Idolatry and Representation

Description

More than half century ago I turned to the history of ideas as a way of probing the presuppositions of the ideas that are most near and dear to us. After reading this volume, I realize that when we fail to plummet the depths of these presuppositions, we "risk idolatry."

If we are to become consciously aware of the presuppositions of all that which our ideas "represent," we are dependent upon our being open to the otherness of others. We meet one another not to "otherize" this otherness into the sameness of our own categories of thought -- perhaps categories we may have spend a life time cultivating -- but rather, for our own categories to be critiqued and enhanced by those of others.

But which otherness? In making the Jesus of history into the Christ of faith, Christianity has thought and taught that Hebraic presuppositions could be readily and easily refitted within the categories of Hellenistic philosophy, in so doing, supressing the Jewishness of Jesus. Although Christian biblical scholars now engage themselves in a third quest for the historical Jesus, with help from Leora Banitsky's IDOLATRY ANE RERESENTATION, I now find myself sharing a Jewish quest for the Jesus of history.

Perhaps a distant outcome of this quest will be a reference in the preamble to the Constitution of the European Union recognizing and acknowledging the Jewish origins of a religious faith that is less and less that of Christianity and more and more that of Islam.

How might Jews, Christians and Moslems one-another one another as they pray to the same God?