Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Kymberly N. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's African American churches and neighborhoods. Moving from Chicago's oldest black Christ figure to contemporary religious street art, Pinder explores ideas like blackness in public, art for black communities, and the relationship of Afrocentric art to Black Liberation Theology. She also focuses attention on art excluded from scholarship due to racial or religious particularity. Throughout, she reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery. Painting the Gospel includes maps and tour itineraries that allow readers to make conceptual, historical, and geographical connections among the works.

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.

In this book, Beatrice E. Kitzinger explores the power of representation in the Carolingian period, demonstrating how images were used to assert the value and efficacy of art works. She focuses on the cross, Christianity's central sign, which simultaneously commemorates sacred history, functions in the present, and prepares for the end of time. It is well recognized that the visual attributes of the cross were designed to communicate its theology relative to history and eschatology; Kitzinger argues that early medieval artists also developed a formal language to articulate its efficacious powers in the present day. Defined through form and text as the sign of the present, the image of the cross articulated the instrumentality of religious objects and built spaces. Whereas medieval and modern scholars have pondered the theological problems posed by representation, Kitzinger here proposes a visual argument that affirms the self-reflexive value of art works in the early medieval West. Introducing little-known sources, she re-evaluates both the image of the cross and the project of book-making in an expanded field of Carolingian painting.

It is often difficult to describe beauty or even justify attempts to experience something beautiful. Yet if artists--whether painters or poets, actors or musicians, architects or sculptors--teach us anything, it is that the pursuit of beauty is a common feature among all humanity. As Cecilia González-Andrieu contends, these varied experiences with artistic beauty are embedded with revelatory and prophetic power that not only affects a single individual but allows for communal formation. Named one of America magazine's most promising young theologians, González-Andrieu seeks to engage art in order to reveal its religious significance. Bridge to Wonder proposes a method of theological aesthetics allowing readers to mine the depths of creative beauty to discover variegated theological truths that enable greater communion with each other and the One source of all that is beautiful.

Think of your local church. Without art--music, song, dance, etc.--it would be a much poorer place. But if protestants have any vision for the arts, it tends to be a thin one. This unique book is an attempt to contribute to a robust, expansive vision for the church and the arts. Its specific aim is to show how the many parts of the landscape of church and art hold together. You can think of it as a kind of helicopter flyover, but one with expert pilots. The guides include the likes of Eugene Peterson, Lauren Winner, Jeremy Begbie, Andy Crouch, and John Witvliet, helping to inspire readers and empower pastor-leaders with a vision of the church and the arts that is compelling, far-seeing, and profoundly transformative.

World-renowned theologian Jeremy Begbie has been at the forefront of teaching and writing on theology and the arts for more than twenty years. Amid current debates and discussions on the topic, Begbie emphasizes the role of a biblically grounded creedal orthodoxy as he shows how Christian theology and the arts can enrich each other. Throughout the book, Begbie demonstrates the power of classic trinitarian faith to bring illumination, surprise, and delight whenever it engages with the arts.

Is the Trinity biblical? Is it necessary to affirm God as three persons in one being? Despite a renewed interest in the Trinity in recent years, many Christians, including most evangelicals, either relegate the Son of God to creaturely status or repudiate the personhood of the Holy Spirit. In addition, numerous scholars affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity is not clearly revealed in Scripture. Is the Trinity merely a philosophical construction, or is it essential to orthodox Christianity? Drawing on hermeneutics and biblical and historical theology, Malcolm Yarnell crafts a careful and clear response to these issues through exegesis of pivotal texts from both testaments. He meticulously examines the foundational Hebrew confession known as the Shema, Matthew's great commission, the divine relations in the Gospel of John, Paul's Corinthian benediction, the opening hymn of Ephesians, and the throne room vision of the Apocalypse. Also considered are the relationships of language to revelation and history to metaphysics, along with recent appeals to recover patristic exegesis and the Christian imagination. He also challenges the reader to discern the implications of the Trinity for personal salvation as well as corporate worship.