If all time is eternally present/ all time is unredeemable.        -T.S. Eliot [1]

Perhaps one of our very conditions in being human is our aversion to the middle spaces.  They are uncomfortable, often indefinable, and the lack of clarity available within the middle space causes a repelling effect, that pushes either forward or backward, but most importantly, away from.  We want to be anywhere but here.  And yet, it is arguably here, within this middle space, where the God of our hope resides.  Part of the creaturely disposition is being subject to temporality, with all of the madness, chaos, and violence.  We long for the day when we will be in eternity, worshipping God, when all the constraints and evils of time have fallen away.  So being embodied creatures subjected to a very specific time frame, how does the role of the artist possibly reflect some truthfulness to time and eternity both?  Is there something within the hypostatic union of Christ that connects time with timelessness through Christ’s human career and the Triduum?  Christ has willingly entered into the humanly irresolvable paradox, the middle space that simultaneously bears and venerates time and eternity.  Beauty therefore is being true to the resurrected but wounded Christ who has entered into and bended time in order to redeem it. 

The Christian is called to these places of bended time, these middles that are “often defined by what they are not: the space, the years in between that which is no longer what came before and that which is not yet what will come later.”[2]  Surely these places in and of themselves have some sort of characteristics?  In a way, these middle spaces are not something we can define well, but they are something we feel, because we feel our desire to be away from and out of them.  These middle spaces are often felt because of our very desire to escape them.  If we can be rid of our earthly suffering, and our inability to make sense of the time in which we inhabit, then we can escape the very seeming meaningless that our time-ly-ness represents.  So even the fullness of our years figures this middle space, “somewhere between darkness and light: that is where we are as Christians.”[3]  Because we are creatures, we are in need; we are contingent upon our Creator.  So even as much as we would like to escape these middle spaces, the middle space actually creates the necessary conditions to be met and to encounter beauty.  Bruce Herman in an essay goes as far to say, “beauty cannot be encountered in its fullness apart from acknowledgment of suffering, aging, contingency and need.”[4]  These are the habitats of humanity, and God chose to enter into our condition rather than plucking us from it.  We live in these middle spaces, and God has met us there.  

The nature of our faith is that our God became God incarnate, and entered into our very condition, subject to temporality.[5]  We cannot disconnect the meaning of the death of Christ from his life, or his human career.[6]  The scriptures speak to this entrance into temporality as his human nature, while still holding the eternity of his divine nature.  To disconnect even Christ’s earthly life from the ongoing salvific narrative diminishes meaning.  For “the fact highlighted in the text that it is in and through time that God works out his purposes… the renewal of creation can begin only by a new and miraculous act of God, the making new of our humanity, which had become soiled and tired.”[7]  So the incarnation can be seen as one of the moments where Christ entered into temporality in order to bend time itself.  In the Emmanuel, the heavens and earth waited for the incoming; time stood still as it waited for the arrival of the Christ child.  And it is in this human career of Christ, that our search for meaning can find a resting place.  The life and death of Christ, holding both realities of: “time & timeless, stillness and movement, self and world, flesh and spirit.”[8]  Christ came into the place of time that for us has no meaning on its own.  History by itself does not present a form or pattern of meaning, let alone a hopeful one.  

Christ came into our middle space.  We have been called into these places because our God came to us and dwelt among us.  The subjectivity to temporality becomes redeemed in the incarnation, and human career of Christ.  In speaking about T.S. Eliot’s Quartets, Begbie sheds light on this incoming and its implications for time itself.  “Time seems to become nothing less than the vehicle of god’s providential and saving action.  This is of a piece with a far more time-laden vision of the incarnation, one which is able to embrace the entire story of all birth and deaths, in which the world’s time is not negated or set aside but healed.”[9]  In Christ, we have the example of not wishing for escape from our set time on earth, but hope for redemption of the very time we inhabit.

In our return to our search for beauty, we are looking for meaning amidst the violence of our past century.  In A Broken Beauty, Gordon Fuglie writes about why there is a renewed interest in the theme of beauty among artists:

Rather they seek a vision grounded in the realities of the present.  And given the widespread global, national, and ethnic violence that marked the last hundred years, it will come as no surprise to twenty-first century viewers that the humanity in the Broken Beauty artists draw, paint, and sculpt is marked by the long, sad legacy of that epoch- how could it not be and remain honest?  But that legacy does not have the final word; the humanity and transcendence in their works also embody hope.[10]    

There is something within the artist that is caught between the realities of the present and the hope that our faith holds to.  Within that, there is a desire for authenticity in representing what history has presented in its meaninglessness and violence, but also the beauty of Christ incarnate and resurrected. 

