What Have the Arts to do with Missional?: Contrary Thoughts on Being Incarnational 2"
Friday, November 24, 2006
We say "incarnational" in order to describe the embodying of the gospel among people in everyday life. By being “incarnational” we seek to follow God who became incarnate in Christ into everyday life to manifest His presence among us. And so we, instead of focusing church in the Sunday morning gathering alone, seek to live the gospel to, in and among the surrounding community. It is the missional way. And of course, these days, it is easier said than done. Nonetheless, this is the practice I endorse for my own life and church.
My question: does such an embodying the gospel require art? Surely the embodiment of the gospel incarnationally requires that we do more than speak about God’s salvation in Christ. It requires we practice the gospel in our life together in community. It requires that we minister it to hurting bodies in our surrounding community. And lastly, it requires we SEE the gospel in all its beauty as a full-orbed reality of life we invite others to participate in. And so it makes sense that the embodiment of the gospel requires the community’s practice of the arts and a recapture of "beauty" as a category of truth for Christian living and witness.
At the risk of being academic here, I offer David Bentley Hart's analysis of beauty within the landscape of postmodernity as the guide that helps us see why art and the category of beauty must play a central role in the church of these postmodern times. In Hart's brilliant The Beauty of the Infinite, he outlines the development of Kant's category of the sublime within postmodern Continental philosophy. He shows how postmodern thinkers separate beauty from the category of the sublime so that beauty now falls under the "representable" in terms of reason, logic and categories of determinacy. While the sublime falls beyond "representation" in either language or form. The sublime is beyond the limits of representation. "Unlike the beautiful, its manifestation is an intuition of the indeterminate .."(P. 45) Hence the attraction of postmodern thought to "the sublime." For postmoderns then, beauty is an object of disdain, too easily domesticated for the forces of power. Hart's agenda is to overcome this false domestication of beauty by the logic and form of the representable. He wants to recover beauty as a participation in God Himself, as that which overcomes the autonomy of the self in worship such that we are shaped and formed into a participation in God's life that is ultimately peace, love and harmony. Hart's book is too magnificent to summarize in this way. Nonetheless, this summary illuminates why, if we are not to fall prey to the Nietzschian trap of postmodern nihilism that denies God incarnates Himself into this world, we must recapture beauty as a category for the revealing of God, the revealing of the good, the revealing of truth.
I said in the Great Giveaway .." to know God is to see His beauty. Until we embrace this notion of truth, art will always be an illustration that merely sets up the sermon." What I was trying to say there, among other things, is that if we would truly incarnate the presence of God, over against a world that has commoditized everything, we must inhabit our faith aesthetically, that art must be more than an introduction to a sermon, it must be part of our worship, and everyday life, not as a commercialized piece of spectral gaze, but as part of our participation in God's glorious redemption of all creation.
Because of all this, plus Bentley-Hart, I believe "incarnational" must involve the manifestation of His beauty out of our organic life in worship and life together. By this I do not refer to the beauty that is achieved through "production excellence” as is so often sought after in the mega church. So often this results in "the production" of a simulacrum beauty detached from our every day incarnational life. Rather, in the way we worship and in the way we live, art is birthed on the canvas, with the camera, in the children's class, on the graphics arts screen that points us to the reality of God revealed in all his beauty around us and in everyday life. In this way, music, dance, and the arts are part of what it means to be present as a witness to the beauty of the Lord. Hopefully this art will adorn our homes, our places of conversation, and in our worship gatherings. Otherwise we fall into the dichotomies of beauty versus the sublime, the truth as rational yet not visible. And worse, truth becomes Gnostic, not embodied for all to see.
And so I argue for art in the church, gatherings and life. I suggest again we need to think carefully about buildings and space (especially after last week's post). I propose that incarnational, yes missional, means we recover beauty as a category for the display of the gospel in and among the world we live.
