Abstract

WELKER, Michael. In what sense can a Christological image of the Divine provide cultural orientations?. In Skriflig (Online) [online]. 2012, vol.46, n.1, pp.1-4. ISSN 2305-0853.

A few years ago, some colleagues from the universities of Heidelberg, Chicago, Harvard and Yale tried to launch a research project which was meant to explore fruitful commonalities and differences amongst the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faith traditions. Over against conventional doctrinal and comparative religious explorations, it intended to explore the impacts which basic contents and forms of faith have on societies and cultures. This approach was also chosen to relate different traditions of research to each other - one more dominant in the European and the other in the Anglo-American world, namely that of the history of ideas (Geistesgeschichte) and the other based on cultural and social studies. As a title of these investigations, the majority of the group voted for Images of the Divine and cultural orientations. At that time, however, we did not discuss the standards and qualities we wanted to connect with the vision of cultural orientations. Nor did we deal with what one could call 'the iconic problem' in religious contexts.

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