The Moving Text: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on David Brown and the Bible

The Moving Text

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on David Brown and the Bible

Edited by

Garrick V. Allen, Christopher R. Brewer and Dennis F. Kinlaw III

© Garrick V. Allen, Christopher R. Brewer and Dennis F. Kinlaw III 2018

Published in 2018 by SCM Press

Editorial office

3rd Floor, Invicta House,

108–114 Golden Lane,

London EC1Y 0TG, UK

www.scmpress.co.uk

SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd

13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich,

Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 0 334 05526 6

Typeset by Regent Typesetting Ltd

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

Contents

Editor’s Introduction

Christopher R. Brewer

Part 1: The Biblical Text

1. Text and Tradition: David Brown and New Testament Textual Criticism

Garrick V. Allen

2. From the Magi to Pilate’s Wife: David Brown, Tradition and the Reception of Matthew’s Text

Ian Boxall

3. Memory, Remembrance and Imagination in the Formation of Redemptive Tradition: Reflecting on the Gospel of John with David Brown

Stephen C. Barton

4. Moving Texts and Mirror Neurons: David Brown and Eleonore Stump on Biblical Interpretation

Robert MacSwain

Part 2: The Visual Imagination

5. Paradise Reclaimed: Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ofili in the Garden of Eden

Taylor Worley

6. Re-visions of Sacrifice: Abraham in Art and Interfaith Dialogue

Aaron Rosen

7. ‘Surely the Lord is in this Place’: Jacob’s Ladder in Painting, Contemporary Sculpture and Installation Art

Christopher R. Brewer

8. Understanding John’s Visions: Unlocking the Insights of Revelation’s Visual History

Natasha O’Hear

9. The Stained Glass Biblia Pauperum Windows of Steinfeld Abbey: Monastic Spirituality, Salvation History and the Theological Imagination

William P. Hyland

Part 3: The Literary Imagination

10. David Brown and the Virgin Mary: A Literary Perspective

Thomas Rist

11. Intertextuality, Tradition and Finding Theology in Unexpected Places: Reading Frankenstein with the Help of David Brown

Jon Greenaway

12. The Forms of Faith in Contemporary American Fiction

Dennis F. Kinlaw III

The Moving Text: A Reply

David Brown

Appendix: The Moving Text in the Life of the Church

Introduction

Garrick V. Allen, Christopher R. Brewer and Dennis F. Kinlaw III

The Ladder Between Heaven and Earth: John 1.43–51

David Brown

Rachel and Leah: Genesis 29.15–28

David Brown

Food offered to Idols and Idolatry in Word and Image: Revelation 2.12–17

David Brown

Emotion and the Tears of Peter: Mark 8.31–38

David Brown

Bibliography

Contributors

Garrick V. Allen is Lecturer in New Testament at Dublin City University (Republic of Ireland), and research associate of the Department of Ancient Languages, University of Pretoria (South Africa).

Stephen C. Barton is Honorary Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, and was formerly Reader in New Testament in the same department. He is also Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Religions and Theology at Manchester University.

Ian Boxall is Associate Professor of New Testament in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America (USA).

Christopher R. Brewer is a Program Officer of the Templeton Religion Trust in Nassau (The Bahamas).

David Brown is Wardlaw Professor Emeritus of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012.

Jon Greenaway is Associate Lecturer in English and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University.

William P. Hyland is Lecturer in Church History at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews.

Dennis F. Kinlaw III is Assistant Professor of English and member of the Honors College at Houston Baptist University (USA).

Robert MacSwain is Associate Professor of Theology at the School of Theology of the University of the South (USA).

Natasha O’Hear is Honorary Lecturer at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews.

Thomas Rist is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Aberdeen.

Aaron Rosen is Professor of Religious Thought at Rocky Mountain College (USA) and Visiting Professor of Theology at King’s College London.

Taylor Worley is Associate Professor of Faith and Culture at Trinity International University (USA).

