IMAGES OF GOD IN TIME AND SPACE

Theology Today, Jul 2004 by Henry, Patrick

I am eight or nine years old. I am playing Bach on the upright piano in the living room. Though it is a simplified arrangement of a Bach fugue, the lines of music move away from and back to each other, never merging or separating, like windblown ribbons on the tail of a kite. I forget that I am playing, and I slip through the lines to the other side of the music where I understand all that was, is, and will be. When the music ends, however, I return to this side and cannot remember what I understood.5

Two features of this reminiscence are especially germane to my argument. First is the very common expression of mystical regret: Lester admits, wistfully, that he can't remember what he understood. But he does remember that he understood, and even a faint recollection of such knowledge makes all the difference and suffices for a lifetime. Second, the lines of music move away from and back to each other, never merging or separating. The ancient problem of the one and the many presents itself to us in many guises. The one is the loneliness of the long-distance runner. The many is the obliteration of all individuality, as in the Borg collective that periodically intrudes, to ghastly effect, on episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The problem of the one and the many cannot be solved in the space and time presided over by God the king with schemes. In such a universe, the problem is given with the initial conditions, is embedded in the way things are. Either/or distinctions proliferate, are fruitful and multiply. Either/ors have bedeviled humankind and still do, in part because our imaginations remain stuck in a space of fixed points and in a time of one damned thing after another.

Science has outrun our imaginations. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, at the conclusion of a paper on elementary particles, said to his colleague Niels Bohr, "You probably think these ideas are crazy." Bohr replied, "I do, but unfortunately they are not crazy enough."6 I want now to ponder some of the crazinesses that are presented to us these days as the way space and time really are and try to hint at what happens to images of God in such an environment.

THANK GOD FOR THE SECOND COMMANDMENT

First, though, I want to give thanks for the biblical prohibition of images of God. The prohibition is not, of course, absolute: If we admit that words are a kind of picture, the Bible is teeming with images of God. But language is fluid, and we're not locked into particular images-even, I might say, images of kingship. We are told that we are made in God's likeness, but we are under no obligation to think that monarchs, or men, for that matter, are better representations of God than are shoemakers or women. Making the maleness of Jesus a criterion for judging anything, including the fitness of women to represent Christ at the altar, seems to me a gross violation of the second Commandment. The biblical prohibition of images is a precondition for the expansion of our images of God along with the expansion of the universe.