On Jordan's Bank, the Baptist Cries...

Here is a timely reflection on the season of Advent,
as we prepare our hearts and minds for the weeks ahead.

McIntyre on the University

Mars Hill Audio Journal, well worth checking out for their own excellent material-- mostly interviews with critical thinkers on contemporary culture-- has posted this interesting article by Alasdair McIntyre.

Three Cheers for Terry Eagleton

I have always had immense respect for Eagleton, whom I read in serveral of my undergraduate literature courses. His Illusions of Postmodernism is especially good.

He has an especially good review-- though it's really more of a castigation-- of Richard Dawkins' latest book up at the London Review of Books site, which you can read here.

Here is an especially quotable quote:
"Now it may well be that [Christianity] is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism."

Thank you, Mr. Eagleton, for yet more intellectual firepower in service of the truth.

Yeah, I live here!

Thomist Aesthetics: A Guest Post by Chris

Below is a guest post by my friend Chris. On our seminary bulletin board, we had a dialogue similar to the one currently in process on these pages, regarding Christian aesthetics. Specifically, how does Christianity adress the question of artistic form?

Within my own communion, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, there is quite a bit of tension between the shape of the liturgy received from the Catholic (that is to say, the universal, and not specifically Roman) tradition, and between forms intended to be innovative and attractive to those without a background in the Church.

At least one of the problems facing a Christian aethetics in the Western Church, is the reality of division. Our common life is fractured and diverse. How can we, together, affirm those forms which best express the content of the gospel? How can we bring the riches of our world’s cultures into the culture of the Church, which is the body of Christ? Can we “baptize,” so to speak, any type of cultural form and thus make it fit for Christian worship & devotion? Even heavy metal or hard-core gangsta-rap?

Here is Chris’ helpful parsing out of some relevant issues:

“ It is one thing to hold that certain cultural forms "cannot be baptized," and quite another to say that some are more beautiful, and therefore more true and Christ-like, than others. To say that something cannot be baptized is to beckon a charge of Manicheanism, as it contradicts God's declaration that His Creation is good. To say that some particular form possesses a surface quality that is not only not hostile to the Gospel, but especially suited to it by virtue of one or more [of its] attributes, is quite different from a coarse dualism. I think there may be an analogy that one could make along Thomist lines by recalling a sort of "preparation for the Gospel" motif. Some cultural forms may possess greater participation in natural truth due to their reasonableness. Grace building on nature, or, if that is too hard to swallow, then grace more easily elevating and sanctifying what is not as much degraded.

I think that, in this precise sense, cultural elitism is called for. There are more reasonable, and more beautiful, cultural forms than others. I think the Great Tradition of Christianity as it has providentially developed by way of Athens and on into Europe has been well supported and expressed. This was one of the points that Benedict recently made at Regensburg . It is, or course, hard to come up with a non-fanciful thought experiment whereby Christianity thrived on different cultural soil (though Africa prior to Muslim tyranny comes to mind, but even this Africa was Latinized). I do not believe that these are mere quirks and jags of historical senselessness. My contention is that the major threads that make up the fabric of this European Christianity are worth conserving: the emphasis on reason and the philosophical tradition of reflection upon aesthetics, and the major aesthetic forms, principally.

We need also to define what is meant by "beautiful." This is not something that we can do easily, short of pointing to an icon of our Lord's image. It remains a crucially important task, if we are to actually make progress towards aesthetics worthy of the Church.

The first thing I can do to advance towards a definition is to uphold that variety of early Christian Platonism, and of Thomism, that God is a simplicity of excellences. God’s being is identical to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Therefore, those things are beautiful that share God’s very being in a more perfect way. There are some ways in which we can make this very basic assumption touch our own experiences via analogy. As God is rational, (well ordered by His own essence) then all things that are rational participate in this attribute in a limited manner. Hence, those things that are rational are also participating in the Beautiful – since God’s essence is simple – and therefore possess beauty.

