Beyond Literal Idolatry: Translating Theo-Logos from Judgment to Love

Abstract

This article explores the capacity for narrating the name of God as a way to liberate the suffering of the world. The first section of this article offers a brief overview of Walter Benjamin’s linguistic theory as it relates to the issue of literal idolatry. In the second section, the content of exploring Ricoeur’s movement toward a poetic faith creates a formal anomaly in which his “byway” is something that may be crucial for readers or may be unnecessary: it speaks to the discontinuity and rupture enabled by incorporating silence into speech. The third section flows from the first and third, discussing the difficulty and importance of naming God as an embodied speech act. This looks at the particular situation of parables, including perspectives from Thomas Altizer and J. Hillis Miller. The fourth section focuses on the psychodynamic work of Jessica Benjamin as it models a way of bringing an embodied witness to the world in a performance of divine love.