D.A. Carson, Maple Mountain and the arts
An excellent question from S.D. Smith
prompted reflection on Christianity, the arts and their
intersection
At the very good Maple Mountain Story Club, Samuel quotes the following from D.A. Carson and
asks what, if any, crossover there is with Christianity and the Arts (a popular
Maple Mountain
topic):
"Redemption terminology in the NT is so bound up with Christ's work for and in the church that to extend it to whatever good we do in the broader world risks a shift in focus. Not for a moment do I want to deny that we are to serve as salt and light, that exiles may be called to do good in the pagan cities where Providence has appointed them to live (Jer 29), that every square foot of this world is under Christ's universal reign (even though that reign is still being contested), that the nations of the world will bring their "goods" into the Jerusalem that comes down from above. But many of those who speak easily and fluently of redeeming the culture soon focus all their energy shaping fiscal and political policies and the like, and merely assume the gospel. A gospel that is merely assumed, that does no more than perk away in the background while the focus of our attention is on the "redemption" of the culture in which we find ourselves, is lost within a generation or two. At the same time, I worry about Christians who focus their attention so narrowly on getting people "saved" that they care little about doing good to all people, even if especially to the household of God. Getting this right is not easy, and inevitably priorities will shift a little in various parts of the world, under various regimes. Part of the complexity of the discussion, I think, is bound up with what the church as church is responsible for, and what Christians as Christians are responsible for: I have argued that failure to make this distinction tends to lead toward sad conclusions."
I thought this was such a good question that I ought to actually engage it with a blog post and not just a comment. The first thing that comes to mind is the direct application of what he is talking about - namely politics and the social gospel. With the whole Jeremiah Wright controversy fresh in our minds, that springs up as an excellent example of how the Gospel "is lost within a generation or two." I know a number of pastors who responded first to that controversy by simply saying "what a waste of the pulpit!" Regardless of whether you think he should be damning America or blessing it, you first must lament that he's more concerned with material things than preaching the Gospel, and the Gospel is what people desperately need to hear from the pulpit.
But moving to how this interacts with the arts and Christians involvement in the arts, I think his distinction between "the Church as Church and Christians as Christians" is very helpful here as well. Often we make the mistake of conflating those two concepts and either ditching the Gospel in our Church services in order to be more arty, or stamping crosses on our mints.
When it comes to the Church, we need to realize that the Gospel and its proclamation can take a back seat to nothing. The Gospel must be proclaimed in everything we do as Church. Mike Horton once said that the reason we need to hear the Gospel every Sunday is because we'll convince ourselves every week that its too good to be true - the Law is written on our hearts; the Gospel is entirely alien to us. Every time we miss an opportunity to proclaim the Gospel in church is a time we leave someone bowed under the weight of their conscience. This is a great argument, for instance, against church services that are exclusively music - i.e. don't contain a confession/absoluion, sermon or Bible readings.
When it comes to us as individual Christians, I think the Lutheran idea of vocation is helpful. Just as Christ did not think of equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied Himself for our sake, we are called to empty ourselves for our neighbor's sake. We have no need of good works (Christ has already provided for us there), but our neighbor desperately needs them. Every different role that we play (whether as Software Engineer, Author or Daddy) should be carried out to the service of our neighbor. There is a distinction between the work we do in service to a Church and the work we do in our normal lives, but it is a mistake to consider one as better than the other.
So how does this apply to the vocation of an artist? The artist serves his neighbor first by creating beautiful things, and in so doing reflecting the beauty of God's creation. We serve our neighbor by amplifying and giving him a venue in which to ponder the wonderful things in life. Here is where aesthetic concerns are helpful - Unity and Diversity, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, etc. This is the biggest diversion from where Christians as Christians function differently from the Church as the Church. The Church has no case to say that it's Sunday morning service would be less beautiful if it HAD to include a direct and clear proclamation of the Gospel. The artist, I think, is afforded some liberty. Perhaps the themes of redemption are so strong that Christian symbols and types assert themselves in the work, when other times it would be as offensive as stenciling LOLspeak words on a Monet. This is what Lewis claims happened with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. He said that it wasn't some work of evangelical calculation that deemed the most effective means of converting kids was to make this Christ figure lion, but rather that as he wrote the story it seemed to have that it mind on its own. Tolkien is an excellent example on the opposite end. The Lord of the Rings has nowhere near the explicit proclamation of the Gospel as Lewis' Narnia, but anyone who doesn't see the trilogy as a deeply Christian work is sorely mistaken.