Perhaps returning to one idea of the role of the Christian artist is now fitting.  Since time is not something to be escaped but entered into, specifically because it is one of God’s vehicles, what is the artist’s role as they contemplate time?  Flannery O’Connor wrote out of this space, wondering how to bring the authenticity to both the chaos of felt time and future hope.  She asks some fitting questions about whether her role as a novelist contradicts or runs parallel to her identity as a Christian.  Rather than the belief that the Christian novelist must tidy up reality, or just reproduce the fallen perversions that they witness, she wonders: “just how can the novelist be true to time and eternity both, to what he sees and what he believes, to the relative and the absolute?”[11]  So from O’Connor’s example, we see the importance and possibility of:

 The sacramental act of creating something good that expresses, in concrete circumstances, the divine beauty of God… [her] prophetic vision, theological and artistic, is directed toward drawing together the physical and the spiritual; that is, the lived sensible world and the mysterious unseen reality that is eternally present… The responsibility of the religious artist is to [work] without denying the reality either of time or eternity and to acknowledge their meaningful relation to human life.[12]     

The Christian’s faith does not have to compromise their artistic work, and they can still be loyal to their craft without losing their faith.  This is the middle space of living between what is temporally true and what is eternally true.  O’Connor worked from a place where she believed this was actually her responsibility as a writer, as responsible both to the form of the novel, her own faith, and to her readers.  So what does it look like to work from this middle space, seeking to occupy a paradox?   

Therefore this is the work of the Spirit through Christ, that temporality is not escaped but entered into.  It is the realm of paradox because the chronology of history does not always bear meaning, form, and sense.  Gregory Wolfe writes:

To recognize this tension between the fragment and the whole, the finished and the unfinished, is to enter into the realm of paradox.  Paradox is not merely a game of logic but something almost sacred- an apparent contradiction that nonetheless hints at a deeper unity.  A paradox simultaneously respects reason and points us toward mystery, a place that reason alone cannot reach.[13]

This sacredness is where the Spirit dwells, and dwells in the paradox.  This too is a substitution, that the Spirit bears paradox where we as humans cannot bear too much of the paradox of reality.  

So Christ, by becoming embodied and subject to temporality, and the Spirit as dwelling in that realm of paradox, opens up our relationship to the middle space.  Lauren F. Winner writes about the lost linguistic middle voice, one representation of the middle space:

The middle is the language of spirituality, of devotion, the language of religious choreography.  It is the middle voice that captures the strange ways activity and passivity dance together in the religious life; it is the voice that tells you that I am changed when I do these things and that there is something about me that allows these happenings to happen; and yet it is the voice that insists that there is another agent at work, another agent always vivifying the action, even when unnamed.[14]

The Spirit is at work, witnessing the paradox between time and timelessness.  We are not alone in this middle space, but rather the Spirit dances through us in the animation of our work.  These truths do not necessarily fix things, but rather allow us to acknowledge the struggle within the middle space, even as the metaphor of the middle space applies to our entire human careers.  “The tension or struggle between eternity and time, and in particular, the problem of how we as human creatures can experience something of eternity’s stability despite living in time with its chronic instability and decay.”[15]  We are caught between the middle space of living within the instable and often chaotic temporality while still putting hope in the promise of eternity.  How these overlap, interpenetrate and co-mingle is perhaps one calling of the Christian artist to name.  

What has been suggested is that the Christian artist is the one who lives within the middle space, specifically by voicing both truths of the chaos of temporality and the hope of eternity, specifically because Christ became human and the Spirit empowered him to do the will of the Father.  We know what beauty is because of the wounds of Christ, who came not to escape time but to redeem time.  Christ entering into our temporality affords us this: “Beauty’s very woundedness is the occasion of redemption.”[16]  Whereas Bruce Herman does not necessarily go this far, it seems that one understanding of love could be defined as wounded beauty.  Christ’s broken body is what binds us together, as we partake in the Eucharist, creating community through the woundedness of beauty.  If our redemption rests on the fact that Christ, in love, entered into temporality and was wounded, then this is the place of beauty.  