At our church, Brian Christensen leads the artwork for each time period in the church calendar. He does a great job. We get the children doing art that puts visually how God is revealing the world to them through the gospel. We hang it up in the church. We have had book clubs, novels, discussion of cyber punk fiction. At times, we have an artwork that graces the altar to symbolize for us what we bring to the altar during the particular season we are exploring through Scripture. We have guided art meditations through the art before we begin church from time to time, we are thinking about making it a regular thing. It gets people out of their rational logo centric argumentative mode to engage God in all his mystery and beauty. We have much further to go.
In what ways is beauty manifested as part of life in your missional communities?
Posted by David Fitch | 7:38 PM
COMMENTS:
Dave,
Great to see you talking about art and its importance. I agree that art needs to be more than just set-up for the sermon. I would say, however, that for many evangelicals, art is not just viewed the set-up for the sermon, but it is viewed as necessarily a sermon in itself. Many seem to think that art must be justified by containing some explicit message, which is often awkwardly tacked on to the detriment of the work itself. I just recently blogged about the fact that for many evangelicals, our art seems to be nothing more than sermons in drag.
One of the saddest and most frustrating things for me about the evangelical world, particularly as regards our art, music, and literature, is how little real beauty one finds there. I think that the lack of beauty in our lives makes our faith thinner and can even hamper us in seeing the fullness of scripture.
The art, music, and literature that has touched me most deeply and helped me see truth more deeply has always been that which embodies rather than that which preaches.
9:11 PM
First, D.F.,
You've gone down my alley again! I have so many thoughts in response to your post...I'll just leave it at: "I really enjoyed it".
And...to D.F. and Gordon,
I think Gordon has provided for me a quite memoroable Talmudic-like commentary quote on a D.F. post that points out the parody of memory-less "simulacrum" (I hear echoes of Echo): "...our art seems to be nothing more than sermons in drag." THANKS! In that spirit of the (anti)relationship between sermon and artifice, it seems that with D.F.'s posts on expository preaching he was advocating a sermon that seems to be something more like art, governed by a set of rules more resembling those giving regulation to a good piece of art than those that give form to a sequence of logical propositions. "Artifice that seems to wear the mask of words", I guess you could say. And, in the spirit of the question of being incarnational, I would like to point out that words are sounds given an order; and sounds are moving air, which for the Greeks was itself bodily...bodies of air.
Back to the "visual arts" (which I guess don't include rhetoric), this reminds me of the phrase, "the plastic arts". The architect who taught me the most, Le Corbusier, did not call "concrete" "concrete" but instead "plastique" (he spoke French, was born in Swizerland and started out as a watch-maker, and was Greek at heart).
And just another word of commentary on the actual content of the post. I don't know all the ins and outs of modern commentary on the matter, but when I hear the Gk. word "eurythmia" (which D.F. mentions in his book), I don't hear an antagonism between two opposing categories which with Kant happened to be called the "Sublime" and, I suppose, the "Beautiful". In our "The History of Architecture" class, we had a joke, "It all goes back to the Omphalos" (mythical aspect of worship at Delphi). Here it seems, "It all goes back to the question of representation."
Peace in,
Jason
12:52 AM
You know, I never really thought much about flowers in the sanctuary of a church until we've been at St. Andrews. Some weeks (often since flowers are not so expensive here in SE Asia) there are flowers that decorate the front of the church because different people sign up to have flowers there. It's funny, but now on the weeks when there are none I miss the beauty of them there. I know that's just a small thing but it is a part of creation.
Most often I am thinking of beautiful things as the things we do for each other. I am really excited right now because in the first week of December I am gathering together a group of women I have spent a good amount of time with (individually) throughout this year and I am preparing a time that I hope will be beautiful. The focus will be Advent and I hope we can have our eyes opened to waiting for and welcoming Jesus into our different circumstances.
//Jenny
5:35 AM
David, great post. Thanks for alerting me to what looks to be a great book on Christian aesthetics. A minor point, which seems like all I comment on. I'm curious: I thought Nietzsche's aim in his mature thought was to overcome what he saw as the nihilism of his Christian culture, indeed his work was dedicating to prevent such an entrenchment. Are you saying that you think he was wrong about his project, and that he instead falls victim to a nihilism himself?