Another means of serving our neighbor through art is holding the mirror up to our fallen condition. By showing the awfulness of sin and our need for God, we can awaken his conscience to his need for the Gospel or perhaps expose the folly of a sin and prevent him from falling into it. This, of course, also affords the artist some license in that they need not necessarily shy away from mature things. There are some pretty ugly and horrific aspects of our nature and our world, and the reflection in the mirror sometimes does not look so nice. We must be careful, however, to keep in mind that this is done in service to our neighbor. This precludes us from including salacious scenes or things that are there for the mere purpose of titillation. It also, perhaps less obviously, prevents us from condemning a sin too harshly and engendering pride in our neighbor. I don't know who said it (I thought it was Matthew Henry, but Google tells me nothing) that "there is nothing a man likes to hear more than the condemnation of someone else's sins." The artist must be careful to guard against this tendency in himself as well, lest we end up like David and find that "those people" count us among their number.
May God grant that we have the ability to strike the proper balance in service to our neighbor, that we might be salt and light and never lose our focus on the Gospel.
"Redemption terminology in the NT is so bound up with Christ's work for and in the church that to extend it to whatever good we do in the broader world risks a shift in focus. Not for a moment do I want to deny that we are to serve as salt and light, that exiles may be called to do good in the pagan cities where Providence has appointed them to live (Jer 29), that every square foot of this world is under Christ's universal reign (even though that reign is still being contested), that the nations of the world will bring their "goods" into the Jerusalem that comes down from above. But many of those who speak easily and fluently of redeeming the culture soon focus all their energy shaping fiscal and political policies and the like, and merely assume the gospel. A gospel that is merely assumed, that does no more than perk away in the background while the focus of our attention is on the "redemption" of the culture in which we find ourselves, is lost within a generation or two. At the same time, I worry about Christians who focus their attention so narrowly on getting people "saved" that they care little about doing good to all people, even if especially to the household of God. Getting this right is not easy, and inevitably priorities will shift a little in various parts of the world, under various regimes. Part of the complexity of the discussion, I think, is bound up with what the church as church is responsible for, and what Christians as Christians are responsible for: I have argued that failure to make this distinction tends to lead toward sad conclusions."
I thought this was such a good question that I ought to actually engage it with a blog post and not just a comment. The first thing that comes to mind is the direct application of what he is talking about - namely politics and the social gospel. With the whole Jeremiah Wright controversy fresh in our minds, that springs up as an excellent example of how the Gospel "is lost within a generation or two." I know a number of pastors who responded first to that controversy by simply saying "what a waste of the pulpit!" Regardless of whether you think he should be damning America or blessing it, you first must lament that he's more concerned with material things than preaching the Gospel, and the Gospel is what people desperately need to hear from the pulpit.
But moving to how this interacts with the arts and Christians involvement in the arts, I think his distinction between "the Church as Church and Christians as Christians" is very helpful here as well. Often we make the mistake of conflating those two concepts and either ditching the Gospel in our Church services in order to be more arty, or stamping crosses on our mints.
When it comes to the Church, we need to realize that the Gospel and its proclamation can take a back seat to nothing. The Gospel must be proclaimed in everything we do as Church. Mike Horton once said that the reason we need to hear the Gospel every Sunday is because we'll convince ourselves every week that its too good to be true - the Law is written on our hearts; the Gospel is entirely alien to us. Every time we miss an opportunity to proclaim the Gospel in church is a time we leave someone bowed under the weight of their conscience. This is a great argument, for instance, against church services that are exclusively music - i.e. don't contain a confession/absoluion, sermon or Bible readings.