Editor’s Introduction

CHRISTOPHER R. BREWER

‘Disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity positively reinforce each other.’¹ David Brown (b. 1948) is an Anglican priest and theologian whose work is a prime example of this claim. Brown has written and edited a number of volumes, and this in addition to more than 50 essays.² These books and essays address a wide variety of themes, including theology, philosophy and the arts, but also biblical studies.³ Brown’s work, however, is rarely engaged in any meaningful way by biblical scholars.⁴ For his part, Brown demonstrates a significant knowledge of currents in biblical scholarship and uses this information as evidence for his broader arguments, but the conversation has more or less moved in one direction. In an effort to reverse the flow, the editors of this volume organized a colloquium – held on 22 June 2015 at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews – for biblical and interdisciplinary scholars interested in engaging Brown’s work, and more specifically his 1999 monograph, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change.⁵ Madhavi Nevader, Stephen Barton, Garrick V. Allen, Jon Greenaway and Dennis F. Kinlaw III presented papers, followed by a response from Brown himself.

In his review of Brown’s Discipleship and Imagination (2000), John Macquarrie concluded: ‘This book, together with the earlier volume, is a profound study … To do it justice would require not a review but a point-by-point commentary.’⁶ We do not yet have a point-by-point commentary, but with the 2012 publication of a volume of essays responding to Brown’s five Oxford University Press volumes (including the two just named),⁷ a more general Festschrift just published,⁸ and this volume of essays from the St Andrews colloquium, we have what amounts to a substantial down payment on the more exhaustive commentary. It may, in the end, come piecemeal, but what cannot be denied is the expansive, profound and generative nature of Brown’s work, which crosses disciplinary boundaries and invites further exploration.⁹ Along these lines, and with reference to biblical studies, James Barr wrote:

I think that David Brown’s work is quite magnificent … I do not say that biblical theology must ally itself with an approach like his; I do suggest that it should see in it a possibility for its own development. It remains possible that biblical theologians will want to keep free from any sort of alliance with doctrinal theology of any kind; I only suggest that in doing so they might first of all make themselves aware of what this line of theological thinking, closely interlinked with biblical exegesis, actually provides. And from its distinctly Christian position, its understanding approach towards Judaism (and Islam) and to Greek religion (and thus in principle to the history of religion) ought to be significant, even if only as a pointer in a direction along which one may go.¹⁰

If Brown’s work is a pointer – a trail marker, if you will – then this volume is a map that directs readers to the trailhead. The introduction thus begins with a brief discussion of David Brown and the Bible before turning to the work of what might be called Brown’s allies and then to a brief introduction to the contents of the volume itself.

David Brown and the Bible

Brown begins, more generally, with an interactionist God,¹¹ as well as an accompanying twin commitment to divine generosity and human freedom. These commitments may, at first glance, seem irrelevant to, or in any case a good distance from, biblical studies, having instead more to do with philosophical theology, but for Brown the ongoing nature of God’s involvement with humanity has everything to do with the Bible. As he wrote in the Preface to The Divine Trinity: ‘It was through reading John Henry Newman … on development of doctrine within the Church that I gradually came to appreciate that the same approach must also be rigorously applied to the Bible.’¹² The motivation for this application of Newman’s insight has to do with biblical criticism, and more specifically, the fallibility of the Bible. Put simply: Brown argues that stress on divine respect for human freedom is the only plausible way to maintain the notion of an interactionist God while acknowledging the fallibility of Scripture.¹³ Against conservatives, who seek ‘to retain the old model of inspiration’, and also against radical critics, who ‘tend to move the locus of authority to divine acts in history’, Brown argues for revision of the concept of revelation in light of religious experience.¹⁴ Revelation is, according to Brown’s incarnational logic,¹⁵ historically situated and culturally conditioned. It is, in other words, an interactionist, kenotic,¹⁶ sensitive/adaptive, progressive/developmental theory of revelation as divine dialogue,¹⁷ an address adapted to specific situations that because of human freedom and its limitations may also regress as well as advance.

