Voicing Creation’s Praise: Intersecting theology and the arts By Robert P. Mills The Presbyterian Layman Monday, September 14, 1998 |
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| The Rev. Dr. Jeremy Begbie is
vice principal of Ridley Hall at the University of Cambridge, lecturer
at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity and author of Voicing Creation’s
Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991).
His professional training is in both music and theology. He currently
serves as Director of Theology Through the Arts, a project designed “to
stimulate and challenge contemporary Christian thinking by a rigorous
engagement with the arts.” While in Lenoir, N.C., to deliver the Jean Alexander Bernhardt Lectures in Theology at the First Presbyterian Church, Begbie talked with The Presbyterian Layman about theology and the arts. The Layman – In Voicing Creation’s Praise you write “The experience of art is a mode of knowing the world certainly different from conceptual and moral knowledge but by no means inferior to them.” Could you say more about that? Begbie – What I’m trying to argue there is that the arts are a particular way of coming to terms with the real world and that they can be a way of coming to terms with God. In other words they can be about truth beyond ourselves. Now, there’s a lot of thinking about arts that suggests that all the arts can do is be a means of self expression; that they’re not really about truth and knowledge and the world out there, and God; that they’re about the way I feel, about emotional expression and nothing else. I think the arts are a way of conveying truth. Or they can be. In the Bible that happens all the time. Jesus tells parables. But who’s ever going to say that Jesus doesn’t tell the truth through his parables. So you have an art form there that conveys truth. Isaiah, I’ve often thought, contains the most artistic passages in the Bible. Isaiah 40, “Comfort, comfort my people,” uses wonderful artistic language when he piles metaphors on top of each other. It’s one of the most artistic passages in the Bible, yet it’s full of truth. I think Protestants often think that God actually gave us the wrong kind of book. The Bible is so full of story and parable and metaphor and picture – art forms, in other words – what a shame. If only we could just get a much clearer book that was full of literal statements and straight prose and 18 points for each chapter and three-point sermons everyone would be happier. No, they wouldn’t. God knew what he was doing. He knew that we all have imaginations. He is appealing to our imagination in Isaiah, and Jesus is appealing to the imagination when he tells stories and parables in order to convey truth. The arts have their own way of conveying truth and we ought to respect that, and Christians need to wake up to it and not be frightened of it. The Layman – You have observed that in the next 10-20 years churches in the West are going to have a much more intensive interaction with the arts than they have been used to. Why is that?
The Church has traditionally been very, very word based, exclusively word based sometimes and very highly intellectual, almost to the exclusion of other dimensions of our personality like the imagination, the arts, emotions. Now my own conviction is that you don’t throw away your mind for a second, but if we are exclusively intellectual, or we believe that’s where all the action is, then we lose other dimensions of our personality. So the Church is going to have to wake up to the arts as the language of our age and the Church has got to get involved in that if it’s going to be engaging with our culture as it actually is. I don’t think there’s anything unChristian about that. The Layman – What is the role of imagination in the Christian life? Begbie – Whatever else the arts do, in a sense they create a different world. They invite you to live in their world whether it’s a painting, a sculpture, whatever. They say “Hey, come and interact with this and live in this world.” And to do that you’ve got to exercise imagination, you’ve got to suspend for a bit the other world that you live in from day to day and live in this world. The best art does that, not in order that we’ll escape the real world, but so that we will see the world we live in from day to day in a different way. C.S. Lewis, for instance, is great at fantasy literature. His writing is not designed to pull us into the fantasy world so we never return to the real world. It’s to make us look at our other world, or real world, so called, more deeply and fully. When Rembrandt paints the return of the prodigal son he says, “Get into the painting with me and then read the text of the prodigal son again. I think you’ll see all sorts of new things there.” When I see a great painting, a landscape painting, for instance by Constable, when he paints a tree and he paints it in 52 different shades of green and I get inside that world, when I go back and see his countryside or whatever, I see things I would have never noticed before. I realize there is no such thing as just green. God has made an almost infinite variety of shades of green. So it reminds me of the diversity of God’s world. What was Jesus doing when he was saying “The kingdom of heaven is like … ?” He was saying, “Get in the world of the prodigal son story, get in the world of the owner of the vineyards. It’s a bit like the world you know. I just want you to imagine what it’s like.” Of course, the whole point of the stories is that his hearers can never see their Jewish faith in the same way again. |
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| The
Layman – How does your understanding of metaphor fit
into this? Begbie – The great thing about metaphor is that all art involves the bringing together of things which have not been brought together before, particularly the bringing together of things which are unlike or which in some sense clash or are incompatible. The most obvious example is a metaphor, like “Juliet is the sun” in Shakespeare – here’s a person and here’s a big ball of fire. Now you wouldn’t normally think of bringing those together. But by bringing them together you’re made to see that Juliet has radiance and brightness and warmth and all the rest. I think all art is doing something like that, bringing together things that shock us a bit or attract our attention but it does it in order to reveal something deeper in the process, in order to open up a new world of meaning. In my book, I try to show different ways in which all arts involve the bringing together of incompatible elements, things that aren’t normally brought together, in order to attract our attention. That’s what metaphor is. The Layman – As this interaction between the arts and the church intensifies, how can lay people respond and participate? Begbie – I think the first thing is for all people to recognize that they are artists to some extent. They put pictures up on walls. They arrange a room. They decorate the inside of their car. They sing a song. Everybody has some kind of artistic gift, an ability to bring things together that aren’t normally brought together to make something beautiful. I also remind lay people that all appreciate art, up to a point. Everyone is normally going to stick something up on a wall. Most people appreciate music up to an extent. Most people read some kind of novel. We’re all involved in the arts either as practitioners or as appreciators. And then I’d want to say don’t be ashamed of that. This is a wonderful dimension of life that God has given us for our enjoyment and in order that we can be more fully ourselves, more fully human. So there’s nothing wrong with either practicing or appreciating the arts. But I think it has to go further than that. People have to learn to read the culture through the arts. There are all sorts of things going on in the arts which are indicators of what’s going on in our culture: What kind of music are people listening to and why are they listening to it? Why, for instance, is there so much interest in the kind of so-called spiritual music at the moment; music that sort of floats, Gregorian chants, Spanish monks singing, so-called new age music? Why is there so much interest in this kind of timeless music? In my opinion it’s because people are finding it very difficult to live in time, and with time, in the great rush of life. And they need this type of music to escape something of the overwhelming multiple pressures of life. The arts can be very powerful cultural indicators. They can open up what is going on at a particular time and place. We’ve got to know what’s going on in the world of the arts and what it’s telling us about the culture we’re living in. We also need to encourage our artists in the church. So those of us who are professionally involved in the arts, indeed are musicians in the churches or wherever, people who are artists and who are Christians, need support. If a script writer in Hollywood were in my congregation, I would be praying for him and making sure others were praying for him. We would have him regularly speaking to the congregation. And we would support him in that vocation, because he is practicing his art in that place. The Layman – What can pastors do? Begbie – They must encourage their artists. They must help lay people be wise about what the arts are telling us about the culture. They must create an environment where artists can flourish and feel at home. Many artists feel ostracized by the church. They feel the church has no place for them. Pastors must create an environment in the church where artists feel at home and supported. I think that’s incredibly important. Also, I think pastors can do a lot of theology through the arts. There’s a book about the life of Christ in paintings. Take a painting a week. That will take you more deeply into the Bible. And it’s a great way of Bible study as well. It’s helping the arts open up the gospel. I think pastors can do a lot more of that even if they’re not experts. The Layman – Who are some of the theologians who have been most influential in your thinking in this area? Begbie – The Torrances, James and Tom Torrance, are very, very influential. And I think Karl Barth. Barth taught me that all theology in the last resort must be controlled by what God has revealed of himself, supremely in Jesus Christ; that we are not free to think anything we like about God. There’s been a revelation and all our thinking about God, all our behavior as Christians, all our church life, the whole works, thought and life, must find its benchmark here, finally, in Jesus Christ. That’s very important in the theology/arts interaction because there’s a lot of talk about the arts which hides bad theology. There’s a lot of bad theology in the arts/theology interface. And there is a lot of talk about spirituality in the arts these days, about the arts helping us to rediscover spirituality, which I think is wooly, frankly. I’m concerned that we’re rigorous in our theology, centered in Christ. Then we can at the same time be rigorously involved in the arts and joyfully so. |
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