Gospel as Work of Art: Imaginative Truth and the Open Text

by David Brown

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2024

Overview

A lushly illustrated, magisterial exploration of the imaginative truth of the gospel

In the modern academy, truth and imagination are thought to be mutually exclusive. But what if truth can spring from other fonts, like art, literature, and invention?

The legacy of the Enlightenment favors historical and empirical inquiry above all other methods for searching for truth. But this assumption stymies our theological explorations. Though the historicity of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is important, it is not of sole importance. For instance, is John’s Gospel any less “true” than the Synoptics just because it’s less historically accurate?

David Brown challenges us to expand our understanding of the gospel past source criticism and historical Jesus studies to include works of imagination. Reading Scripture in tandem with works of art throughout the centuries, Brown reenvisions the gospel as an open text. Scholars of theology and biblical studies, freed from literalism, will find new avenues of revelation in Gospel as Work of Art. This volume includes over one hundred color illustrations.

Key Features

• A lushly illustrated, magisterial exploration of the imaginative truth of the gospel
• Reenvisions the gospel as an open text
• Challenges us to expand our understanding of the gospel past source criticism and historical Jesus studies to include works of imagination

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction

Part I: Foundations

• 1. Religious Control and the Spiritual Imagination
• 2. Meaning and an Open Text
• 3. Imagination and Truth in Theory and in Art
• 4. Truth in a Changing Narrative

Part II: Resources Then and Now

• 5. Through Prayer and People
• 6. Mystical and Natural
• 7. Responding to Inherited Traditions

Part III: Significance

• 8. Why a Gospel at All?
• 9. Layers of Revelation
• 10. Miracle as Symbol and Sign
• 11. Variety in Parable and Teaching
• 12. Death and the Exhaustion of Metaphor
• 13. The Resurrected Lord and the Spirit
• 14. The Openness of Faith

Product Details

• Title: Gospel as Work of Art: Imaginative Truth and the Open Text
• Author: David Brown
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2024
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Pages: 572
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Bible. N.T. Gospels; Imagination › Religious aspects--Christianity; Christianity and the arts
• ISBNs: 9780802882820, 080288282X
• Resource ID: LLS:GSPLSWRKTRPNTXT
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-04T21:06:40Z

About David Brown

David Brown is a professor of theology, aesthetics, and culture and the Wardlaw Professor at St Mary’s College School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. He is the author or editor of several books, including God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama and God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary.