‘Leaving the Church to find God’: an excerpt from Tin House’s conversation with Paul Harding

Former rock-band-drummer-turned-author Paul Harding shocked the hell out of lit-types recently by winning the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel Tinkers. Published by an indie, non-profit press at the NYU School of Medicine (no joke), Harding’s fictional account of a dying man’s hallucinatory meanderings has become the darling of struggling, art-minded authors everywhere.

My review of the book is on the way. In the meantime, take a moment to enjoy this surprising quote touching on theology, atheism, and quantum mechanics from his recent conversation with Tony Perez from Tin House:

TP: There’s a quiet spirituality to your work that I think is lacking in a lot of contemporary fiction (your old teacher Marilynne Robinson being an obvious exception) and I’ve heard you’re a big reader of theology. I wonder if you could talk about how your work or your thinking is influenced by people like Karl Barth, or Martin Luther. Or even someone like William James?

PH: All the people you’ve just described I think you can sort of line up in parade formation, they all come out of the same tradition—reformed Protestant thinking. I grew up here in Boston kind of a neutral atheist. I read my Nietzsche and what not, but I wasn’t a dogmatic atheist—I wasn’t doctrinaire; I didn’t have anything against religion. And then after having studied with Marilynne Robinson for a number of years, it occurred to me that if I asked her where the source of her aesthetic, and intellectual, and soulful kind of integrity and sophistication came from, she would tell me that it was her religion. She would tell me that it came out of her reading in this tradition. Given that I respect her so much, I would be inclined to respect her answer, her own accounting of herself. So I just started to read these things and I found them to be incredibly beautiful— deeply concerned with narrative and cosmology. It was so much more than the popular sand kicking you hear in the press between Richard Dawkins and Creationists—the crummy little cartoon versions of these things. The more deeply I read into them, the more I realize that if you isolate yourself from these traditions of thinking, you’re isolating yourself from most of Western intellectual history, up until, almost post-World War II thinking. It almost feels like a type of censorship, like “religion’s bad for you, don’t bother looking at theology.” I read someone like Karl Barth and it’s just the most beautiful, aesthetically pleasing human thought I’ve encountered. In Tinkers, since it’s fiction, I’m not under the obligation to engage in apologetics or offer proof, but I can explore things. I can play around with them dramatically and aesthetically, and sort of see how these people account for themselves in terms of spiritual conceptions of who they are in the Universe.

If you look at Emerson, he was a Unitarian minister and he left the church. The common rap about that is, you know, he left the church for greener pastures. But if you look at the tradition out of which he came, there’s a strong argument to be made that he left the church to find God. That’s the Protestant tradition—at least the writing and thinking with which I’m familiar. There’s a built-in anti-authoritarianism, the presumption that the institutional church is a human construction; it’s always going to ossify, and it’s antithetical to truly pious thinking. For them, really what it comes down to, is you and scripture. The Unitarians broke away from the Calvinists; the Calvinists broke away from the Lutherans; the Lutherans broke away from the Catholics; the Catholics broke away from the Jews; the Jews broke away from the Babylonians. That’s a beautiful tradition, and seems hardwired into this understanding of what pursuing religion and that kind of thinking is. The best theologians, for example Karl Barth, view the Bible as a work of literature, and that does not demean its normative or holy authority. He’s a close reader of a text. It’s a much more sophisticated use of the imagination and the intellect, and just makes you think about what we talk about when we talk about God. When you go back to someone like Dawkins, he just perverts all that stuff by saying, “if you believe in God, you believe in an old man with a white beard sitting on a throne.” Of course that’s ridiculous. But then you realize that people like Dawkins have never read a word of theology, they rely on popular prejudice—or all this material positivism that they misheard in their, you know, Wittgenstein 101 class. If everything is made of matter, and there is no such thing as the spirit, then all that means is that we have no idea what the nature of matter is. I’m perfectly willing to grant that everything is made out of stuff, but that just means that we don’t really know what stuff is. To me, theology and poetry and art go hand-in-hand with physics. That version of materialism is totally antiquated, out-dated, Newtonian mechanics. They’re always complaining that it’s not testable, it’s not falsifiable, but the most sophisticated quantum mechanical experiments only make the nature of matter more ambiguous than it ever was before—it’s all observer dependent. If you’re a writer, there’s a very cool anti-realist strain in quantum mechanics. Supraluminal influence and observer dependent reality—all of that speaks to the experiential and participatory nature of human consciousness. When translated into fiction, it’s part of character. There’s a passage in Tinkers where Howard is walking through the woods, and when he turns around to look at his wagon, he’s certain that every time he turns his head, everything behind him disappears or changes. In a way, that’s just fooling around with quantum physics, just in a narrative sense.

