“Without an appreciation for grace and beauty, there’s no pleasure in creating things

and no pleasure in having them!” – Calvin

No, that is not a quote from John Calvin but rather the eponymous child from Calvin and Hobbes. I want pick back up with this metaphor of languages I talked about in my last post on church and culture. As a writer, I’m intrigued by the definitions of words. I find their origins fascinating, as well as the fact a single word can have multiple, and drastically different, meanings.

Grace and Beauty, incarnate

Beauty is a term that most people have some idea of. They may disagree about specifics and why or what is worthy of being called beautiful, but for the most part they agree something like a sunset, for example, is beautiful.

Grace on the other hand is an interesting word. In the above quote, one could assume Calvin is speaking of “grace” in the sense of elegance and artistic form. A “graceful” dancer, for example. But as Christians we know there is an alternate definition that significantly changes the profundity of the statement.

Grace is the freely given, unconditional love of Christ by which our sins are forgiven. Think of how the above quote is changed if we are creating art out of a space where we are giving thanks for the Grace and Beauty of God’s love! This is a message the Church can bring to culture.

But as with any message, it must be delivered in a language that can be understood. The language used by much of the church today is not the language of people on the streets outside of the church. It’s not that the culture necessarily rejects God’s grace, they may just have not yet encountered it in a language or style they understand.

Grace and culture

I’ve talked before about my love for all things Wes Anderson. I think there is a powerful thread of grace and reconciliation that runs through his films. The reconciliation of Royal Tennenbaum to the rest of his family, between the three brothers in Darjeeling Limited, and between a father and son in The Life Aquatic. There are many for whom these films conjure stronger feelings and reactions than any theological argument, or even Bible story.

Speaking the language of culture doesn’t mean compromising the Gospel, rather it simply means leading with words and images familiar to a post-church, post-Christian world rather than assuming people understand the Four Spiritual Laws. To be honest, I hardly expect anyone to have heard of the Four Spiritual Laws let alone understand what they are. I can’t even tell you what they are without looking them up.

I do want to finish by saying though that we shouldn’t stop with simply co-opting examples and spiritual illustrations from culture, we should be creating our own as well. Excellent art from Christians grounded in the community of the church but using the language of the street is a powerful tool for changing the culture. This must be done with authenticity, but it can be done. There is a whole generation of artists already doing it.

“When I look back on my own conversion, I cannot credit a gospel tract or an altar call or an exposition of John 3:16. I had encountered these things many times over in childhood and had learned to mistrust them because of the lies my church in the fundamentalist South had told me. Rather, nature, classical music, and romantic love formed the channel of grace that awakened my senses to perception of God. Through that channel I came to believe, first in a good world and then in a good God. It is a terrible thing to feel gratitude and have no one to thank, to feel awe and have no one to worship. Gradually, prompted by beauty and by art, I returned to the castoff faith of my childhood.”

-Philip Yancy

“Much could be said about the theological, ethical and social symbolism of our worship space, but here I’m speaking primarily about the importance of aesthetic beauty. Beauty in the worship space is not intended merely to give pleasure to the congregant. It is there for the glorification and praise of the divine. If, as theologians assert, God is not only the Good and the True but also the Beautiful, then only through an experience of beauty may we fully know God. To be good and true ourselves, we need to bring the beautiful into our worship, formation, and fellowship…

To speak of God as Beauty is to speak of a transcendent attractiveness, not a superficial one, of an awesome splendor and magnetic power that both humble and challenge us.”

-Robin M. Jensen, “The Substance of Things Seen”

This is the most rough draft-ish of any of the sections I’ve posted so far but it’s complete enough that I’ll post it for now. If nothing else it at least proves I’m continuing to work on my thesis! I’ve got two sections which are currently partly written and a conclusion to polish and then I’ll be done with the heart of my thesis, so the end is definitely in sight! Very exciting times indeed! Anyway, on to the paper…

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In Luke 4 Jesus stands up in the temple in Nazareth and reads from a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (vs 18-19). With this proclamation of justice, the Son of God announces the start and purpose of his mission. Jesus stands as the ultimate proof of God’s love for creation and desire for restored relationships. Jesus’ ministry was at its heart about reconciliation, restoration and relationship. Time and again in both parables and actions Jesus redefines our understanding of justice and wholeness. Healing was not simply an act of physical restoration. Often emotional, spiritual and social restoration takes place at the same time; the woman at the well, the many lepers and physically disabled people he heals, and the parable of the good Samaritan are all examples.

