other unique
selves, constitutes our ‘self’. And, because identity is constituted and emerges in a
narrative, it is constantly being modified and emerging.19
In his writing on hermeneutics Friedrich Schleiermacher insists that ‘the art
of interpretation’ is necessary not only in the case of ancient or culturally remote
texts, but equally in the case of an encounter with the living voice of the other,
for here, too, the otherness of the other means precisely that the possibility of
misreading or misunderstanding (and thus inappropriate modes of relationship or
response) is universal. ‘In interpretation’, therefore, he writes, ‘it is essential that
one be able to step out of one’s own frame of mind into that of the author’20 or, we
might say, the other. And, whether we are dealing with texts or living voices,
Schleiermacher suggests, the initial mode of procedure must always be the same:
that of a respectful, attentive listening.21 Of course the goal of stepping into the
frame of mind (or in more contemporary terms the ‘horizon’) of the other is, as
Schleiermacher acknowledges, a goal which can never be achieved perfectly by
any human interpreter; it can at best be approximated to. To achieve it completely
would be in effect to become the other and to lose one’s own particularity
in the process, an achievement which, as we have seen, even were we able to
manage it, would be of mixed benefit at best. But the point is that the goal can be
approximated to, and such approximation is the responsibility laid upon ethical
imagination. If we are to understand the others’ perspective, and thereby relate to
them in constructive and life-giving ways, then we must make the relevant effort
required of us to do so. In some cases that effort may be relatively little; in others
it will be quite substantial.
If the sort of imaginative self-transcendence of which I have been speaking
begins with a respectful and receptive listening, this means in the first instance
that it will not allow any ready-made categories or types, or carefully prepared
responses immediately to be brought to bear. Such categories are inevitably based
on generalities and, useful though they may be in due course, can actually prevent
us from hearing what someone is saying to us if we attend to them in the first
instance. Those of us in the Christian Church know all about these ready-made
boxes. We have a whole host of them which we apply to one another, often on the
basis of a relatively short and shallow impression: Evangelical, liberal, catholic,
charismatic, fundamentalist, and so on. Even when others present themselves to
us in terms of such neat labels we have a responsibility to refuse to allow these,
or any combination of them and others, to be determinative of our response and
relationship to them as other. We have to listen (to ‘observe’), and in listening to
try to hear who they are and where they are coming from, to enter as far as we
can into the unique complex of relationships, events, memories, hopes and desires
19
See, e.g., Ricoeur, 113–51.
20
F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts (Missoula:
Scholars Press, 1977), 42.
21
Ibid., 109.
as well as identifications-with (i.e. the larger groups or sets of values which they
identify with) which shapes who they are. And to do this will involve an effort
of imagination in which we transit out from our own way of seeing things, and
attempt to see things for a while from a quite different vantage point, not in order to
become the person who stands over against us as other, but in order to know them
more fully, through such sympathetic identification with them as it is possible to
achieve, and by the way of empathic detachment, attending to their otherness as it
appears to us from our perspective, in order thereby to understand what it might
mean for us, being ourselves, to love them as our neighbour.
In his book Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster draws a distinction between
what he calls ‘flat’ and ‘rounded’ characters in a novel.22 Flat characters are those
whom the novelist forms around a single basic idea or trait, or two or three at most.
In effect their reality extends no further than their identification with these simple
ideas, and need not do so for the purposes of the plot. Round characters on the other
hand are much more complex; we know much more about them, and their narrative
identity is such that they could never be summed up in a single phrase. There is
development, inner-conflict, genuine struggle with the messiness of human life.
We feel that they might surprise us at any moment as we learn more about them.
They resist quick and easy classification. And, of course, they are what makes
most novels worth reading. Well, novels, as Forster suggests, need their share
of flat characters in order to make them readable. If all characters were rounded
out, the novel would rapidly lose touch with its main story line. But life is not a
novel, and no human being is simple. No one can fit neatly into a simple category,
even though we often treat people as if they could and did. To treat them thus is
to pigeon-hole them, to ignore their particularity, their genuine otherness. It is to
fail to treat them as neighbour, and a dangerous failure of moral imagination. Of
course life is too short for us to treat all the people we meet as rounded characters;
but we should never forget that they are rounded characters, and we should beware
of ‘flattening’ those with whom we do have to deal with, just because it is often
easier to do so. As Anthony Thiselton points out, such reductionism and failure of
imagination results in depersonalising modes of relationship (we treat the other
as an object to be classified and ‘explained’ rather than a person with a complex
identity and set of needs to be understood) and in pastoral contexts results only in
superficial and inadequate therapies.23
There is, then, in every act of moral imagining, every attempt to practice the art
of interpretation, a fundamental need for particularity to be respected and attended
to. Both our own particularity and that of the complex ‘text’ or other whom we
are seeking to understand, to whom we are relating, must be taken fully seriously.
It is in the interweaving of the two unique perspectives which are our respective
‘selves’, and the narratives which have shaped these, that a genuine meeting of
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Pelikan, 1962), 75f.

22
A.C. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
23
1995), 54, 75.

persons and the mutuality in which genuine love consists, occurs. In the words of
Ernst Fuchs, in interpretation ‘The texts must translate us before we can translate
them’.24 In other words, the other must draw us out, translate us from where we are
to where he or she is, in order that we may return to our own particular standpoint
bearing understanding with us. But this does not mean that universality or
generality is either unimportant or dispensable. The opposite is the case. Although
we must begin by seeking particularity, and by listening rather than classifying,
it remains true that the effort to attend to the other in its otherness (rather than in
its sameness to us or to others whom we know) presupposes and depends utterly
upon a mesh of common, shared human experience shot through the difference.
Only by appeal to this are we able to travel out from our own particularity at all,
making contact with the other because there is something in common between
us to grant us some footholds on the otherwise slippery and inhospitable slope
of particularity. The extent to which we can already identify with the other, we
might say, is the extent to which we are able to go further and discover the wholly
unfamiliar. The typical post-modern denial of anything called ‘human nature’ or
of commensurable spheres of common human experience thus paralyses every
attempt at imaginative self-transcendence and risks leaving us trapped within the
isolation of our own ways of seeing and doing things.
This does not mean beginning with the general and only subsequently moving
on to particularity (not, at least, in temporal terms: the logical order may actually
be like this since, as we have already seen, the apprehension of difference depends
upon a sense of sameness). This is because in reality universality and particularity
are woven together in the texture of the human. Universal or shared dimensions
of experience and behaviour are nonetheless incarnated in radically particular
moments and aspects of complex lives, and we cannot separate the two out without
tearing those lives apart in unnatural ways. It is this perichoretic intermingling
of universality and particularity alone which grants us access to the life of the
other as humanly significant. Thus, if we return again briefly to Schleiermacher,
we discover that he finds it necessary to identify two distinct but inseparable
movements in the bid to understand the other. In addition to the dialectic between
‘self’ and ‘other’, there is another to be maintained between what Schleiermacher
calls the methods of ‘divination’ and ‘comparison’. ‘Each method’, he writes,
refers back to the other. The divinatory is based on the assumption that each person
is not only a unique individual in his own right, but that he has a receptivity to the
uniqueness of every other person. This assumption in turn seems to presuppose
that each person contains a minimum of everyone else, and so divination is
aroused by comparison with oneself’.25 Generality and particularity, then, far
from being opposed to one another, are mixed together and require one another,
being mutually self-constitutive and self-defining. Understanding, an ethical
24
Cited in A.C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Biblical Hermeneutics (Peabody, MA.:
Hendricksen, 1992), 64.
25
Schleiermacher, 150.
imagination, thereby involves a constant toing and froing between these two poles,
the shared and the particular, the familiar and the alien. The general or ‘shared’ is
necessary as a familiar backdrop in order for us to identify particular versions of or
departures from it; while particularity requires a certain sort of generality in order
to be significant and meaningful to others. It is because we ‘contain a minimum
of the other’ (even though we cannot abstract that ‘minimum’ out from particular
events and experiences, and cannot always specify what it is) that the imaginative
motion out into the realms of the unfamiliar is possible. Moral imagining, we
might say, is inherently metaphorical. In discovering the like in the very midst of
the unlike, it is able to resonate with it, to speak of it, and thereby to begin to plot
its very otherness.
In his poem ‘Swallows’26 R.S. Thomas offers us a suggestive image for what
George Steiner refers to as the ‘hermeneutic motion’.27 Our encounters with
otherness are pictured as endless migrations out from our particular ‘perches of
bone’ only to return, eventually, with our own particularity somehow modified and
enhanced, identifiably the same and yet somehow different. Steiner’s preferred
metaphor is that of a voyage of discovery and invasion of the world of the other,
a voyage from which, like the imperial armies of old, we return bearing exotic
trophies of our success, importing into our own world cargo which may infect
it with alien and uncomfortable ideas and ways of seeing things, and telling
colourful tales of the remarkable things we have seen and experienced so far from
home. Such images draw attention to the nature of every bid for understanding
of the other as essentially a journey of imagination in which we are granted the
capacity to transcend the boundaries of our own particularity and to engage with
otherness in ways which plot something of its difference, before finally returning
to ourselves with our horizons broadened and our ‘self’ in some sense more
rounded and complete through the venture.
For this reason it might be argued that a training in the ‘art of understanding’
ought always to incorporate engagement with imaginative literature of one sort
or another as a means to the cultivation of a disciplined imagination. For, what
a great novel or poem does, in effect, is precisely to take the reader on journeys
of imaginative self-transcendence, to lift us out of ourselves and relocate us
temporarily somewhere else; to show us things we had not seen before, or familiar
things now looking quite different because viewed from an unfamiliar perspective.
The poet (using the term for the moment inclusively for all creative writers)
enlarges our vision, tracing patterns, threads and connexions which stretch out
beyond the horizons of our known world, and leading us out (as we trace them
with him) into the complex structure of things until, at last, we find ourselves
in quite unfamiliar territory, our imagination stretched, sometimes to breaking
26
R.S. Thomas, No Truce with the Furies (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books,
1995), 49.
27
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 312f.
point.28 Upon our return we discover that, while we are the same person we were,
our personhood has nonetheless been transfigured in some way by the experience.
We have seen and tasted more of reality than we had previously, and the texture
and colour of our own world presents itself differently as a result.
Literature is, according to Ricoeur, ‘a vast laboratory for thought experiments’
in which, under carefully controlled conditions, we are subjected to all manner
of possible (and sometimes impossible) variations on human experience and
outlook.29 As we read, we effectively leave our ‘selves’ behind in suspended
animation and move out to become, in our imagination, someone other than
ourselves. Sometimes we ‘become’ the central character about whom we are
reading, identifying ourselves with their actions and experiences. The form of the
novel facilitates this more fully than any other because (especially through the
assumption of the voice of the grammatical first person) its narrative is able to
put us inside the heads of its characters until we know them as well as – and
occasionally better than – they know themselves. The author can achieve this
imaginative transition in her readers because she is the creator of her characters
and responsible for fashioning their identity. She can fill out the picture from her
position of authorial omniscience and omnipotence vis-à-vis the world of the text,
granting us opportunities for indwelling alien particularities to a degree which
could never arise in our real-life encounters with otherness.
C.S. Lewis, reflecting on the benefits of such imaginary migration between
nominatives concludes that in and through it we seek and are granted ‘an
enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. … We want to see
with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as
well as with our own. … The man who is contented only to be himself, and therefore
less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through
those of others. … Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining
the privilege, of individuality. … in reading great literature I become a thousand
men and yet remain myself. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in
knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do’.30 Of
course our being is enlarged more, and we are rendered more fully ourselves, by
encounters with a real rather than an imaginary other or others. Furthermore, we
must tread carefully in pursuing the parallel; literary migration is undertaken in
order to secure pleasures and benefits directed towards the self who reads, whereas
the exercise of moral imagination in real life is, if not entirely selfless, nonetheless
concerned for the good of the other as well as the self. The vital point, though,
is that both are encounters which occur through an imaginative engagement, and
the imaginary or fictional, by virtue of its controlled and deliberate nature and
the possibilities of a more intimate becoming which the narrator’s omniscience
28
See C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), 85f.
29
Ricoeur, 148.
30
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1961), 139–41.
affords, can equip and train us better to handle our engagements with the actual
others who face us daily in our living.
Culture and Conversation
Given all this, my concern in the rest of this chapter will be with a number of
different frontiers along which engagement or exchange between distinct territories
of meaning may arise or reasonably be sought. If, for the sake of convenience
(but more than convenience alone) we shift our ground from the domain of
one metaphor to another, and speak instead of distinct ‘voices’ and the sorts of
exchange which may arise or be sought between them (argument, interrogation,
testimony, ‘small talk’, or whatever), the potential sites for such exchange are
identifiable at various levels of our personal encounter with that which is other
than ourselves – i.e. as those possessed of ‘voice’ and called upon variously to
speak. For our purposes here we might think most immediately of different voices
(and exchanges between them) arising within and between literary texts, within
and between different intellectual disciplines, and within and between distinct
human cultures. So far as mapping the complex web of relations between self
(or same) and other is concerned this is, of course, merely to scratch the surface,
but doing so will provide us with plenty to reflect upon in the space available to
us. My particular concern in what follows is with the sort (or sorts) of exchange
that may prove beneficial in inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural or cross-religious
exchanges in particular, and the tone or register of voice most befitting constructive
participation in these.
What, though, of theology? In Western treatments of our subject (even
thoroughly ‘secular’ ones) it is still commonplace to be reminded that all human
utterance arises ‘after Babel’. The allusion, of course, is to the prehistoric occasion
when, according to the canons of Jewish and Christian scriptures, God deliberately
scrambled the signals of human speech (in a calculated act of judgement and grace)
to prevent the completion of an essentially Promethean technological project and
its potentially disastrous outcomes. The consequent fracturing of discourse and
‘scattering’ of linguistically mediated perspectives is variously weighed, but pious
Christian readings of the Pentecost story and technical manuals of hermeneutics
alike tend mostly to view it eschatologically, i.e. as a ‘fall’ into language the
redemption of which (whether divinely or philosophically accomplished) will see
diversity and plurality duly displaced by a Utopian immediacy and concordance
of meaning.
Towards the end of the chapter I shall suggest that from the standpoint of
Christian faith there are good theological grounds for supposing otherwise,
resisting the idea that the effoliation and enrichment of human speech lies in the
direction of any effective reduction of it to a monoglot, monotonous semantic
singularity. Since, in any case, we do not find ourselves as yet unambiguously in
the kingdom or even on its threshold, our imaginative attempts to ‘make sense
of’ others, venturing across boundaries of one sort or another, are for the time
being bound to involve acts of translation and interpretation, and vulnerable to
all the fragility and indeterminacy typically attendant upon these (constraints of
which those who have kindly undertaken to translate this chapter are no doubt
already and painfully all too aware!). Again, I shall suggest duly that there are
grounds within the grammar not just of theology but of Christology in particular
for supposing that this circumstance ought not to be construed in wholly negative
terms, and for reimagining Pentecost, therefore, as a symbol not of the erasure of
otherness but of the transcendence and fulfilment of the self/same as it risks itself
in relationship with the other and for the other’s sake.
In a 1959 essay the English philosopher and political theorist Michael
Oakeshott observed (against the grain of the linguistic philosophy of the
day) that not all human utterance is cast in (or should be measured by virtue
of its capacity to imitate) the tones of one privileged mode, that is, the mode
of practical activity or argumentative discourse.31 Significant human speech,
he insists, may be found in other modes less immediately concerned with the
exigencies of survival, and more suited, therefore, to a descriptive, reflective or
even a playful exploration of the realities and possibilities of the human world
as we find it. Among such ‘authentic’ yet strictly speaking non-combative and
impractical (technically ‘useless’) idioms of speech Oakeshott lists ‘science’,
history and ‘poetry’ (the latter here a metonym for literature and creative
writing more widely), and we might add other distinct voices participant in the
speech of human cultures including, no doubt, ‘theology’ as and when it arises.
And, Oakeshott suggests, the place where all these voices (and others within
or alongside them) come together and engage with one another is itself most
helpfully pictured and approached not as ‘an inquiry or debate among inquirers,
about ourselves and the world we inhabit’, but as a conversation, a quite different
sort of linguistic and semantic context, and one in which different conventions,
expectations and rules of engagement apply.
What sort of thing is it, then, that makes a conversation a conversation, as
distinct from any other sort of ‘language game’ or thing done with words? An
extended account lies beyond the scope of this chapter, and in the interests both of
clarity of expression and economy of words, therefore, I will resort here to citing
Oakeshott himself at greater length than I might otherwise be inclined to:
In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate;

there is no “truth” to be discovered, no proposition to be proved no conclusion
sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another,
and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all
speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course,
31
See ‘The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’ in Michael Oakeshott,
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 488–541. The
essay was originally a Ludwig Mond Lecture delivered in the University of Manchester.
a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden

to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the
conversation itself does not compose an argument. … In conversation, “facts”
appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were
made; “certainties” are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact
with other “certainties” or with doubt, but by being kindled by the presence of
ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally
remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round
one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another
to fresh exertions. … (I)n it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge
each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts
their being assimilated to one another.32
The central point, then, is that a conversation of the sort Oakeshott intends, is
essentially plural, open-ended and in a proper sense playful; we join it for the sake
of participating in it rather than to secure some predetermined (economically or
politically driven) goal or output, and any benefit we gain from doing so (besides
the enjoyment of the conversation itself and as such) arises serendipitously, from
the unpredictable interplay or collision of difference. Anyone may speak, and may
do so on their own terms, the relevance of their utterance being measured not
by some external standard but by the course of the conversation itself alone, an
‘unrehearsed intellectual adventure’.33 There is no arbiter, no hierarchy of voices,
and strictly speaking no conclusion; conversations do not ‘conclude’ anything
as such, and nor do they have an obvious terminus, instead being in effect put
on hold, capable of resumption on another occasion. As civilised human beings,
Oakeshott argues, we are heirs to just such conversations of which, in their public
guise, ‘cultures’ are the natural bearers and sustainers from one time and place to
another. But conversations of this same sort go on unnoticed, too, within each of us
as voices (some identifiably our own, others infused and metabolised, others still
coming from who knows where) each say their piece in a lively internal exchange
that generally looks nothing like a scripted or carefully marshalled dialogue, and
frequently moves in unpredictable and sometimes disconcerting directions. And,
of course, conversations can be deliberately hosted, bringing voices from different
orders of discourse into the same space in order to see what happens, where the
exchange will go and what might arise out of it.
This model of a conversation between voices offers a quite distinct mode of
engagement from that of the sort of ‘dialogue’ so often pursued between groups or
traditions, familiar not least (and the preferred model of encounter) in the sphere
of inter-faith or inter-religious relations. While there are clear similarities, the key
differences seem to me to be very significant, and to resist any easy reduction
of the one to the other. A dialogue generally has some clearly specified goal or
Ibid., 489–90.
32
Ibid., 494.
33
outcome (even if that is something as vague and general as ‘enhanced mutual

understanding’), and very often is directed specifically towards establishing
increased levels of shared agreement around core issues. Furthermore, those
involved in dialogue of this sort are generally mandated with representing their own
tradition and its perspectives, charged with responsibility for not compromising
the official party line on fundamental issues on the one hand, while seeking to
determine the highest common denominator on the other (often a task demanding
a high level of diplomatic skill). The dialogues themselves tend to be staged and
carefully structured rather than open-ended and spontaneous, and are far from
‘unrehearsed’ – on the contrary, to a certain extent they are necessarily pieces
of more or less scripted theatre. As we saw in our brief discussion of Sennett’s
notion of ‘dialectic’ above, exchanges such as these are quite capable of taking
into consideration and respecting the particularity of respective traditions, though
it must be admitted that within the theology of religions they have often tended
tacitly to relegate such particularity to secondary and marginal status in the interests
of some supposed generic ‘religion’ or ‘religious experience’. But it is at the level
of the group or the tradition that particularity of perspectives is mostly handled in
dialogue, rather than the individuals involved in such exchanges feeling free to
be themselves (the much more complicated and fluid ‘composite of sentiments,
affiliations and behaviours’34 that makes each one who he or she ‘is’ at a given
point in time) or to sit loose in a playful manner to the expectations of whatever
group(s) he or she generally identifies with. I am not suggesting that ‘conversation’
of the sort that Oakeshott proposes should displace this more familiar model of
‘dialogue’; I suggest simply that it may furnish a vital complement to it, and one
which might bear its own distinctive fruit in the knowing of ‘the other by the
other’, and the establishment of the ‘community of the different’. Additionally,
they entail a form of personal vulnerability in the face of otherness (which is yet
not wholly without power and authority of its own) which seems to me to be
rather closer to the heart of Christian identity than either the ‘fetish of assertion’35
which would drive home its own case at all costs as though that were itself the
highest form of good, or else the slightly insipid models of pluralist essentialism
for which the particular is always inherently soluble in the underlying acids of
shared consensus, and thus ‘identity’ a category finally surplus to requirements.36
34
Sennett, 8.
35
Bernard Williams, cited in Sennett, 18.
36
As Bauman observes, the question of ‘identity’ only arises where ‘belonging’ is
no longer taken to be a simple matter of fate and fact, and where there exist alongside one
another numerous ‘communities of believers’, so that ‘one has to compare, to make choices,
to make these repeatedly, to revise choices already made on another occasion, to try to
reconcile contradictory and often incompatible demands’. Bauman, 11. Pluralism of the sort
I have in mind here seeks to reverse the processes of history and cultural cross-fertilisation,
and finds it difficult to cope constructively with the idea of abiding contradictions or
incompatibilities which must be held onto despite the desire for harmonious co-existence.
I have used the term ‘playful’ of conversations understood in this way, and
in so far as that term severs the connection with considerations of immediate
practical utility or calculable pay-off, it performs an important function. But such
playfulness has nothing to do with mere frivolity, as Oakeshott himself is concerned
to insist. On the contrary, it can be deadly serious; indeed, in a certain sense it
always is, for in order to ‘play the game’ at all we are obliged to put ourselves in
a vulnerable place, a place where risk (to self, and the things we generally take
to be most defining of it) is par for the course, and to pursue defensive strategies
is to spoil the game or at the very least to exclude ourselves from it by default.
For the risk has to do precisely with exposing ourselves to otherness and (for the
sake and the duration of the game at least), sitting loose to the various markers
and security blankets of our own identity, that unique coincidence of perspectives,
images, experiences, associations and dispositions that marks out the particular
space in the cosmos that is ‘me’ or ‘you’. The risk (or danger) of conversation
thus has at least two aspects – first, that we shall fail in our bids to transcend the
limits of selfhood, remaining trapped, as it were, behind the boundaries of our own
particularity, unable to make contact with the other (saying what we mean, being
heard and understood, and hearing and understanding what is being said to us);
and second (perhaps even more disconcerting), that we might actually succeed.
Let’s consider these in reverse order.
Meaning, Reality and Literature
In various writings on the subject, C.S. Lewis (best known to the reading public as
an apologist for Christian faith, but more relevant here as a philosophically-trained
critic of literary romance and mythology) observes that the power of literary or
poetic imagination has in the first instance to do with meaning rather than reality.37
Put succinctly, the fact that we can imagine some state of affairs (that it holds
together or coheres in our mind’s eye) certainly does not lead us to conclude that
any such state of affairs is true, or has some real exemplar in the world. Indeed,
insofar as art is precisely artifice, an ‘aesthetic’ disposition will always be one
in which we remain aware at some level of the difference between the ‘world’
of the work (novel, poem, painting or whatever) summoned forth by the artistic
imagination and the world of our day to day affairs. To do otherwise is to commit
a category error which ruins the effect of the piece for us as art, like the fabled
man who, seeing a dastardly murder about to be committed, leapt from his seat in
the theatre and rushed onto the stage, determined to prevent it. Of course there is a
proper mode of ‘believing in’ which characterises our enjoyment of the artifice, but
it is not the same sort of belief as that which we invest in what we take to be real,
and we are mostly well aware of the distinction between them. The former (what
37
See, for instance, the essay ‘Bluspels and Flalansferes’ in Lewis, Rehabilitations
and Other Essays, 135–58.
Coleridge refers to as a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, and J.R.R. Tolkien, more

positively, as ‘secondary belief) is an enjoyment of meaning without any moral
commitment to the truth or falsehood of the circumstance represented. The skill
of the poet or artist lies precisely in showing us something which, by the manner
of its showing, draws us in and thereby takes our imagination captive, suggesting
a larger ‘world’ or state of affairs in which the particular thing shown (no matter
how outrageous or improbable when measured by other canons of ‘reality’) makes
sense and does not cause us to stumble imaginatively. Of a particularly clumsy
translation of a work of literary fantasy to the stage Tolkien once complained that
it demanded of the viewer not so much that his disbelief be suspended as that it be
hung, drawn and quartered! It is precisely this that, by its skilled suggestion and
evocation of meaning, the successful work of artistic imagination avoids.
Meaning, then, is as such (and as a product of imaginative construction)
separable from questions of reality and truth. And imagination is more concerned
to suggest playfully What if it were thus? than to convince us that in fact it is
(even though it may in fact be). To enjoy a story or a play as such, therefore, is
not to demand that it be consonant with what (on other grounds entirely) one
believes to be true of the material, moral or spiritual orders beyond its borders, but
simply to enjoy the architecture of its meaningfulness, and the experience of being
granted temporary citizenship in its imaginative world. Since he takes reality to be
meaningful in its own way rather than a chaos, Lewis also insists that imagination
is a necessary condition of ‘truth’ just as it is of falsehood. We must, after all, be
able to make a certain amount of sense of something to believe it to be true or
false, otherwise such profession would itself be meaningless.
It seems to me that in the sort of ‘conversation’ described for us by Oakeshott,
the various participant voices are (for the purposes and duration of the conversation)
epistemically resituated in a manner that renders them subject to analysis in
essentially similar terms. They are temporarily shorn of their relationship to
questions of truth or falsity (which, for the purposes of the conversation may not be
presumed, nor demonstrated by appeal to considerations lying beyond the borders
of the conversation itself, placing every voice, as it were, on a level playing field)
and must be attended to at the level of their meaning alone. As those who speak,
what we are in effect saying is What if it were thus?, inviting among our hearers
and interlocutors an imaginative assent which as yet leaves questions of actual
truthfulness bracketed out of consideration. And as those who hear the voices of
others, we are called for our part to exercise imagination, to imagine that it might
be otherwise than we have typically supposed it to be, to open ourselves to new
possibilities of meaning, and to see whether they unfold themselves before us in a
convincing and compelling manner. We must, to pick up a telling phrase of Lewis,
‘risk being taken in’.38
There is that word again – risk. For secondary belief is not quite so innocuous as
first appearances might suggest. And while questions about reality and truth have
38
Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 94.
no formal part to play in its operations, they will not be held at bay indefinitely,
and often sneak in under the radar to harry us, compelling reconsideration and
re-evaluation of cherished assumptions and perspectives. We may, as it were,
only have velcroed our convictions to the mast for the purposes of imaginative
indwelling, but we sometimes find them stubbornly resistant to our attempts to
detach them again before moving on. The entertainment of meaning, afforded us
by the imagination’s constructive and reconstructive labours, is powerful, and can
be persuasive. This is hardly surprising, given the centrality of the imaginative
in all our efforts to ‘make sense’ of things, including the most serious and ‘hard
headed’ approaches to reality that we are humanly capable of (as we have already
noted, science is nothing if it is not imaginative first),39 and those vague and
indeterminate yet profoundly influential metaphysical constructs to one or other
of which each of us subscribes – albeit often tacitly – in order to identify, situate
and orientate ourselves in the world, and to which Charles Taylor has helpfully
granted the label ‘social’ and ‘cosmic imaginaries’.40 The lines between the real,
the imaginative and the purely imaginary, in other words, are not able to be drawn
quite so precisely or with such a thick pencil as we might suppose, the undertow
of the imaginative towards conviction sometimes proving impossible to resist.
And this, no doubt, is precisely why we find art and literature so compelling
and so valuable; because they will not be isolated in some hermetically-sealed
‘alterity’ set in apposition to our lived reality, but continually break in (or break
out) to modify our ways of experiencing that same reality, for good or ill. The
self who returns from the imaginative migrations afforded by literary artifice is
never precisely the same self, but a self expanded, adapted and changed (and who
knows how much?) by what it has experienced. The value – and so too the risk –
of our participation in conversation is surely of an essentially similar sort. Sitting
loose to our own particular identity and commitments for the while, we gain the
blessing of seeing and tasting the world through other eyes; but with that blessing
comes the danger of ‘being drawn in’, having our being enlarged, and in ways
that may return us to the fray of living with our eyes and ears opened to quite new
and compelling ways of experiencing it – the boundaries of our particular ‘self’
or identity transcended and fulfilled only at the risk of its radical reconstruction.
The Slippage of the Sign
The second risk we take in conversation is failure to make contact, failure to

communicate with the other precisely because of its otherness from ourselves
and because the currency of linguistic exchange itself is intrinsically unstable and
See above, 13–16.

39
See, e.g., Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke
40
University Press, 2004); and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
constantly shifting in value. Otherness, as we have observed, comes in various

degrees, shapes and sizes, but it is present even in the most straightforward and
everyday utterances or inscriptions. The risk of misunderstanding, or of being
misunderstood is a constant of human ventures in communication.
We have already taken note of Schleiermacher’s appeal to a form of
hermeneutics in our dealings with living voices as well as those inscribed in
historical or culturally remote texts. Hermeneutics, though, can only go so far in
its attempts to salve the wounds of cultural plurality attendant upon our primeval
‘fall’ into language itself. The gap between the sign and that of which it is a sign,
between the ‘flesh’ of meaning incarnate in language and that which transcends
its mere flesh alone, remains in place and will not be circumvented. As has been
observed before, there is thus a kenotic aspect (a loss, a slippage, a self-effacement,
a vulnerability) involved in any and every linguistic venture, any attempt to bring
reality satisfactorily to expression in language. Our efforts to share ourselves, our
perspectives, our deepest convictions are all broken on the rack of signification,
and the more significant and cherished among them seem necessarily to be the
most fragile in this regard. We cannot say what we mean, even to ourselves, since
what we mean – while inexorably wedded to language – is never simply identical
with what we say. When we say it to others, utter it aloud or inscribe it, it quickly
slips even the leash of formulation on which we supposed we had it temporarily
secured, escaping down the labyrinthine corridors of possible meaning which
open out in every direction from the sign, frustrating our attempts to pin it down
neatly for inspection, or to present it, neatly trussed and prepared for consumption.
Immediacy of meaning, without loss, distortion or remainder, may be entertained
by some as an image of the redeemed state; but as those in whose very being the
realms of material and immaterial reality (‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ if we prefer) meet
and interpenetrate, no such immediacy or certainty lies within our grasp, crave and
seek it as we may. To embark upon significant exchange is thus always to submit
oneself to the inevitability of failure at some level and to some extent – to risk
misunderstanding and being misunderstood, unable to convince and convict others
through the power of the word alone. In conversation, where the rules of the game
forbid easy appeal to external authorities or demonstrations, this risk is, we might
suppose, all the more apparent.
Perhaps, though, this messy circumstance, this promiscuous chain of fleeting
engagements between meaning and materiality is best understood in theological
terms not as a curse, but as a blessing and a benefit, or at least as the condition which
makes both blessing and curse possible, and as bound up with what it means to be
human rather than something from which we should seek deliverance. There are,
I think, reasons arising from within the particular horizons of Christian doctrine
itself to suggest this, as well as reasons of a more general hermeneutical sort.
On the general front, we might note simply that the uncertainty and
indeterminacy attaching to all discourse can all too easily (and ironically) be
overstated. Despite the challenges of otherness, the systole and diastole of the
hermeneutic motion does yield results; we communicate with one another, and
often to a degree perfectly adequate to our practical needs. Complacency on the

one hand and despair on the other are, it seems, evils to be avoided equally. And
what can be presented negatively as the ‘loss’ or ‘slippage’ of meaning, of course,
can be turned on its head and redescribed in terms of semantic ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’,
pointing us to the endless capacity of the world to outstretch our language, a rich,
mysterious and seemingly inexhaustible source from which ever more meaning
may be quarried and enjoyed. By comparison, the urgent demand for immediacy
and determinacy where it arises seems bound to an arid rationalism which has (and
rests content with) precisely what it has, no more, and no less.
For the Christian, though, there are reasons for resisting this demand which
issue naturally from the heart of a Christian symbolics itself, and thus ought to carry
particular weight. For, as we observed in Chapter 3,41 according to the testimony
of Christian tradition, God has placed himself variously not just within the world
and its history but thereby also within the order of signs,42 tabernacling, as it were,
within the ‘flesh’ of the semiotic economy itself – in inspired Scripture, in the
symbolics of sacraments and preaching, and supremely and definitively by clothing
himself with our nature and dwelling amongst us as the man Jesus Christ. This
divine assumption and appropriation of language, though, is precisely a kenotic
accommodation to the human condition (including its linguistic condition), and not
a ‘transcendental’ abrogation or overriding of it. By nature of the case, therefore,
it cannot and does not involve any sheer ‘givenness’ or donation of absolute and
unchallengeable meaning. The humanity of Christ is and remains always ‘other’
than God, or ‘not-God’ as the Swiss theologian Karl Barth puts it; in and of itself,
therefore, it has no necessary or proper reference to that which, here, it signifies.
Precisely here, therefore, at the point where faith certainly apprehends the glory of
God himself, Godhead is and remains nonetheless paradoxically ‘veiled in flesh’
as Charles Wesley’s lyric reminds us.43 There is no direct, unmediated encounter
with the naked ‘presence’ of God facilitated by this sign. Instead we are called
to attend unceasingly to the flesh of the sign itself, to the presentation of Jesus’
humanity, borne witness to and made sense of within that wider dynamic web
or matrix of signs that is Christian Scripture and tradition. Indeed, it would be
supremely ironic if, here of all places, the flesh of the sign ceased either to mean
more than, as flesh alone, it means, or else to fade into insignificance, becoming
the wholly transparent conduit to a pure (fleshless) ‘transcendental signified’.
‘Transcendental signified’ is Jacques Derrida’s term for a putative point outside
the system of language, and hence existing (and known) in a manner free from the
constraints and vicissitudes of language as a medium. Kevin Hart suggests that,
for Derrida, ‘since Christ is God, what He signifies is signified in and of itself’,
41
See above, 43–73.
42
Cf. David Jones, Epoch and Artist (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 179.
43
In the hymn ‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing’.
and thus Christ (as God) is a transcendental signified in this sense.44 My suggestion
here is that, on the contrary, the logic of incarnation as understood by the classic
doctrine of hypostatic union can be taken to prohibit any such conclusion, the
relationship between Christ’s ‘deity’ and his humanity being paradigmatic of the
wider semiotic economy rather than rupturing or abrogating it.45
This incarnation of meaning at the heart of Christian faith is kenotic in another
sense, too, of course; for in giving itself in this form it also risks its own demise,
eschewing the way of power and coercion, and ‘triumphing’ finally only by
remaining true to the way of an unconditional, risky and selfless love for the other.
Christ returns to the Father as the victim of human rejection and crucifixion, the
embodiment of foolishness rather than the victorious champion of a ‘Logocentrism’
that has successfully obliterated all perspectives but its own. This is the peculiar
logic of Christian logos, and a distinctly Christian participation in conversation
with the other (inter-personal, inter-cultural, inter-disciplinary or whatever sort)
ought thus always to be one which is willing to risk itself through imaginative
strategies designed to engage unconditionally with the other as other, to empty
itself of power and even risk its own loss or demise, trusting that only in doing
so – paradoxically – can it truly fulfil itself and be faithful to its particular identity.
44
See Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1989), 8.
45
For related (and more substantial) discussions see further Graham Ward, Barth,
Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
31–41, 235–51.
Chapter 5
Cosmos, Kenosis and Creativity
Unfinished Business
On 7 October 1936 Dorothy L. Sayers, a writer as yet acknowledged primarily for

a string of successful murder mysteries, had received a letter from the organisers
of the Canterbury Festival, inviting her to write a play for their forthcoming 1937
event. The invitation came both as a surprise and an honour. A surprise because,
although she was in fact just about to take her first dramatic production to the
stage (Busman’s Honeymoon, co-written with Muriel St Clare Byrne, was cast and
rehearsed in that same month, and had its opening night in mid November),1 this
venture was not widely known about and Sayers’ talent as a playwright was still
effectively untried. An honour, because her immediate predecessors in writing for
the Festival were anything but up-and-coming, let alone unknown and untested.
In 1935 the event had been graced by T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, and
in 1936 by Charles Williams’ Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury.2 No wonder her
response expressed initial caution on the grounds that the project was ‘rather out
of my usual line’.3 Notwithstanding this fact, Sayers accepted the challenge.
In accordance with the Festival’s theme that year (the celebration of artists and
craftsmen), but wishing also to maintain its focus on the history of the Cathedral,
Sayers selected for the plot of her drama events surrounding the rebuilding of
the church’s choir in the late twelfth century.4 Her protagonist was William of
Sens, the French architect duly chosen by the Cathedral Chapter to undertake this
1
See Barbara Reynolds, ed., The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1899–1936, The
Making of a Detective Novelist (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 401 (10 October 1936,
to L.C. Kempson); 405 (14 November 1936, to Margaret Babington).
2
Williams appears to have suggested Sayers’ name as his successor. According to
Reynolds’ biography, the two had certainly been in contact since 1935, and possibly earlier.
As Reynolds notes earlier in her work, Sayers had in fact tried her hand at drama before,
incorporating a short mystery play (The Mocking of Christ) in her collection Catholic Tales
and Christian Songs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1918), and a letter written to The New Witness
in January 1919 reveals that Williams had read this. See Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L.
Sayers: Her Life and Soul (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), 98–101; 310.
3
Reynolds, Letters, Vol. 1, 401 (7 October 1936, to Margaret Babington).
4
The original choir had burned down in 1174. For the history see Roslin Mair, ‘The
Choir Capitals of Canterbury Cathedral 1174–84’ in The British Archaelogical Association
Conference Transactions for the year 1979, Vol. V, Medieval Art and Architecture at
Canterbury before 1220 (British Archeaological Association and Kent Archaeological
Society, 1982), 56–66.
work. Four years into an expensive but thus far successful renovation project,
the historical William was seriously injured, falling from a cradle he himself had
designed to facilitate installation of the keystone to the great arch. His body broken,
the master craftsman was compelled to resign his commission, leaving his work
unfinished, to be completed by others. Sayers locates the circumstances of this
accident at the heart of her play, using it to explore some fundamental questions
about the place of human ‘making’ in God’s scheme of things. Picking up on
fragments of evidence provided by the contemporary chronicler, she characterises
William at first as a man whose spiritual qualifications for building the Lord’s
house are at best questionable. If, as the Cathedral Prior suggests, William’s
avarice, promiscuity and generous disregard for truth are at least offset by his
evident skill and his passion to use it well, it is nonetheless this that is the occasion
of his quite literal downfall. Immediately before the ascent which will maim him,
Sayers places the following words on William’s lips:
We are the master-craftsmen, God and I –

We understand one another. None, as I can,
Can creep under the ribs of God, and feel
His heart beat through those Six Days of Creation.
… since all Heaven was not enough
To share that triumph, He made His masterpiece,
Man, that like God can call beauty from dust,
Order from chaos, and create new worlds
To praise their maker. Oh, but in making man
God over-reached Himself and gave away
His Godhead. He must now depend on man
For what man’s brain, creative and divine
Can give Him. Man stands equal with Him now,
Partner and rival.5
In theological terms, this is a convenient summary of Promethean excess at its

worst, and William compounds the tragic hubris further when, to the warning that
such blasphemous sentiments may tempt God to strike him down, he responds:
‘He will not dare;/He knows that I am indispensable/To His work here.’6 This
is, of course, a misplaced confidence, and only moments later the sword of the
Archangel Michael cuts the rope on which William dangles precariously above the
flagstones of the Cathedral floor, sending him plunging to his physical ruin, but (as
it turns out) his spiritual redemption.
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Zeal of Thy House (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937),
5
69–70.
6
Sayers, 70. On William’s ‘blasphemy’ cf. Reynolds, Letters, Vol. 2, 14 (26 February
1937, to Laurence Irving).
Cosmos, Kenosis and Creativity 121
Having depicted the folly and outrage of William’s theologically informed

‘aesthetic’ and the nature of its outcomes, though, the drama does not proceed,
as we might reasonably expect, to eschew the analogy and proposed correlation
between divine and human modes of creativity which lies at the heart of it. Instead,
it suggests provocatively that God, the great Master Architect of the cosmos (and
so William’s divine exemplar), has indeed placed himself in a circumstance where
he needs human agents to complete the work begun in creation, albeit not quite in
the manner that William self-importantly supposes. This, indeed, is the spiritual
lesson that William is to learn through his fall and his subsequent inability to
complete the masterwork he has begun. His initial proud refusal to relinquish a
micro-managing, hands-on oversight of the precise shape ‘his’ work will now
take is redeemed when he finally grasps a theological truth lying at the heart
of the doctrine of the incarnation – in becoming one of his own creatures, God
himself has embraced humiliation, suffering, failure and death, leaving others
behind to pick up his work and carry it forward.7 Though it is not articulated in the
dialogue, close at hand lies the idea that, far from being the first moment of kenosis
identifiable in God’s dealings with the world, the incarnation should be understood
as the most acute instance of a wider pattern beginning with the divine decision to
create as such.8 If God himself does not jealously exclude but actively conscripts
the agency of others in the realisation and redemption of his creative project, the
drama enquires, how can any human maker be prepared to do less?
There is, of course, another story to be told about the incarnation, and one
that it would be very dangerous to lose sight of. According to a soteriological
tradition stretching from Irenaeus of Lyons to Karl Barth and beyond, God has,
precisely by taking flesh (and thereby simultaneously earthing the Trinitarian
dynamics of the life of God within the patterns of human history and drawing
our humanity redemptively within the penumbra of his own existence), reversed
the impact of sin and alienation upon our nature and so established a place within
the creaturely sphere where already he dwells together with us in fellowship,
so fulfilling by way of prolepsis the purpose of creation itself.9 Put differently,
7
See Sayers, 99–100: ‘Not God Himself was indispensable,/For lo! God died – and
still His work goes on.’
8
The notion of creation entailing a voluntary self-limitation on God’s part is
especially prominent in forms of Kabbalistic mysticism influenced by Isaac Luria
(1534–72), especially in the distinctive doctrine of Tsimtsum or divine concentration/
contraction. See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York:
Schocken Books, 1941), 260–64. The idea also finds emphasis in strands of the Christian
tradition, most recently in the work of Jürgen Moltmann. See, e.g., Jürgen Moltmann, God
in Creation (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1985), 72–93.
9
This is the central idea of Barth’s twofold insistence that the covenant between God
and Israel fulfilled once for all in Jesus Christ is the internal basis of creation, and creation
the external basis of the covenant. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark,1958), 94–329.
in Christ God substitutes his own humanity for ours, and thus himself provides
the free creaturely response in which creation comes to its intended goal and
fulfilment. Nonetheless, the logic of this divine self-substitution is not to displace
creaturely action altogether, but precisely to create a context in which, understood
as a participation in Christ’s own action through the Spirit, it may be undertaken
freely and without fear of failure or falling short. In the peculiar ‘already –
not yet’ modality of human existence situated between the incarnation and the
eschatological consummation of all things, what has been achieved by God for
us remains as yet to be worked out in, and with, and through us, and within this
context there is much for us still to do, and no compromising of the integrity of
our actions in doing it.
While, therefore, in William’s hubris Sayers shows us the worst and most
problematic aspects of the Humanism which emerged from the Renaissance, as
Nicholas Wolterstorff notes, she does so finally not to damn the project but to
seek its redemption by re-situating elements of it within a quite different religious
and theological perspective.10 In place of autonomous man, struggling nobly for
artistic liberation amidst a rivalry with God, Sayers offers an alternative vision,
of human artistry and craftsmanship – understood now in explicitly Christian
theological terms – as at the very least a ‘spiritual’ vocation equivalent to others
(‘William’s devoted craftsmanship’ she tells a correspondent, has ‘more of the true
spirit of prayer than … self-righteous litanies’), and at best as something much
more besides. The play closes with a speech to the audience by the Archangel
Michael, and in his words we find the first inkling of a theme to which Sayers
would return and which she would work out more fully in her own mind over
the next several years. Human making and craftsmanship, it suggests, is not a
breach of divine copyright or set in deliberate counterpoise to God’s own creative
activity; rather, the basic structure of our human ways of engaging with the world
‘creatively’ should be identified as a concrete vestige of and participation in God’s
own triune being, and as such the proper locus of that ‘image and likeness’ of God
in which our humanity is itself made: ‘For every work of creation is threefold, an
earthly trinity/to match the heavenly.’11
Grammars of Creation
Putative analogies between divine and human modes of making are all well
and good; but, it might reasonably be objected, in Christian theology across
the centuries the doctrine of creation has more typically been linked to the
See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Carlisle: Solway, 1997), 67–9.

