THE LIVING GOD AND HIS OR HER IMAGE

In the ancient world people imagined a god or a goddess by referring to a double ‘image’ of the divine being: one is the invisible and immaterial god in opposition to the visible and material world of humankind; the other represents it as a material image, in shape and size almost that of a human being. As I will argue in this chapter, most people were aware of the difference between these two images. Christians, however, accused their pagan adversaries of confusing the two – by taking the material representation as the invisible living god, they worshipped a dead stone, a tree or a beast. Yet the Christians themselves blurred the border between the divine and humankind, since they identified the invisible god with the material and visible man Jesus. They developed this notion by looking back to an older discourse on adequate images of divine beings:

1. a discourse on Pheidias' masterpiece of the Olympian Zeus as the ideal representation of the invisible god;

2. a parallel discourse which argues that the relation between the invisible god and the material man called his son can be understood in the same framework as the relations between god and his image. In this respect the man Jesus Christ is the material visible image of God.