Abstract
This is a very beautiful book, both in visual presentation and in the vision with which its renowned author writes. Few can even approach David Brown in combination of breadth and depth. He draws on vast knowledge of both culture and history in his attempt to point the way for modern Christians to embrace the gospel with greater openness and imagination. By contrast with previous monographs, here he gives extensive space to direct engagement with scripture, in dialogue with visual arts as well as poetry. He is critical of both church and academy, but his aim is not to tear down, but to build up, prophetically pointing the way to what he perceives as a saving path at a point when Christianity is in crisis.
He writes with the intention of rescuing Christendom from the idolatry of closure of various kinds. His concern is that people are enthralled to particular, familiar forms of belief and criteria of truth, which prevent them from exploring the world from a Christian perspective, or from exploring a Christian perspective in dialogue with natural revelation within the world. In particular, he targets misapplication of historical method, misguided commitment to the fixity and finitude of the written word, and particular ways of formulating belief. Not that he wishes to jettison history, doctrine, or the word, but rather to mend fallen relationships with imagination, and thereby with one another and with God.
His book is simultaneously a clarion cry for practising Christians to embrace the ‘good news’ in revelatory encounter beyond what is familiar, and a serious intellectual argument that seeks to convince academic theologians of the coherence and plausibility of his approach. The theoretical discussion equips others to build on his work. He offers criteria for evaluating imaginative attempts at Christian meaning-making and presents a wealth of worked examples that relate scripture to art and poetry. Brown received grants to enable him to include over 100 images, as well as complete poems, beautifully chosen, and Eerdmans have printed it all on high quality paper with wide margins and attractive print, with headings in orange ink. Visually as well as in content, the book is a delight.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part offers ‘foundations’. Brown argues that the spiritual freedom of art ought not to be contrasted with ecclesial control in religion; rather, art and religion are natural allies. They both invite people into a different world and leave scope for interpretation (Chapter 1). Citing Tim Crane, Brown affirms that religious belief is a quest not for explanation but for meaning. The modern academy has focused too much on objectivity (or, recently, radical subjectivity) and too little on Christian meaning-making. History is not just a matter of objective facts (although the fact of the incarnation within history is central): canonical texts contain much ‘rewritten history’, where history is re-presented for new contexts and from new perspectives. Indeed, continuing revelation requires such re-presentation (Chapter 2). Art, meanwhile, is neither wholly subjective nor merely illustrative, but rather is itself a way of seeking meaning and truth. Brown proposes three criteria of truth in evaluating art from a Christian perspective: firstly, ‘reality dependence’, which is to say that the art must be grounded in some form of reality, whether historical, scientific, or metaphysical; secondly, ‘fit to context’, whereby it is appropriate both in relation to the original text and its modern day recontextualisation; thirdly, ‘affective success’, which concerns how it shapes people’s emotions and affective engagement with Christian meaning. He emphasises that all these criteria admit of degrees. Truth is not absolute (Chapters 3-4).
In the second part of the book, ‘Resources then and now’, Brown considers Jesus himself and the shaping of his imagination. His approach here is theologically grounded in a ‘kenotic Christology’ that he has defended at greater length in his book Divine Humanity. The underpinning assumption is that God so emptied himself in the incarnation that Jesus’ experience of formation of his own relationship with God is comparable with ours, as it takes place under ordinary human conditions. Brown highlights Jesus’ formative experience of prayer and personal relationships (Chapter 5), mystical encounter and response to nature (Chapter 6), and his creative, imaginative reworking of the traditions that he inherited (Chapter 7).
The third part of the book, ‘Significance’, begins by asking what ‘gospel’ means in the sense of how these texts seek to convey good news, with similarities as well as differences between the four evangelists. Brown points to three issues that preoccupy them: discerning meaning in the present; coping with stress and other life challenges; and finding vocation and purpose in looking toward the future. He explores biblical texts alongside art and poetry, unfolding for us how his three criteria and evaluations of ‘degrees of truth’ work in practice. He identifies various ways of appropriating for oneself the good news of the gospel: taking the perspective of one of the disciples; placing oneself in the story; or coming up with a similar tale (Chapter 8). Brown next seeks to show that revelation itself cannot be understood in purely historical terms any more than as unmediated dictation by the Holy Spirit. Stories that are central to Christian faith and practice, including the annunciation, the baptism of Jesus, and his temptation in the wilderness, have been shaped creatively and imaginatively in the telling. This does not degrade but dignifies their fitness for purpose; the openness of the text is integral to how revelation has been mediated (Chapter 9). Four chapters then explore Jesus’ miracles (Chapter 10), parables (Chapter 11), death (Chapter 12) and resurrection (Chapter 13). Finally, a concluding chapter on the ‘Openness of Faith’ argues that some closure is essential to the right sort of openness, but openness remains integral to faith (Chapter 14).
