Section I—Religious Imagination and Philosophy

A.

1. Connie Aarsbergen (Amsterdam), ‘The Dangers of Religious and Secular Imagination and Richard Rorty’s Alternative’.
2. Jessica Frazier (Cambridge), ‘Religious Realism after Heidegger: Imaginative Options in Gadamer and Levinas’.
3. Wenche Marit Qvist (Copenhagen), ‘The Fantastic Imagination: Heidegger’s Understanding of Existence as Possibility seen in the light of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Imagination’.

B.

1. Peter Bloemendaal (Leiden), ‘From Wittgenstein to Wittgenstinianism’.
2. Agnaldo Portugal (Kings College, London), ‘Bayesianism and Religious Experience in the Justification of Theism’.
3. Petruschka Schaafsma (Leiden), ‘The Importance of Religious Imagination of Evil to Philosophy’.

Section II—Religious Imagination and Theological Aesthetics

A.

1. Hans Geybels (Leuven), ‘Imagination and Aesthetics in Augustine’s Religious Epistemology’.
2. Johan Modée (Lund), ‘Religious Artefacts and Imaginative Cognition’.

B.

1. Yves de Maeseneer (Leuven), ‘The Angels and Christ: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics and the End of Imagination’.
2. Russell Manning (Cambridge), ‘Between Theology and Aesthetics: Paul Tillich’s Theology of Art’.
3. Gesa Thiessen (Milltown Institute, Dublin), ‘Towards a Theological Aesthetics: Karl Rahner’s Contribution’.

Section III—Imagination and Religion

A.

1. Desiree Berendsen (UFSIA, Antwerp), ‘Religious Emotions: Imagination and Intentionality’.
2. Peter de Mey (Leuven), ‘The Descent into Hell as a Test-case for the Power of Religious Imagination’.

B.

1. Rosalie Kuyvenhoven (Amsterdam), ‘Imagination in the Christian Liturgy’.
2. Sean McGovern (Kyoto), ‘Metaphors in Rock and Gravel: Zen Discourse in Topographical Form’.
3. Edwin Koster (Amsterdam), ‘Metaphorical Processes in Biblical Narratives’.

The topic of this conference of the European Society for Philosophy of Religion is religious imagination. At the end of modernity, a new place for imagination has been found in the entire academic field, as an unavoidable means of apprehending ‘reality’. In combination with postmodern non-foundationalism, this development means new opportunities for theology. The apologetic role towards modernity can be diminished and instead religious imagination can be employed to grasp a picture of God in an undogmatic way and to find creative ways to improve life on earth. However, when this imagination is used to dream about perfect societies on earth, there can be serious dangers. History has taught us that when people actually try to establish these utopias, the outcome is usually the opposite: bloody conflicts and totalitarian states.

In this paper I examine the dangerous aspects attached to religious and secular imagination in the political and ethical field. I use the value pluralist insights of the British philosopher and historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The reason why according to Berlin secular and religious dreaming about heavens-on-earth usually leads to hells and nightmares, is that it is connected with monist and teleological thinking. (In this paper, these terms will be fully explained). In the past decades, historical events and views such as Berlin’s, have led to an anti-utopian climate and a ‘non-ideologist’ realism in foreign politics. Closely connected with that is a laissez-faire attitude, a quietism, towards the Third World and the ecological dangers our planet is facing. According to green political parties and the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (1931), to safeguard our future we are not able to do without imagination and utopianism at all. Rorty has recently introduced a less dangerous form of imagination and utopianism that could be of interest in the religious field that wants to benefit the new opportunities postmodernism is offering.

Connie Aarsbergen, Free University, Amsterdam, Email: mailto:connie.aarsbergen@planet.nl

Both realists and anti-realists are confronted with a challenge to the sheer intelligibility of their debate in the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics. Yet the phantom of an independent ontological sphere which is the source and reference of our thoughts, continues to haunt Heidegger’s heirs with the charge of reductionism on one hand, and the allure of religious realism’s powerful affectivity on the other.

Having clarified the radical critique facing contemporary realists, I will examine the philosophical strategies which Levinas and Gadamer use to test the epistemological boundaries of the imagination, and redefine the grammar of realist belief. Focusing on the elusive but persistent ideal of a knowledge-transcendent ‘thing-in-itself’, I contrast Gadamer’s analysis of our ‘possession’ by the ‘kinds’ of reality, with Levinas’ epistemologically suspect, but imaginatively liberating mode of relating to transcendence. Does religious realism, redefined, lend itself to a liminality that concretises or disrupts the self? And must realist praxis eclipse realist theory?