8:25 AM
Dave,
Can't resist another comment here. I totally agree with your comment about "simulacrum beauty." I think that many evangelicals believe that if we can achieve technical excellence, we have acheived artistic excellence. I see this as totally consistent with the rational/pragmatic/propositional character of so much of contemporary evangelicalism. We understand excellence in terms of technique, but we lack a sense of the poetic.
So much of Contemporary Christian Music provides a great example of this. It is well produced, well recorded and well played but it comes off as shallow, soulless, and lacking in any deeper sense of beauty or mystery.
Jason,
Thanks for the encouragement. Glad you found something useful in my comments.
Jenny,
Thanks for once again bringing things back around to the presense of goodness and beauty in ordinary things like flowers and friendships. I need these constant reminders.
3:34 PM
Gordon,
Thanks. I often appreciate your comments. Would like to comment on your technique thing...I am sensitive to that, being an architect and all. It's funny, we separate the poetic and the technical; but the word poetry comes the Gk. "poesis" which means "to make", basically. And we think of "technique" as a "method". It's all the same, until things get objectified into what we now consider a "product". In which case when we refer to "technical" and "poetic" we are really making an economics comment on the unfortunate need for "regulations" on the "ideally free market"...it seems. At which point, too, "poetry" and "technical"/"practical" stuff are in a commercial tug of war.
Jason
4:42 PM
Jason,
I agree that the categories of the technical/rational and the poetic/artistic do not have to exist in watertight separate spaces. That said, though, I think the two categories do typically denote different kinds things and have different emphases, and it is possible to have one without the other. What I meant to say in my comment is that evangelicals tend to have am imbalance towards the technical side of things, with very little emphasis or appreciation towards the poetic side of things. As a result, I think the way we tend to conceive of and live out our Christian faith is typically thinner, less beautiful, and generally less attractive to the world around us than it should be.
6:05 PM
Gordon,
I'm with you. I think my commnet was meant to, in agreement, simply comment further. Sorry for any miscommunication. I should have been more clear there.
And to all,
I forgot to mention this at the beginning. Along the lines of participation in the beautiful rather than being caught up in the "spectral gaze"...I have seen toddlers in their curly-cue doodlings "participate in the beauty of the cosmos" in ways that I think would have inspired Picasso and Joan Miro...while tuned out of a sermon in which the preacher was trying to paint the truth like a piece of photo-realism (and yet make it look "interesting"). Seriously, once...in the middle of a sermon, I leaned over and wateched while this little red curly haired three year old drew a series of counter-clockwise circles inscribed in a bigger one that itself was moving clockwise. I was awe-struck...baffled, amazed...it gave me chill-bumps! And you should have seen the rest of her her little pice of scrap paper. The beauty, simplicity and order of the forms and how they related to each other on the page...Phidias may have been jealous. And I just happened to lean over that particular moment to have the priviledge to make that one form that just blew me away. Funnily...then when I returned to the expository sermon, I was hearing a story...now that I think back on how that day went...
Jason
:)
Jason
12:57 AM
I was on staff at a church that placed a high value on the arts. If you walked into the place, you would have celebrated the color and creativity and "incarnational-ness" of the physical space. It was contemporary and a little out of the box....
People who visited always commented on the talents of those who poured their souls into making the place beautiful.
But just underneath that beautiful surface was an aggressive, competitive bunch of frustrated women who ran roughshod over anyone who dared to re-present God in a way that didn't go along with their "look at what we did" vision of things.