And yet, beauty is not the first thing that comes to mind when we ponder the wounds of Christ.  Do we notice the paradox of eternity and temporality working both in and through the human career of Christ?  Do we see Christ in the darkness, the middle tints that may not necessarily sing on their own, but are enabled to because of the gradations that lead up to splashes of beauty?  Are we willing to linger in the middle and notice what we may not be looking for?  Perhaps here is where the words of Isaiah 53 begin to name the middle that Christ occupied.  “He was despised and rejected by men,/ a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering,/ like one from whom men hide their faces/ he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”[17]  Christ experienced the suffering and chaos, because he was subject to temporality.  His hypostasis held his humanity and divinity together, and his time on earth and his timelessness of eternity.  To return to the words of T.S. Eliot, what would it mean for our experience of time, if God had not come into its very structure?  Could we be redeemed any other way?

There may not be sure answers to these questions, but this paradox does point to yet another layer of paradox.  The wounded Christ is the foolishness of God, and in fact “Christ returns to the Father as the victim of human rejection and crucifixion, the embodiment of foolishness rather than the victorious champion.”[18]  And if the wounded Christ is the very foolishness of God, we remember that “the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.”[19]  God’s foolishness and Christ’s wounded body again stands in the place we cannot; paradox between temporality and eternity.  What we cannot bear and make sense of, Christ has entered, and made us beautifully foolish.  Time becomes redeemed as a continuation of creation moving toward the eschaton, and beauty is not prettiness, but woundedness transfigured.  “The marks of human history, indeed of human sinfulness, depravity, and injustice, are indelibly inscribed upon the flesh of the resurrected Lord.  These marks in no way tarnish the glory of the new creation, but rather those ‘those wounds yet visible above’ are ‘in beauty glorified.’”[20]  Our very aversion, Christ entered into.  What we wish to escape, Christ has borne and redeemed.  Time is taken up in his wounds, and becomes the vehicle of our redemption.  

1.  T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Collected Poems, 1909-1962, 181.
2. Lauren F. Winner, “Middles,” Image Journal no. 72 (2011-2012), 75.
3. Frederick Buechner, “Light and Dark,” in Clown in the Belfry (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 121.
4. Bruce Herman, “Wounds and Beauty,” in The Beauty of God, ed. Daniel J. Trier, Mark Husbands and Roger Lundin (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 112.
5. My point is less of an understanding of what Christ’s incarnation/death/resurrection actually accomplishes, or that God ultimately came to show us how we should live, but more so that God subjected Godself to the same conditions we experience, one of which is temporality.  Part of his humanity is to be fully human in having a set time on earth.  
6. I am borrowing this term from Colin Gunton, found throughout his work The Christian Faith, where he speaks holistically about Christ’s time on earth.
7. Colin Gunton, The Christian Faith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 100. Italics added.
8. Makoto Fujimura et al., Quartets (Salem, MA: Deschamps Printing, 2012), 7.
9. Jeremy Begbie, “Keeping in Time,” in Quartets (Salem, MA: Deschamps Printing, 2012), 76.
10. Gordon Fuglie, “A Broken Beauty and Its Artists,” in A Broken Beauty, ed. Theodore Prescott (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdsman Publishing, 2005), 2005.
11. Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), 177.
12. Susan Srigley, Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2004), 3.
13. Fujimuro, 7.
14. Lauren F. Winner, “Middles,” Image Journal no. 72 (2011-2012), 77.
15. Ibid., 72.
16. Bruce Herman, “Wounds and Beauty,” in The Beauty of God, ed. Daniel J. Trier, Mark Husbands and Roger Lundin (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 118.
17. Isaiah 53:3, New International Version.
18. Trevor Hart, “The Grammar of Conversation,” in Between the Image and the Word (Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 117.  Italics added.
19. 1 Corinthians 1:25, New International Version.
20. Steven R. Guthrie, “Beautiful, Beautiful Zion,” in Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 195.

The act of reading is often seen as a solitary, isolated, or even escapist activity.  To see reading this way is to focus on a narrowing of space as the reader retreats into themselves.  Not only does this narrow the space and draw the focus onto the reader, but the text itself becomes something that is consumed.  Quality is then based not on what the text says in craft, complexity or otherwise, but becomes based on the reader’s taste and if the reader was changed through the consumption.

