Abstract
Over the past 20 years David Brown’s work has focused largely on ‘imagination’: theological engagement with art, literature and architecture. This book brings together short essays on a variety of more mainstream theological themes where we see him working in a more conventional sense as a philosophical theologian. Writing of Keith Ward, Brown pays tribute to his concern not to misrepresent rival views and to acknowledge the vitality and complexity of other positions – including those of other religious traditions – but this applies to his own work too.
The book is divided into four parts, dealing with questions of creation and theodicy, revelation, incarnation, Trinity and redemption, and the question of death, resurrection and the communion of saints.
In the first part readers will find perceptive and interesting comments on pantheism and panentheism, reflections on why God chooses to create, and on the contribution that philosophy and theology variously make to addressing the problem of pain and evil. Critical engagement with Moltmann is especially helpful.
The second section is largely concerned with how we understand Scripture and rightly challenges the widely adopted post-Vatican II practice of ending our lectionary readings with: ‘This is the Word of the Lord’. Brown prefers: ‘Hear the Word of the Lord’, as a challenge to reflect on how and in what way we might be hearing the Word of God. He also presses the case for God’s self-revelation beyond Christian or Jewish boundaries, asking what kind of experience might count as revealing the divine. He adds to the hermeneutic debate a principle of retrospective inference (so that we do not have to go back to an ur-text which is more authentic than the later recension, a practice which would have major implications for Third Quest studies of the John Meier variety, for example), a principle of doctrinal expansion and a principle of analogical predication (the shepherds and the Magi of the nativity stories standing for the universality of the need for Christ, as indeed they often are in preaching). He also suggests a principle of prayerful reception in which ‘the text is respected but allowed to carry believers further’ (p. 81).
In the third section he revisits arguments at the heart of Christian doctrine, defending currently unfashionable positions like kenoticism and the social Trinity – a welcome riposte to the rather tiresome stone throwing about tritheism which we constantly encounter these days. In his discussion of the incarnation, he suggests an interesting analogy from method acting as a way of thinking what it might mean to say that God engages with the created order in such a way that we would want to talk of ‘incarnation’. Method acting as an analogy (not a model!) points to the ‘acquisition of an added dimension through total, absorbed commitment to the other’ (p. 99). The discussion of the openness of metaphors for the atonement is also important.
The last section makes arguments for purgatory, suggests a non-individualist way of understanding ‘saints’ and their importance, and engages with the question of what we are doing when we pray for the dead. The book as a whole is characterized by the eirenic, non-combative stance we have come to expect from Brown (though he says clearly what he disagrees with) and can be recommended as a thoughtful and often original contribution which challenges many current theological clichés.