Since we are dealing with aesthetics, which is, for us, largely confined to the realm known through the senses, we must consider how we can have sensible knowledge of God’s being. We need a form that is sensible to guide our aesthetic judgments. The “glory” or kabod of the Lord first appears as Creation. Creation itself is superfluous other that declares God’s Goodness. The Wisdom tradition of Israel connects Wisdom to God and to Creation in a fundamental manner. Within this, there are Theophanous events with specifically available surfaces that serve as a form for our sense of the Beautiful.

Ultimately, these surfaces are unified and made available in an unsurpassable manner in the person Jesus of Nazareth. He is the exact mirror image of the Father and the fullness of his being made flesh. The pre-existent Son, who is the eternal form for Creation, comes into Creation and makes Himself recklessly available to our senses.

The life of submissive self-oblation towards that Father, the eternal pattern of giving that is the Son, is identified in history as an accessible life lived, with shape and sensible form.

This form is the one that must become our definition for the beautiful. Anything that is beautiful will look like Christ. The similitude of beauty to a phenomenon is the proportion of its resemblance to Christ.

A brief concrete example: I like Radiohead (especially OK Computer), but it is very difficult for me to discern this music’s similitude to Christ. In fact, there are anti-Christian sensibilities that comprise the work. There may in fact be such a similitude to Christ, at some abstract level, but it is not easily intelligible. Hence, it is not easy for me to call the work, in a proper sense, beautiful (every phenomenon possesses some degree of beauty or it would not exist, but I cannot use the term in the sense I have just attempted to define). It is more likely that my own sinfulness has warped my aesthetic sense in some quite profound ways, and this perversion of aesthetic sense is what accounts for my attraction. I am certain that this is the case for me sometimes. It is important to recall that some of those who consider themselves to have rarified and cultured aesthetic sense are those who flock to see abominations like [Andres Serrano’s] “Piss Chri__” (I will not blaspheme).

Radiohead is a complex phenomenon, but I’m not entirely convinced by David Dark’s apology. I was three years ago, but not any longer…”

I might add to Chris’ statement that a number of other cultures have brought their riches into the Church and share appropriately in God’s glory—African-American spirituals to name just one.

One must offer a nuanced account of history to both attend to the very deep currents of Christian thought running through European art for the past millenia, but also to see how other cultures have offered their gifts to Christian humanism, and to appreciate the ways in which well-developed art forms that originated in other traditions could enrich the Church now and in times to come. Christians are bound to affirm that the triune God's providence is at work everywhere, bringing all things-- even other religions-- to fulfillment.

I don't feel nearly well-enough informed about world music, but I do love some of what I've heard. As anyone who has seen the recording of the 1967 Moneterey Pop Festival knows, Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire is really quite boring; it is not really worth the “legendary” status that is attached to it. In my opinion, Ravi Shankhar steals the show with an amazing fifteen-minute classical Indian raga. I think that this is a superb example of how other cultures can exhibit just how repugnant western nihilism and self-indulgence is!

It seems that with the cultural suicide of the West, the "global south" (Africa, South America) and Asia, too, are inheriting the riches of the Christian faith. While emptied cathedrals echo in France, Taiwan’s churches are packed to the gills. It will be interesting to witness the continuities and discontinuities between the European forms of the faith and the cultural forms of "the next Christendom” of the Global South.

Some Cursory Thoughts on Christian Aesthetics

My friend Kevin commented on my November 9th post regarding the October Luther-Aquinas conference and my thinking afterwards about aesthetics more generally in the Church's worship. Kevin asked an important question about the space in a Chrsitian aesthetic for personal charism. How do individual gifts, personal dispositions, and preference fit into the artistics forms we use for worship and devotion?

In my response to his query, I reflected on a "cultural-linguistic" model of the Church, and the consequent implications of that view for aesthetics. In brief, such a model means that Christianity and its distinctive culture / language is "intratextual;" it draws in the world and interprets it rather than the other way around. Furthermore, this means that the individual is constituted by the Church and its distinctive "grammar" and its set of distinctive cultural practices.