To get beyond this individualistic understanding of reading, we need to redefine the boundaries of the space in which reading functions.  What would it look like to reimagine the act of reading as an expansive endeavor; one that actually opened up the self beyond its own limitations? If language is only something that we consume, and are or are not changed by, then the text becomes something that is completely subjectively used and then set aside, or even discarded.  I want to suggest that a more iconic appreciation of reading (whether text or image) is that it is an act that should be contemplated and not used.  Meaning becomes textually referential rather than self-referential, and the space that metaphor specifically opens allows reading to become a dynamic and imaginative activity.  Metaphor then is actually a central concern, and not poetic excess lingering at the periphery of how we make meaning of text and image.  Ideally, reading becomes a humble, iconic, and imaginative engagement with metaphor in which we are stretched beyond self-referential ways of using texts and images.

The way we relate to texts governs how we will interact with them.  Whether we regard texts and the reading of texts as raw material able to be consumed, or as differentiated entities that are to be contemplated, we must examine how it is we relate to art and our interactions with them.[1]   C.S. Lewis writes, “The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it.”[2]  Gregory Wolfe develops this idea of contemplating art rather than using it, and says “to use it is to abuse it.”[3]  To regard art as something that can be used is already to disregard its dignity and entity beyond the subjective view of self as viewer/reader.  Wolfe attributes this notion of using art to our inability to find proportions of truth, goodness, and beauty each with equal dignity and measure.  Our suspicion of beauty is that it can be counter to truth, and this can cause us to take from art rather than to experience it.[4]  Not only are truth, beauty, and goodness each entities with equal measure, but they can also be vehicles for the other.  For many however, the suspicion is that beauty cannot be a vehicle for truth.  Before engaging the nature of metaphor, it will be helpful to acknowledge and investigate where there is suspicion of metaphor that leads toward consumptive rather than contemplative acts of reading.     

The two paths of suspicion for understanding language worth noting here are rationalism and deconstruction.  Both of these ways of thinking have considerably impacted the way language is interpreted, expressed, and tied to meaning.  What is worth considering are the questions raised around both ways of thinking, and what may be conceptually borrowed from each in considering the role of metaphor.  Derrida specifically shifts philosophy and writing away from the world of ideas to the fallibility of the vehicle of language.  One example is the idea that language is frustratingly circuitous; language yields more language, which does not guarantee moving in the direction of meaning.  Rather the writing and reading of texts shows the tenuous nature of language itself to the meaning that is sought. In this way, language becomes a deferral of meaning, catching us within its own transmission.  Derrida’s work in shifting philosophy to textuality reveals these inabilities and shortcomings of language.

In terms of interpretation of the texts, not only is there a need to confront the possibility of an incomplete certainty, but also the awareness of “how everything is falling apart.”[5]  Derrida’s work calls into question not only how language functions, but the implications of that within our acts of reading and writing, such as the forces of signification: the act of signs always distancing themselves from other signs.  It is within this space between words that actually give words their meaning, spoken as a “productive negativity.”[6]  Therefore the question arising from this way of thinking about texts, language, and reading is: is there really anything there?

On the other hand, suspicion of metaphor in terms of rationalism poses that “meaning and truth are successfully conveyed only by means of concepts of an intellectual kind which have been purified as completely as possible from all imaginative content.”[7]  In explaining this type of conceptual rationalism, Colin Gunton goes on to say that “concepts are strictly distinguished from and opposed to pictures and images: while the former are fitted to convey truth, the latter are, because of their unclarity, the source of deceit and confusion.”[8]  So not only do words need to be stripped of all superfluousness and poesis, but in this overly rationalistic mindset, images downright deceive.  Because of this desire for clarity and directness, “metaphor becomes disqualified from being a means of our rational interactions with the world: unless is ceases to be metaphor, it cannot tell the truth.”[9]  Metaphor becomes an enemy of truth, not the vehicle.

In the face of this suspicion, Jeremy Begbie asserts that metaphor is not an enemy of truth, particularly because it is oriented to an object, and even creates bonds through language.[10]  The profound success of metaphor is that it is indirect, though through the fusion of the seemingly incompatible, there can be a burst of meaning.  Even the way we speak about language is a metaphor therefore the relationship between language and the world is indirect.[11]  Because of this very indirectness, metaphor becomes the most appropriate way to know the world.[12]  Here Gunton disqualifies the idea of clarity and distinctiveness as necessary parts of truth, and instead returns to the indirectness of metaphor as holding together the “affirmation that ‘it is’ with the vital qualifier that, even so, ‘it is not.’”[13]  David Brown speaks about metaphors in this way: “They do after all both affirm something to be the case and yet refuse complete identification and closure.”[14]  The indirectness of metaphor is what contributes to its success of relating our language to reality.  This purchase of metaphor makes them “not odd, unusual, improper or merely decorative.  They are so persuasive a part of our experience that they are a, if not the, clue to what language is and does.”[15]  Metaphor becomes something that is not only for artistic endeavors, but more integral to the way we use language to understand, make meaning, and connect to our world.  The function of metaphor, in giving or receiving, is an imaginative exercise that advances our understanding, particularly and not detrimentally, in its indirectness.