Given that Brown emphasizes the conditioned character of all thought (including Scripture and revelation), it should come as no surprise that he thinks the Bible fallible, but for him this means potential for development. He explains: ‘Close attention to original context can uncover open trajectories as it were, pressure points that almost demand further development.’¹⁸ I will return to this idea in a moment, and more specifically the related concepts of triggers and criteria, but the point to be made here is that while some would think fallibility a sign of weakness, perhaps even grounds for rejecting the faith, it is for Brown part and parcel of the divine dialogue that constitutes living faith. Brown explains:

[Dialogue] suggests, on the one hand, accommodation to one’s interlocutor – expressing oneself at a level at which he can understand and, on the other hand, some contribution from that interlocutor, some explication of the point which he believes the dialogue to have reached, which will then in turn elicit a further response and so on. Or, putting it another way, the notion of dialogue fully acknowledges that God’s communication with man takes place in very specific contexts with certain things already assumed at each stage, an already existing canon of assumptions, as it were, – a canon that has shaped the community’s conception of God, and thus inevitably shapes both the present experient’s response to a particular experience and also what it is possible for God to put into that particular experience by way of content.¹⁹

Fallibility is, from Brown’s perspective, to be preferred, and this for logical as well as moral reasons.²⁰ To be more specific, the logical reason is that God works with existing thought patterns, and so reveals within a tradition of understanding that is developed over time. The moral reason, on the other hand, has to do with human freedom, as Brown explains:

For it might be that God deliberately refrains from ever imposing a particular viewpoint on a recipient, but always wishes that it should become, as it were, internalised or, putting it another way, experienced as the recipient’s own insight.²¹

In any case, fallibility means openness to change, and this development occurs when ‘triggers’ (i.e. external stimuli, beyond Scripture) lead to reinterpretation. Brown thus concludes: ‘What we therefore seem to have is a community of faith in continual process of change as fresh contexts trigger fresh handlings of inherited traditions.’²² This process of change no doubt raises the question of criteria (i.e. which changes are legitimate and on what basis?), and though Brown has identified nine types of criteria,²³ critics have continued to press the issue.²⁴ This is not the place to adjudicate, and more work certainly needs to be done by Brown and others to address this issue; but surely, as Brown has noted, ‘we must not use that as an excuse for not facing the more complex reality which we find’.²⁵ In any case, what the reader should take away from the discussion of Brown and the Bible thus far is that Brown accepts the findings of biblical criticism, and more specifically the fallibility of the Bible, but thinks fallibility not only acceptable but also preferable in light of his developmental theory of revelation which, together with fallibility, maintains divine interactionism and human freedom.

At this point several things should be noted. First, Brown rejects any sharp distinction between natural and revealed theology, emphasizing the role of reason as well as the wider context of religious experience in any adequate account of revealed theology.²⁶ Second, he distinguishes revelation from the canon of Scripture.²⁷ Third, he expands the notion of canon to include not only the biblical canon but also the canon of interpretation. Fourth, he relocates revelation to the act of interpretation. Tradition (i.e. interpretation) is thus, for Brown, potentially revelatory and, I might add, imaginatively mediated. He thus speaks of tradition as ‘the motor that sustains revelation both within Scripture and beyond’²⁸ and, additionally, suggests that ‘the truth of imaginative fit’ may well be preferable to the criterion of ‘literal fact’.²⁹ It is for this reason that Brown speaks of ‘Art as revelation’³⁰ and, elsewhere, ‘Artists as Theologians’;³¹ that is, because ongoing imaginative mediation is, from Brown’s perspective, more than reception or illustration but, instead and more significantly, has the potential to innovate and reinvigorate. Going further, Brown argues that these later developments might even correct or ‘critique’ the scriptural text.³² All of this is part of what Brown calls ‘the moving text’, which spans scriptural and interpretative canons; that is, ‘a shifting real text whose actual content at any particular moment could only be determined by careful analysis of its social setting’.³³

Brown’s attention to a given text’s social setting may, at first glance, seem to privilege history – that is, insofar as he wishes to draw attention to the text’s intervening history – and this is in one sense true,³⁴ but he ultimately gives priority to questions of meaning and significance rather than history or canon. As he explains:

