Tradition and Imagination

Abstract

Abstract Seeks to offer a new way of understanding revelation. Instead of the usual contrast between later church tradition and biblical revelation, Brown suggests that revelation be seen as something that itself proceeds through a continuously developing tradition, operable no less within the canon itself than during subsequent church history. Change occurs through narratives being told in new ways, in part in response to changing cultural challenges. After setting the argument in the context of current debates about objectivity and postmodernism, the next two chapters then illustrate the argument from changing versions of the nativity stories and from developing self‐understanding within Judaism and Islam. The middle two chapters offer a sympathetic presentation of classical myth before giving detailed consideration to transformation of the patriarchal narratives both within the canon and beyond. The last two chapters then apply the argument to christology, noting in particular the way in which the artistic imagination can be seen to reflect and reinforce various changes in understanding that have occurred over time.

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