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Research project In-visibilis - Visibility and Transcendence in Religion, Art and Ethics

September 1, 2010-December 31, 2012.

The project In-visibilis - Visibility and Transcendence in Religion, Art and Ethics establishes a broad and extended, but also a concise and probing field of discussion by uniting synchronic and diachronic structures and textual as well as material sources, and by investing multipronged theological competences in a cross-curricular field of research.

Four main sub-themes, which both in tradition and in recent research are of central importance to the questions on visibility and invisibility, are covered. All four apply, though in different degrees, to the areas of religion, art and ethics.

Human existence between visibility and invisibility

The project takes its starting point in Martin Luther, who articulated the relation between visibility and invisibility with particular sharpness and pointed to its dialectical structure. Relating to Luther the distinction can be traced down the centuries in Europe, leaving an imprint on different contexts, one being the understanding of human existence. Thus, the project focuses, at the anthropological level and with reference to the notion of man as a visible image of the invisible God, on the distinction between visibility and invisibility present in a concept of the human being as visible (outer, body, matter) and invisible being (inner, soul, spirit) and as imagining himself - or herself - through images, signs and language, until death interrupts this imagination. Sub-projects 1-3:

•1.  Invisibility and Faith (Anna Vind)

•2.  Imago Dei and Human Dignity (Claudia Welz)

•3.  Death and the Limits of Visualization (Philipp Stoellger)

Language as mediation between the visible and the invisible

Reflections upon the importance of metaphorical language are conspicuous in the theological tradition. Considering the metaphor as a primary function of language, and not just an ornament, has been crucial to several thinkers when pondering upon "the word of God creating what it says" (Psalm 33,9). The project encompasses a study into the metaphoricity of religious language pointing to the dialectic between visibility and invisibility: when that, which becomes visible, created by the word, is transcendent and thus refers to or even incorporates the invisible. Sub-projects 4-5:

•4.  Metaphors and Parables (Iben Damgaard)

•5.  Cognition and Poetry (Therese Bering Solten)

Images, liturgical inventory, and architecture as mediation between the visible and the invisible

 It is not only words that serve as mediator between the visible and the invisible. The reformatory agenda had, so to speak, a graphic and further audible offshoot in the religious implementation of the arts, such as images, music, liturgical inventory and architecture. In connection to these media, considerations upon what can and cannot be seen, heard and unheard have been numerous and varied. The project's synchronic historical studies of these theories of representation thus create an extensive picture of the possibilities within the dialectic between the visible and the invisible. Sub-projects 6-7:

•6.  Mediality and Aesthetics (Sven Rune Havsteen)

•7.  Tangible Church and Sacred Space (Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen)

Visible community and invisible transcendence

 Finally it is clear that considerations upon the visibility and invisibility of the religious subject individually and in community have influenced and shaped these aesthetic endeavours and, in turn, have been influenced by them. The religious community in different ways has been considered to be the visible representation of the invisible, of transcendence. In order to come to terms with the visibility-invisibility dialectic as related to religious community, the project examines theories of church and community. Sub-projects 8-9:

•8.  Church and the Kingdom of God (Kirsten Busch Nielsen)

•9.  Relationality and Vicarious Representation (Karina Juhl Kande)

The design of the project secures a strong theoretical and material synergy between the nine sub-projects. They share a common point of departure in that they all presuppose and discuss the dialectic between visibility and invisibility. The four main sub-themes into which the sub-projects are subsumed, represent central aspects of Reformation theology, and together they cover all its aspects. Every sub-project has its own material, and through the selection of that material - from Luther in the beginning to modern theories of Church at the end - a chronology is drawn from Early Modern Europe to today. This chronology cannot lay claim to adequacy, but it represents the five centuries in a historical longitudinal cut. Thus the field of the project is as well covered in width as in length.

The synergy between the sub-projects is strengthened methodologically: some are historical with a systematic perspective (sub-projects 1, 5, 6, 7) while others are systematic with historical preconditions (sub-project 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9). Regardless of method all the projects share a basis of textual interpretation. They represent different disciplines, theological (church history, dogmatics, ethics and philosophy of religion) and humanist (art history and archeology), and these are brought into correlation by the project. Finally the project blends and applies methods of historical-genetics and historical criticism, cultural studies and reception history, art and architectural history, philological and hermeneutical textual interpretations, phenomenology, biblical exegesis and literary theory. This methodological diversity will fertilize and facet each individual sub-project and contribute to the composition of a diverse and polychrome picture of the overall theme.