So the claim that metaphor has the potential to create more space, due to its indirect way of relating language to reality begs the question of how this may occur.  Additionally, why might this be a necessary construct for how we interpret text and image?  The suspicion of beauty sees metaphor as excess and not essential, but if metaphor is truly a way in which we interpret the world, then the ‘indirect purchase’ on reality in which the metaphor presents must be taken into account.  When the only reference to a work is the self, the viewer/reader uses the texts for their purposes.  In a way, this is what would be considered ‘closed’ or ‘fixed’ meaning.  When we are open to contemplate and are able to respond to a work, we will less likely use it for our own purposes.  This openness allows for more of an ‘open’ meaning, and allows the work to speak, albeit often indirectly and suggestively.  Being open to a work is an imaginative activity, which Paul Ricoeur describes the role of metaphor as having the ability to redescribe reality.[16]  The question of image or word dominance becomes irrelevant because the role of metaphor connects word to image and image to word.  In the search of a Christian understanding of word and image, they are intricately connected through the incarnation.  This precludes the idea that word based or image based endeavors are more successful than the other, because they are inextricably held in tandem.  

Hart explains this practice of believing in two distinct tiers of intellectual engagement (through image and word) as a mistake, specifically because “the fact of the incarnation eschews any neat or convenient bifurcation between word and image.”[17]  They are more interwoven and they also mutually illuminate the other.  Trevor Hart writes: “the lesson to be learned from Christology, and applied more widely is that the levels of image (eikon) and idea/concept (logos) must constantly be held closely together, generating meaning precisely and only as they are maintained in a dialect where each is constantly qualified and rejuvenated by the other.”[18]   

So part of being open to a work is being aware of the metaphor; how image and word are at work.  The temptation, to return to Lewis is to use art, and when that happens “you don’t lay yourself open to what it, by being in its totality precisely the thing it is, can do to you.”[19]  The role of metaphor becomes not only an imaginative endeavor but a humble one.  Lewis makes this distinction as an act of humility, that in reality, “the first demand that any work of art makes upon us is surrender.”[20]  Purely subjective reading runs the danger of being consumptive, whereas Lewis is calling readers to open to the realities of the text that exist beyond themselves.  This is where Lewis introduces the idea of the humility of the icon, in that the point is not to fix attention upon itself but rather being a conduit of passing through to something beyond itself.[21]  Returning to the metaphoric qualifier of ‘it is and it isn’t’ can also be understood in these iconic forms.  Thomas Torrance describes open meanings, which permit us to ‘look through’ words rather than ‘looking at’ them.[22]  Although Torrance’s argument continues down a path of the conceptual rationalism that Gunton introduces, the idea of the iconic use of language (without its need to be stripped of its metaphorical or pictorial content) is a useful one.  Specifically, iconic use of language reveals the distrust and desire to remove image from word, and the desire to deny that the experience of art is an imaginative activity rather than a consumptive one.  It is the difference of “nothing is really there” and “something is really there” that are both possibilities arising from the idea of open meaning.  What becomes suspicious in light of Christian reading is that open meaning feels like the loss of truth.  What if actually our hesitation with metaphor as essential rather than excess has to do with our uncertainty of the interconnectivity between images and words and the idea that metaphor and open meaning is the enemy of truth?

Returning to the idea of incarnation, Hart proposes that we must maintain “apophatic humility without compromising or attenuating the significance of the claim that the Logos of God is always an enfleshed logos.”[23]  Through Christ, the word self-presents as physical and the physical re-presents as word.  Image and word are bound, inseparable, not to their disservice, but to their merit.

