The Theological Imagination
Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith
Judith Wolfe slips a photograph of Timothy Schmalz’s 2013 sculpture Homeless Jesus into the end of the third chapter of her learned, slender new book. She doesn’t comment on the image per se—she parenthetically refers the reader to it after a brief mention of Matthew 25. But the photograph may be taken as a synecdoche of her argument. Or, better, my response to it: my seeing in the photograph a sculpture, and then seeing in the sculpture the shape of a man asleep on a bench, and then seeing in that rough sleeper not only the Jesus of Matthew 25 but also of Matthew 8:20, and then connecting the image to the similar sculpture which sits in front of my own church.
My response illustrates Wolfe’s argument. Human beings characteristically see patterns and make connections. Christians ought to celebrate that faculty and receive it as part of how we find our way to God. It’s clever that Wolfe does not say much about the photo. Her taciturnity allows the reader’s imagination to perform the book.
Throughout The Theological Imagination, Wolfe draws analogies between people’s encounters with art and Christians’ encounters with God. The imaginative faculty that allows human beings to discover something in a painting or a concerto is the same faculty that allows us to discover God, and to discover God’s traces in the world. “Christian faith . . . brings to things in general some of the attitudes that people ordinarily bring to works of art,” she writes, “an expectation that there is something here to be found, and a willingness to participate in its utterance.” And the anxieties that sometimes beset us when looking at, say, Georges Braque’s Violin and Candlestick (Is what I think I’m seeing in the painting really there to be seen, or am I just making it up?) are analogous to anxieties we sometimes have about God—because my capacities to see patterns and depth allow me both to sense God and to respond to a painting. (And, were I a painter, they’d be the same capacities that allow me to see in a violin and a candlestick a relationship that should be painted.)