10
Sayers, 110. The play closes with this speech which, although cut from the
11
1937 production to meet the strictures of prescribed length, was restored in subsequent
performances and can be seen in retrospect to be pregnant with the seed which would grow
into The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen & Co., 1941).
apprehension of God’s radical ontological otherness from the world, and appealed
to, indeed, in a manner taken as definitive of this vital gap. What differentiates
‘the heavens and the earth’ or ‘all things, visible and invisible’ from God most
sharply in other words is precisely the fact of their creatureliness. God alone is
‘uncreated’; nothing else is or ever could be. Thus we find the categories of the
doctrine of creation cross-fertilising naturally and properly with those of Trinitarian
and incarnational theology in biblical and patristic thought. For those whose
theological understanding was shaped by Second Temple Jewish monotheism,
Richard Bauckham has recently argued, to speak of Christ in Pauline or Johannine
fashion as participating directly in the creation of the cosmos (e.g., Col. 1.15–16;
cf. Jn 1.3) was without further ado to include him scandalously within the ‘unique
identity of the God of Israel’.12 Meanwhile, in the fourth century dispute over the
precise status of the person of the Son of God, the creedal identification of Christ
as the one by whom ‘all things were made’ and the concomitant insistence that,
being of one substance with the Father, he himself is ‘begotten, not made’, was
taken to be a clinching argument against the Arians. In each case, the relevant
theological premise taken for granted is that God alone is uncreated, and God
alone creates in the relevant sense.
What, then, is the relevant sense? What is it that only God has done and is
capable of doing? Most fundamentally, in this context the term refers to the
divine donation of existence as such where otherwise there was neither scope
nor possibility for it, an act of absolute origination necessarily unparalleled
within the creaturely order itself. Thus, for Aquinas, ‘God’s proper effect in
creating is … existence tout court’.13 Here, the philosopher’s ‘interrogation of the
ontological’14 – ‘Why is there not nothing?’ – finds a response reaching beyond the
categories of philosophical ontology alone and drawing explicitly on the resources
of a theology of grace. There is ‘not nothing’ because God freely grants something
esse alongside himself and invites it to ‘be with him’; in doing so, furthermore,
God establishes a ‘primordial plenitude’15 of meaning and possibility, an orderly
habitation fit for human (and other sentient creaturely) indwelling and flourishing.
All this, of course, bespeaks the radical transcendence of God with respect to
the cosmos, and its concomitant dependence on him not just for its inception but
for its continuing moment-to-moment existence. Furthermore, what distinguishes
‘creation proper’, Colin Gunton argues, is its status as something done and dusted
‘in the beginning’, the necessary presupposition of historical existence rather than
12
Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008),
18; cf. 26f.
13
Summa Theologiae, 1a.45, 4.
14
George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 32.
15
I owe this phrase to Michael Northcott.
a feature of it. What remains, he insists, is not ‘more creation, but simply what
creator and creature alike and together make of what has been made’.16
All this being so, it is unsurprising that the linguistic trespass whereby
Renaissance humanists transplanted creare, creator and creatio from the hallowed
ground of Christian liturgy and doctrine (which hitherto had been their sole
preserve) onto the soils of art historical and art theoretical description in the
sixteenth century – to refer now not to divine but to fully human activities and
accomplishments – occasioned considerable nervousness at the time, and has
ever since aroused protest in some theological quarters. The semantic fields of
‘creation’, George Steiner notes, overlap and interfere,17 and those who borrow
and try the term on for size in whatever human context situate themselves and their
actions of ‘making’, whether knowingly or not, in relation to divine precedent.
Even in the past fifty years or so, when the metaphor has spread well beyond
the reach of aesthetics into fields as varied as hairstyling, pedagogy, economics,
technology and the media,18 and fully aware that the lexical genie cannot now
be put back in the bottle, some Christian authors have advocated a strategy of
counter-cultural resistance, refusing in principle to sanction use of the term
‘creation’ for anything other than a particular sort of ‘act of God’ and its outputs, or
at least interjecting whenever occasion permits (and we remember to do so) that,
in the strict and proper sense, ‘finite agents do not create’19 (they merely ‘make’,
or ‘invent’, or whatever).
While such theological concerns and emphases are important, though, there is
more yet to be said about ‘creating’ and the ‘presumption of affinity’20 involved in
wider uses of the relevant vocabulary. As Gunton himself admits, if divine creating
is indeed an action situated properly within the grammar of the perfect tense (God
always has created), there is nonetheless a vital sense in which ‘creation’ itself
(the output of that action)21 remains incomplete and a work very much still in
progress.22 In the Genesis narrative the advent of the seventh day marks a fire-
break in the characterisation of the divine action, a point in time by which certain
things are already established and ‘given’, and beyond which they need not be
16
Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 89. Gunton draws directly here on the account of Oliver
O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order. An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Leicester:
IVP, 1986), chapters 2–3.
17
Steiner, 17.
18
See, e.g., Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books,
2002).
19
Gunton, 1, n.2.
20
Steiner, 18.
21
Gunton reminds us that the term ‘creation’, whether applied to God or human
agents, tends to be used in a dual sense, to refer both to the action of ‘creating’ and the thing
duly ‘created’. Gunton, 1.
22
Ibid., 88–9.
repeated or modified. The world is now ‘finished’ (Gen. 2:1) inasmuch as it is ready
for immediate occupation, and after this, Pannenberg suggests, in a fundamental
sense, God ‘does not bring forth any new creatures’.23 Wherever in pre-history
we imagine this point in time to have arisen, though (in the text it is only with
the appearance on the scene of human beings), it is clear that in another equally
fundamental sense all this is as yet only the beginning of ‘God’s project’,24 not
its divinely intended end. The fulfilment of God’s ‘creative’ labours, shaping and
reshaping a world fit for human and divine cohabitation (see, e.g., Rev. 21.3–5),
must therefore be traced not in protology, but in an eschatology christologically
and soteriologically determined and orientated.25 While we may still wish to insist
upon reserving talk of ‘creation proper’ for a particular set of precise and technical
theological uses, therefore, it is nonetheless clear that the term has a penumbra
already gesturing towards the possibility of a wider and extended set of uses, even
within the grammar of theology itself.
The shape of the biblical witness to creation is entirely consonant with this
semantic overspill. Hebrew possesses no single term covering the range of
meanings of the English ‘creation’, and while the Hebrew poets certainly take
trouble to demarcate some lexical holy ground which must never be trespassed
upon (the singular verb bārā’ being set apart from the wider imaginative field to
name a unique and non-transferable activity of ‘creation proper’),26 their witness
to God’s primordial performance equally resists reduction to any ‘single or simple
articulation’ of the matter.27 Instead, the writers deploy a string of different verbal
images to describe some, at least, of what occurs ‘creatively’ during the first six
days (shaping, making, forming, commanding, etc.), these being by definition
suggestive of human or other creaturely analogy. Moreover, recent work by
Brown, Fretheim, Levenson and Welker has urged that, if we would be faithful to
the imaginative logic of the biblical text here and elsewhere, we must recognise
arising within it quite naturally the suggestion that aspects of God’s fashioning
of the cosmos are not only analogous to but actually conscript and demand the
23
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology. Vol. 2. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd.,
1994), 36. Cf. Barth, 182.
24
Gunton, 202.
25
It is on these grounds that Barth interprets the divine judgment in Gen 1.31 not
as a valediction but as an ordination. All that God has made is pronounced ‘very good’
for the accomplishment of creation’s intended goal in the fulfilment of the covenant in
Christ. See Barth, 212–13. See below, 131–2.
26
So Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute,
Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 148–9. For instances see W. Bernhardt,
‘bara’, in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck and
Helmer Ringgren (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 246; Ludwig Koehler and Walter
Baumgartner, eds, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. M.E.J.
Richardson et al., Revised ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 153–4.
27
Brueggemann, 149.
participation of creaturely forces and agencies as such.28 The God of Scripture,

Brown suggests provocatively, is no jealous guardian of his own ‘creative’
prerogatives, but one whose work as Creator is – by virtue of his own choosing
and self-limiting – ultimately achieved per collaborationi.29
Such poetic suggestion concurs, of course, with what we now understand of the
shaping of the material cosmos, an understanding no longer tolerating imaginative
confinement of it to a single working week situated ‘in the beginning’. Whatever we
may suppose about the temporal status of the primal act of incipience granting esse
charged with meaning and potential to all things (including, Augustine reminds
us, the structuring function of creaturely time itself),30 several centuries of learning
in physics, geology and biology serve to assure us that the work of forming a
physical cosmos fit for human indwelling is one which, precisely insofar as it
harnesses and involves the created capacities embedded within the cosmos itself,
cannot be hurried but takes a long time. Again, wherever we locate the advent of
creation’s seventh day, to the best of our knowledge those same creaturely forces
and processes are ones that rumble on beyond it, possessed of an abiding remit, a
temporal future as well as a murky pre-historic past. Correspondingly, many of the
biblical images used to picture God’s ancient forming of the cosmos are extended
perfectly naturally to picture his hand still at work, shaping the world’s history and
moving it towards its promised future.31
If Brown’s further argument, that in the ‘creation traditions’ of Scripture
itself, God’s activity of generating and ordering a physical cosmos is understood
to be of a piece with – and not properly separable from – his calling forth an
accompanying ethos to render an integral material-spiritual-social ‘world’,32
then acknowledgement of the enhypostatic inclusion of creaturely agency in the
28
See, e.g., William P. Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos: The Genesis of Moral
Imagination in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 36–52; Terence E. Fretheim, God
and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 2005), passim; Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1999), 6–20. Brueggemann, too, refers to a ‘transactional’ quality in the OT’s description of
the relationship between Creator and creation. See Brueggemann, 528.
29
Brown, 41.
30
Augustine, City of God, 11.6.
31
Thus, for instance, the image of God as a yotser (potter) fashioning humanity
from the clay is deployed quite naturally both in the narrative account of Gen 2.7–8 and
in Jeremiah’s poetic engagement with Israel’s political history, fortunes and prospects (Jer
18.1–11; cf. Isa 29.16, Wis 15.7), and Paul’s imaginative redescription of all this in the
light of Christ (Rom 9.14–26; cf. 1 Tim 2.13, where the only other NT use of the Gk
verb plassein refers back to God’s fashioning of Adam from the earth, thus completing
the exegetical circle). Cf. C.E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the
Epistle to the Romans, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1979); James Dunn, Romans 9–16,
Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1988); William McKane, A Critical
and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, Vol 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986).
32
Brown, 1–33, passim.
relevant processes by which this same world is ‘made’ becomes inevitable (there
can be no cultivation or culture without human activity), as does the concomitant
insistence that its making continues beyond the threshold of the day of divine
rest. Of course Adam’s divinely mandated naming of the animals must be situated
on a wholly different plane from God’s own earlier ‘creative’ speech acts; but,
if Brown’s appeal to a biblical ‘cosmopolis’33 is correct, as a symbol of the birth
and flowering of human ‘culture’ Adam’s act of linguistic poiesis is nonetheless
part and parcel of God’s project to establish a world (which in this sense comes
‘unfinished’ from his hand), and not merely concerned with preserving or yet (since
it arises in the narrative prior to sin’s appearance) with redeeming one. Currents
in the psychology of perception ever since Kant, and others in contemporary
cultural theory point to the likelihood that categories such as ‘object’ and ‘subject’,
‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (cosmos and ethos) themselves are more closely entangled
than we typically suppose, the boundaries between them permeable rather than
absolute; however much may stand authoritatively over against us as something
already divinely ‘given’, therefore, it seems that the reality of the ‘human world’
(the world as experienced humanly)34 is in any case always one mediated by
some relevant human activity of making – whether individual or social, explicit
or occult. ‘The world,’ Iris Murdoch insists, ‘is not given to us “on a plate,” it
is given to us as a creative task. … We work, … and “make something of it”.
We help it to be.’35 If so, Steiner avers, the hermeneutics of ‘reception theory’
offers us a vital aesthetic analogue for the creation of a ‘world’ which comes to us
thus deliberately (and wonderfully) incomplete and full of promise, implicating
us directly and dynamically in the processes by which the ‘work’ takes shape,
realising (and doing so only gradually) some if not all of the plenitude of potential
meaning invested in it by the divine artist.36
Again, therefore, while for perfectly good theological reasons we may still wish
to reserve talk of ‘creation proper’ for something that God and God alone does,
and does during creation’s first ‘six days’ alone, it seems artificial and perhaps
even theologically unhelpful to draw the relevant lines with too thick a pencil.
The biblical texts associated naturally with a doctrine of ‘creation’, it seems,
flag continuities as well as discontinuities both between patterns of divine and
creaturely action and between what precedes and follows the divine ‘Sabbath’ on
the seventh day. Taken together with other considerations drawn from theological
and ‘non-theological’ sources, this suggests that ‘what creator and creature alike
and together make of what has been made’37 might even yet helpfully be viewed
under the aegis of a creation theology, rather than being subsumed rigorously and
33
See ibid., 13–14.
34
Cf. Anthony O’ Hear, The Element of Fire: Science, Art and the Human World
(London and New York: Routledge, 1988).
35
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage, 2003), 215.
36
Steiner, 53.
37
Gunton, 89.
without further ado instead under the alternative rubrics afforded by doctrines of
‘preservation’, ‘providence’ or ‘redemption’.
Making Good
The idea that God grants humankind a responsible participation in his own
creative project is central to the Jewish notion of tikkun olam, the mending or
perfecting of the world. As Jonathan Sacks notes, this notion has very ancient
roots in strands of biblical and Mishnaic teaching, but receives its definitive
synthesis in the kabbalism of the sixteenth century mystical rabbi Isaac Luria.38
The central theme of the doctrine in its various forms is that the world that we
inhabit as God’s creatures is as yet imperfect (and in this sense God’s creative
vision remains unfulfilled or incomplete), and that every Jew, in the radical
particularity of his or her circumstance, is called to share actively in the process of
‘mending’, ‘perfecting’ or completing the harmonious whole which God intends
his creation to become and to be.39 In its Lurianic version, as Sacks is at pains
to point out, this participation is understood to be through particular concrete
acts of piety and spirituality (and thus chiefly a matter of the soul) rather than by
engagement in political initiatives for social justice or efforts to adjust the human
impact on our created environment; but in the last hundred years or so the phrase
has acquired a more inclusive connotation, all acts designed to avoid evil and
do good, specifically religious or otherwise, being understood as a manifestation
of tikkun.40 The gist of this participatory vision is summed up neatly by Rabbi
Joseph Soloveitchik:
When God created the world, He provided an opportunity for the work of his
hands – man – to participate in His creation. The Creator, as it were, impaired
reality in order that mortal man could repair its flaws and perfect it.41
See Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility

38
(London: Continuum, 2005), 72–8. For a more extended discussion of the idea see Scholem,
244–86 and Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish
Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1995 [1971]), 78–141, 203–27.
39
De Lange notes that in Lurianic kabbalism the despoiling of the world occurs not
in a prehistoric fall contingent on human freedom, but before or during the act of creation
itself. The world is thus always a fractured, imperfect or incomplete project within which
humans are called to act to secure the good. Nicholas De Lange, An Introduction to Judaism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 206. Cf. Sacks, 74–5.
40
See Sacks, 78; cf. De Lange, 206–8.
41
Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 101, cited in Sacks, 71.
Christians are likely to have some legitimate theological concerns and questions
about elements of this religious narrative, and its linking of divine and human
agency so directly in an account of the completion and redemption of the created
order. Two concerns in particular stand out and demand some response. First, there
is the suggestion that the world was from its inception already flawed or fractured,
and received from God’s hand, therefore, in a state needful of repair by (among
other things) the work of human hands. Any such suggestion compromises the
doctrine of creation’s primal goodness, and flirts dangerously with gnostic notions
of a world created not by God himself, but by an incompetent demiurge. Christian
orthodoxy has always resisted such ideas, insisting that the world is from first to
last the work of a Creator the hallmarks of whose character are infinite goodness,
wisdom and love, and accounting for the brokenness and alienation of historical
existence by appealing to the radical misuse of freedom and a consequent ‘fall’
of humankind into a condition of sin and death.42 As Paul Fiddes observes,
however, the theological notion of ‘fall’ is not inexorably wedded to a U-shaped
narrative in which primal perfection is compromised and lost, to be restored again
in due course by a divine salvage operation.43 The primal goodness of creation
can be understood otherwise than this. So, for example, Karl Barth interprets the
divine pronouncement of creation’s goodness in Gen 1.31 not as a valediction,
but instead as an ordination, proleptic and eschatological in its vision: all that
God has made is indeed ‘very good’, given its promised end in the fulfilment
of the eternal covenant.44 And it is true, surely, that the goodness with which
Christian faith is finally concerned is not one speculatively posited in a remote
prehistoric past, but one as yet to come, anticipated decisively in history’s midst
in the humanity of Jesus, but realised only in the promised future of God when all
things shall be made new, and God himself will dwell amongst us as ‘all in all’.
Thus Fiddes outlines an understanding of fall not as a temporally situated once
for all departure from an original perfection, but rather as the continual outcome
of a human creatureliness as yet incomplete and imperfect, and therefore caught
up in a dialectic between the possibilities of freedom and the limits of finitude, a
dialectic constantly resolving itself either in trust and obedience or (more typically)
anxiety and ‘idolatry’.45 Such a view does not, of course, view creatureliness and
fallenness as the same thing, or ascribe the origination of evil and death to the
Creator himself. Sin, and its consequences, remain the result of the creature’s free
choices. But this sort of view does face squarely the fact that sin arises due to a
42
See, among patristic rejoinders to the idea, Irenaeus, Against Heresies, and
Augustine, City of God XI.17; XI.23; XIII.1–3. For discussion see helpfully John Hick,
Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1966).
43
Paul Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue Between Literature and Christian
Doctrine (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), Chapter 3.
44
Barth, 212–13.
45
i.e. seeking security in finite objects and goals, and granting these a worth properly
due only to God.
vulnerability and weakness built into the structure of our finite existence, at least
potentially. Doctrines of the fall of an Augustinian sort, which prefer to posit an
original human perfection, face a number of significant difficulties of their own.
They are, of course, entirely remote from anything in our experience of what it is
to be human, and find it notoriously difficult to account for how or why it was that
creatures enjoying unalloyed felicitude and imperturbability should choose to set
it aside.46 And such doctrines do not finally succeed in their aim of exonerating
God of all responsibility for the presence of sin and evil in his world. To the extent
that they ascribe ultimate sovereignty to God in creation and in redemption, they
are at least compelled to acknowledge that he called into being a world which was,
in Milton’s phrase, ‘free to fall’47 and perhaps even bound finally to do so. Neither
understanding of fallenness involves predicating sin and evil as functions of
creation itself, or as necessary components of human existence as such; but each
in its way finally admits that the possibility of sin and evil is given in the nature of
the world as it comes to us from God’s hand. The difference between them, finally,
is that one seeks to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ by directing our imaginative
gaze backwards to a primordial creaturely perfection, whereas the other (granting
that the creation itself comes to us as yet incomplete and empirically ‘imperfect’)
prefers to direct us to Christ, and to the fulfilment of God’s promise in the future
of Christ.
The other theological concern likely to trouble Christians in the notion of tikkun
olam outlined above is the ascription of what is apparently too high a premium
to the significance of human actions vis-à-vis the completion or perfection of
the world, putting at risk an adequate account of divine transcendence and a
theology of grace as the sole source of both our creation and redemption. That
this is indeed a problematic inference of the Lurianic doctrine is suggested by
Gershom Scholem, who notes the way in which an organic unity and continuity
‘between the state of redemption and the state preceding it’ tends to characterise
some kabbalistic visions, so that redemption ‘now appears … as the logical
consequence of the historical process’,48 with God and humankind functioning
effectively as partners (albeit unequal partners) in the enterprise. The specious
wedding of process and progress that haunts our culture courtesy of the remaining
vestiges of modernity grants such ideas a seductive allure even at the outset of
the twenty-first century, and makes it all the more urgent that theologians speak
clearly and unashamedly of the transcendent nature of Christian hope, vested
as it is in God’s sovereign otherness and Lordship, and not in any possibilities
or potentialities latent within the creaturely (and fallen) order as such.49 Any
46
See the discussion of this same problem as it arises in Milton’s Paradise Lost in
Chapter 6.
47
See John Milton, Paradise Lost, 3.99. See below, 155–8.
48
Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 47–8.
49
See the critical rejoinder to the so-called ‘myth of progress’ in Richard Bauckham
indication that the world’s redemption might be contingent in some way upon the
nature of the actions we perform in the eschatological interim may well seem to
compromise this transcendent commitment, and to constitute a pernicious form of
‘works righteousness’ inimical to the logic of the Christian Evangel.
As Sacks observes, in Judaism itself there is an unresolved tension at this
point, tikkun olam functioning both as a principle for ordering human action in the
midst of history and as an object of daily prayer and eschatological expectation.50
It is, paradoxically, both something that God will do and must be implored to do
(since we cannot), and something that we must do in the here and now and in the
nitty-gritty of everyday decisions and actions. The achievement of cosmic harmony
thus comes both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ – from the side of the creature in
faithful response to the Creator’s calling and approach. Within the religious vision
of Judaism, this dual insistence is bound either to remain an unresolved dialectic
or else resolve itself in some form of religious and ethical synergism likely to
place a crushing burden of responsibility on human shoulders. As we have already
had occasion to notice, though, Christianity has a different framework to offer
respectfully for consideration, one within which such seemingly contradictory
claims may legitimately be situated and made sense of, without any confusion
arising between them or any loss of integrity or force attaching to either as a result.
In the messianic, priestly humanity of Christ, the Church discerns and proclaims a
fully human action of tikkun corresponding directly to the creative and redemptive
purposes and activity of God the Father and energised from first to last by the
activity of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore – and decisively – this same human action
is that undertaken by God himself, substituting his own humanity for ours at
the heart of the covenant he has made with creation, not in such a manner as to
exclude our due response, but rather to provide a context within which the partial
and faltering nature of that response no longer has the power to crush us, being
relativised in significance (though not rendered wholly insignificant) by the
response of Christ made on our behalf.
Within a Trinitarian and incarnational account of atonement, and a
corresponding understanding of human action as a participation in the priestly
human action of Christ, in other words, the ‘from above’ and ‘from below’
dimensions of tikkun olam are able to be correlated and held together, and their
whole dynamic situated within the overall triune pattern of God’s activity and
life. Only God can finally heal the world and bring it to completion. But he
has chosen to do so not without a corresponding human action, but precisely
in, with and through such action, concluded once and for all in the humanity
of his own Son, but participated in and replicated ever and again in the Spirit-
filled lives of others until the time when God will be all in all. Only God can
and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999).
50
It arises at the heart of Alenu, the closing prayer of each daily liturgy. See Sacks,
75–6.
bring about the ‘new creation’ to which the apostles and prophets bear poetic
witness; but in the meanwhile, we are called already to live in ways that declare
this new creation to be a hidden reality, performing parables of it in the midst
of history, and so conforming historical existence, piece by piece, more fully to
its promised destiny in God’s hands. It is this emphasis upon the significance of
the piecemeal and the seemingly inconsequential that is one of the attractions
of the notion of tikkun olam. Too often Christians are driven by a utilitarian
ethic which supposes things worth doing only if some return can be identified
on the investment, rather than understanding that good actions are worth doing
precisely and only because it is good to do them, and that the world is in some
sense made better thereby even when no grand strategy is advanced or outcome
accomplished in the process. At one level, indeed, acknowledgement of the
self-substitution of God’s humanity for ours in Christ renders every other
human action inconsequential; and yet, paradoxically, it simultaneously charges
every action with a new significance by situating it within the sphere of action
undertaken in union with Christ, and thus rendering it either a witness to or a
denial of its reality as such. That the healing and completion of the world will
not depend finally on my actions or yours is a vital inference of this theological
vision; but that we are called, commanded even, to immerse ourselves fully
in our own small part of the world and to do all that we can in every sphere
of it to ‘make good’ the peculiar claims of faith concerning the world’s origin
and promised end, is an equally vital entailment. And it is, we should recall,
precisely this world, and not some other, that will be taken up and made new by
God in the fullness of time. And in that sense, nothing that we do, no choice that
we make or action that we undertake in life, is wholly without eschatological
consequence. For it is itself the object of God’s redemptive promise.
The Liturgy of the Arts
One of the gains of an adequate theology of the priesthood of Christ is that it

liberates us to acknowledge the potential liturgical significance of parts of our
identity and action we have hitherto held back or supposed relatively ‘secular’
and lacking in religious merit. The news that the Son of God has laid hold of our
humanity in its entirety and offered it back, crucified and risen, to his Father in
the power of the Spirit for our sakes, compels us in our turn now to offer back to
God in joyful thanks nothing less than all that we personally and communally are,
and have and may yet become. As Jonathan Sacks notes, in biblical thought homo
sapiens is the one creature which is itself identifiably ‘creative’, capable not just of
adapting to its created environment, but of making more of that environment than
is initially given in it;51 enhancing, or adding value to it. Indeed, in as much as the
world is apprehended as meaningful, it constitutes a distinctly human environment,
Sacks, 79.
51
shot through with significance which transcends its materiality alone, a union of
material being and semiotic excess in which ‘a thing is not just what it is’, and its
reality takes time to unfold.52 A distinctly human engagement with or indwelling of
the world is thus inevitably and always one in which we ‘make something of’ the
world rather than functioning as mere passive observers or consumers of it. To live
responsibly in this sense, Rowan Williams suggests, is to draw out what is not yet
seen or heard in the material environment itself, to ‘uncover what is generative
in the world’,53 and so, working with the grain of the cosmos, to aid and assist in
the imaginative effoliation by which the world approaches more fully what it is
capable of being and becoming. In offering our humanity back to God, therefore,
we offer back to the world in which we are embedded bodily and culturally, and
what we have made of it for good or ill.
The sort of creative imagination involved in human artistry, Williams submits,
is thus not an eccentric or exclusive sort, but precisely an acute form of our wider
human engagement with the world, with its distinctive dialectic of imaginative
give and take.54 The premise of artistry is that perception is always incomplete,
that truthfulness unfolds as we continue to explore it, that there is always an excess
of meaning in what is given to us for consideration.55 Yet artistry, considered thus,
is no mere cataloguing of the world’s given forms, no ‘mimetic’ inventory of the
extant. Art brings new things into existence, and, precisely in doing so, discovers
that which it makes. Precisely because significance has no purchase apart from the
actions and responses of those who indwell the order of signs, because human acts
of signification and sense-making are already factored into our apprehension of an
orderly and value-laden world (one in which ‘cosmos’ and ‘ethos’ are, as it were,
perichoretically related), every act of discovery, of the uncovering or disclosure
of new meaning, necessarily entails acts of making too, and every act of making
lays bare some latent but hitherto unrecognised semiotic possibility. In art, as in
life more generally, our calling is thus, paradoxically, to ‘change the world into
itself’,56 but we can do so precisely and only by means of imaginative responses
which help to make of it more and other than it is as yet. Again, therefore, the
necessary supposition is that the world is in fact not yet ‘itself’, but in some sense
unfinished, with much more still to be drawn out of its primordial plenitude and
fashioned in accordance with the ‘generative pulsions’ divinely invested and
humanly intuited in it.57 This is not ‘creativity’ of a sort that craves trespass on the
soil of divine prerogatives, but it is nonetheless a participation in the unfolding
52
Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (Harrisburg,
PA: Morehouse, 2005), 26.
53
Williams, 162.
54
Ibid., 140.
55
Ibid., 135–9.
56
Ibid., 18.
57
Ibid., 27. Williams borrows the word ‘pulsions’ from Maritain. See Jacques
Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (London: Harvill Press, 1953), 302–6.
of ‘creation’, and in God’s making of new things and making all things new. It is
precisely by means of our imaginative and ‘creative’ responses to the given world
in the arts and elsewhere, therefore, that the world approaches that fullness of
which it is capable (or, conversely, is held back from it).58
Having opened this chapter with a discussion of the work of Dorothy
L. Sayers, it seems fitting to draw it to a close by referring to the thought of her
direct contemporary and compeer J.R.R. Tolkien.59 Looking back over his already
lengthy career in 1954, Tolkien suggested to a correspondent that the whole of his
literary output, imaginative and critical, had from the first really been concerned
with exploring a single question; namely, the relationship between divine Creation
and acts of human making or ‘sub-creation’ as he preferred to call it.60 Two poetic
texts in particular tackle the issue head-on, and in a manner which points to single
abiding insight present from his very earliest ruminations on the subject: Primary
and Secondary Reality, the world received from God’s hand and ‘what we make
of it’ in various acts of human ars are not to be too sharply distinguished, since
they are both ‘ultimately of the same stuff’,61 and our creaturely participation in
each demands of us further acts of imaginative response and making. Creation, in
other words, always solicits and enables further acts of a ‘creative’ sort rather than
jealously guarding its own prerogatives.
The Elvish creation myth ‘Ainulindalë’ was cast in its final form in the 1950s
and published only after Tolkien’s death more than 20 years later, but its earliest
Williams, 154.
58
They were hardly colleagues, despite the popular association of Sayers’ name with
59
those of Lewis, Tolkien, Williams and others. In a letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien
professed a ‘loathing’ for Lord Peter Wimsey and his creatrix! See J.R.R. Tolkien, The
Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981),
82 [71, to Christopher Tolkien, 25 May 1944]. Doubtless the hyperbole can be taken
precisely as such; but while they shared some common theological and aesthetic concerns,
and despite the identifiable kinship between some of their ideas, Tolkien thought Sayers’
detective fiction vulgar.
60
Tolkien, 188 [153, draft, to Peter Hastings]. The letter was seemingly never sent.
A related suggestion is contained in an earlier letter to Milton Waldman written in 1951:
‘all this stuff’, Tolkien writes (alluding to his entire mythological enterprise), ‘is mainly
concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine’ (Tolkien, 145 [131, undated, to Milton
Waldman]). A footnote to the text reads ‘It is, I suppose, fundamentally concerned with the
problem of the relation of Art (and Sub-creation) and Primary Reality’.
61
J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, Including the Poem Mythopoeia & The Homecoming
of Beorhtnoth (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 30. The citation is from the essay ‘On Fairy
Stories’ first published in 1947. Given the consonance of the idea with those expressed in
earlier works, and its place in the argument of the essay as a whole, it seems likely that it
dates back to the lost original (presumably much shorter) text of the lecture ‘Fairy Stories’
delivered in the University of St Andrews on 8 March 1939. On the history see Rachel Hart,
‘Tolkien, St Andrews, and Dragons’ in Trevor Hart and Ivan Khovacs, eds, Tree of Tales:
Tolkien, Literature and Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 1–11.
version belongs to the imaginative genesis of Middle-earth itself in the years

immediately following the First World War.62 It concerns Eru, or Ilúvatar, and
his creation of the cosmos, not by solo virtuoso performance, but by calling into
existence creatures themselves capable of sharing in the joyful task of bringing
a world to completion. The metaphor in terms of which the myth pictures this
creative interplay is itself, appropriately, an artistic one. Ilúvatar propounds a great
musical theme, and invites the Ainur or Valar (the angelic first-created) to join in
the music-making, each adorning the main theme with his own, to the end of a great
and glorious harmony sounding forth. The creativity of the Ainur, therefore, is at
once wholly unlike Ilúvatar’s own creative act, while yet constituting an extension,
development of and participation in it. While each of the angelic creatures is free
to fashion his own individual melody, the skill or ‘art’ of the matter lies not in any
sheer creativity ex nihilo, but precisely in the harmonious development of a theme
which Ilúvatar himself has already propounded and which determines, as it were,
the form of the overall work. The core image, then, is that of harmonising by free
and spontaneous ornamentation. For his part, we are told, Ilúvatar will ‘sit and
hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song’.63
Creaturely acts of sub-creation, therefore, are here contingent on a divine self-
limitation which, paradoxically, creates the conditions for that which pleases God’s
heart and satisfies his desire the most – reciprocal acts of a ‘creative’ sort, taking
what God has given and offering it back enriched and enhanced in accordance
with its original God-given store of possibility. Of course, such kenotic sharing
of responsibility opens the emergent cosmos to malign influence, and Tolkien’s
myth, while hardly a calque on its biblical equivalent, has its own Miltonic Satan
figure in Melkor, the most gifted angel of all, in whom sub-creative desire falls
away from its proper orientation and manifests itself in the reality-denying wish
‘to be Lord and God of his own private creation’.64 Melkor’s capacity for weaving
discord and ruin amidst the primal harmony of the divine design is considerable,
and it calls forth from Ilúvatar a deeper and superior artistry in order to redeem
it, not (unlike the God of at least one Christian hymn) drowning out ‘all music but
his own’,65 but rather taking the offending and destructive noise up skilfully into
the pattern of his own music-making in such a way that its significance is finally
transfigured and made good. The bringing of the creative vision to fulfilment
and completion, therefore, is by no means automatic or straightforward; but it
is contingent on creaturely as well as divine action and response and, in God’s
62
See J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1977), 15–22. On the different rescensions of the myth see Trevor Hart,
‘Tolkien, Creation and Creativity’ in Hart and Khovacs, 39–53.
63
Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 15.
64
Tolkien, Letters, 145 [131, undated (1951), to Milton Waldman].
65
‘Crown Him with Many Crowns’ by Matthew Bridges (1800–94) and Godfrey
Thring (1823–1903). The full text may be found in The Methodist Hymn Book (London:
Methodist Conference Office, 1933), No. 271.
hands, it is finally secure rather than uncertain. In earlier versions of the myth,
Tolkien was much more bold in his suggestion of a world given by God only in
what amounts to outline form, with empty spaces deliberately left unfilled and
adornments unrealised, looking to the ‘eucharistic’ artistry of the Ainur for their
due enrichment and completion. Later editions tone this down slightly, as Tolkien
perhaps increasingly realised the danger of theological misunderstanding, and
felt the need to indicate more clearly the distinction he believed must indeed be
drawn between that creating which God alone does and is capable of doing, and
creaturely ‘sub-creating’ as he had by now dubbed it. For, while the myth is first
and foremost a work of the literary imagination, making no obvious claim as such
to a truth beyond its own borders, it is also an exploration and daring sketch of
the contours of a theological aesthetic – an account not of primordial angelic sub-
creating, but that ‘artistry’ to which human beings find themselves called in the
very midst of Primary Reality.
The poem ‘Mythopoeia’ had its origins in a now legendary after-dinner
conversation between Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson conducted in the
grounds of Magdalen College on the evening of 19 September 1931.66 Among
other things, the substance of the conversation touched upon the capacity of myth
(and by extension other imaginative and poetic forms) to deal in the stuff of reality
and truth, rather than being (in the reported words of Lewis,67 the ‘Misomythus’
of the poem’s cryptic inscription) lies ‘breathed through silver’. In his verse
Tolkien playfully drives home his polemical point, that poetry may indeed be a
sharp instrument in the hands of truth, helping us to cut the world at its joints,
and he decries by comparison the sort of arid rationalism and literalism for which
everything is exactly what its label says it is, and nothing is ever found to be
more or other than it is. The poetic eye, the poem itself suggests, is thus the one
best fitted to explore a world believed to be chock full of deep connections and
hidden meanings, rather than exhausted in our measured consideration of its
mere surface appearances. Furthermore, such acts of poesis are fundamental to
the roots of human language and perception themselves (‘trees are not “trees”,
until so named and seen – /and never were so named till those had been/who
speech’s involuted breath unfurled …’),68 and whatever world of meanings and
significances we apprehend around us is therefore already in part a product of prior
poetic responses to what is divinely given from beyond ourselves – a ‘refracted
light’ which has been splintered from its pure white into a glorious array of colours
only by being passed first through the prism of our humanity. We experience the
world in accordance with the capacities invested in our nature, and far from being
See Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (London: HarperCollins,

66
2002), 196–9.
67
The occasion was prior to Lewis’s return to Christian faith from the atheism of his
early adult years, and a significant moment in the narrative of that return. See Carpenter,
197–8.
68
Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 86.
essentially passive and receptive, those capacities turn out to involve us necessarily
in acts of construction, interpretation and ‘sense making’ from the very first. There
is, of course, a distinction to be drawn between Primary and Secondary Reality,
but again it must not be drawn with too thick a pencil, since both are bound up
with our peculiar poetic disposition towards things, and the boundaries between
them are flexible and permeable:69 we make, as Tolkien puts it ‘in our measure
and in our derivative mode’, by the law in which we’re made – ’and not only
made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker’.70 To be participant ‘in our
measure and … derivative mode’ in God’s own continuing creative engagement
with the world and its possibilities of meaning, drawing it closer by constant small
scale acts of ‘guerrilla theatre’71 to what, in God’s creative vision, it was always
intended to be, and what, through the work of his own hands, it will yet become
and be, this, Tolkien suggests, is not just our right, but our distinctive creaturely
calling and charge, whether used or misused.72 And it is for acts of imaginative
sub-creating that God looks and longs in his human creatures, craving nothing
more than the glimpse of his own creative heart having found purchase and offered
back in joyful thanks from the side of the creature. If, as Williams suggests, artistry
is indeed but an acute and paradigmatic case of our wider human disposition to
the world, then here the arts, holiness and worship promise to fuse in a manner as
yet to be fully reckoned with in most of our churches, and with some potentially
fruitful implications, perhaps, for a newly cast Christology. ‘Dis-graced’ we may
well be, Tolkien avers; but neither the right nor the responsibility invested in us at
our creation has decayed. ‘We make still by the law in which we’re made.’73
69
Thus, artistic imagination may grant us ‘Recovery … a re-gaining – regaining of a
clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers,
though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”’. ibid.,
57–8. The concession, albeit made in passing, is significant, both including human response
already within any accounting of the ‘real’, and suggesting the latter’s susceptibility to
modification by poetic redescription.
70
Ibid., 56; cf. 87.
71
Amos Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1976).
72
73
Ibid., 87.
Chapter 6
Unauthorised Texts
Theology, Faith and Fictions
In the previous chapter we saw how works of the literary imagination (drama,
poetry, myth) can engage fruitfully with religious and theological themes, and how
explicitly poetic modes, contrary to popular presumption, may function perfectly
well as efficient instruments in the hands of those concerned either to commend
or to reckon further with aspects of reality as it is taken to be. My concern in this
chapter is with the related suggestion that certain works of literature may properly
function as texts of theology – texts, that is to say, that engage and wrestle with,
and deepen our grasp upon the realities with which religion (and doctrine in its
own distinctive mode) has properly and inevitably to do.1 It is possible that this
suggestion will be met with stiff resistance from certain quarters, and we must
consider some possible objections to it.
First, there is the intellectual hangover from the specious dichotomy posited
in the nineteenth century by Feuerbach and rejuvenated more recently by Gordon
Kaufman between revelation and imagination.2 Theology of a traditional sort,
Kaufman notes, supposed itself to have received an authoritative revelation from
God, and to be charged with re-presenting the gist of this in terms familiar and
accessible to contemporary understanding. Kaufman himself, though, believes
that revelation is no longer available to us as a meaningful category in the modern
age, and that the reality of ‘God’ is one that in fact remains forever hidden
and inaccessible to us.3 Theological and religious language, therefore, must be
understood rather differently, as the product of the constructive human imagination
working up a concept or symbol of ‘God’ ‘that gathers up into itself and focuses for
us all those cosmic forces working toward the fully humane existence for which we
long’.4 In short, whereas ‘revelation’ comes down authoritatively from above as
1
Cf. Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music,
Art and Rhetoric (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 123–53. Viladesau’s concern, though,
is chiefly with pictorial art as such, and in particular its capacity to function theologically
‘without the necessity of accompanying words’ (123–4).
2
See Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, translated by George Eliot
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957); Gordon Kaufman, The Theological Imagination:
Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981). See above,
40–41.
3
Kaufman, 21.
4
Kaufman, 50.
the putative product of divine action, ‘imagination’ is the projection upwards from
below of an image produced by the human imagination alone, thus possessing
only whatever authority the Church or other human institutions choose to vest
it with.5 The theological task, therefore, is precisely one of poetic construction
(‘making things up’ as popular parlance might put it), albeit one constrained by
social and linguistic considerations of various sorts.
It is not my purpose here to respond to Kaufman’s arguments, which demand
more space and more careful dissection than my present task permits.6 It will be
clear from earlier chapters that I share to the full his conviction that theology is
from first to last a highly imaginative enterprise. As David Bryant notes, however,
what Kaufman gets quite wrong in articulating his case is his apparent assumption
that the products of human imagining are, without exception, the products
of imagination alone – that is, that the imagination is essentially and always
constructive in its working, and has no significant receptive capacity whatever.7
This is an odd supposition, since even a moment’s reflection on various workings
of the imagination in human life will compel the recognition that imagination can
never work ex nihilo (despite the aspirations of some Romantic accounts of the
matter), but always works with and transforms more or less significantly something
given to it, by empirical experience or by some human tradition of language, belief
and practice. Curiously, Kaufman’s own account of how various images for God
arise and are to be weighed and evaluated itself acknowledges precisely this, but
what impresses itself on the reader’s memory is the sharp polarity he presents
between an essentially receptive disposition towards revelation and the essentially
constructive nature of theology as an imaginative venture, and his proposal that
theology must finally choose between the two. It is this – and the consequent
elision of the distinction between the imaginative and the purely imaginary – that
needs to be dismissed, in the theological context and elsewhere.
Imagination, as we have already seen, is the organ of meaning and, as such,
furnishes the necessary conditions both for the construction of artifice and the
intelligent statement of truth – and, indeed, for a whole range of meaningful
constructs in which these coexist and coalesce in a fruitful manner.8 Imagination,
It is important to note that Kaufman wrestles long and hard with issues of authority,
5
and is certainly not advocating an individualistic free-for-all. He does, though, shift the
authoritative centre of gravity decisively away from the received heritage of ecclesial
tradition to the perceived needs of a contemporary context.
6
For helpful responses see Tony Clark, Divine Revelation and Human Practice:
Responsive and Imaginative Participation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008), 197–222; Bruce
McCormack, ‘Divine revelation and human imagination: must we choose between the
two?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 37(4) (1984): 431–55.
7
David Bryant, Faith and the Play of Imagination: On the Role of Imagination in
Religion (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1989), 54–5.
8
See above, 13–16.
Unauthorised Texts 141
too, precisely in its capacity for the deliberate construction of ‘heuristic fictions’9
of one sort or another, is a vital tool for the extension of our knowledge of the
world and whatever lies beyond it. So, we cannot simply dismiss the imaginative
as such and suppose that by doing so we secure the interests of authoritative
knowledge and its intelligent ordering. Furthermore, once it has been conceded –
as it must be – that even the most radical imaginative departures from the texture
of reality are nonetheless compelled to begin and to work with materials given
to them from beyond the scope of their own generative powers, the question of
how much is given and of its ultimate provenance becomes an open one, and the
suggestion that God might give himself to be known not in ways that are exclusive
of acts of human imagining (a sort of divine ‘download’ of data inviting a purely
passive disposition), but precisely in ways that solicit, demand and undergird
responses of a highly imaginative sort is put back in play.10 When we consider
the texts that lie at the centre of any Christian talk about revelation, of course,
the substance of what we find certainly encourages rather than discourages the
supposition that this is so. Not only is the literary genre of much of the Christian
canon of a sort that makes explicit appeal to our imagination first – parable, story,
poetry, saga, apocalypse, proverbs and so on – and only thereby to our powers of
intellectual judgement and affective and moral response, Jesus’ own ministry of
teaching and preaching and healing and sign-giving was, from all that we know
of it, one that drew men and women into discipleship (and left others cold) via a
continual and sustained appeal to their powers of imagination. ‘How, then, shall we
picture the kingdom of God?’ is perhaps sufficient dominical mandate for taking
the religious and theological importance of imagination thoroughly seriously, and
for considering an understanding of revelation as a continual divine bid by the
Holy Spirit to take our imagination captive, compelling us to see, hear, feel and
taste the world in a wholly new manner and to respond accordingly. And I have
already argued above that theology (which is predicated upon and part of that same
response) is always and necessarily engaged with images of one sort or another,
and thus with the operations and outputs of imagination.11 So, the suspicion that
acknowledgement of the role of imagination as such is corrosive of theological
claims to be grounded in a knowledge revealed, God-given and authoritative is
ill-founded, and can safely be set aside, whatever more remains still to be said.
9
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of
Meaning in Language, trans. R Czerny and others (Toronto and Buffalo: Toronto University
Press, 1977), 239.
10
Kaufman, as we have noted, believes revelatory acts as such to be impossible,
or at least non-actual; but we need feel no obligation whatever to share this assumption,
which is one held on quite independent grounds, and which has no necessary connection
whatever with the alleged presence or absence of an imaginative component in religious
and theological knowing.
11
See above, 33–8.
It remains true nonetheless, that imagination works in different ways and

produces quite different sorts of outputs, and this observation might occasion a
second, rather different objection to the claim that works of literary imagination
may function as texts of theology. Surely, it might be argued, the nature of
literature is playful and open ended, eschewing the moral demand to provide an
authentic or ‘true’ account of any circumstance, and prone thereby to muddy the
waters of reality rather than lending itself naturally to a clear and concise analysis
and accounting of the sort that theology, in the interest of helping faith better to
understand its object, typically seeks? This criticism though, can and should be
turned promptly on its head. Just as imagination can and does do more than one
sort of thing, so too theology, in its turn, is patient of more than one mode of
working and one sort of outcome. And, far from the open-textured and technically
uncommitted nature of literary imagining being a fatal flaw, for some theological
purposes, we might insist, it presents itself rather as a potential virtue.
Perhaps it may help if we differentiate at this point between theology and
doctrine. For convenience, let’s define doctrine as the attempt to clarify and to
offer a cogent statement of what the Church believes and has classically believed
across the centuries. This is a vital intellectual task, and while (for all the reasons
rehearsed above) it can and will hardly be one entirely free from the contributions
of imagination, its modus operandi will typically be one that seeks to delimit and
define, closing down the available options in the interests of clarification and
the establishment of a core of consensual confession. Of course, there may still
be differences of perspective to be had and even disagreements to be lived with
(different ‘doctrines’ of the person of Christ, of the Spirit, of the Church, and so
on); but in so far as each is concerned with formulating – as clearly as the intrinsic
mystery of faith’s object permits – what can and should be confessed in relation
to various articles of faith, each shares the doctrinal imperative of stating that
mystery and doing so in a manner that equips Christian preaching and teaching in
its faithful rendering of the story of God’s dealings with the world.
Understood thus, doctrine is obviously a form of theology, of thinking and
speaking about God. But it is not the only form. Theology needs to be willing,
too, to interrogate, open up and explore the entailments of what is given to it in
revelation, to consider different possibilities, and to ask uncomfortable questions
and adopt alien standpoints, precisely in order better to understand its own
perspectives. It needs to do this continually, returning afresh to hear the Word
spoken to it from beyond, rather than resting content with the mere transmission
and translation of an agreed set of formulae. Furthermore, precisely in faithfulness
to what it believes itself to know of the God who has given himself to be known –
viz., that this God is ultimate mystery, otherwise unknowable, and remaining veiled
even in the midst of being revealed12 – theology must reckon with the semantic
shortfall and excess of all its statements, and never rest content that it has its object
pinned down, and trussed up for easy inspection. Paul Fiddes puts the matter very
See above, 63–4.