Neither history nor canon can be allowed to function as final arbiters, since more fundamental are questions of significance. What we need to consider is whether theologically or spiritually the new versions of a story or a new use to which it is put had something valuable to say in its new context, and so perhaps also to us today.³⁵

Brown is, in other words, concerned with relevance, or as he puts it, ‘spiritual significance’. As he explains in the introduction to his first collection of sermons:

when I became a priest, I determined that – no matter how difficult it should prove – I would attempt to integrate fully these two areas of my life: study and pulpit. To my delight this seemed to enable me to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ more effectively, not less. But this should not have surprised me, for the biblical writers themselves had thought spiritual significance more important than a literal recording of events … Through acknowledging this, the text ceased to be a burden upon me; instead it insisted that I too spoke of God’s power of healing and renewal for my own day.³⁶

And so we have come full circle, back to an interactionist God who is involved in an ongoing dialogue with humanity through ‘the moving text’.

Brown speaks also of ‘an open tradition that is willing to learn from approaches beyond the narrow compass of the Christian community itself’,³⁷ and this ‘open tradition’ is more or less synonymous with his notion of ‘the moving text’, albeit framed in terms of ‘tradition’ rather than ‘text’. The point here is that tradition is more indefinite than definite, supple rather than static or unchanging. And while innovation may well come from within the tradition itself, change might just as easily come from external stimuli, including other religions.³⁸ Brown explains:

The Christian story has thus acquired new insights not merely through recovery of neglected aspects of its past but also through external stimuli necessitating fresh thought and with it rather different imaginative appropriations of the Christian message from what the primitive community would have envisaged.³⁹

This notion of ‘an open tradition’ might be compared and contrasted with Howard E. Root’s ‘constellations’, William Desmond’s discussion of ‘open wholeness’ (aka ‘a more open reading of Hegel’) or Lieven Boeve’s articulation of the ‘open narrative’.⁴⁰ That said, comparison with any of these thinkers would take us further from biblical studies, where there are plenty of comparisons to be made.

David Brown and his Allies

While Brown’s notion of ‘the moving text’ may at first glance appear extreme, there are a number of scholars – biblical as well as theological – who have advanced similar notions, and though not all interact with Brown, they nevertheless display a certain ‘family resemblance’. David Parker, for example, has argued from the perspective of biblical studies that ‘Scripture is Tradition’; that is, ‘part of the early tradition … transmitted to us only by tradition’.⁴¹ Brown would, I think, in principle agree,⁴² but in addition to ‘the moving text’ within the scriptural canon, he speaks also of ‘the moving text’ beyond ‘the canon’ (i.e. ‘the canon of interpretation’), itself revelatory. More fully, Brown explains:

To my mind it is thus a delusion to suppose that the Church, having acquired a fixed canon, thereby lost the pattern of development which characterized the earlier community. The canon of interpretation continued to develop, even if this ceased to be by the simple creation of wholly new texts. Sometimes this involved creative mistranslation; sometimes a new grid being imposed upon an existing story; sometimes lacunae being filled and thus indirectly an almost wholly new story generated. Sometimes even what is constitutive of this real canon is not written text at all but a narrative controlled by visual image … The real narrative text that controls the Christian imagination of today is not the various biblical stories as such, but an amalgam created over the centuries, and in particular more often than not mediated through nativity plays, art and hymns rather than the details of the biblical narratives.⁴³

This idea that the real canon is not a written text at all goes beyond Parker, who – though he argues that, in one sense, ‘there is no such thing as the New Testament’⁴⁴ – maintains the notion of a ‘living text’,⁴⁵ rather than something beyond the textual (e.g. Brown’s interpretative canon). In any case, this gets beyond the idea of a static text accompanied by reception history of which Brown is critical. For Brown, there is only ‘the moving text’ within and beyond the canon, and that beyond is better described, according to Brown (who cites the work of Paul M. Joyce and Diana Lipton on Lamentations as being exemplary in this regard), as ‘reception exegesis’.⁴⁶ In other words, according to Brown, too much of the currently fashionable investigation of reception history confines itself to an account of what has happened across the centuries rather than sympathetic engagement with the reasons for the changes and their potential to speak as relevant exegesis for the community of faith then and perhaps also now.