Jessica Frazier, Queens’ College, Cambridge, Email: mailto:jmf21@cam.ac.uk

In The Sickness unto Death (1849) Kierkegaard writes: ‘As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing; it is not a capacity, as are the others—if one wishes to speak in those terms, it is the capacity instar omnium [for all capacities]. When all is said and done, whatever of feeling, knowing, and willing a person has, depends upon what imagination he has, upon how that person reflects himself—that is, upon imagination’. This means that imagination opens life for the human being. It is by virtue of imagination that a human being can see possibilities in life and thereby can gain an understanding of how life can become different. In this way imagination makes it possible for the human being to relate to him or herself in a way that is different from the human being’s ordinary perspective of closed possibilities. This can be related to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith as raising possibilities. By seeing imagination in connection with faith, the paper will address imagination as an edifying force. But it will become clear that the concept of imagination is ambiguous. The passage that contains the above quotation has the heading ‘Infinitude’s Despair Is to Lack Finitude’ and here Kierkegaard stresses the fact that imagination can cause despair by leading the human being away from him or herself. As the ‘process of infinitizing’ it makes the human being capable of seeing him or herself in relation to what he or she is not, but it then becomes crucial that the human being is lead back to reality – to him – or herself again and that the imagination thereby does not become fantastic. The ambiguous understanding of imagination raises the possibility of seeing Kierkegaard’s definition of the human being as a synthesis of necessity and freedom, of the finite and the infinite together with Heidegger’s understanding of the human existence as possibility as it is presented in Sein und Zeit (1927). This comparative reading will show that Kierkegaard’s emphasis of the movement back to the actual life sheds a critical light upon Heidegger’s interpretation of the human being as self – and world creating – a light that shows that Heidegger might just be making imagination fantastic.

Wenche Marit Quist, Institut for Systematisk Teologi, Københavns Universitet, Email: mailto:wmq@teol.ku.dk

The paper examines the rise of what is by now commonly referred to as the Wittgensteinian School of philosophy of religion. Focusing upon the earlier works of Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, Norman Malcolm and D.Z. Phillips, the paper argues that, although these authors remain firmly rooted in Wittgenstein, the use they make of his philosophical heritage raises a number of problems. There is both strength and weakness here. The early Wittgensteinians elaborated the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for the philosophical study of religion, fleshing out his fragmentary remarks to pave the way for a systematic, more comprehensive account of religious belief. However, in moving beyond Wittgenstein, they laid themselves open to the charges of fideism and reductionism. As against Wittgenstein, these charges are difficult to substantiate, if at all. The early Wittgensteinians’ work, however, leaves more room for doubt.

Peter F. Bloemendaal, University of Leiden, Faculty of Theology, Email: mailto:anter@planet.nl

Although the probability calculus was used as early as the 18th Century to criticise Hume’s theory of miracles, we owe to the contemporary British philosopher Richard Swinburne the most accomplished attempt to employ probability reasoning to justify the belief that there is a God. Swinburne aims to defend the intellectual respectability of theism in view of the challenges posed to it by the academic and scientific circles. On the one hand he takes theism as an explanatory hypothesis h whose prior probability (P(h)) is determined by universal and necessary criteria such as the principle of simplicity. According to Swinburne, given the simplicity of theism, its initial plausibility is higher than that enjoyed by its main rival, namely ontological naturalism. On the other hand, theism has a higher explanatory power than its adversary regarding phenomena like the existence of the universe, the occurrence of order in the universe, and other pieces of evidence e that are either too big or too odd for naturalism to explain. As a result, and considering the decisive argument from religious experience, the posterior probability of theism becomes higher than 0.5, which, to Swinburne, entitles it to be a justified belief given that it is more probable than not.

Apart from the objections against taking theism as an explanatory hypothesis and the possibility of applying the probability calculus to assess its rationality, Swinburne’s proposal was criticised by the way the notion of simplicity influences the result found by him. Not only the concept and application of the principle of simplicity depend on contextual judgements (and so it is not a universal and autonomous criterion), but also it is rather controversial to postulate that theism is a simple hypothesis. In addition, there are several problems with taking religious experience as a piece of evidence for a universally acceptable inductive argument.