12
helpfully.13 There is, he suggests, on the one hand a vital movement ‘from Mystery
to us’ in revelation as God seizes our language,14 and this places us under an
obligation to speak in our turn, and to speak as clearly as possible what we believe
has been said to us. But there is also a perfectly proper and theologically important
movement from the side of human reflection ‘towards Mystery’, as our response to
revelation takes the form not just of fixing and determining meaning, but forever
seeking to interrogate and immerse ourselves imaginatively in its fertile excess
afresh, unafraid of becoming lost, precisely because we trust the one who holds us
and will not let us go. As Fiddes suggests, both of these impulses are necessary,
and must be sustained in a constant and constructive dialogue if theology is not
either to lapse into an amorphous flux of images, uncertain what it believes or why,
or, on the other hand, to wither into an arid dogmatism long since drained of vital
contact with the living Mystery of faith itself.
There are, of course, numerous forms which the human move towards mystery
may take. Here, it suffices to note that all are necessarily highly imaginative, and
that the literary imagination affords a number of such forms for consideration.
Furthermore, as Fiddes observes, since ‘all creative writing … is concerned with
human experience’, it ‘is occupied with themes that also occupy Christian faith
and theology’.15 This being so, most such writing may serve to provoke and
stimulate theological imagining of a sort which, drawn into creative conversation
with the distinctive voice of doctrine, holds out possibilities of renewal and
regeneration, and a strengthening rather than any weakening or dilution of
doctrinal reformulation of the tradition. It is precisely such a dialogue which
Fiddes hosts fruitfully in Freedom and Limit, and it furnishes a worthy model.
My concern here, though, is with works of literary imagination which, beyond
furnishing an imaginative stimulus for theological reflection, might themselves
reasonably be claimed as ‘theological’ texts, albeit ones quite different in form and
tone to works of doctrine. Identifying such texts (and so excluding others) is itself
a task rendered complex in the post-Christian context, with the social imaginary
still populated by (albeit often unawares) and indebted to the symbols, images
and narratives of its Christian heritage. Determining what may sensibly count as
situating itself imaginatively within the horizons of Christian faith and practice,
and thus concerned to move us towards and deeper into the Mystery (rather than
merely into ‘mystery’) is often far from straightforward. Fortunately, my concern
in the remainder of this chapter is with two literary texts each of which situates
us as readers or audience (one is a drama) identifiably, quickly and fully within
the world of biblical story, and is concerned in one way or another to explore and
unfold the substance of that world and its possible theological entailments from
13
See the discussion in Paul Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue (London:
Macmillan, 1991), 8–15.
14
See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 2nd ed., trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F.
Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 430.
15
Fiddes, 33.
within. Each, I shall suggest, offers a serious engagement with the Mystery of
faith which, precisely by its open-endedness and imaginative detachment from
the constraints of accepted doctrinal orthodoxies or ‘authorised’ perspectives,
develops ‘heuristic fictions’ intended to enhance rather than distract or detract
from the interests of theology in the wider sense, and thus, through a creative
dialectic, of doctrine as such.
Byron’s Cain: A Mystery
The observation that Lord Byron’s Cain: A Mystery16 keeps company with some of
the thornier issues of theodicy is hardly a new one. But the play does so, it seems,
on two quite distinct levels. First, the problem of ‘justifying’ God in the face of
the often horrendous evils confronting us in God’s world is woven explicitly into
the dialogue and the action of the drama itself. The so-called logical form of the
problem (in which definitions of goodness and omnipotence are triangulated with
the surd fact of evil in order to generate an atheistic reductio ad absurdum) is
alluded to directly at least twice by the eponymous anti-hero. So, for instance, in
an early soliloquy, dismissive of the piety and comfortable religious certainties of
his parents and siblings, Cain complains:
They have but

One answer to all questions, “’twas [God’s] will,
And he is good”. How know I that? Because
He is all-powerful must all-good, too, follow?
I judge but by the fruits – and they are bitter. (I, i, 74–8)17
Secondly, though, in a peculiar parallel to this natural theological move from

below to above (from the evidence of the world to disputed inferences concerning
the intent and character of its creator) we find, in the criticism on the play, a
literary-critical version of the same move. Now it is the ‘world’ of Byron’s drama
that is under close scrutiny (what happens in it and, chiefly, what is said in it), and
the intent and character of its maker that is being either confidently ‘read off’, or
anguished over, on the basis of the available evidence.
In her own sustained essay tracing parallels between the God–world relation
and the artist’s relationship to his text, Dorothy L. Sayers noted that for some
reason ‘we are continually tempted to confine the mind of the writer to its
expression within his creation, especially if it suits our purposes to do so. We try
to identify him with this or that part of his works, as though it contained his whole
16
For the text, see Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, eds, Lord Byron: The
Complete Poetical Works, Vol. VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 228–95.
17
Cf. 2.ii.284–5. ‘… my sire says he’s omnipotent:/Then why is evil – he being
good?’
mind’.18 In fact, of course, the mind of the maker transcends his work. And, even
though in the strictest sense it must be true that ‘a writer cannot create a character
or express a thought or emotion which is not within his own mind’,19 the relation
of transcendence remains vital. Authors create through acts of imagination, calling
into being realities that are genuinely other than themselves as well as firmly
tied to their creative energy and vision. Indeed, ‘if a character becomes merely
a mouthpiece of an author, he ceases to be a character, and is no longer a living
creation’ with an integrity of his own.20 Literary ventriloquism, in other words,
is tantamount to pantheism, and the genuinely creative relation breaks down
completely at that point.
Furthermore, whatever standpoint we may adopt within the larger critical
problem of authors and their intentions, we need to reckon with the fact that, as
C.S. Lewis puts it, our chief concern in reading literature should not be utilitarian,
any more than the author’s was in writing it, but with allowing our imaginative
capacities (and through them our emotions, moral sensibilities and spiritual
awareness) to be stimulated by the imaginary pattern created by the artist. There
is, we might say, an intrinsic and deliberate moral distance between the imaginary
worlds of art and the real world. Even in the most realistic of fiction, Lewis argues,
we are not being told ‘this is what the world is like’ (or even may possibly be
like), but given an imaginary ‘as if’ for aesthetic enjoyment.21 The point can be
overstated, of course; but it does need to be taken seriously. Too many theologies
would have us treat the world – in all its complexity – as a stepping stone to an
encounter with its maker, rather than something to be reckoned with and ‘enjoyed’
in its own right. Yet a theology of creation as ‘gift’ is bound to insist that we linger
at the level of the world itself, treating it in some proper sense as an end, and not
merely as a means to some ultimate or spiritual goal.
Creation, Transcendence and the Mind of the Maker
The equivalent literary point has often been made in relation to the world of
Cain, not least by its maker himself. Thus, in a letter to John Murray dated 3
November 1821, Byron notes that for the sake of dramatic consistency (and, one
might say, permitting his key characters the sort of creaturely ‘freedom’ appropriate
to the world he has summoned into being): ‘I was obliged to make Cain and Lucifer
talk [in the manner they] – and surely this has always been permitted to poesy?’22
18
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen, 1941), 39.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 41.
21
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1961), 88.
22
Leslie A. Marchand, ed., ‘In the Wind’s Eye’. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 9
(London: John Murray, 1979), 53.
A similar case is urged by Byron’s most ardent advocate in the spat that ensued
over the publication of Cain by John Murray in December 1821. Addressing
himself to the charge of the anonymous ‘Oxoniensis’ – that the play was an organ
of sedition and blasphemy, its author at best a sacrilegious mischief maker out
to make a fast buck, and, at worst, to be numbered among the party of Lucifer
himself23 – the self-styled ‘Harroviensis’ concentrates on showing how the poet
John Milton, when measured by the same standards, permits his own diabolic
characters sentiments every bit as heterodox and irreligious as anything to which
Byron’s imagination has given voice. Yet Milton’s name is held in ‘highest honour
and applause’. The demoniacal opprobrium granted existence in each case is, he
suggests, precisely a matter of the poet being true to the world and the characters
he has chosen to make, and is to be treated as such in the first instance. After all,
what self-respecting fiend would speak the pious language of angels, or encourage
his human protégé to do so? Is hateful blasphemy not precisely what we should
expect, and therefore its presence part and parcel of the creative skill whereby a
secondary world is called forth, and our belief in it secured?24
Finally, though, Harroviensis compromises the real force of his own argument.
So determined is he to acquit Byron of the charge of being the author of the evil
that stalks his dramatic world, that he mounts an alternative ‘natural theological’
case, stacking up the evidence of the text as a whole in a bid to construe the poet
instead as a great moralist and the champion of a spiritually edifying orthodoxy.
But Byron himself was probably innocent of this charge too, his own insistence
that the play is ‘as orthodox as the thirty nine articles’ positively dripping with
irony.25 The point is, surely, that to make either move is to miss the point. There is
something about the nature of the creative relationship itself which means that the
creator always remains veiled behind as much as being revealed in and through his
or her work, and consideration of the content of the work in itself can generally do
little to help us to discern where the relevant continuities and discontinuities lie.
Cain as a Theological Text?
This cannot mean, of course, that ‘poesy’ can have no very serious moral or spiritual
purpose and effect, as though it were a mere playful trifling with imaginative ‘as
ifs’, a matter of entertainment only, titillation, and never transformation. Byron’s
plea that ‘Cain is nothing more than a drama – not a piece of argument’ does
nothing to exculpate him from the charge of doing theology in this sense.26 It
Oxoniensis, A Remonstrance Addressed to Mr. John Murray Respecting a Recent

23
Publication (London: Francis and Charles Rivington, 1822),

24
See Harroviensis, A Letter to Sir Walter Scott, Bart. in Answer to the Remonstrance
of Oxoniensis on the Publication of Cain, A Mystery, by Lord Byron (London: Rodwell and
Martin, 1822), 7–8.
25
Letter to Douglas Kinnaird of 4 November 1821. See Marchand, 56.
26
Letter to John Murray of 8 February 1822. See Marchand, 103.
merely draws our attention to the fact that by choosing to write a drama (and
nothing less than a drama), rather than a religious pamphlet, any theology that he
does will be of a quite distinctive sort, one that spoils all expectations of rigorous
argument and compels us to view such, should it arise in the dialogue, with due
suspicion, refusing to be persuaded unless and until the work as a whole has been
reckoned with, and happy to suppose that closure in any guise, even the closure
of ‘an overall point of view’, as Wolf Z. Hirst puts it,27 may actually be something
more and other than the writer intends to convey. The poet’s description of the
play’s subject as ‘A Mystery’ is, it seems, not wholly a gesture of tribute to earlier
dramatic traditions,28 but equally an announcement that we should expect a piece
concerned more to explore and chart the contours (emotional and spiritual as
well as intellectual) of difficult and uncomfortable territory than to furnish any
confident – let alone easy – answers. The drama creates a self-contained reality in
which unpalatable possibilities can be contemplated, conflicting voices heard in
all their strength, and contradictory perspectives indwelt. It is in this way that the
drama’s distinctive excess or surplus of meaning is brought to bear. It can make us
feel (and thus ‘know’ in the fullest sense) the force of the painful questions that life
often thrusts cruelly upon us but single-mindedly refuses to answer. Here reality is
understood by being ‘tasted’ rather than reflected upon, even though our tasting of
it is through the skilled artifice of the poet’s pen rather than direct and raw as in life
itself. But for that very reason, we can risk lingering awhile in those places where,
in life, we might not dare to linger, the distance between the imagined world and
our own being just sufficient to have, as it were, the best of both without losing
touch with either. The outcome can often be a more full-orbed and emotionally
adequate grasp on our own reality, refusing to endorse any view (theological or
otherwise) that achieves its answers too easily or only by suffocating the most
important questions before they are properly born.
Despite the preferences of theologians for tidying things up into packages
altogether neater and more certain than the texture of reality typically is, we
should at least note that the Bible regularly adopts this same imaginative strategy.
So, as the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann notes, alongside the ‘core
testimony’ to God’s character and actions that furnishes the ‘overall point of view’
of the Scriptural witness, there are elements of vibrant and vital ‘counter-testimony’
in which serious questions are asked of God, and in which he is construed on
occasion as ‘devious, ambiguous, irascible and unstable’.29 That such perspectives
are aired, and such questions asked, Brueggemann suggests, is an important part
of the health of the text, giving vent to feelings that, far from being sacrilegious
27
‘Byron’s Lapse into Orthodoxy: an Unorthodox Reading of Cain’, in The Plays
of Lord Byron: Critical Essays, ed. by Robert Gleckner and Bernard Beatty (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1997), 253–72 (270).
28
See Byron’s Preface to the play, McGann and Weller, 228.
29
Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute,
Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 359.
or blasphemous, constitute an important and natural part of faith’s response to

the messy and painful eventualities that divine providence encompasses. God, we
may suppose, is big enough to handle any possible offence caused.
Hope Baffled, but Not Lost
In the entry dated 28 January 1821 in his ‘Ravenna Journal’, Byron notes that
he has been pondering ‘the subjects of four tragedies to be written (life and
circumstances permitting)’. Among these projects is ‘Cain, a metaphysical subject,
[…] in five acts, perhaps, with the chorus’. Later in the same entry, among some
‘memoranda’, we find the following reflection:
Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure […] does there mingle a
certain sense of doubt and sorrow – a fear of what is to come – a fear of what
is […] Why is this? […] I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most
susceptible of giddiness and that we never fear falling except from a precipice –
the higher the more awful, and the more sublime; and, therefore, I am not sure
that Fear is not a pleasurable sensation; at least, Hope is; and what Hope is there
without a deep leaven of Fear? and what sensation is so delightful as Hope? and,
if it were not for Hope, where would the Future be? – in hell.
And then:
Thought for a Speech of Lucifer, in the Tragedy of Cain: –

Were Death an evil, would I let thee live?30
While Byron’s creative purposes must finally be permitted some appropriate level
of apophatic inscrutability, it seems reasonable to suggest that here, at least, we are
given a glimpse of the germinal thought, feeling or question which duly grows and
takes form in Cain: A Mystery. If ‘Death’ (understood now as synechdoche for all
that opposes, pollutes and finally prevents human life and flourishing) is indeed an
evil (as it certainly seems to be), and if (as a vision conjured up by Lucifer in the
play of the whole history of creaturely suffering suggests) death has a stranglehold
on life from first to last, then why the hell (as it were) does God grant us life in the
first place? What is he playing at? Is this not a strange ‘gift’ indeed, that inflicts
pain on us even as we enjoy it, and that will, in any case, finally be wrenched from
our grasp just as we have become used to it? Would it not be better for Cain’s infant
son Enoch to be dashed horribly against the rocks before his innocence rather than
his skull is shattered? Are all dreams, desires and aspirations not thwarted from
the outset by the fact that, as Cain’s wife Zillah proclaims towards the play’s end,
‘Death is in the world’ (III, i, 370)? It is this fact, and its significance, that haunts
30
Leslie A. Marchand, ed., ‘Born for Opposition’. Byron’s Letters and Journals,
vol. 8 (London: John Murray, 1978), 36–7, 38, 39.
Cain throughout the play. It is death that he is preoccupied with, death that he
seeks knowledge of, a vision of death that he is granted, and death that, ironically,
he himself grants entrance on to the world stage. ‘Death is in the world.’ What are
we to make of that? It is first Cain’s questioning, and then the despair born of the
‘knowledge’ bestowed by Lucifer’s vision, that occasion some of the play’s most
impassioned utterances:
Thoughts unspeakable
Crowd in my breast to burning, when I hear
Of this almighty Death who is, it seems,
Inevitable. (I, i, 256–9)
Thoughts unspeakable – yet thoughts, and feelings, that must be spoken, that must
be aired, that we must be allowed to air. Which of us has not known the reality
of such thoughts and feelings? To feel less would be to be less fully human, not
more. But Cain’s perspective, whether his early incredulity or his later wretched
hopelessness, is not the drama as such. And the play leaves hanging to the end
questions about the inevitability, the finality of death, about death’s hold over
life as a matter of ‘seeming’. To be sure, it ‘seems’ to be thus. All the available
evidence, when weighed in the balance, points us in that direction. Yet the drama
suggests (nothing more) that even yet it may prove not to be thus. As Harold
Fisch has observed, the closing scene contains a beginning as well as an ending,31
with Cain and Adah cast out towards the East, bearing their children with them
rather than putting them out of their misery. There is a hint here, then, of promise,
of new possibilities, and finally, perhaps, even of an ‘omnipotent benevolence –/
Inscrutable, but still to be fulfill’d’ (III, i, 235–6). The evidence of the play itself
cannot show us this, any more than that of our lives in the world can; but it leaves
us, at the last, when all the rage and anguish have been vented and allowed to
subside, with a hope that may, indeed, often be ‘baffled’ by the mystery of it all,
but that is not yet lost.
Poetry and Theology in Paradise Lost
In his 1925 study Milton: Man and Thinker Denis Saurat urged upon his readers
the importance of the attempt to ‘disentangle from theological rubbish the permanent
and human interest of (Milton’s) thought’.32 The thought is the familiar modern one
that what really matters in poetry, as elsewhere, transcends the accidents of time
and place (and particular theological commitment), and may only be had by a
painstaking process of stripping these away. In his Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)
31
‘Byron’s Cain as Sacred Executioner’, in Wolf Z. Hirst, ed., Byron, the Bible, and
Religion (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 25–38 (25).
32
Denis Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker (New York: The Dial Press, 1925), 111.
C.S. Lewis responded, in typically forthright and colourful fashion, that this was
somewhat like ‘asking us to study … centipedes when free of their irrelevant legs,
or Gothic architecture without the pointed arches’.33 Somehow the very point of
the matter has been missed, or at least wantonly denied. ‘Milton’s thought,’ Lewis
insists, ‘when purged of its theology, does not exist’. Much more recently, Theo
Hobson has laid an analogous charge at the door of post-Romantic approaches to
Milton’s poetry as ‘Literature’ which regularly laud him as a great poet, yet assess
his worth as such without reference to those ideas which, on another view of the
matter, appear to be the very life-blood of his poetry itself. This, Hobson suggests,
is like celebrating Jesus as a ‘great moral teacher’; the judgement is not itself false,
but it hardly scratches the surface of what really matters about his teachings.34
As a pre-Romantic, Milton himself would not have recognised the point of a
tribute to his or anyone else’s poetry in terms of its aesthetic and ‘literary’ aspects
alone. Of course he understood perfectly well that poetry was gratuitous beyond
any utility it might also possess. Indeed, as Frank Kermode notes, ‘From all that
Milton says about the way poetry works, it is clear that he asks of it not that it
should immediately instruct, but that it should immediately delight’.35 It is also
true enough that ‘Milton wrote a theological treatise; but Paradise Lost is not it’.36
De Doctrina Christiana, in effect a work of systematic theology, was composed
over several decades and probably completed at the end of the 1650s, just seven
years before the publication of Paradise Lost.37 But the aestheticist notion of an
art produced ‘for art’s sake’ was unknown in Milton’s day, and the words of poetry
mattered for much more than their music alone. In an early anti-prelatical tract38
Milton himself articulates a vision of the poet as one uniquely gifted by the Spirit
to gauge the verities of human life under God and, by showing these forth in
ways sufficient to capture the popular imagination, transform the conditions of
personal and public life alike. Instruction and delight, he clearly believed, could
C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942),
33
65.
34
Theo Hobson, Milton’s Vision: The Birth of Christian Liberty (London and New
York: Continuum, 2008), 164. Phillip Donnelly’s recent work also insists upon holding
Milton’s theology closely together with his poetry if we are properly to understand the
latter. See Phillip J. Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant
Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 73–165.
35
Frank Kermode, ‘Adam Unparadised’, in The Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 92.
36
Ibid., 91.
37
On this text and the circumstances surrounding its composition see Gordon
Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 271ff.
38
‘The Reason of Church Government Urg’d Against Prelaty’ (1641). For the
relevant passage see Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Works of John Milton, vol. 3.1 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 238.
and should interpenetrate, and in this sense the poet could and must properly be a
‘theologian’ too.
Milton’s poetry issues from (and situates itself explicitly within) the
intellectual, practical and affective world of Christian faith in the early-modern
period. This was, William Poole observes, a period when the narrative centre of
gravity of Paradise Lost (in Genesis 3) and doctrinal constructs attendant upon it
were at the forefront of theological conversation.39 Among Protestant variations
on Augustinianism, differing perspectives on the doctrines of grace, freedom,
foreknowledge, the divine decree and the state of human nature before and after
the ‘Fall’ were bandied around as convenient markers of party allegiance, and
all came to a head conveniently in contested readings of this particular biblical
text. Why did Adam do what he did? This, of course, is an interesting religious
and theological question. But in an age when religious and political visions were
more difficult to disentangle than they sometimes are (in theory at least) today,
the exegesis of biblical texts both informed and was in turn informed directly by
the realities of public life, and a question about the conditions of Adam’s fall was
naturally understood to be a question about what human beings are really like
when push comes to shove and, consequently, how human societies might most
appropriately be ordered for the common good. For Milton and his contemporaries,
the true context for human action could really only be understood through an
imaginative grasp on a profoundly theological vision of reality, a vision of the
precise sort Milton himself offers in Paradise Lost.
Certain questions in particular exercised Milton throughout his life, especially
those to do with human liberty and the conditions under which it may meaningfully
be exercised in a moral way. Thus in Areopagitica (1644), attacking Parliament’s
efforts to curb the freedom of the press, we find the following:
If every action which is good, or evill in man at ripe years, were to be under
pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were vertue but a name, what
praise could be then due to well-doing, what grammercy to be sober, just or
continent? many there be that complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam
to transgresse, foolish tongues! when God gave him reason he gave him freedom
to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a meer artificiall Adam,
such an Adam as he is in the motions. … Assuredly we bring not innocence into
the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and
triall is by what is contrary.40
Temptation, in other words, is the necessary condition not only for sin, but for
its opposite too, obedience and the cultivation of true virtue. Goodness which
39
See William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), esp. chapters 3–4.
40
See Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Works of John Milton, vol. 4 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1931), 319, 311.
never has to grapple with evil (either because its choices are coerced, or because
the opportunities for evil are carefully airbrushed out of its world in advance) is
bound only to be a shallow and morally sickly thing; and the establishment of
good in place of evil impulses in human lives lies only through victories in battle
rather than strategies of constant retreat. If, then, we would truly be delivered from
evil, Milton is suggesting, it can only be because we have first been led into (or
exposed to) temptation. And it is this, he muses, that ‘justifies the high providence
of God, who though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet powrs
out before us ev’n to a profuseness all desirable things, and gives us minds that can
wander beyond all limit and satiety’.41 Another two decades would pass before the
publication of Milton’s more famous attempt to ‘justify the ways of God to men’,
yet the theological and political themes explored poetically in Paradise Lost are
here already on the table.
Milton, then, was immersed to the hilt in the political theology of his day, and
we cannot glibly brush this practical, fiduciary and intellectual context aside in the
pursuit of ‘purely aesthetic’ considerations. The beliefs, the ideas, are absolutely
essential to the way the poem works as a poem, fusing the concerns of heart and
mind and will together in an imaginative vision which challenges and reshapes not
just our thinking, but in Lewis’s phrase our ‘total response to the world’.42
‘Forewarn’d’, or ‘seduc’d to foul revolt’?
If, as I have suggested, it is important to approach Paradise Lost as a text which is

concerned to instruct as well as to delight its readers, it is equally important to ask
about the precise manner in which this instruction is duly delivered. By its very
nature, as we have already noted, the voice of poetry is generally more elusive,
more indirect than that of manuals of doctrine, demanding a far higher level of
interpretation. To misidentify or mishear the ‘voice’ of the poem is (even in cases
where higher rather than lower levels of reader reception must be acknowledged
as essential to the event of poetic meaning) to jeopardise the broad shape of the
learning and teaching process which the poet hoped to set in motion.
How, then, in Paradise Lost should we think of Milton placing himself (or
rather the voice of his poem) and his readers vis-à-vis the received theological
orthodoxies of his day? His poem contains many voices, and in the nature of the
case they articulate many different perspectives, perspectives which often stand
in stark contradiction to one another. The poem could hardly contain the drama
that it does otherwise, drama being largely a matter of the careful generation and
subsequent resolution of conflicts. But where, amidst all this complicated play
of locution are we to identify the singular ‘word’ of the poem itself speaking to
us and – since Milton deliberately casts his epic within the context of prayer,
Ibid., 320.
41
Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 54.

42
transforming Homer and Virgil’s appeal to the Muse into an invocation to the
Spirit – for the poetically mediated Word of God?43
I want next briefly to identify four literary-critical answers to this question,
before turning to a theological issue that lies at the very core of the poem’s
treatment of Genesis 3, and considering it in the light of them. On the basis of that,
I shall end by proposing that a fifth alternative may need to be entertained.
1. According to one tradition, notoriously pioneered by Blake and Shelley,

and subsequently developed by William Empson and others, Milton’s
poetry must finally be judged heterodox in its theological achievements,
whether he intended it that way or not. So, in Plate 6 of The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (c.1790), William Blake suggests that ‘Milton wrote in
fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils and
Hell, … because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing
it’.44 In brief, according to this reading the character of Satan comes out
of the thing on the whole rather better than God in moral terms, and the
reader quickly finds himself imaginatively and sympathetically identifying
with him and with the rebellion which constitutes the first ‘Fall’ in the
poem. Of course the ‘official’ voice of the poetic narrator, and some other
voices (those of God himself, of course, and of the Archangel Raphael)
offer a damning perspective on all this (as Milton realized, perhaps, that his
poetic creation was rather running away with him, and sought to turn things
around), but it is too late; the damage has been done, and we, together with
our poetic recruiting agent, find ourselves too to be ‘of Satan’s party’.
2. A directly opposed view to this is championed by C.S. Lewis, according

to whom Milton’s account of the Fall and all that surrounds it is
straightforward (for those with eyes to see), and ‘substantially that of St
Augustine, which is that of the Church as a whole’.45 Like most other pre-
Romantic poets, Lewis suggests, Milton was perfectly content to give a clear
lead on matters of spiritual and moral concern, evoking ‘stock responses’
among his readers (in this case responses tutored by a Vincentian catholic
consensus stretching back over the centuries),46 and thus contributing
directly to the formation and preparation of human character to meet life’s
various challenges and opportunities in a fitting manner. Of course there
are conflicting voices in the poem, but the discerning reader sees quickly
through the boo characters, and takes a stand with the ‘overwhelmingly
43
See, e.g., 1.17f.; 3.51f.
44
The suggestion is duly endorsed in Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1840). Empson
insists that the main virtue of Paradise Lost is precisely that it unwittingly ‘makes God so
bad’. See William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 275.
45
Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 66.
46
See ibid., 82.
Christian’ perspective of the poetic consensus. Milton, Lewis suggests,

‘manipulates’ his readers unashamedly rather than allowing them to make
up their own minds or wander too far off the beaten track;47 and he does so
in the unashamed interest of Christian formation.
3. In Surprised by Sin,48 Stanley Fish builds on Lewis’s identification of a

subtle manipulation of the reader by Milton, but takes it in a rather different
direction. Rather than holding the reader by the hand, as it were, what Milton
does, according to Fish, is to dump the reader down unceremoniously in the
world of his poetic creation itself, and leave him there, withdrawing the
benefit of narratorial omniscience, and setting him up to be seduced by
the very same voices and alluring options that duly lead Eve and Adam
themselves into disobedience. So yes, we do find ourselves seduced by
Satan’s allure, at least at first. And, when Adam falls, we are sympathetic
to his choice, and would follow him. But in the moment that we ‘fall’ the
authoritative voice of the poem rebukes us and calls us to account. The
intent of all this, Fish suggests, is not sheer sadism or harassment of the
reader. Caught up in the poetic action rather than simply taught by it, we
discover the dark truth about ourselves, and emerge from the encounter
(which occurs more than once in the poem as we fail to learn the relevant
lesson) chastened, and penitent. In a sense, Fish’s Milton is a supralapsarian
deity who leads his readers into temptation precisely in order to deliver
them from evil, a suggestion which echoes ideas we have already identified
in Milton’s earlier musings and which is relevant to the poem’s own larger
theological understanding as we shall see.
4. In Milton and the Idea of the Fall William Poole suggests that a
compromising of dogmatic orthodoxy occurs in the poem, together with an
unresolved conflict of perspectives, all due to the demands of the narrative
genre itself. Precisely by seeking to do what Genesis 3 itself never seeks
to do, namely, to offer a convincing (i.e. psychologically, emotionally and
humanly convincing) narrative account of the commission of the first sin,
Milton finds himself compelled to break company with the mainstream
dogmatic tradition. For this tradition Adam and Eve were, in their pre-
lapsarian state, regal and exalted creatures unperturbed by anything and
easily able to send Satan packing had they chosen to do so. Milton’s poem,
Poole observes, offers just such a vision with one hand, but then withdraws
it with the other, portraying the paradisal couple at various points as frail
and vulnerable, easy prey to Satan’s machinations. Such inconsistency,
he argues, albeit theologically problematic, is poetically vital, since in
Ibid., 41.
47
Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge,
48
MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

narrative terms there must be a struggle before a capitulation, and thus

some indeterminate state leading up to and accounting for the ‘bad action’
which follows. Narrative is, after all, a matter of situating events in some
meaningful and persuasive order, and the sheer anomaly or surd occurrence
sits ill with its aesthetic demands.
Poole’s observation provokes an important question. Might the existence of

conflicting and unresolved voices here in Milton’s poem in fact be driven not
(as Poole suggests) by poetic and dramatic considerations alone, but by distinctly
theological considerations too? Could such deliberate lack of resolution, in
certain circumstances, be more a matter of theological integrity than theological
compromise? Might poetry, indeed, be supposed to provide a mode of engagement
better suited to the exploration of some theological questions than approaches
which tend too soon and inevitably finally towards the production of a neat
systematic unity? Bearing this query in mind, we turn now briefly to consider the
poem’s treatment of the question which echoes through it from end to end: how,
in the good purposes of God, was it ever possible for sin and its progeny to enter
our world?
‘Sufficient to have stood’?
According to God’s own testimony in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, human beings

were created ‘sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’ (3.99).49 In many ways
the poem constitutes a sustained reflection on the tensions inherent in this terse
formulation and the ways in which it variously illuminates and complicates
the dramatic action of Book 9 where the fruit of the forbidden tree is actually
plucked and eaten. In what sense ‘sufficient’? And in what sense ‘free’? And if
both sufficient and free, whither then the fall? In grappling with the issue, Milton
keeps more than one vision of pre-lapsarian sufficiency identifiably in play; and
the question is, why?
From one angle, then, Milton’s poem follows closely the mainstream
Augustinian tradition, offering us a paradisal couple in full enjoyment of
‘unalloyed felicity’, unperturbed ‘by any agitation of the mind, nor pained by any
disorder of the body’, in full control, in other words, of their passions and their
will.50 These are not the childlike, naïve foundlings of Socinian theology, but regal
beings, ‘erect and tall,/Godlike erect, with native Honour clad/In naked Majesty’
(4.288–90). The garden in which God has placed them provides everything they
need and much more besides, so that the ‘sole commandment’ is one ‘easily obey’d
49
Citations from the poem are taken from Christopher Ricks, ed., John Milton:
Paradise Lost (London: Penguin, 1968).
50
City of God XIV.10. See Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, Penguin
Classics (London: Penguin, 1984), 567.
amid the choice/Of all tastes else to please their appetite’ (7.48–9).51 It is Adam
who asks the relevant question: ‘can wee want obedience then/To him, or possibly
his love desert/Who form’d us from the dust, and plac’d us here/Full to the utmost
measure of what bliss/Human desires can seek or apprehend?’ (5.514). It hardly
seems possible, though we as readers, like God, have the relevant foreknowledge
that grants the question powerful dramatic irony.
Milton also rules out any suggestion that the first sin might have been born
of childlike ignorance rather than wilful disobedience. In Book 5 God sends the
Archangel Raphael on a diplomatic mission to forewarn Adam in the most explicit
terms that his faithfulness will be tried, thus rendering ‘inexcusable’ his actual
capitulation when it comes. And finally, the poem disentangles the Fall quite
explicitly from any predestinarian scheme in which, sub specie aeternitatis, the
fall of human beings was as much a matter of God’s willing as of Eve and Adam’s
own, a matter of ‘divine overruling’ or ‘absolute Decree’, which, even in their
freedom, they were in no position to resist.52 Cleverly, Milton makes God here a
more than convenient mouthpiece for his own Arminian theological sympathies.53
At the point of sin, Eve and Adam act undetermined by anything other than their
own will.54 They are, God insists, ‘Authors to themselves in all/both what they
judge and what they choose’ (3.122–3); they decreed their own revolt (3.116),
ordained their own fall (3.128). The weight placed on creaturely freedom with
respect to God’s purposes is quite breathtaking at points: As Eve leaves Adam
for a bit of gardening on her own, the circumstance electrically charged by both
their and our awareness of the impending danger, Adam contributes some dubious
cheerleading: ‘God towards thee hath done his part’, he reminds her; ‘do thine’!
The emphasis, then, is on the capacity and the freedom to obey or to disobey
(without which true obedience could not exist at all), and Milton’s verdict is
apparently God’s own: whose fault is the Fall and all that follows from it? ‘Whose
but (man’s) own’ (3.96–7).
There is though, in the poem, another voice, another very different perspective
on the whole matter, and it cannot, I think, be dismissed entirely as a seductive
perspective which we are expected to entertain only to be duly rebuked and rescued
from it as both Lewis and Fish suggest. To be sure, it is only from Satan’s lips that
God’s human creatures are ever described in the poem as ‘frail’ (1.375) and ‘puny’
(1.367). They are not that. Yet Milton’s God himself is finally ambivalent about
the precise state in which his human creatures meet Satan’s temptation. At one
Cf. City of God XIV.12. ibid., 571.

51
See especially 3.114–16: ‘As if Predestination over-rul’d/Their will, dispos’d by

52
absolute Decree/Or high foreknowledge …’.