I welcome Brown’s approach in many ways. The problems that he sets out to address resonate with concerns that I have felt in both pew and academy, and he furnishes both a learned articulation and a constructive reorientation of the challenges. It is a book of large vision and deep compassion, and I shall go on learning from it long after this review is published. Among the aspects that I appreciate are his use of art to explore the openness of the text; his focus on forms of openness that deepen Christian encounters with texts and with Jesus, both individually and in community; his criteria for evaluating different engagements with openness; and his treasury of worked examples. This combination of attention to openness and its limits resonates with patristic approaches to openness of the text, and could fruitfully be compared with them or integrated into dialogue with their structured exploration of levels and kinds of meaning. I also appreciate Brown’s earnest engagement in dialogue between secular and sacred, with the conviction that art can be Christian even when the artist is not, and his conviction that this broad perspective can enhance Christian confidence in engaging with the world today.
Brown’s arguments in the book are so nuanced and his reflection so deep that it is difficult for a reviewer to critique effectively, since he has foreseen many potential concerns and qualified his statements appropriately. Furthermore, much of what is muted in this book is developed elsewhere in Brown’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, some areas stand out for me as needing further discussion.
Firstly, how would this work play out in ecumenical dialogue, particularly in regard to the role of tradition? The book comes across as Anglican in its approach to ‘openness’ in Christian spirituality and theology. I wonder if we need to put this in dialogue with church traditions where the balance between openness and closure is different, and where that is experienced for good rather than for harm? My concern here is both social (deepening Christian community through attentive listening across divided communions) and intellectual (learning from those for whom closure plays a positive role). Brown connects recent abuse scandals with conservative ways of regulating the imagination by tradition or scripture; he recommends imaginative exploration of what is ‘true enough’ (Catherine Z. Elgin’s phrase) for us to find gospel meaning here and now. But we still need to evaluate whose understanding of ‘true enough’ prevails if we clash, and this can potentially open us to new power games, which may be more distant from scripture, tradition, and Christian community.
Although Brown affirms the importance of a measure of closure and of recognising degrees of truth, nonetheless it can be hard to discern his boundaries. The idea of ‘degrees of truth’ remains underdetermined (perhaps necessarily so), and traditional modes of closure are underexplored. For example, Brown’s focus is on Western art, and there is little dialogue with Eastern Orthodoxy, where art is developed within a more defined canon and set of visual practices. Although Brown comments on scriptural canon, it was never clear to me how he evaluates the significance of canon. Although he quotes from scripture, his concern in this book is not with the sacramental value of the words (by contrast with his wonderful God and Mystery in Words). The spiritual, psychological, social, and even ontological significance of citation and repetition, which is the basis and form of continuity within tradition, do not come across very clearly here.
Secondly, Brown is critical of the role of history in other contemporary modes of biblical interpretation, but his own argument blends history and theology in intriguing ways. Modern historical-critical biblical scholarship has sought vivid encounter with texts in their original context. That has exposed a hermeneutical challenge regarding how to ‘bridge the gap’ between the first century and the twenty-first. Brown is wrestling with a similar challenge, but what he highlights in the original sources is their testimony to a characteristic disposition toward openness in receiving divine revelation, and he proposes that we embrace this. Since ‘openness’ in and of itself is too broad a category to be helpful, it is further qualified by consideration of particularities of Jesus’ example and the evangelists’ perspective on what constituted ‘good news’. In relation to Jesus, this reconfigures the tradition of imitatio Christi both in its focus and in its theology: in focus, it still incorporates the cross but subordinates it to other categories; in theology, it partly depends on accepting Brown’s understanding of kenosis, such that Jesus’ growth in relationship with God can be a model for ours. I find it helpful that Brown draws attention to the openness of the early tradition as exemplary and typical, but much of the traditioned character of Christian imagination recedes from view amidst his exhilarating (and often fruitful) leaping of imaginative gaps from scripture to a variety of experiences of ‘today’. I also think that Jesus can be understood to teach and to model a relationship with God pedagogically by accommodation (or ‘condescension’) without our having to affirm kenosis in the form that Brown espouses.
Thirdly, in light of Brown’s critique of the academy and its subdisciplines for leaving students stranded in relation to meaning-of-life questions, I find myself wondering what his vision is for academic theology. His critical portrayal of what he refers to as ‘conventional biblical scholars’ seems to me a little unfair, repeating a well-worn trope that undermines the discipline from within. His own argument depends on skill in interweaving different subdisciplines, which requires prior mastery of their individual approaches. I heartily share his concern that we train people in how the Christian imagination is a way of seeking ‘meaning’ and engaging with ‘truth’ (indeed, it would be helpful if he clarified the relation between those terms a bit more), and I appreciate both his example and his contribution to theorising this. But what kind of curriculum does he envisage to support this? His three criteria of truth require at least a grasp of history, metaphysics, science (for ‘reality dependence’), cultural and textual skills (for ‘fit to context’, both original and new), and sensitivity to issues of spiritual and psychological flourishing (for evaluating ‘affective success’). Not all of us are as brilliant, nuanced, or learned as the author of this wonderful book, and I am still left wondering what he suggests in practical terms, both for universities and for theological colleges.