It is a pleasure to welcome a writer in the field of biblical hermeneutics who writes with elegance and acuity and a firm grasp of the seemingly intractable problems arising from ‘the profound atrophy of the power of the imagination to see ourselves and our world through scriptural lenses’ (p. 4). Dickens, the fruit of whose postgraduate studies at Yale (one assumes, though we are not told in so many words) is presented here, sets himself a series of daunting tasks. In the first place, he sets out to present a coherent and sustained account of Balthasar's ‘views and uses of scripture in the Theological Aesthetics’ (p. 2); and, second, he seeks to derive insights from Balthasar's work in an attempt to recover some of the features of pre-modern modes of biblical interpretation without outright rejection of historical critical study of the Bible. Briefly these features are: (i) ‘the biblical narratives were held to mean what they say’(p. 5): they were treated as realistic narratives (Frei); (ii) they were read as forming a cumulative story; (iii) the Bible was read within an ecclesial context for purposes of ‘practical and intellectual religious instruction’, where ‘Some form of typology. . .is the primary hermeneutical device by which these applications of the text were effected’ (p. 6). In this way, ‘Christians lived within the imaginative and linguistic world of the Bible, drawing within its horizons, and thereby modifying, such non-biblical elements of their cultural heritage as were needed faithfully to meet the exigencies of time and place’ (p. 6). Can Balthasar's work help us to recover this lost ‘biblical imagination’ (Lindbeck)?

Balthasar's task in the Theological Aesthetics, the first part of his massive trilogy, is no less than to undo over five hundred years of theological history from the time of the late Middle Ages, marked by the increasing loss of a sense of the beautiful. The medieval doctrine of the transcendentals affirmed that all created being (and therefore all particular beings) is fundamentally determined by – characterised by – unity, truth, goodness and beauty. In some measure, all these can be predicated of all existents. In this way they reflect something of the glory of the creator God. The beauty of a piece of music, that is to say, is not something separate from the form and the execution of the work itself; it is inextricably part of it. The form and the splendour of a work of art are fully interdependent. What, for Balthasar, this means in terms of the Bible is that we cannot separate the vision of God's glory which it mediates to us (its ‘splendor’) from the contemplation of the complex of interconnected texts (of the ‘forma’) of the biblical canon. The Bible does not just simply purvey certain dogmatic truths, as Balthasar likes to put it; it is not simply a set of signs pointing to certain truths: we encounter and make those truths our own only in so far as we are open to and are conformed to the glory which informs the Gestalt of the Bible, through which the revelation form of the incarnate Christ is mediated.

The effect of the loss of the sense of beauty in theology was that the Bible was conceived either in terms of truth: as revealing, pointing to, certain doctrines, which could then stand on their own; or that it was conceived in terms of the good: as instrumental in effecting change in its readers. The Bible like the gospel ‘treibet Christum’ (Luther), effects, in those who encounter in it the Word of God, a new self-understanding (Bultmann).

All this is presented with admirable clarity by Dickens. How does he see it as bearing on the problem which he seeks to address: the replacement of pre-modern ecclesial biblical interpretation by an historical critical interpretation which has become deeply resistant to any form of theological interpretation? The problem at one level is that, in the account that Balthasar offers of the history of the ‘de-aestheticising’ of theology, historical critical studies of the Bible are only one manifestation of a much more deep-seated malaise, the loss of the aesthetic dimension, of the sense of contemplation of the divine revelation in Christ, which affected both Catholic and Protestant forms of theological interpretation of the Bible, and had done so long before the ‘eclipse of biblical narrative’ of which Hans Frei wrote so perceptively. Indeed historical critical study of the Bible was by no means always opposed to theological interpretation: Baur's historical project was designed to show the emergence of a new God-consciousness in the early church, just as Bultmann's programme of existential interpretation was intended to point to the new possibilities of self-understanding which were opened up by the text, through or despite its mythological forms of language.

Dickens's work is intriguing inasmuch as its brings together two accounts of the contemporary ecclesial malaise in the understanding and use of the Bible: one, a Yale-based, Barthian, post-liberal account which mourns the loss within the church of a religious language capable of shaping the sensibilities and values of its members and which seeks to recover the church's capacity to engage imaginatively in typological, figurative appropriation of the – realistic – biblical narrative (singular); the other a Johannine-Ignatian, Catholic analysis which locates the roots of the malaise in the loss of a sense of wonder and mystery, of thaumazein, of contemplation of the mysteries of creation and revelation. This loss leads to the denial that there is any meaningful analogy between the perception of beauty in the natural world and the contemplation of God's glory and reduces the Bible to a set of propositions to be believed or to signs and symbols, dispensable in themselves, of a particular self-understanding. I suspect that, for Frei in particular, historical critical readings of the Bible are more threatening than for Balthasar, as they are far more corrosive of the biblical narrative conceived of as a realistic and continuous narrative encompassing/accompanying the canon of the Old and New Testaments (a process which goes back into the seventeenth century as was wonderfully documented by Klaus Scholder's The Birth of Modern Critical Theology). Balthasar's contemplative presentation in the Theological Aesthetics of the revelation figure of Christ, of the Christ who empties himself, embracing the human condition, death on the cross and the descent into hell and who sums up and transcends the fragmented revelation of the divine glory in the old covenant, is much more like the contemplation of Grünewald's Isernheim Altar than it is a commentary on an extended biblical narrative. Indeed with its emphasis on kenosis and the descensus motif, such narrative as it contains is unashamedly mythological in character, rather than realistic. In such a context, historical critical studies may assist the reader in clarifying the details of the text, but they are at best ancillary, for the most part so unrelated to the overall project that they do not seriously trouble the reader, certainly not Balthasar.

For him, as Dickens brings out in a highly illuminating discussion (pp. 106–23), what drives the hugely powerful christocentric readings of the Aesthetics is much more the ecclesial mediation of such readings in the context of tradition, liturgy and faith. Theology is not simply a process of clarification and application of a given deposit of faith to which scripture bears witness; it is engaged with the tradition in ‘a historically extended conversation about the subject matter of the biblical texts’ (p. 109). And precisely because that subject matter is always greater than any possible understanding of it, that conversation leads to an ‘endless range of interpretability’ (Glory vol. 1, p. 552). Despite Balthasar's deeply conservative instincts, which became increasingly evident in his later years, there remains a fruitfulness and indeed subversiveness in his theology, to which this excellent study directs us and which may yet lead the church to discover again the creative and renewing power of the biblical text.