Full Description
The Gospel Coalition 2023 Award of Distinction (Arts & Culture)
Southwestern Journal of Theology 2023 Book Award (Honorable Mention, Church Music/Worship/Christianity and the Arts)
Late-modern culture has been marred by reductionism, which shrinks and flattens our vision of ourselves and the world. Renowned theologian Jeremy Begbie believes that the arts by their nature push against reductionism, helping us understand and experience more deeply the infinite richness of God's love and of the world God has made.
In Abundantly More, Begbie analyzes and critiques reductionism and its effects. He shows how the arts can resist reductive impulses by opening us up to an unlimited abundance of meaning. And he demonstrates how engaging the arts in light of a trinitarian imagination (which itself cuts against reductionism) generates a unique way of witnessing to and sharing in the life and purposes of God.
Theologians, artists, and any who are interested in how these fields intersect will find rich resources here and discover the crucial role the arts can play in keeping our culture open to the possibility of God.
Contents
Introduction
Part 1: Pressures of Containment
1. Reductive Pressures
2. The Arts under Pressure
3. A Scriptural Interruption: Seeing and Not Seeing (John 9:1-34)
4. Reductionism's Peculiarities
5. A Scriptural Interruption: Living Water and Overflow (John 4:1-15)
Part 2: Counterpressures
6. Art's Generativity
7. God's Uncontainable Pressure
8. God's Own "Ex-pressure"
Part 3: Convergences
9. Resonances and Reverberations
10. Open Feast
Index
