An innovative view to theological texts as a literary genre has been established in research of the modern religions and designated as theopoetics, because, irrespective of whether a theological text is written in the poetic genre, in the form of a story or the style of a more dense, theoretical prose, it is based on the poesis: innovative, intuitive and an imaginary composition of the authors where the central figure is God. Therefore, approximately ten thousand recorded and published folk songs, as well as other Latvian folklore texts about God, are equal to theopoetics as a genre of creative writing with its specific expression tools. Folk songs are a product of purposeful human spiritual/intellectual activity and imagination, a typical cultural phenomenon of the relevant society, which helps to study the public’s views about the perception of God.
To approach adequately to analysis and interpretation of such texts, in the late 20th century, a new method of research on religious texts – theopoetics – was established. Theopoetics is a method of analysing religious texts that encourages us to look at the ancient metaphors of God from another angle. It explores the language possibilities of figuratively creating God’s patterns, unlike the previous “scientific” God’s theories as the systematic attempt of theology to find God through the living (“incarnated”) God. Theopoetics theorists accept reality as a source of divine revelation as well as personal experience and metaphor-influenced divine understanding in various religions. This method allows to establish the essence and possible interpretations of the basic metaphors used in every individual religion: 1) critically weigh up the previous explanations of God; 2) study the interaction of applied metaphors, models and concepts within religion; 3) offers the potential of transformative, revolutionary models, using the language and metaphor layer that is widely understandable and used by people in everyday life.
Research of metaphors does not impose objective or general criteria for assessing understanding of God; therefore, the aim of theopoetical discourse is not to prevent competing interpretations but to multiply the number of perceptions of God, to extend the emotional feeling, and to reveal new opinions. Folk songs figuratively represent God in metaphors and comparisons, but the theopoetics method has not been applied in the previous studies of God either because it is a relatively new methodological system, or because God’s perception in the folk songs has not been the focus of researchers of contemporary religions.
