We undertook the visual arts strand at King’s. Led by Ben Quash, our symposium group gathered theologians, biblical scholars, art historians, and curators for discussions that took place in arts institutions rather than theological faculties. We met at the Royal Academy, here in London, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Bode Museum and Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Each meeting was accompanied by a public event featuring artists and scholars, and in each city we visited galleries and studios and talked to contemporary artists about their work and its engagement with Christianity. Throughout the project we were trying to understand what questions the visual arts pose about Christ and modernity, and what truths about Christ and modernity they ask us to face.

As a way of structuring this potentially vast subject, we employed four prepositions that might direct or reflect forms of relationship between art and Christianity. So we thought about art with Christianity, art instead of—or even against—Christianity, art about Christianity, and art for Christianity. The book follows this structure, grouping the chapters prepositionally (by way of focus rather than as a restriction).

Above all, this book brings to the surface a host of narratives and interactions that invite readers to reconsider what they might think they know about modern and contemporary art and religion. God is not dead, at least not in the gallery, and art and Christianity have a huge amount to talk about today—as indeed they always have.

Still others consider such theologically thorny matters as doubt (Jonathan Anderson with Robert Rauschenberg) and justification by faith (Daniel Siedell with Luther, Cranach the Elder, Rilke, and Cézanne) or the nature of the risen body (David Taylor with Edward Knippers). I can’t do justice to all the contributions here, but this gives some idea of the scope. I’ve already put chapters on course bibliographies (it helps that, like all the volumes in the Brepols Arts and the Sacred series, it has masses of large colour photographs), and I know it is a book that I’ll come back to both for teaching and for my own edification.

As a relatively new discipline within the academic study of theology, theology and the visual arts initially developed in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and until really quite recently there was very little structured development of the field in its own right. Now publications are increasing and interest is running high, but the infrastructure of the discipline is still unstable. There are some big gaps on its bookshelves, and the whole enterprise feels rather precarious.

Now feels like the ideal moment—a kairos if you like—to try to consolidate what we have and think more strategically about where we want to go. We want theology and the visual arts to be a confident, secure presence in theological academies, in the church, and in conversations with art history and art criticism, both in universities and in museums and galleries. We want this to be the norm rather than the exception. A couple of years ago in Berlin, after our last Theology, Modernity, and the Visual Arts symposium, you and I and Jonathan Anderson and Ben Quash agreed that what we all desired was to “normalize the union of Christian theology and the visual arts of the past, present and future.” I strongly believe that theology and the visual arts should not be an added extra in theological education; thinking about and getting involved with materiality, sacramentality, human imaginings of the divine—these aren’t things that should be optional thinking for the fortunate. This is the stuff of life, and matter matters, fundamentally, to an incarnational, pneumatological understanding of life. All of which means that there is work to do to strengthen our foundations and build on what we have so that it becomes—in the best possible way—normal.

Our new Theology and the Visual Arts project is part of this work. In particular, we’re trying to respond to some of the problems that those of us who work in this field face. One of the big issues is that people are often isolated and so many crucial discussions have simply never happened: we need new conversational communities. Another problem is the absence of some crucial texts: we need a sustained discussion of hermeneutics and method in theology and the visual arts, and an extensive exploration of systematics through the visual arts. (We’re trying to produce both.) And there are still very few public events at which theology and art sit side by side: we need more opportunities to invite people into these enriching interactions.

This project is trying to do something about these three issues in particular. We have a group of scholars working collaboratively, we’re addressing some of the big gaps on the subject’s bookshelves, and we’ve launched a series of public lectures in theology and the visual arts (the first of which took place in July this year with Neil MacGregor and Jonathan Ruffer thinking about art and Christianity on public display). I hope that in a few years’ time, when someone asks, “What is this subject and how do you do it?” we will be better able to answer them and have a better range of resources to give them.

MJM: The Visual Commentary on Scripture is ongoing and continues to be an extraordinary free resource for scholars, theologians, pastors, and lay people. Would you mind pointing out a few highlights from the many mini-exhibitions?

CR: The Visual Commentary on Scripture is a series of individual “exhibitions” structured around a biblical text and three artworks that are brought into conversation with that text by an author who writes a short commentary about each of the three artworks they’ve chosen and a longer one that brings them all together. The Scripture and the artworks illuminate each other through a kind of three-way conversation between themselves and the author.

There is a great variety of artworks and authorial voices among the 370 or so passages now online (there are another hundred in the pipeline, and the aim is to cover the whole Bible eventually), so you can browse for hours or look at a new one every day. But one of the less-known highlights is the video channel, which has introductory videos and some video exhibitions, and also (if you keep scrolling down the page) a host of beautiful short films called “Unlocking Christian Art at the Bode-Museum & Gemäldegalerie,” which explore the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary through these two Berlin art collections. I really recommend them.