Drawing more explicitly on Brown, Benjamin D. Sommer has advocated a ‘participatory theory of revelation’ (‘participatory theology’) characterized by ‘dialogue between God and Israel’.⁴⁷ He explains:

Many biblical texts that describe the giving of Torah move simultaneously and without contradiction in two directions: they anchor the authority of Jewish law and lore in the revelation at Sinai, but they also destabilize that authority by teaching that we cannot be sure how, exactly, the specific rules found in the Pentateuch relate to God’s self-disclosure … These biblical texts suggest that revelation involved active contributions by both God and Israel; revelation was collaborative and participatory.⁴⁸

Going further, he writes:

that the participatory theology of revelation implies that the very category of scripture is a chimera, and that the participatory theology resituates – and, surprisingly, resuscitates – the Bible as a work of tradition. This approach implies that for Judaism there really is no such thing as scripture; there is only tradition, which begins with and includes the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings.⁴⁹

We find fascinating this notion that what Brown refers to as ‘the moving text’ – and Sommer as ‘participatory revelation’ – might well ‘resuscitate’ the Bible, and the essays in this volume are intended to explore this idea. The point, in any case, is that neither Brown nor Sommer mean to disparage the Bible. Rather, in seeking to acknowledge the findings of higher criticism, they are trying, in Brown’s words, ‘to extricate it from a burden which … it cannot possibly bear’.⁵⁰ With this context in mind, I turn now to the contents of the volume.

The Moving Text: An Overview of its Contents

Part 1 of this volume draws Brown into the orbit of biblical scholars with essays ranging from New Testament textual criticism to hermeneutics. In ‘Text and Tradition: David Brown and New Testament Textual Criticism’, Garrick V. Allen argues that textual critics are not only interested in ‘establishing an original or authoritative text’, but also, and perhaps more so, in textual variation (i.e. development within Scripture itself). Given that Brown wants to push Newman’s insight back into Scripture, Allen thinks him an excellent dialogue partner for the New Testament textual critic. Allen thus seeks, on the one hand, to reinforce and extend Brown’s argument and, on the other, to draw upon and present Brown as a ‘ready-made’ resource for textual scholars. Ian Boxall’s chapter, ‘From the Magi to Pilate’s Wife: David Brown, Tradition and the Reception of Matthew’s Text’, begins with Brown’s discussion of the Magi, but – as an extension of Brown’s commitment to ‘Learning from Pagans’⁵¹ – considers receptions of the story of Pilate’s wife. Boxall argues that these receptions are a prime example of positive enrichment. In another chapter focused on the Gospels, ‘Memory, Remembrance and Imagination in the Formation of Redemptive Tradition: Reflecting on the Gospel of John with David Brown’, Stephen C. Barton offers a sympathetic summary of Brown’s project before arguing that more attention might be paid to the role of memory and remembrance in John 2.13–22. Shifting from the Bible to biblical interpretation, Robert MacSwain’s chapter, ‘Moving Texts and Mirror Neurons: David Brown and Eleonore Stump on Biblical Interpretation’, compares Brown’s approach with that of Eleonore Stump and, more specifically, considers their respective interpretations of Abraham, Job and Mary Magdalene/Mary of Bethany.