One of the most profound examples of this redefinition of justice in the New Testament is the parable of the Prodigal Son. It stands out almost as if it is God’s love letter to humanity. In the story, the rich man’s son rejects his father and what he sees as a boring and sheltered life on the family farm so he can chase after a life of wealth and excess. After squandering his inheritance, the son shamefully and humbly crawls back to the father. Instead of being chastised and turned away for his foolishness, he is welcomed with open arms and rejoicing by his father. But there is an older brother who wants to see “justice” done. He wants his younger brother to face the consequences of his actions, complaining that his father is rewarding the young man’s foolishness. But the father redefines our understanding of justice. We often like to think of ourselves as the young, repentant son being welcomed back with open arms. But as often as not, we act more like the older son, proud of our obedience and loyalty to our father and bitter about the blessings he freely gives. There is a part of us that wants the story to end with the father relegating his foolish son to the role of field hand. We could then point to the story as a cautionary tale and praise the righteousness of obedience. But this is not the justice God wants for us. Justice is not about punishment or restitution. Justice is the restored relationship between father and son, between God the Father and His child creation. There is justice in God’s grace.

But if all the parables and actions of Jesus during his ministry serve as examples of what justice is like, his death on the cross was a radical statement of how grace restores righteousness. Christ was already modeling the new kingdom and covenant by forgiving sins and healing the sick on a case-by-case basis. The new kingdom would not fully be brought into reality however until a final sacrifice was made to satisfy God’s righteousness, something a mere human could never accomplish. Only the perfect Son of God could make that sacrifice. Jesus taking on the sin of the world and dying on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice is what finally allowed a broken world to freely receive the grace of God. The work of building the new kingdom that Jesus began in the synagogue in Luke 4 could now spread out into the world.

When Jesus ascends after his resurrection and leaves the disciples with the Great Commission, he charges them to carry on his message of restoration and hope. We see right away in the early chapters of Acts that one of the first concerns of the early church was care for the widows and other needy members of the community. The church looked far more like a charity organization working among the poor, the sick and the oppressed than an institution of great social and political influence. It was only after legalization under Constantine when Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire that the church began to move from solidarity with the poor to wrapping itself with the vestiges of nobility and taking comfort in the halls of power.

The Kingdom-oriented life Jesus modeled redefined justice not as retribution as it had been under the old covenant, but now as restoration under the new covenant. Andy Couch writes of this new vision, “The kingdom of God would touch every sphere and every scale of culture. It would reshape marriage and mealtimes, resistance to the Roman occupiers and prayer in the temple, the social standing of prostitutes and the piety of Pharisees, the meaning of cleanliness and the interpretation of illness, integrity in business and honesty in prayer” (Crouch, 2008). Justice in the Kingdom of God is people living in right relationship with each other and with God. In the light of this justice-centered kingdom we as artists create art for our community, calling people into the narrative of relationship, restoration and justice.

Robin M. Jensen writes on page 3 of her book The Substance of Things Seen,

“…times have changed, and even the most staid churches are starting to incorporate art into their worship… but I worry that too often art is perceived as a kind of ‘extra’ offering, meant for those of us who can appreciate it or want to be involved, rather than something essential to the shaping of faith and religious experience.

“…When we consciously attend to an object, especially an art object, we will have some kind of reaction to it. The response may be subtle or it may be strong. It may be positive or negative. We may be turned off, aroused, repulsed, delighted, or disappointed. We may be moved to tears, frightened, bored, or baffled. Our responses may be different from those of the person next to us. But no matter how we respond, we are slightly or significantly different for having had the viewing, or the hearing—for having paid attention. Maybe only a single atom of our consciousness has shifted; maybe a landslide has taken place in our souls. Indelible memories may be fixed or recovered. We may not be aware of much impact, or or we may recognize that this was a significant moment. Still, something happens. The experience and our response often resist explanation in words, reminding us that we can know or learn things without the benefit of language. Our memories, even our ideas, are essentially constructed out of images and colors, spatial relationships, smells, sensations, and sounds, more than they are made of words ordered into sentences—even when we record and transmit them this way.”

