The Logic of Religious Images

Since I am one of that band of people involved in alt.worship for whom the rediscovery of iconography has importance, how could I pass up this article. [Incidently if you don't like signing up to access articles you can find the full thing at a site that may raise eyebrows for some of you]. First it grapples with the difficulty noted by "Yehezkel Kaufmann, on page 13 of his vast work, translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg as "The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile" (Schocken Books, 1972), [who] remarks: "A great part of biblical literature is dedicated to the battle against idolatry, striving to expose its absurdity and discredit it in the eyes of believers. When this material is examined it appears... that the sole argument advanced against pagan religion is that it is a fetishistic worship of 'wood and stone.'" In other words non fetishistic use of imagery is not condemned by the prophetic tradition. The further difficulty is that, given what we know of the use of images in most pagan religions, it is unlikely that many of the pagans at the time of Isaiah [whichever one] actually had a fetishist attitude but rather an eikonic one ... where the symbolic meaning of something somewhat abstracted is important not the actual form. What of the state where worshippers do not understand themselves to be worshipping the materials but rather the reality to which they are taking the materials to point, God? It is hard to see how this is in principle different from the position of words; verbal symbols pointing to a reality.

The argument may be that words are more capable of exactly defining what is meant whereas images are polysemous and polyvalent. I think that this is only superficially and apparently true. In fact words are pretty polyvalent and rely on context and shared understandings to enable them to highlight shared meanings between speaker/writer and hearer/listener. Similarly in Pictures. What you do have in pictures is a whole lot more information and therefore more possibilities for 'reader' response than with one-dimensionaly words.

So I still say that the James Packer line that crucifixes are bad because they fail to proclaim the resurrection is misguided. It is no worse that writing on a church billboard "We procalim Christ, and him crucified" -which also fails to proclaim the resurrection and is ambiguous in that it could be read to separate Christ from some anonymous person who was crucified ... our context and cultural background supplies the identity of the two characters in that quote.

I liked this historical note in the article:
"For more than 500 years after the death of Buddha, traditionally put at 480 BCE, there was no representation of him in human form. He was, instead, represented by a footprint, symbolizing the notion that he preached a Path. Hindu images with many arms and heads developed well over a thousand years after the highly philosophical discourses of the Upanishads."

Early Christians were known as followers of the way, perhaps a footprint instead of the now maligned-by-overuse-and-misuse Ichthus symbol ... ?
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