Robin M. Jensen’s early works — Understanding Early Christian Art and Face to Face: Portaits of the Divine in Early Christianity — have established her as an articulate and judicious scholar of paleo-Christian art. No one has done a better job of explaining the first three centuries of Christian images within their peculiar cultural context: the persecutions, the doctrinal disputes, and the great intellectual ferment.

Jensen is professor of Christian art and worship at Vanderbilt Divinity School, but she delivered the lectures that make up her most recent book as part of Calvin Institute of Christian Worship’s “Liturgical Studies Series.” The Substance Of Things Seen: Art, Faith, And The Christian Community is, in part, a concise summary of her work so far; in part, an apologia for icons, addressed to American Protestants in aniconic and even iconoclastic traditions; and in part a passionate esthetic manifesto for the future of Christian arts.

The book begins with a memoir, as Jensen recounts her own upbringing in a church that had “very little tolerance for visual art in the worship space of our spare, Protestant sanctuary.” She proceeds to a summary history of “Visual Art and Spiritual Formation in Christian Tradition,” which she aptly relates to the sacramental worldview of Catholic and Orthodox Christians. She tells the story of Christianity’s recurring struggles with iconoclasm, restating the eighth-century Father St. John Damascene’s arguments in favor of images. Her chapter on the relationship between art and Scripture in the ancient Church — titled “Visual Exegesis: Sacred Text and Narrative Art in Early Christianity” — is stunning.

Her conclusions, however, will perplex many readers, and not just those who come from traditions that venerate images. While dismissing sentimental art, she calls for a religious esthetic open to works as overtly transgressive as the dung madonna, Terrence McNally’s homoerotic play “Corpus Christi,” and Andres Serrano’s infamous work that featured a sacred image steeped in human waste. About the last she says: “The photograph, which shows a plastic crucifix plunged into the artist’s blood and urine, speaks deeply to me about Christ’s bodily incarnation and the sanctification of human life, especially the life of those who suffer … Serrano’s crucifix is submerged in what it means to be human.” And later: “When they shock us, they are forced to think harder about what we really believe. Have we been hanging on to old images that are no longer relevant?”

One needn’t accept her conclusions to appreciate the outstanding ecumenical (and apologetic) value of her opening chapters.