The incarnate and simultaneous relationship between word and image prevents the full embrace of the suspicion of metaphor present in rationalism and deconstruction.  Rationalism expects that language must be stripped of image in order to be true, and deconstruction expects that there is so much semantic slippage that nothing is truly there.  So the humble imaginative reading of image and/or word becomes what George Steiner calls a wager on transcendence.[24]  It is the assertion that something is really there, as the reader/viewer dances between closed and open meaning in hopes of being surrendered to the work.  Hart sums it up in this way:

Both Torrance and Gunton would, I think, see due intellectual humility (and hence demand for openness, indirectness and imaginative semantic surplus in our speech and thought) as proper to all properly objective knowing, and a vital counterpoint, therefore, to whatever efforts in the direction of the precise determination and tight definition of terms may legitimately arise in our dealings.  Only thus can we both ‘fix’ meaning sufficiently to think and speak and write in a coherent manner about things at all, and yet, at the same time, allow reality to enforce constant modifications and adjustments to those meanings, rather than leaving them ‘fixed’ in some once and for all manner and thus blind and deaf to further insights and discoveries.[25]

Here Hart outlines the possibility of metaphor to communicate meaning, and that the indirect nature of it still demands an openness of us as readers.  The use of language can be concrete enough in order to communicate, but does not rule out changes and modifications that language inevitably undergoes.  The ability of the viewer/reader to remain open to the work, approaching with humility and imagination, allows the interconnectivity of the word (and the images it evokes) and the image (and the words it evokes) to connect us with our realities.  

Returning to the idea of the importance of the incarnation, Ricoeur introduces the texture of narrative within the biblical word: “life of the word occurs through the death of the body.”[26]  The word made known through the biblical text is read through the lens of the bodily death of Christ.  Even still, this death does not mean an absence of flesh (image) but a resurrected (redeemed) one.  On the other hand, it is the very “broken image”[27] that opens us up to the world, and “permits the world in its turn to enforce changes in the meanings that our words bear.”[28]  Therefore the life and death of Christ shows not only the simultaneity of image and word, but also the transformation each undergo.  The word became image, the image was then broken, and this becomes the metaphor in which we understand our reality.  

Understanding the role of metaphor then becomes crucial to how we read a text or image.  Ideally, each work invites the viewer/reader to the risk of contemplating the presence of something beyond not only the self, but the physicality of the work.  Our cultural suspicion of beauty and desire for pure clarity push the metaphor into the margins, and cause us to use art for nothing more than how we want to.  In order to receive what the work has to offer, we must be willing to ponder how a work respects mystery, constructs its language, while still giving glimpses of transcendence.  We must enter into the enlargement of space that metaphor provides, and the into imaginative activity to which word and image beckon us.

1. I am using the term art here, as Lewis does in this section, to represent both verbal/text and visual/image.  We will return to this idea later when we examine the role of metaphor and why they can be used interchangeably.

2. C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 19. Emphasis added.

3. Gregory Wolfe, “Why Using Art is a Sin,” Lecture, [trans]formation Conference Seattle, February 28th, 2015.

4. Reminiscent of the writings of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, especially within The Glory of the Lord, that theology must actually begin from a place of beauty

5. Carl Raschke, “Derrida and Post-structuralism,” Lecture, Philosophy II from The Seattle School, June 5th, 2014.

6. Ibid.

7. Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 17.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 30.

10. Jeremy Begbie, “Faithful Feelings,” Lecture, Emotional Life of Artists Retreat, Kerrville TX, April 30th, 2015.  Gunton also writes that metaphor “brings expression to some but not all aspects and relationships of the segment of the world to which it is directly.” See Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 34.  Metaphor, though indirect, is still directed to an object.

11. “The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who then takes the objects out of the containers.”  See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.  Even when we try to break down the language we use about language, we run into metaphor.  This does not even take into account the complexities of contextual hearers and speakers.

12. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 38. One of Gunton’s working definitions of metaphor involves the transfer of a word from one context to another.

13. Trevor Hart, Between the Image and the Word (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 26.

14. David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.

15. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 32

16. Paul Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 216-256.

17. Hart, 34 & 77.  Also Ricoeur writes about this mutually illuminative process in terms of intertextuality, as the embedded narrative revealing the symbolic potentialities of the encompassing narrative.  Interestingly he calls this process metaphorization, as the process between the two texts.  See lis: Fortress Press, 1995), 144-166.

18. Trevor Hart, Between the Image and the Word, 33

19. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 17.

20. Ibid. 

21. Ibid.

22. Thomas Torrance, Theological Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 20 as quoted in Hart, Between the Image and the Word, 27.

23. Hart, 34.

24. See George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything In What We Say? (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 229.

25. Hart, 26.

26. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 163.

27. Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 46

28. Hart, Between the Image and the Word, 37.