My proposal attempts to keep the probabilistic approach to the subject since belief and justification are a matter of degree and Bayes’s theorem can provide a good and rigorous account of the inductive character most arguments of Natural Theology have. However, it works with an intersubjective theory of probability so that the prior probability of theism is not defined according to purportedly neutral and universal criteria, but given the particular background of the main parties involved. On the side of the theists, religious experience will play an important role in the initial evaluation of the probability of theism in this debate. Although the naturalist will give to theism a much lower prior, the matter can in principle still be resolved through argument given some conditions that will be discussed in the paper.

Agnaldo Cuoco Portugal, King’s College London / Universidade de Brasília/ CNPq (Brazil), Email: mailto:agnaldo.Portugal@kcl.ac.uk

In contemporary philosophy the use of the term evil is no longer undisputed because of its vagueness, but also because of its supposed religious character. For those who, nevertheless, want to discuss the theme, there is no obvious approach, like theodicy once was. Given these difficulties, Ricœur chooses to begin his philosophical reflection on evil with an analysis of the main symbols and myths of evil in our Western culture, most of them of a religious nature. The role this religious imagination plays in his approach can only be understood if one takes into account Kant’s use of the term symbol in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. On the basis of Ricœur’s approach, I would like to show the value of religious imagination for philosophical reflections on the problem of evil. First, this value lies in its ability to deal with paradoxical thoughts, without striving for harmonisation. Moreover, by incorporating religious imagination philosophy is able to relate to lived experiences of evil.

Petruschka Schaafsma M.A., University of Leiden, Department of Theology (Netherlands), Email: mailto:e.p.schaafsma@let.leidenuniv.nl

Imagination, with its connotation of creativity and philosophical neutrality, plays a very important role in contemporary esthetical understanding. Especially in theology, the concept of imagination is worth investigating, while aesthetics – for which imagination is a key-concept – gets more and more a prominent place in contemporary apologetics, always looking for new, all-encompassing paradigms. In this essay, we focus on the meaning of imagination in Augustine and how he is able, or rather not able to interfere in contemporary debates.

Augustine is an heir of Aristotle precisely because he considers imagination (imaginatio, phantasia) to be an activity of the soul (mens) which mediates between sense perception and intellectual knowledge through the production and reproduction of incorporeal images, stored in memory and providing the data of cogitation. The major difference between Augustine’s opinion on imagination and our contemporary one, is that nowadays, imagination is directly linked to creativity in the field of aesthetics. In Augustine’s mind, these are two different strands, with the will as central link.

When confronted with contemporary thinkers, who accentuate the power of totally free imagination in religious epistemological process, Augustine would probably ask several questions, influenced by his metaphysical context. Perhaps the most relevant question for us, apart from his particular metaphysics, would be the challenging question for external criteria. For, how do we know for certain that imaginative knowledge refers to God and not to self-constructed idols? How do we know for certain that we do not deceive ourselves? As a consequence, the question of imagination ultimately leads to the fundamental debate, whether our knowledge of God can or cannot transcend our particularity.

An interesting intuition of Augustine is that imagination in religious epistemology can have moral implications. That concerns especially those images, which include violence, intolerance, abuse, and so forth. Further, the interpretative plurality of religious imagination prevents us from absolutizing one canonised set of images for God. Instead, theologians constantly have to abandon images, which became insignificant, they have to look for new images when the old ones became nonsensical or even idolatrous. Imagination then, revitalises religious language. As we mentioned before, not every image is a convenient one. That is why Augustine linked a moral aspect to imagination, e.g. in his fourfold method of interpreting Scripture, encouraging imagination, but at the same time limiting it. Then, for contemporary theology, the before mentioned discussion raises again, whether or not there are criteria for such limitation or broadening of view; the old discussion between ontology and hermeneutics.

