What if David Brown Had Owned a Television?

Abstract

This chapter asks whether David Brown's forays into popular culture have gone far enough. It argues that Christian theology needs to be more self-critical about its cultural assumptions when relating to media and the arts. It must also be more inter-disciplinary, more attentive to actual religious practice and undertake even broader engagement with non-ecclesiastical experience and resources than Brown has ventured. In this way, the chapter suggests, a theological methodology more appropriate for Christian systematics today will emerge. Such a methodology would be more closely linked with the ordinary, human, social, affective practices in and through which people, religious and not, make meaning. It would also be more deeply shaped by incarnation, general revelation, common grace, the imago Dei and pneumatology.