341 - Imagining God

Imagining God
By Patrick D. Miller

Considering the common assumption that the imagination is a sphere of the mind to be contrasted with reality, one is not surprised to find things stirred up when people begin to talk about "imagining God." The Re-imagining Conference held late last year in Minneapolis certainly stirred up the church, virtually paralyzing some denominations (Presbyterians and, to some extent, Methodists). At the same time, we note, in other contexts, a serious attention to the realm of the imagination as a central locus of revelation (so, for example, Garrett Green in Imagining God) and the ground of preaching and proclamation (so Walter Brueggemann, Texts under Negotiation: The Bible and the Postmodern Imagination). Indeed, it is rather ironic that the Re-imagining Conference creates such a furor precisely at the time that theology-perhaps in a postmodern mode, though one does not have to assume that context to let the imagination have its theological play-through various voices asserts the significance of the imagination in the theological task. Nor can one identify this focus on the role of imagination in theology as essentially a liberal or radical enterprise that departs from tradition and Scripture. In the work of a Gordon Kaufman, it may be that-or seem to be (see his The Theological Imagination)-though no theologian has worked any harder at serious "construction" of a contemporary doctrine of God. But in Garrett Green, contemporary theology presents an essentially conservative, tradition-oriented theologian, with little sympathy toward a feminist perspective, reminding us of the revelatory significance of the imagination. Similarly, Walter Brueggemann lifts up the imagination precisely in relation to the interpretation of Scripture as he notes, with Green, that "the canon of Scripture provides the paradigm through which the faithful practice imagination."

The imagination is an indispensable part of our theogical work. It is also a risky and dangerous sphere of operation. The verbal associations between "imagining" and "imaging" are so close that one may easily speak the one when intending the other. Imagining is an act of imaging. From the Scriptures, we learn that imaging God is both necessary and idolatrous. We live, theologically, between imagining in a way that makes fear and worship and obedience possible, that provides the grounds of hope and trust without which human existence is hardly possible, and

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imagining in a way that turns God and the matters of faith into utensils of human ambition, power, and self-interest. To pray to the Father, to look to the Rock, to be led by the Shepherd, to bow before the Ruler-all of these are acts of Christian, indeed, religious existence that belong to the very nature of faith in God. Such images give concreteness to that which is not concrete. They let us picture what can not be pictured, enable us to connect with a source we can not touch, see, feel, or locate.

Without such imagining, faith in a God who is personal, involved with human life and this world, would be most difficult. Nor is such imagining an arbitrary act. What human life needs joins with what human life is given-in Scripture. The reliance on Scripture that has been an integral part of the life of many Christians and Jews is not simply out of some sense of duty or religious requirement but because there one finds the story and the images that make sense of our existence and ground it in a transcendent Other who claims our lives and makes them good and true-or lets us know when they are not. The imagination is at work in the formation of Scripture and in its reception.

In more traditional terms, we speak of that as the work of the Spirit, although neither imagination nor Spirit is identical with the other or exhausted by the other. It is no accident that where fresh winds of faith and powerful acts of imagination have burst forth in the life of the church-from Pentecost to the Reformation to a Re-imagining Conference-some people have seen the Spirit at work while others have seen confusion and idolatry. The Spirit blows where it will, and our imagining may be the construction of idols. No one is more perilously and constantly on the edge of breaking the commandment against idolatry than the theologian, the one who thinks and speaks about God. The image may become the idol.

In our time, we have discovered, in the imagery of God the Father, how close we have come to turning the revelatory imagination into a factory for idols. Every time we begin the Lord's Prayer, we direct our minds and hearts toward one who cares and in whose "hands"-so the imaging of the imagination suggests-we place our lives. Yet, each time we do that, we also risk plasticizing and concretizing, in a manner that claims to know too much, the God who has created us, letting the metaphor so become the reality that it becomes an idol. Indeed the equation of the metaphor, the image, with reality is where idolatry happens. The evoking of metaphors as an act of imagination whose relation to reality is elusive, yes and no, is what theological work is all about. Surely some images are more yes and some more no, but there are none that are unambiguously yes and few that are unambiguously no. Whenever we take up images of God, we are, as Deuteronomy 4 reminds us, playing with fire. They may illumine and represent God, or-as fire often does-they may consume us. Either way, it is a dangerous game.

