Perhaps a mark of a theologian's impact is the breadth of responses to their work. Certainly this is the case with David Brown. Theology, Aesthetics and Culture: Responses to the Work of David Brown (ed. Robert MacSwain and Taylor Worley) appeared in 2012; now Christopher Brewer has edited a Festschrift. Brown is best known as a theologian engaging with the arts, arguing for a presence of God in art, rather than art as only a disposable vehicle of transcendence. More controversially, Brown has argued for the continued revelation of God after and outside of the Bible. But perhaps his central concern is God's presence in so many areas from which theology has generally withdrawn: the arts get treated marginally (and if so, dance gets barely a mention), while other areas of human flourishing and recreation, such as sport and gardening, receive little in any serious theological engagement. Yet in traditional societies games are sacred, and to this day many people find the spiritual in their gardens. What emerges from the current volume is Brown's passionate concern with re-enchanting the world as place of divine revelation, accessible to all (or maybe rediscovering that the world is already enchanted). This makes him a far-reaching and at times provocative theologian, concerned with reason, faith, and tradition, and with theologies of the Incarnation and Trinity, as well, of course, with sacramentality and the arts. This is the structure of this collection of essays, which also, perhaps most valuably, includes a response from David Brown himself, which offers us some clarification of his necessarily complex thought.
Starting with essays on the fundamental question of faith and reason, we are given a broad context for the theology of the arts which forms the largest section of the book. Robert McSwain on Butler and Vincent Brümmer on divine agency respectively reveal Brown's refreshingly broad sense of what reason might mean and the question of divine agency and human activity. In the latter, one can sense a response to Christian/scientific fundamentalisms in which there is no truth outside of the Bible/hard logic, nor any sense of the primary/secondary causality distinction. Moving on to the Incarnation and Trinity, C. Stephen Evans's essay on kenosis and the question of God's loving self-limitation in the Incarnation is particularly moving, although maybe it could have gone further, including in its conversation with Brown on the question of nature, by drawing on the Eastern tradition of theosis. Paul Fiddes bridges to art through the Trinity: moving beyond explicit works on the Trinity, he argues that works of movement and relationality open us to the Trinity, though his notion of the idea of brokenness within the actual Godhead needs more clarification.
The range of theological approaches in the arts section is broad, with great insights along the way: N.T. Wright defends the canticles in Paul's letters (e.g. Eph. 1) as possibly Paul's own compositions rather than pre-existent texts, hence poetry as opening an imaginative world in which we become God's poiema (cf Eph. 2:10). Frank Burch Brown sees art as touching the heart rather than being a delivery system (thus Christianity cannot instrumentalise art), and draws on David Brown's problematic notion of the ‘ongoing process of continually revised and revisable Christian tradition’ (p. 123). David Brown himself in his response evokes the intriguing notion of a marriage between art and theology, which would perhaps safeguard better than his previous thought the definitiveness and ever-new depths of Christian revelation.
Depth is an important concept in George Pattison's exploration of Brown on the sacramentality of word, and also in Christopher Brewer's contribution on conceptual art and natural theology. The latter is a good example of much contemporary Christian engagement with the arts, finding theological themes even in non-Christian/non-religious artists, such as, in this case, Jonathan Borofsky's Counting from 1 to Infinity. But depth in itself does not take us to God: Brown responds to Brewer that
the negative implication is that Borofsky envisages no response ever coming from that infinite beyond. Thus, whilst the believer can use his work to instigate a discussion of what is lost, the sadness is that there is no such acknowledgement in this sort of work from the artist himself (p. 256).
Brown also insists, responding to Ann Loades on theatre dance (which includes a fascinating account of Alvin Ailey's choreographies inspired by the Roman Catholic Mass), that immanence alone is not enough. We humans also seek transcendence: we need, in Ailey's words cited by both Loades and Brown, ‘bodies in heightened states of grace’.
So, an exciting collection that could be recommended as an introduction to contemporary ideas on the big theological questions of nature and grace, faith and reason, body and spirit, and to the role of the arts in the theologian's work. In view of this, the absence of an index is a shortcoming. Nevertheless, like David Brown's own work, this collection invites more responses. For one thing, it suggests to me that more work is needed on the hermeneutic relationships between Revelation in Scripture and Christian tradition, and the ‘revelations’ that people report in art, sport and gardens, inter alia (Brown's ‘Sacrament in Ordinary’). In our increasingly broken and conflict-riven society, in which art increasingly rejects transcendence and yet is inspired by the occult (cf the Berlin Biennale of 2018), can we really say that all art is revelation of God? Perhaps, if we are to have a true dialogue between the ‘depth’ in people's experience and contemporary art on the one hand, and the Bible, Christian tradition, and theology on the other, we need to recover and renew metaphysics, evacuated from so many schools of theology in the later twentieth century? More work for David Brown and his ever-growing network of respondents.
