ola sigurdsonand the soul, and where liturgy and prayer came to be instrumental-
ized at the same time as the sacrament of communion and the Bible
were reified.^33 The idea that revelation consists in a communication of
divinely sanctioned facts made, as I suggested in the first part of this
study, the material form of the act of communication “invisible” in
that it had no particular theological importance as such, and thus also
hid how the message was connected to the medium as well as the re-
lationship between God and human beings. From this it followed that
God and human beings were regarded as each other’s contrasts, and
their relationship understood as a distance between transcendence and
immanence that had to be overcome somehow. This implies a concep-
tion of subjectivity where God as well as human beings are conceived
as two autonomous centers of subjectivity, self-present and transpar-
ent. The what of all religious claims for universality then becomes,
through a short-circuit between God and human beings that disre-
gards mediation, divorced from the how of all claims for universality,
and so the fear arose, almost inexorably, that a religion that is not
private must be authoritarian and perhaps also violent.
To regard prayer as a central religious phenomenon and a central
theological theme is to return to an attention to the medium; prayer
is not a farewell to embodiment in the struggle for something sublime,
prayer is a struggle for the transfiguration of the body and its structures
of desire. If prayer informs theology about a possible and also
appropriate relation of human beings to the divine, and therefore also
informs about which kind of subjectivity that is presupposed by such
a relationship, theology then becomes not primarily an abstract
speculation about universality, not a world-picture that the inquirer
could comprehend as a map of existence in its entirety, but rather a
kind of itinerary for the journey towards God. The function of religious
language would then not be to “mirror, master, grasp, or encompass
the divine reality.”^34 The focus of such a theology would not only be
- This is a history that is recently narrated by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age,
Cambridge, Mass./London: Belknap Press, 2007, esp. 146-158, 221–269. Cf. also
my book Himmelska kroppar: Inkarnation, blick, kroppslighet, Logos/Pathos 6, Göte-
borg: Glänta, 2006, 373–378. - Merold Westphal, ibid., 117. Merold Westphal, ibid., 117.