Part 2 engages, interrogates and extends Brown’s work with reference to a wide range of visual art, all the while mindful of the larger argument and its implications for biblical studies. In ‘Paradise Reclaimed: Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ofili in the Garden of Eden’, Taylor Worley considers the paintings of Marshall and Ofili – two in particular – as part of what Brown calls ‘the interpretative canon’, and argues that these two painters, whose work embodies a ‘black aesthetic’, offer a necessary, corrective reading of Genesis 1—2. Aaron Rosen’s chapter, ‘Re-visions of Sacrifice: Abraham and Interfaith Dialogue’, interrogates Brown’s reading of Genesis 22 and highlights potential trajectories for dialogue. In yet another chapter on the book of Genesis, ‘"Surely the Lord is in this Place’: Jacob’s Ladder in Painting, Contemporary Sculpture and Installation Art’, I argue that Jacob’s ladder is a great example of art – and more specifically, contemporary sculpture and installation art – raising not only semantic but also metaphysical questions in ways perhaps more engaging than Scripture itself. Natasha O’Hear’s chapter, ‘Understanding John’s Visions: Unlocking the Insights of Revelation’s Visual History’, seeks to challenge – and in so doing extend – Brown’s consideration of the reception history of Revelation. More specifically, O’Hear examines the visionary experience behind the text, and some images of Revelation’s Beasts. Moving on from scriptural to interpretative canon, William P. Hyland’s chapter, ‘The Stained Glass Biblia Pauperum Windows of Steinfeld Abbey: Monastic Spirituality, Salvation History and the Theological Imagination’, considers the fascinating history of the cloister windows from the former Premonstratensian abbey of Steinfeld. Hyland raises the question of context and the experience of the sacred in relation to Brown’s conception of ‘the moving text’.

Part 3 turns the page, so to speak, and explores the ways narratives outside of Scripture serve to develop and enrich our understanding and experience of the narratives within Scripture. In ‘David Brown and the Virgin Mary: A Literary Perspective’, Thomas Rist questions Brown’s subjugation of literature to religion and, focusing on literary depictions of Mary, seeks to offer a helpful corrective. Jon Greenaway’s chapter, ‘Intertextuality, Tradition and Finding Theology in Unexpected Places: Reading Frankenstein with the Help of David Brown’, takes the reader from Rist’s early modern survey to a particular Gothic novel: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Seeking to apply Brown’s work to his own area of specialization (i.e. the Gothic) – and more specifically, to read Frankenstein as part of ‘the moving text’ – Greenaway explores issues of value, worth and personhood in an effort to highlight the theological relevance of the Gothic. Dennis F. Kinlaw III then draws us firmly into the present with his consideration of contemporary American fiction, and more specifically the work of David Foster Wallace.⁵² The volume concludes with a reply and – in the Appendix – four sermons from Brown himself. These sermons are intended to illustrate how Brown’s approach might be put into practice.

Mostly sympathetic, even if critical, the essays in this volume are constructive insofar as they seek to make the case for interdisciplinarity, and more specifically for a more thorough consideration of Brown’s contribution to biblical studies. Our hope is that they will serve as points of contact, footholds for students and scholars alike as they seek out and read ‘the moving text’.

Notes

1 David Soskice, ‘Foreword’, in Crossing Paths: Interdisciplinary Institutions, Careers, Education and Applications (London: The British Academy, 2016), 6. Online: www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Crossing%20Paths%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf; accessed 30 April 2017.

2 Some of these essays have been republished, alongside several new ones, in two volumes: David Brown, God in a Single Vision: Integrating Philosophy and Theology, ed. Christopher R. Brewer and Robert MacSwain (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); idem, Divine Generosity and Human Creativity: Theology through Symbol, Painting and Architecture, ed. Christopher R. Brewer and Robert MacSwain (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).

3 See, for example, David Brown, The Divine Trinity (London: Duckworth; La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985), 52–98; idem, Invitation to Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 12–14, 42–89, 106–7, 144–5; idem, ‘Did Revelation Cease?’, in Reason and the Christian Religion: Essays in Honour of Richard Swinburne, ed. Alan G. Padgett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 121–41; idem, The Word to Set You Free: Living Faith and Biblical Criticism (London: SPCK, 1995); idem, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), passim; idem, Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), passim; idem, ‘Sinai in Art and Architecture’, in The Significance of Sinai: Traditions about Sinai and Divine Revelation in Judaism and Christianity, ed. George J. Brooke, Hindy Najman and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2008), 313–31; idem, Divine Humanity: Kenosis and the Construction of Christian Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011), 4–14; idem, God in a Single Vision, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, 61–85; idem, ‘The Bible and Wider Culture: Animals as a Test Case’, in In the Fullness of Time: Essays on Christology, Creation, and Eschatology in Honor of Richard Bauckham, ed. Daniel M. Gurtner, Grant Macaskill and Jonathan T. Pennington (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 65–81; idem, Divine Generosity and Human Creativity, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, 81–7.

