Images of Redemption: Art, Literature and Salvation

T. & T. Clark Publishers, May 2003. Paper Back. New. In this important addition to the growing list of titles grappling with the subject, Sherry gives equal weight to theology and art, the metaphor of salvation as drama providing the fulcrum. Past, present and future aspects of the story of salvation organize his investigation, which is punctuated by the conviction that dogmatic truths must continually be incarnated in forms intelligible to people for whom traditional expressions have become incomprehensible or only intuitively grasped. Sherry is aware of the multiple meanings attached to the Christian doctrine of redemption, and he responds with a correspondingly large number of examples from art, literature and music -- the icon of the Resurrection or harrowing of hell from the Orthodox monastery of Chora, the monumental novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bernanos, Mauriac and Greene, the compositions of Bach, Handel, and Tavener. Edward Yarnold, cited by Sherry, aptly capsulizes the ways art and theology reciprocally unveil the types of revelation specific to each: ''The artist and the theologian need each other. The artist needs the theologian to check the exuberance of his vision and to rescue it from isolation and subjectivity by linking it with the consciousness of the Church. The theologian needs the artist to enrich his thinking and rescue it from aridity and irrelevance by linking it with the aspirations of humanity.''