Lyric Theology: Art and the Doctrine of Creation. By Thomas Gardner

Abstract

In the Introduction to Lyric Theology: Art and the Doctrine of Creation, Thomas Gardner notes how the recent upsurge in scholarly interest in the lyric has provided resources for a greater understanding of the theological significations of lyric thinking. This book is timely, not only due to its engagement with current developments in lyric theory. It also resonates with movements in the theological sphere where, building on the major contribution made by reflections on the narrative and dramatic modes to discussions of theological method and theological aesthetics, interest is now turning to lyric modes of God-talk. Gardner writes as a literary critic and lyric essayist with a deep interest in theology, as attested to in his earlier work, John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination (Baylor University Press, 2011). His treatment of his subject is theologically literate, rooted in the Reformed tradition of Jürgen Moltmann, Colin Gunton, Belden Lane, and Jeremy Begbie, but also drawing more widely across the theological spectrum, from figures such as David Bentley Hart and Rowan Williams. Gardner presents lyric as a form that understands a truth by inhabiting it. Describing reading as ‘a lyric act’ (p. 9), Gardner presents his book as itself a lyrical exercise that draws the reader into the experiences it describes. He employs this perilous power of the lyric voice adeptly and sensitively, resulting in a work that goes beyond scholarly discourse towards a meditative and spiritual form of writing that is a demonstration of lyric theology in action.