Pictures at a Theological Exhibition

Scenes Of The Church'S Worship, Witness And Wisdom

Kevin Vanhoozer

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781783594269
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783594757
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Many Christians are held captive by a picture of the imagination as a purveyor of false images, prone to idolatry. We live in a society fixated on images that have little or no significance. We are surrounded by models of the world that are not in touch with any truth outside of themselves. But we lack the resources to see and imagine things differently.Kevin Vanhoozer calls the church to a more biblical and premodern picture, one that sees every particular person, thing and event in the light of God's act of reconciling the world to himself in Christ. Through essays on the church's worship, witness and wisdom, Vanhoozer shows us how a poetic imagination can answer the questions of life's meaning by drawing our attention to what really matters: the God of the gospel.

Notes

Preface

1Most notably, in The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005) and Faith Speaking Understanding: Performing the Drama of Doctrine (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014).

2Elsewhere I advocate a “theological arc” that moves from naïve to illumined understanding of the Bible, with conceptual analysis as a necessary middle stage. See my “Love’s Wisdom: The Authority of Scripture’s Form and Content for Faith’s Understanding and Theological Judgment,” Journal of Reformed Theology 5 (2011): 247-75.

Introduction: The Discarded Imagination

1Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1991), 5.

2Plato, The Republic, Book X.

3Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985).

4George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000).

5Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

6See esp. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989).

7See Barton Swaim, “Novel Ideas,” Touchstone (November/December 2009): 13-14.

8C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 12.

9Another way of describing the “big evangelical picture” would be to speak of “the biblical metanarrative” or, simply and succinctly, what is “in Christ.”

10Lewis, The Discarded Image, 39.

11See, for example, Arthur Peacocke, A Naturalistic Faith for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009) and Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

12On the theme of “emergence” in science and religion, see Philip D. Clayton, Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), part two.

13C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 34.

14Lewis, The Discarded Image, 202-15.

15Ibid., 211.

16So George Caird: “In biblical terminology the heart is not the seat of the emotions, but stands for the whole inner self, without any tripartite division of will, intellect, and feelings” (Paul’s Letters from Prison [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976], 45).

17For an extended discussion of this claim, see Alison Searle, “The Eyes of Your Heart”: Literary and Theological Trajectories of Imagining Biblically (Milton Keynes and Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2008), 33-40 and Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 108-13.

18James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 25.

19Ibid., 26.

20See Smith’s incipient philosophical anthropology in part one of his book, which defines human beings as “desiring, imaginative animals.” Ibid., 60.

21See, for example, ibid., 52-53. I shall return to this point below in my discussion of the “social imaginary.” Nothing less than biblical authority as it relates to the life of the church is at stake in my debate with Smith over the cognitive status of the imagination.

22By “cognitive” I simply mean what pertains to mental rather than bodily action. In the words of Alan R. White: “To imagine something is to think of it as possibly being so” (The Language of Imagination [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990], 184; emphasis original).

23Jesus’ parables are “metaphoric narratives,” that is, metaphors writ large or extended. See Paul Ricoeur, “Biblical Hermeneutics,” Semeia 4 (1975): 29-148 and Nicholas Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom: Symbol and Metaphor in New Testament Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1976). We will return to metaphor below.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Discarded Imagination: Metaphors by Which a Holy Nation Lives
• Foyer: Before the Promenade (Prolegomena)
• Gallery One: Pictures of the Church’s Worship
• Gallery Two: Pictures of the Church’s Witness
• Gallery Three: Pictures of the Church’s Wisdom
• Conclusion: The Man with the X-Rho Eyes
• Notes
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• Search items for Scripture references