What then about re-imagining? Is that part of the theological enterprise, or is it merely the perversion of the authentic and faithful imagining that arises out of the scriptural paradigm? I recall the joke that went

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around a couple of decades ago about the reporter who got an interview with God and, when pressed by everyone to tell them what God looked like, responded, "She's black." Most of us laughed, but some among us said, "That's my God." Or one remembers the sensational sculpture "Christa" that was pictured on the front pages of newspapers across the country several years ago, a crucifix on which hung a Christ with breasts. Scandalous, said most of us. But others said, "That's my Jesus." In our time, we often decry the absence of theological giants, Barths and Bultmanns who shake the theological fortresses we have built and force us into new thinking. Meanwhile, just such shaking of the foundations has been going on around us, but it is less in singular, deep theological voices and more in a groundswell of witnesses whose re-imagining of God in different colors and images points us afresh to the reality that is God, indeed the God who made us and speaks to us constantly through Scripture, whose blackness and breasts may be the most powerful revelatory imagining of the incarnation, of the word made flesh, that our minds-at least in this moment--can receive. So also the evocation of sophia/Sophia, an image of God that is-like all our images-both yes and no and-like all the images that sustain us in any authentic way rooted deeply in Scripture, should provide an impetus for theological work more than for ecclesiastical resolutions.

It may also suggest the need for more imaginative elbowroom in our contemporary theology, more willingness to ask for the connections between Christian tradition and, for example, a feminist's invoking of female figures from other faiths or lifting up a minor element of biblical tradition into central focus, and more hesitancy at drawing sharp lines, particularly by male theologians, whose guardianship of the faith through the ages has sometimes been a barrier to the authentic vision of God. The largely-though not totally-negative reaction on the part of males to primarily female acts of reimagination is something we ought to ponder. It is at least consistent with a common tendency of the community of faith-from biblical times to the present-to judge a particularly feminine perspective or religious activity as heterodox.

If one can speak of the circle of faith, as I think one can, it is truly a circle and not a box, and the lines of its circumference are always fuzzy and imprecise, so that one does not always know how close one is to being "in" or "out." Scripture itself reminds us that some voices dwell on the outskirts of faith's camp, so much so that sometimes they seem to be, indeed, outside the camp. One thinks of Ecclesiastes in this regard, but Martin Luther would have argued the case against other biblical voices also. Yet, Christian faith claims God's revelation in the skeptical faith of Qohelet, even if its themes seem like a radical rejection of the Mosaic faith. The Preacher's problem was less the too-much-faith of syncretism than the too-little-faith of nihilism. The latter may be no less a danger to the proper worship of God than the former. Still, Ecclesiastes remains inside the circle, inside the camp.

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There may be no place where the theological imagination has so worn a rut in the line between fantasy and reality than in our thinking about angels and devils, the particular focus of this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY. In our minds, our art, our literature, in our official theology and our popular theology, the imagination has worked overtime in conjuring up angels and devils. Sometimes the devil has dominated our imagination. Today, we are looking more for angels, but many of us still see the work of the devil at every turn. None of us would equate an angel with God, but Scripture does. None of us would equate the work of Satan or of lying spirits with God, yet Scripture does. Is there any other aspect of Christian faith that is regarded by so many of the faithful as a fantasy and figment of the imagination while as many others, equally faithful, see in the angels and devils crucial pointers to the reality of God that is so otherwise elusive? Sophia seems new and strange to many of us-though Scripture tells us she was there at the creation-but we have been fantasizing about angels and devils for centuries. Is there anything there? Does faith find connection to God when it speaks of the angelic or the demonic? If so, in what way? Or do our imaginations simply run wild and play games, seeking to find in the company of angels and devils the God we are afraid to face more directly? Are the angels and devils of our minds, whether in theology, art, or literature, merely and dangerously a form of playing with idols? Such questions will receive no final answers in the pages that follow, but there one will find some powerful imagining and re-imagining that may help us think more truly on the way to worshipping more faithfully.