Hans Geybels, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Email: mailto:hans.geybels@theo.kuleuven.ac.be

In this paper, I am going to argue that religious artifacts play a vital role in religious cognitive imagination, i.e. in the making of a religious view of the world. It is a fact there is no lack of artefactual instances in the spiritual life. All religions use a selection of various typical religious artefacts for diverse means, for example cult buildings, images, religious tools (such as strings of beads, prayer wheels and prayer carpets), artefactual bodily aesthetics, ritual utensils, incense, and candles, certain styles of clothing, books assumed to have a special status, chanting and music etc. Given this fact, it is reasonable to assume that these artefacts and the use of them play an extremely important role in the everyday life of ordinary believers, shaping a religious cognition of the world. In contrast to that assumption, however, most philosophers have worked with the issue of religious cognition as if it was a mainly abstract intellectual and maybe also an emotional affair for the individual (propositional beliefs and ‘religious emotions’, taken as basic). Even the discussion on religious aesthetics has focussed more on the abstract and inward issues (e.g. standards of taste, cf. F. B. Brown 1989 & 2000, T. Martland 1981, N. Wolterstorff 1980,) than on the possible ‘objective’ function of the artifacts in the context of religious cognition.

Johan Modée, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University, Email: mailto:johan.modee@teol.lu.se

‘The Kabbalah relates that in every instant God creates an immense number of new angels, all of whom only have the purpose, before they dissolve into naught, of singing the praise of God before his throne for a moment.’ (Walter Benjamin, August 13, 1933)

No theological debate on imagination can avoid the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. His voluminous Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästhetik (1961–1969) remains the key reference in the field of theological aesthetics. This paper will articulate a severe critique on Balthasar’s theological aesthetics. Especially from the German political-theological perspective (in the tradition of J.-B. Metz and J. Wohlmuth) Balthasar is said to be caught in a totalising discourse—a claim which has serious ethical and political implications. In line with German critical theory (Frankfurter Schule), imagination, the production of images, risks to end up as an illegitimate identification of the O/other in an absolutised particular image—this is an aesthetic definition of totalitarianism. In order to counter this tendency, many contemporary theologians invoke Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, as this painting of Paul Klee appears in his notorious Thesen über die Geschichte (1939). Regarding the theological-aesthetic question, this disruptive angel as limit figure, figuring the limits of imagination and evoking a messianic flaw in the continuum of history, is contrasted with Balthasar’s figure of Christ (Christusgestalt). Balthasar’s theological aesthetics is accused of a dynamic of closure, especially because he develops his aesthetics in terms of incarnation.

This claim is suggesting a reductionist concept of incarnation as the delimitation of the transcendent within a concrete figure. My point, however, is not that it could be easily argued that this totalising figure of incarnation in fact corresponds to what Balthasar himself calls ‘titanism’, targeted again and again in his many critiques of ‘Promethean’ aesthetics. Instead I will consider the typological contrast between the Angel and the Incarnate as an invitation to work out a recurrent theme in Balthasar’s theological aesthetics: the exaltation of the Risen Christ above the angels. In an intriguing comment on Rilke’s Duineser Elegien e.g. Balthasar points to the fatal dynamic of the angel as figure of the modern imagination: the angel figuring an ever purer transcendence up to the degree of radical disappearrance, paradoxically resorts a totalising effect in the realm of immanence. Balthasar’s comments on the figure of angel at least problematise the anti-totalitarian use of the angel in contemporary theological aesthetics. More interesting however is Balthasar’s alternative to this ‘angelic aesthetics’: the way he works out the figure of the Risen Christ as the central figure of his aesthetics. This paper will investigate if the theme of the resurrection body allows Balthasar to figure the limits of imagination and beyond, between the Scylla of pure transcendence (the angel) and the Charybdis of totalising immanence (the titan).

Yves de Maeseneer, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Email: mailto:yves.demaeseneer@theo.kuleuven.ac.be

In his programmatic essay of 1919, On the Idea of A Theology of Culture, Paul Tillich identified a three-fold task for theology as theology of culture—‘firstly, a general religious analysis of culture, secondly, a religious typology and philosophy of cultural history and thirdly, a concrete religious systematisation of culture.’ As is well known, Tillich applied these three tasks to various different spheres of culture, in particular that of the visual arts. Whilst he never produced a systematic aesthetic theory, Tillich wrote extensively and widely on art and architecture. This paper aims to reconstruct, from Tillich’s various occasional pieces, a theology of art as an instance of his theology of culture consistent with the tripartite structure.

