In God’s Image: An Anthropology of the Spirit by Michael Welker

Abstract

Reviewed by: In God’s Image: An Anthropology of the Spirit by Michael Welker Derek Nelson In God’s Image: An Anthropology of the Spirit. By Michael Welker. Translated by Douglas W. Stott. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2021. xii + 155 pp. This book by German theologian Michael Welker continues and departs from his established approach and points of emphasis. It is the published version of his Gifford Lectures from 2019–2020, in an excellent translation from the German. Indeed, as a longtime reader of Welker’s books, I have not quite “heard” his voice in English as clearly as I have in this book, and for that reason, as well as the way the book synthesizes and moves forward Welker’s past theological program, it may be the best place to start in exploring Welker’s oeuvre. Welker’s book depends on two conceptual contrasts. One is the contrast between “multimodal” and what he calls “bipolar” thinking. Multimodal and multipolar thinking is Welker’s way of updating the work of the younger Hegel, who thought of human and divine spirit realizing themselves (literally, “making real”) in human justice and freedom. The divine Spirit, for Welker, cannot be simply contrasted to the human spirit in the way that “revelational” theologies tend to do. Multimodal means something like multi- centered and multi-medial. When I communicate multimodally, for instance, using text, images, technologies, music, and so on, I cannot use [End Page 440] simple opposites like “form” and “content,” such that what I want to say is one thing, and how I communicate is another. How I communicate becomes part of what I am communicating. Bipolarity is a problem for theology because “In situations in which one sensed that the spirit was somehow ‘more’ than could be articulated by bipolar reductions, the remedy . . . was simply to view it as a mysterious, nebulous, incomprehensible power” (25). Welker’s alternative is, as in past works, to develop a “realistic” theology. This means a theology that corresponds with, speaks to, and emerges from reality itself. Because reality is complicated and messy, so too must theology be. Here Welker draws on Bonhoeffer’s later insight that “Christianity . . . puts us into many different dimensions of life at the same time; in a way we accommodate God and the whole world within us. Life isn’t pushed back into a single dimension but is kept multidimensional, polyphonic” (109–10). This means that Welker’s conversation partners will necessarily be from across the spectrum of academic disciplines and avenues of high and popular culture. It also means that Welker’s theology is “realistic” in an additional way, namely being realistic about the awful and dreadful things human beings do when gripped by a false spirit of sin and evil. “Emotionalized public sentiment” is one such dangerous threat that Welker identifies (6–9) and comes back to throughout the book. The second conceptual contrast is the difference between the positive presence of some good versus the mere absence of its opposite. This, it seems to me, is the organizing principle for the second half of the book, which in four chapters deals with the human callings to justice, freedom, truth, and peace. Each of those goods can be defined negatively, such as “justice” being something like “conflict limitation” (51) and “freedom” being something like “to be without barriers” (69, quoting Rüdiger Bittner). But Christianity proposes and moves toward the institutionalization of the positive presence of real justice, and the moral beauty of real freedom. My two criticisms are related. The book is so evocative and, by Welker’s self-assigned task and the nature of the Gifford Lectures, so connected to multiple fields of human endeavor that a two-page conclusion (129–131) is hardly adequate. Welker’s principles of [End Page 441] selection for conversation partners also raise questions. Why does Welker deal with Arendt and Habermas in political theory and not others? Why Nicholas Luhmann on pluralism, and not others? For a sociologist everything is data. For a theologian, on the other hand, a careful sifting and principled engagement with non-theological disciplines is required. Notwithstanding these concerns, this book will be of service to any theologian...