While their respective projects are not always as divorced from one another as is sometimes suggested, it would be fair to say that theologians and artists do not always share the same concerns. That said, I suspect that every reader of the Book of Psalms will have sensed something germane to the vocation of both theologian and artist. Both are concerned, it seems to me, with a deep commitment to fostering and sharpening a triple vision—to take seriously what has been, what will be, and what is contemporary. (Another way of thinking about this is to simply take the journey with St Paul through Romans 5 to 8.) And theology, like art, responds to that triple awareness, resists the temptation to dissect the tri-part vision, and keeps asking—in its own particular way and with its own particular tongue—the foundational questions for all being; namely, who is Jesus Christ, and what has God done, what is God doing, and what has God promised to do in him?

Put otherwise, both art and theology properly seek to speak about what our eyes have seen, about what our ears have heard, about what our lips have tasted, and about what our hands have touched. And both are equally concerned with the matter of hope—about what our eyes hope to see, our ears hope to hear, our lips hope to taste, and our hands hope to touch. And both are concerned too to be attentive to the immediate, to what is, to those realities contemporary to our senses. So art and theology are fixed on a triple vision—of attention to what is behind and before and over the horizon—a vision grounded in the history of God’s own past, future and contemporaneity.