53
On Milton’s Arminianism see, e.g., Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 106, 274f.,
338, Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Lion, 2008), 137f., Hobson, Milton’s
Vision, 41–3, 54–5, Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall, 159.
54
Cf. 5.525 : ‘… good he made thee, but to persevere/He left it in thy power, ordain’d
thy will/By nature free, not overrul’d by Fate/Inextricable, or strict necessity.’
moment he insists that their sin is one committed with a high hand, like that of the
rebellious angels before them; yet in the same speech God admits that there is a
vital difference, since the angels ‘by their own suggestion fell,/Self-tempted, self-
deprav’d: Man falls deceiv’d/By the other first: Man therefore shall find grace,/
the other none …’ (3.129–32). Elsewhere, Satan is likened by the authoritative
voice of the narrator to the thief who climbs into God’s fold to harm the flock
(4.192), and to a vulture just waiting to prey on helpless newborn lambs (3.434).
In Book 5 Satan assaults Eve first not in waking reality but in a dream, seducing
her through the organ of ‘Fancy’ or imagination, leading her all the way to the
edge of the slippery slope of disobedience, holding the forbidden fruit to her
mouth; but the dream (as so often) ends and evaporates before the fatal step is
taken. Adam’s response, on hearing of the dream, is to reassure: Don’t worry,
he tells her, there’s nothing culpable in having had a dream like that in and of
itself; ‘Evil into the mind of God or Man/May come and go, so unapprov’d, and
leave/no spot or blame behind.’ (5.117–19). Perhaps. Or perhaps here Satan has
driven the screw of temptation in just so far, engaging the imagination in order to
prepare the path in mind and heart and will for the final, decisive drive in Book 9.
Perhaps, in other words, there is here an initial ‘virtual’ temptation (if not quite a
virtual fall) which renders the other when it comes more explicable. Eve has been
softened up. The moral ground has been carefully prepared. Man’s fall when it
occurs will, God admits in his divine foreknowledge, be ‘easy’; all too easy in
fact; and when the actual Fall is narrated briefly in Book 9 what we are offered is
a picture of credulous seduction, all trace of ‘solid virtue’ and sufficiency to stand
now seemingly absent.
Again, Milton has Adam ask the relevant question (albeit this time from
the perspective of fallen humanity): ‘O why did God,/Creator wise … create at
last/This novelty on Earth, this fair defect/of Nature…?’ (10.888–92). The ‘fair
defect’ referred to is Eve, who falls ‘deceived’, taken in by Satan’s seductive
lies. But we can translate the question; because what Milton does, moving
beyond the dynamics of Genesis 3:1–6 with the permission of 1 Timothy 2:14, is
to symbolise in the characters of Adam and Eve respectively the twin terms of a
Kierkegaardian paradox (viz., one which we should not expect or seek to resolve).
Where human freedom is concerned (even unfallen freedom),55 in a sense we are
‘undeceived’ and thus fully responsible moral agents (and fully ‘guilty’ when we
sin); and yet we fall precisely because we are subject to forces preying upon us
from without and from within, forces that prey upon us, furthermore, with divine
foreknowledge and permission. Milton’s God unashamedly leaves Satan ‘at large
to his own dark designs’ and looks on as those designs bear their evil fruit; yet
55
Milton’s treatment effectively softens any rigid distinction between fallen and
unfallen freedom. Again, one might write this off as a necessary cost of any attempt to
imagine the paradisal circumstance concretely (since we can only imagine an alien
experience by configuring it in terms of what we know); my suggestion here, though, is that
Milton does this quite deliberately in order to keep a deeper theological question in play.
he does so precisely so that Satan ‘enrag’d might see/How all his malice serv’d
but to bring forth ultimate goodness, grace, and mercy …’ (1.213–18). Milton’s
account of divine Providence here in the poem and in his earlier systematic treatise
echoes that of his Arminian mentor Grotius; God is involved in the production of
evil in his world inasmuch as he permits its existence, ‘throwing no impediment
in the way of natural causes and free agents’, and out of its effects God himself
‘eventually converts every evil deed into an instrument of good … and overcomes
evil with good’.56
On Milton’s Refusal to Conclude
Adam’s question in Book 10 of Paradise Lost is really the one asked by Augustine
in Book 11 of his Literal Commentary on Genesis: Why did God not make his
human creatures more ‘sufficient to stand’ than he actually did? Milton’s approach
to this question through the dramatic devices of epic poetry permits him to leave
the relevant tensions open and unresolved in a manner that more systematic
theological treatments might not, keeping the ideas of human sufficiency and
insufficiency paradoxically in play at the same time, rather than resolving them
prematurely in the interests of any overarching logical unity. Lazy appeals to
mystery can of course be an intellectual cop-out in theology as elsewhere; but
as I have already suggested, not all appeals to mystery are lazy, and we must
take care not to grant the spirit of Procrustes a dangerous foothold by tethering
our notions of what counts as due intellectual rigour mistakenly to any particular
mode of engagement. Arguably, Milton’s open-ended poetic approach is at least
faithful to the canonical pattern of biblical thought on this particular subject57 and
to the shape of our experience of evil in the world, neither of which encourages
us to dignify sin and its outputs by ‘explaining’ them and thereby justifying them,
ascribing some positive meaning to them within the scheme of things. And,
whether we judge a higher systematic resolution to be warranted or not, the poetry
of Paradise Lost undeniably affords a powerful theological engagement with the
realities of human freedom, temptation and the commission of sin, one which
admittedly raises rather than resolves the big questions, but which thereby, I would
suggest, charts the relevant territory more rather than less adequately. In the end,
Milton points us to Augustine’s own answer in the Literal Commentary: ‘Penes
56
On Christian Doctrine I.8 in James Holly Hanford and Waldo Hilary Dunn, eds,
John Milton. De Doctrina Christiana, ed. Alan Paterson et al., trans. Charles R. Sumner
D.D., The Works of John Milton, vol. XV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933),
67, 79/81. Cf. Grotius’ defence of Remonstrant views, e.g. in his Ordinum Pietas of 1613.
See Edwin Rabbie, ed., Hugo Grotius: Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas (1613),
Studies in the History of Christian Thought, vol. 66 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995).
57
i.e. human freedom and God’s sovereign responsibility for all that happens in his
world.
ipsum est’ (11.10.13).58 Why did God set things up this way? ‘God alone knows.’
But then, while it may well seem to us to be a very odd way of proceeding, God,
we may reasonably trust, knows best.
58
See P. Agaësse and A. Solignac, eds, La Genese Au Sens Littéral en Douze Livres
(VIII–XII), Oeuvres de Saint Augustin, vol. 49 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1972), 250.
Chapter 7
Unseemly Representations
The Visual Mediation of Presence
The etymology of imagination suggests the correlate ‘image’ to refer to the

outcomes and outputs of its productive activity, though the term is clearly desirous
of some broadening and breaking if it is to serve the breadth of the circumstance. To
begin with, while imagination always works in one way or another with the ‘flesh’
of human existence, summoning forth states of affairs already laden with sensory
qualities, clothing abstract ideas and aspirations with concrete and particular dress
for our grasp and consideration, the relevant sensation is certainly not always or
primarily visual, as the otherwise perfectly serviceable metaphor of the ‘mind’s
eye’ tends naturally to suggest. On the contrary, where memory is concerned in
particular, the more powerful and evocative ‘images’ called to mind (and drawing
others readily in their wake by chains of association) may often be some distinctive
soundscape, fragrance or flavour. We should not be misled by the dominant visual
connotation. Furthermore, the products of imagination, whether they remain in
the mind or are duly granted external form, are only occasionally fragmentary and
static in nature, freeze-framing a particular moment from some remembered or
projected stream of lived experience, to produce the mental or material equivalent
of a photographic snapshot. Most imaginings, and most imaginative products,
share instead the temporally extended and mutable quality of experience itself,
differentiated from it, perhaps, most notably by their identifiable narrative and
dramatic patternings of what is often in ‘real life’ a much more complex, open-
ended and sometimes even chaotic manifold. Our attention to images as such in
this book has thus far been directed chiefly to narrative imagining of one sort or
another, and to verbal images (in poetry, in liturgy and theology, and elsewhere)
rather than their visual and plastic correlates and equivalents. And yet the material
image has enjoyed a long and fruitful (if at times admittedly tempestuous and
problematic) coexistence with the religious institutions, needs and concerns of
Christian faith, especially in the West, so much so that any adequate history of
Christian tradition and theology ought arguably to afford such art its own place as
a distinct strand of the reception, interpretation and performance of that tradition
across the centuries.
In this chapter my concern will be with issues attaching to Christian belief
and practice and the Church’s appropriation, production and conscription into its
religious life of the image in this more circumscribed sense. The relationship has
certainly been very varied, and, as I have just indicated, sometimes uncomfortable.
At one end of an imaginary spectrum (quite possibly one unrecognizable in reality,

and posited here, therefore, absent due qualification for the convenience of analysis
alone) we might locate the figure of the artist as poet-priest, celebrated as someone
participating directly in God’s own creative energy, and fashioning works capable
of transporting the viewer directly ‒ if mysteriously ‒ into the penumbra of the
divine presence.1 We may grant Welsh poet R.S. Thomas the privilege of depicting
the spectrum’s other imagined end, with his characteristically phlegmatic and
caustic charge laid at the door of
Protestantism – the adroit castrator

Of art; the bitter negation
Of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy –
You have botched our flesh and left us only the soul’s
Terrible impotence in a warm world.2
The charge itself will no doubt stir up responses of one sort or another, both by
its overstatement and the undercurrents of legitimacy which guide it home to its
target. It also compels us, early on in our consideration of the subject, to draw
some careful distinctions.
For our purposes I want here to disentangle four discrete strands of theological
concern, all having to do with the nature and legitimacy of artistry, and which are
sometimes fused together in an unhelpful manner.
• First, there is perhaps the most fundamental issue of all, namely, the
question of the capacity or incapacity of creaturely (and specifically here
material) reality to figure or mediate the presence of God as such. I do
not want this to be confused with wider aesthetic considerations about the
function of art in mediating that which ‘transcends’ the empirical given in
some more general sense, or its capacity to put us in touch with ‘spiritual’
realities of one sort or another. These are interesting and important issues;
but they are discrete from the specific problem posed by Christian accounts
of God’s radical otherness as Creator with respect to the creaturely (which
includes, as the Fathers of Nicaea take care to remind us, both ‘things
visible and invisible’).
• Second, the appropriateness, benefits and dangers of images of Christ (the
form of God’s own self-imaging in the flesh).
• Third, the benefits and dangers of locating any physical image (though they
will generally be of some identifiable religiously significant narrative or
A measured example of this emphasis can be found in Richard Viladesau, Theology

1
and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art and Rhetoric (New York: Paulist Press,
2000). See, e.g., 151.
2
From ‘The Minister’ in R.S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945–1990 (London:
Phoenix, 1995), 54.
Unseemly Representations 163
scene, depicting Christ, the Virgin, the apostles, patriarchs, prophets and
saints) in liturgical space.
• Fourth, a wider concern about the propriety of human artistry as such, as
an essentially creative and redescriptive engagement with the givenness of
God’s creation.
The first three of these issues belong closely together in any discussion of ‘visual
piety’, a term I borrow gladly from David Morgan’s book of that title, and which
he defines conveniently for us as ‘the visual formation and practice of religious
belief’3 – that is to say, the traditional uses of physical images to inform and
nurture faith, the visual mediation not just of ‘knowledge’ in its more familiar
precise sense, but communion with God in liturgical and devotional contexts. The
fourth concern, while related to the others, is much broader in its scope, and it
will concern us during most of the chapter only via occasional allusions. It may,
nonetheless, be helpful here to make a couple of broader observations about art –
and about the visual and material image in particular – which seem to me to bear
directly on our more specific field of concern.
Art, Image and Reality
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s book Art in Action reminds us of the dangerous

anachronism involved in reading back into earlier periods the peculiarly modern
(and Western) concept of ‘the arts’.4 When the language of art or ‘the arts’ is
used in our society, Wolterstorff suggests, the notion lying closest to hand (‘Art’
with a capital A) is that of the production or presentation of works of art which
have disinterested intellectualized perceptual contemplation5 (that is, careful
and lingering attention to the artefact itself and as such, probably in some space
deliberately designed for this purpose) as one of their primary intended public
uses. As the work of scholars such as Paul Oskar Kristeller shows, though, writers
and thinkers of the many centuries preceding the eighteenth, ‘though confronted
with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither
able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art from their
3
David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1.
4
See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Carlisle:
Solway, 1997), 7–18.
5
I shall not attempt to deal here with the vexed post-Kantian notion of aesthetic
disinterestedness. For our purposes Wolterstorff’s definition of it as ‘contemplation
undertaken for the sake of the satisfaction to be found in the contemplating’ (47) must
suffice.
intellectual, moral, religious and practical function or content’,6 considerations

which generally preclude the artefact as such functioning as our ultimate focus
of concern. I mention this first because it provokes us to ask just what works
of visual art in liturgical space are actually designed to do (and the answer, of
course, may differ markedly from instance to particular instance, and sometimes
no single answer will suffice) rather than tolerating sweeping statements about
‘the use of images in worship’. Secondly, this distinction between different ways
of thinking about art’s purpose and its relationship to wider considerations raises
again at an early juncture the vital issue of ‘iconic transparency’ – the capacity
and function of the image to direct our attention beyond (if not away from)
itself.7 That is an issue to which we shall return in due course.
Another observation has to do with the enormous power and the residual
ambiguity of the image. I’m not speaking now of artistic images nor even visual
images alone, of course, but certainly of these too as part of a wider symbolizing
and re-presentation of things. Images are a vital contributor to the so-called ‘social
construction of reality’.8 They operate in the most subtle (and therefore the most
ruthlessly efficient) ways to inform and to shape our sense of what is real, our
awareness of self and others, our hopes, desires and aspirations. Physical images
in particular are capable of evoking profound visceral responses, directing our
willing, our particular actions and our accustomed habits of practice. They ‘call
out not only to the mind but also to the body (consider the immediate physical
impact of erotic images), to thought, and also to emotion’,9 engaging us more
completely as rounded beings, perhaps, than some other symbolic forms are
capable of doing. They are no mere substitutes for words, then (as verbal images
are no mere substitutes for or dispensable ornamentations of ‘literal’ speech),
but an alternative, highly-charged medium of exchange between ourselves and
the world. As we shall see, cultural theorists could have learned this much from
reading Bonaventure or Aquinas, but their studies do serve to reinforce the point
and to enhance our understanding of how it is that images do what they do. This
essential and intrinsic power of the visual image to shape responses at the level of
both body and soul, and thereby in part to make us the particular people we are,
might be supposed either to endorse their entry into the sanctuary as useful tools in
the shaping of religious identity, or to render us inherently suspicious of it.
6
Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
7
See above, 33–7.
8
For the thesis that what counts for us as ‘reality’ is in considerable measure
‘constructed’ by the social media of human cultures see, classically, Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1967).
9
Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 7.
Finally I want to allude to some familiar aspects of the image as treated and
understood in postmodernity. One is the way in which the image has assumed or
been granted a sort of priority over the ‘reality’ which, more traditionally, would
have been supposed to be the vital correlate granting its warrant as ‘an image of x’.
In his now classic study, Daniel Boorstin cites the following exchange to illustrate
the erosion of ‘reality’ by the generation of ‘pseudo-events’:
ADMIRING FRIEND:
‘My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there!’
MOTHER:
‘Oh, that’s nothing – you should see his photograph!’10
Here, Richard Kearney suggests, ‘the image precedes the reality it is supposed to
represent. Or to put it in another way, reality has become a pale reflection of the
image’.11 In more radical postmodern visions such as that of the French theorist
Jean Baudrillard, of course, matters are more diffuse yet. Here the distinction
between image and archetype, signifier and signified is erased entirely, casting
us afloat on a sea of signifiers entirely lacking in anchorage, with such meaning
as there is being had in relations of ‘mimesis without origin or end’,12 and the
opportunity to judge the artifice of the image in the light of our grasp on some
supposed ‘original’ perpetually denied us, the altogether less secure surfaces of
the ‘hyper-real’ or ‘simulacrum’ providing the only handholds available.13 Again,
parallels may be traced between recent theory and more ancient concerns. The
tendency to afford practical (and devotional) priority to the religious image over its
transcendent referent, and the subsequent collapse of any meaningful distinction
between them in the practice of visual piety has been a recurrent problem for those
seeking to endorse such practice, and a popular (because easy) target for its critics.
Such collapse may, indeed, provide a convenient definition of the term ‘idolatry’
which I have so far held in reserve, but which I take to mean the inappropriate
ascription of prerogatives proper to the transcendent to that which merely figures
it. To refer in any sweeping manner to postmodernity as idolatrous in this regard
would, of course, be as churlish as it would be inaccurate. When, for example,
Mark Taylor refers to an artistic image as one which ‘trembles with the approach
of an Other it cannot figure’,14 instead of nihilistic abandonment of responsibility
10
Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York:
Vintage, 1992), 7.
11
Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture
(London: Routledge, 1988), 2.
12
Ibid., 6.
13
See, e.g., Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser
(Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–42.
14
Mark Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of
we might discern rather an unqualified sense of mystery which copes better with
a hidden Logos asarkos than with a Word which has truly become flesh. Both
monophysite confusion and apophatic separation of the two terms in the artistic
sign, though, lead ultimately towards the same practical outcome – the focusing
of our attention unhelpfully upon the image itself and as such, and concomitant
loss of that vital transparency to which we have already alluded in earlier chapters
of this book. The Christological metaphor may prove to be more than a fleeting
rhetorical device in this context. As the chapter proceeds, I will explore further
the correctives which the resources of classical Christology in particular may
furnish to address imbalances of one sort or another in theological estimations of
the image. As a framework for consideration, though, I propose to pursue some of
the issues already mentioned by engaging with aspects of that specific historical
context in which, in Western Christianity, they acquired a particular religious
urgency, namely, the European Reformation.
Image, Christology and circumspection
That the Reformation had immediate, substantial and negative implications for
Christian attitudes to the arts is clear and is reflected, for example, in the barbed
observation of the humanist Erasmus already in 1526 (explaining the departure
of Hans Holbein the Younger from Basel for the Netherlands) that ‘here the
arts are freezing’.15 Concern about the appropriate use of images in what Daniel
Hardy refers to as ‘the nonverbal mediation of religious belief’16 did not, though,
suddenly emerge fully-fledged in the early sixteenth century. Its history is as
ancient as Christianity itself, and those Reformers who chose to do so were able to
draw upon a long tradition of theological reflection on the subject. One substantive
theological issue, as we have already noted, was that of the capacity of creaturely
(and, more specifically, material) reality to represent, and thereby to mediate the
presence and reality of God; or, perhaps, the capacity of God to make himself
known through such things, the ‘mediation of revelation through the eye’ in
David Brown’s felicitous phrase.17 For Christians this issue was and is heightened
further by the claim that God, while wholly other than the created world, has
Chicago Press, 1992), 305. Cited in David Brown, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation
and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 368.
15
See Hans J. Hillebrand, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), art. ‘Art’, 74. See also Sergiusz Michalski, The
Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern
Europe (London: Routledge, 1993), 192.
16
Daniel W. Hardy, ‘Calvinism and the Visual Arts: A Theological Introduction’, in
Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, ed. Paul Corby Finney
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 6.
17
Brown, 322.
actually appropriated creaturely form, chiefly in the incarnation, but also through
the physicality of baptism and the eucharist, and more broadly in sustaining and
engaging directly with the life and history of his material creation. The modes
of presence and activity posited are different in each of these cases, of course,
and we must take care not to conflate them inappropriately; but each involves the
relationship between God and the creature being mediated by creaturely realities
which, if more than the sum and configuration of their physical parts alone, are
nowhere and never less.
None of this was lost on exponents of icons in the Byzantine debate which
rumbled on from the seventh to the ninth centuries.18 So, for example, John of
Damascus (c.665–749) argued directly from the incarnation that veneration of
images of Jesus could not be judged idolatrous, since God himself had rendered
himself in human form. It could not, he supposed, be breaking the second
commandment to honour a picture of God’s own self-imaging in the flesh.
Opponents of icons, though, held that this defence was specious, and simply
proved the idolatrous nature of such worship. What was pictured in these images
was precisely the humanitas, the ‘flesh’ of Christ, and not his deity (which by
definition could and should never be pictured). So, those who venerated them
were not attending to God, but only a creaturely, physical reality behind which the
invisible and mysterious reality of God remained hidden. Both parties, we should
note, were agreed that what was imaged as such was not to be confused with the
deity or divine nature of Christ. Where they differed was on its capacity, within the
structure and by virtue of the hypostatic union, to refer beyond itself suggestively
to God, and to direct human worship appropriately. Those who advocated the use
of images thus developed a sophisticated theology of iconic transparency, insisting
that in worship the mind’s eye was naturally directed through the visual symbol to
terminate on the mysterious reality beyond it. Either to collapse these two levels
of reference, or to separate them from one another, so that attention was directed
onto the image as such was to fall into a crass literalism, untrue to their proper
understanding and legitimate use.
Similar arguments can be found among Western writers of the later medieval
period concerning religious art more widely. Images, they insist, without being
God are nonetheless capable of figuring or signifying God in such a way as to
inform the mind and move the affections in worship. William Durandus (in his
Rationale Divinorum Officiorum of 1286) cites approvingly some verses inscribed
on an altar frontal in Bergen, reminding worshippers of the fundamental distinction
between that which they see with their eyes corporaliter, and that which their
18
For a thorough account of the history and issues see Averil Cameron, ‘The
Language of Images: The Rise of Icons and Christian Representation’, in The Church and
the Arts, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). For a more
concise account see Ken Parry, ‘Iconoclast Controversy,’ in The Dictionary of Historical
Theology, ed. Trevor Hart (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000).
hearts and minds are meant to discern spiritualiter.19 It is the transcendent referent
which is the proper object of worship, and not the physical image itself. The same
careful insistence is found in Thomas Aquinas (c.1224/5–74) who, typically,
cites Aristotle in support of his view: ‘As the Philosopher says (De Memor. et
Remin. i) there is a twofold movement of the mind towards an image: one indeed
towards the image itself as a certain thing; another, towards the image in so
far as it is the image of something else. … Thus therefore we must say that no
reverence is shown to Christ’s image, as a thing – for instance, carved or painted
wood … It follows therefore that reverence should be shown to it, in so far only
as it is an image.’20 Given this circumspect understanding, Bonaventura (1217–74)
confidently identifies three vital functions of the religious image: to educate the
illiterate masses concerning core doctrinal and narrative tenets of the faith (he
refers to images as ‘more open Scriptures’), to arouse due devotion and inculcate
a worshipful disposition since ‘our emotion is aroused more by what is seen than
by what is heard’, and to imprint certain vital truths on our memory.21 In each of
these regards visible images were observed to be more efficient than the written or
spoken word, and a higher value duly came to be placed upon them.22
Words, Images and Idolatry
This practical exaltation of the image over the word in medieval piety reminds us
that even the most rigorous iconoclasm can never escape the image per se, since
the word functions in significant measure precisely by its capacity to evoke or
generate mental images of one sort or another, and nowhere is this more apparent
than in the Christian Scriptures. To speak and think of God as Lord, or father, or
shepherd, or a spring of refreshing water, or a consuming fire is just as surely to
trade in images as to paint or sculpt him as such. To this extent, as noted above
in Chapter 1,23 Austin Farrer was correct to insist that for Christians knowledge
of God is mediated ‘in an act of inspired thinking which falls under the shape of
certain images’.24 And if, the German Reformer Martin Luther asks in a closely
related observation, ‘it is not a sin but good to have the image of Christ in my heart,
See Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval
19
Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 203.

20
Summa Theologica 3, Q. 25, Art. 3, cited in ibid., 207.
21
Liber III Sententiarum, IX, a. 1, q. 11, cited in William R. Jones, ‘Art and Christian
Piety: Iconoclasm in Medieval Europe’, in The Image and the Word: Confrontations in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. Joseph Gutman (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977), 84.
22
See ibid., drawing on the testimony of Durandus.
23
See above, 27, 42.
24
Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1948), 57.
why, should it be a sin to have it in my eyes?’25 Luther’s accompanying suggestion

(which led him to adopt a far more sanguine disposition towards religious images
than some others among the Reformers) is that a heart cured by the Holy Spirit
of idolatrous inclinations is never likely to succumb to the error, even though
church buildings be filled with all manner of visual and tangible occasions for
temptation, while one left uncured will find occasion and excuse even in the most
aesthetically austere of liturgical environments.26 It is a reasonable contention,
and one that cannot be skirted around by those more inclined towards image-
free worship spaces. But Bonaventura’s observation about the superior efficacy
of the physical image for certain devotional purposes, Aquinas’ careful analysis
of the phenomenology of such images, and Luther’s ‘You can take the boy out of
Wittenberg, but …’ line of argument all draw attention helpfully to the distinction
between the physical and the mental image, and suggest its importance for any
evaluation of the uses of images in liturgical and devotional contexts.
The very solidity and sensuousness of the painting or sculpture, we might
note, impresses itself upon us with a degree of concrete inflexibility and
permanence, drawing our attention quickly and easily to the material qualities
of the image itself and as such as an object situated identifiably in the same
space as the beholder. Furthermore, while not all religious images conform to
the canons and conventions of the beautiful, most have sought to do so, and
others still, in light of their particular subject matter (perhaps most obviously
certain prima facie ‘ugly’ treatments of the suffering of Christ),27 challenge and
compel reconsideration and adjustment of such conventions. It has sometimes
been held that instances of material beauty refer us naturally and quickly to their
eternal exemplar or ‘horizon’ in God, thus furnishing a fitting visual (or, in the
case of music, aural) focus for worship quite apart from their particular subject
matter.28 Suggestive as this is, it fails to reckon adequately with another trait
of beauty noted by Immanuel Kant. Judgements about beauty, Kant observes,
are always finally judgements about particular manifestations or instantiations
of it, which is why questions such as ‘what is it meant to be?’ fall quickly into
abeyance as irrelevant to the circumstance.29 While an object may also function
for us as ‘an image of x’, therefore, in so far as we judge it to be beautiful, Kant
25
See Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, eds, Luther’s Works (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1958–86), vol. 40, 100.
26
See sermon preached on 11 March 1522, in ibid., vol 51, 83. Also ‘Against the
Heavenly Prophets’ (1525) in Pelikan and Lehmann, 84–5.
27
See Richard Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology
and the Arts – from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 9–12, et passim.
28
So, for instance, Viladesau, Theology and the Arts, 34–46.
29
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis
and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), 64. ‘Beautiful is what, without a concept, is liked
universally.’ See further, §9, 61–4.
insists, we are effectively looking at it for the moment with all such external
considerations bracketed out, allowing the material qualities of the object itself
to impress themselves upon us in their sheer particularity. Beauty, we might say,
often tends, in the first instance at least, to be opaque rather than transparent
or translucent. Even in the relatively rare case of devotional images where
judgements of beauty are either irrelevant, counter-intuitive or problematic,
still the status of the material image as an object possessed of its own unique
hypostasis, and capable of being attended to and treated as such, increases the
propensity for the mind’s eye (as well as the actual eye) to do precisely this –
stopping short at the painted or sculpted surface and attending to its sensuous
contours and features, rather than permitting these to become imaginatively
permeable, and passing quickly beyond it to a transcendent referent (understood
or anonymous), apprehended here only in the paradoxical form of its literal
absence and imagined presence, but apprehended really nonetheless.
In the case of the mental image, though, the opposite appears to be true. It
is fleeting, remaining in focus only so long as it takes for another of the same
sort to enter consciousness in order to supplement, supplant, or morph out of
it. It is inherently transparent, has its existence precisely and only as a vehicle
for directing us to something else – is, in fact, precisely ‘a way of thinking about’
something else.30 If we strip away the relation ‘is an image of’, then nothing
whatever remains to be looked at by the (equally immaterial) ‘mind’s eye’. A
physical image can be considered under more than one aspect: by the viewer as
‘an image of’ some person, event or place; by the art expert as a fine example of
a certain sort of brushwork or other technique; by the restorer as aged canvas,
cracked and dull oil paint all in need of careful professional attention; by the art
dealer as a shrewd capital investment. But we cannot consider the mental image in
these latter ways, for it has no existence apart from the mental activity of ‘thinking
about’. It is, to deploy a theological category, anhypostatic. It is not, that is to say,
a ‘thing’ in its own right, but has its being and its proper meaning and force only
in its vital relation to something else other than and transcending its own reality.
Given all this, it seems reasonable to enquire whether the mental image (evoked
imaginatively through the word) might be more naturally suited to maintaining
that careful distinction between image and prototype which the religious, and
especially the liturgical or devotional context demands. Or, putting the matter
negatively, is it more likely that the physical image with all its sensuous effect will
always be more prone to collapsing these two levels with potentially idolatrous
outcomes? If so, then of course this hardly constitutes in itself an adequate
theological case against the use of physical images in worship. And, to balance
the account, we would certainly have recognized that words too may, in their own
So, for example Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin, 1963),
30
Chapter VIII and Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (London: Methuen,
1972). For a full critical account see Mary Warnock, Imagination (London: Faber, 1977),
Part IV.
distinct way, be susceptible to analogous modes of idolatry, for example through

woodenly literal or theologically over-determined readings of the biblical text,
fixing and exalting a single unchallengeable ‘meaning’ proffered, ironically, in the
name of the putative ‘authority’ of the text, while failing utterly to reckon with
it adequately as text, or to allow it to speak (possibly in ways that challenge and
overturn our preconceptions and prejudices) on its own terms. Or, if we think of
the force of the spoken rather than the written word, David Brown observes that
such ‘(w)ords are potentially just as seductive as images, and so inherently in just
as much danger of misleading the worshipper into idolatry as any visual image.
The preacher has the ability to entice the listener into as corrupting and controlling
an image of God as any construct offered by artist or sculptor’.31
It would certainly seem, then, that the pathology of images is not confined
to those cast in material form, and that due care and discipline in their use is
needed across the board. While gladly conceding this, though, and not wishing to
underestimate the seductive capacities of words misused or deliberately abused,
I remain to be convinced that the probabilities of misunderstanding or misuse are
quite so evenly distributed as Brown tends to suggest. At the very least, verbal and
mental images lend themselves more easily and naturally to the sort of continual
kenotic breaking and remaking that I have suggested earlier in this book must be
undertaken not just with the worst but even with the best of their uses in religious
and theological contexts.32 The material image does not lend itself naturally to
such breaking open, except by that vandalism which would deny it any legitimate
existence whatever, and to which the state of many pre-Reformation churches in
northern Europe still bears painful witness. The logic of the iconoclast’s hammer
and pickaxe, in other words, is one which can only see the force of the metaphoric
whisper ‘it is not’, and presses this to unfortunate lengths. If a more balanced and
healthy attitude to art in liturgical space is to be inculcated, though, the distinctives
of the material image (and in particular the propensity of its independent ‘isness’ to
bolster the countervailing metaphoric suggestion that ‘it is’) behove us to develop,
inculcate and nurture within our congregations a religiously and theologically-
grounded visual hermeneutic of the sort to which Aquinas and Luther point us
and upon which the Counter Reformation subsequently elaborated,33 encouraging
31
David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and
Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 110.
32
See above, 33–8.
33
So, for instance, Session 25 of the Council of Trent (3–4 December 1563) decreed
that ‘images of Christ, the virgin mother of God and the other saints should be set up and
kept, particularly in churches, and … due reverence is owed to them, not because some
divinity of power is believed to lie in them as a reason for the cult, or because anything is to
be expected from them, or because confidence should be placed in images … but because
the honour showed to them is referred to the original which they represent: thus, through the
images which we kiss and before which we uncover our heads and go down on our knees,
we give adoration to Christ and veneration to the saints, whose likeness they bear’. Norman
and enabling believers to be ‘good readers’ of images as well as good readers of

biblical texts or responsible poets in the pulpit. It was the apparent lack or failure
of any such strategy in late medieval churches, and not the presence of images as
such, that provoked the vociferous response of some of the Reformers.
The Reformation, we should recall, was more a response to the grass roots
popular religion of the late medieval period than to the highest thoughts of its
theologians. The masses, unsurprisingly, had not read Aquinas, and, as Michael
Camille notes, the need for constant reiteration of such a visual code during the
period indicates at least the ever-present danger of popular misunderstanding
and misuse.34 In practice, as Camille’s study shows, this danger was realized in
all manner of ways. From the late thirteenth century onwards there can be traced
an erosion of any popular awareness that images were, as it were, to be looked
through rather than looked at. Instead, there was to be found an increasing
attention and devotion to the image itself and as such, and the investment of
it with powers and status unbefitting its reality as, in itself, a mere aesthetic
object. A frankly superstitious preoccupation with the tangible paraphernalia
of religion captured the public imagination and, in due course, spawned an
entire economy as a veritable ‘image explosion’35 ensued. As William Jones
notes, ‘Popular piety filled the churches of Europe with a diversity of sacred
art – rood screens, wall-paintings, stained-glass windows, crucifixes, statuaries,
reliquaries and monstrances’.36 To patronize the production of such devotional
objects (whether for use in churches or domestically) came to be viewed as, in
itself, an act of pious ‘good works’, and Europe’s artistic community rapidly
adapted itself to this growing market.37 Spiritual, economic and wider political
concerns became mixed up in this development, and thus iconoclasm, when it
arrived, was laying an axe to the root of an entire social status quo in which
the wider populace was heavily invested. Its chief focus remained, though,
a theological and spiritual one. Statues and paintings (not just of Christ, but
depicting God the Father and – most frequently – the Virgin and other saints)
had become the focus of individual middle-class cultic guilds established to
maintain them, and were regularly ascribed miraculous powers and associated
with profound (and often bizarre) visionary experiences.38 Such objects –
increasingly realistic rather than abstract in their depiction39 – were used in
P. Tanner S.J., ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols., vol. 2 (London: Sheed and
Ward, 1990), 775.
34
Camille, 207.
35
Ibid., 219.
36
Jones, 83.
37
See ibid., 86–7 and Camille, 214.
38
See, e.g., Camille, 223–4.
39
See ibid., 213–14. Cf. Hardy, 7.
liturgical drama and festival processions and, as one study observes, readily
acquired ‘an aura of peculiar sanctity as divine personalities or presences’.40
This popular fascination with cultic physicality was further stimulated and
seemingly underwritten, as Camille notes, by the religious establishment when,
in 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council promulgated the eucharistic doctrine of
transubstantiation (in which the creaturely realities of bread and wine were held
to ‘become’ – rather than simply ‘figuring’ or referring the worshipper through
themselves to – the body and blood of Christ), a development further reinforced
by the instigation of the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1264.41 Nobody was formally
suggesting that religious images were to be afforded analogous treatment; but
popular imagination had been decisively encouraged to identify rather than to
disentangle the sign and that to which it pointed. For some, if the result did not
count as ‘idolatry’, then it was hard to see what ever would.
The Explosion of Iconophobia
This centrality of the cult of the image to the web of late medieval religion helps us
to understand the otherwise seemingly odd attention granted to aesthetic concerns
at the Reformation. John de Gruchy has suggested that ‘The Reformation may
even be regarded as a contest over the meaning and control of images, their power
to save and to damn, and the legitimate authority or tyranny they represented’.42
Like modern studies in the sociology of knowledge, the reformers in their own
way recognized the powerful hold which image-based media may have upon
the human spirit, and their capacity to shape and control religious, political and
moral identity for good or ill.43 While, though, the major reformers were agreed in
their opposition to the idolatry which they perceived in the Roman Church, they
differed as regards the practical implications of suppressing or correcting it.
Among the earliest and most radical responses was that of the Saxon
Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541)44 who, when, in the wake of his
condemnation by the Diet of Worms in 1521, Martin Luther fled for the relative
safety of the Wartburg, implemented a rigorous reform of worship at Wittenberg
40
Ilene Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in
Romanesque France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 49. Cited in
Camille, 223.
41
See Camille, 215.
42
John de Gruchy, Christianity, Art and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in
the Struggle for Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 38.
43
See, e.g., David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and
Theory of Response (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989).
44
See Alejandro Zorzin, ‘Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt’ in Carter Lindberg, ed.,
The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period
(Oxford, Blackwell, 2002), 327–37.
including the abandonment of clerical vestments and the removal from churches
and destruction of all religious images. In writings such as his 1522 treatise
‘On the Removal of Images’ Karlstadt advocated the use of Mosaic law in the
civic sphere, deprecated the role of scholarly learning in interpreting Scripture
(and, indeed, the value of the arts and humanities for Christians), and urged all
Christians to follow the immediate dictates of the Holy Spirit.45 In response to
such urgings by Karlstadt and others, many clearly judged themselves led by
the Spirit to implement without further delay the apparently clear and relevant
injunction of the second commandment,46 regardless of official ecclesiastical or
civil jurisdiction, and a spate of disorderly and illegal ransackings of churches
ensued. Civic authorities were placed under huge pressure, and some were forced
effectively to authorize in retrospect actions of violent iconoclasm for fear of the
unrest and destruction getting completely out of hand. Others managed to effect a
gradual and staged process while they weighed the possible political and economic
consequences of their actions.47 There can be little doubt that it was widespread
public support that led to the spread, both unofficial and official, of rigorous
iconoclasm where it occurred. As so often, though, democracy proved to be an
unreliable index of truth, and the groundswell was theologically unsophisticated
and often at the mercy of uneducated extremism.
More moderate than Karlstadt, but nonetheless unrelenting in his insistence
that visual and plastic art be banished from liturgical and devotional contexts, was
Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) whose influence among people and city magistrates
alike in Zurich resulted in 1524 in ‘an orderly but thorough destruction of virtually
all material accessories to worship’.48 Zwingli had no time for illegal acts of
iconoclasm.49 Nor (unlike some in the Radical Reformation) was he an opponent of
the arts as such. Trained as a humanist, he retained respect for the cultural products
of antiquity, and valued the highest achievements of the human spirit in any sphere50
so long as they did not engender attitudes or practices incompatible with a Christian
45
See J. Dillenberger, Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images
in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 90. See also Ronald
J. Sider, ed., Karlstadt’s Battle with Luther: Documents in a Liberal-Radical Debate
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).
46
Exodus 20:4–5a : ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of
anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under
the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a
jealous God’ (NRSV).
47
See on this, for example, Carl C. Christensen, ‘Patterns of Iconoclasm in the Early
Reformation: Strasbourg and Basel’ in Gutmann, ed., The Image and the Word, 107–48.
48
Christensen, ‘Patterns of Iconoclasm in the Early Reformation’, 107.
49
See, e.g., G.R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976),
130–31.
50
See Martin Klauber, ‘Zwingli’ in Trevor A. Hart, ed., The Dictionary of Historical
Theology, 576.
piety and hope properly focused on God alone through faith.51 False bearings here
were, he believed, by definition idolatrous and the essence of Godlessness.52 Even
artistry with a religious theme was tolerable for Zwingli, so long as it did not
intrude on devotional contexts where it might give rise to inappropriate feelings of
reverence.53 Thus, what Bonaventure had celebrated as the image’s positive gain
(its capacity to arouse and direct the emotions in worship) Zwingli eschewed as
its chief weakness since, he held, fallen human beings are naturally prone to false
worship and, despite the careful distinctions of scholastic theologians, images in
church or other devotional situations inevitably become the occasion of idolatry
and rob God of the worship due to him alone. Images of Jesus are especially
inappropriate and dangerous (though purely ‘historical’ representations of him in
depictions of gospel scenes are acceptable outside churches and for non-devotional
use), dealing only at the level of the sensuous and unable to communicate the true
Christ to us54 – a clear echo of the ancient iconoclasts’ insistence that images could
not show forth the deity but only the ‘flesh’ of the Saviour. For Zwingli, too, the
religious image was spiritually opaque, rendered such by human sinfulness rather
than its own incapacities or anything in the nature and capacities of God. His
insistence that religious subjects in art must be purely ‘historical’, though, indicates
resistance to any pictorial depiction of God even for non-devotional ends. The
second commandment, therefore, Zwingli held to be binding on Christians as a
prescription against the deployment of the visual arts inside places of worship, a
divine strategy for the avoidance of an otherwise inevitable idolatry.
Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) attitude to religious images was, as we have noted,
more ambiguous.55 For Luther the Reformation was always first and foremost
about another theological issue altogether; namely, the doctrine of justification
by grace through faith rather than works. Compared to this, he considered the
matter of paintings and sculpture in church adiaphora – a matter of relative
unimportance. Indeed, he insisted, no amount of smashing and burning could
get rid of superstitious idolatry, since this was lodged deep in the sinful human
heart and was likely to be established even more firmly there by any external
attempt to dislodge it; whereas, once the heart was liberated by faith from the
51
Potter, Zwingli, 114–15.
52
See W.P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 154–5. Zwingli writes ‘Whoever has sought help and confidence from a
creature which the believer ought to seek only with God, has made a foreign god form
himself’. ‘A Short Christian Instruction’ (November 1523) in H. Wayne Pipkin, ed.,
Huldrych Zwingli Writings, Vol. 2 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984), 69.
53
‘Outside church as a representation of historical events without instruction for
veneration, they may be tolerated.’ Zwingli, ‘A Short Christian Introduction’, 71.
54
See Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli, 174.
55
What follows in this paragraph is based largely on the helpful overview provided
in Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany (Athens. Ohio: Ohio University Press,
1979), 43–65.
snares of works-righteousness, the ritual abuse of wood and stone in an attempt to

court favour with God would be bound to cease, having no further motive force.56
Luther’s stated opposition to the religious image, therefore, centred primarily on
its appropriation within and bolstering of a false understanding of how to stand
justified before God. He also objected strongly to the huge amounts of money
consequently invested in producing and venerating such images, money which
could and should have been spent in alleviating poverty and human distress.57
Luther certainly never resorted to the somewhat crude ‘because the Bible says
so’ warrant for iconoclasm (the more violent manifestations of which he considered
to be a triumph for the devil rather than Christ).58 Indeed, he interpreted the second
commandment explicitly as a gloss on the first, a proscription of the making and
use of plastic ‘gods’ as such, and not a prohibition on representative artistry more
widely, even for use in Church.59 More broadly, Luther resisted the idea that
Judaic ceremonial law is binding on Christians, it being part of what has been
abrogated by the New Covenant. Possession of images, therefore, he considered
to be a matter of Christian freedom, though the superstitious veneration of them
was clearly sinful and to be abandoned. Luther’s thought on the matter evolved
over time, though, from critical and cautious tolerance to recognition of the value
of the image as a device for shaping religious identity in positive, rather than
negative ways. Human beings, he insisted, cannot help forming images of the
objects of their attention and reflection. The religious image is merely an extension
of the mental image. Thus Luther follows Bonaventura in advocating the benefits
of religious art, though he identifies these benefits solely in pedagogy, ‘for the sake
of remembrance and better understanding’ among the faithful.60 Prioritizing of the
Word was not, therefore, exclusive of the image since the ‘Word’ could, ironically,
be faithfully painted and etched just as surely as it had been made flesh.
Calvin, Art and Idolatry
John Calvin (1504–64) is often listed together with Karlstadt, Zwingli and others
as, at heart, an iconophobe,61 and the theological tradition associated with him
has frequently been identified as the chief perpetrator of art’s adroit castration.62
See sermon preached on 11 March 1522, in Helmut T. Lehmann, ed., Luther’s

56
Works (LW), vol. 51, 83. Also ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’ (1525) in LW 40:84–5.
57
See sermon preached on 12 March 1522, LW 40:86.
58
See LW 40:105.
59
See LW 40:86.
60
LW 40:99. See also LW 43:43.
61
So, e.g., Michalski, Chapter 2.
62
Cf., for example, the observation of P.T. Forsyth that ‘If our spirits habitually think
of Nature as cursed and God-forsaken we can have no more Art than Calvinism has left to
Scotland,’ Religion in Recent Art (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905), 145.
The 1559 edition of the Institutes reveals, though, a more complex and subtle
understanding than we might expect to find.
Calvin is certainly emphatic in his rejection of images in liturgical and
devotional contexts. His criticism is directed chiefly towards visual representations
of God as such, and reflects the tenor of his wider doctrine of God. Unlike Luther,
Calvin appeals to the abiding force of the second commandment (‘You shall not
make for yourself a graven image, whether in the form of anything that is in the
heaven above, or that is on the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth’
[Exod. 20:4], a formulation which I take to correspond to the Nicene Creed’s ‘things
visible and invisible’, and thus sweeping in its exclusion of creaturely forms).63
But the foundation for Calvin’s rejection of visual piety in this mode is more
securely rooted than any ad hoc appeal to biblical proof texts. Rather, he interprets
this verse and the wider pattern of God’s depiction in the canon as deliberately
circumscribing human attempts to figure God’s mysterious reality.64 The God
revealed in Scripture, Calvin insists, so transcends the creaturely order that any
attempt at visual depiction amounts by definition to an assault upon his glory and
majesty. Such ‘unseemly representations’ are, that is to say, not only inadequate to
bear the weight of transcendence, but actively profane God’s name and contradict
his being. Since the chief end of human beings is to know God truly and to offer
him due worship,65 it follows that all visual figurations of deity must be prohibited
absolutely, in church or anywhere else. Here, then, we have a concern the roots
of which go much deeper than a pragmatic desire to avoid unhealthy superstition
and practical idolatry. Calvin is convinced beyond doubt that the reality of God is
inherently incapable of figuration in creaturely realities, and that any attempt do so
in whatever context must amount to something little short of blasphemy.
As we have already observed,66 the exegesis of the opening verses of the
decalogue is far from straightforward, and the question of their interpretation in a
specifically Christian context adds a further level of hermeneutic complexity. We
have noted von Rad’s contention that the original logic of the prohibition placed
upon material images was directed toward the propensity for idolatrous conflation
(as distinct from confusion) of the image with its divine archetype, and the
supposition that Yahweh, like the gods of some of Israel’s canaanite neighbours,
might be rendered present, directly influenced or in any way given over into the
hands of the worshipper through the cultic presentation and manipulation of the
63
Aidan Nichols notes that the phraseology of the commandment deliberately and
comprehensively covers ‘the three basic habitats of creatures’, viz., all that is distinct from
God himself. See Aidan Nichols, Redeeming Beauty: Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics,
Ashgate Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 22.
64
See Inst. I.xi. in John T. McNeill, ed., Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion,
ed. John Baillie, John T. McNeill, and Henry P. Van Dusen, The Library of Christian
Classics, vol. XXI (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 99–116.
65
Inst. I.iii.3, ibid., 45–6.
66
See above, 39–40.
sign. Understood thus, the exclusion of images from Israel’s cult testified to the
elusiveness and utter freedom of the God of Sinai with respect to the creaturely, and
set her worship and theology starkly apart from the assumptions and expectations
of the wider religious culture – assumptions and expectations which, hitherto, no
doubt, most Israelites had shared. The prohibition is thus designed to drive home
some of the radically new patterns of thought and speech which must be etched
on Israel’s imagination as she learns what it means to worship and to serve the
elusive God of the covenant, the one whose holy name has only recently been
disclosed in her midst. If this interpretation (effectively reading Exod. 20.4–5a
as a single commandment, and as an extension of the range of the imperative
contained in verse 3 [‘you shall have no other gods before me’]) is correct, then,
of course, the issue is not one about the absolute impropriety of imaging God,
nor the absolute impossibility of creaturely forms serving as mediators of God’s
presence and activity. As noted in our discussion in Chapter 1, the cornucopia of
poetic images furnished by the very same texts that so rigorously exclude their
material counterparts makes a nonsense of any such suggestion. Rather, it might
be argued, it is about securing the theological presuppositions and understanding
the religious conditions under which alone any such imaging (whether it arises
in the mind’s eye or in material form) may in due course properly be attempted,
and dangerous misunderstandings of its significance and implications thereby
duly avoided. Only by virtue of the appropriation of creaturely realities by God
himself and their assimilation into the patterns of his gracious self-giving can they
properly function as the forms of that divine self-disclosure and human response
in which knowledge of this God consists.
Again, one might point to the particular qualities of the material as distinct
from verbal and mental images as relevant to the context, though as we have
seen, neither category is free from the problems of idolatrous misuse or abuse.
In any case, as Aidan Nichols suggests, Christian readers of Exod. 20.4–5 need
to reckon fully with the implications of the peculiarly Christian claim that this
same God, in the fullness of time, himself took flesh and so ‘figured’ himself in
the materiality of a life lived,67 a claim which, as we have seen, informs to the
full the Eastern theology of the icon, but has been granted less significance in
much Western reflection on the legitimacy and nature of the religious image. The
claim does not, of course, furnish warrant for a free-for-all in which any and every
material form may be appealed to as a likely site of encounter with the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, yet it certainly excludes the supposition that creaturely
form as such is either wholly inappropriate or utterly incapable of being used by
God in giving himself to be known and known intimately, a supposition further
contradicted in Christian liturgical practice, as we have seen, by the dominically
instituted extension of divine sign-giving to the material symbols of water, bread
67
Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, 21. The case is argued more extensively in Aidan
Nichols, The Art of God Incarnate: Theology and Image in Christian Tradition (London:
Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980).
and wine. Let it be said at once, of course, that the incarnation, the dominical
sacraments, the multifarious images for God used in Scripture, preaching and
systematic theology, and material or artistic images of God of one sort or another
must not be situated on the same level of consideration in theological terms, as
though they were all and equally instances of the same kind and significance, as
talk of an incarnational or sacramental ‘principle’ at the heart of Christianity might,
without due qualification, be taken to suggest. The centrality and importance of
flesh and blood realities to the account Christian faith and practice are obliged to
give of God’s own being and action, though (including the permanent assumption
of our humanity in its fullness into the threefold existence of Father, Son and Holy
Spirit), would seem to counsel a more judicious and Christologically informed
reckoning with the propriety and possibilities attaching to the material image than
has sometimes been attempted.
The Image and the Eye
Returning now to Calvin, who appears not to have reckoned adequately with
such considerations, we should note that in addition to representations of God
the Father he also banished from the sanctuary all images of other sorts too (of
Christ, of other biblical characters and stories, of Christian saints), rejecting their
frequently alleged pedagogical justification on the grounds that the human soul
inclines naturally to idolatry wherever the opportunity for it arises,68 that many
of the likenesses (of virgins, martyrs etc.) to be found in medieval churches were
actually morally dubious (‘examples of the most abandoned lust and obscenity’),69
and that there would be far fewer ‘unlearned’ Christians in the first place if the
Church took seriously its responsibility to preach the Gospel and teach basic
doctrine.70 Interestingly, this unstinting iconoclasm with regard to the sacral sphere
was not carried through to the domestic. Calvin was apparently quite content for
believers to have narrative images drawn from Scripture adorning their homes
and personal effects.71 This, though, seems to be drawing an arbitrary distinction,
and to overlook the likelihood that the ‘liturgical space’ within which worship
occurs is in fact made up both of literal physical space and the objects which adorn
it, and what we might call the ‘space of our imagination’ (and the objects which
adorn that) which we undoubtedly bear with us into Church together with our
hopes and fears and prayers. While we have already seen good reason to suppose
that physical images have in significant respects a greater immediate impact upon
us than their verbal and mental counterparts, we have seen too that it would be
unwise to overlook or ignore the vital contribution which ‘the imaginations of our
68
Inst. I.xi.9, McNeill, ed., 109–10.
69
Inst. I.xi.7, ibid., 106–7.
70
Inst. I.xi.7, ibid.
71
See Michalski, 70.
hearts’ actually and inevitably make – for better or for worse – in disposing us
with respect to God. And a picture impressed upon consciousness because hung
on a familiar bedroom wall, or one fed subliminally into our subconscious via the
ministrations of cable TV or the Internet, left unattended and allowed to sediment
within consciousness, may in due course prove much harder to banish from our
worship than plaster, wood and painted canvas.
The distinction between sacral and secular spheres of life, though, forms
an important part of the Renaissance background to Calvin’s thinking, and
it emerges clearly in his attitude towards the arts more widely.72 Despite the
admittedly damning comments that he makes about the visual arts in church, it
is quite misleading to suggest that Calvin had ‘a negative attitude towards human
creativity and imagination’ as such.73 While he inevitably insists that true creativity
belongs to God alone, Calvin celebrates the second-order powers of imagination
and invention (‘the mother of so many marvellous devices’) with which God has
invested the human soul74 and identifies artistic vision and skill as among those
things which the Holy Spirit ‘distributes to whomever he wills for the common
good of mankind’.75 These gifts, he notes, are distributed ‘indiscriminately upon
pious and impious’,76 being part of that common grace which is nonetheless to
be acknowledged and admired by believers (together, for example, with the great
learning of philosophers and scientists) lest, ‘by holding the gifts of the Spirit
in slight esteem, we contemn and reproach the Spirit himself’.77 Indiscriminate
rejection or belittling of the arts, therefore, is an affront to God just as surely as
is their misuse in the sacral sphere. God, Calvin insists elsewhere – in a passage
which shows him to be anything but aesthetically frigid – has provided for his
creatures things which ‘seem to serve delight rather than necessity’,78 and we
should enjoy them as he intended us to.
Of course, Calvin steers carefully away from any apparent condoning of
unbridled sensory excess. The key principle is that things should be enjoyed in
accordance with their divinely-intended end. Hence, painting and sculpture are to
be enjoyed as gifts of God, ‘conferred upon us for his glory and our good’. In the
hands of fallen creatures they can and have been abused (not least in the sacral
context), but there is ‘a pure and legitimate use’ of them to be enjoyed.79 The
See M.P. Ramsay, Calvin and Art Considered in Relation to Scotland (Edinburgh:
72
Moray Press, 1938), 12–17.