One day, a woman came into the church and had the nerve to set up a rickety card table with mismatched dishes and grocery store flowers, along with an "ugly" sign inviting people to come and be the mission, serving a meal and praying with people at an inner-city mission. The poor woman got beat up eight different ways from Sunday. (She didn't follow the church protocol for initiating new ministries, for one thing.) But the worst beating she took was at the hands of the decorators/visual artists. They were merciless and mean about her lack of aesthetics for the lobby display she lovingly created to invite people to join her in a ministry she loved; one that touched lives in ways more beautiful and profound than the palette of Benjamin Moore paint colors that colored the walls of what was, that day at least, nothing more than a beautifully decorated whited sepulchre.
Though you can draw a number of conclusions from this story, there are two I'd like to throw out there. #2 - True beauty is hard-wired into God's character. If we get too enchanted with our own ideas, artistic prowess, or sophisticated takes on Real Art - no matter how good or clever or right we are - our pride in our own aesthetic immediately drains our art of the ability to be truly missional.
#1 - No matter how progressive, how provoking, how technically wonderful - the best, truest forms of creative expression are nothing more and nothing less than God's refrigerator art when done in and through and for Him.
12:39 PM
Jason, concrete from the latin "concretus" which is a sermon in itself.. pushing us away from the cartesian separation of rational/relational, or analytical/aesthetic. "Simulacrum" always makes me think of Shelley's Frankenstein, which was a story written near the birth of the technological age and already saw the loss of humanity in the making.. (or as good a story, Lewis "That Hideous Strength.")
But the piece missing in the reflections so far is the connection to sacrament. David I'm guessing this is an important piece for you.. have you given it much thought in relation to the wholeness of incarnation/mystery/beauty? Is the ultimate response to simulacrum a sacramental response?
5:19 PM
Oh incidentally, isn't the aesthetic movement a firm and holy integration of the analytic and artistic? I'm thinking here of Dorothy Sayer's argument that without the Trinity there would be no art. Because we certainly can't leave logos behind.. though we might want to leave behind the violence we have done to word in separating it from the life of Spirit.
5:21 PM
I'm always out of it between Saturday a.m. and Sun p.m. ... but see that there has already been some conversation here. Thanks for the compelling thoughts on beauty as an organic expression of God's work and truth taking shape among a people.
knsheppard ... I am a little confused by your comment on Nietsche ...Len ... yes ... I think that sacrament and beauty are related ... and again draw much on the incarnation ... Of course where sacrament ... incarnation .. and art draw the closest is Eastern Orthodoxy ... where I am afraid I am less competent to talk about. I am interested in your Dorothy Sayer's comment.Where is that from?
Thanks for all the other thoughts.
david Fitch
8:30 PM
Hey Len,
You said: "Jason, concrete from the latin "concretus" which is a sermon in itself.. pushing us away from the cartesian separation of rational/relational, or analytical/aesthetic..."
Before I say the following, let me put it in context. I've noticed from your comments that you know what you're talkng about. I enjoy your comments. I trust what you say. So...in that context...
I'm not sure what you are saying in the referenced quote. Please expound. I know I had made reference to architectural "concrete", the poured-in-place stuff made from rocks and portland cement and water and stuff...and that "concrete" isn't a material is partially why Corbusier wasn't a fan of calling that poured-in-place-architecural-material stuff "concrete"...but then you confuse me with the reference to the "sermon itself", and a bit too with the stuff about "relational/rational" (an interesting pairing of words that mean the same thing :), and "analytic/aesthetic" (a bit more perplexing to me...for me a bit more antagonistic...MAYBE you sensed in me a false antagonism - or at least a specifically Cartesian one - and that's WHY you made the commnet...?).
I mean, I think you were referring to the differece between the "concrete" actuality of the sermon itself, as opposed to the abstraction of "sermon", or even "that sermon"...in which case I suppose you were making reference to like a product or artifact itself...in which the poesis and techne, the method and content can't really be cut out and extracted from the meaning and/or message of the "concrete" thing itself.
