God Undercover
Authors:   , Heijn Herman Simon Jan 
Published: August 2023

God Undercover

Title and subtitle
This book examines the relationship between the sublime and theology and focusses on the development of a missionary concept. Hence the subtitle: ‘a missionary concept with the sublime as guiding principle.’

The sublime
Confronting the sublime is regarded as an extremely exceptional experience. It invokes contrasting feelings. Both total confusion and complete fascination. The impact of this on an individual is so intense that it has an urge to be communicated. However, the fact that it is so exceptional means that it requires a new and appropriate form of expression. This new form of expression reveals a novel perspective and/or insight. Experiencing the sublime initiates a mental and/or creative ‘chain reaction’ of innovation.

The theological sublime
Part two of this study aims to create the ability to describe ‘the theological sublime.’ The term is a variant of the expression ‘the political sublime,’ which was coined by Michael J. Shapiro in 2018.

The impact of the sublime
One effect of the sublime is to transform ‘art’ into ‘Art’. Artists strive for the sublime by definition. But the sublime also has great significance in the bible. We cannot survive without vitamin C, which prevents scurvy. One of the conclusions drawn by this study is that a society cannot survive without the sublime. The sublime works as a kind of antidote that can be used to neutralise the dehumanising processes dominating our consumer society.

Study question
The question driving this scientific project is: how can the aesthetic-epistemological category of the sublime contribute to the interpretation of theological texts and notions in the Christian tradition and thereby support the mission of the church in the contemporary western context?

The structure of the study
Part one analyses the sublime, with the aim being to develop a reading key (a hermeneutic concept) that can be applied to theological texts. Aspects of the sublime that may potentially be of use in a missionary profile that is yet to be defined are simultaneously inventoried. To this end, a number of philosophical core texts from the discourse on the sublime are analysed in chapter one, in particular those penned by Longinus, Burke, Kant, Otto and Lyotard. Chapter two focuses on the work and methodology of a specific artist, with the intention being to explore the sublime in practice. The painter and animator Gerrit van Dijk was selected.

In phase two, I study the potential interaction between the sublime as a hermeneutic concept and theology. The reading key developed in part I to make this interaction possible is evaluated. Several biblical pericopes from Luke-Acts are then analysed in this manner. Chapters four and five cover a selection of systematic theological texts from the works of Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer respectively. This is how the sublime instrumentation is refined into ‘the theological sublime.’

Part three endeavours to develop the envisaged missionary concept, with the intention being to integrate the sublime as an essential component. In chapter six I start by outlining the contemporary context on the basis of socio-economic theories describing how people are increasingly approached as either solely production units or consumers due to the processes of ‘McDonaldization’, ‘Disneyization’, and the overall ‘mythization’ of the economic discourse. Subsequently, three ecclesiastical forms of missionary presence can be described in the western context and how they can be interpreted on the basis of the three categories used by Kant in his aesthetics: amusement, the beautiful and the sublime. The seventh chapter consists of a constructive theological discourse in which an attempt is made to describe the envisaged missionary concept using a synthesis of the foregoing.