Lest anyone get the impression I have been slacking off and not working on my thesis, here is another big chunk of it. This is the first half – two thirds of the section on the connection between faith and justice. As always, thoughts and comments are welcome!

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The central narrative of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is the relationship between God and His creation. In the Garden, God and humanity lived in perfect communion with each other. Life as it was meant to be. However, in the Fall the relationship was severed. God desires a relationship with his creation and is moving through time to the eventual restoration of that relationship in the completion of His Kingdom. The nature of the Kingdom of God is justice—the restoration of relationships; between people and God and between people and each other.

The term “social justice” itself has come to take on many different meanings. Tragically these are often highly politicized. Even devoid of its “social” qualifier, justice is still a term up for interpretation. Is justice punishment for crimes, or restoration for the community? But referring to some justice as social and inferring that other justice is not is a misnomer. Justice is inherently social. Whether referring to re-distribution of wealth, free health care and high taxes, or to tough immigration law, retribution for criminal activity and free enterprise, all justice is social. Where we often get caught up is in the argument behind what kind of justice is good versus what is bad. This argument often misses the point. The idea of justice as a political or economic concept capable of being enacted into law is known as “right order” and is not what God calls us to as Christians, nor is it what he called the Israelites to either. God’s justice, even in the Old Testament is not about rule following. It is not about having the right laws, but rather living in right relationship with God and creation.

The idea behind the “right order” society is that by finding the proper way of doing government, of doing society, and then codifying it in our laws we will achieve the ideal utopian society. When you see or hear politicians using religious language to argue for or against a new law, often they are arguing for a right order. Unfortunately this has lead to a reality in which religion, politics and social will are often at odds. The irony of this is God gave us a model for what a rightly ordered society looks like. Ancient Israel after being lead up out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land was to live as a people set apart to be an example to the rest of the world of an entire nation living in relationship with God. God was to be the King over Israel and would protect them and provide for them in return for their devotion. God gave the Ten Commandments and the Deuteronomic code as instructions for how to live in a just society and be that example He called them to be. Deuteronomy 4:5-7 reads,

“See, I [Moses] have taught you decrees and laws as the LORD my God commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it. ⁶ Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ ⁷ What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the LORD our God is near us whenever we pray to him?”

The problem with this model is our efforts to enforce it, that is not really the point of the rules. It is not the law itself which prospers Israel, it is the relationship with God adherence to the law allows which is what allows God to prosper and protect Israel. As long as this relationship was in right order, as long as Israel worshiped God alone and followed the law, prosperity flowed freely from Heaven. But when Israel turned away from God and broke the law, the relationship was severed and God removed his prosperity and protection until Israel turned back to Him. Andy Crouch says, “Just as Babel was the cultural embodiment of independence from God, so Israel will be the embodiment of dependence on God. … In the midst of the nations, Israel will be a sign that it is possible to be a nation whose key characteristic is the trust in the world’s invisible Maker—to use the biblical word, a culture defined by faith” (Crouch, 2008).

The book of Judges records the back and forth of Israel from adherence to the law, worship of God alone and their prosperity as a result, to Israel turning from God to worship idols and their suffering as a result. Finally, the people of Israel grew tired of this cycle and decided they had a solution. They looked around at other nations and petitioned God for a king. God desired Israel to be an example of a people in relationship with their one true King. But after prosperity under Samuel, they saw the wickedness and injustice of his sons and decided they had enough. Instead of trusting in their relationship with God, they looked at the earthly power and spoils of the human kings of their enemies and chose that path instead. And so in choosing Saul as king they began a path away from relationship and toward destruction.

In 1 Samuel 8:10-17 God says what the cost of having a King will be for the people of Israel. The king will demand the best of their crops, will conscript their sons into his army and their daughters into his courts, distribute the wealth of the nation as he sees fit and claim 10 percent of all they own as his. And then God says in verse 18 of the suffering this will cause for the people, “When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.” God grants them their king, but no longer will he send judges to rescue them and restore justice when they cry out. The people have rejected their King and as a result God tells them of the consequences.