Love, love, love that bit about Wittgenstein 101. So funny. Seriously, read the whole article. And the book.

Technorati Tags: art, Church, Culture, Paul Harding, Physics, Theology, Tinkers

On Jack White, Worship, and the Marketplace of Art & Spirit

Jack White is a performer – no ifs, ands, or buts about it – and yet he has the audacity to expect a relationship of mutuality from his audiences. If you’ve ever preached, given a speech, or performed on stage in any capacity then you know exactly what he’s talking about here. There is a kind of reciprocal relationship that can exist between artist and audience, giver and receiver, wherein the gift is nurtured and grown between them.

The problem, according to Jack, is that American audiences are increasingly “spoiled,” by which he seems to mean lazy or entitled. Referring to the rock concert, Jack says, “It’s supposed to be a sharing experience.” Is it just me, or is he describing something we see happening in churches too?

For my part, I would say that Americans have increasingly lost the imaginative realm of the gift as the locus of relationships. Hence, we’re less able to conceptualize our relationships as anything but marketplace exchange; a tragic loss that has crippled institutions of art and spirit as sacred spaces of human formation - largely because we’ve thoroughly saturated those realms with the metrics of the marketplace. Consequently, I tend to think that by purging gift-space of marketplace dynamics we might be able to re-appropriate the role of artists and priests as performers in an appropriate sense.

Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: art, Charlie Rose, Church, Jack White, Preaching, Reciprocity, The Gift, The White Stripes, worship

After SVS 2010: Elisa Berry: Beauty and the Practice of the Kingdom of God

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Elisa Berry: “Beauty and the Practice of the Kingdom of God”

Abstract
The Protestant tradition has as its heritage an iconoclasm that rejects the idolatry of religious images and symbols in favor of seeking God in God’s Word and in direct experiences of God. This reaction to imagery, instigated by real problem facing the church of the 16^th century, fails to address the issues facing the church today. As we recontextualize the message of Christ for this time and place, our churches are much more likely to face the pitfalls of the unreflective adoption of the values of consumerism, or, conversely, the use of tradition for tradition’s sake. In this paper I explore how the theological reflections of Saint Bonaventure, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards can help us avoid these pitfalls without ignoring God’s Trinitarian communication of Godself through beauty, creation and the senses. My discussion of the thought of these theologians is framed by Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between the idol and the icon. Marion describes the idol as a mirror that can only reflect back the scope and power of the gaze that looks upon it. While an idol fails to point the gaze beyond itself, an icon is a mirror consumed by divine glory, through which the gaze transpierces the visible to behold the invisible. This metaphor of the mirror is also used by John Calvin an St Bonaventure to describe the God’s self-revelation through the beauty of creation. Creation is a mirror of God’s generative wisdom. The world is made through Christ, the Wisdom of God emanating from the Father. For Jonathan Edwards creation happens as the result of an overflowing of Trinitarian love that God desires to communicate to creatures. God draws us as creatures to Godself through ravishing beauty, not allowing us to rest in the senses, but ultimately drawing us to the crucified and incarnate Christ. As we wait for the ultimate fulfillment of God’s kingdom, we encounter God’s love in the senses through the body of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. For all of these theologians, God promises to be most fully present to our senses in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper through which as a community we encounter the fullness of God’s presence.

Interview With Elisa

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: As both an artist and a Christian, the question of the role of beauty and the senses in our relating to God has  been present in my mind for quite awhile. It was one of the questions that led me to divinity school, where I explored the intersection of theology and art and encountered the theologians that appear in my paper. It was during divinity school that I first became involved in a Vineyard church plant and was designated the “aesthete” in our planning meetings.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: In my anecdotal experience in the Vineyard, there is an apathy toward visual beauty and the role it plays in our relating to God.  I think that we live in a society that is hungry for lasting beauty, and also attuned to respond to beauty. We are constantly visually stimulated, and the church must search for responses and alternatives to the inundation of visual stimuli. I also think that as Christians we will remain impoverished if we fail to be formed by the resources of the historical theological tradition. Theologically, beauty is important because through beauty and creation God is present to us, drawing us, and communicating to us.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: The Vineyard churches in which I have participated transform preexisting structures into their worship spaces and during the rest of the week powerfully encounter God in the intimate settings of people’s homes. I think that that is a beautiful picture of the way in which God’s kingdom breaks into the most unlikely places and redeems all the parts of our world. Visual and sensorial beauty are important ways that God draws us to Godself, and so as followers of Christ we might attend to God’s communication to us through beauty and the senses in our worship, in our spaces, and in one another, just as we value creativity and skill in music and preaching (as well as hospitality,  compassion, prayer etc). I also hope that in the Vineyard the celebration of communion, in a way that acknowledges what Christ has done for us, will be central to our communities as we gather to worship and encounter God.