But that's just my confusion. Those things can't be separated like that UNTIL the "product" is "analyzed" (uuhh...Aristotle would probably beg to differ...he wasn't just "analysing" the hind end of a "genus"). In other words...I think there is an antagonism, but not between aesthetic and analytic, but between actual and analytic. Now, OK, I'm not sure where the separation into the categories of the analytic and aesthetic comes from. Maybe it's Descartes, and I didn't know that, and that's the problem; and I'm having an irreleant conversation with myself and you were assuming that I knew that that the analytic/aesthetic antagonism comes from Descartes and tha I didn't know that changes the conversation in some way that...well, in a way that I dunno'!
Or...maybe you weren't even referring to the whole techne, poesis and product thing...and you were bringing something new into the conversation about abstract and concrete...and aesthetic and analytic...and I don't have a big overall-enough view of history to pull all that together into one meaningful whole to figure out what you meant with your comment.
Eeehhh...that was a lot of goofyness. But I'm not gonna delete it. I'm gonna leave it...I think it may help you, Len, see where I'm at and therefore better help you elaborate on your comment to me and answer my question as to what you meant...as I'm sure you were trying to help, and I don't doubt that if you were, the intended helpe probably WOULD be helpful in some way!
Thanks,
Jason
11:00 PM
Oh and,
I went off on my quesiton, and forgot to say some other little stuff. Len, I enjoyed your Frankenstein thought. I also enjoy your sacrament thought. I wonder about the actual source behind your connecting simulacrum and sacrament. That's interesting to me...when it comes to a question of form(ation). Also,
Lyn, another question for me arises in your next comment about Sayers (I don't know who that is) and the firm and holy integration of the analytic and aesthetic. I wonder if you are referring to the analytic mode of systematic theology specifically, and the aesthetic mode of...whatever. I wonder, when you say "holistic" there, do you mean a holistic vision of how any "product" might turn out (my professor once said, "All/most modern 'work' is analytic"), or are you thinking more in terms of the overall vision of a community and what gives it life? Like, are you asking a question of the proper place of systematic theology/analytic thought, and the proper place of beauty and aesthetics...and how they might relate to each other in the overall life of the church? I also wonder if this line of questioning is related to my question in my previous comment. The Trinity portion of your comment leads me to believe that you weren't just asking questions about practices and ecclesiology...and that I should stay out of a conversation that is even more beyond me than one about the practical stuff of ecclesiology. But I am still a curious cat...
Michelle Von Loom, I appreciated your comment a lot. I could use a good dose of just such mercy oftentimes.
Jason
11:22 PM
Jason, heh, you're right.. I didn't say enough. Sorry, just in a hurry last evening.
I have a friend who is deeply found of concretus, as opposed to abstract, which is to remove from context and "objectify" as if that were possible. In that sense I think the sermon has largely become dysfunctional, and the things that Raschke or Clapp say about our overdependence on words and propositions then apply.
I don't know if Descartes had an aesthetic theory, but I doubt that he did. But my thought is that we all inherit this world view that is centered on the Cartesian self, and in order to move beyond it we have to talk about rootedness, incarnation, context, wholeness, integration, and beauty. I'm with Ellul in that sense, that there can be no real separation between means and ends.
David, Dorothy Sayers work on the arts is "The Mind of the Maker," a great read, and possibly the earliest argument in the last century for recovering story as a vehicle for truthy.
8:56 AM
Oh Len,
Thant's funny. It sounds like you and I had a very similar miscommunication as Gordon and I. I had simply commented further in agreement with Gordon on what he had already said, but in a bit of a different way, and it sounds like you were doing something ver similar in relation to my comment...So I guess I'm with you. You know the work of lots of folks about whom I know either nothing or very little however...and it interests me...
Jason
9:18 AM
Incidentally, Chris at ODYSSEY is making some observations on sacramental logic..
http://odyssey.blogs.com/
4:06 PM
Dave, I really appreciate your thoughts and especially in the second paragraph of this post. Doesn't it seem like there is much missional talk but little missional action where missional action is needed outside of church? Why go to church if we are not being the Church? Why use art for us (mostly the already reached)mostly. Why not use this great tool to show Jesus and His beauty and creation to those who hunger deeply for something they call "spiritual" which is Jesus and they often don't even know it.