73
de Gruchy, 41–2, drawing on a fleeting and unsubstantiated assertion in William
J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 80.
74
See especially Inst. I.v.5, McNeill, ed., 56–8. and I.xv.6, ibid., 192–4.
75
Inst. II.ii.16, ibid., 275.
76
Inst. II.ii.14, ibid., 273.
77
Inst. II.ii.15, ibid., 273–4.
78
Inst. III.x.1, ibid., 719.
79
Inst. I.xi.12, ibid., 112.
artist, though, Calvin suggests, should depict only that ‘which the eyes are capable
in principle of seeing’, whether ‘histories and events’ or ‘images and forms of
bodies’.80 We may take ‘capable of’ as meaning in principle rather than in fact,
and thus read this as permissive of a degree of imaginative invention and licence.
But it is clear that Calvin, following upon his absolute resistance to the visual
symbolizing of God, is uncomfortable with the use of symbolism more broadly,
tending towards a visual literalism in which art functions primarily as a secretary
of nature’s forms and history’s salient happenings. It is in this particular sense
that he emits negative signals about the imaginative (which functions precisely
on the basis of tracing and constructing significant relations trespassing beyond
the reach of the eye of the beholder) and fails to appreciate the more than mimetic
capacities of art in engaging with the wonders of God’s creation and the historic
events of Heilsgeschichte.
The Image and the Hypostatic Union
In this regard, as has been observed, it is a pity that Calvin did not allow his
avowed commitment to Chalcedonian Christology to inform his thinking more
directly.81 The relationship between the two ‘natures’ of the Son of God, while
admitting of no confusion whatever, must be a relationship in which figuration of
some sort occurs if the humanity is truly to inform our understanding of God, as
Calvin insists it does.82 What the fathers at Chalcedon attempted was to say the
most that can be said positively, and to exclude whatever must not be said, about
the relationship between God and any creaturely reality in the light of this, its most
unique, pointed and defining instance. This is how close God and the creature are
capable of being; and this is how far distinct, even in the midst of such a union,
they nonetheless remain. Any theologically adequate account of the nature of the
religious image must thus take adequate account of both poles of the relationship
posited here, supposing that creaturely reality, at various levels of consideration,
while remaining utterly distinct from God and all the while retaining its integrity as
‘not-God’, may yet mysteriously be broken open and granted a capacity to suggest,
or to point, or to allude in some way to the mysterious presence and activity of
God himself. Paul Endokimov’s insistence that, where the icon is concerned, what
is understood to be attested and mediated is precisely a hypostatic presence –
i.e. the presence and action of God in person – and not a natural or substantial
one, offers a valuable clarificatory framework here, though I would not wish to
restrict it to the icon and the justification for its particular aesthetic.83 Whenever
and wherever the God made known in Jesus Christ is held to be present and active
80
Inst. I.xi.12, ibid.
81
So, de Gruchy, 41.
82
See, e.g., Inst. II.xiv.3, McNeill, ed., 484–6.
83
Endokimov, 196.
in and through creaturely realities, I would maintain, Chalcedon prescribes the

category of hypostasis as the most appropriate one in terms of which to identify
that presence in, with and through the relevant object or event.
This is not, of course, to suggest an open-ended series of homoousioi, but
simply to infer that if God can enter so deeply into a union with the flesh as
this (i.e. in the incarnation), then the same God may choose to enter into other
less radical but nonetheless fruitful levels and sorts of ‘union’ with physical and
other creaturely realities in order to draw us into relationship with himself (most
centrally, perhaps, the preaching of the Word, the sacraments, the dynamics of
communal liturgy and personal devotion, but including too all manner of visual
and verbal poetry in which these are represented and made sense of in the life of
the Body of Christ, and an endless range of natural and cultural phenomena). The
emphasis here, though, lies decidedly upon what God is capable of doing and may
choose to do, and not upon any intrinsic properties of the objects, actions and
events themselves and as such (whatever effect these may otherwise have upon us).
When it comes to visual piety, in other words, the aesthetic merits of artefacts may
not be irrelevant (that, perhaps, would be an odd suggestion), but they are certainly
not sufficient, and may not even be necessary. David Morgan’s book provides
adequate testimony to the fact that, for very many of those who habitually practice
their religion in visual modes, it is works of religious kitsch rather than great art
which serve as the media. This is hardly an argument against seeking the best in
aesthetic terms to locate in our worship space. It is simply an extension of the logic
of a theology of grace making good the shortfall in our offerings, no matter how
great that shortfall may be, and reminding us not to have unrealistic expectations
even of the greatest human creation taken in and of itself. For, concern with the
object ‘in and of itself’, even its capacities to evoke response, we should recall,
lies close by the way to idolatry.
There is not space to address it fully, but brief mention must at least be made
in passing here of the Orthodox contention that, since the presence attested in
the icon is not that of nature (either divine or human) but of the transcendent
hypostasis of the Son, both skillful artistic evocations of empirical reality on the
one hand and renderings possessed of great visual beauty on the other are wholly
inappropriate to the circumstance, turning the representation into a mere piece of
portraiture or a pleasing objet d’art. Instead, Endokimov argues, the sacred visual
presentation is undertaken with ‘a certain cultivated hieratic dryness along with an
ascetic detachment in the technique’, granting a theophany rather than ravishing
the soul and the senses.84 One might respond on aesthetic grounds that, whatever
the intention of those who produce them, many icons are in fact possessed
of a profound beauty which, if denied or overlooked, may prove all the more
problematic by comparison with the unashamed sensuousness of some Western
religious imagery. On theological grounds, the difficulty I have with the argument
is that, in the interests of securing a due sense of transcendence (of the person
Endokimov, 179.
84
or hypostasis attested as present), the fact that this same person is only known
and knowable through an engagement with the flesh (the particular humanitas
of Jesus) is relatively underplayed, and a transcendent abstraction from his
creaturely form preferred. This is a visual counterpart to the problem I identified in
Chapter 1, of allowing Christology to move too quickly to a level of conceptual or
imaginative abstraction, and losing sight thereby of the particulars of Jesus’ earthly
and historical existence, action and passion as the New Testament bears careful
witness to these. Furthermore, while Endokimov’s insistence that the presence
attested and mediated by the religious image is precisely a personal presence
(rather than the divine ‘nature’ being supposed to be present ‘within’ or mixed
together with the space-time realities of creation), the Eastern tendency towards
radical apophaticism where the ousia or being of God is concerned, nonetheless
needs to be balanced here by an appeal to an appropriate form of analogy between
the creaturely ‘flesh and blood’ realities of Jesus’ historical existence on the one
hand and the character of God on the other. Otherwise, the revelatory force of
that humanity is effectively undercut. By so transfiguring the human form of the
Son as to render it virtually transparent, icons thus run the risk of robbing it of
its vital abiding epistemic force. That there should be visual images which err in
this direction and draw attention to a corresponding theological emphasis is not
in itself problematic; but in the interests of a healthy Christology they need to be
balanced by others which remind us that it was precisely in the midst and out of
the depths of historical existence that God gave and still gives himself to be known
personally, not by our withdrawing or ascending from the fleshy particulars of
his human existence, but in a sense precisely by being drawn ever more fully and
deeply into their meaning.
Indeed, as I suggested earlier in this book,85 the logical structure of the
incarnation as Chalcedon presents it comes tantalizingly close to that of
metaphorical predication and thus of the religious image itself, in which both unity
and distinction must be maintained without loss, which, as Sallie McFague puts
it, always contain(s) the whisper, ‘it is and it is not’,86 but in which one reality
accommodates itself in giving another, strikingly different, reality to be known.87
In her treatment of it, Janet Martin Soskice describes metaphor as possessed
of unity of subject and plurality of associative networks, and as involving the
positing of some striking or prima facie strained conjunction.88 Might not
something analogous be said (is it not in fact said) of that mystery whereby the
Word becomes flesh, and God, for all his overwhelming otherness, is conjoined
strikingly and surprisingly with our humanity? Some version of Karl Barth’s
85
See above, 86.
86
Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 13.
87
See above, 87.
88
See Janet M. Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985), 49–51, 64–6.
doctrine of an analogia fidei as distinct from an analogia entis will suffice here,
for those uncomfortable with the suggestion of any natural likeness between the
God who is Wholly Other and the realities of creaturely and fallen existence; but
analogy of some sort and at some point there must be if God is to be apprehended
through his appropriation of the forms of nature and culture.89 God must take our
imagination captive if we are to respond to him in ways that befit his divine reality.
Capitulation to a radical agnosticism or non-cognitive anti-realist mysticism also
generates theological activity of an imaginative sort, but one wholly unconstrained
by the nature of faith’s true object, and prone finally always to project its own
desires and aspirations onto the clouds, rather than remaining genuinely mute.
I want in closing to return to a question I raised early in this chapter. Namely,
just what is it that we expect a work of art to do in liturgical space? Without
developing the point here, there is, it seems to me, a different set of things that might
be said about artefacts which primarily ‘construct’ the space for us – informing
us (consciously or subliminally) by their symbolic depiction of elements in the
tradition, raising our hearts through their accompanying beauty to map that raising
of our hearts in joy to God which worship involves, perhaps even guiding the
worshipper’s eye to some focal point in the physical space itself – and on the other
hand artefacts which, by their nature or their location, assume the much more direct
role of a physical symbol of God’s or Christ’s presence itself. This latter category
of artefact, it seems, is likely to be afforded the sort of contemplative attention
which raises all the vital questions about iconic transparency and opaqueness
which we have already considered. But contemplation of a sort, we should recall,
belongs in the gallery as well as in the Church, and we must finally be able to
furnish some reason for distinguishing between them.90 It was Karl Barth, again,
who observed that, just as God could raise up sons for Abraham from stones, so
this same God could make himself known (if he chose) equally well through a
blossoming shrub, a flute concerto, or a dead dog.91 But that doesn’t suggest any
levelling of differences between these various possible media, let alone commend
a policy of locating canine corpses in the sanctuary (which might otherwise at
least be more affordable than commissioning a new painting or sculpture). It
is a point about God’s capacities and God’s abiding freedom where the matter
of our personal encounters with him are concerned. What it reminds us is that
On analogia fidei see above, 38.

89
I do not, of course, wish to suggest that God might not be encountered by someone
90
viewing a work of art (religious or otherwise) in an art gallery, but simply to distinguish
between such an occurrence (wherever it arises) and the purely aesthetic gaze which lies at
the centre of much current aesthetic theory and experience, and to facilitate which galleries
are typically designed and constructed.
91
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/1, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F.
Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 55. Cf. Karl Barth,
Church Dogmatics 1/2, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. George
Thomas Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 1–44, 203–79.
any adequate account of visual piety or ‘the mediation of revelation through the
eye’, needs to locate itself finally not just within a doctrine of creation, nor even
relative to the doctrine of the incarnation, but within a theology of worship as
an imaginative participation in the threefold shape of divine action as, in Barth’s
formulation, Revealer, Revelation and Revealedness, or the one who is himself
always both the objective and the subjective actuality and possibility of our
knowing of him.92 Apart from the continuing self-revelatory ‘artistry’ of this God,
known to us in Jesus as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, no amount of exposure to the
artistic work of human hands will ever differ much from what goes on daily and
routinely as the crowds pour through the doors of Tate Modern and the Uffizi for
yet another look.
92
See Barth, 295–347.
Chapter 8
Unfinished Performances
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano –

A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.1
All-seeing heaven, what a world is this?2
In this chapter and the next, I return to some of those artistic genres in which
imagination generates form extended through time, and presents it for our
consideration variously via such devices as emplotment, narration and (in the
case of drama) embodied performance in real time. My concern will be with the
complex interplay between the texture of human experience itself (immediate and
reflective) and its careful reworking and re-presentation by the artistic imagination.
In particular, I shall consider the significance of the notion of aesthetic completeness
and the nature of certain sorts of literary ending for a theological reflection on the
shape of human personhood and its eschatological prospect, and for an adequate
reckoning with the full cost of the divine kenosis in the incarnation.
The World Stage
Perhaps it is inevitable that playwrights and actors should come, sooner or later, to
reflect on the curious relationship that holds between drama and life. If dramatic
art is in some sense always a version of – or at least ‘based on’ – life as we know
it, so, in its turn, life as we know it can and has often been figured according
to models duly provided by the theatre. As an actor, Shakespeare could hardly
help noticing the interstices. The ‘microcosmic correspondence’ between the two
realities was driven home each time he stepped out to perform yet another role
on the boards of the Globe theatre, a venue which in construction as well as in
name held the two worlds closely together.3 As playwright, too, the metaphor
clearly intrigued him, and is already introduced into his work before the Globe’s
1
The Merchant of Venice, 1.1. See George Brandes, ed., The Garrick Shakespeare,
Vol. 3 (London: William Heinemann, 1905), 6.
2
Richard III, 2.1. See George Brandes, The Garrick Shakespeare, Vol. 6 (London:
Heinemann, 1905), 408.
3
The globe was constructed on the circular pattern of Roman amphitheatres, open
to the view of the heavens, and with a stage that permitted actors to stand more or less
centrally amidst their audience. See the article ‘Globe Theatre’ by Gabriel Egan in Michael
construction in 1599.4 The world is a stage and life a drama in which each of us
has a particular part to play, and perhaps many different parts. Once deployed, this
image provokes questions thick and fast about the ‘drama’ of all that lies beyond
the theatre’s limits; questions about the script, about characterization, about how
much freedom a player may have in determining his part and how it is played,
about the quality of a performance, and so on. What are literary–critical and
dramaturgical questions in the one world are, of course, religious and theological
ones in the other. In order to ask and to answer them, we cannot help positing a
reality which transcends the drama itself – a playwright, a director, an audience;
something which was before and will be after the drama itself is played out, and
which in some sense accounts for its existence at all. And if Shakespeare does not
often explicitly push such theological questions into the foreground of his plays,
one cannot live long with his imagery before some of the more uncomfortable
ones begin to impinge. Sometimes, of course, he cannot resist giving us a helpful
shove in the right direction:
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;

They kill us for their sport.5
It’s not precisely the same metaphor, obviously; but it’s equally clearly in the
same poetic (and theological) ball park. For here we have the gods as those in
whose presence (and for whose amusement) our life is played out, with a degree
of malicious inter-activity thrown in for good measure. The theatrical image
lurking in the background (behind the more immediate and universal improvised
entertainment of the ‘wanton boys’) is that of the ancient ‘spectacle’ rather than
the theatre as Shakespeare himself knew it, but the theological issues lying close to
hand are some of the same ones. While he arguably furnishes us with some of the
most familiar and elegant examples, though, Shakespeare was certainly not the first
to play with such images. They had already occurred to the ancients themselves.
Dobson and Stanley Wells, eds, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 165–6.
4
The Merchant of Venice is dated 1596–97 by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley
Wells, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), xix. The Globe was constructed in 1599 for use by the Chamberlain’s Men, a
company founded in 1594 and to which Shakespeare seemingly belonged from its inception.
See John H. Astington ‘Playhouses, players and playgoers in Shakespeare’s time’, in De
Grazia and Wells, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, 99–113. Interestingly,
Shakespeare’s most developed use of the world-stage metaphor is the familiar passage in
As You Like It (2.7: ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players …’
etc.) a play that seems to date from the very period during which the Globe was being built,
or immediately thereafter. Other uses of the image occur in 2 Henry IV (1.1; 1597–98) and
Henry V (Prologue, 3; 1598–99), immediately prior to the Globe’s construction.
5
King Lear, 4.1. See George Brandes, ed., The Garrick Shakespeare, Vol. 9 (London:
Heinemann, 1905), 301.
Unfinished Performances 189
The use of the world-stage image by the Roman philosopher Epictetus

(c. 55‒135 AD) is among the first significant instances.
Remember that you are an actor in a play, and the Playwright chooses the
manner of it: if he wants it short, it is short; if long, it is long. If he wants you to
act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be
a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character
that is given you and act it well; the choice of the cast is Another’s.6
It is Stoic philosophy which provides Epictetus with the specific theological

context for his use of the dramatic metaphor; namely, a strong overarching doctrine
of divine Providence fused with an equally strong account of the rational-soul’s
jurisdiction within a circumscribed but definite sphere of concern. Life, he insists,
is lived on a stage, against a backdrop and props, and amidst a script and a cast
not of our own choosing. And yet not all in a human life is determined. There is
a sphere within which the exercise of human freedom makes all the difference
to the quality of what occurs on stage.7 Called to perform a certain ‘part’ or to
play a character over which we have no control whatever, we are nonetheless in a
position to perform that part well or badly, and here ‘character’ in the other sense
is of the utmost importance. The highest calling is to face whatever life (the divine
Playwright or his script) may send our way, and to respond to it well. Accordingly,
we must learn not to desire (or to ‘live for’) the things which please us, nor, on
the other hand, to complain when our part in life is to endure unpleasant and even
painful events.8 Nothing, Epictetus urges, is evil in itself; it only becomes such
when we permit it to affect our soul in certain ways, and that is something entirely
within our control.9 ‘Ask not that events should happen as you will, but let your
will be that events should happen as they do, and you shall have peace.’10 And no
6
Epictetus, The Discourses and Manual, Translated with Introduction and Notes in
Two Volumes by P.E. Matheson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), Vol. II, 219. Catharine
Edwards refers us to a tradition according to which, already in the fifth century BC,
Democritus observed the same trope: ‘The world is a stage, life is a performance; you
come, you see, you go away.’ See Catharine Edwards, ‘Acting and self-actualisation in
imperial Rome: some death scenes’ in Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, eds, Greek and Roman
Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
377. The work of Epictetus offers a sustained development of the image, and locates it
within a clear religious and theological context.
7
‘In our power are will and all operations of the will, and beyond our power are
the body, the parts of the body, possessions, parents, brothers, children, country, in a
word – those whose society we share’ (Discourses I.22). See Epictetus, The Discourses
and Manual, Vol. 1, 110.
8
‘The will to get and the will to avoid.’ See, e.g, Discourses I.4; III.2 in Epictetus,
The Discourses and Manual, Vol. 1, 55; Vol. II, 10–11.
9
See, e.g., Discourses I.29 in Epictetus, The Discourses and Manual, Vol. 1, 131.
10
Manual, 8 in Epictetus, The Discourses and Manual, Vol. 2, 216.
human circumstances are truly ‘tragic’. Tragedy is a theatrical genre, and ought
properly to be confined to the world of the stage alone. Tragedies are ‘a portrayal
in … metrical form of the sufferings of men who have set their admiration on
outward things’,11 rather than mastering the appropriate detachment from them.
Accordingly, in real life tragedy is what occurs only when fools are compelled to
face everyday events, and cannot respond as they ought.12 It is a state of turmoil
in the heart, mind and will, and at odds with that ‘true nature of things’ to which
each soul ought voluntarily to adapt itself.13 ‘Blows are not by nature intolerable’,
Epictetus writes.14 And if they are, it is we who make them so. So yes, life is
indeed lived under the gaze of One who is Playwright, Director and Audience.
The gods are watching.15 But they are not toying with us for the sake of their
own gratification, wantonly removing legs or wings, or capriciously dispatching
us with a down-turned thumb. That’s not an appropriate characterization of the
human situation at all. Rather, we are offered a part in life’s great play, a private
performance for the gods no less, and with it the opportunity to become a great
actor capable of taking whatever part may be offered to us and rendering it with a
noble artistry worthy of that which first created it. So, if we find ourselves given a
short rather than a long part, or if we must bear much suffering and disadvantage
rather than honour and privilege, there is no room for complaint; rather, we must
strive to play even the most ignominious part well, and thereby make our personal
contribution to the success of the drama as a whole. Even death itself, Epictetus
reassures us, is no evil to be feared; it is simply the divinely ordained end of our
allotted time on stage, and, being able to do nothing about it, we should not fear
it, but should simply accept it and ‘die well’, as it were, rather than badly.16
11
Discourses I.4 in Epictetus, The Discourses and Manual, Vol. 1, 56.
12
Discourses II.16 in Epictetus, The Discourses and Manual, Vol. 1, 198.
13
‘Have courage to look up to God and say, “Deal with me hereafter as Thou wilt,
I am as one with Thee, I am Thine. I flinch from nothing so long as Thou thinkest it good.
Lead me where Thou wilt, put on me what raiment Thou wilt. Wouldst Thou have me hold
office, or eschew it, stay or fly, be poor or rich? For all this I will defend Thee before men. I
will shew each thing in its true nature, as it is”’ (Discourses II.16, Epictetus, The Discourses
and Manual, Vol. 1, 199–200).
14
Discourses I.1 in Epictetus, The Discourses and Manual, Vol. 1, 47.
15
Edwards reminds us that for the Stoics human actions are meaningful ‘insofar
as they are witnessed’, and alludes to the essentially social and public situation of such
performance before a human audience. ‘Acting is a success or a failure insofar as it
communicates the part to those watching. The audience has expectations.’ As such,
Stoicism, she suggests, has an inherently ‘theatrical’ aspect because it is ‘intrinsically
social’. (Edwards, ‘Acting and self-actualisation in imperial Rome: some death scenes’,
382–3.) While Epictetus certainly affords due weight to the social location of human
action and its implications, the ‘audience’ he has in mind in his appeal to the metaphor of
the world-stage is generally divine rather than human.
16
See, e.g., Discourses II.1; III.24. Epictetus, The Discourses and Manual, Vol. 1,
144–5; Vol. 2, 98–9. It goes without saying that the deaths of others ‘close’ to us (parents,
Karl Barth was certainly no Stoic, but his theology does manifest an analogous
concern to affirm both a high view of Providence and the freedom and ethical
responsibility of the creature. And it is interesting, therefore, to note that the
metaphor of the world-stage commends itself to him
In so far as I am caught up in this movement from my beginning to my end,

my life becomes my history – we might almost say my drama – in which I am
neither the author nor the producer, but the principal actor. I did not place myself
in this movement, nor do I maintain myself in it. But I myself am this movement.
Between my birth and my death the freedom is given to me to be myself in this
movement, in this ascent and descent. To be in this freedom is to live.17
In this chapter I propose to explore further the fruitfulness of this image of drama,
performance and some of its natural correlates for understanding two particular
aspects of human existence: (1) The possession of what psychiatrist Victor Frankl
calls the ‘will to meaning’18 due to which narrative patterns of one sort or another
suggest themselves naturally as the form of the human hypostatic trace in time
(‘I myself am this movement’ in the drama). (2) The way in which our living of
life, and more precisely our embracing of discipleship, is related to the patterns of
meaningfulness which we trace and project; as we perform the part we have been
given in the drama. So, this is an exercise in what Frank Kermode calls ‘making
sense of the ways we make sense of the world’.19 And, since death is the one thing
we can be sure of in life, I shall do so with a particular view to our finitude as
human creatures, and the significance of our death for the patterning of life. Is it
part of the performance, or the final curtain which indicates that the horizontally
challenged lady has now sung, and everyone else can safely leave the theatre?
And, as we act out our part, what impact does its inexorable approach have upon
our performance?
wives, sons, daughters etc.) are to be treated with the same dispassionate acceptance rather
than becoming the occasion for (essentially indulgent) grief. Their parts in the play are over,
and Epictetus indicates that we should be moved by them as little as any actor is by the stage
‘death’ of one of his fellow players. See, e.g, Manual, 11 in Epictetus, The Discourses and
Manual, Vol. 2, 217.
17
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1960), 231.
18
Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York : Washington Square Press,
1985), 121.
19
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press,
1967), 31.
Finitude and Fulfilment
Let us suppose that my life is indeed a drama in which I am the principal actor; a
drama, then, played out on the stage of the world, and bounded at each end by my
birth and my death. This is who I am. This is who I am. The answer to the question
of my ‘hypostasis’ is answered in this performance, and not in abstraction from it
(as though in some eternal programme note).
Some literary allusions (borrowed from novels rather than the theatre) may
help further to draw out and sharpen the force of the metaphor and the problems
involved in fitting it to the shape of life. First, from the final chapter of George
Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, where we find the following reflection: ‘Every limit
is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being so long
with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years?’20 In the
book, this paragraph prefaces, and serves to justify, several pages of narrative
closure in which first one minor character and then another is tied neatly, like
so many loose ends, into the tapestry of the novel’s world. The same narrative
contrivance, disparagingly referred to by Henry James as ‘a distribution at the last
of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and
cheerful remarks’,21 is to be found in many classics of the genre (Dostoyevsky’s
The Idiot is another example), and prompts us to ask why. No doubt it would
have been possible to leave these stories within a story incomplete, fragmentary,
unresolved. That the novelist felt the device needful, though, tells us something
about life as well as fiction; namely, that when it comes to story, we crave some
sense of an ending, a resolution, a pattern completed rather than left open and
unresolved. We wonder how things turned out, what happened to whom, where
they ended up. In life, where we resort habitually to narrative in order to give some
account of ourselves, who we are, how we came to be where we now are, it is as if
the very meaningfulness of individual lives (our own, or those of others) is at stake
in this quest for unified form. Literature, at least, might be judged aesthetically
deficient to the extent that it fails to bring its principal characters to some satisfying
narrative closure. Can we say the same of human lives, of personhood?
Frank Kermode has famously suggested that narrative imposes form on what
is in reality a chaotic world, and thereby deceives in order to console us. We are
beings who crave form and meaning. This is why we find stories so compelling:
they provide form where, in reality, there is none to be had. ‘It seems’, he writes,
‘that in ‘making sense’ of the world we … feel a need … to experience that
concordance of beginning, middle and end’,22 the overall unity of form which
characterizes literary fictions. And in particular, he suggests, it is in the sense of
an ending which narrative provides that we find the most satisfaction; for it is in
the narrative resolution of character that the meaningfulness of the plot as a whole
20
George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 1965), 890.
21
Cited in Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 22.
22
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 35.
really becomes apparent. Of course we know that life and literature are not the
same thing, but the powerful aesthetic satisfaction provided by the contrivances
of fictional emplotment may at least reveal a deep down sense that life, too, ought
to be possessed of shape or pattern, brought to some satisfying closure, its form
shown to be meaningful rather than meaningless.
The same sense that ending is definitive with respect to the meaningfulness of
a life lived is echoed in Heidegger’s claim that an authentic personal existence is
to be had precisely by facing the inevitability of our own death (the ‘end’ towards
which our existence inexorably moves), accepting it, and ‘living toward’ it rather
than repressing all thought of it. Thereby, he suggests, death becomes the unifying
factor in our existence, that to which everything is related, and we are enabled
to seize the concrete opportunities and possibilities proper to our particular
existences, being responsible in the face of them, rather than missing or ignoring
them.23 Because he knows that every moment is unrepeatable, and his life itself,
which must some day end, is the boundary beyond which there are no motion
replays or second chances, ‘At any moment, man must decide, for better or for
worse, what will be the monument of his existence’.24
Jean-Paul Sartre, though, demurred from this view, insisting that the
meaningfulness of a particular life could only be discerned from the specific ending
which it had (rather than ‘ending’ or ‘death’ as an abstraction, however inevitable
it may be), and ‒ since the particularity of death is almost always unexpected ‒
it cannot be lived towards as something clearly anticipated. Hence, he argues,
mortality does not bestow meaning upon our living or reveal its meaning, but in
fact robs it of the only sort of meaning we might have found in it. We are never the
ones to see the whole of our life from the perspective of this ending, and during
our living, therefore, we are by definition in no position to discern the meaning of
our actions or experiences. ‘If we must die’, he concludes, ‘then our life has no
meaning because its problems receive no solution, and because the very meaning
of the problems remains undetermined’.25 Again, we crave meaning for our lives,
our ‘selves’, but our finitude, rather than bestowing such meaning finally denies us
the opportunity of tracing any.
But this is not all. More must be said. And my other literary allusion is to Ian
McEwan’s novel Atonement. Here, in a coda to the main story, the narrator (whose
account is based on events in her own early life) confesses to having falsified
her ending in order to render it more bearable and satisfying. The two lovers
whose frustrated passion and separation is finally resolved and consummated in
the novel, in fact never saw one another again, one having died on the battlefield
and the other in a bombing raid in the London blitz. But, the narrator asks, ‘How
could that constitute an ending? What sense of hope or satisfaction could a
23
See John Macquarrie, An Existentialist Theology (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1955),
116–31.
24
Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 143.
25
Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957), 539–40.
reader draw from such an account? … Who would want to believe that, except
in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too
frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining.’26 It is not
simply a sense of an ending as such that we seem to crave, but a certain sort or
quality of ending. A novel which brings all its characters to clear narrative closure
may still not provide the sort of aesthetic satisfaction we are hoping for, because
it leaves so many half-completed projects, relationships, hopes and aspirations.
Some postmodern art deliberately plays on such interruptive endings (Quentin
Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction for example), and in some respects it is the stock in
trade of those dark literary tragedies where all finally comes to nothing. But the
sort of aesthetic satisfaction we derive from such depictions is of a very peculiar
sort, and might even be thought to lie in the sense of protest which it stirs in us
against the fragmentary, broken and unfulfilled potential which they lay before
us. What we desire, for the characters on screen or page, and for ourselves and
the others with whom we live, is a different sort of ending, an ending in which the
opportunity for fulfilment and realization of self is offered and seized, rather than
wrenched from human grasp. We crave not just an ending, but a good ending in
which all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
Here though, it is even more apparent that life cheats us. Even in our own
affluent, healthy and ageing modern societies, relatively few people approach
the prospect of their death with a sense of being ‘sated with years’, or of having
fulfilled their lives’ human potential. We only have to cast our gaze more widely to
see a circumstance far more troubling. In the words of one report, due to endemic
poverty ‘the actual life of most (humans) has been cramped with back-breaking
labour, exposed to deadly or debilitating disease, prey to wars and famines, haunted
by the loss of children, filled with fear and the ignorance that breeds more fear’.27
Jürgen Moltmann drives the nail home with characteristic force: ‘Think of the
life of those who were not permitted to live, and were unable to live: the beloved
child, dying at birth; the little boy run over by a car when he was four; the disabled
brother who never lived consciously, and never knew his parents; the friend torn to
pieces by a bomb at your side when he was sixteen; the throngs of children who die
prematurely of hunger in Africa; the countless numbers of the raped and murdered
and killed.’28 What are we to make of the alleged meaningfulness of these lives?
Their particular ‘endings’ are clear enough, but they are not the endings to, do
not bestow the meaningfulness upon the lives which we might naturally crave for
them. Despite the temporal ending which death inevitably constitutes to our living,
few if any human lives appear to constitute anything other than incomplete and
unsatisfactory stories, and many present themselves as tragic. Because they are
life rather than literature, this sickens rather than satisfies us, and leaves us with
Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 371.

26
Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth (New York: Penguin, 1972), 35.
27
Cited in John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (London: Collins, 1976), 153.
28
Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1996), 117.
the sense that it should all be otherwise. If we could rewrite the endings to their
stories, we should do so. But in real life, unlike fiction, we are unable to do so.
In his essay ‘Art, religion, and the hermeneutics of authenticity’, philosopher
Nicholas Davey focuses on the notion of ‘the withheld’ in art, and relates it to the
nature and pattern of certain sorts of religious experience.29 Aesthetic experience,
he notes, especially in the case of art performed, is intensely temporal, and sees
meaning brought into form through time. He cites Gadamer: ‘Every performance
is an event, but not one in any way separate from the work – the work itself is
what “takes place”’.30 As meaning unfolds, so what was withheld is disclosed to
performer and audience alike. In a statement sounding remarkably consonant with
Heidegger’s perspective Davey writes: ‘As a dwelling between past and future
possibilities, authenticity involves a being open to the call of the withheld, not
a prising open of the withheld, but a remaining open to and a holding with that
which is still withheld from us.’31 In the case of religious experience, he suggests,
we have to do with the anticipation of a meaning as yet to be revealed in the living
of a particular life. Such anticipation ‘projects a horizon of meaning whereby the
incoherent and presently fragmented aspects of a work [or life?] might achieve an
envisaged but as-yet-to-be-attained coherence’.32 Aesthetic experience, in which
precisely this comes to pass, Davey notes, lends substance to religious hope and
its manifestations in existence. Religious performance, we might say, involves a
responsiveness to a call to venture out in faith in a meaning for our lives as yet to
be disclosed.
There is, of course, at least one vital difference between performance in art
and in life, one shuddering ‘it is not’ which qualifies the poetic ‘it is’. In drama,
the performer is confronted with openness and the freedom for realization of a
meaning as yet still withheld; yet he also generally has a script, indicating in broad
outline at least the shape which his movement towards dramatic closure will take.
So too in musical performance. If a rendering of a sonata is of aesthetic value it
will disclose new depths of meaning in the work; yet for it to be a performance
of this sonata, and not some other, it must have an identifiable relationship to
a score indicating the limits within which freedom may be exercised. (I’m not
suggesting that there aren’t exceptions to this – of course there are. But most artistic
performance is like this.) But in life it is hardly ever like this. Mostly, as ‘actors’,
we face a future which is open, unknown in its openness, and often threatening in
its unknowability. Even our best projections and most reasonable expectations can
be and frequently are defied or rudely interrupted by the unexpected development,
by ‘events’ which are no respecter of the neat patterns of our planning. Apart from
29
In Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds, Performance and Authenticity in the Arts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66–93.
30
Truth and Method, 147, cited in Kemal and Gaskell, Performance and Authenticity
in the Arts, 77.
31
Davey in Kemal and Gaskell, Performance and Authenticity in the Arts, 89.
32
the singular certainty that we shall one day die, all else is, in the strictest sense,
contingent and vulnerable in this way. As we have already seen, the Stoic ideal was
one of acceptance and readiness to face whatever might come next, determined not
to allow events and emotions to get us down, thereby turning life’s drama into
a tragedy. But is stoicism (in the technical or the more extended sense) really
enough if we are to live well? Do we not need, we might well ask, something more
to be disclosed, something akin to the actor’s script or the musician’s score, some
indication of the relevant limits within which our own freedom may and must be
exercised, so that we know just what it is that we are supposed to be performing?
Perhaps in this respect the performance of life is indeed rather more like a
certain sort of improvised drama than the playing of a carefully scripted role.
There is something about it, too, which resembles the literary device of peripeteia,
in which readerly expectations are deliberately thwarted by the omnipotent author
generating ‘events’ to throw in the protagonist’s path. If the device is successful,
then the expected end is eventually reached, but via anything but the expected
routes. And it is this, of course, that keeps us reading, always eager to know
what will happen next. Shifting perspective again from the standpoint of ‘reader’
to that of ‘actor’, we might say that it is this same structural pattern in which
starting points and promised ends are given, but the route between them as yet
unclear or ‘withheld’, that keeps us living, striving, moving forward in our own
personal or communal dramas. In other words, while we may not have access to
a script, we need, and are offered, some imaginative vision of an end, a closure,
a telos to our living which bestows meaning and worth upon it, and which grants
a sense of direction. To borrow categories used by Sam Wells in his discussion
of drama and Christian ethics, we need to be able to relate our here and now to
some larger pattern which enables us to ‘overaccept’ the contingencies and accept
them as gift.33 And while we may hope that hitherto undisclosed meanings will be
revealed along the way, we know that the meaningfulness cannot finally be had in
the here and now at all. This consideration is one to which we shall return in our
final section.
The novelist Gustave Flaubert observed that ‘Real life is always misrepresented
by those who wish to make it lead up to a conclusion. God alone may do that’.34
Perhaps our human bid for form, our ‘will to meaning’, is rooted here in an implicit
eschatological sense that, despite the experienced gap between literature/drama and
life, our existence and that of others may yet be revealed as meaningful through the
closure provided by the one in whose hands the drama, the plot, the performance
finally lies. Sartre’s point remains to be addressed. Can an authentic performance
of life, let alone discipleship, be approximated to without some sense, however
Samuel Wells, ‘Improvisation in the Theatre as a Model for Christian Ethics’ in

33
Trevor A. Hart and Steven R. Guthrie, Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 147–66. For a more developed version of the argument see
Samuel Wells, Improvisation: the Drama of Christian Ethics (London: SPCK, 2004).
34
Cited in P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God (London: Duckworth, 1916), 223.
provisional and partial, of the broad pattern of that meaning which remains to be
disclosed? In theological terms, do we not need some sort of eschatological vision
to fuel our existence? And if so, what sort?
Two Theological Approaches
I want in this section briefly to consider the ways in which two theologians have
handled questions pertaining to the pattern of human existence, especially in
relation to the issue of death and what it says about the meaning of human lives
considered in eschatological perspective. The two theologians concerned are John
Hick and Karl Barth.
In his book Death and Eternal Life Hick picks up on some of the problems we
have already mentioned. Thus he notes that most of the world’s population has
lived in ‘a condition of life so degrading as to insult human dignity’.35 We see daily
the sort of potential that human lives contain, and yet everywhere we see such
potential unfulfilled, cut short, and in many cases blighted by terrible suffering
while it lasts. The advanced state of science and technology in the modern
world makes little dent in all this. The final stages of editing undertaken before
submitting the manuscript of this book to the publisher were completed on a train
journey from Kolkata to Darjeeling, and in the immediate wake of several days
spent visiting HIV/AIDS hospices, slum relief projects and the abandoned infants
taken in by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity; all ample evidence, were any
needed, of the verity of Hick’s observation. If, then, we are to suppose that human
life has meaning, that there is fulfilment to be looked for, a pattern to be traced, it
is apparent that the span of this life as such is not where we shall find it. The time
between birth and death, even in the case of those longest lived, is insufficient
for its realization. Furthermore, the traditional Christian focus on the span of this
earthly life as the environment within which human salvation is realized (or not)
is, Hick insists, ‘unrealistic both as regards what is to happen before death and
as regards what is to happen after death. If salvation in its fullness involves the
actual transformation of human character, it is an observable fact that this does
not usually take place in the course of our present earthly life’.36 Therefore, he
concludes, we must suppose that the pattern of a human life continues beyond
what we see of it, that its development towards fulfilment is extended temporally,
that it is ‘given more time’ to grow and advance towards that spiritual perfection
which alone (however we think of its nature) secures the person’s story as a comic,
rather than a tragic one.
This, then, is the fundamental claim that Hick makes. Death must not be the
point at which the pattern of any particular human life is finally concluded and
determined. It can at most be the conclusion of a key stage along the way toward
35
Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 154.
36
the completion of this pattern. In some sense, when we die, ‘the persisting self-
conscious ego will continue to exist’. But the model of personal identity which
Hick entertains is not at all abstract, but is rooted in particularities of space and
time, the contingencies of culture and circumstance. All this, he holds, is necessary
to the idea of the self as an entity capable of moral and spiritual development,
and hence salvation (rather than mere escape from the exigencies of historical
existence). ‘For’, he writes, ‘we have been formed as empirical egos within a
particular culture and a particular epoch of history. The language in which we think
and speak, the structure of society through which we are related to our neighbours,
the traditions and mores which we inherit, the state of public knowledge, the
unconscious framework of presuppositions through which we perceive the world,
the contingencies of political history … have all helped to make us what we are’.37
‘Strip all these culturally conditioned characteristics away’, he continues, ‘and
I should be someone else – or perhaps no-one’.38 We have our identity, in other
words, are who we are as embodied selves in more than a merely physical sense.
Our being is enfleshed in the realities of a socio-political, cultural and historical
context, and the very particular opportunities, challenges and possibilities with
which it presents us.
Thus Hick arrives at his preferred account of the patterning of human existence,
an account which draws consciously upon, but is quite distinct from, certain
Eastern models of reincarnation. The self, he suggests, is extended in time after
death through ‘a series of lives, each bounded by something analogous to birth
and death, lived in other worlds in spaces other than that in which we now are’.
This enables him to take seriously both the idea of more time being granted and
the finite particularity which seems to provide the backdrop, props and cast list
needful for the performance which I am called to give (since all these together are
constitutive of the I who is called to give it). Each life in the series is finite in itself,
each represents, as it were, another act in my personal drama, and each provides
opportunity for an advance of the self from the stage of development it had reached
at the end of the previous Act. Furthermore, the action of each is directly related
to that which is needful for particular stages of the self’s development, and has
its meaning therein. Here Hick’s concern with theodicy dominates the shape of
his eschatology. For now we can, indeed must, say that the suffering of this life is
revealed at the last to be meaningful, since through participation in our particular
portion of it we become the persons we are, and are fitted to progress to the next
Act. Hick does not indicate just how many such lives each of us may have to enjoy
or endure, though he seems to suppose it may indeed be many, depending upon
the rate of our progress.
What is notable in Hick’s account of salvation and survival of the self through
death is the relative absence of reference to God as the one through whose agency
and direction all this occurs. The drama – to return to our core metaphor – is played