4 Notable exceptions include James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 586–604; James D. G. Dunn, New Testament Theology: An Introduction (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2009), 158; and Benjamin D. Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition, The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 103, and 403–4 for a complete listing. For reflections on the Bible in pastoral practice with reference to Brown, see Gordon Oliver, Holy Bible, Human Bible: Questions Pastoral Practice Must Ask (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 97–8.

5 The editors are grateful to the Centre for Academic, Professional and Organisational Development at the University of St Andrews for a CAPOD Professional Development Grant, and also to Professor Mark Elliot, then Head of School, for a matching grant from St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews.

6 John Macquarrie, review of David Brown, ‘Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth’, Journal of Theological Studies 52.2 (2001), 982.

7 Robert MacSwain and Taylor Worley (eds), Theology, Aesthetics, and Culture: Responses to the Work of David Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a concise introduction to Brown’s five OUP volumes, see Robert MacSwain, ‘Introduction: Theology, Aesthetics, and Culture’, in Theology, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. MacSwain and Worley, 1–10.

8 Christopher R. Brewer (ed.), Christian Theology and the Transformation of Natural Religion: From Incarnation to Sacramentality – Essays in Honour of David Brown (Leuven: Peeters, 2018).

9 See also David James Stewart, ‘The Fulfillment of a Polanyian Vision of Heuristic Theology: David Brown’s Reframing of Revelation, Tradition, and Imagination’, Tradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 41.3 (2015), 4–19.

10 Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology, 603.

11 For discussion of Brown’s view, which he originally described as interventionist, and then later interactionist, see Brown, The Divine Trinity, x, xv, 4–5, 53–4, 101, 140–1, 236–7, 239, 255–6; idem, ‘Wittgenstein Against the Wittgensteinians: A Reply to Kenneth Surin on The Divine Trinity’, Modern Theology 2 (1986), 264; idem, ‘God and Symbolic Action’, in Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary, ed. Robert MacSwain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 134; idem, Tradition and Imagination, 277.

12 Brown, The Divine Trinity; cf. idem, Choices: Ethics and the Christian (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 34. See also idem, Tradition and Imagination, 62.

13 See Brown, ‘God and Symbolic Action’, in Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry, ed. MacSwain, 136; cf. Sommer, Revelation and Authority, 186–7, 235–9, 248.

14 Brown, The Divine Trinity, xii; cf. Sommer, ch. 1: ‘Artifact or Scripture?’, in Revelation and Authority, 11–26.

15 Brown explains: ‘[T]he incarnation involved a more radical kenosis than Christianity has assumed throughout most of its history, with Jesus very much conditioned by the culture of which he was part. But if this was true at the point of God’s deepest disclosure and involvement with humanity, then a fortiori one would expect matters to proceed similarly elsewhere in revelation, and this is in fact what we find as we study the origin of the various biblical ideas. Revelation was thus a matter of God taking seriously our historical situatedness, our dependence on our own particular environment and setting, rather than attempting to override it.’ Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 7–8. See also ibid., 109; idem, God in a Single Vision, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, 64–5.

16 For discussion of the kenotic model, see Brown, The Divine Trinity, 219–71; David Brown, Divine Humanity: Kenosis Explored and Defended (London: SCM Press; with an alternate subtitle – Kenosis and the Construction of a Christian Theology – Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011); idem, ‘Incarnational Models Revisited’, in God in a Single Vision, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, 92–106.

