Chris E. W. Green - Böcker

God calls humans to be creative. The human drive to represent transcendent truths witnesses to the fact that we are destined to be transfigured and to transfigure the world. It is worth asking, then, what truthful representations, whether in art, spirituality, or theology, teach us about the one who is our truth, the one who made us and the one in whose image we are made. All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology is an experimental and constructive aesthetic Christology sourced by close readings of a wide array of artistic works, canonical and popular-including poems, films, essays, novels, plays, short stories, sculptures, icons, and paintings-as well as art criticism and passages from the Christian Scriptures. From first to last, these readings engage in conversation with the deep, broad wisdom of the Christian theological tradition. The liturgical calendar guides the themes of the book, beginning with Advent and Christmas; carrying through Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, and Ascension; and ending with Pentecost and Ordinary Time.Chris Green brings together these readings to create a mosaic-like impression of Jesus as the one through whom God graces and gives nature to all things, his life and death redeeming the whole creation, including human creativity and artistic endeavor, and transfiguring it into the full, free flourishing that God has purposed. This vision of Christ holds promise for artists and theologians, as well as preachers and teachers, revealing how our compulsions to create-and the meanings with which we endow our creations-become a site of the Spirit's presence, opening us to the goodness and wildness of God.

The Fire and the Cloud is a non-supersessionist biblical Christology developed from close readings of Israel's Scriptures. In this work, the second in a trilogy that began with All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology, Chris E. W. Green tracks the recurrent and interwoven themes of exile, journey, and return across the canonical order, beginning with the story of Cain's exile and ending with the homecoming of Naomi and Ruth. He examines crucial passages and their significance in later Jewish and Christian interpretations, reckoning honestly with the history of Christian anti-Jewishness and reminding us of the good news that the nations are being grafted into the people of God. Beginning to end, Green's figural--indeed, mystical--Christology lays itself open to the mysterious and transformative power of imaginative exegesis, seeking both to honor Israel's unique, ongoing vocation as the people of God and to honor the church's faith in and witness to Jesus, striving not to impose a dead image of him onto the ancient texts but to recognize his living likeness in their Spirit-inspired movements. Green believes such interpretation is necessary and necessarily difficult, requiring us to read both with and against the grain of our convictions and commitments, expecting and allowing the biblical texts to teach us what we did not know we needed to learn differently. This is so, he argues, because a biblical Christology, if it is to be true to its purposes, must be capable of surprising us as the living word of the living Christ--confronting us in judgment, decentering us in praise, and sweeping us up into the covenant-making work of the Spirit for the sake of the nations.

This book explores how the Spirit is represented in visual art, but also how the Spirit is at work in and through visual art, in all its forms. The volume editors and contributors engage visual art from the perspective of pneumatology to give theologies of culture fruitful new perspectives that begin with the Spirit rather than other common theological contact points. The book explores the Spirit’s role in art-making, looks at how the Spirit engages culture through the arts, and shows how the church has historically engaged the Spirit through visual art. Contributors ask how Christian convictions about and experiences of the Spirit might shape the way one thinks about visual art.

The Spirit and the Screen engages contemporary films from the perspective of pneumatology to give theologies of culture fruitful new perspectives that begin with the Spirit rather than other common theological contact points (Christology, anthropology, theological ethics, creation, eschatology, etc.). This book explores pertinent pneumatological issues that arise in film, as well as literary devices that draw allusions to the Spirit. It offers three main contributions: first, it explores how Christian understandings of the person and work of the Spirit illuminate the nature of film and film-making; second, it shows that there are in fact “Spirit figures” in film (as distinct from but inseparable from Christ-figures), even if sometimes they’re not intended as such, “Spirit-led” characters, are moved to act “prophetically,” against their inclinations and in excess of their skill or knowledge and with eccentric, life-giving creativity; third, it identifies subtle and explicit symbolizations of the Spirit in pop culture, symbolizations that requires deep, careful thinking about the Christian doctrine of the Spirit and generate new horizons for cultural analysis. The contributors of this book explore these issues, asking how Christian convictions and experiences of the Spirit might shape the way one thinks about films and film-making.

The Spirit and the Song:Pneumatological Reflections on Popular Music explores pertinent pneumatological issues that arise in music. It offers three distinct contributions: first, it asks what, if anything, music tells listeners about God’s Spiritedness. Can the experience of music speak to human spiritedness, the world’s transcendentality, or a person’s own self-transcendence in ways nothing else does or can? Second, this book explores how the Spirit functions within, and even determines, culture through music. Because music is a profound human expression, it can find itself in a rich dialogue with the Spirit. Third and finally, this book explores the contested status of music in Christian spiritual traditions. It deals with music as inspired by the Spirit, music as participation in Spiritedness, and music as temptation of “the flesh.” As such, this book also engages music’s placement in Christian spiritual traditions. The contributors of this book ask how Christian convictions about and experiences of the Spirit might shape the way one thinks about music.