The paper further contends that Tillich’s theology of art exhibits some important tensions – between theology and aesthetics – which are illustrative of his overall project for a theology of culture, and the difficulties such a project encounters. Tillich, condemned to be forever on the boundary, struggles with the component elements of his theology of art, as he struggles with the complexities of the relations between a sacred theology and a secular culture. This is particularly clear in the case of theology of art because of the prominent position Tillich gives to visual art within culture and further his alleged adoption of conceptual categories drawn from aesthetic theory into the theoretical framework of theology of culture. In conclusion, however, this paper suggests that in spite of these tensions (or rather, perhaps, precisely because of them), Tillich’s reflections on the possibility of a theology of art remain a significant contribution to the debate concerning the relations between theology and aesthetics with continued contemporary relevance.

Russell Manning, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, Email: mailto:rrm24@cam.ac.uk

Karl Rahner’s thought on the importance of the role of the arts in the work of theology is the subject of this paper. In his reflections on this area he discussed, in particular, the contribution the visual arts and poetry can make to theology.

He emphasises that the arts ought not to be seen as being merely ancillary to theology and to the life of the church, but that they actually constitute as such real and relevant loci theologici. This assertion anticipates, and is in line with, fundamental assumptions in contemporary theological aesthetics, in particular the dialogue between theology and the arts. The paper will consider Rahner’s insistence that theology must not be reduced to the verbal. It will look at his ideas regarding the experience of the transcendent in art, and his emphasis on subjectivity in theology and in the arts. Moreover, his extensive discussion on the religious and theological significance of poetry will be part of the presentation.

A theme in Rahner will therefore be explored which until now has received only little attention.

Gesa Thiessen, Milltown Instiute, Dublin, Email: mailto:gtheissen@esatclear.ie

If religion in the first instance is not belief in religious truths, but faith in what can only be expressed in religious language as symbols and in rituals, imagination can become an important category in religion. In this paper human imagination is seen as a constitutive element in religion.

In this paper I want to search for the possibility of a concept of ‘religious emotions’ in which the emotions have a kind of intentionality and religion is seen as a kind of imagination. In order to find such a concept, I first want to explore the religious part: what does it mean to say that religion is a form of imagination? Having defined (very roughly) a specific concept of religion, I want to turn to the emotions and clarify the concept of intentionality in the recent debate on emotions a bit. My question is whether or not it would be possible to define intentionality of a (religious) emotion in such a way that the emotion is directed at something, when at the same time, however, this something cannot be defined more specifically than as stemming from human imagination.

Outline:

1. Religion as Imagination: G. Green: imagination as the point of contact between the divine and human beings.
2. Emotions and Intentionality: Intentionality in cognitivism and Peter Goldie’s modified cognitivism (feeling towards).
3. Religious Emotions: In the last section of this paper I want to show that it is possible to conceive of a concept of religious emotions in which on the one hand religion is seen as imagination and on the other hand emotions are intentional. (Järveläinen)

Desiree Berendsen, UFSIA Antwerp, Email: mailto:desiree.berendsen@ufsia.ac.be

When a theologian decides to engage in a reflection on the theme of the Descent into Hell, the use of religious imagination is indispensable given the absence of clear dogmatic definitions. The starting point of this exercise is always the New Testament. The proclamation by Peter on the day of Pentecost suggests that the resurrection of Christ implies a divine struggle with the powers of death (Acts 2:24). The suggestion in 1 Peter that even sinners will benefit from Christ’s proclamation in Hades (1 Pe 3:19–20) is an important support for theologians who do not want to restrict salvation to the righteous of the Old Testament. The most important restraint for an unconcerned defence of universal salvation remains the condemnation of the doctrine of the apokatastasis at the council of Constantinople in 553.

In the present paper I will take a number of artistic representations of the Descent into Hell as my point of departure, asking whether such images can stimulate a theological reflection on the theme of universal salvation. Thereafter I will investigate the arguments of two twentieth century theologians, each of whom defends a different position in the debate, i.e. Jürgen Moltmann and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Finally, I will express my sympathy for the distinction between apocalyptic and eschatological imagination proposed by James Alison. This distinction makes it possible to justify the Christian hope for the apokatastasis toon pantoon without expressing the latter conviction in a ‘dogmatic’ way.

The theme of the descent into hell has acquired a central place in Orthodox iconography. In contrast to the Western image of the resurrection from the grave, the eastern icon of the resurrection (anastasis) highlights the soteriological implications of the crucifixion. The christological function of the image is to indicate that the unity of Christ’s human soul and his divine nature remains intact even when Christ’s body lies in the tomb. The soteriological message is that the death of Jesus implies the defeat of the powers of death and the liberation of those who have been imprisoned by these powers. By lifting up Adam the new Adam simultaneously announces life everlasting for his offspring.

