God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and Theology 1st Edition

In God and the Creative Imagination, Paul Avis attempts to develop a critical realist perspective on religious and theological language which does justice to the particularly metaphorical nature of its content. In the first page, Avis provides his thesis that `Christianity lives supremely from the imagination.' That is, revelation occurs in linguistic modes that are supremely related to the human imagination, namely metaphor, symbol and myth. Avis claims that without this true knowledge of the imaginative nature of Christianity, `we cannot ourselves truly believe.' The question he attempts to answer is the question of the veracity of the Christian faith in light of its `imaginative provenance.'Avis suggests, intriguingly, that modern and postmodern thought tends toward a denigration of the truth-bearing capacities of the imagination and attempts to demonstrate this through a rather inchoate explication of recent philosophical developments. In chapter 2, `The Imagination in Modernity,' his preference for analytic philosophy becomes quite clear. Avis defines modernity in relation to the project of analytical philosophy at the turn of the 20th century, particularly that of logical positivism. For Avis, then, modernity is the search for clarity in description, a privileging of the literal to the status of truth and a radical prejudice against the figurative.Avis suggests that postmodernity sustains the same dualism of modernity, i.e. between reason and imagistic thinking, yet instead denigrates rationality for pure subjective images. For the postmodern, there is no truth in the imagination, for the image is a product of human creativity, nothing more. Thus, no one can escape the subjectivity of her own social and personal projections and reach truth. In response, Avis attempts to develop a philosophy of the symbol which unites both the modern and postmodern emphases through a critical realist theology which unveils the symbolic and mythic structures of Christian religion and theology. For Avis, realist merely means that revelation is possible, and at least some truth exists in theological reflection, though only insofar as thinkers realize the symbolic nature of revelation.In order to demonstrate his conviction of Christianity's imaginative (not imaginary!) nature, Avis attempts to trace the lineaments of an `alternate tradition' in Christian theology, rooted in Augustine and culminating in the English Romantics. Avis proposes that it is precisely the Romantic conception of the imagination which is the best analogy in creation to the nature of God. Thus revelation occurs through the medium of the imagination: metaphor, symbol and myth. Thus, for Avis, one can not say `God is love' in any literal sense, but as a metaphor, `God is love' is a powerful symbol of the Christian faith, which reminds us of the centrality of love to Christianity. It is impossible to know what exactly the metaphor tells us about God, but we know it teaches us how to live.Though Avis attempts to preserve the integrity of revelation by preserving its transcendental qualities vis-à-vis the created world, he overemphasizes the point and unwittingly tends toward a denigration of the goodness of creation itself, precisely because he retards its ability to bear divine truth. Divine truth, for Avis, is only a literary phenomenon and impossible outside of imaginative contexts. Revelation becomes too great, too pure and too good to mingle with the fallen world of becoming in a significant sense. This results in a Gnostic-like dualism of the metaphysics that underlies his thought, which he is at terrible pains to avoid, even denying it outright.The Gnostic quality of Avis's thought regarding the inability of revelation to be found in the material world accords with his surprising epistemological gnostification that without true knowledge of the imaginative nature of revelation `we cannot understand the Christian faith' and even `we cannot ourselves truly believe' (3). Further, Avis's lack of regard for the physical world's revelatory capacities has two more implications: His Anglican advocacy of sacramentalism becomes empty resulting in a doctrine of the Incarnation that is undescriptive and hollow. For Avis, though he uses the same historic language about creation and the sacraments as orthodox Christians, it is extremely hard to tell what exactly he means by creation's `inherent capacity to reflect the creator' (108) and `symbols of the sacred are sacred themselves because they participate in what they represent' (110). Real presence for Avis can only mean something less than what the Church has historically understood because Avis can not allow the divine real, historical presence in the world. The best Avis can say of the Incarnation is that it is ultimately a myth (the historical veracity of which cannot be analyzed) and can only be studied as such, and that Jesus is the `metaphor of God' (111) and `at least a human being uniquely open to God' (174).Avis fails at his task of a reconciliation of the modern/postmodern dualism and ends up merely advocating a postmodern primacy of images and Christianizes it by seeking to fill them with veridical content vis-à-vis the literal excesses of modern rationalism in which he finds no possibility of revelatory import. Without the historicity of the Incarnation, one cannot have a sacramental theology or a right understanding of the nature of symbols for Christianity.In presenting his conception of the theological imagination, Avis deconstructs virtually every historical event central to the Christian faith, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, even casting doubt on the historicity of the resurrection from the dead (169-74). For Avis, Christ seems to exist only as a mere symbol in the consciousness of believers. In this sense, Avis is clearly an advocate of Tillich's symbolic theology and this book can be seen as an ambiguous extension of Tillich. Avis leaves one wondering what he actually believes, if anything, and why he considers himself to be a Christian.However, Avis is right, and terribly so, in suggesting that the imagination is an essential locus of inquiry in theology today. Yet, his conclusions are far from satisfactory. His implicit denial of the goodness of creation resulting from his less than full incarnational theology is manifest in his truncated theology of the symbol which lacks the depth of a real sacramental theology. It seems that a proper theology of the religious imagination should be founded on an orthodox understanding of the sacramentality of nature rooted in a historical conception of the Incarnation. Only here can the relationship between imagination and revelation be rightly understood.