Such a view stands in tension with the common view of the Church as an organization that is constituted by individuals, with their personal preferences for general fellowship. In this predominant view, Christianity is one among many "religions" which are more or less only private dispositions which motivate one to behave in particular ways. While I want to recognize and affirm the unique gifts that God bestows on persons, I also want to emphasize that for Christians, the Church has logical priority since it is the culture & language that gives them the mediate forms through which they can "experience" the world to begin with.

As Luther says, the Church is our "Mother" who "bodies forth our faith." Our way of being in the world is shaped by the proclamations and practices of the Church.

This view means that the Church is not a juridical authority that impinges upon our prior individuality, quashing or malforming our personal gifts. Rather, the Church gives us our individual gifts, and guides us in the ways of life. The Holy Spirit works through the practices of the Church, and guides our personal charisms into their fullest expression. The artist, the worshipper use their gifts and express themselves, but at their fullest when within the givenness of the language of the Church.

It's nearly a week after All Saints Day, but I have special cause to remember two remarkable ladies from my home parish of Saint Timothy Lutheran Church in Forest Park, Georgia.

Erika Stull was born in Germany, and lived through World War II as a child in Weisbaden. She wrote a wonderful (and unfortunately, unpublished) memoir of her childhood years, including the difficult war years. As a young woman, she immigrated to the United States and married an American. Denver, her husband, is also a writer. Their faithfulness was always an example to me, and Erika, as my "shepherd," kept tabs on how I was doing in high school and in college. Unfortunately, Erika is not doing well now; she is recovering from a stroke. God bless & keep her.

Sarah Irvin is another dear soul who nurtured me in my youth. She was in attendance at nearly every event that I can remember and gave me small words of encouragement that, though they may have seemed insignificant to her, really planted seeds for me to begin discernment about a vocation in the Church. Now, Sarah, too, is ailing.

I love these dear ladies, and hope that our Lord grants them healing and full restoration. They are truly saints through whom God's grace has shined upon me.

I am glad to read this breath of fresh air on a difficult political issue. I hesitate to vote for the democrats because they are often stridently pro-abortion. I simply do not believe that this issue, complex as it may be, is one of purely personal choice, which is how the pro-choice side is without exception, always framed. Perhaps some Lincolnian will bravely forge a path for us that is similar to Abraham's position on slavery (which to me is a morally accurate analogue to abortion). Unlike Lee, the blogger cited above, though, I do not at all hold to a constructionist account of moral worth (i.e., the more developed the embryo, the more of a person it is). Richard Sith, in an October 30th entry on the First Things blog, has a nice retort to such a position.

I abstained from voting in the recent elections here in Boone because I am sorely unfamiliar with the candidates in this district, and felt like pulling the lever for a "mystery guy or gal" would likely do more harm than good. Much as I liked the local Republican incumbent senator's perspectives on fiscal policy and marriage law, I feel that her endorsement of the current war in Iraq is lamentable. The war in the middle east seems to me unjust both in terms of jus ad bellum (it has little chance of sucess and does not seem to have adequately just cause) and jus in bello (it has been indiscriminate in its damage to civilians and has decidedly not treated prisoners of war as noncombatants.

I fear that elections for the rest of my life will be such moral quandries such as this one.

I take comfort in Luther's insistence, in his commentary on one of the royal psalms, that the most powerful forces shaping our political world are prayer and the holy angels. Let us all pray together during this advent: "Savior of the nations, come!"

I went to the Luther-Aquinas conference in Hickory a couple of weeks ago. Almost all of the lectures there were very good. Dr. Amy Schifrin, a Lutheran pastor in Pennsylvania, though, was absolutely phenomenal. I hope that she will make good on her promise to e-mail me a copy of her talk. Though, even if she forgets (I'm sure she's very busy, having wrapped up a doctoral dissertation and then gone on to a pastorate!) I think that Lutheran Forum usually tries to publish the addresses of the conference in one of their issues.