The link between the resurrection of Christ and the general resurrection becomes obvious when one sees pictures of the western wall of the church of S. Maria Assunta in Torcello, Italy, where an eleventh-century mosaic depicts the unique sequence Crucifixion-Anastasis-Last Judgement. The figure of the glorious Christ transcends the boundaries of the register of the anastasis to indicate that the same Christ will exercise God’s judgement on the Last Day.

It will be our contention that the option of God’s universal salvation has neither been affirmed nor denied in the available iconography of the theme of the Descent into Hell. A further theological reflection concerning the extent of Jesus’ saving act seems to be necessary.

In his recent christological and eschatological books, Moltmann expresses his firm belief in universal salvation on the basis of the work of Christ: ‘It is not the optimistic dream of a purified humanity, it is Christ’s descent into hell that is the ground for the confidence that nothing will be lost but that everything will be brought back again and gathered into the eternal kingdom of God.’

Von Balthasar’s reflections on Karsamstag offer a more nuanced reflection on the possibilities and restrictions of theological imagination. One has to find a middle way between the literal affirmation of the descent of Christ into the reign of death and a radical process of demythologisation that would lead to the rejection of the very theologoumenon. The tradition of the Descent into Hell reveals important insights such as the solidarity of the One Crucified with all the dead. After the Crucified experienced the reality of ‘godforsakenness’ in our place, death has ceased to be without hope. The content of Christian salvation offered by Jesus’ encounter with the realm of death, however, is not to be objectified. Balthasar explicitly warns against the extrapolation of a systematic theory of universal salvation on the basis of a legitimate expression of piety.

Alison appreciates the reservation made by Hans Urs von Balthasar, but believes that contemporary theology must defend the possibility that hell will appear to be empty. When the classical view of a definitive separation of the righteous and the sinners at the Day of Judgement is defended, even out of respect for human freedom, Alison considers this in line with René Girard to be a continuation of the spiral of violence. The theologian has to engage not in an exercise of apocalyptic imagination but rather of eschatological imagination This involves the acceptance of the idea of universal salvation, but not ‘as a system’, as ‘a story already told, with its beginning, its moment of high drama, and its happy ending’. ‘Would God that Origen’s profound intuition turns out to be right, and that at the end all manner of things are well for everybody and that even the most obstinate of Cains have learned to accept the forgiveness of our Abels. But there is a great difference between hoping in this possibility and suppressing hope by taking it for granted.’ A similar example of such an exercise of eschatological imagination is the thought experiment of Miroslav Volf, intended as an elaboration of the view of his teacher Moltmann, that the ‘time’ between death and eternal resurrection will allow for a post-mortem reconciliation between human beings and that only thereafter the apokatastasis toon pantoon will take place.

Peter De Mey, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Email: mailto:peter.demey@theo.kuleuven.ac.be

In his book Imagining God. Theology and the Religious Imagination (New York 1989) Garrett Green elaborates the Kantian definition of imagination – a faculty for representing an absent object – in to a human capacity to use paradigms to interpret the world. He argues that the religious imagination is the locus, the ‘point of contact’ of God’s meeting with human beings. Formally the imagination is where any content is understood; materially, the content of the Christian faith is given through God’s free grace. This enables the religious imagination to function properly, to imagine God aright. In the last chapter of his book, Green argues that the point of contact (the Anknüpfingspunkt) is a subject for the practical theology because it includes the question how the Word of God becomes effective in the human experience and action. The practical consequences of the theological imagination show how God’s Word meets the whole human being and transforms him. Green ascribes to the theological imagination an integrating power: it integrates human experiences of the different human possibilities and qualities. This integrative function allows an answer from the imagining subject’s side.

Green gives priority to God’s grace. God is independent and He is the active Subject. The human is dependent and passive object. Green uses paradigms as given things. But what if we consider paradigms, Christian as well, as human achievements both in their origins and modifications through the centuries? I don’t want to deny that a Christian believer is shaped by the paradigmatic structures of Christianity, but it is also human who have created and sustained them in his encounter with divinity. This means that there is a creative religious imagination which might be called the ‘theo-poetic’ evocation of the Presence instead of the ‘theo-logic’ representation of an absent object as Green seems to suggest.

