Sense and Spirituality

The Arts and Spiritual Formation

James McCullough

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498270656
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

There is growing interest in the relationship between the arts and Christian faith. Much has been written about the arts and theology and the place of the arts in church life. Not as much has been written, however, about how the arts might actually advance spiritual formation in terms of the cumulative effect of religious experience and intentional practices. This book provides a modest step forward in that conversation, a conversation between theological aesthetics and practical theology. Understanding aesthetics as "the realm of sense perception" and spiritual formation as "growing capacities to participate in God's purposes, " James McCullough suggests how these dynamics can mutually enhance each other, with the arts as an effective catalyst for this relationship. McCullough proposes an analysis of artistic communication and explores exciting examples from music, poetry, and painting, which render theoretical proposals in concrete terms. This book will engage both those new to the arts and those already deeply familiar with them.

Part I

Theoretical Framework

1

The Arts and Spirituality

What is the place of art in the Christian life? Is art—especially the fine arts of painting and music—simply a way to bring in worldliness through the back door? We know that poetry may be used to praise God in, say, the psalms and maybe even in modern hymns. But what about sculpture or drama? Do these have any place in the Christian life? Shouldn’t a Christian focus his gaze steadily on “religious things” alone and forget about art and culture?1

Recent Reflections on the Arts and Christianity

The anxieties given expression in the passage above seem one-sided now, even among those who identify with conservative forms of Christian faith. While concerns about worldliness remain, a more confident posture toward matters of art and culture have largely, although not entirely, replaced former feelings of insecurity and alienation. Among Evangelicals in the English-speaking world, the arguments and anxieties have turned toward questions related to what kind of art is beneficial, how art might be effectively deployed for religious purposes, and how the arts might be more meaningfully engaged. But when the influential American Evangelical Francis Schaeffer wrote his tract Art and the Bible in 1973, such anxieties and misgivings were very much at the forefront.

Much has happened since Schaeffer in effect gave Evangelicals permission to engage with matters of art and culture. Evangelicals and Christians of all communions have in the ensuing years produced a wealth of studies addressing the relationship between the arts and Christian faith, theology, mission, and imagination. There seems to be no abatement of this trend. Just a few very recent examples might suffice to substantiate this claim.

Nancy Pearcey is a direct intellectual and theological descendent of Francis Schaeffer. In her 2010 book Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning, she extends Schaeffer’s cautiously positive regard for the arts, particularly as they serve as both signs and symptoms of trends within Western society. The book is a welcome contribution to otherwise familiar “worldview” analyses of culture that tend to focus almost exclusively on human thinking as opposed to human doing, making, or feeling. Her reflections on the arts as forms of “language” that project ideational content is a perspective shared in this project. But there are disappointing limitations to the scope of her analysis. Her approach to the arts is largely predetermined along a narrow set of criteria, and the manner in which artworks are portrayed as one-dimensionally “true” or “false” tends towards the sense of a lack of depth. A similar narrowness of theological and doctrinal orientation, where a basically neo-Reformed Evangelicalism passes muster as the “Christianity” against which all other forms or faiths are measured, adds to the narrowness of cultural engagement.2

By contrast Timothy J. Gorringe offers a quite different perspective. In Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art, Gorringe, like Pearcey, seeks to address the presence and meaning of the “secular” in Western society. Unlike Pearcey, however, Gorringe does not locate changes in perception and orientation in a one-dimensional story of decline. Gorringe sees Western secularism—that is, the affirmation of the value and validity of the temporal world—as a logical outcome of Western Christianity, especially its Protestant variety. In support of this thesis, Gorringe refreshingly explores some of the less familiar works of the Dutch School, still life, portraiture, and abstraction, paintings where the things of this world assume center stage. Employing an undeveloped metaphor from Karl Barth, Gorringe suggests that works such as these can be interpreted theologically as “secular parables.” It is a compelling thesis argued in a persuasive manner, with the added virtue of introducing readers to aspects of Western art too often overlooked in such analyses.

The most impressive recent project of theology and the arts, in terms of sheer size and extent of engagement, is David Brown’s three-volume series published by Oxford University Press.3 Brown’s agenda for the entire series is to “widen the range of material thought relevant to constructive theology,” particularly in the realms of cultivated nature, the arts, and human activity.4 Brown’s repeated admonition that Christians should first engage in careful “listening,” rather than anxiously predetermining potential meanings in art and culture, is a helpful balance to what too often takes place.

My project responds to and seeks to expand on two of Brown’s contributions. One is his thesis on the sacramental potentials of art. Brown bases this thesis on the theological presupposition that God is “generous” and desires to make himself accessible and available for human finding, and that God does so both within and from without the specifically Christian circle of influence. Brown’s recourse to the sacramental is grounded on the analogy of what God accomplishes in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, which is extended to being perceived as “a major, and perhaps even the primary, way of exploring God’s relationship to our world.”5 A sacrament for Brown is both a sign and a real extension of God’s presence in the world made available to human understanding and experience. Like Gorringe’s use of the parabolic, Brown’s analysis of the arts and human culture within a sacramental paradigm has the virtue of placing the “secular” aspects of life within a “sacred” scope of perception. They highlight the efforts of rendering genuinely theological analyses of these natural and human phenomena. My concern with the invocation of the sacramental in an analysis of art, however, is the degree that it implicates God in products of human endeavor, at least when the object under consideration is a work of art. Again, part of the effort of this essay is to allow works of art to have their own integrity as human artifacts. Humans are traditionally understood to be made in God’s image, and operate within a context of God’s creating and redeeming purposes, and even their best and most original works are but derivative of God’s creative properties. But I wish to move slowly on the attribution of these works to God’s intentions.

Drawing on a variety of resources my project advances the paradigm of the catalyst as a way to understand the relationship between the arts and spirituality. The paradigm of the catalyst is less metaphysically fraught, less theologically loaded, and yet can address itself to the positive ways the arts might contribute to Christian spirituality. Indeed, even the most “secular” works, which on every other criteria of assessment might be deplorable in intention and disturbing in content, might serve to catalyze meaningful reflections on life with or apart from God, while making no particular claims on divine implication in the work.

Secondly, David Brown’s project focuses on the experiential. His whole project centers on “reclaiming human experience” for its theological significance. The thrust of my project seeks to explore the cumulative effects of religiously significant experiences, namely those in relation to the aesthetic. Such experiences should result in something yielding lasting effects. I seek to understand those effects in terms of spiritual formation.

excursus

Francis A. Schaeffer (1912–84)

Francis...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Theoretical Framework
• Chapter 1: The Arts and Spirituality
• Chapter 2: A Communicative Theory of the Arts
• Chapter 3: Aesthesis, Ascesis, and Catalysis
• Part Two: Practical Application
• Chapter 4: T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
• Chapter 5: Makoto Fujimura: The Four Holy Gospels
• Chapter 6: James MacMillan: Seven Last Words from the Cross
• Chapter 7: What Are They Saying?
• Part Three: Conclusion
• Chapter 8: Eyes that See, Ears that Hear
• Bibliography
• Recommended Reading