God in the Gallery (Cultural Exegesis): A Christian Embrace of Modern Art

worry about a Platonic or Kantian (or Hegelian) approach to the image that reduces the image to meaning—to how, that is, the image points beyond itself to a significance located elsewhere. The image, in the view these picture theorists criticize, is oriented toward the transcendent in a way that devalues it.

I would suggest that the position with the most theological coherence and historical validity would be best encapsulated this way: God is, and always has been, at work in every culture planting the seeds of Christ even though it may not be communicated in the exact grammar of the traditional Christian lexicon. With Christ as the hermeneutic key, th

“the arts in worship ought to be freed to form the church in their own ways though not on their own terms.”

Horst Bredekamp argues that images bear an agency (a presence) that is reducible neither to the projections of the viewer