Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change / Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth

Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change. By David Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. viii + 402 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth. By David Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. vi + 438 pp. $39.95 (cloth). David Brown's excellent two-volume study urges that tradition and should not be contrasted, but that Christians should see the hand of God in a continuing process that accompanies (p. 1). Christian story developed as a dialectic between the tradition and in which insights are often triggered by cultural situations. Indeed, tradition, so far from being something secondary or reactionary, is the motor that sustains revelation both within and (p. 1). is no more privileged for understanding the process of the Christian story than is tradition. God operates both in and in the long and vivid history of interpretation. This history is not limited to verbal theology, but encompasses the arts (especially poetry and painting) that express Christians' understanding of God's activity in the world. Both volumes include a section of plates that Brown discusses in some detail as important bearers of theology. In the first volume, Tradition and Imagination, Brown, who is the Van Mildert Professor of Divinity in the University of Durham and Canon of Durham Cathedral, describes the moving text of Christian revelation. His examples include the development of Christmas as a narrative that goes well beyond in its modern celebration, and significant interpretations of biblical narratives within Judaism and Islam. Aware that his view that later developments can open up perspectives undreamed of in the first century (p. 25) will be perceived as a radical view of revelation, Brown nevertheless defends the right of later tradition to critique Scripture (pp. 110-111). He concedes that although later does not automatically mean better, new circumstances must generate principles (p. 166). common thread that links and tradition is by which narrative and doctrine can be translated into religious experience. incarnation of Jesus Christ is Brown's strongest evidence for the ongoing need for renewal. If [Christ] were to achieve maximum relevance to the people of his own immediate time and place, might this not mean that what he had said had to be reinterpreted within a growing tradition? (p. 276). Becoming human meant submitting to the limitations of context and perspective. Any claim to universality, then, must begin with respect for the highly different contexts in which the gospel is reinterpreted. Brown introduces the concept of imaginative density to suggest the condition in which a reality is allowed to come alive in the here and now (p. 311). Imagination is absolutely integral to the flourishing of any religion (p. 366). Situating his argument between modernism and postmodernism, Brown contends that the useful and important emphasis of Enlightenment thinkers on historicity and objectivity must be related to postmodernism's insistence on the conditionedness of all thought and thus the central role of community and tradition. In Discipleship and Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth, Brown sets himself the difficult task of discussing the question of the relationship between imagination and truth. Part I, Appropriating Christ for the Present, considers changing attitudes to the status of women. Part II, The Impact of Changing Experience, addresses attitudes to suffering, the family, and sexuality. Part III, Truth and Authority, discusses nine types of criteria he has applied throughout the two volumes for discerning the truth of theology from to Bellini. Arguing that idolatry is the product of a poor imagination, Brown says that painting, no less than writing, can present truth (p. …