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TANNER CAPPS, In the Beginning Is the Icon: A Liberative Theology of Images, Visual Arts, and Culture by bergmann, sigurd, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 70, Issue 2, May 2012, Pages 241–242, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01515_6.x
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bergmann, sigurd. In the Beginning Is the Icon: A Liberative Theology of Images, Visual Arts, and Culture. Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2009, 173 pp., numerous color illus., $85.00 cloth.
This is an ambitious work that gently crosses established disciplinary boundaries. Through critical engagement with theories of the image, theologies of the icon and the aesthetic, and various theological, sociological, and anthropological accounts of the arts, Sigurd Bergmann seeks to forge a “contextual art theology” that grants to the visual arts a relatively independent place vis‐à‐vis traditional Christian theology. Accordingly, Bergmann offers an approach to theological analysis that attempts to revive the use of images within the domain of theological and religious reflection. He contends that theology in the modern West has tended toward “logoscentric” constructions that prize the written and spoken word over more “eikoncentric,” or image‐based, approaches. “With regards to the history of Christianity,” he writes, “the theological interpretation of images has a common ecclesiastical and philosophical ground closely related to Jewish and Hellenistic approaches. While the Western Church developed a more catechetic iconology, in which images generally were perceived as positive, albeit in a reductionist sense as illustrations to the Holy Scripture[s] and the written dogmas of theologians, the Eastern Church developed a more ontological theology of icons, in which the intrinsic value of the visual media is recognized” (p. xv). Whatever we might think of Bergmann's historical account of image theologies between the East and West, these comments lead him to declare that “there is [now] an urgent need for ecumenical reflection over the inter‐confessional historical similarities and divisions of a theology of images and its future ethical potential in a globalized and secularized world system” (p. xv). And this book is designed to meet this perceived need.
