David Brown
Revelation and Experience Through Culture and the Arts
Here I seek to introduce the five volumed series that I wrote for Oxford University Press, and which were published between 1999 and 2008. A conference discussing all five volumes is due to take place in September, 2010. There are fifteen invited speakers including the chairs of the sessions from both Britain and abroad, all of whom will contribute to the eventual published book. More details will be available on the ITIA website and also at my own website.
- Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (1999)
- Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (2000)
- God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (2004)
- God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (2007)
- God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (2008)
Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (199) was the first to appear.
The blurb described the contents as follows:
Tradition and revelation are often seen as opposites: tradition is viewed as secondary and reactionary in relation to revelation which is a one-off gift from God. Drawing on examples from Christian history, Judaism, Islam and the classical world this book challenges these definitions and presents a controversial examination of the effect history and cultural development has on religious belief: its narrative and art.
David Brown pays close attention to the nature of the relationship between historical and imaginative truth, and focuses on the way stories from the Bible have not stood still but are subject to imaginative `re-writing′. This rewriting is explained as a natural consequence of the interaction between religion and history: God speaks to humanity through the imagination and human imagination is influenced by historical context. It is the imagination that secures that religion continues to develop in new and challenging ways.
Some review comments:
I think that David Brown's work is quite magnificent (James Barr in his chapter on this book in his Concept of Biblical Theology).
An erudite and magisterial volume...the work reflects impressively wide, indeed voracious reading (Henry Chadwick in English Historical Review)
Writes...in a way that does justice both to the integrity of religious belief and to the intrinsic complexities of the disconcertingly diverse books of which Scripture is composed ... a work at once of reverence and of learning (David Levey in The Catholic Herald).
This is a major achievement, the fruit of long and extraordinarily varied study, written with Brown’s characteristic clarity, opening doors into all sorts of fresh insights.... we can be sure that this book and its sequel will play a hugely significant role in the debates of the decades ahead. (Rowan Williams in Theology)
Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (2000)
The blurb describes the contents as follows:
How has the arrangement of biblical narratives over the centuries had an impact on the understanding and practice of discipleship?
David Brown's Tradition and Imagination was described on its publication as `an achievement unmatched by any British theologian for a long time′ (Maurice Wiles). In this controversial sequel David Brown tackles questions on the presentation of biblical narratives over the centuries, and asks whether this has had an impact on our understanding of discipleship. Professor Brown examines presentations of Job, the biblical Marys, heaven and the saints to argue that the Church went beyond purely scriptural ideas to keep the life of Christ continually relevant to a changing society.
This book explores new attitudes to suffering and sexual equality, and concludes with arguments for a new way of understanding Bible and Tradition. Professor Brown shows in his consistently open and sensitive approach that not only does conflict exercise a creative role in the search for truth, but that the most important type of truth, far from being narrowly historical, is in fact imaginative.
Some review comments:
A most impressive study ... a superb discussion of Job that would grace the writings of an Old Testament specialist (Cyril Rodd in Expository Times).Marked with wide erudition, lucidity of expression, a rootedness in scripture and tradition that is utilised in reasonable, open and eirenic ways - a thought-provoking book in every way (Walter Moberly in Theological Reviews).
This is the most impressive book that I have read in a long time. ...a first class book that is both illuminating in itself and that challenges the reader to think further on matters that are central to the Christian faith (John Macquarrie in Journal of Theological Studies).
God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (2004)
Whereas the first two volumes were concerned with the relation between Bible and the imagination, and so with the more general question of the nature of divine revelation, the next three tackle the topic of how God might be experienced within the wider culture of the ordinary world. Running against the modern trend to narrow the sphere of theological concern essentially to worship, ethics and politics, David Brown seeks in these three volumes to explore how for most of human (and indeed Christian history also) the understanding of religion was quite different, and could be so again.
The blurb describes the contents as follows:
In this book David Brown seeks to recover the importance of areas of human experience that were once regarded as central to people's experience of God but have since become marginalized. The sociologist Max Weber spoke of the disenchantment of the world as the inevitable consequence of the modern tendency to view everything in terms of its value solely as an instrument towards some further goal, and in this modern Christians are often no better than their secular counterparts. Enchantment, can, however, return, Brown suggests, if God being mediated through all of creation (human and divine) is once again valued in its own right. Here Brown examines how this might occur with respect to place in all its forms: nature, landscape painting, architecture, town planning, maps, pilgrimage, gardens, and sports venues. The issue is explored over a great range of history and context. While focus is mainly on Christianity, examples are also drawn from Hinduism, Islam, and the classical world.