17 Brown writes: ‘[R]evelation is a process whereby God progressively unveils the truth about himself and his purposes to a community of believers, but always in such a manner that their freedom of response is respected.’ Brown, The Divine Trinity, 70. See also idem, God in a Single Vision, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, 61–2.

18 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 54.

19 Brown, The Divine Trinity, 70.

20 For discussion, see ibid., 71–4.

21 Ibid., 72.

22 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 57. Going further, Brown writes: ‘The reason why narratives retain their power in different circumstances is because readers either give new prominence to hitherto neglected aspects of the text or because they resolve to tell the story in a new way.’ Ibid.

23 Brown, Discipleship and Imagination, 389–405.

24 Brown mentions this criticism in God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. For additional discussion, see Christopher R. Brewer, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Divine Generosity and Human Creativity, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, viii–ix; and for what is probably the most comprehensive response on this point to date (even though it has primarily to do with Brown’s writings on music), see Gavin Hopps, ‘Popular Music and Spilt Religion: A Window onto the Infinite’, in David Brown and Gavin Hopps, The Extravagance of Music (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

25 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 127.

26 Brown, The Divine Trinity, 61, 77–86; cf. idem, God in a Single Vision, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, 3; cf. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology: The Gifford Lectures for 1991 Delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 103, 115, 121–2, 136–7, 144–5, 195–8, 200; idem, Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr, vol. 1: Interpretation and Theology, ed. John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 411–80.

27 Brown, The Divine Trinity, 61, 74–7.

28 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 1.

29 Ibid., 7. See also Brown, The Divine Trinity, 103–5; idem, Discipleship and Imagination, 402–3.

30 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 322–64.

31 Brown, Divine Generosity and Human Creativity, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, 99–149.

32 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 1, 5. Important to note is that this process of critique works in both directions (ibid., 1, 51), and also that progress is not inevitable (ibid., 207). See also David Brown, ‘Human Sacrifice and Two Imaginative Worlds, Aztec and Christian: Finding God in Evil’, in Sacrifice and Modern Thought, ed. Julia Meszaros and Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 180, n. 1. Making an important clarification, Brown there notes: ‘That is, undermine the predominance of texts, even if still brought under some more fundamental scriptural principle.’ Ibid.

33 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 127.

34 I say ‘in one sense’ as Brown does, in fact, wish to draw attention to ‘the intervening history’. He explains: ‘Present-day Christianity, it seems to me, will go badly wrong, if it attempts an unmediated dialogue with the biblical text rather than recognizing also the intervening history that has helped shape its present perception of the text’s meaning.’ Ibid., 2. See also ibid., 117.

35 Ibid., 208.

36 Brown, The Word to Set You Free, ix–x.

37 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 7.

38 Ibid., 106ff.

39 Ibid., 8.

40 Howard E. Root, Theological Radicalism and Tradition: ‘The Limits of Radicalism’ with Appendices, ed. Christopher R. Brewer (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 65–71; William Desmond, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), xix; Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs 30 (Leuven: Peeters, 2003). For discussion of Root and Desmond along these lines, see Christopher R. Brewer, ‘Rolling with Release into the Future: William Desmond’s Donation to a Natural Theology of the Arts’, in William Desmond and Contemporary Theology, ed. Christopher Ben Simpson and Brendan Thomas Sammon (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 217–37.

41 David Parker, ‘Scripture is Tradition’, Theology 94.757 (1991), 17.

42 That said, Brown has been critical of Parker’s ‘exaggeration’. Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 301–2.

43 Ibid., 123–4.

44 Parker, ‘Scripture is Tradition’, 16.

45 D. C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For further reflection on the relationship between Brown and Parker, see Garrick V. Allen’s chapter in this volume.

46 Brown, God in a Single Vision, ed. Brewer and MacSwain, 82.

47 Sommer, Revelation and Authority, 2.

48 Ibid., 1.

49 Ibid., 8; cf. Parker, ‘Scripture is Tradition’, 16.

50 Brown, Tradition and Imagination, 1.

51 David Brown, ‘The Glory of God Revealed in Art and