The art museum serves as both conceptual metaphor and methodological resource in this project. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's claim that the museification of the world is an accomplished fact and Donald Preziosi's argument that the museum is modernity's pre-eminent epistemological technology predicated on a latent secular theologism, the project argues that theology and the museum share a fundamental structural identity. Both manage the conditions under which artifacts, ideas, and beliefs become visible, legible, and credible. Both are defined by their lateness relative to the living practices they preserve and interpret. And both rely on and generate belief rather than merely display or present it. Exhibiting God thus borrows its organizing metaphors from the mechanisms by which art museums manage what is visible and invisible, present and absent, intimate and distant, such as vitrines, lighting, juxtaposition, conservation, documentation, reproduction, and installation.

This project develops curating as an appropriate theological method for this museological situation—a practice of display, juxtaposition, and interpretive framing through which meaning emerges from the charged space and friction between artifacts rather than from any single authoritative source. Exhibiting God suggests that in a museified world, theology is a museological discourse, sharing the museum's fundamental concern with managing visibility, invisibility, and belief, where theology's constitutive lateness becomes the condition of its continued creative vitality in a world in which the museification of art, religion, politics, and nature are, as Agamben claims, "an accomplished fact."