My interest is always in trying to understand how works of art might form and transform the relationship of the viewer to God. “Inspiration” is a rather grand word, but I think my projects have started with a strong (often unexpected) emotional and spiritual response to a painting, and a desire to understand that by trying to articulate what I think might be happening in or through that painting. And then wondering if I could do that in a way that might be intelligible and useful to other people. As someone whose faith is far more experiential and sacramental than propositional, I’m trying to explore a way of understanding theology, of doing theology, that is holistic—embodied, cerebral, emotional, and religious all at once. I want to understand how some artworks might produce the kind of theologically informed experience that is both thought and felt, analyzed and encountered, explored rationally and experienced relationally at the same time.

The first book I wrote about Renaissance art (Transformations in Persons and Paint: Visual Theology, Historical Images, and the Modern Viewer) is about fresco cycles in churches in Florence. It is an attempt to understand how these embedded images work with the places they inhabit to shape the people who visit or live with them. The starting point for that project was really Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in Cell 3 at San Marco and the apparently empty space in the middle of it, which is so pregnantly full of new life and salvation. Looking at frescoes in San Marco, in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce, the Brancacci Chapel, and others showed me something about the importance of place, of images that shape their viewers, and about the relationality of paintings and viewers. Picture, place, and person make a triangle that creates a space in which new things happen and transformations are possible. The paintings are all fourteenth and fifteenth century, and their original contexts are very important in helping us to understand them. But these works are still part of a living faith—still potential sites of spiritual encounter—and I was trying to write for viewers today too.

The second book (Strangeness and Recognition: Mystery and Familiarity in Renaissance Paintings of Christ) is about the dynamic of strangeness and recognition at work in so many biblical texts, the strange things that happen when God is the subject of human communication, and how all that connects to the strange ways in which some Renaissance paintings of Christ respond to the extraordinary, frankly crazy, task of trying to paint someone who is fully human and fully divine. I wrote it (and made some films about the audacity of Christian art) while I was working at the National Gallery in London as the Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion. I was repeatedly struck by the sense that the classic gallery installation can easily undermine the sheer shock and surprise that we can sometimes experience in encounters with art, and that the experience of estrangement (or of what pseudo-Dionysius calls dissemblance) might be very important to the recognition of divine mysteries. It’s easy to feel that we “know” what these pictures are “about” because we recognize their subjects, or periods, or schools, but some artists are exceptionally good at reminding us that we actually know vanishingly little about the mystery of God—and (importantly) at making us want to know more.

One is that Christian art is audacious, impossible, strange, inadequate, and surprising, and this is as it should be, because the very fact that the grammar of visual communication ultimately breaks down under the pressure of trying to paint God’s involvement in the world means that those pictures invite us to continually rediscover our relationship with God and the world around us. We can never be complacent in our understanding; we are called again and again to something so far beyond our comprehension that some painters seem deliberately to remind us that we can’t understand it. There’s a powerful example of this in the exquisite Annunciation by Filippo Lippi, where, at the deepest point of the perspective, beyond the intersection of the message of the angel and the divine light descending, we run slap into a wall and have to return to the surface. Lippi can’t show us the moment of the incarnation, but he can show us that we can’t see it.

And the third is that if paintings are person-like, people are also like pictures. We are re-presentations: dissimilar, estranged, and question-raising, just like paintings. In attempting to re-present God, whose image people (in a flawed way) re-present, painted images re-present both God and flawed human selves. When visual language disrupts itself with the truthful inadequacy of dissemblance, it leaves open the possibility of human transformation through a personal exchange that leads through estrangement to recognition, rediscovering the familiar within the strange, the new and renewed within the familiar, and the ultimately unspeakable, unpaintable mystery of the incarnation.

Denny began as a landscape painter, and I grew up with his painting on the walls at home and then began visiting his windows in Gloucestershire and Dorset as his stained-glass career took off. I realize in retrospect that they were hugely spiritually formative for me, and that was something that I wanted to understand better. He is very well known now, and I contributed a piece to a beautiful book of essays about his glass that has just been updated, but I think his work needs something more extensive. We are commissioning new photography of the many unphotographed early windows, and I’m currently doing site visits, watching him work, and asking a lot of questions! I’m also taking great delight in discovering the incredible richness of medieval commentaries on windows and glass, how they relate to sacred buildings and to Scripture, and how we might be transformed by their light. It’s a project that is full of ideas of revelation and vision, and the dynamism of an art form that, because it depends on light, is continually changing. I’ll be able to tell you more in a couple of years.

You don’t have to study via an academic route; you can just look and ask yourself what you see and what difference that makes. Read something, learn a bit more about what you saw, and then look again the next day and see something you hadn’t noticed. Take pleasure in it.