37

38
out as a lengthy series of related Acts, but it appears to be largely an improvised

performance, with nothing resembling a script, a playwright, or a Director in
whose hands the movement to the final scene rests securely. Nothing, of course,
could be further from the truth in Barth’s theology to which we now turn.
To be human, Barth notes, is to be temporal, to have our existence in time.39
This is part of our proper creaturely contingency and, as such, distinguishes us
from our Creator. Specifically, it is not that we are temporal which differentiates
us from God, but the form of temporality in which our existence is played out.
God’s eternity is not timeless, but rather ‘authentic temporality’ from which our
creaturely temporality derives. In God (for eternity is a perfection of God himself,
proper to the form which God’s existence takes, and not a field within which God
exists and to which he is in any sense subject) ‘present, past and future, yesterday,
to-day and tomorrow, are not successive, but simultaneous’.40 As creatures, on the
other hand, we live transient lives, existing on the uncomfortable present cusp of
a pastness in which all that we value decays and disappears (‘is’ no more) and a
future which threatens possible horrors and terrors, and holds out at best uncertain
hopes. Furthermore, our temporality, our ‘own time’, the span which God has
granted us, is precisely that ‒ a limited span, bounded at each end by the events
of birth before which we did not exist, and death after which we shall not exist.
Barth recognizes that, in our fallenness and guilt, this finitude is experienced
by us as a problem, even a threat. But he is not sympathetic to Hick’s bid for
the extension of our personal drama beyond death. The idea that the granting of
further time – even infinite time – would somehow redress the problem of personal
fulfilment or salvation, is one that he rejects as a dangerous illusion. ‘This could
only mean in fact that we should be able to sin infinitely and even quantitatively
multiply our guilt on an infinite scale.’41 Far from treating it as a curse, therefore,
Barth suggests, we should view our finitude as a good thing. Death comes as a
blessed release from a life in which the forces of chaos and sin reign supreme and
torture us. Far from the curve of our pattern of personhood being a gradual climb
towards perfection, viewed in itself it is plunging ever further down beneath the
point where the graph stops. ‘Could there’, Barth asks, ‘be any better picture of
life in hell than enduring life in enduring time?’42 Finitude, on the other hand, puts
us out of our misery, sets us free from a life of addiction to sin, grants us peace. It
is a form of euthanasia.
In positive terms, finitude is a blessing because it bestows particularity, form
and thereby meaningfulness upon our personal existence before God. Like Hick,
Barth recognizes that human life and identity is rooted and played out in relation
to the contingencies of time, place and culture. It is this that gives the creature its
39
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd, 1960), 437. See
also 526.
40
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, 437.
41
42
specific and genuine reality. ‘Only the void is undefined and therefore unlimited.’43
‘The creature must not exist like the unhappy centre of a circle which has no
periphery. It must exist in a genuine circle, its individual environment. It must
not exist everywhere, but in a specific place. It must not exist endlessly, but in its
own time. It must not comprehend or understand or be capable of or accomplish
everything. It has freedom to experience and accomplish that which is proper to
it, to do that which it can do, and to be satisfied.’44 In other words, the limitations
of our finitude, culminating finally in the horizon that is our death, provide a
shape, a set of horizons, within which our life may and must be lived. It limits
the opportunities presented to us, and thereby the demands placed upon us. It
furnishes a matrix of relationships, capacities and possibilities that are ours alone,
the hypostatic fingerprint which differentiates us from all others and seals our
personal uniqueness before God. We may be playing on the same stage, but the
character we are called to perform and to be is unlike any other in the drama. God’s
specific limitation of an individual life is thus his granting of overall form to that
life, a pattern which we are called to develop and to improvise upon in our free
performance of life, but which defines the thresholds, the limits within which such
freedom may actually be exercised. This pattern, this role, this character within the
drama is our particular place within, our personal portion of the whole creation,
and we should value it as such.45 That it comes to an end is indicative of God’s
affirmation of a particular life, since ‘I am and can be only what I am in this one
time, in the few years of this single lifetime’, and those who resist such limitation
‘necessarily resist themselves, for they themselves are none other than those who
are limited in this way’.46 The span of time which God grants us, our allotted
portion of time is the duration of our ‘part’ within the wider drama of human
history. The form is completed. The pattern is what it is, and we are who we are
within its limits.
The further and final reason why God’s limitation of our time, his granting of
particularity to our personhood through finitude, is something to be welcomed
rather than eschewed is simply that it is in this time, our time, our particularity,
that God makes us the subject of his promise, and calls us to a response of faith
and obedience. Our time is our unique opportunity for response, and it is to me
(who I am in all my finite limitedness) that God calls, and from whom he looks
for a particular personal response. ‘The promises must be claimed’ by each, Barth
writes, ‘Otherwise what is objectively true in [Christ] is not true for him. Otherwise
he himself is not within the truth of his creatureliness but somewhere outside’.47
And here it is precisely the form provided by our finitude, the inevitability and
unexpectedness of our own death, which grants significance to our living, since it
43
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd., 1961), 567.
44
45
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, 569, 573.
46
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4, 571, 570.
47
charges the divine summons with an urgency it would not otherwise possess. Now
is the day of grace. The opportunity to fulfil our particular creatureliness, to seek
the correspondence of the pattern of our personhood with that of Christ’s (in all its
particularity) is one which presents itself to us as who we are and through what we
do and become in this limited life, and not otherwise. This, though, if it is indeed a
blessing, may seem to us to be a mixed one, a daunting prospect. Our character is
cast for us, the stage is set, and all the props in place. But there is no rehearsal, and
only a single performance before the reviews are written. Thus a burning question
presents itself to us. Is this all there is? And, if not, if the absence of any further
time is not the end for us personally, how are we to think of what lies beyond and
its relationship to the person we have been granted the freedom to be and become
between the limits of our birth and our death?
Here, Barth insists, we must remain largely agnostic. Hence, ‘We do not know
what and how we shall be when we are no more and have no more time for being
in virtue of our death. … We can only cling to the fact … that even in our death
and as its Lord (God) will be our gracious God, the God who is for us, and that
this is the ineffable sum of all goodness, so that everything that happens to us in
death will in some way necessarily work together for good’.48 So, in the strictest
sense, ‘our consolation, assurance and hope in death are restricted to the existence
of God’.49 The question we must ask is whether such apophatic ‘clinging’ is really
sufficient as an imaginative basis for living hopefully towards death. In fact, of
course, Barth does give us something to work with. He cannot help invoking
some positive imagined content with respect to this hereafter, even as he adopts a
deliberately agnostic approach. Hence death will not mean our return to the sort of
non-being out of which we were originally called in creation.50 God will ‘be there
for us’, and will hold us in some form of continued existence with himself.51 But
‘whatever existence in death may mean, it cannot consist in a continuation of life
in time’.52 We shall have had our allotted time, and more of it would only be bad
rather than good news. Instead, we must imagine some distinct mode of creaturely
correspondence to God’s own ‘authentic temporality’ in which past, present and
future are no longer strung out in a series of consecutive moments, but coexist in
perichoretic simultaneity.53 Even as one ‘who has been’, I shall somehow share
in God’s own eternal life.54 But here a further problem arises. Who, we must
ask, is this ‘I’ who thus enjoys eternal fellowship with God? What is the relevant
content indicated by the pronoun? Again, perhaps a certain level of agnosticism is
in order; but in as much as Barth addresses the question directly, he points to an
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, 632–3.
identification of the particular person with whom he or she ‘has been’ in the time
allotted to them by God. Thus, ‘man is, only as he is in his time. Even in eternal
life he will still be in his time’.55 The ‘whole time’ given us by God is his gift to us
of our distinctive existence, and is thus the subject of our redemptive participation
in God’s own life. Man ‘looks and moves’, Barth writes, ‘towards the fact that this
being of his in time, and therewith its beginning and end … will be revealed in
all its unmerited shame but also its unmerited glory, and may thus be eternal life
from and in God’.56 In itself, this seems to exacerbate the problem rather than to
resolve it. The pattern of who I shall have been in my life (as brought to closure
by death) is, as Barth rightly sees, precisely what needs to be redeemed. Yet the
things he is willing to venture (positively or negatively) about the possible shape
of this ‘eternal future’ end up sounding more like a rescue from the particulars of
our embodied and historical existence than the redemption of them.
The issue which divides Hick’s view from Barth’s from the outset and
fundamentally is the claim that the granting of ‘more time’ to a person’s existence
might somehow address the theodicy issue. Both begin with a frank recognition of
the problem – human lives as actually lived are, by the time death brings them to
an end, identifiably incomplete and imperfect, and sometimes woefully so. Hick
appeals precisely to this solution (a whole series of temporal extensions to our
allotted time), and Barth rejects it outright. This rejection is needful in order to
underwrite his conviction that – human beings being what they are – no amount
of extra time (time, that is, of the sort and under the conditions we currently know
and experience) could ever suffice to address the problem of sin and suffering,
but only the radical intervention of God’s grace. ‘Only God can do that.’ In fact,
though, Barth takes a further significant step, drawing a sharp contrast between
the nature of historical time (essentially linear, sequential and consecutive) and
the simultaneous shape of ‘eternity’. He also suggests that the pattern of personal
identity (who ‘I’ am in the final analysis) will be closed by death, and thus within
our allotted span of historical time. Such suggestions do not arise in the form of
imaginative ‘takes’ on how things might be in the Eschaton, but are effectively
limit statements. They are meant to exclude the feasibility of supposing that
anything analogous to the sequential nature of historical time could pertain
beyond the bounds of history (or those of a particular life). This, it has to be said,
is hardly a necessary insistence on biblical grounds or any other, and sits ill with
Barth’s professed minimalist agnosticism with regard to the shape of post-mortem
existence. Were we to treat it just as one imaginative scenario to set alongside
others, though, it remains one with some highly problematic entailments for the
way in which we might suppose this life (and our identity as particular persons in
it) to be related to the next.
55
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, 521. Cf. 523: ‘whatever I am, I am in my temporal
reality, in the totality of what I was and am and will be.’ Also 554: ‘Man is … in this span,
and not before or after it.’
56
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, 633. My italics.
In short, Barth’s account leaves no ‘time’ available for us to imagine anything

further taking place in. Put differently, it leaves no ‘time’ for God to do anything
further with us. (And we are capable, surely, of imagining some alternative mode
of temporality unlike that we know in all sorts of ways, but in which things
might nonetheless still be imagined meaningfully as ‘happening’?) In Barth’s
account, eternity consists, in effect, of the simultaneity of our past, present and
future, a pattern played out, as it were, in the presence of God, and now bathed
somehow in the glory characterizing the penumbra of that presence. But there
is no more time for any further modification of the pattern of a life itself. What
will be simultaneously present to us and to God, therefore, we must suppose, is
the ‘whole time’ of a particular life bounded by birth and death, and lived in the
world. Yet this seems to leave us trapped eternally with what, by the time of our
death, we ‘shall have been’, an inference that hardly addresses the theodicy issue
satisfactorily. Arguably, it exacerbates it. Of course, in meeting this concern, Barth
insists that we shall nonetheless by then be in the presence of God, and none of this
will blight our eternal joy. But this seems to meet the problem only by effectively
disentangling the substance of a particular personal identity (the ‘me’ who will
be there with God to witness and enjoy all this) from the content of a particular
life as lived and suffered. Eschewing the imagination of post-mortem temporality
altogether, Barth is driven to a very high level of imaginative abstraction (the
concrete is inexorably embedded in time); and this leads in turn to a vision in
which, rather than the content of our life being redeemed in any identifiable sense,
we are effectively rescued from it (even though ‘it’ is in some sense still ‘ours’).
Barth may be at one with one important element in the theological tradition here,
placing emphasis upon death as a decisive cut-off point where much about the
creature’s form and eternal destiny is already decided; but he is equally clearly at
odds with the wider rich and fertile imagining of the redeemed state in Scripture
(e.g. in the prophets) as a transformation and renewal of what this life amounts
to, a raising of it to new life in which it both remains the creature that it has been,
and yet is transfigured into a joyful and glorious version of itself which we can,
as yet, only imagine. The pattern of history, and of individual lives lived within
it, need to be reconfigured, healed, cleansed, completed and brought to fulfillment.
But this, we must suppose, ‘takes time’, time beyond the limits of historical
existence itself. To the extent that we refuse at least to imagine any such time,
we risk positing an arbitrary disjunction between this life and the next, tracing no
meaningful connection between the two stages. Far from justifying God’s decision
to create (which is what Barth intends), this in turn calls into question the status of
our embodied, historical existence as the unequivocal object of God’s redemptive
purpose and activity, and thereby devalues it.
Hope, Improvisation and Eschatological Imagination
What, Jürgen Moltmann asks, should we make of the Pauline claim that
‘“this mortal life will put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:54)? … Will this life be
“immortalized”, as obituary notices sometimes say? If that meant that this life
from birth to death is recorded as if on a video, and stored up in the heaven of
eternity, that would be anything but a joyful prospect: immortalized with all the
terrible experiences, faults, failings and sicknesses? How would we imagine the
immortalizing of a severely disabled human life, or the immortalizing of a child
who died young?’57 It is this question, answered in the light of convictions about
God’s justice, that leads Moltmann finally to demur from Barth and to affirm a
version of the doctrine of the intermediate state in which further ‘time’ is granted by
God for the task of completing his creation and fitting us individually for eternity.
‘I shall again come back to my life’, Moltmann writes, ‘and in the light of God’s
grace and in the power of his mercy put right what has gone awry, finish what
was begun, pick up what was neglected, forgive the trespasses, heal the hurts, and
be permitted to gather up the moments of happiness and to transform mourning
into joy’.58 This is certainly no mere extension of our creaturely time, or ‘another
chance’ to get it right this time. It is a qualitatively distinct form of temporality
in the presence of Christ, spanning the time between our death and the general
resurrection of the dead, and furnishing space for us to become the persons God
intended and intends us to be. Like Barth, Moltmann sees the content of eternity as
a transformed version of temporality. Indeed, his own account of the ‘aeonic’ time
of God’s new creation is similar in many respects to Barth’s proposed eternity of
‘simultaneity’.59 Like Barth, too, he insists that the content of this aeonic reality
will be directly related to the particular lives we live in the here and now. Unlike
Barth, though, he understands death not as that which closes and completes the
pattern of a life, but as a penultimate scene leaving ‘time’ yet for the necessary
healing, sanctification and fulfilment of a life in God’s hands. The Gestalt of an
individual life, therefore, is not apparent from the perspective afforded by its point
of death, but only eschatologically, in the transformation of its form by the Spirit.
Let’s attempt, then, to cash out these eschatologies in relation to our dramatic
metaphor. Hick presents our personal existence as a series of largely unrelated
performances, hardly even ‘acts’ in a unified story, except insofar as they are all
linked by their relationship to a common human ‘actor’ or subject. From another
angle we might think of them as ‘rehearsals’, designed specifically to fit this actor
for an existence in eternity (the ‘command performance’ for which such thorough
57
Moltmann, The Coming of God, 70.
58
59
See, e.g., Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1990),
330. For a critical account of Moltmann see Richard Bauckham, ‘Time and Eternity’ in
Bauckham, ed., God Will Be All in All: The Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 1999), 155–226.
preparation is necessary). And this, we should note, places a particular value on

the pattern of personal development: Salvation pertains to, is constituted by, the
final stage in the drama. All else is preparatory, and thus of merely transient
significance. In truth, though, the performative metaphor breaks down badly at this
point, and is really much better replaced by a more timeless, contemplative model
of aesthetic experience. Like Barth, although Hick tries hard to hold on to personal
particularity, he finally loses touch with it in his own way, spreading identity much
too thinly over a whole series of particular lives lived consecutively, and affirming
its eventual absorption into atemporal pattern of ‘atman’ or the ‘universal self’.60
Barth, meanwhile, places his initial emphasis entirely differently. Life itself – and
we only get one allocated span of time between our birth and our death – is the
drama. There is no further ‘final act’ to be played out. What remains beyond death
is a ‘redemptive’ eternalizing of the various acts in the drama of our lives. It is
those same acts revisited, viewed now in the light of the denouement and bathed
in the light of another story, Christ’s, which has been played out in juxtaposition
to it. And the relevant action in question is God’s, not ours. Our life, in its entirety,
is in this sense both the singular time and the sole object of redemption. There
is no rehearsal, and no post-production party. But, for reasons which we have
addressed above, Barth’s emphatic eschewal of post-mortem time undercuts
some of what he intends. Specifically, it leads him, too, in the direction of an
abstraction of personhood from the particulars of a life as lived, makes it difficult
to imagine in concrete terms how this life may actually be the object of God’s
redemptive activity, and thus raises questions about the meaningfulness and value
of the lives we live. Moltmann, too, wants to insist that the whole pattern of our
living, and not just its most developed stage, is the object of God’s redemptive
action. But the ‘whole pattern’ of our living, he insists, is more than it amounts
to at the point of our dying. In order to address the problems raised by Barth’s
account, Moltmann, as it were, introduces another intermediate series of dramatic
‘scenes’, a performative transform which shifts us decisively from the pattern of
what we ‘shall have been’ by the time of our death, and prepares that pattern
for its eternalization in the presence of God. What perdures in the new creation
(Moltmann’s favourite biblical image for the final act), therefore, is not the drama
of a particular life as lived, but that same life redeemed, transfigured, its evil
purged and its lacks made good.
I noted earlier that life is unlike drama in as much as no precise script for the
remaining sections of the Act exists (or, if it does exist, its larger shape is known
only to the Playwright and Director, and not yet to the actors). Perhaps, I suggested,
life is indeed in this respect (viz., from the standpoint of the actor) rather more like
improvisation than the performance of a script. I want now in closing to suggest
that it may be well-likened to a particular form of improvisation; namely, the
musical cadenza. Here, within a space left precisely for the purpose, the musician
improvises in a manner which fits both what has gone before and (crucially) what
60
See Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 450f.
lies still in the future. It is this view to what is yet to come which differentiates
the patterning of Christian performance in certain respects from some forms of
improvisation. Our performance is rooted and nurtured necessarily in a tradition,
a pattern assimilated, a set of habits acquired and skills gained. And it demands
the skilful (though I don’t want to allow the virtuosity of the cadenza much space
in the appropriation of the metaphor) and imaginative application of these to new
and unexpected circumstances. There is a vital Christological component to this
performance which time does not permit us to deal with here. Let me simply refer
the reader to the sensitive and helpful treatment provided by David Brown in
Discipleship and Imagination. ‘Discipleship’, Brown writes, ‘is … both a matter
of locating ourselves within Jesus’ story and acknowledging the way in which
our own situation differs significantly from his’.61 Nonetheless the pattern of his
performance is a vital nourishing source for ours, not just as we reflect on it in
the narrative, but as the Spirit unites us to him, takes our imagination captive
and makes our performance part of the same drama, the same piece. In this sense
the action of our lives is an improvised development of themes drawn from an
earlier Act.
At the same time, though, the performance has a vital eschatological dimension
and energy. In our Christian ‘will to meaning’, we do not just look backwards, but
perform hopefully towards a promised and imagined end. It is this same promise
and its imaginative apprehension which releases energy for our living the life of
discipleship.62 To return for a moment to Davey, we recall his insistence that ‘As
a dwelling between past and future possibilities, authenticity involves a being
open to the call of the withheld, …. remaining open to and a holding with that
which is still withheld from us’.63 In the case of Christian performance, there is
precisely this sense of an existence ‘between the times’. That which is withheld
from us, though, is also granted us to grasp, at least in the form of hints and clues.
There is imaginative apprehension of our end together with God, even though
comprehension is (perhaps will forever be) beyond our intellectual reach. The
biblical symbols of ‘bodily resurrection’ and ‘new creation’ seem to me both to fit
into this category, and both point clearly in the direction of a redemptive renewal
of current states of affairs, and one which clearly does not occur prior to our death.
While Moltmann’s imaginative proposal of an ‘intermediate state’ may well raise
its own theological questions and concerns, so far as the inculcation of an ecology
of ‘hopeful performance’ is concerned, it stands identifiably in this same tradition,
affording a way of imagining in concrete and sufficiently coherent terms (ones we
can ‘make sense of’) how it might be that, in our post-mortem existence with God,
David Brown, Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth

61

62
See further on this Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope:
Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999),
esp. 44–71.
63
the broken, distorted and incomplete patterns of particular lives may yet, in God’s
hands, come to satisfying closure and be rendered fit for our eternal enjoyment,
and God’s.
Chapter 9
Unexpected Endings
Death has been swallowed up in victory …

Where, O death, is your sting?1
‘Spem in Alium’ ‒ A Theological Overture
As we saw in the last chapter, Christian faith typically begins at the end. It has
its provenance in, draws its vital energy from and patterns its living towards
an ultimate future divinely promised and imaginatively apprehended. Christian
faith, we might say, is irreducibly hopeful, and Christian theology irreducibly
eschatological. These are terms carefully chosen, and they need to be equally
carefully defined: faith is hopeful, not optimistic; and eschatology is not teleology
except in a very peculiar sense. For there is, in the distinctively Christian
patterning of our end, a ‘catastrophe’ to be reckoned with – an overturning
of the cosmic furniture, a subversion of all reasonable expectations, a sudden
interruption of the wider order or system of things to which we have become
used, and a contradiction of many of its capacities and incapacities. The hope
in which faith is invested is, we might say, finally and decisively a transcendent
rather than an immanent hope. Its constraints lie not with the ‘real possibles’ nor
even the ‘not-yet-possibles’ of history,2 but only with what is possible for the
God in whose hands alone our end, as our beginning, rests, and whose hallmark
is the gift of life – life called forth not just out of some imagined murky primeval
‘nothing’, but out of the altogether more concrete and familiar darkness and
dankness of the tomb which, otherwise, ‘gets us all in the end’. ‘Thanks be to
God’, writes Paul, ‘who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’.3
So, to reiterate, the reach of Christian hope is always beyond the thresholds of
the most and the best of what, otherwise, the world amounts to and is capable
of. Christian hope is always hope invested in a divine ‘other’, and it cannot be
other, therefore, than faith – trust in a promise given and received, and obedient
willingness to live and to die by it.
1
1 Cor. 15:54–55 (NRSV).
2
The distinction is based loosely on that drawn by Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope
(3 vols, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 144. Bloch differentiates hope from mere fantasizing in
terms of the former’s imaginative apprehension of a ‘Real-Possible’ or a ‘Not-Yet-Being
of an expectable kind’. Both categories include states of affairs the conditions for the
possibility of which may themselves as yet not exist. See further below, 236–8.
3
1 Cor. 15:57. My italics.
Correspondingly, therefore, the question contained in the epigram from 1

Corinthians with which I opened this chapter (‘Where, O death, is your sting?’)
remains, I suggest, at one level a genuine rather than a merely rhetorical question
for Christian faith and for its theologians. It is not the religious equivalent of
the taunt chanted by fans of the winning team on the football terraces to their
counterparts in the opposite stand (sung to the tune, ‘She’ll be coming round
the mountain when she comes’) ‘Oh, it’s all gone quiet over there …’. Perhaps
some of Paul’s original readers took it that way, which would explain why he had
subsequently to address a second epistle to them seeking to correct the errors of
inappropriate triumphalism and an overly-realized eschatology. But hope in the
resurrection and faith in the God who promises it, for all the appropriateness of the
rhetoric of ‘victory’, cannot and must not behave as if it could erase, obscure or
trivialize the pain, alienation and death which continues to characterize so much of
life in this world, and which is so central to the peculiar way in which, according
to Christian faith, that same victory was won. I shall have more to say about these
things later in relation to the literary category of tragedy and its uses in theology;
but for now I want to go back temporarily to the future, or the end, or at least to the
matter of ‘endings’. In particular, literary endings, and what they may have to tell
or to show us about endings of other sorts.
Odd Consolations
In his Andrew Lang lecture on ‘Fairy-Stories’ (delivered in the University

of St Andrews in March 1939) J.R.R. Tolkien observed that one of the most
characteristic features of that genre was the happy ending, a fact made the
more remarkable by the accompanying fact that the beginnings and middles of
the stories concerned are often anything but happy or even pleasant. Some are
positively grim, and apart from the demands of literary convention seem bound,
indeed, to end badly and perhaps even rather messily. The relevant consolation
is, though, Tolkien indicates, essential to the genre, and ‘its highest function’,4 not
just a convenient way of bringing terrified and traumatized bedtime consumers of
the genre back to a point where sleep (and sleep without nightmares) is a genuine
possibility. Whereas, he suggests, tragedy is the highest form of drama, fairy-tale
cannot have a ‘tragic’ resolution. No matter how dark its initial vision, it must end
well and console. Notice, though, that on this account the opposition between the
tragic and ‘faerie’ is defined in terms of its ultimate outcome, and not necessarily
its prevalent mood or much of its content. Indeed, something capturing the dark
mood and vision of tragedy might well be supposed to provide the perfect prelude
See J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 68. The text
4
of Tolkien’s original lecture is lost, and all references are to the revised and expanded
version eventually produced for a 1947 Festschrift for Charles Williams and subsequently
republished several times.
Unexpected Endings 211
to a drastic peripeteia of the sort which Tolkien has in mind. There are, after all,
other genres which typically arrive at a happy ending through contrivance of one
sort or another. But Tolkien coins the term ‘eucatastrophe’ to refer to the particular
sort of ending he has in mind: a ‘good catastrophe’; an outcome, then, which itself
stands in stark opposition to much that precedes it, and pulls the rug cleverly out
from beneath the feet of our expectations and predictions.
In Tolkien’s terms a eucatastrophe is something highly improbable and perhaps
even impossible within the secondary world of the text itself. Within this world,
Tolkien insists, the ending arises precisely as a ‘sudden and miraculous grace:
never to be counted on to recur’.5 Its characteristic product in the heart of the
reader, he suggests, is a form of joy, which is all the more joyful to the extent that it
breaks the apparent stranglehold otherwise of sorrow and failure on the outcome.
The source of the joy, therefore, comes from ‘beyond the walls of the world’6
in which the tale itself is set. There may seem to be a price to be paid for this in
aesthetic terms, as what – in the tale’s own terms – can only be construed as a Deus
ex machina is summoned to secure the conclusion. The move made, though, is no
arbitrary grafting of a happy ending where it does not belong. Rather, the reader is
invited to situate the world of the tale now within a wider and higher pattern (still
fictional, but nonetheless distinct) and the possibilities pertaining to it, thereby
shifting the grounds of what might eventually count as convincing in literary
terms or compelling in aesthetic ones. Catastrophe, of course, by definition never
leaves unified wholes uninterrupted or intact; and Tolkien’s eucatastrophic ending
is compelled to break the pattern of the tale open precisely in order to redeem
it. The relevant aesthetic satisfaction is linked directly to the joy of recognizing
(and endorsing) the beauty of the bigger picture which is invoked or revealed in
the process.
Golgotha and Parnassus
Tolkien was never interested in literary form or literary affect for its own sake.
Art, he believed, was of a piece with reality in one way or another, even when
it seemed farthest flung from it. So, here, his reflections on the unashamed and
explicit literary consolations of fairy-story move quickly on to questions about
what such endings may have to tell us about our own humanity, about life, and
about the shape of the wider reality within which we find ourselves. Here it is
to the essential brokenness of so much of what we experience in life, and our
corresponding desire that things should be otherwise, that Tolkien directs us in the
first instance. Fantasy more widely and faerie in particular, he notes, plays directly
and deliberately upon ancient and deeply rooted human desires, affording a form
of imaginative ‘escape’ from sufferings, lacks and limitations which frustrate and
5
Ibid., 69.
6
Ibid., 69.
blight our existence daily, things which make the world a ‘grim and terrible’ place
for many people much of the time. Hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, loss, sorrow,
injustice, alienation; and under-girding and sealing the grip on human lives of all
these there is death; death towards which life moves inexorably, and by which
life (together with all those pleasures and joys and achievements which go some
way, at least, to balancing the account) is finally swallowed up. No surprise, then,
perhaps, that escape from death’s clutches should be among the most basic and
central of human desires, and the consolation of the eucatastrophic ending, Tolkien
avers, is to be understood in part as a literary scratching of this deeply felt itch.
In a discussion of art in the first chapter of her Gifford Lectures, Iris Murdoch
also notes its role as a consoling force in human life.7 In particular, she suggests,
through literary and dramatic art we situate ourselves within imaginatively framed
unities of one sort or another, granting form and meaning to what frequently
appears otherwise to be a formless, meaningless and unpalatable manifold of
experiential flotsam and jetsam. As human beings, Murdoch says, we instinctively
crave meaning, the security of the familiar pattern. We are, she suggests, naturally
‘one-making’ creatures. And, drawing on the accounts of Hume, Kant and others,
she notes the wider contributions of human imagination in this regard, furnishing
various ‘limited wholes’ for our consumption – ‘We see parts of things, we intuit
whole things’8 – despite the philosophical problems involved and the paucity of
evidence. Day to day material objects, the coherent world in which we confront and
grasp them, ourselves and others as continuous bodies and continuous minds, the
wider movement of events, actions and outcomes in history – all this experienced
reality has already been extensively ‘worked’ by the imagination. In art, therefore,
we are dealing with something on the same basic spectrum, though clearly at a
different point on it.
At one level, of course, literary and dramatic art in particular are always a
version of (based on certain elements or patterns in) life as we know it. Art, that is
to say, imitates life, at least to a certain extent. But it rarely only does this. There is
always some element of modification, some transformation of the commonplace
involved, even when it is hardly apparent. Indeed, the most compelling realism
and naturalism in art is generally only possible through a complex and skilled
encoding, persuading us that what we see is ‘like’ real life, when actually it isn’t
at all. And a simple ‘mirroring’ of daily experience, were it served up to us, would
be much less compelling, perhaps even hardly recognizable.9 But art also modifies
See Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Vintage, 2003), esp.
7
1–24.
Ibid., 1.
8
That representational art encodes reality in the terms proper to its distinctive media
9
in order to solicit from us the ‘beholder’s share’, stimulating sensory, neural and imaginative
responses from us of the same sort as ‘reality’ itself, is one of the key insights developed
by Sir Ernst Gombrich in his writings. See, e.g., Art and Illusion: Further Studies in the
Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1982). The point Gombrich
the stuff of life not in order to generate likenesses to the texture of our experience
of it, but in order to make good some its felt deficits and contradictions too. When
the volume of darkness and chaos is cranked up to a point where it threatens to
break through and deconstruct our most cherished unities, art is one of the ways
in which, sometimes, we console ourselves. It does so, Murdoch suggests, by
representing ‘something which we deeply (unconsciously) want to be the case.
We intuit in art a unity, a perfection, which is not really there’.10 We ‘take refuge’
in art, and we do so in various ways. Not only by using it as a means of temporary
escape from the relative lacks of the world, but, when the world becomes too
threatening, too dark, we borrow from art some of its carefully constructed ‘re-
workings’ of reality and deploy them in order to pattern life itself. Thus, Murdoch
notes, art often provides us a ‘language’ in terms of which to confront, and make
sense of, and speak about the ‘contingent dreadfulness of the world’.11 When, for
example, we instinctively or habitually say of some horror in life that it is ‘tragic’,
the circle is complete, and life begins to borrow its forms from art rather than
vice-versa.12 Directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously, then, life is
‘aesthetically worked’ as part of the ‘calming, whole-making’ tendency of human
thought. Art consoles us, and we are glad for it to do so.
Now, it is true enough that at first blush Tolkien and Murdoch are saying
something remarkably similar. Art, among other things, consoles us, and it does
so in certain instances by contradicting the shape (or perhaps the threatening
shapelessness) of life. Whether by supplying the ‘happily ever after’ endings
which transience and death deny to our actual lives, or furnishing imaginative
templates to obscure the chaos and ‘dreadful contingency’ of living, art transforms
the stuff of human existence into something more bearable, something, maybe
even, for which to be glad. Of course, though, art is artifice, and questions of a
metaphysical sort will not long be kept at bay (as they never can be). And it is
here that we find a radical division between the two accounts. The shared claim
about art’s consoling role, in other words, is situated against two wholly different,
opposing accounts of what is ‘really’ the case and how things fare ultimately with
human beings and their place in the world.
For Tolkien, eucatastrophe in literature is no mere projection or wish-
fulfilment, bravely erecting imaginary bulwarks against a raging tide which will
ultimately wash them and us away, permitting us for the time being at least to
build our sandcastles as though doing so really mattered. Rather, he suggests, the
peculiar quality of joy associated with it is an index of its imaginative intuition of
makes about the visual arts is transferable, mutatis mutandis, to other art forms, and lies
at the heart of Paul Ricoeur’s account of threefold mimesis in Time and Narrative, Vol. 1
(London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 52–87.
10
Murdoch, Metaphysics, 19.
11
Ibid., 100.
12
‘It is difficult to talk about terrible things and we tend to turn ‘the facts’ into quasi-
tragic art in our minds.’ Ibid., 96.
a deep underlying reality or truth about the world, a truth of which it furnishes a
sudden, unexpected and fleeting ‘glimpse’. It suggests that our deeply cherished
conviction, held perversely in the teeth of uniform global experience, that things
‘ought not to be this way’ may actually be something other than a cruel and
mocking discrepancy between aspiration and the facts of the matter. Of course,
the eucatastrophic imagination is compelled to appeal ‘beyond the walls’ of this
world; but precisely what it refuses to accept, therefore, is that ‘this world’ is
finally identifiable with the sum of what is and will be real. Christians, Tolkien
notes, have a particular reason for insisting that this is so; but the intuition that
here ‘ought’ and ‘is’ may actually coincide eschatologically is a broader one, and
we find it more widely distributed in forms of literary eucatastrophe which afford
a ‘far off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world’.13
Murdoch’s take is quite different. Her premise is essentially Nietzschean,
drawing on the sharp distinction posited in The Birth of Tragedy between the
Dionysiac chaos of ‘reality’ and the Apolline impulse of imagination to impose
illusory (and consoling) order on the absurd, swirling play of forces. Apollo is
the god of ‘beautiful illusion’, and for Nietzsche the illusions are not simply
pleasurable but necessary ones, a view which Murdoch, in her turn, re-echoes. The
consolations of great art, then, are indeed artifice, illusions obscuring the awful truth
and, in doing so, permitting us to organize and to live our lives on the very brink of
truth without toppling over into the despair and turmoil which, otherwise, it must
inevitably provoke in us. Murdoch, therefore, has little time for art which ‘consoles
too much’, effectively pushing us away from the edge into illusions designed to
shield us altogether from the truth of our circumstance, something which, she
insists, even some forms of tragedy themselves end up doing. Happy endings and
eschatological consolations, therefore, she resists as manifest departures from
reality and, in that sense, failures artistically. Art’s highest calling is to lift the lid
on reality, to evoke its Dionysiac absurdity, stripping away the layers of consoling
form and meaning until there remains only the bare minimum needful to permit
us to gaze upon its face without being consumed. The view from Parnassus, then,
is of a rather different sort than that which gazes out from Golgotha, and sees the
Mount of Transfiguration and Ascension on the far horizon. For Murdoch, we shall
see (and she is not alone), it is tragic art which draws closest to the truth, and it can
have nothing whatever to do either with eucatastrophe or evangelium. Its darkness
is of a much more ultimate and enveloping sort.
The Value of Agony
Tragedy has frequently been awarded the accolade of being the most serious, the
greatest, the truest among literary and dramatic forms. It is worth asking ourselves
why, because on the face of it this is an odd fact. After all, ‘tragic’ art as more

13
precisely defined (i.e. by tragic theorists from Aristotle onwards) is far from
being a universal phenomenon; in fact, according to most standard accounts, it
really only crops up properly twice: in the classical world (Aeschylus, Euripides,
Sophocles, Seneca) and then again in the wake of the Renaissance (Marlowe,
Jonson, Shakespeare, Racine). Of course one may choose to expand or contract
the canon by shifting the terms of the relevant definition, and Terry Eagleton’s
refreshing study of the subject lambasts ‘normative’ uses of the term tragedy
which, in the pursuit of some tragic essence, end up reducing the list of relevant
texts down a few splendid instances here and there, and affording others the status
of ‘failed attempts’. This, he suggests, ‘is rather like defining a vacuum cleaner in
a way which unaccountably omits the Hoover’.14 Tragic theory, Eagleton argues, is
a theory in ruins, and one which cannot possibly do justice to the wider pattern of
works deserving the description, as attempts to grapple seriously with the ‘tragic’
dimensions in life. His point is well-made, and Murdoch, for one, falls well foul
of it. If, though, there are some good reasons for democratizing the concept of
tragedy, there may still be other reasons for attending to particular forms of it, and
to the theory which has exalted these above the rest. And for our purposes this
more rarefied, ‘purist’ canon provides at least a useful source of comparison, even
if it is a bit of an abstraction or an ideal to which few works aspire let alone attain.
Another reason why the celebration of tragic drama might be thought odd is
simply its prima facie sado-masochism. There is something odd and complex,
surely, George Steiner notes, about the re-enactment of terrible private anguish
on a public stage, and the derivation from this by the audience of some form of
satisfaction or pleasure?15 Even if we adopt Eagleton’s Hoover-inclusive definition
of tragedy as any drama which is ‘very sad’, the problem persists. Why should we
want to attend to such things, to contemplate them? Do we not get enough of them
in life itself? What, in short, does the enjoyment of tragedy tell us about ourselves,
about the so-called ‘human condition’?
Provision of answers to this question, of course, is precisely the domain of
tragic theorists such as Murdoch, and we have already begun to see something
of the direction her answer takes. Eagleton, still driven by a democratic urge,
broadens things out much further, but leaves them in the same basic ballpark. It
is precisely the fact that tragedy does tell us or show us something basic about
the human condition, he suggests, that is the point, and which makes depictions
of horror and pain so compelling for audiences across cultural boundaries,
rendering them much more than ‘a kind of high-brow version of ripping yarns for
boys’.16 Of course, the very idea of a shared human condition is highly suspect
in some dominant intellectual circles, but, Eagleton insists, tragedy has its sights
set firmly on something securely ‘trans-historical’ even if the manifestations and
representations of it are different. The fact is, he writes, ‘that we die … It is, to
14
Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: the Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 7.
15
See George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber, 1961), 3.
16
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, ix.
be sure, a consoling thought for pluralists that we meet our end in such a richly
diverse series of ways, that our modes of exiting from existence are so splendidly
heterogeneous, that there is no drearily essentialist “death” but a diffuse range of
cultural styles of expiring … But we die anyway’.17 Death, then, is the unavoidable
truth which unites us as human beings. And not just death as such, but the pain and
suffering and sorrow which lead up to and are duly caused by it, the whole world
of darkness for which it serves as an appropriate and chilling symbol. ‘Wretched
man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?’18 The fact of suffering,
Eagleton notes, ‘is a mightily powerful language to share in common’.19 In the final
analysis, ‘there is nothing hermeneutically opaque’ about it.20 It speaks loudly and
clearly across miles and years, and we hear what it has to say, not just about those
depicted on the stage, but about ourselves. Perhaps tragedy’s greatness lies in part,
then, in the fact that, to cite Donald MacKinnon, it is ‘powerful in the disclosure
of what is’.21 Or, in Murdoch’s phrase, it looks ‘the contingent dreadfulness of the
world’ squarely in the eye, without flinching, and in doing so enables us to reckon
with the final truth of our human circumstance.
And yet, of course, tragic drama is no mere replication in the theatre of life’s
horrors and terrors, or of its inevitable end in death. And the greatness of tragedy
cannot lie in such depiction alone, otherwise we should accord similar greatness to
the prurient ‘gore-fest’ of many contemporary films, and even to the ‘on the spot’
TV journalism which, while it is certainly not unedited, nonetheless comes closer
in its coverage of horror and suffering to the sheer messiness, fragmentation and
bewildering chaos of life itself. Well then, ‘can art’, Murdoch enquires, ‘actually
convey the horrors of life better than the television news?’22 The supposition that
in some sense it can has to do with the recognition that, in representing our shared
pain and transience, tragic drama grants it a form which, in real life, is lacking or
at least not readily available to us for contemplation.23 It is this, of course, that
lies behind the insistence by theorists such as Murdoch and Steiner that, despite
the universality of things to which we habitually refer as ‘tragic’ in human life,
in the strict sense ‘Real life is not tragic’, and cannot be, because ‘tragedy’ refers
17
Ibid., xiii.
18
Rom 7:24.
19
Ibid., xvi.
20
Ibid., xiv.
21
Donald MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (London:
Lutterworth Press, 1968), 101.
22
Ibid., 117.
23
Perhaps the latter rather than the former. Appeal to the epiphanic force of
tragic genres, after all, seems necessarily to presuppose that, as Ricoeur suggests, its
artistic representations are indeed first drawn from the substance of life itself as well as
reconfiguring it for our contemplation, and challenges the Nietzschean assumption that
‘real life is shapeless, and art alone is orderly’ (Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 15). Cf. Ricoeur,
Time and Narrative 1, 72.
to a particular way of working life aesthetically, patterning the raw materials life
provides (raw in more than one sense of the word) in drama. Here, what otherwise
sounds like academic prissiness of the first order (so, Eagleton enquires pointedly,
‘All-out nuclear warfare would not be tragic, but a certain way of representing it
might be’?) does have an important point to make. It draws our attention again
to the fact that life is always aesthetically worked, and that the peculiar appeal of
tragic art probably has to do not just with its subject matter, but with the particular
ways in which that subject matter is deliberately configured for us on the stage,
which are quite different to most of our experiences of it in reality.
In what sense, then, might it be supposed that these representations of suffering
are ‘better’, rather than merely ‘different’ to those in our TV news bulletins, or
even the ways in which we experience ‘tragic’ things as they occur to us and
to others around us? For Murdoch the answer has to do, paradoxically, with the
capacity of great tragic drama to prise open our sweaty grip on art’s consolling
forms, and thereby bring us face to face with the brokenness and chaos of a
Dionysiac cosmos. Tragedy gives us just enough to hold on to, while compelling
us to confront the reality lurking behind our dreams and illusions. Tragic genius,
she argues (and she acknowledges that instances of this are rare), manages to steer
a course between consolling us on the one hand, and allowing us to be swept away
by despair on the other. As art, great tragedy must have borders, it must have
shape; and yet it must not have shape or form which finally redeems or dignifies
its subject matter, granting it some form of silver lining, and thereby robbing it of
its authentic and unalloyed darkness.
Yet, of course, this is exactly what some other tragic theorists have looked
for and found in it. Here, the dark focus of tragedy is effectively undercut by an
ascription to its representations (and to what they represent) of certain sorts of
value: tragedy itself, that is to say, consoles, justifying the pain and suffering and
loss of the world it depicts, but doing so, paradoxically, in a manner which affirms
their ultimacy rather than ever calling it into question. So, for example, Dorothea
Krook maintains that mere pessimism is just as inimical to the tragic as optimism,
being blind to ‘the redeeming power of the knowledge born of suffering’; and ‘the
final paradoxical effect of great tragedy’, she indicates, ‘is to leave us not wretched
and oppressed, but liberated, restored and exhilarated’.24 It all begins to sound,
Eagleton notes in typically ironic vein, like ‘a superior way of cheering yourself
up’,25 ‘just the thing to lift one’s spirits after a bankruptcy or bereavement, a tonic
solution to one’s ills’.26 The seeds of this ‘affirmative’ account of tragedy are sown
early, in Aristotle’s account of it as possessed of ‘cathartic’ benefits – ‘effecting
24
Dorothea Krook, Elements of Tragedy (New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 1969), 116, 239.
25
Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 26.
26
Ibid., 25.
through pity and fear the purification (catharsis) of such emotions’.27 We need not
concern ourselves with the contested question of what precisely Aristotle means
here – it suffices to note his conviction that there is good of some sort to be had
even out of terrible ills, at least for those who watch them played out.28 Some
have noted the way in which tragedy underscores and draws our attention to the
value of things precisely as it wrenches them cruelly from our grasp. Despite
the persistent longing for a world healed of its suffering, W. Macneile Dixon
suggests, to wish that the world were otherwise than it is, is in practice to wish
away our humanity itself. ‘Everything … is what it is’, he writes, ‘and in the moral
world leans for its existence on its contrary, as courage upon the possibility of
cowardice, magnanimity on that of meanness. … What makes us haters of evil
makes us lovers of good; and if evil vanished from the world much good, the
most precious, would assuredly go with it, and the best in us rust unused’.29 Far
from undermining our sense of value or the worth of things, therefore, tragedy
serves to do the opposite, and shows us that, in fact, value itself (and not just our
sense of it) is finally tied inexorably to contingency, suffering and transience. For
others, it is not in the stalls or the balcony that tragic goods are to be traced first
and foremost, but on the stage, where not just suffering is enacted, but suffering of
certain sorts, and suffering as an action rather than a mere passion. In other words,
it is to the quality of response to horrific and terrible events, rather than the events
themselves, that our attention is drawn by the drama. This notion, too, goes back
to Aristotle and his suggestion in the Poetics that the suffering of the tragic hero
must be ‘admirable’.30 The events themselves may be dark and meaningless; but
when they are borne or faced in certain ways, they may produce dignity, nobility,
wisdom, whether through a stoic resignation and acceptance, or a protest against
the absurdity and futility of it all.31 In the world of tragedy, George Steiner writes,
‘(t)here is no use asking for rational explanation or mercy. Things are as they are,
Aristotle, Poetics, translated with an introduction and notes by Malcolm Heath

27
(London: Penguin, 1996), 10.

