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Christopher R. Brewer (ed.), Christian Theology and the Transformation of Natural Religion: From Incarnation to Sacramentality – Essays in Honour of David Brown (Studies in Philosophical Theology; Leuven: Peeters, 2018), pp. 289. ISBN: 978-9042936393. RRP £71.08 or US$55.15.

Christopher Brewer, whose doctorate was supervised by David Brown, is also co-editor of two recent collections of Brown’s essays, God in a Single Vision (2016) and Divine Generosity and Human Creativity (2017). The latter book – as this one – is about sacramentality. This new book was also published more or less contemporaneously with another co-edited by Brewer, The Moving Text (2018), that one being on ‘interdisciplinary perspectives on David Brown and the Bible’. This flurry of recent activity comes several years after a large collection of essays, Theology, Aesthetics and Culture, engaged with five of Brown’s books – on tradition (Tradition and Imagination, 1999; Discipleship and Imagination, 2000) and ‘reclaiming’ human experience (God and Enchantment of Place, 2004; God and Grace of Body, 2007; and God and Mystery in Words, 2008). Brewer’s book, the first Festschrift amongst all these others, is organized around ‘reason, faith and tradition’, ‘incarnation and trinity’, and ‘sacramentality and the arts’. Taking in Brown’s work from the whole sweep of his career – across Oxford, Durham and St Andrew’s Universities – means it is wider than Theology, Aesthetics and Culture and The Moving Text. With 8 of its 13 essays in its last part, Brewer’s new book also tilts the weight of gravity to the arts among all of Brown’s interests. However, the middle section is critical to fully understanding Brown’s contribution, reflecting as it does the influence of both his early The Divine Trinity (1985) and his more recent work on kenosis (Divine Humanity, 2011) – the latter quite remarkably acclaimed (in its cover blurb by Brian Hebblethwaite) as ‘Brown’s return to mainstream theology and metaphysics’, which albeit going on to declare Divine Humanity as ‘fascinating’ and ‘fine’ seems strange praise in view of Brown’s decade-long and prodigious project on the arts. Here in the Festschrift, Paul Fiddes identifies a long essay of Brown’s on ‘the trinity in art’ as a ‘hinge essay’ in the trajectory of Brown’s work. And Brewer himself challenges too strong a distinction between an earlier and later Brown, the former engaged in philosophical theology, the latter immersed in the cosmopolitan concerns of the ‘God and : : : ’ series.