Page - 75 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/02

Review: Hermeneutik des Bilderverbots | 75www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 71–77 tion of Plato, descartes and the Protestant/reformed tradition, which consid- ers the body, images and the imagination in general to be inferior. finally, he addresses the role that corporeality has played so far in the anthropological discussion of humankind as imago dei and in Christology. By dedicating the next chapter to the image ban in conjunction with mono- theism and negative theology, the author opens up the discourse of monothe- ism and violence, led most prominently by Jan assmann, who views the image ban as an expression of religious intolerance. Moxter writes of a completely oppositional (unhistorical, apologetic) reception in the Jewish enlightenment, when monotheism and the image ban were praised as the triumph of reason over the irrationality of polytheistic forms of religions. following the Jewish phenomenologist emmanuel Lévinas, who employs the monotheistic image ban at the core of his ethics, Moxter discloses his view of the long tradition of negative theology, with the image ban taken out of its original cultic context and turned into a paradigm of negative theological reasoning with regard to a special praxis (like Lévinas; the author refers also to immanuel Kant and søren Kierkegaard). this discussion leads Moxter to his central chapter, entitled “invisibility or hiddenness of God?” (Unsichtbarkeit oder Verborgenheit Gottes?) (246–266). Here, he establishes the guiding thesis of the book – that the “image ban can be interpreted as a protection of God´s hiddenness” (251) – which will be devel- oped in the following chapters. Accordingly, Moxter first elaborates Luther´s distinction between invisibility (Unsichtbarkeit) and hiddenness (Verborgen- heit). God´s grace is not invisible but rather is hidden behind or in the folly of the cross. this has to be believed, it is nothing simply invisible which could be grasped by logical reasoning. Moxter picks up this formulation of hiddenness for his own hermeneutic of the image ban (260) and accordingly interprets the doctrine of the human being as imago dei as a protection of humankind’s own openness. this makes possible the application of a hermeneutic of the image that adapts the insights of the “iconic turn”: the image´s function is not primarily “representation” but – in a tension of presence and absence – “giving to see/making present and conceal- ing”. Moxter is viewing the other side of the coin: instead of interpreting the image ban with the help of a hermeneutic of the image, he sees the image ban itself as a paradigm for hermeneutics and thus notes its anthropological impli- cations (266). Consequently, the following chapter turns to the question of the inner power of images themselves. Moxter draws on Jean Paul sartre and Ludwig Wittgen- stein to bring greater depth to his thesis, noting “images even make present what is absent, which can be experienced as intensification of presence” (278).