Chapter 2 notes at the outset that there is a growing interest among biblical scholars in reception history that has spawned considerable theological attention to paintings, music and novels. This chapter is more personal in character, suggesting a number of artistic works where the author could not imagine, at the time, how they could have been done better – the first a complete performance by Yo Yo Ma of Bach’s Cello Suites at the 1995 Edinburgh Festival, the second an astonishing painting, the race-horse Whistlejacket by George Stubbs, featured in London’s National Gallery, and the third an ancient bronze sculpture, The Boxer at Rest, in Italy’s Museo Nazionale Romano. It also looks at a celebrated novel, The Bell, by Iris Murdoch that features a fictional sermon on Matt. 5.48 and raises significant issues about artistic and moral human perfection and the contentious distinction between Murdoch’s novels and her philosophical writings. The chapter also looks at the debates about the theological relevance of the arts variously by David Jasper, Paul Fiddes, David Brown and Jeremy Begbie today, with reference also to Karl Rahner and Paul Tillich of the previous generation.

This chapter examines the reception of philosophies of the sublime in European painting of the Romantic period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, many painters took up subjects that echo descriptions of the sublime offered by Burke, Kant, and other philosophers, prompted by art critics who attempted to apply the idea of the sublime to art. The chapter focuses on artists who engaged with three facets of the sublime that had become recurrent concerns of British and German philosophical aesthetics: (1) vastness, captured in landscapes of towering mountains and the open ocean; (2) power, expressed through the imagery of volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters; and (3) violence, depicted in paintings of animal conflict.