As long as the king of Israel and the people followed the law, God continued to prosper them. However as time passed it became more and more difficult for the people and their king to follow God’s commandments. Kings changed, the nation was split in two, Israel was lead away in captivity, returned to the Promised Land, then again lead away only to return once more. Yet even at this point, God continued to champion Israel. As long as they were living according to the law he protected them. God never stopped desiring a relationship with his chosen people. In fact, God would go so far as to completely scrap the old covenant and in the ultimate act of justice sacrifice His Son so the entirety of creation might be restored to relationship with Him.

Our vision is cloudy, oh Lord
We have failed to see by our own light
Our path is shrouded by darkness

We stumble in darkness, distressed and hungry
We look toward the earth and see only turmoil and darkness
But the people wandering in darkness have seen a great light

The Light of Life has burst forth in the world
Our path is made clear in its brilliance
By the grace of God the rising sun shines upon us.

The sun will no more be our light by day,
nor will the brightness of the moon shine by night,
for the Lord will be our everlasting light.

We await your coming, Lord, with eagerness and thanksgiving,
Shine your true light in the corners of our hearts and darkness of our world,
That we may see more clearly the glory of the creation you have come to redeem.

We do not need the sun or the moon to shine on us,
for the glory of God gives us light and Christ is our lamp.
The nations will walk by the light,
and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it.

With anticipation we seek the light of your glory,
We long to dwell in your grace and truth,
Our hope is in you, Lord.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.
Now we know in part; then we shall know fully, and we shall be known in full.

Listen Here

About a year ago my church went caroling for Christmas and I wrote about our little rag tag group and why I thought even our small showing was still important. Last night we went caroling again with far better turn out–in fact we had about 25 people go. I wanted to repost what I wrote last year though because it still holds true. I hope you enjoy this little trip down memory lane…

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One of the traditions I have missed out on the last couple years not being in Seattle is going Christmas caroling with a group from my parents church. As much as I love the songs, part of the motivation for going when I was a kid was the goodies we’d always have afterward. Hot cider, homemade doughnuts, Christmas cookies, you get the idea. My mom asked this year if I wanted to go or just stay home. Since I haven’t been able to go the last couple years I figured it would be fun. Besides, it would be good to get out of the house and spread a little kitschy holiday cheer.

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“The Gospel is everything. The Gospel is not enough.”

After our art and coffee discussion this morning this idea kept running through my head. It seems to me there is this paradox when talking about art and theology. We want to make art that is evangelical without being “Christian”. We want to make art that is Christian and still relevant. We want to make art that is real and grounded and true, but we don’t want to make art that is so heavy on message that the art itself is misunderstood.

I guess this is a post actually more about questions than answers. This is something I’m just starting to explore. I’d love to hear other opinions on how Christian artists are making art that is true and powerful without being heavy handed and overly religious. What are your thoughts on this?

“The Gospel is everything. The Gospel is not enough.”

here’s another thesis draft bit I worked on today…

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In the beginning God created. Importantly, he didn’t do it all at once. God took his time, paused after each stage of creation and saw that his creation was good. We see God as a creative being delighting in his creation. Among everything he made, God uniquely created humanity in his image. Being created in the “Imago Dei” we have our own inherent desires to create. But just as God was intentional in creating humanity for relationship, our creative intentions should reflect God’s. True art is communal and narrative. It is created in community for the purpose of drawing the audience into a conversation.

Most artists I know rightfully harbor suspicion of anyone who tries to tell them what or how they should create. A long history of manipulation and sanitation of the arts in Church has sadly hurt many artists. Just as artists create for the community, the community needs to support them. This debate does not need another voice telling one side they are right while the other is wrong. Artists are no more or less important than any other part of the Church, but we are unique. We see clearly in Ephesians 4:11 that God has different roles for different people, none any better or more important than any other, but all working toward the same goal. So how do artists work toward building up the body of Christ as Ephesians says?