In effect, the discussion continues the argument of Brown's much-praised earlier volumes, Tradition and Imagination and Discipleship and Imagination, arguing the need for Christian theology to take much more seriously its relationship with the various wider cultures in which it has been set. Whereas the focus of the two earlier books was on biblical revelation, here it is on natural religion. Instead of the conventional, rather tired arguments for the existence of God, the suggestion is that one take seriously the types of experiences that made earlier generations conceive of all of life as offering the possibility of encounters with God. This is why care is taken to examine what kind of God might be drawn from such experiences - transcendent, immanent, ordered, mystical - and also the resultant impact on the subject, including perceptions of the natural world.
Some review comments:
Every page is stimulating, and the whole writing illustrates just the kind of sacramentality that David Brown wants us to experience, and create imaginatively for ourselves (Church Times)
Overwhelming in its richness of detail...fresh insights on every page (Theology)
Brown's passion to see Christianity truly engaging with God's presence in the world is intoxicating (Modern Believing).
God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (2007)
The blurb describes the contents as follows:
Religion in the Western world, it is often observed, is in decline. One reflection of this is where experience of God is sought: almost exclusively in the obviously religious, such as worship, meditation and prayer. However, it was formerly believed that numerous aspects of human society and culture mediated the presence of God. In this book David Brown continues the discussion he began in God and Enchantment of Place, in exploring that wider history and its contemporary relevance. Here he investigates the ways in which the symbolic associations of the `graced' body and what we do with it have helped shape religious experience and continue to do so. A Church narrowly focused on Christ's body wracked in pain needs to be reminded that the body as beautiful and sexual has also played a crucial role not only in other religions but also in the history of Christianity itself. Dance was one way in which the connection was expressed. The irony is not that such a connection has gone but that it now exists almost wholly outside the Church. Much the same could be said about music more generally, and Brown writes excitingly about the spiritual potential of not just classical music but pop, jazz, musicals and opera. Like Brown's much-praised earlier volumes, God and Enchantment of Place, Tradition and Imagination, and Discipleship and Imagination, the present book will enlarge horizons and challenge the narrowness of much theological thinking.
Some Review comments:
This is the second volume in a trilogy by David Brown, who has in recent years done groundbreaking work in the area of religion and the arts… This book is a major piece of scholarship. It develops a wide ranging, original and fascinating vision of the way in which the experience of God can be mediated through the arts. It will undoubtedly change the way in which readers look at the visual arts and listen to music. (Vincent Brümmer in Journal of Reformed Theology)
It is hard to avoid wondering if the perceived irrelevance of Christianity to the dominant Western European culture is not due to the unwitting withdrawal of Christianity from artistic creation into intellectual abstraction. If so, David Brown’s book could not be more timely … a fine and challenging book. (Dominic White in New Blackfriars)
Readers of David Brown’s work will have come to expect huge scholarship and breadth of knowledge marshalled in an imaginative and accessible manner. This book will not disappoint (John Inge in Theology).
God and Mystery in Words: Experience Through Metaphor and Drama (2008)
The blurb describes the contents as follows:
In God and Mystery in Words David Brown uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibilities of religious experience as a launch pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today. So far from encouraging imagination and exploration, hymns and sermons now more commonly merely consolidate belief. Again, contemporary liturgy in both its music and in its ceremonial fails to take seriously either current dramatic theory or the sociology of ritual. Yet this was not always so. Imagery in hymns mattered, liturgical music encouraged a sense of drama, sermons required rhetoric. In a characteristically stimulating and inspiringly expansive study, that ranges from ancient Greek drama to modern poetry, from the meaning of the Logos to the history of vestments, David Brown pleads for a much wider focus on the kind of factors that aid experience of God.
Some review comments:
This book is beautifully written, always thought-provoking, and displays vast, quirkily juxtaposed erudition. (Philip McCosker in The Tablet)
In sum, this volume handsomely repays attentive reading, being elegantly written, lucid and admirably concise… The range of material employed, across genres, periods, and countries, is dazzling and some highly suggestive historical insights are offered. (Peter Webster in Anvil)
In this volume, Brown is concerned particularly with words and worship, but he ranges very widely, with much knowledge, over all the arts. He suggests that we need to move away from the idea of words or metaphors as abstract entities, pointing elsewhere. Rather, metaphors can themselves be carriers of revelation. We need to stay with the actual words and images, and let them work in and on us. …Obviously this approach poses a number of questions about criteria… But it would be a pity if we became so obsessed with these difficult questions that we side-stepped the important change Brown wants us to make, not just in how we see divine revelation but in the practice of our church life, particularly its worship (Richard Harries in The Church Times).