Theology and the Arts

Engaging Faith

Ruth Illman, W. Alan Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135014605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

This book brings the emerging fields of practical theology and theology of the arts into a dialogue beyond the bias of modern systematic and constructive theology. The authors draw upon postmodern, post-secular, feminist, liberation, and dialogical/dialectical philosophy and theology, and their critiques of the narrow modern emphases on reason and the scientific method, as the model for all knowledge. Such a practical theology of the arts focuses the work of theology on the actual practices that engage the arts in their various forms as the means of interpreting and understanding the nature of the communities and their members, as well as the mechanisms through which these communities engage in transformative work, to make persons and neighborhoods whole.

This book presents its theological claims through the careful analysis of several stories of communities around the world that have engaged in transformational practices through a specific art form, investigating communities from Europe, the Middle East, South America, and the U.S. The case studies explored include Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze, indigenous, and sometimes agnostic subjects, involved in visual art, music, dance, theatre, documentary film, and literature. Theology and the Arts demonstrates that the challenges of a postmodern and post-secular context require a fundamental rethinking of theology that focuses on discrete practices of faithful communities, rather than one-dimensional theories about religion.

Part I

A Practical Theology of the Arts

1 When the Center No Longer Holds

Challenges to Modernism

Biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann identified the modern theological insistence on reason, universal and positivistic principles, scientific method, and logico-mathematical thinking with a thoroughly male, Western, and largely white cultural hegemony.¹ During the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, a number of parallel challenges began to assault these modern assumptions. This chapter focuses on some of the issues that bear significance for the current investigation into art and religion. First, the notions of postmodernism and post-secularity arise as attractive alternative perspectives as the hegemonies, aptly summarized in Brueggemann's description, start to deteriorate. Second, dimensions of power and androcentrism are challenged by critical epistemologies developed within the frames of feminist and liberation theologies. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of art, religion, and truth.

“CENTER? WHAT CENTER?” THE POSTMODERN CHALLENGE

Jean François Lyotard is credited with outlining the essential claims of postmodernism.² According to Lyotard, postmodernism began with a transformed understanding of the nature of knowledge. In what Lyotard calls the “post-industrial world,” “knowledge-for-the-sake-of-knowledge” (theoria), “knowledge-to-produce-a-product” (technē), or even “knowledge-for-living-well” (poiēsis) are no longer adequate descriptions of knowing. Rather, knowledge has become little more than a form of discourse that is unattached to questions of meaning or truth. Richard Rorty has claimed that the search for universal moral truth is futile, leaving one with the realization that the only source for moral decision making is the agreement of “everyone in the room”³ (although, as some have noted, this still leaves open the question of who is admitted to the room in the first place). Also, recent developments within practical theology have been driven by calling into question the hegemony of theoria and consequent explorations of phronesis–practical knowledge–as a viable route for academic theologians.⁴

The modern worldview operated out of a series of authoritative metanarratives (such as the scientific method or salvation history) that provided the hermeneutical lenses through which persons evaluated truth and meaning. Lyotard and others regard these metanarratives as intellectual constructs and nothing more.⁵ Paul Lakeland claims that, in attempting to account for everything, the metanarratives of which Lyotard spoke subsumed the other under its narratives of reality, marginalizing the other in the process.⁶

Sources of authority characteristic of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as scientism, Church, State, and the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” (WASP) male have all had that authority challenged at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. Modern theology's assertions of a solid, universal, dogmatic, and propositional truth of the Christian faith have been challenged by claims to truth emerging from the East, Africa, South and Central America, from women, from other religious traditions, and from multiple sources of authority. As Harold Horell suggests, the “Christian” perspectives that persons “grew up thinking were normative and universal for all Christians, if not all people, are rooted in the specific outlooks, concerns, histories, and social contexts of their respective” communities.⁷ Thus, Horell concludes:

A radical awareness of the historical and bodily situatedness of all human knowledge and doing gives rise to a sense that the resources and traditions of the past are not transhistorical or universal structures of meaning and value, but can be taken as historical examples, raw materials, or even as fragments that need to be selectively and creatively combined in constructing a sense of faith identity that can guide thought and practice in the present.⁸

The center that grounded modern theology can no longer be said to hold the task of theology (or of culture) together–if, indeed, there is a center. Carl Raschke claimed the origins of deconstruction–one of several theologies/philosophies emerging out of the postmodern condition–could be found in the belief that “the cathedral of modern intellect is but a mirage.”⁹ No single form of knowledge is privileged over another. Thus, Gordon Kaufman concluded that theology is “an open and evolving discourse, rather than a set of revealed and tradition-bound doctrines.”¹⁰

THE POST-SECULAR RETHINKING OF RELIGION

A parallel process of reevaluation is simultaneously under way concerning the role of religion in contemporary societies. The rapid spread of secular worldviews–as well as the ideology of antireligious secularism that sometimes goes along with it–was for a long time seen to represent an irrevocable process leading to the slow decline or even death of religion. Yet, such claims seem superficial and are increasingly called into question.¹¹ Even if conventional forms of religious life show a decline in many parts of the world, a vivid interest in religion thrives outside these institutional structures in such forms as immigrant religions, charismatic movements, as well as health and body practices.¹² Such trends suggest an ongoing transformation toward a greater diversity of ideas, values, and practices.¹³