When it comes to us as individual Christians, I think the Lutheran idea of vocation is helpful. Just as Christ did not think of equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied Himself for our sake, we are called to empty ourselves for our neighbor's sake. We have no need of good works (Christ has already provided for us there), but our neighbor desperately needs them. Every different role that we play (whether as Software Engineer, Author or Daddy) should be carried out to the service of our neighbor. There is a distinction between the work we do in service to a Church and the work we do in our normal lives, but it is a mistake to consider one as better than the other.
So how does this apply to the vocation of an artist? The artist serves his neighbor first by creating beautiful things, and in so doing reflecting the beauty of God's creation. We serve our neighbor by amplifying and giving him a venue in which to ponder the wonderful things in life. Here is where aesthetic concerns are helpful - Unity and Diversity, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, etc. This is the biggest diversion from where Christians as Christians function differently from the Church as the Church. The Church has no case to say that it's Sunday morning service would be less beautiful if it HAD to include a direct and clear proclamation of the Gospel. The artist, I think, is afforded some liberty. Perhaps the themes of redemption are so strong that Christian symbols and types assert themselves in the work, when other times it would be as offensive as stenciling LOLspeak words on a Monet. This is what Lewis claims happened with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. He said that it wasn't some work of evangelical calculation that deemed the most effective means of converting kids was to make this Christ figure lion, but rather that as he wrote the story it seemed to have that it mind on its own. Tolkien is an excellent example on the opposite end. The Lord of the Rings has nowhere near the explicit proclamation of the Gospel as Lewis' Narnia, but anyone who doesn't see the trilogy as a deeply Christian work is sorely mistaken.
Another means of serving our neighbor through art is holding the mirror up to our fallen condition. By showing the awfulness of sin and our need for God, we can awaken his conscience to his need for the Gospel or perhaps expose the folly of a sin and prevent him from falling into it. This, of course, also affords the artist some license in that they need not necessarily shy away from mature things. There are some pretty ugly and horrific aspects of our nature and our world, and the reflection in the mirror sometimes does not look so nice. We must be careful, however, to keep in mind that this is done in service to our neighbor. This precludes us from including salacious scenes or things that are there for the mere purpose of titillation. It also, perhaps less obviously, prevents us from condemning a sin too harshly and engendering pride in our neighbor. I don't know who said it (I thought it was Matthew Henry, but Google tells me nothing) that "there is nothing a man likes to hear more than the condemnation of someone else's sins." The artist must be careful to guard against this tendency in himself as well, lest we end up like David and find that "those people" count us among their number.
May God grant that we have the ability to strike the proper balance in service to our neighbor, that we might be salt and light and never lose our focus on the Gospel.
Posted: Tue - June 24, 2008 at 09:53 PM | | | | | | |
Quick Links
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Categories
Archives
XML/RSS Feed
Highlighted posts
Blogs of interest
The Moviegoer
Anesthetic Smoke
Scots Wha Hae!
Applied Semiotics
Odelay!
The Adagio County Independent
A Firm Nail
Eidos : Dr. John Mark Reynolds
Mere Orthodoxy
A Voice in the Wilderness
Jollyblogger
Squiblog
Beyond the Rim
ESV Bible blog
My Tobacco Cellar
Anesthetic Smoke
Scots Wha Hae!
Applied Semiotics
Odelay!
The Adagio County Independent
A Firm Nail
Eidos : Dr. John Mark Reynolds
Mere Orthodoxy
A Voice in the Wilderness
Jollyblogger
Squiblog
Beyond the Rim
ESV Bible blog
My Tobacco Cellar
Brought to you by
The Church Directory
Counters provided by
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jun 24, 2008 10:40 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jun 24, 2008 10:40 PM
Search
The Tip Jar
Counter provided by
Brought to you by