Her talk was on Luther's use of hymnody in the Evangelical mass. She emphasized the unity of form and content in liturgy and hymnody. The quotable quote that stuck with me was this: "It is a vicious lie that Luther got the tunes for his hymns from the bars." In fact, Luther very much wanted to preserve the proper distinction between ecclesial and popular culture. This is not to say that he disliked bar tunes-- in his Genesis commentary, he talks about the Word of God doing its work while he and Melanchthon drank beer (and I'm sure they sang a bar tune or two.) But some music is not the most appropriate for the Church. Its form does violence to the gospel.
It is hard to make this kind of an argument about proper music for worship without being accused of cultural elitism. That's why I don't make that argument in my parish...but I tenaciously hold to it, and try to subtly encourage it and subversively advance it!
I certainly don't want to demean rock music, R&B, etc. I love those forms dearly, as my Otis Redding & Velvet Underground boxed sets can attest to.

I think that DC Talk (or Lost & Found, or Stryper, or whatever...) is fine if that's what grabs you, but it does not seem to be capable of adequately carrying the apostolic deposit in its fullness. Which is why it is probably not best for Sunday morning. But listen to it all you want elsewhere. Let's face it, though, it is impossible to divorce the formal aspects of rap and heavy metal from their cultural contexts, and I certainly don't want to see the crass misogyny or pagan abandon that these forms embody, in the Church.

I am not the biggest fan of Marty Haugen and David Hass. This is mostly because of the "social gospel" that sometimes seems implicit in their lyrics. I have to admit that part of my distaste, though, is the folksy forms that are more reminiscent of Peter, Paul and Mary than of the Church's great composers (for a funny protest, see this site). But I will say that Haugen & Hass do a reasonably good job of taking musical forms of the people and transposing them into the Church.

But where are our generation's Crugers and Bachs and Wattses and Wesleys? I certainly do not insist upon "highbrow" music, but I crave scriptural depth, doctrinal profundity and musical gravity that can also appeal to our contemporary culture. A tall order, yes, but one we deeply need some faithful musicians to fulfill.

I remember reading a commentary one time on how the hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" was revised in a baptist hymnal. Because no one understood the reference, they changed "Here I raise my Ebenezer," to "Here I raise a sure reminder." That is really sad, but seems to reflect a trend in Church music.

Schifrin made the argument that there are three types of music-- art music, folk music, and "industrial music." Art music comes from a composer's head with a specific ensemble in mind. Folk music comes from among the people and circulates widely. "Industrial" music comes from a studio with the intention of making money. She argues that Church music has been co-opted by industrial music.

Now, I am not sure that I'm with her all the way. After all, sometimes music does not fall cleanly into one category. What do you do with a Bob Dylan who borrows widely from folk forms and forges a somewhat unique style with the end of making money from it? Or what do you do with a Radiohead, who makes avowedly difficult "art" music for an industrial market?

Perhaps the ends of an industrial culture have inevitably warped our cultural forms-- the only way out is by being ironic (a la Andy Warhol) or transgressive (a la Andres Serrano-- the "artist" who put the crucifix in a jar of urine). Or, maybe we should just march on in this awful parade and pretend like the emperor leading us is clothed magnificently.

But I have great hope. I am anxious about doing my project related to arts & faith in my congregation. We have talked about having an artist in residence to do a sculpture here. We have talked about hosting Christian writers and dramatists to do readings and plays and talks. There are many painters and writers and musicians and puppeteers here. Can't they use their skills in an excellent way to glorify God?. There is too much mediocrity that is glorified in the Church. This is especially true for music!

I see aesthetic renewal as a significant horizon for the Church. Or maybe it's more like ressourcement. After all, from icons to Gothic cathedrals to Dante, the Church has nurtured a lot of the greatest art. Let's not forget that the Renaissance- - claimed as a benchmark for rational humanism-- happened in large part because the Church acted as a patron for Palestrina and Michelangelo and Raphael and many others. We need to nurture our own day's artists or else they will be making art on the terms of our increasingly destructive secular culture.

If you have not seen it, you should check out the journal "Image," which publishes excellent literature and art from a Judeo-Christian perspective. This is one of my beacons in a dark world.