The effects of pluralism have broad implications for contemporary societies and individuals. Globalization and mobility have expanded the understanding of pluralism to include all possible religions, spiritualities, and ideologies–not just different variations of Christianity. For the individual, the “taken-for-granted status” of religion, as Peter L. Berger called it, has dramatically diminished: no matter how pious and devout one may be, one can no longer disregard the obvious fact that different persons take different religious truths for granted.¹⁴ Even if the postmodern condition does not affect one's personal conviction, the awareness of pluralism necessarily changes what it means to be religious today. As Charles Taylor states:

We live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on. We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time, looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.¹⁵

Jürgen Habermas proposes the term “post-secular” as a way of describing societies affected by such ruptures in patterns of secularization. In a postsecular society, he argues, the traditional lines between secular and religious seem to evaporate. What many have assumed to be an inevitable evolution of society toward increasing secularity at the expense of religious influences is challenged in his analysis.¹⁶ For Habermas, secular and religious outlooks on life mingle and mix in ways that are conditioned by historical situations and cultural patterns.¹⁷

The post-secular, however, does not represent a uniform, historical line of development. Neither can it be regarded as a simple retreat to pre-secular times. As Sarah Bracke notes, contemporary religiosity bears significant imprints of modernity, even if the secular values connected to this paradigm are rejected. In the post-secular condition, Bracke contends, the modern “becomes envisionable without the secular.”¹⁸ The post-secular discourse is contested, and it can indeed be criticized on the same basis as its secular counterpart. Thus, it tends to assume a linear and monolithic historical development of societies from religious, to secular, to post-secular–a development that makes no sense outside the Western perspective (if, indeed, it is valid from within that perspective).¹⁹ To avoid such oversimplified claims, the term should be understood as offering a critique of overtly confident secularist theories rather than as a plea for the return of religion to a stage, which it once had abandoned.²⁰ Furthermore, as Judith Butler contends, postsecular processes of transformation do not proceed through “homogeneous, empty time” but rather form into an interruptive force of “multiple temporalities.”²¹ This metamorphosis should also be understood as including the whole specter of transformative alternatives: from increased orthodoxy and conservatism to liberal rethinking. Hence, it inflicts change not only in relationships between traditions but also within them and depends on an epistemology that no longer inhabits the “modernist, dichotomous discourse” in which all that is known is known “binarily” as either or.²²

The end of the modern era has also nurtured a growing skepticism toward the supremacy of rational reasoning. Hence, as discussed above, emotional and experiential dimensions of religiosity appear as attractive alternatives, focusing on action and giving emphasis to subjective traits such as passions, enthusiasm, and feelings in the unmediated, lived experience. Spiritual self-transformation often includes a striving to reach beyond rationality by grounding ones religious outlook in personal experience. By giving precedence to experience over rational reasoning, a religiosity grounded in personal practice is emphasized.²³ In Rosi Braidotti's words, the political no longer equates with the rational and the religious with the irrational: “We are confronting today a post-secular realization that all beliefs are acts of faith, regardless of their propositional content”–even, or especially, when they invoke the superiority of reason, science and technology.²⁴

As a consequence of this development, consequently, the secular and the religious (or spiritual) are no longer fashioned as binary opposites or as steps that follow each other as a natural progression of development. The idea of secular and religious as mutually exclusive categories is muddled and confused.²⁵ Hence, theology must take into account that the elements that constitute pluralism are being continuously transformed themselves as a result of their own dynamic character.²⁶ Worldviews are no longer always exclusively religious or secular in character. In such a situation, Michael S. Hogue argues, theology necessarily becomes a contextually engaged, “cross-difference enterprise.”²⁷

When one moves from the societal to the personal level, a different set of questions arises. We live with an increased sense of individualization, an emphasis on personal choice, and a significant decline in the influence of “traditional” religious institutions. The increased popularity of the notion of “spirituality” has become a symbolic repudiation of, and counterpart to, “organized religion.” According to Taylor, the popular position of being spiritual but not religious reflects a reaction against and disillusionment with traditional claims of religious authority. Greater significance is attached to so-called soft aspects of religion–personal experiences and relationships– than to the top-down, hierarchical authority of “received truth.”²⁸ As Ingolf U. Dalferth notes, however, shying away from the term “religion” and opting instead for the “less dogmatic and more personal, pluralistic, and open orientation of life” promised by the discourse of spirituality does not in itself guarantee a position that is “less offensive to the secular mind” or to religious others outside the Western sphere of hegemony.²⁹

Nevertheless, the images attached to spirituality and its popularity today underline significant characteristics of contemporary religiosity. The shift in perspective has also nurtured a growing skepticism toward the “religion of reason” characteristic of modernism in favor of an emphasis on emotions and felt experiences of faith.³⁰ Hence, Walter Brueggemann describes the “postmodern imagination” as characterized by a move from the written to the oral, from the universal to the particular, from the general to the local, and from the timeless to the timely.³¹ Despite the contemporary emphasis on the individual as an increasingly important source of authentic religious experience, postmodern fragmentation does not mean that all societies and individuals have separate, solipsistic identities and worldviews. Even with the growing pluralism of our societies, identity formation is always open to, and conditioned by, the influence of one's context. Therefore, the identities we compose out of disparate bits and pieces i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Prelude
• Part I A Practical Theology of the Arts
• Part II Études
• Notes
• References
• Index