Art plays several roles in the church, but perhaps the most obvious is in our worship experience. Art enriches our worship experience. For a long time this was through religious iconography, pictures of saints or of Christ himself that helped parishioners and viewers reflect on specific aspects of faith. Maybe it was service to others, or maybe the grace we experience in forgiveness of sin, the specific theme of each icon varied. While this expression remains in the Orthodox and Catholic churches, since the Reformation iconography and worship through art has largely been absent from Western Protestantism. The church harbors suspicion of overtly spiritual art as an idol which is itself worshiped. This has led to the sanitization of the “art” we find in our churches today and this is tragic.

We see throughout the Bible examples of people making idols out of just about everything imaginable, so I am not arguing that art cannot be an idol, but rather that viewing art as inherently distracting from God is incorrect. By questioning the intent of the artist and the use of their art, we have forced art to serve church culture rather than allowing it to be a free expression of worship. Author Andy Crouch writes,

“Art and worship stand together on the common ground of the unuseful. And this is why our attitude toward art ultimately has a great deal to do with our attitude toward worship. Much is at stake in whether we think that our worship is a free response to grace or an exercise in persuasion, an effort to get either God or people to do what we want them to do. If we ultimately have a utilitarian attitude toward art, if we require it to justify itself in terms of its usefulness to our ends, it is very likely that we will end up with the same attitude toward worship, and ultimately toward God.”

Having a perverse view of art is no less harmful than having a perverse view of mountains, trees, animals, ourselves or even God. Art is part of Creation and thus can be used to the glory of God. Put another way, Philip Graham Ryken says, “…when we settle for trivial expressions of the truth in worship and art, we ourselves are diminished, we suffer a loss of transcendence” (Art for God’s Sake, pg 15). Ignoring the role of art—and thus the role of artists—as an expression of worship in the church is no different than ignoring some aspect of God’s nature.

To say that art has been kept out of the Church or contemporary Christian culture though is not true at all. Modern mainstream Christian art is produced in mass quantities; Christian music sales figures alone are in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. However, much of this art follows a carefully scripted formula for what is and is not acceptable. Even while sales figures are strong, rarely do Christian musicians or bands cross from the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) genre to the mainstream of the music market. Similarly, arguably the most well known “Christian” visual artist, Thomas Kinkade, is viewed almost as more of a punch line than a legitimate artist. The Church and contemporary Christian culture have pressed out any controversy from “Christian art.” It has become so sanitized it has reached a point of being largely irrelevant to popular, mainstream culture. In the last 100 years the vast majority of Christian art has been devoid of Truth. It has been about idealist values of happiness and purity rather than reflecting the real and true experiences of the human journey.

One of the more strange responses to this abundance of sanitized art in the face of desire for meaningful works is Christians attempting to find faith and Christian values in mainstream art. Youth groups will hold screenings of The Matrix and pastors will use sermon illustrations from Gladiator. Debates will rage online about whether or not Bono is a Christian and churches will even sing U2 songs as part of their worship set. There is a hunger both in the church and in culture for meaningful art they can connect with; art that will help them make sense of their experiences. One of the founding documents of the Stuckist art movement out of the United Kingdom is called the Remodernist Manifesto. Started as a response to the lack of grounding in the Post-modern art movement, one of the declarations of Remodernism is, “The making of true art is man’s desire to communicate with himself, his fellows and his God” (Childish, 2000) People long to engage with great art. When the Church is not producing great art, it will be forced to use the best available examples from outside the Church. For this reason the Church MUST make creating great art a priority. If the church fails to make great art, we will be left with the scraps of mainstream culture.

Sadly we are unlikely to flip a switch and have great art in the church overnight. The road to creating great art though is long and requires much grace along the way. Artists must be allowed to experiment and fail as they work toward creating pieces that are meaningful and truly great. Productivity and creativity guru Merlin Mann puts it this way, “‘Spend less time fantasizing about ‘success’ and way more time making really cool mistakes’” (Mann, 2010). Just as God created he longs to see us engage in creative works. When we are being creative we are living in the image of God. It is not easy. There is a long way to go before art and artists are playing the role in the Church I believe God has called us to. But one poem at a time, one photograph at a time, one painting at a time, one show at a time we will get there.