28
On Aristotle’s notion of catharsis see, helpfully, David Ross, Aristotle, 5th ed.
(London: Methuen, 1949), 283–5.
29
W. Macneile Dixon, Tragedy (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), 110–11.
30
Aristotle, Poetics, translated with an introduction and notes by Malcolm Heath
(London: Penguin, 1996), 10. For this reason, Aristotle argues, the character of the person
whose suffering is represented is of the utmost importance. He must be neither exceptionally
wicked (in which case we should judge his suffering to be deserved) nor exceptionally good
(in which case we should not be able to identify with him in his response), but ‘someone
intermediate between these’ – in other words, someone like us. Aristotle, Poetics, 21.
31
Krook suggests that it is neither in the ‘fighting spirit’ of the tragic hero nor in
‘acceptance and resignation’, but ‘in his great moments of knowledge, insight, illumination,
when he discloses to us some aspect of the ultimate condition of man, and shows us how a
man may face it and be reconciled to it’ that the truly tragic disposition and the ‘restorative,
re-affirmative effect of tragedy’ is found. Krook, Elements of Tragedy, 243.
unrelenting and absurd. We are punished far in excess of our guilt. … Yet in the
very excess of his suffering lies man’s claim to dignity. Powerless and broken …
he assumes a new grandeur. Man is ennobled by the vengeful spite or injustice of
the gods. It does not make him innocent, but it hallows him as if he had passed
through flame’.32
Such accounts, for all their insistence that tragedy depicts an irrational
and unjust cosmos, finally offer us a sanguine view of suffering which ‘makes
sense’ of it, reassuring us by an appeal to some obscure higher order of things,
to values and meanings to be derived from the very heart of the pain which it
represents. In effect, as Eagleton notes, in taking this turn ‘Tragic theory becomes
a kind of secular theodicy’,33 and we might add that it suffers from some of the
problems pertaining to its religious counterparts. We need not deny that sometimes
some good can be born out of awful human suffering in order to insist that the
connection is far from necessary or pervasive, let alone that they are related as
end and justifiable means. Much human pain is squalid, cruel, unbearable, and to
all appearances futile, and has little more to be said about it than that. There have
been many victims who have passed through the flame quite literally, and it is far
from clear that their ashes contain the seeds of a Phoenix of any sort. And in any
case, even where we can trace a link between suffering and some emergent good,
the connection is not thereby established as one which grants any positive value to
the suffering itself and as such, as though certain ways of enduring or presenting
it were intrinsically uplifting to the spirit. Far from penetrating the depths of life’s
darkness, and its tragic contingencies, in the final analysis such accounts have a
tendency to sanitize it unduly, to view even the darkest suffering as containing the
seeds at least of its own redemption, as something which, endured in certain ways,
‘hallows’ rather than crushes us.
It is for this reason, perhaps, that Iris Murdoch repeatedly emphasizes the
centrality of death, and not just suffering as such, to all great tragic art. ‘Our
concept of tragedy’, she writes, ‘must contain some dreadful vision of the reality
and significance of death’.34 Death, after all, snuffs out nobility, dignity, wisdom and
everything else sooner or later, bringing it all back to the nothingness from which
life was originally called. And it is death, therefore, Murdoch insists, that tragedy
must stare in the eye, and suffering only as it leads to death. Thus she sets her face
resolutely against all accounts of tragedy as affirming or uplifting, and insists that
genuine tragedy attempts no such thing. Having been taken to the edge of the pit
of reality and truth, she urges, we should go away not uplifted or exhilarated, but
chilled by an ‘unconsoling coldness’. Hence even some of Shakespeare’s tragedies
must be judged deficient: ‘After witnessing the superb deaths of Othello, Macbeth
and Hamlet’, she writes, ‘we leave the theatre excited, exalted, invigorated,
32
Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 10.
33
34
perhaps even persuading ourselves that our pity and fear have been purged’.35 To
this extent, though, we have been reined in, pulled back from a real encounter with
the way things are in the world, and given a sop to console us. But, ‘we must not
be too much consoled’.36 And Shakespeare’s tragic genius is realized more fully
in Lear, where, with the final turn of the plot’s screw, the vice-like grip of death
and loss and its capacity to dash hope to pieces is affirmed, and all suggestion
of a redemptive aspect to suffering finally and completely extinguished.37 Here,
then, is the true tragic vision: pain unredeemed and unredeeming, because it is the
henchman of Death and dissolution. To present this ‘awe-full’ vision, to expose
us sufficiently to its sublime magnitude, Murdoch suggests, this is the greatness
of genuine tragedy, and in order to achieve it art itself must almost break down,
sailing as close to the wind of truth as it is possible to do without being capsized
by it and enveloped by the waters of despair.
Between Tragedy and Eucatastrophe
We have strayed quite a long way from the theme of eucatastrophe, and I want
now to return to it in this final section. I want to do so, though, by way of a further
claim often made about tragedy. Tragic art, it is often held, requires a tragic world-
view to produce and to sustain it. Tragedy’s foremost obituarists such as George
Steiner have traced the decline of the form to the concomitant rise and prevalence
of more hopeful and optimistic visions, inhospitable to tragedy’s resolute refusal
to shift its gaze from life’s tragic aspects. In the modern era there are various
suspects – humanism, Romanticism and Marxism generally find a mention, each
accommodating some essentially optimistic account of history and its prospects.
But the rot sets in much earlier than the modern age, and we may trace it, Steiner
suggests, to the Garden of Gethsemane, where ‘the arrow changes its course, and
the morality play of history alters from tragedy to commedia’.38 More precisely
and pointedly still, ‘Christianity is an anti-tragic vision of the world’.39 It ‘offers
to man an assurance of final certitude and respose in God. It leads the soul toward
justice and resurrection’.40 Romantic melodrama with its happy endings, Steiner
suggests, is sound theology, whereas tragedy can never be. Murdoch more or less
concurs with this assessment. God, she insists, cannot be a character in a tragedy;
his presence is unavoidably reassuring. And while there is much in the gospel story
that is dark, the darkness is not properly tragic because Jesus’ death is not ‘real
death’ (i.e. death as we know it to be), being finally swallowed up in the victory
35
36
Ibid., 99.
37
Ibid., 119.
38
Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 13.
39
Ibid., 331.
40
Ibid., 332.
of resurrection, and suffering is affirmed as a redemptive rather than a destructive

force. Ironically, therefore, for all its explicit and sometimes prurient focus on the
suffering and death of Jesus, the Christian story undermines rather than sustains
the tragic vision. ‘The risen Christ’, Murdoch writes, ‘can be seen beyond the
appalling anguished sufferer. Together with the crucified one we see the terrifying
authoritative figure of Piero della Francesca’s picture (of Christ stepping out of
the tomb), or the strange magical being, portrayed by so many painters, who told
Mary Magdalene not to touch him’.41 It is precisely the gospel’s nature as ‘good
news’, therefore, Christian faith’s resolute hopefulness based on the pledge of
Christ’s resurrection from death, which is anti-tragic, and which means that there
can never be any convergence of insights between the two. For this difference,
Murdoch insists, makes true tragedy anti-Christian as well. We are dealing with
mutually corrosive visions of the place of humanity in the world.
Let’s pause for a moment to consider exactly what is, and is not, at stake here.
The question is not, of course, primarily a literary one, but precisely a theological
one. We are not concerned, that is to say, with the issue of whether the overall
shape of the Christian story (the story of Jesus as narrated in the gospels, and the
wider story of humankind narrated in the biblical canon and the wider Christian
tradition) fits a tragic template, and can simply be added to the list of tragic works.
The answer to that must be a resounding negative. Nor does that story have an
easily detachable ending, a literary coda apart from which the story could then be
so adopted. The gospels are written from the standpoint of faith in the resurrection,
and faith (as I suggested at the outset of this chapter) has its own beginning in its
end. The question is, rather, whether despite the presence of this happy ending and
the imaginative backwash from it, there might nonetheless be some significant
(i.e. theologically significant) concurrences and resonances between elements in
or dimensions of the Christian story, and the ways in which tragic poets have seen
and ‘felt’ the world. Might theology, in other words, have something to learn from
tragedy about its own story, something apart from which it risks misunderstanding
itself? I want to argue that in fact, the ‘happy ending’ of the resurrection leaves this
possibility wide open, and does not compromise it. And this is precisely because
of the sort of happy ending it is, and its peculiar relationship to the shape of all that
precedes it. It is, in Tolkien’s terms, precisely a eucatastrophic ending, rather than
a comic or melodramatic one.
First we may note briefly the views of two theologians who have responded,
in quite different ways, to the claim that Christianity is indeed inherently and
irredeemably anti-tragic. Perhaps the most familiar voice is that of Donald
MacKinnon who, in various essays and in his own Gifford lectures argues
directly in the face of Steiner and Murdoch,42 insisting that ‘there are lessons of
41
42
See, for example, ‘Theology and Tragedy’, Religious Studies 2 (1967), 163–9;
‘Atonement and Tragedy’ in Donald MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology (London:
Lutterworth Press, 1968), 97–104; Donald MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics
the greatest importance to be learnt here by Christian theology, and not least in
the field of Christology, which is arguably its heart and centre’.43 MacKinnon’s
own Christology was profoundly kenotic, and it is to the depths to which the Son
of God descended in taking flesh that his vision returns us again and again, and
to the pain and waste and loss endured not just by Christ himself but by others
too as a direct outcome of this flesh-taking. Thus ‘(w)hat it was for him to be
human’, MacKinnon reminds us, ‘was to be subject to the sort of fragmentation
of effort, curtailment of design, interruption of purpose, distraction of resolve that
belongs to temporal experience. To leave one place for another is to leave work
undone; to give attention to one suppliant is to ignore another, to expend energy
today is to leave less for tomorrow’.44 And these entailments of the structure of
creaturely temporality itself, and their power to frustrate and truncate human
efforts and designs, bear tragic consequences in their wake no less in the case of
the enfleshed Logos than in any other life. ‘To Christian faith’, MacKinnon writes
elsewhere, ‘Jesus is without sin; yet from his life, as a matter of historical fact,
there flows a dark inheritance of evil as well as good’.45 ‘Indeed, increasingly
one sees that the reality of Christ’s humanity resides partly in the fact that as he
lived he was confronted with real choices, fraught, in consequence of the way
in which he chose, with disaster as well as achievement in their train.’46 There is
the story of Judas, whose actions and fate serve as a fulcrum for what, viewed
without anachronistic reference to the events of Easter Day, can only be viewed
as the abject failure of Jesus’ ministry. ‘Good were it for this man if he had not
been born’ says Jesus. It doesn’t get much more darkly ‘tragic’ than that, and Judas
goes out and hangs himself.47 There is the fact, too, of Jesus’ effective abdication
of responsibility for the welfare and fate of his own people in the way that he
eventually took, whether we think of ‘the catastrophe that was to overtake the
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974),114–45; ‘Ethics and Tragedy’ in Donald

MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1979), 182–95. For an
illuminating account of MacKinnon’s engagement with Steiner see Graham Ward, ‘Tragedy
as Subclause: George Steiner’s Dialogue with Donald MacKinnon’ in The Heythrop
Journal 34.3 (1993), 274–87. For a wider discussion of MacKinnon’s treatment of tragedy
see Giles Waller, ‘Freedom, Fate and Sin in Donald MacKinnon’s Use of Tragedy’ in
Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller, eds, Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic
Literature and Tragic Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 101–18. Unfortunately this book
was published too late in the process of editing the current volume for proper account to be
taken of it in this chapter.
43
MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology, 195.
44
MacKinnon, Themes in Theology: The Threefold Cord (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1987), 162.
45
46
Ibid., 194.
47
See MacKinnon, ‘Theology and Tragedy’, 168–9.
Jewish people less than forty years from the crucifixion’48 or, taking a broader view,
‘the infection of anti-Semitism present in the Christian church from the earliest
years’, and culminating in the horrors of the Shoah and its ‘final solution’.49 So
far as I am aware MacKinnon himself does not, but we might, mention too the
so-called massacre of the innocents in Matthew 2, a story which, in our rush to
celebrate the good news of ‘God with us’ each year, we conveniently overlook.50
The way in which God enters our world is itself messy, and fraught with some of
the attendant pain and death to the futility of which tragic poets regularly draw
our attention. It is unalloyed disaster, and the narrative makes no attempt to justify
or account for it. Matthew cites Jeremiah: ‘Rachel weeping for her children; she
refused to be consoled, because they are no more’ – again, tragedy par excellence.
And of course, there is Jesus’ own suffering, not just of the pain of betrayal and
crucifixion, but of the personal failure and defeat with which in actual fact these
were inexorably bound up – another raw historical reality which, in our rush to
insist that of course all this was embraced willingly and ‘for our sakes’, we all too
easily sanitize, diminish or overlook altogether.51
For MacKinnon, then, the story of the incarnation is from the very first one
with deep tragic resonances. Indeed, without blindly overlooking the multiple
complexity of those works typically classified as tragedies, and without being
careless in identifying the sense in which the term may significantly be applied,
there is nonetheless a sense, he argues, in which, mutatis omnibus mutandis,
the term may apply ‘in full measure’ to the way in which the canonical gospels
recount Jesus’ life and ministry, and to elements of the wider Christian story too.52
The ‘flesh’ which the Son of God assumed and made his own in the incarnation
was precisely tragic flesh – flesh marked, that is to say, by weakness, triviality,
contingency, failure, perplexity, bewilderment, hopelessness and at the last even
god-forsakenness. In Christ, God himself sounded the ‘abysses of existence’
and plumbed and explored the ‘ultimate contradictions of life’, and the tragic
imagination knows of no depths or darknesses of human suffering, therefore,
of which Christian faith may not legitimately claim together with the psalmist’s
wondering recognition ‘Thou art there also’53 – there, that is to say, as a fellow
sufferer together with us, and not simply as the one in whose presence suffering
cannot and will not finally endure. ‘It is a lesson to be learnt from tragedy’,
MacKinnon writes, ‘that there is no solution of the problem of evil; it is a lesson
which Christian faith abundantly confirms, even while it transforms the teaching
48
MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology, 103.
49
MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology, 65; MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology,
103.
50
I am confident that I owe this thought to an essay by Rowan Williams, but have
been unable to trace the precise reference.
51
52
MacKinnon, ‘Theology and Tragedy’, 163, 168–9.
53
Ps. 139:8 (KJV).
by the indication of its central mystery’.54 Conventions of Christian interpretation

of the gospels, he observes, slip too easily into reading them as if they were
orientated from the start towards a happy ending. Yet, despite the fiduciary
standpoint from which they were undoubtedly compiled and written, we misread
and misunderstand them if we represent the resurrection ‘as in effect a descent
from the Cross, given greater dramatic effect by a thirty-six hour postponement’.55
It was not that, and we must not allow the light of the empty tomb to seep back too
far too soon in our understanding, inducing forgetfulness or any amelioration of
the route which led him there. The gap – chronological and theological – between
Golgotha and the resurrection appearances is vitally important, and for more than
one reason alone. If we do not preserve it intact, MacKinnon suggests, then we
‘blunt the edge’ of Christological and soteriological doctrine and lose sight of
its significance for theological (and pastoral) responses to the problem of evil.
Resurrection is certainly a ‘victory’ at which the story finally arrives, but it is a
victory which does not obliterate the tragic quality of the life and action by which
alone it is won,56 and on the heels of which it follows not as a natural outcome,
but after the interruption of death and decay, and therefore as the most remarkable
peripeteia imaginable. In the account of Christ’s passion, there is no attempt to
sanitize or dignify human suffering or to lighten its darkness (a fact which, we
have seen, actually sets it apart from some strands of tragic theory), and death is
owned as a genuine threat, a dangerous enemy threatening to devour us. On the
eve of Good Friday, therefore, the sun goes down on a scene which looks as tragic
as anything could possibly look.
The other theological voice I want at least to reckon with in passing is that of
David Bentley Hart, who argues forcefully in the other direction. The Christian
narrative is, he insists, resistant to a tragic reading, and ‘tragic theology lacks
theological depth’.57 Specifically, what it risks doing, he suggests, is to allow evil to
obscure the aboriginal goodness of creation, and so cause us to overlook or forget
it. Hence ‘for Christian faith the only true tragic wisdom is that there is no final
wisdom in the tragic’.58 There is much in Hart’s analysis that I find compelling, but
at this point it underestimates the seriousness and the full extent of what theology
describes in terms not of tragedy but ‘fallen-ness’ and its consequences. Whatever
status we afford the aboriginal goodness of creation in our narration of the world’s
history in God’s hands,59 the gravity of sin and its corruption of such goodness
54
55
Ibid., 100.
56
57
David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 374.
58
Ibid., 387.
59
I have in mind here, for instance, Karl Barth’s suggestion that, as the external basis
for the covenant, God’s judgement in Gen.1:31 that all that he had made was ‘very good’
pertains to its being adapted to the purpose which God had in view’ rather than a primeval
in the texture of human experience can hardly be overestimated. Aboriginal

goodness is not and cannot be the focus of Christian hope in history’s midst, but
the eschatological goodness of God’s promise, a promise adhered to for the time
being in the teeth of an experience which repeatedly contradicts it and threatens
to eclipse it. And it is precisely here, in dealing with what the world presently
amounts to in its sin and apart from God’s redemptive activity and promise, that
tragic vision arguably has much to offer. ‘So much of our religious teaching’
writes P.T. Forsyth, ‘betrays no sign that the speaker has descended into hell, been
near the everlasting burnings, or been plucked from the awful pit. He has risen
with Christ … but it is out of a shallow grave, with no deepness of earth, and no
huge millstone to roll away’. And then, ‘it was not Galahad or Arthur that drew
Christ from heaven. It was a Lancelot race. It was a tragic issue of man’s passion
that called out the glory of Christ. It is a most tragic world, this, for those who see
to the bottom of it, and leave us their witness to its confusion, as Shakespeare did
in Hamlet, Lear and even The Tempest’.60 Of course the key word in the citation
from Hart is ‘final’: tragedy has no final wisdom; the darkness which it depicts
can never, according to Christian faith, be ultimate, but only ever penultimate.
Here one may indeed properly worry that some advocates of tragic readings of the
gospel do insufficient to keep the joy and finality of the resurrection hope clearly
in their sights. But need it be the case that an emphasis on the ‘tragic’ qualities of
an unredeemed cosmos robs the final denouement of an equivalent amount of its
joy and glory? Or vice-versa? Must we rob Peter to pay Paul?
It seems to me that it is not so, and that in fact the very opposite is true. Indeed,
Hart himself gives us the clue here: Christian faith, he writes, clings finally to an
‘impossible’ hope, rather than the dark but clarifying vision of necessity which
tragedy affords.61 This note of impossibility, a discrepancy or mismatch at the
very deepest level between what is possible now and what God has promised,
is of the utmost importance. It is the vital gap between cross and resurrection,
between the conditions of any teleology immanent to nature and history and those
generated alone ‘from above’ by God’s activity as Creator in raising Jesus again to
be the first-fruits of a cosmos redeemed from death’s hold over it. And it means,
I suggest, that the genuine insights which tragedy affords into human existence,
its unrivalled imaginative power ‘in the disclosure of what is’62 in an as yet still
unredeemed world (a world which awaits the fulfilment of the promise), can and
must be acknowledged and faced fully by theologians without squeamishness, yet
perfection subsequently lost. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1958), 213. For a consonant restructuring of the Christian story see Paul Fiddes,
Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue Between Literature and Christian Doctrine (London:
Macmillan, 1991), 47–64.
60
P.T. Forsyth, The Church, the Gospel, and Society (London: Independent Press,
1962), 100; 102.
61
Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 392.
62
without any compromising or denial or attenuation of the final glorious vision, or

any suggestion that darkness has some ultimate status alongside it.
The Christian hope, we might say now, is properly invested not just in a ‘happy’
ending, but in a eucatastophic ending. And in eucatastrophe, the relationship
between the ending and the story which leads up to it is precisely one in which
the story doesn’t actually ‘lead up to it’ at all. The ending indulges in a radical
peripeteia the hallmark of which is precisely impossibility. The sudden joyous
turn which lifts our hearts can do so precisely and only to the extent that it does not
seem to rely upon or emerge out of any patterns or possibilities latent within what
has gone before, but only to contradict and subvert them in the most outrageous
and undeserved and unbelievable fashion. This disjunction between the mood and
the pattern of the two elements is precisely the point; and while, therefore, the
eucatastrophic ending certainly consoles, it does so in a manner which does nothing
whatever to deny or to rob of its terrible reality the dark and awful nature of what
has gone before it. On the contrary, Tolkien insists, the reality of dyscatastrophe,
sorrow, failure and doom, our futile struggle with a hostile world, all this is not
at odds with but furnishes the necessary conditions for the truly eucatastrophic
climax. What eucatastrophic consolation denies, therefore, is not the reality, the
scale or the awfulness of the struggle, but ‘universal final defeat’,63 and it does
so, he notes, in the face of much evidence.
‘Resurrection for Christianity’, notes Terry Eagleton, ‘involves a crucifixion
and descent into hell. Otherwise what is reclaimed … would not be this condition
in all its deadlock and despair’.64 Christian faith, he notes, confronts the worst,
yet hopes for the best. That it can hope for the best, and that it can look the worst
in the face and take it fully seriously, is due, I am suggesting, to the fact that it
sees no necessary or organic relation between them, but an entirely contingent
one. The worst is captured just as surely in the terrible and despairing symbol of
crucifixion as it is in the banishment of the self-mutilated Oedipus or the death
of Shakespeare’s Cordelia. For Christianity, the best issues eucatastrophically
from the divinely plundered tomb on Easter day. But, as Alan Lewis has
reminded us (following von Balthasar’s lead), the story of Jesus culminates in a
triduum – a three-day sequence: the day of crucifixion, the day of burial and the
day of resurrection.65 And the story, Lewis insists, may and should be ‘told and
heard, believed and interpreted, two different ways at once – as a story whose
ending is known, and as one whose ending is discovered only as it happens. ‘The
truth is victim’, he writes, ‘when either reading is allowed to drown out the other;
the truth emerges only when both readings are audible, the separate sound in
63
64
65
Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross & Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday
(Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2001). Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, trans.
A. Nichols (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990).
each ear creating, as it were, a stereophonic unity’.66 The retrieval of this same
stereophonic effect is an important part of ‘hearing the story again’ and re-enacting
it through participation in the liturgy of Holy Week, during which the faithful are
taken back to a point where, by an imaginative erasure or suspension of that which
faith holds most dear, within the unfolding logic of the story itself the approaching
Friday presents itself as it did to the disciples, not as the first of a sequence of three
(destined to end well, in victory and life) at all, but as ‘the last day, the end of the
story of Jesus. And the day that follows it is not an in-between day which simply
waits for the morrow, but it is an empty void, a nothing, shapeless, meaningless,
and anticlimactic: simply the day after the end’.67 The death of Jesus on Good
Friday must thus be experienced and understood as ‘both the disastrous finale to
Christ’s life as it sounds on the story’s first hearing, and as the first episode in a
three-day event of triumph, and thus retrospectively not a disastrous but a saving,
resurrecting death’.68 The complex meaning and theological significance of the
story will only be appreciated, Lewis insists, if we indulge in this careful act of
shifting from one imaginative vantage point to another. We must hear ‘what the
cross says on its own, what the resurrection says on its own, and what each of
them says when interpreted in the light of the other’.69 Again, following the logic
of the narrative itself, the resurrection is a powerful act of glorification ‘for which
we have not been prepared by the defeat and ignominy which went before’, and it
compels us to recognize and reminds ourselves in retrospect, therefore, that it is the
resurrection ‘specifically and exclusively of one crucified, buried, terminated’.70
It is the enigmatic second day in this same carefully emplotted sequence, with
its seemingly empty but in reality pregnant silence, which captures the tension
and relation between the other two days. As a buffer it both keeps them apart,
preventing either from encroaching on the other, and yet – paradoxically – holds
them together. This day is, we might say, the eucatastrophic space which determines
the meaning of what precedes and what follows it, and their relation to one another,
resisting maudlin and despairing readings of the cross in equal measure. By taking
‘time to regard the death of Jesus in all its unabbreviated malignancy and infernal
horror’, Lewis writes, ‘we both protect the cross itself and throw into the sharpest
relief the resurrection gospel: that out of just such a cross as this’ (and not some
circumstance less dark or threatening, ‘a shallow grave, with no deepness of
earth’) ‘… come life and joy and hope’.71 If, in literary terms, this interruptive
relationship is ‘eucastrophic’, the relevant theological category in terms of which
to make sense of it, surely, is ‘grace’: a grace which calls the world into being out
of nothing, which calls sinners into an adopted ‘sonship’ which we not only do not
66
Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 33.
67
Ibid., 31.
68
Ibid., 33.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid.
71
Lewis, Between Cross & Resurrection, 40.
deserve but actively resist, which takes our sinful flesh upon itself and bears it all
the way to the cross not in order simply to ‘unmake’ it, but so that it may duly be
heir to a new life and a new creation which its empirical form cannot yet bear. And,
of course, it is in the eschatological reality of Jesus raised from death, the first-
fruits of God’s promised ending, that all this finds its most concrete focus. Here, as
Tolkien himself suggests, imagination and faith, literature and theology, ‘Legend
and History have met and fused’. Here ‘Art has been verified’.72

72
Chapter 10
The Substance of Things Hoped For
Theology … is imagination for the kingdom of God in the world,

and for the world in God’s kingdom.1
What I propose to do in this final chapter is to explore some themes relating to

the transformative impact of eschatological hope upon the shape of the Christian
present. I begin with some select examples of this which themselves serve to raise
a question about an apparent incommensurability between the experienced present
and the hoped for future of God. This theme will concern us again later in the
chapter. Next I turn to two secular analyses of the transformative impact of the
human capacity to imagine the future; those of George Steiner and Ernst Bloch.
Finally, turning at last to Jürgen Moltmann’s work, I shall explore some of the
ways in which it forces us to differentiate a distinctively Christian imagining of
the future from these extra-Christian versions.
Seeing Beyond the Silence
Shusako Endo’s novel Silence2 tells the story of a seventeenth-century Jesuit

missionary. Sebastian Rodrigues is sent to Japan in 1643 at the tail end of the
so-called ‘Christian century’ in that country’s history. It is a time of enormous
hostility to the Christian faith and all that is associated with it, a backlash of
indigenous culture against the rapid growth and flourishing of the Church there.
Upon his arrival (secretly) Rodrigues is met by some of the many thousands of
native believers clinging tenaciously to a way of life outlawed by the authorities
and punishable by savage torture and execution. The novel recounts his brief
existence as a guerilla priest, emerging from the forest to baptize, hear confessions
and celebrate the eucharist for communities of the faithful who have for several
decades been forced to keep their faith well hidden from public gaze, and deprived
of priestly ministry. It tells of his capture and torture, and of the awful struggle he
has in coming to terms with his own eventual forced apostasy, trampling on an
image of the face of Christ in order to save, not himself, but Japanese Christians
held in adjacent prison cells, from the cruelty of judicial execution.
At one key juncture in the story the Samurai come and arrest two elders of
a village where Rodrigues is being hidden. Accused of practising an outlawed
1
Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret
Kohl (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1996), xiv.
2
S. Endo, Silence (London: 1988).
religion, and refusing to spit on a crucifix, the two men are duly sentenced to
death. Yet neither they nor anyone else in the community will do that which will
secure their immediate release: betray the priest. The men are executed, bound
to two stakes on the seashore, stakes positioned carefully and cleverly so that the
incoming tide will not quite cover their heads, but will come and go, gradually
sapping their strength and bearing their life away with it. Endo narrates this part of
his tale from Rodrigues’ own perspective:
Night came. The red light of the guards’ blazing fire could be seen faintly even
from our mountain hut, while the people of Tomogi gathered on the shore and
gazed at the dark sea. So black were the sea and the sky that no one knew where
Mokichi and Ichizo were. Whether they were alive or dead no one knew. All
with tears were praying in their hearts. And then, mingled with the sound of the
waves, they heard what seemed to be the voice of Mokichi. Whether to tell the
people that his life had not yet ebbed away or to strengthen his own resolution,
the young man gaspingly sang a Christian hymn:
We’re on our way, we’re on our way
We’re on our way to the temple of Paradise,
To the temple of Paradise …
To the great temple …
All listened in silence to the voice of Mokichi; the guards also listened; and
again and again, amid the sound of the rain and the waves, it broke upon their
ears.3
The silence of which the novel’s title speaks is God’s seeming silence in the face of
his people’s enormous suffering. This, above all, is the issue with which Rodrigues
is driven to wrestle as he comes to terms with the vulnerability of his own faith.
Yet what stands out in passages such as this one, and what Rodrigues himself
eventually discovers through his journey to self-knowledge through suffering, is
the striking and ironic juxtaposition of darkness and light, terror and fearlessness,
humiliation and great dignity, the inevitability of death and the expectancy of new
life. The Japanese Christians go to their deaths singing this hymn not (as Rodrigues
himself at first avers) as a form of ‘whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up’,
but because they are possessed by a vision of God’s faithfulness and his promised
future which subverts the darkness of their experienced present. They are afraid,
yet not bowed. In death, as in life, they bear the apparent silence and absence of
Endo, Silence, 102.

3
The Substance of Things Hoped For 231
God because they share a hope which transcends this present, and which bathes it
in a quite different light.
It would seem that it is often thus in the experience of God’s people. The times
of great struggle or suffering, when to all appearances God’s face is hidden, have
often been precisely those times which have given birth to the most colourful and
convicted visions of God’s promised salvation, when the sense of promise has,
as it were, been renewed and developed. Refusing to buckle under the painful
weight of actuality (whether that be persecution, exile or whatever) the faith which
holds fast to such hope resists and contradicts it, insisting upon living as if it were
not thus, living in the light not of the way things are, but of the way things will
be in God’s future. Two brief examples from Scripture will suffice to illustrate
this further.
First, chapters 40 to 55 of Isaiah, written from the estrangement of exile in
Babylon at a time when the nation of Judah was effectively a nation no more;
removed from the now ruined sanctuary of Zion around which her faith was
focused, frog-marched in fetters some 700 miles east across the desert plains,
broken on the wheel of events which were also the instrument of God’s judgement.
The land of promise, the land flowing with milk and honey, was now preserved
and cherished only in her corporate memory, the theme of so many folk songs and
tales designed to preserve a sense of national identity. The familiar words of the
psalmist from this same era capture in a sentence or two what the hearts of the
people must have felt: ‘By the rivers of Babylon we sat and we wept when we
remembered Zion. … How can we sing the songs of Yahweh in a strange land?’
(Ps. 137:1–4)
Yet, curiously juxtaposed with such understandable lament, we find the
green and vigorous shoots of new hope bursting through the arid and seemingly
inhospitable soil of exile. ‘Comfort my people, says your God. … In the wilderness
prepare the way of Yahweh, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. …
For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself;
now I will cry out like a woman in labour, I will gasp and pant. … Now thus says
Yahweh, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear,
for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. … Do not
remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new
thing’. And so it continues. As shrewd estimates of political reality go this can
hardly number high on anyone’s list. Yet Isaiah weaves a hopeful vision which
contradicts the apparent realities of his people’s circumstance, promising what
seems beyond the bounds of current possibility, convinced that the redemptive
capacities of the God who created all things cannot be circumscribed or measured
by expectations rooted in the actual. In his imagination the prophet sees beyond
the given to an unexpected and surprising future, a future in which his fellow Jews
are able to find hope even in the midst of despair, renewed purpose in the face
of servitude and an identity as the people of God which exile had threatened to
obliterate. Holding firm to such a vision, the present suffering loses its ultimacy
and hence its capacity to crush the spirit.
Something similar may be observed in the New Testament book of Revelation.

Now it is the Christian Church rather than the Jewish nation which finds itself
in a form of exile in a world dominated by the forces of Roman empire. Writing
to those for whom resistance to this regime and faithfulness to Christ may mean
persecution, arrest and even death, John unfolds what Richard Bauckham has
classified as a ‘prophetic apocalypse’ which discloses through its imaginative form
a transcendent perspective on this world and the events of contemporary history,
setting them in the wider and fuller context of God’s ultimate purposes for the
coming of his kingdom. Bauckham writes as follows:
John (and thereby his readers with him) is taken up into heaven in order to
see the world from the heavenly perspective. He is given a glimpse behind the
scenes of history so that he can see what is really going on in the events of his
time and place. He is also transported in vision into the final future of the world,
so that he can see the present from the perspective of what its final outcome must
be, in God’s ultimate purpose for human history. The effect of John’s visions,
one might say, is to expand his readers’ world, both spatially (into heaven) and
temporally (into the eschatological future), or, to put it another way, to open their
world to divine transcendence. The bounds to which Roman power and ideology
set to the readers’ world are broken open and that world is seen as open to the
greater purpose of its transcendent Creator and Lord. It is not that the here-and-
now are left behind in an escape into heaven or the eschatological future, but that
the here-and-now look quite different when they are opened to transcendence.
The world seen from this transcendent perspective … is a kind of new symbolic
world into which John’s readers are taken as his artistry creates it for them.
But really it is not another world. It is John’s readers’ concrete, day-to-day
world seen in heavenly and eschatological perspective. As such its function …
is to counter the Roman imperial view of the world, which was the dominant
ideological perception of their situation which John’s readers naturally tended
to share.4
What we have here, then, is an imaginative vision in which the dominant way
of seeing things (both present and future) is fundamentally challenged and an
alternative picture painted of the potentialities and possibilities inherent in God’s
future. Rome is not the ultimate authority, and will not have the final victory. God
is not absent, and his kingdom is coming. Whatever experience may suggest, and
whatever the voices of power may insist, these are the realities of the readers’
situation. The challenge to the Christian Church in the midst of the all too real
discomfort and danger of actuality is, as always, to live in the light of this alternative
vision rather than submitting to the dominant ideology, even when the latter is
4
R. Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993) 7–8.
backed up with military and political force. Revelation, like deutero-Isaiah, offers
God’s people a subversive vision, furnishing the resources to wage what Amos
Wilder calls a campaign of ‘guerilla theatre’, a battle for people’s hearts and wills,
and rooted firmly in a bid to capture their imaginations.5
Imagination is a key category for making sense of this hopeful living towards
God’s future. One of the key functions of imagination is the presentation of the
otherwise absent. In other words, we have the capacity through imagination to
call to mind objects, persons or states of affairs which are other than those which
appear to confront us in what, for want of a better designation, we might call our
‘present actuality’ (i.e. that which we are currently experiencing). I do not say
‘reality’ precisely because the real itself may well prove to be other than what
appears to be actual. Another key role of imagination in human life is as the source
of the capacity to interpret, to locate things within wider patterns or networks of
relationships which are not given, but which we appeal to tacitly in making sense
of things.6 We see things as particular sorts of things, and this is, in substantial
part, an imaginative activity. And, since more than one way of seeing or taking
things is often possible, what appears to be the case may actually change with an
imaginative shift of perspective, rendering a quite distinct picture of the real. As
numerous accounts of Gestalt and paradigm shifts have observed, a useful model
for this is the religious ‘conversion’ in which the selfsame set of particulars is
observed or experienced by the subject now quite differently because viewed in a
wholly new light, located within a different pattern. In the examples we have just
considered, the difference between what the eye of faith ‘sees’ and what is seen
by the faithless eye is precisely a difference of interpretation or, we might say, a
different imagining of reality. The prophet in each case feeds the imagination of
God’s people to enable them to see the world in ways other than those engendered
by the dominant ideology.
Imagination, then, enables us to call to mind sets of circumstances other than
the actual. These may be things which we (or others) have known in the past but
which we are not perceiving or otherwise experiencing in the present (in which
case we are dealing either with some form of memory or historical reconstruction).
Or, drawing again inevitably on our knowledge and experience of what has been
and what is, we may think about the future, about what is yet to be. In this case
our expectations will be shaped more precisely by the ‘laws’ of association/
nature which seem to govern the world of our experience. Thus, while we may
well imagine any number of futures which could but will not in fact arise (some
perhaps highly unlikely to do so) we will, in this mode, not be prone to imagine
things which are, so far as we are able to judge from a shared human experience of
the world, not possible futures. States of affairs which trespass beyond the bounds
of the unlikely or improbable into the realm of that which is in some obvious way
5
A. Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1976).
6
On this see, e.g., M. Warnock, Imagination (London: Faber, 1976).
incommensurable with the world as we know it we might ordinarily choose to

classify as fantasy rather than expectation, and as such a distinct sort of imaginative
activity. In fantasy, for example, while we must always root our imagining in some
identifiable way in the regularities and continuities of what we have known (we
cannot imagine ab initio), we nonetheless modify the known to such an extent
that what results is well removed from either memory or expectation. I labour this
point slightly because it is relevant to issues raised later in the chapter.
Imagination and the Grammar of Hope
I want now to focus on the human capacity for hope: the capacity, that is to say,
to imagine a future which, in broad terms, furnishes an object of hope for us in
the present, a vision of how things may be to which, as we say, we look forward.
What I am specifically interested in, again, is the way in which certain aspects of
that capacity exercise a necessary and transformative reflexive impact upon our
ways of being in the present. As already indicated we shall proceed by drawing on
the thought of two Jewish thinkers who have engaged carefully with these issues.
George Steiner in his classic work on the nature of language and translation,
After Babel,7 notes that our ability as human beings to think about (we might
reasonably substitute the word ‘imagine’) temporality, to construe past and future
as distinct from the present, is in large measure bound up with our use of language.
Our possession of a grammar complete with tenses is what makes such imaginative
projection possible. ‘Language’, Steiner writes, ‘happens in time but also, very
largely, creates the time in which it happens’.8 Language, that is to say, shapes our
perception of the moment of speech or thought as present, and of other times as
either past or future. Especially in the case of the future this capacity to transcend
the present, to speak of or imagine a state of affairs other than the present, is vital
to the direction of our ways of being in the world. ‘The status of the future of the
verb,’ he observes, ‘is at the core of existence. It shapes the image we carry of the
meaning of life, and of our personal place in that meaning’.9
The potential shaping impact of such linguistic or imaginative projection was
already clearly grasped by Karl Marx who, in reference to what he deemed illusory
hopes of a religious nature, construed that impact in negative terms, as debilitating
the urge for political reform in the real world. The substance of religious belief
(the opiate of the people) is a deliberately engineered illusion designed to
generate and sustain fantasies and dreams which will divert the attention of the
oppressed masses from the actual awfulness of their circumstance long enough
for their labour to be thoroughly exploited. What is required, on Marx’s analysis,
7
G. Steiner, After Babel, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See
especially Chapter 3, ‘Word Against Object’.
8
9
is a regime of cold turkey sufficient to kick the habit, allowing reality to break
through the illusion, and provoking in due course a thoroughly justifiable reaction
against those pushing the drug. But Steiner turns this around, and reminds us of
the deliberate suppression in former communist regimes, not this time of hope,
but of memory. The outlawing of the past, the careful editing of national memory
was designed precisely to mould and shape present consciousness, and thereby
to control it and direct it in particular ways. ‘One can imagine a comparable
prohibition of the future’, he ruminates. ‘What would existence be like in a total
(totalitarian) present, in an idiom which limited projective utterances to the horizon
of Monday next?’10 His point is clear. The suppression of imaginative projection
into the future, the enforced removal of the future tense from the language, would
just as surely be debilitating with respect to present activism and energy, because
future tenses necessarily entail the possibility of change of one sort or another.
Without them, hope for a better future is simply not possible. Such hope, far from
dulling the senses to the pain of the present, is precisely the thing which makes a
deprived present unbearable.
Steiner proceeds to suggest that human life as such is characterized (and
distinguished from other forms of life) by its essential directedness towards the
future, and its fundamental capacity for hope. And the capacity to imagine and to
speak of what lies beyond the given here and now is vital to this direction. ‘We
move forward’, he writes in characteristically graphic vein, ‘in the slipstream of
the statements we make about tomorrow morning, about the millenium’.11 Through
imaginative construction we posit what he calls, paradoxically, ‘axiomatic fictions’
which, as it were, drag us forward in their wake and energize our living towards
tomorrow rather than merely in today. We live in hope. Apart from it we are inert
and, like sharks in water, would quickly drown in our own despair, trapped in an
eternal and ‘total’ present. Change, progress, intention, excitement, anticipation,
all the things which enable us to cope with and to overcome the undoubted pains,
trials and disasters which we experience, these are bound up with our movement
towards the future. ‘The conventions of forwardness so deeply entrenched in our
syntax make for a constant, sometimes involuntary, resilience. Drown as we may,
the idiom of hope, so immediate to the mind, thrusts us to the surface.’12 This ability
to imagine ahead, to see beyond the given to a better and brighter future, Steiner
avers, furnish distinct advantages in the evolutionary process, and have doubtless
contributed to the survival and superiority of humankind. ‘Natural selection’, he
suggests, ‘has favoured the subjunctive’.13
We might, I suppose, prefer a more specifically theological construal of that
claim, but its essential point is well made. The capacity to construct futurity, we
10
11
12
13
might rather say, which is a central function of the imagination, is essential to our
humanity and to its movement forward in the creative purposes of God.
Steiner identifies another closely related imaginative function as equally
important in this regard which we must mention briefly; namely, our capacity for
counter-factuality, for the deliberate construction of falsehoods or alterities. The
generation of ‘counter-worlds’ is, of course, the source of fantasy, illusion and
lies. But it is also the source of our ability to see how things might be different
(i.e. how they might change in the future, or how the present can already be seen
or taken differently), to refuse to accept the world as it is given to us. Insofar as
the language which we habitually use to describe the world, the ways in which
we image and construe it, are a vital component in the shaping of our experience
of it, to the extent, that is to say, that reality is a social and linguistic construct
(and there is no need to capitulate altogether to radical accounts of this in order to
recognise some truth in the claim), the capacity to picture and to speak of the world
otherwise than in accordance with the currently favoured social construct, is itself
a capacity to change reality, to deconstruct and then reconstruct it for ourselves.
As Christians, for example, we shall probably want to construe the world in which
we live as one in which Christ is Lord, rather than as a meaningless complex bio-
chemical accident on a cooling cinder; and this insistence on describing the world
differently will generate quite distinct ways of being in the world.
Turning now from Steiner to Ernst Bloch, we find a strikingly similar
recognition of the essential directedness of human life towards the future, and
of the vital contribution of imaginative hope in the realization of this futured
existence. In his massive magnum opus The Principle of Hope14 Bloch traces the
patterns and manifestations of this constant ‘venturing beyond’, as he calls it, in
the forms of human life.
Human existence, Bloch observes, is driven by cravings, urgings, desires and
strivings, all of which are essentially forms of discontent with the way things are.
Some of our cravings are duly clothed by imagination with particular form, and
transformed into wishes. But the nature of wishes is to be somewhat detached from
moral commitment. We may entertain two or more mutually exclusive wishes at
once. ‘I wish I were playing golf rather than sitting at my word processor’ and
‘I wish I were sitting in the garden at home with a good book instead of …’,
are wishes which, as such, may both be entertained at once. Only when we
choose between them and begin to invest them with moral intent, acting towards
their eventual fulfilment, do they become what Bloch calls ‘wants’. The central
category with which Bloch deals in expounding all this is that of dreams, and
especially daydreams. In daydreams, he notes, we are more in conscious control
of our imaginings than in dreams, and we are able to bring our wishes and wants
to ficititious fulfilment. But daydreams are certainly not just the stuff of self-
gratifying entertainment, nor armchair aspiration. They are not contemplative
or analgesic, but invigorating and empowering. All freedom movements, Bloch
E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope (3 vols, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

14
insists, are inspired and guided by daydreams, by utopian aspirations which posit
a disjunction between knowledge of how bad the world is and ‘recognition of how
good it could be if it were otherwise’.15 ‘The pull towards what is lacking’, he
writes, ‘never ends … The lack of what we dream about hurts not less, but more.
It thus prevents us from getting used to deprivation’.16 Daydreams, then, are the
imaginative form in which hope is cast.
Bloch does, however, draw a careful distinction between imagination’s
construction of daydreams on the one hand and what he calls ‘mere fantasizing’
on the other. Genuine hope is possessed of both subjective and objective aspects.
As a component of human consciousness it is, nevertheless, soundly rooted in
real ontological possibilities in the world. Hope, that is to say, as manifest in
daydreams, intuits what Bloch calls ‘a Not-Yet-Being of an expectable kind’.
It ‘does not play around and get lost in an Empty-Possible, but psychologically
anticipates a Real-Possible’.17
Here we must identify Bloch’s framework as a metaphysic of the world and
its history as an incomplete process which moves forward, above all, through the
capacity of human hope to lay hold of the ‘Not-Yet-Existent’ and the ‘Not-Yet-
Conscious’ and, precisely in anticipating them, to transform the present, energizing
us in the here and now to transcend the here and now with its apparent limitations
and actual deprivations. Hope empowers our striving towards its own realization.
But it must be genuine hope, and not mere fantasy. Only a Real-Possible has the
resources to draw us forward into the future in this way. The Novum (genuinely
new thing) to which hope attaches itself and looks forward is, paradoxically, in one
sense not new at all. It is wholly new in as much as it has never previously existed,
and in as much as the conditions for the possibility of its existence may not yet
themselves even exist. But it is, nonetheless (and in retrospect will be able to be
seen to have been) a real possibility, because the conditions for that possibility are
already latent within the conditions and possibilities of the present.
An illustration may serve to make the point here. In climbing a mountain,
while one may glimpse the summit through the clouds from the car park at the
bottom, experience on the climb is often characterized by being able to see only
the next ridge, not knowing precisely what lies beyond it, or whether and how
the route transcends it and subsequent visual blockages to reach the top. Having
glimpsed the top, however, knowing it to be there to be reached, one carries on and
overcomes these numerous limited horizons, committed to the task and determined
to attain the peak. The apparent disjunctions and discontinuities presented to sight
do not make life easy, but they are not insurmountable. We press on, even though
we cannot see exactly where we are going or how the top is to be reached. On
having reached the top, however, and turning to consider the distance we have
climbed, it is sometimes possible for the whole route from the car park to be more
15
Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 95.
16
17
or less visible at least in its broad outlines, so that the possibilities and continuities
of each stage along the way are manifest in a manner that they could not previously
have been.
What the imagination does in hope, its ‘utopian function’ as Bloch calls it, is
thus twofold. First it leaps over the limits and perceived discontinuities which
lie between present reality and the utopian future, even though it cannot yet see
clearly the route from here to there – it intuits it as a real-possible. Second, through
setting this vision before us and enabling us to ‘look forward’ to it, hope drives us
forward, empowering and guiding ways of being in the world in the present which
themselves serve to create the conditions in which the object of hope becomes
possible. There is no hint of a rationalistic prediction or plotting of the future here,
therefore. We cannot, for Bloch, know the future, or precisely how it will arise.
(In passing it is perhaps worth asking whether, if we could, there would always be
aspects of what lies in front of us which would so cripple us with fear as to render
us incapable of action?) Hope, as Bloch sees it, is that activity of the imagination
which lays hold intuitively of something which may or may not actually come to
pass, but the potential for which lies genuinely within the latent capacities of the
system or process of human history. ‘The historical content of hope’, he writes, ‘is
human culture referred to its concrete-utopian horizon’.18
The Imagination of Glory
In the remainder of this chapter I shall consider some of the key elements in
Moltmann’s eschatology which, I shall suggest, compels us at certain points to
differentiate a distinctively Christian understanding of hope from general analyses
such as those offered by Steiner and Bloch, valuable and compatible though these
remain in many respects. My overview of Moltmann will draw particular attention
to questions pertaining to the nature of the relationship between present and
future, old and new creations, and the transition between them, and to the roles of
imagination as a locus of God’s transforming activity in human life.
The Goad of the Promised Future
Like Steiner and Bloch, Moltmann insists that the capacity to envisage a hoped-for
future, far from dulling our sensibilities to the pain of the present, actually serves
to heighten those sensibilities and is a powerful stimulus to resistance and reaction
which itself drives us to break away from the present towards the future.19 Hence:

18
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press
19
Ltd, 1965), 100.

Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience
but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart
in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but
begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with
the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of
every unfulfilled present.20
While on the one hand, therefore, this hope certainly strengthens our resolve in
bearing ‘the cross of the present’, granting us a perspective which robs that cross
of its finality,21 on the other hand it ‘sets loose powers that are critical of being’ and
seek to subvert what is in the name of the One who is to come.22 It is anything but an
encouragement towards a resigned or passive submission in the face of injustice,
suffering and other characteristic features of the present regime therefore. On the
contrary, its transformative impact upon the present lies precisely in its furnishing
of ‘inexhaustible resources for the creative, inventive imagination of love’.
It constantly provokes and produces thinking of an anticipatory kind in love to

man and the world, in order to give shape to the newly dawning possibilities in
the light of the promised future, in order as far as possible to create here the best
that is possible, because what is promised is within the bounds of possibility.23
The possibilities of God’s open future are, then, genuinely anticipated in the midst
of this present age, with a resultant transformation of present ways of being and
doing and thinking in the world on the part of God’s people. This takes place, we
might aver, primarily through the stretching of their imaginations, and thereby
the reshaping of their expectations, desires and values, fashioning an alternative
vision of ‘the bounds of possibility’ and liberating people from the despairing
horizons of a history rooted in the past rather than open to the future.
Imagining Future and Reimaging Present
Picking up on the previous point, Moltmann indicates that the nature of hope is
to force a radical reinterpretation (reimagining or reimaging) of the real, seeking
a meaning for the present which is historical in the sense that it is teleologically
determined. The present, in other words, does not contain its full meaning
within itself, but only in its relatedness to what is yet to come. To reimagine the
future differently in the light of God’s promise is thereby also at once to force a
reevaluation of the present and its significance. The Gestalt shift has to do not
with the future alone, but with the present which that future informs and shapes.
20
Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 21.
21
Ibid., 31.
22
Ibid., 119.
23
Ibid., 34–5.
Our view of what is the case as well as what will be is transfigured. Here again
there would seem to be a positive relationship between the future and the present
whereby God’s future reaches back into the present and effectively refashions it
by altering its meaning, an altered meaning which faith subsequently discerns and
seeks to acknowledge in appropriate forms of life and thought.
Since, however, it is in the nature of our ‘knowledge’ of the future to be at
best partial and provisional, a further implication of this would seem to be that
questions of meaning and truth may in the interim only be answered in partial and
provisional ways. The final answer to the question of the real and the true must
wait for that eschatological moment when, as the apostle suggests, we shall know
fully as we in turn are fully known. For now we must make do with seeing through
a glass darkly, and must not allow our Western eschatological impatience to get the
better of us. This ought to drive us to reassess the status not only of eschatological
and theological statements, but all the statements we make about the real, and
perhaps to moderate the claims which we make for those statements.
The Power of the Future Made Present
For Moltmann, the relationship between the here-and-now and the hoped for
future which transforms that here-and-now is, we have seen, in certain respects
understood to be a positive one, at least in the sense that the power of the future
is capable of being present within and exercising a transforming influence over
the present. At this level, therefore, we must suppose that there is some degree of
commensurability and continuity between the two realms.
This is especially clear (as one might reasonably expect) in Moltmann’s
pneumatology. Here, in discussing the Christian doctrine of regeneration, he
insists that while the palingennesia of our humanity is decisively rooted in that
objective rebirth which occurred on Golgotha and will be fulfilled only in ‘that life
which is eternal’, regeneration is nonetheless something which spans the period
between these two points in the lives of particular Christian people. ‘We are still
involved in the experience of renewal, and the becoming-new travels with us.’24
The God who is yet to come in glory has already come both in the economy of
the incarnate Son and as the Spirit poured out upon the Church at Pentecost. In
our experiences of this same Spirit ‘God himself is present in us’, and ‘we are
possessed by a hope which sees unlimited potentialities ahead’. ‘The goals of hope
in our own lives, and what we ourselves expect of life, fuse with God’s promises
for a new creation of all things’.25
Human experiences of joy, of peace, of sanctification and the affirmation of
life, all these things are anticipations of this same promise within that sphere
where we would most naturally be ‘“Trauergeister” ‒ sad or grieving spirits’.
24
Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl
(London: SCM Press Ltd, 1992), 155.
25
Ibid., 153.
They issue from an experience of the Spirit of the resurrection, the one in whose
power Jesus himself was raised from death in that most decisive and paradigmatic
anticipation of the new creation within the old. They are ‘the presence of eternity’
in the midst of history.26 Eternity, indeed, is not some abstract and timeless
simultaneity but ‘the power of the future over every historical time’.27 The
Christian disciple, therefore, is not limited to hoping for the power of the future,
but also experiences that same power in his or her present life; not in its fullness,
to be sure, but genuinely nonetheless. ‘Expectations hurry ahead. Experiences
follow. They follow like a divine trail laid in the life of the individual. Every
exodus is accompanied by trials and perils, but also by “signs and wonders”
which are perceived by the men and women who are travelling the same road.’28
The same insistence upon a certain continuous relationship between God’s
promised future and our experienced present is identifiable in Moltmann’s
metaphorical extension of the model of conversion to describe what happens to
the old in its transition to the new.
Conversion and the rebirth to a new life change time and the experience of time,
for they make-present the ultimate in the penultimate, and the future of time
in the midst of time. … The future-made-present creates new conditions for
possibilities in history. Mere interruption just disturbs; conversion creates new
life.29
That which God fashions in the ‘new creation’, Moltmann insists, is not something
novel. God does not set aside his original creation and replace it with one which
is ‘new’ in that sense. Rather, God is faithful to his original creation and renews
it through the exercise of that same power which raised up Christ to life from the
emptiness of death, and which, in the beginning, called the universe itself into
being out of nothing. God’s promised future, then, is anticipated in the midst of
the old order of things not only through an imaginative looking forward to it, but
through actual irruptions of the power of the Spirit who raised Jesus from death.
The Contradiction of Corruption
Here, though, we reach a point where a rather different emphasis must be taken
equally into account. If there is indeed a positive relationship, a measure of
commensurability and continuity between the old and the new creations, for
Moltmann it is vital that we do not mistake the nature of this positive relation.
The point may be made quite clearly by contrasting Moltmann’s account with
that offered by Bloch. For the latter, as we have seen, hope is essentially that
26
Ibid., 153.
27
28
Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 152.
29
which intuits a ‘Real Possible’ the conditions for which are already latent within
the process or system of human history. In Leibniz’s phrase (cited by Moltmann)30
the present is ‘pregnant with future’. What remains is for us to grasp the potential
inherent in the present, and then work towards its realization, spurred on by the
energy of our hopeful imaginative vision. But this will not do as an account of
the Christian hope. Here what is presented to us is precisely ‘the thing we cannot
already think out and picture for ourselves on the basis of the given world and of
the experiences we already have of that world’.31 Again, ‘Christian eschatology
does not examine the general future possibilities of history. Nor does it unfold the
general possibilities of human nature in its dependence on the future’.32 This is
where Moltmann finds it necessary to part company with Bloch.
For Moltmann the Christian gospel is precisely about something surprisingly
new, something which is not rooted in and does not rest upon the inherent
potentialities and possibilities of the actual present, but upon the capacities of the
God of creation and resurrection who has promised to make all things new. Indeed,
that upon which Christian hope rests is precisely the action of this same God in
summoning life forth out of death in the resurrection of Jesus, an action in which
faith discerns both an anticipation and a pledge of the ultimate resurrection and
renewal of all things. Just because it is this promise made by this same God which
establishes and undergirds Christian hope, ‘the expected future does not have to
develop within the framework of the possibilities inherent in the present, but arises
from that which is possible to the God of the promise. This can also be something
which by the standard of present experience appears impossible’.33 The hope which
is rooted in an event discontinuous with the general capacities of the old creation is
also a hope which looks beyond those capacities for its eventual fulfilment.
What all this amounts to is an insistence that whatever level of continuity
and commensurability between the old and the new may have to be discerned
and acknowledged, it is radically offset by a level of stark discontinuity and
incommensurability. At its starkest Moltmann puts the matter thus: ‘this world
“cannot bear” the resurrection and the new world created by resurrection.’34 It can
begin to sound as if the here and now is not at all the sphere of God’s presence and
activity, although Moltmann clearly cannot mean this. Yet: ‘the kingdom of God
is present here as promise and hope for the future horizon of all things, which are
then seen in their historic character because they do not yet contain their truth in
themselves. If it is present as promise and hope, then this its presence is determined
by the contradiction in which the future, the possible and the promised stands to a
corrupt reality.’35 Moltmann indicates that the promise of God generates an interim
30
31
32
Ibid., 192.
33
Ibid., 103.
34
Ibid., 226.
35
Ibid., 223.
period prior to the fulfilment of promise in which (as hinted above) the kingdom is
present in the here-and-now tectum sub cruce et sub contrario, rather than in any
explicit or apparent manner. ‘Yet this its hiddenness is not an eternal paradox, but
a latency within the tendency that presses forwards and outwards into that open
realm of possibilities that lies ahead and is so full of promise.’36
Such statements stand in a clear tension (although not contradiction) with
those which appeal to a genuine suffusing of the present with the transformative
power of the future in such a way that that power is manifest in people’s lives and
actually changes things. That Moltmann wishes to affirm both things is clear; but
it provokes questions about the precise extent and nature of the presence of this
contradictory and incommensurable future in our midst, questions to which we
must return duly.
There is, then, a contradiction between that which characterizes the new
creation and that which marks the old, between the promise and our experience of
the present. This, we might note, is essentially the point which Barth was making
in his notorious dispute with Emil Brunner over natural theology, albeit cast
now in terms of an eschatological framework. The old creation is not capable of
(‘cannot bear’ i.e. give birth to) the new creation. The present is not ‘pregnant with
future’, we might say, except insofar as the God of the virgin conception is present
and active in its midst, working ever afresh the miracle of life where there is only
the potential for not-life. The new creation does not come simply to perfect the old
creation, but to do something radically new which transcends any capacities latent
within it. There is no natural capacity for the new within the old.
What is especially interesting is the fact that Moltmann and Barth deploy the
very same theological examples to drive home their point: in nature ex nihilo nihil
fit, yet the God who is the author of life is able to call life even ex nihilo. The
crushed and lifeless form of the crucified has no latent capacity for new life, yet
the God who is the author of life is able to raise him out of death as the first fruits
of a new humanity. The point which both theologians wish to make is that the
proper question is not, and must never be, about the latent capacities of the created,
but rather about the capacities of the God of the future to do with his creation that
which he has promised.
For Moltmann this relationship of incommensurability or contradiction
between the present and the promised future makes the crucifixion-resurrection
of Jesus, the ‘enigmatic, dialectical identity of the risen Lord with the crucified
Christ’37 much more than the occasion upon which Christian hope is founded; it is
itself a paradigm for thinking about the relationship of old to new creation. Again,
this is a point to which we must return.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., 220.
Hope, Promise and the Logic of Grace
One key difference between Moltmann’s theology of hope, rooted as it is in the

category of the promise of God, and Bloch’s principle of hope is that it is an
assured hope. This certainly does not mean that we know precisely what will
happen in the future. On the contrary ‘the knowledge of the future which is kindled
by promise is … prospective and anticipatory, … provisional, fragmentary, open,
straining beyond itself. It knows the future in striving to bring out the tendencies
and latencies of the Christ event of the crucifixion and resurrection, and in seeking
to estimate the possibilities opened up by this event’.38 Yet the Christian hope
is assured in the sense that it is invested in the capacities of the one who has
raised Christ from the dead.39 Bloch, on the other hand, while he does not seem
seriously to entertain the option of failure, nonetheless unfolds a model in which
hope intuits a future which in principle may or may not ultimately come to pass.
It might be asked whether such a level of assurance (‘because he has raised Christ
from the dead, therefore the fulfilment of his promise is certain’),40 rooted as it is in
an insistence that the hoped for future is not contingent upon preconditions in the
here-and-now, is not likely to reduce (if not remove altogether) the transformative
impact of such hope? One might suppose so. After all, if the eventual outcome
is secure regardless of our striving or lack of it towards the goal of our hope, if
redemption does not rest on our fashioning of the conditions for the coming of
the kingdom, then surely the more economic and comfortable option is to sit back
and wait for it all to happen. Is Bloch’s model with its element of risk and genuine
responsibility on the part of those who strive for the utopian future not more likely
to generate the sort of enthusiasm and effort necessary to see the kingdom at least
approximated to in this world?
It would not be surprising if such a question were asked or answered in the
affirmative. But the Christian answer to it must be an emphatic negative, for it
misunderstands the logic both of the gospel and of Bloch’s alternative to it. To
begin with, we should observe that if this were so then it would not be the principle
of hope about which Bloch was writing at such length, but rather a principle of
fear or anxiety (generated by the risk of failure) which drives humans forwards in
a frenzied bid to do their best, for fear of the consequences of inaction. To suppose
this would in fact be to have missed the entire thrust of Bloch’s case. For him it is
actually hope, and not fear, which energizes and transforms our present activity.
Fear inhibits and cripples. Yet the question is worth asking precisely because it
provokes a reasonable counter-question: namely, whether, without the introduction
of some transcendent guarantor of the outcomes of hope, without the receipt of
something akin to the promise of the God of the resurrection, hope can really be
the genuine source of a transformed present at all. If, in the final analysis our hope
38
Ibid., 203.
39
See ibid., 145.
40
is rooted in the latent potential of the present, including our own potential to act
and thereby generate the conditions for its eventual realization, then it is difficult
to see just how we can escape the despair which accompanies the juxtaposition of
our self-knowledge and the demands which the road to self-redemption makes.
Thus Moltmann writes of Bloch:
His ontology of “not-yet-Being” fails to provide a foundation for hope because

it inescapably has to become the ontology of “Being-that-is-no-longer”. If
future arises from the tendencies and latencies of the historical process, the
future cannot bring anything surprisingly new, and never a novum ultimum.
Eschatology is then only possible as teleology. But, as Bloch knew, teleology
runs aground on death.41
Within the logic of the Christian gospel of grace, with its explicit rejection of
every attempt at self-justification, the priority of indicatives over imperatives
is everywhere apparent. Redemption comes to us as a free gift of God created
ex nihilo, rather than a staged initiative which demands the prior fulfilment of
conditions on our part before final bestowal of the ‘promised’ blessing. Yet this
utter freeness does not create a context for antinomian lethargy. Nor, indeed, is
it lacking in its demands. But the evangelical ordering of promise and demand is
all important. Because the gift is offered freely and does not rest on the adequacy
of our response, it actually liberates us from the culture of fear and anxiety, and
thereby sets us free to act with radical confidence, confidence which is free to
make mistakes because it knows they will not result in rejection. Failure itself
is forgivable and redeemable. When, therefore, God’s promise comes to us and
fashions our hope, in the very same moment it demands what it offers and offers
what it demands. What it demands is that we should become the children of God,
citizens of his kingdom. What it offers is the opportunity to become children of
God, citizens of his kingdom. The demand is to embrace the freely given gift,
that which is promised to us, and to live it out in the here and now. Hence the
promise certainly calls for obedience: ‘It is necessary to arise and go to the place
to which the promise points, if one would have part in its fulfilment. Promise and
command, the pointing of the goal and the pointing of the way, therefore belong
immediately together.’42 But here the logic of gospel sets us utterly free from the
burden of having to become the condition for the realization of the kingdom. And
it is this liberation, rooted in the imaginative vision which lays hold of God’s
promised future, which transforms our way of being in the present and generates
patterns of obedience and response. Here again the acknowledgement that this
world ‘cannot bear’ the new creation lifts from our shoulders the responsibility of
having to establish it by our own labours. Yet it must be held in tension with the
41
Ibid., 344, n.58.
42
constant call of God to live in the here-and-now as those whose lives are shaped
by the power of his future at work as the contradiction of corruption.
Modulation, Messiah, and the Moment
We have seen that this essential tension between recognizing the radical newness
of the new creation and its incommensurability with the present order of things
on the one hand, and on the other hand the genuine presence of the Novum in the
midst of the present order, drawing us forward transformatively into God’s future,
is maintained in Moltmann’s theology. Thus of the resurrection he writes:
The new thing, the kainos, the novum ultimum, is the quintessence of the wholly
other, marvellous thing that the eschatological future brings. With the raising
of Christ from the dead, the future of the new creation sheds its lustre into the
present of the old world, and in “the sufferings of this present time” kindles hope
for the new life.43
Yet this event ‘has no analogies in experienced history’.44 This, on Moltmann’s own
account of the matter, is both true and untrue. There are no historical preconditions
for the resurrection of Jesus to be sure; yet Christian experience is now filled with
happenings which are analogous to it in the sense that they too introduce the lustre
of the new into the old order, that they too derive not from potentialities latent
within nature, but from the creative power of God calling forth life out of death.
There is, in this present order, a repeated and identifiable ‘eschatologically new
intervention of God’s creative activity’.45 Like Barth’s analogia fidei, however, the
analogy to be discerned here is always in one direction, from the paradigm event of
the resurrection to those subsequent partial and dependent anticipations of the new
creation which arise out of its power at work in the world. The relationship is not
reversible. The resurrection has no natural analogies in this world.
Yet the insistence that there are unnatural analogies, arising directly and only
out of the power of the future-made-present, forces us to qualify the sense in which
we construe the incommensurability between the two orders. It cannot be such that
the old ‘cannot bear’ the new in the sense of ‘cannot endure’ it or accommodate it
in its midst at all, but only in the sense that it cannot give birth to it in and of itself.
Through what figure, then, should we picture the transition from the old to
the new creation? Moltmann, we have seen, typically takes the crucifixion and
resurrection of Jesus as paradigmatic. This accommodates both a vital degree of
continuity (the identity of the historical Jesus with the risen Lord) and the all
important discontinuity since, as has often been observed, ‘dead men don’t rise’!
The problem with this figure, though, important and necessary though it may be, is
43
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
the fact that it emphasizes the discontinuity and incommensurability to such an

extent that it becomes hard to make much sense of the genuine presence of the
new order in the old, the suffusing and transforming of the old with the power of
the new. It tends rather to indicate a model in which the old will be transformed
‘in the blink of an eye’ into something only faintly (yet nonetheless genuinely)
recognizable as continuous with the old, just as the transfigured and the risen Jesus
were. Again, while this may in itself be appropriate and necessary enough as a
pointer to what may ultimately occur in God’s eschatological future, we also need
a model to set alongside it which allows us to say in unequivocal terms that the
shift from the old to the new has already begun, that there is an overlap between
the two orders not in the sense that there is some prior basis or precondition for
the new already latent in the old, but in the sense that the new has already begun to
create its own presence in the midst of the old by assuming it and drawing it into
new self-transcendent anticipations of what it will ultimately be.
The messianic interpretation sees “the moment” that interrupts time, and lets
us pause in the midst of progress, as the power for conversion. At that moment
another future becomes perceptible. The laws and forces of the past are no
longer compulsive. … New perspectives open up. … The way becomes free for
alternative developments.46
The paradigm offered by the compound event of crucifixion-resurrection, then,

needs to be supplemented as a basis for imagining the shift between the old and
the new creations of God.
In the composition of a piece of music, if one wishes to change key (especially
if one wishes to change into a relatively unrelated key) there are ways and means
of doing so. One may, of course, simply change in a largely unannounced and
unanticipated manner, causing a jarring to the sensibilities of the listeners who will
very likely find it hard to link the two passages together at first. This is sometimes
done for effect. But the more accepted and likely means of achieving the change
is via a modulation or series of modulations in which one takes a chord belonging
properly in the old key, but uses it in ways which are proper to a new key, thereby
transforming its significance, and effecting a harmonious bridge between the
passages. This same process may need to be effected several times in order to
get from the original to the final desired key. Skilful composers may also smooth
the transition by introducing already into the closing strains of the old passage
melodic motifs which do not really belong there at all, but which point ahead of
themselves to the new.
Moltmann’s passing appeal to the model of ‘conversion’ indicates the need
for the development of some such paradigm to set alongside that of crucifixion-
resurrection in order to complement it dialectically, and hence accommodate the
apparent evidence of God’s skilful modulation from the key of death into the key
46
Ibid., 45.
of life. There is no need to turn to musicology for such a paradigm however. It

is there already in the Christological focus to which Moltmann himself directs
us. But we need to cast our gaze back behind the event of the cross, and to remind
ourselves that prior to this strikingly discontinuous irruption of the power of God’s
future into the present there had already been a whole life lived in which the power
of this future was already perceptibly locked in a struggle to the death with the
powers of evil. The transformation or palingennesia of humanity did not begin on
Golgotha, that is to say, but precisely in the womb of the virgin, and was effected
through Jesus’ Spirit-filled and enabled responsiveness to his father from moment
to waking moment of his life culminating in the self-offering to death on the cross.
In the events of Jesus’ messianic ministry we find constant foreshadowings of the
new order which constitute a genuine presence of the kingdom or rule of God in
the midst of this order. As the one who furnishes Yahweh for the first time with a
satisfactory covenant partner the Messiah is himself an embodiment of this rule
in the world. And yet, the cross and resurrection, the decisive anticipation of the
shift from old to new, are still to come. In all this we have a valuable paradigm
for reflecting on how the power of God’s future can be genuinely present and
effective in the midst of a world which, as yet, cannot bear it. This, perhaps, is part
of the theological significance of the gospel story of Jesus’ transfiguration on the
mountain, an eschatological moment in which the true meaning of Jesus’ present
is revealed to the three disciples through a vision of his post-resurrection glory,
a glory discontinuous with the conditions of his historical ministry, yet genuinely
present under the form of anticipations of it, and visible for those granted eyes
to see. It is no coincidence that it is in the light cast by this event that Peter’s
stumbling confession of Jesus as the Messiah comes. Messianic history, we might
say, is the context for the modulation from the conditions and potentialities of
death to those of life in this world.
Transfigured and Transfiguring Imagination
The power of the future to transform the present lies chiefly in the capacity of
God’s Spirit to capture our imagination and to open up for us a new vision of
God’s promise and the present which it illuminates, thereby stimulating alternative
ways of being in the world in the present, living towards the future. Imagination is
thus a vital category in eschatology as in theology more generally.
Imaginative forms are rendered necessary rather than merely useful or
ornamental precisely by the dialectical relationship between present and future
about which we have already spoken. On the one hand some level of continuity
and commensurability between the old and new orders is vital if we are to be able
to say or think anything meaningful about God’s future at all. The novum ultimum
cannot be wholly lacking in analogy to the here-and-now, otherwise we are driven
to silence, and can have no hope precisely because we can expect nothing, look
forward to nothing, fashion for ourselves no imaginative horizon towards which
to move. It is in terms of a transfigured present that we are able to speak and
think about God’s promised future. Yet the discontinuity and incommensurability
about which we have said so much renders imagination absolutely necessary as
the mode or capacity relevant to eschatological expectation and statement. Reason
and science, the tools of logos, insofar as they are orientated and accommodated
to the familiar, the regular, the continuous, have no means of penetrating beyond
its limits.47 It is precisely imagination, the capacity which is able to take the known
and to modify it in striking and unexpected ways, which offers us the opportunity
to think beyond the limits of the given, to explore states of affairs which, while
they are earthed in radical and surprising modifications of the known, are so
striking and surprising as to transcend the latent possibilities and potentialities of
the known.
If, therefore, the promise of God is the source of hope, it may be that we must
pursue the suggestion that it is the imagination of men and women to which that
promise appeals, which it seizes and expands, and which is the primary locus
of God’s sanctifying activity in human life. That, though, is a topic for another
volume.
47
It would be unfortunate if this were taken to mean that reason and science had
nothing whatever to do with the activity of imagination. Clearly this is not the case, and no
such crude separation is intended. The point here, however, is simply that insofar as they
are attending (as they often do) to the regularities and predictable orderliness of this world,
working deliberately within the boundaries furnished by our shared experience of it, these
tools as such are unable to take us beyond those self-set limits into the limitless beyond
of the eschatological future. Here a different sort of imaginative activity is required. At
times science itself (in constructing hypotheses for example, especially ones which involve
moves towards a significant paradigm shift) is driven to utilize imagination in similar ways.
But for the most part its reliance upon imaginative modes is of a more constrained sort,
imagining within the limits (which might be described as a form of reasoning – inference?
deduction?) rather than trespassing beyond them.
Index
Aeschylus 215 Boorstin, Daniel 165

Agaësse, P. 159 Botterweck, G. Johannes 125
Analogy 6, 9, 15–23, 31, 38–9, 54, 62–3, Bouwsma, William J. 180
79, 89, 93, 99, 121, 125, 183–4, Boyd, Richard 15, 93
246, 248 Brandes, George 187–8
Anaxagoras 100 Bridges, Matthew 135
Aquinas, Thomas 6, 16–23, 31, 51–4, 58, Brown, Balfour 100
84, 123, 164, 168–9, 171–2 Brown, Frank Burch 6,
Arianism 123 Brown, David 3, 6, 7, 10, 75–89, 96, 166,
Aristotle 49, 51, 53, 99, 168, 215, 217–18 171, 206
Arminianism 156, 158 Brown, William P. 125–6
Astington, John H. 188 Brueggemann, Walter 125–6, 147
Augustine 2, 53, 56, 58, 126, 129–30 153, Bryant, David 140
155, 158 Buckley, James 62
Avis, Paul 3 Byrne, Muriel St Clare 119
Byron, George Gordon Noel 8, 144–9
Babington, Margaret 119
Baillie, Donald 46 Calvin, John 7, 9, 44–5, 53–63, 65–7,
Balthasar, Hans Urs von 85, 226 70–74, 166, 176–81
Barfield, Owen 83 Cameron, Averil 167
Barth, Karl 7, 9, 30, 31, 38, 44, 45, 53, Camille, Michael 168, 172–3
62–74, 89, 90, 116–17, 121, Campbell, Gordon 150, 156
125, 129, 143, 183–5, 191, 197, Carpenter, Humphrey 134, 136
199–205, 224–5, 243, 246 Casey, Edward S. 3
Barth, Markus 44–5, 68, 71, 72 Chalcedon, Council of 9, 31, 86, 181–3
Bauckham, Richard 24, 32–3, 73, 87–8, Christensen, Carl C. 174–5
101, 123, 130, 204, 206, 232 Chrysostom, John 55
Baudrillard, Jean 165 Clark, Tony 41, 140
Bauman, Zygmunt 97, 111 Coleridge, S.T. 113
Baumgartner, Walter 125 Corns, Thomas N. 150, 156
Beattie, Bernard 147 Cranfield, C.E.B. 126
Begbie, Jeremy 10, 76 Culler, Jonathan 94
Berangarius of Tours 52
Berger, Peter 164 Dalferth, Ingolf U. 49, 79
Bettenson, Henry 86 Damascus, John of 167
Blake, William 153 Dante 90
Bloch, Ernst 9, 209, 229, 236–8, 241–2, Davey, Nicholas 195, 206
244–5 Davies, W.H. 80
Bonaventura 168–9, 176 Davison, Andrew 14
De Grazia, Margreta 188 Freedberg, David 173

de Gruchy, John 173, 180–81 Frei, Hans 85
De Lange, Nicholas 128 Fretheim, Terence 125–6
Democritus 189 Fuchs, Ernst 105
Derrida, Jacques 78, 91, 95–6, 116–17
Diet of Worms 173 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 195
Dillenberger, J. 174 Gaskell, Ivan 195, 206
Dixon, W. Mcneile 218 Gleckner, Robert 147
Dobson, Michael 187–8 Gombrich, Ernst 212–13
Donnelly, Philip 150 Goodman, Nelson 15, 21, 37
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 192 Green, Garrett 3
Dubos, René 194 Grotius 158
Dunn, James 126 Gunton, Colin 23, 26–9, 33–4, 37, 81–2,
Dunn, Waldo Hilary 158 93, 123–5, 127
Durandus, William 167–8 Guthrie, Steven 10, 196
Dyson, Hugo 136 Gutman, Joseph 168, 174
Eagleton, Terry 9, 92, 94, 96, 215–17, 219, Hall, Edith 189
226 Hamann, Johann Georg 91
Easterling, Pat 189 Hanford, James Holly 158
Edwards, Catharine 189–90 Hardy, Daniel 166, 172
Egan, Gabriel 187 Harroviensis 146
Eliot, George 192 Hart, David Bentley 224–5
Eliot, T.S. 119 Hart, Kevin 91, 95, 116–17
Empson, William 153 Hart, Rachel 134
Endo, Shusaku 9, 229–30 Hart, Trevor 4, 59, 76, 96, 131, 135, 167,
Endokimov, Paul 181–3 174, 196, 206
Epictetus 189–91 Hastings, Peter 134
Erasmus 166 Hegel, G.W.F. 28–33
Euripides 100, 215 Heidegger, Martin 193, 195
Eutychianism 57 Heron, Alasdair 52–3, 72
Hick, John 9, 129, 194, 197–205
Farrer, Austin 27, 42, 168 Hillebrand, Hans J. 166
Fee, Gordon 76 Hirst, Wolf Z. 147, 149
Feuerbach, Ludwig 139 Hobson, Theo 150, 156
Fiddes, Paul 8, 129, 142–3, 225 Holbein, Hans 166
Finney, Paul Corby 166 Homer 153
Fisch, Harold 149 Hopps, Gavin 10
Fish, Stanley 154, 156 Hume, David 212
Flaubert, Gustave 196
Florida, Richard 124 Irenaeus of Lyons 121, 129
Ford, David 102
Forster, E.M. 104 James, Henry 192
Forsyth, Ilene 173 Johnson, Mark 3, 14–15, 80, 83
Forsyth, Neil 156 Jones, David 44, 76, 85, 95, 116
Forsyth, Peter Taylor 176, 196, 225 Jones, William R. 168, 172
Fourth Lateran Council 52, 173 Jonson, Ben 215
Frankl, Victor 191, 193
Index 253
Kant, Immanuel 14, 82, 127, 163, 169, 212 Michalski, Sergiusz 166, 176, 179
Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von 173–4, Milton, John 8, 130, 135, 146, 149–58
176 Molnar, Paul 63
Kaufman, Gordon 3, 40, 41, 139–41 Moltmann, Jürgen 7, 9, 10, 99–121, 194,
Kearney, Richard 2–4, 165 205–6, 229, 238–48
Kemal, Salim 195, 206 Mopsuestia, Theodore of 50
Kenosis 8, 34, 36, 47, 80, 87, 115–17, 121, Morgan, David 8, 163, 182
135, 171, 187, 222 Muir, Edwin 81
Kermode, Frank 150, 191–2 Murdoch, Iris 9, 98, 127, 212–17, 219–21
Khovacs, Ivan 134–5 Murray, John 145–6, 148
Kierkegaard, Søren 16, 157
Kinnaird, Douglas 146 Nestorianism 57
Klauber, Martin 174 Nettle, Daniel 3
Koehler, Ludwig 125 Nicaea, Council of 162
Kristeller, Paul Oskar 163–4 Nichols, Aidan 177–8
Krook, Dorothea 217–18 Nietzsche, Friedrich 214, 216
Nussbaum, Martha 97
Lakoff, George 14
Langer, Susanne 55 Oakeshott, Michael 7, 109–13
Lehmann, Helmut T. 169, 176 O’ Donovan, Oliver 124
Leppert, Richard 164 O’ Hear, Anthony 127
Levenson, Jon 125 Oxoniensis 146
Lewis, Alan 9, 226–7
Lewis, C. Day 83 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 125
Lewis, C.S. 14–15, 43–4, 107, 112–13, Parry, Ken 167
134, 136, 145, 150, 152–4, 156 Partridge, Michael 10
Lindberg, Carter 173 Paterson, Alan 158
Loades, Ann 86, 88 Patterson, Frank Allen 150–51
Luckmann, Thomas 164 Pelikan, Jaroslav 169
Luria, Isaac 121, 128, 130 Plato 28–9, 96
Luther, Martin 168–9, 171–7 Polanyi, Michael 35
Poole, William 151, 154–6
Marx, Karl 220, 234 Potter, G.R. 174–5
McCabe, Herbert 16–17, 19, 20 Prestige, G.L. 77
McCormack, Bruce 38, 41, 140 Proclus 19
MacDonald, George 14
McEwan, Ian 193 Rabbie, Edwin 158
McFague, Sallie 21–2, 40, 183 Racine, Jean-Baptiste 215
McGann, Jerome J. 144, 147 Rad, Gerhard von 39, 177
McKane, William 126 Ramsay, M.P. 180
MacKinnon, Donald 9, 216, 221–5 Reformation 8, 46, 166, 171–5
Macmurray, John 102 Renaissance 122, 124, 164, 180, 215
Macquarrie, John 193 Reynolds, Barbara 119–20
Mair, Roslin 119 Ricks, Christopher 155
Marchand, Leslie A. 145–6, 148 Ricoeur, Paul 15, 22–3, 25, 79–81, 83, 99,
Maritain, Jacques 133 102–3, 107, 141, 213, 216
Marlowe, Christopher 215 Ringgren, Helmer 125
Mettinger, Tryggve 39 Ryle, Gilbert 36–7, 170
Thomas, R.S. 16, 106, 162

Sacks, Jonathan 128, 131–2 Thring, Godfrey 135
Sartre, Jean-Paul 36, 170, 193, 196 Tikkun Olam 128–32
Saurat, Denis 149 Tolkien, J.R.R. 7–9, 113, 134–7, 210–14,
Saussure, Ferdinand de 54, 92–3 221, 226, 228
Sayers, Dorothy L. 8, 119–22, 134, 144–5 Tolkien, Christopher 134–5
Scarry, Elaine 40, 41, 43 Torrance, Thomas F. 6, 25–37, 41, 45, 49,
Schillebeeckx, Edward 48–53, 62 88
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 103, 105, 115 Trent, Council of 51–2, 171
Scholem, Gershom 121, 128, 130
Seneca 215 Vico, Giambattista 90
Sennett, Richard 100–101, 111 Viladesau, Richard 6, 8, 139, 162, 169
Sens, William of 119–22 Virgil 153
Shakespeare, William 3, 187–8, 215,
219–20, 225–6 Waldman, Milton 134–5
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 153 Waller, Giles 222
Sider, Ronald J. 174 Ward, Barbara 194
Solignac, A. 159 Ward, Graham 90, 117, 222
Soloveitchik, Joseph 128 Ward, Michael 14
Sontag, Susan 58 Warnock, Mary 3, 170, 233
Sophocles 215 Welker, Michael 125–6
Soskice, Janet Martin 6, 19, 21, 23, 37, 79, Weller, Barry 144, 147
86, 183 Wells, Sam 196
Steiner, George 9, 78–80, 90–96, 106, Wells, Stanley 188
123–4, 127, 215–22, 229, 234–6, Wesley, Charles 113
238 Wilder, Amos 137, 233
Stephens, W.P. 175 Williams, Bernard 111
Stevenson, Leslie 3–4 Williams, Charles 119, 134, 210
Stoicism 83, 189–91, 196, 218 Williams, Rowan 45–6, 80, 86, 88, 133–4,
Sykes, Stephen W. 87 137, 223
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 37
Taille, Maurice de la 7, 85 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 122, 163
Tanner, Norman P. 171–2 Wood, Diana 167
Tarantino, Quentin 194
Taylor, Charles 29, 114 Yang, Huilin 10
Taylor, Kevin 222 Young, Frances 86–7
Taylor, Mark 165
Terrien, Samuel 84 Zorzin, Alejandro 173
Thiselton, Anthony 104–5 Zwingli, Ulrich 47, 73, 174–6

Between The Image and The Word

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Between the Image and the Word

Theological Engagements with Imagination,

Jeremy Begbie, Duke University and University of Cambridge, USA

Art, Imagination and Christian Hope

An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste

Christian Theology and Tragedy

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN 9781472413697 (hbk)

Provenance of Chapters  vii

1 Between the Image and the Word  13

2 The Promise and the Sign  43

3 The Economy of the Flesh  75

4 The Grammar of Conversation  97

5 Cosmos, Kenosis and Creativity  119

6 Unauthorised Texts  139

7 Unseemly Representations  161

8 Unfinished Performances  187

9 Unexpected Endings  209

10 The Substance of Things Hoped For  229

Son or Word as the man Jesus Christ. It is to Christology, and in particular to

accessible through an aesthetic encounter with natural or cultural phenomena of

that a distinctly Christian theological engagement in inter-cultural and inter-

It is apt to remind ourselves at the beginning of a book bringing Christian theology

Imagination, Meaning and Reality

Analogy, Meaning and the Incomprehensible

R.S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945-1990 (London: Phoenix, 1995), 324.

Aquinas suggests, in the plasticity of language and its capacity to be redeployed

God, Analogy and Metaphor

in contrarium, but Aquinas’s responsio endorses it as a ground for rejecting univocal

their flesh-laden context of use,21 only point obliquely to a ‘certain likeness’ or

Analogy and the Apophatic Contra-indication

at last by a nineteenth-century amateur collector,24 rather than the ultimately

which therefore, in McFague’s paraphrase of Paul Ricoeur, contains the whisper

Semantic Slippage and the Problem of Petrification

McFague, 13. Cf. Ricoeur, 224.

Hos. 5.12, NRSV. KJV has ‘as a moth’.

The Object and the Mode of Knowing

in order to prevent us from collapsing into an inappropriate, impious and irrational

By-passing the Image in Pursuit of the Logos

Given Torrance’s own inevitable reliance on figurative uses of language in

Imagination, Reason and Rationalism

Imagination, Imagelessness and Invisibility

For Torrance, the ‘flesh’ or humanity of Christ is absolutely indispensable as a

Incarnation, Particularity and Dialectic

Apophaticism, Images and Concepts

former would, once purged of fleshy impurities, be capable, in principle at least,

Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 22‒3, 38.

Pictures and Images of Other Sorts

Despite his broad-brush disparagement of the image in relative terms, Torrance’s

thing to serve as ‘a picture of’ something else.78 A physical picture, of course, is

Image, Iconoclasm and Revelation

See Gordon D. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept

greater length,95 namely, that an account of religious and theological engagement

Embodiment and Meaning

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1941), 44

and Faber, 1959), esp. 143–51.

Issues in Eucharistic Theology

The Presence and Action of God

Provenance of Chapters vii

1 Between the Image and the Word 13

2 The Promise and the Sign 43

3 The Economy of the Flesh 75

4 The Grammar of Conversation 97

5 Cosmos, Kenosis and Creativity 119

6 Unauthorised Texts 139

7 Unseemly Representations 161

8 Unfinished Performances 187

9 Unexpected Endings 209

10 The Substance of Things Hoped For 229