In this paper, the role of the religious imagination will be explored from the perspective of the Christian liturgy. In response to Green, the creative imagination will be elaborated. The way in which the Christian community expresses their religious experience is by means of songs, prayers, rituals, objects, the architecture of the place of worship. These are all results of the creative imagination. What is this and how does it work? And what does it mean for our understandings of human, God and tradition?

Rosalie Kuyvenhoven, Faculty of Theology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Email: mailto:r.e.kuyvenhoven@th.vu.nl

The Ryoan-ji garden is part of a Zen temple complex of the Rinzai sect. Located on the northern outskirts of Kyoto, for a thousand years the capital of Japan, the rock garden was laid out sometime after 1486. It consists of a relatively small, ten-by-thirty meter area of raked gravel, marked off by a low earthen wall. The rectangular space contains 15 rocks of various sizes and shapes and the only plant life in the garden precinct itself is the moss that grows around the base of the rocks.

The combination of rock and gravel immediately bring to mind ink landscape paintings of mist-enshrouded mountains and flowing rivers, with the moss perhaps representing a grove of minuscule trees surrounding the mountain crags and the Zen tradition quite commonly employs metaphors of sacred topography. But while there are visual elements which clearly make iconic reference to mountains and rivers, the textual meanings conveyed in the Ryoan-ji garden are far more than a representation of ‘landscape-in-miniature’. The garden also draw its meaning from certain linguistic organizational principles and the underlying logic of writing, in terms of direction and shape.

Metaphors are regularly employed to communicate abstract subject matter and function as a way of extending resources of meaning. In the Ryoanji garden two separate but interwoven metaphors are at work: the metaphor of ‘mountains’ and the metaphor of ‘writing’. Certain material qualities are being exploited for the purpose of creating multiple analogies. The garden masterfully utilises this capacity for dual thematic interpretations in the way rock and gravel suggest the analogy ‘rocks and gravel are like mountains and rivers’ and the other, ‘rocks are like written characters on paper’.

This paper demonstrates how the Ryoan-ji garden is strongly multidimensional in its semiotic organizing principles and communicative purposes. My analysis of the Zen garden goes beyond the usual historical (and too often simply impressionistic) writings about the subject of Zen and Japanese aesthetics, by demonstrating the specific ways in which the Ryoan-ji garden acts as a textual exegesis: a way for complex philosophical perceptions and religious ideals to become tangible in topographical text form.

Sean McGovern, Setsunan University, Osaka, Japan, Email: mailto:mcg@rio.odn.ne.jp

Biblical narratives are religious stories, situated in history, and with literary pretensions. To clarify the rationality of faith which is based on biblical narratives, it therefore could be helpful to analyze historical and literary or fictional narratives. In these narratives metaphorical processes play an important role.

Metaphors work through a projection of ideas and concepts from one context onto another context. Due to this projection, a metaphor offers a new point of view upon reality. It (re)organizes our perception of the world. In doing so, a metaphor discloses reality. This process of disclosure is not just a discovery of reality, but (in a sense) also a creation of reality: a metaphor can redescribe or refashion the world. This power is not restricted to metaphors in a traditional sense. The same process can be noticed in narratives, as I hope to demonstrate.

Like metaphors, historical narratives give a proposal to look to the past from a certain point of view and in this way they organize our knowledge of the past. Only by way of such points of view, knowledge about the past can be put in language. Because each historian views the past from a different perspective, many images and narratives are needed to represent the past and the significance of historical reality. The historical narratives are not the result of the free imagination, but have to do justice to the past from a certain point of view, and are in principle open to tests.

The reading of fictional narratives can be considered as the dynamic activity of the productive imagination. Like the metaphorical projection, we project the world of the text onto our own world. In this way a narrative evokes an image of a world which has the power to redescribe our own reality.

Biblical narratives give an image of the past with a view on the present. They are the result of the productive imagination of the living tradition. Like metaphors, biblical narratives have a descriptive component as well as the power to redescribe reality. By imagining a world in which for example the Gospel would describe a possible state of affairs, we do refashion the world. Here begins the dynamic activity which has been indicated by Christians as the ‘imitation of Christ’.

Edwin Koster, Theological Faculty, Free University of Amsterdam, Email: mailto:E.Koster@th.vu.nl