I noticed a stream in the comments here and I know I'm stuck on a few notes like a broken record. But why does it always happen, I mean we seem to gravitate back to the place of the "event" or "come and see gathering" or "church" in the institutional location sense. The post is great but our dialogue always seems to go back to how we can make "the church" better and better. Nothing wrong with making it better. Something is wrong if "the church thing" is more important than "being the Church" as missionaries in our own communities. Can we ever be missional and ever hope to fulfill the purposes of the Great Commission if the main thing isn't being missionaries in the world? We say we are missional but I am still looking for it. Do we really need more for us in the "artistic expression" or does the world need more of us as "artistic expressions" of lives changed by Jesus. I long for Christ followers to use expressions of artistic beauty to show the world who Jesus is and what He can mean to them.
Having said that (please don't throw me in the barrel of negativity) can some of you help me figure out how we can use this tool "artistic beauty" in a missional "missionary" way in the world.
6:13 PM
Bob ... thanks for the comments again and I appreciate your passion for the missional church. I think (not to self promote) if you read my book, you'll get that we are not that far apart. I definitely get the attractional problem evangeliclism seems to be stuck in. Yet, as much as I resonate on just about every page with what Frost and Hirsch are calling for, I am not convinced their ecclesiology is strong enough to manifest a missional presense in the postmodern times (or yes post Christendom times) we find ourselves, which makes the call for such a missional conversion of the church, so urgent. I hope to make this clearer in the future. And it has to do with my reticience toward a Reformed theology of culture versus a more Anabaptist ecclessiology. Hopefully we can explore this further in the blogosphere that lies ahead.
As for your last paragraph, "use this tool" may be the source of a problem for how I would view the incarnational presense manifested in art. But an example of the way art is part of a missional presense is some of the coffee house "churches" where art on the walls, and part of these communtiy's life ... could help you see art and beauty as part of a missionalk presense. Check out Pernell's church cafe on my blog roll ...
Blessings .. hope to meet along the way
David Fitch
8:42 PM
David, Great! I'll look for the art on the walls of coffee shops as well as looking forward to our meeting along the way. I'll check out the blog feed and book.
Keep plowing ahead but don't forget to take us with you.
9:15 PM
Speaking of simulacrum - D.F., from the pulpit is your voice amplified, simulated and projected electronically through speakers? How do you think of that; what are your thoughts on that?
Jason
12:43 PM
Christ is the Creator. He expressed Himself in the act of Creation. Creative expression is a part of who He is.
Art and the act of creative expression is as much a part of Christ-like-ness as love or faith.
Without Christ-like creative, artistic expression - the church has not fully embodied its' mission, nor will it fully realize its' potential to share the Message.
4:13 PM
It seems silliy to argue between gathering and being sent. It's like arguing which gift is more important. Let those who gather and those who go, do so to the glory of God, and not get all puffed up because they do the more important thing.
Besides, everybody knows who's the most important. Now where did I put my locusts and honey? It's lunch time.
12:35 PM
Mike lipuma, "WAKE UP!" You said, "Let those who gather and those who go is so not biblical!" Lets all gather and go and gather and go!
No one should get puffed up but all should go -Jesus said so, argue with Him.
You just give people excuses to sit on the butts while the world never gets to see Jesus through our going. And, please don't tell me about your church outreach program. That isn't what we mean nor what Jesus meant by living incarnationally in the world.
You are right -we all know the purposes of the Great Commission and God's Manifold purpose throught the entirety of Scripture to "Be fruitful and multiply" are most important! Jesus is most important and for us His purposes must be most important in all we do.
Hope you enjoyed your locusts and honey. Now tell me who you touched this week when you went "going" to show the world who Jesus is. Can you please tell me? The important thing is doing the important thing - "Be fruitful and multiply."
Too direct or pointed, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.
9:08 PM
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