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CURRENT RESEARCH
A Poetics of Redemption For the past twenty-five years or so, much of my research and writing has been associated with the work of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrews, a Research Institute which I co-founded in 2000 with Jeremy Begbie and of which I served as Director from 2000 to 2013. My current major project is still a work of three volumes engaging Christian theology in constructive conversation with other disciplines and practices clustered, for convenience, around the rubric of 'imagination and the arts'. This recognises that the capacities and contributions of human imagining are concentrated identifiably in the practices and products of human artistry, but insists that the imaginative dimensions of our humanity range far more widely in ways that are both distinct from and continuous with the artistic and 'creative' imagination. |
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In October 2014 the first volume of this major work (which I have dubbed 'A Poetics of Redemption') was published. The larger project investigates the claim that imagination lies close to the heart of our creaturehood as human beings, and is thus central rather than peripheral to the trinitarian dynamics of God's redemptive engagement with us. Making Good: Creation, Creativity and Artistry (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press) situates an account of human 'creativity' within the parameters of a Christian doctrine of creation, and explores some of the theological tensions and resolutions involved in doing so. Human artistry, I argue, affords a concrete paradigm of our wider human calling to participate in God's own creative project, fashioning a world fit for our perpetual indwelling together with the one who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
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I am currently working on the second part of this projected trilogy. Taking Flesh: Incarnation, Embodiment and Artistry will build directly on its predecessor. Based on explorations first undertaken in preparing the New College Lectures for 2015 (hosted by the University of New South Wales, Sydney) it will furnish a theologically informed account of another essential facet of human creatureliness—viz, its embodiedness, its situation in the world of matter, of bodies, of the ‘flesh’. A theological account of things is bound to resist the reduction of reality either to matter (as some forms of ‘materialism’ seek to) or to ‘spirit’ (as some forms of idealism seek to). A Christian account, I shall argue, is bound nonetheless to acknowledge their discrete levels of existence while yet grasping them only together and in the closest of relationships to one another, each, as it were, penetrating the other’s being within the warp and woof of creation. |
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Within the dynamics of human existence and action in the world, I contend, matter and meaning are forever being woven together in new ways, their natural admixture lending itself naturally to creative reconfigurations in which each is needful to the other’s fullest existence and expression. Such an account will, of course, demand a careful reconsideration of some traditional valuations of human bodies relative to the world of things ‘spiritual’. It will need, too, to grapple seriously with that other connotation of ‘the flesh’, viz, 'creaturely' reality as distinct from God's own (a category which applies just as surely to the non-material elements of our humanity as to our fleshy extensions into geometric space), and with the fact that flesh-taking and meaning-making occurs within a world entangled in the bonds of sin and death, still struggling and groaning for its liberation. What, we shall have to ask, might a redemptive flesh-taking amount to and look like?
As its full title suggests, Taking Flesh will find its theological concentration and orientation in the Incarnation, the unique moment of flesh-taking in the life of God himself which both parallels and in some sense (and part of this book’s purpose will be to clarify in whatsense) furnishes the conditions for all those acts of creaturely flesh-taking and meaning-making alluded to above. That the Word or Logos of God finds its final expression and fulfillment vis-à-vis the creature by appropriating ‘flesh’ rather than remaining discarnate furnishes a vital theological limit-case in terms of which creaturely analogies may and should be weighed and measured.
The central thesis of this second part of the three volume set is thus that for God to be fully God in relation to the world he has created involves God in ‘taking flesh’ and making it his own in a redemptive reconfiguration and transfiguration of it, exalting it so that it becomes fully the bearer of the divine life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In an analogous and related manner, for the human creature to be fully human (and for the world to be fully ‘the world’ for us) involves us in repeated acts of ‘flesh-taking’ and ‘meaning-making’, of which the practices and products of artistry, albeit only one sphere in which this occurs, may function as a particularly appropriate paradigm, and furnish a set of instances and types consideration of which brings us quickly to reckon with the peculiar tensions and resolutions proper to the phenomena of our wider human being-in-the-world.
Taking Flesh: Incarnation, Embodiment and Artistry is due to be published by Fortress Press in 2027.
As its full title suggests, Taking Flesh will find its theological concentration and orientation in the Incarnation, the unique moment of flesh-taking in the life of God himself which both parallels and in some sense (and part of this book’s purpose will be to clarify in whatsense) furnishes the conditions for all those acts of creaturely flesh-taking and meaning-making alluded to above. That the Word or Logos of God finds its final expression and fulfillment vis-à-vis the creature by appropriating ‘flesh’ rather than remaining discarnate furnishes a vital theological limit-case in terms of which creaturely analogies may and should be weighed and measured.
The central thesis of this second part of the three volume set is thus that for God to be fully God in relation to the world he has created involves God in ‘taking flesh’ and making it his own in a redemptive reconfiguration and transfiguration of it, exalting it so that it becomes fully the bearer of the divine life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In an analogous and related manner, for the human creature to be fully human (and for the world to be fully ‘the world’ for us) involves us in repeated acts of ‘flesh-taking’ and ‘meaning-making’, of which the practices and products of artistry, albeit only one sphere in which this occurs, may function as a particularly appropriate paradigm, and furnish a set of instances and types consideration of which brings us quickly to reckon with the peculiar tensions and resolutions proper to the phenomena of our wider human being-in-the-world.
Taking Flesh: Incarnation, Embodiment and Artistry is due to be published by Fortress Press in 2027.
