Tag: Faith Integration

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Representation: Part 3

I’ve been working this week on a view of representation that takes into account Christian presuppositions. You can find my earlier posts here and here.

In what follows I respond to the nine points made by WJT Mitchell in his essay on the topic for the Critical Terms in Literary Study volume. I put his points in italics and mine in bold. The point is to sketch out ways in which the Christian description and deployment of the term “representation” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.

  1. The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis) and that humans are symbol making creatures. At the heart of God is the Son’s perfect representation of the Father (Heb. 1:3). At the heart of creation is the Logos creating the universe and calling it good (Gen. 1) which implies that creation is a perfect creative representation of what God intended to make. Moreover, both men and women are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). So the study of literature begins by acknowledging that humans are not just symbol-making creatures. They are symbol-made creatures who reflect a symbol-making God.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country. Representation is not just aesthetic or political; it is spiritual. Or rather, because it is spiritual, it is necessarily aesthetic and political. Representation is at the heart of the godhead. It manifests itself in our being as creatures made in God’s image. We live in a world sustained by God’s eternal Word. Any field of study that asks us to consider representation gets us closer to understanding metaphysical truth.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth. While this claim may be true ethically (i.e. the right or wrong uses of human representation) it is not true metaphysically. For the reasons listed above, I don’t think a Christian cannot agree that representation has a necessary cost. Our image-bearing nature is premised on distance. Creation reflects God’s power and glory. He called it good although it was different than him. Christ was not suddenly sinful because he became a person. We were only able to see the Father truly because of that representation. After the fall humans can and do use God-given tools (e.g. logic, language) for ethically malicious ends, but that is different than saying that there is a cost always built into representation. In fact, it is because of representation that redemption is possible (Rom. 5:12-15).
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible. It’s telling that the perfect representation of God, Christ, is the Bible character who uses the most blatantly literary form: the parable.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication. This is ethically true before redemption, but God’s word will always accomplish what it was intended to accomplish (Isaiah 55:11) which means that even in an ethically fallen world, the metaphysics of representation are not tainted.
  6. Representation has always had its skeptics, from the philosophical (e.g. Plato) to the religious (e.g. any religion that prohibits idols) to the aesthetic (e.g. modernism and its rejection of representational art). The God of Christianity is both transcendent and immanent. The law forbids graven idols or images (Exodus 20:4) but establishes symbols and types that will represent the divine. God wants to communicate with humanity. He does so through creation, his revealed word, and ultimately Christ. Christianity is wary about representation primarily because of how crucial it is to the nature of God, creation, and humanity.
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone. My problem with this model is that it means that the audience (the one who receives the representation) is the only necessary agent in the process. It leaves the agent representing TO someone blank, as though all we can talk about is a person who imputes meaning after the fact. If the Christian story is true, then meaning and representation are ethical and personal because they both begin with God. Creation itself represents God’s glory (Psalm 19:1, Romans 1:20), and the Psalmist and Paul tell us we should be able to discern from creation the existence of the one who created the world. (Note: my thinking here is not as clean and precise as it should be.)
  8. You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent via arbitrary signs. Writing is the third of these. This taxonomy gives us a way of thinking about the differences among Christ (God’s icon), people (God’s index), and the Bible (God’s symbolic revelation). One note: just because symbolism can be arbitrary doesn’t mean it has to be, however.
  9. Our theory of representation plays a key role in how we interpret the identity of a work of art, that art’s meaning, the integrity of the author, and the validity of any interpretation of that art. Truth. That’s why it matters if Christian presuppositions clash with those of scholars like Mitchell.
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The Opposite

This paragraph appears in the preface of the Christian Worldview Integration Series.

By contrast, the Bible presents faith as a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true. Understood in this way, we see that faith is built on reason and knowledge. We should have good reasons for thinking that Christianity is true before we completely dedicate ourselves to it. We should have solid evidence that our understanding of a biblical passage is correct before
we go on to apply it. We bring knowledge claims from Scripture and
theology to the task of integration; we do not employ mere beliefs or
faith postulates.

Here, Francis Beckwith and J.P. Moreland argue that faith comes out of our knowledge, that because something is reasonable we will believe it.

In other circles I have seen people describe this process as one where faith makes up the gap between what we can know and the truth of the world. Our reason and knowledge may get us 65% there, but faith is able to fill that remaining 35% because it is built on that sure foundation.

The problem is that this is flies in the face of what scriptures teach about all wisdom beginning with the fear of God and our acceptance of facts (e.g. eyewitness accounts of Christ) being less important than revelation. As Augustine argues, faith provides the foundation for reason, not vice versa. We understand because we believe.

Beckwith and Moreland are right to distance themselves from a faith that is inimical to logic and evidence, but the only way we can have confidence in that logic and in the facts we find is because of our ultimate faith in God.

This is an easier point for me to make here than actually consistently live out, so I pray that as I read, talk, and learn I will discover how this crucial distinction has real consequences.