Elisa will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Elisa Berry (www.elisakariberry.com) lives in St Paul, MN and is in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Minnesota with a concentration in sculpture. Her art most often focuses on found objects, collage, light, spaces, and experiences of nature. She also obtained a Masters of Religion and Art from Yale Divinity School in an attempt to grasp the relationship between theology and aesthetics. She attends Mercy Vineyard Church in Minneapolis and prior to this was part of the Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven, CT.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, Beauty, Elisa Berry, Society of Vineyard, SVS, Vineyard Churches

Mark Driscoll Gets Lost in Translation

Mark Driscoll recently ranted about the movie Avatar, calling it the most “Satanic” movie he’s ever seen, and doesn’t understand how any Christian could watch it and not absolutely condemn it. Well…I’m a Christian and I liked the movie (I know it’s fashionable to hate on Avatar these days, but I was thoroughly entertained. No, it wasn’t fine cinema, but is that really what you expected from James Cameron?). It also contains some fascinating commentary on our culture and the deep spiritual longings of humanity, all of which are relevant to Christianity and not all of which are opposed to Christianity.

This reminded me of an old post I wrote last year (on an old blog) while I was at The Sundance Film Festival. So, first Mark’s 3-minute rant (if you care to watch it), then my old post below:

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Sundance/Windrider Day 3: Lost in Translation (January 22, 2009)

I’m three days into my time here at The Sundance Film Festival and it’s been amazing. I’ve seen 10 movies so far – 4 shorts and 6 features, plus Q&A sessions with directors and cast members after every film – and I’ve noticed a few surprising things about the culture of film on display here.

There are some amazing artists who are asking important questions about life, and telling incredibly compelling stories of suffering, loss, hardship, redemption, love, joy, and spirituality. Again and again, the common ground that exists between the filmmaker’s values and the values of the biblical narrative have taken me by surprise. There is very little ambiguity in the depictions I’ve seen of yearning for love and security, or the necessity of risking one’s life in order to find it, or the desperate need for justice in situations of appalling human suffering and depravity.

Through cinema, the world is shouting for the things of God. Sadly, as far as the church is concerned, they’re using the wrong language.

Most of these directors and producers are completely secular. I don’t necessarily mean they’re ireligious – many aren’t – but their worldview, and the vernacular utilized to convey their art is utterly unfamiliar to the Christian subculture. I think this makes for a distance between these two groups that is more perceived than actual.

Tonight after the screening of Sin Nombre (an intensely powerful and disturbing film about illegal immigration) an audience member from our group asked the director whether he’d intended to depict contrasting images of “conditional vs. unconditional love” in his portrayal of two specific relationships, one involving mercy, the other betrayal.

It was a good question. The story delved deeply into the complexities of acceptance, rejection, trust, loyalty, and faithfulness between the characters.

Still, the director balked. In a very polite way he basically said he didn’t know what to do with the phrase “unconditional love,” and preferred to think of those character dynamics in terms of “families in flux,” forming on the one hand, and dissolving on the other.

In other words, his answer was “yes.” He absolutely intended (among other things) to depict broken covenant loyalties on the one hand, and faithful covenant loyalties on the other.

The problem, I think, is language itself. “Unconditional love” is conservative evangelical church vernacular for the kind of love that is most valuable or virtuous (and only comes from God). It’s a staple teaching point in most evangelical youth groups. But in my experience secular people rarely ever use that phrase, even if they might be talking about the same spirit.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen or heard this sort of thing in the last few days, either in the films themselves or the Q&A sessions. God is profoundly at work through many of these films, but he’s usually disguised in a culture and a language that is entirely foreign (and often frightening) to prevailing Christianity.

If we want to be conversant with the culture we find ourselves in we’re going to have to go out of our way to learn the language by listening deeply, patiently, and charitably. Once we do, we may indeed find that these powerful cultural prophets only want the things of God, but not God himself. However, we may discover that, at least for some, they were never rejecting God, only what we said and what they heard.

Technorati Tags: art, Avatar, Christianity, Culture, Film, Mark Driscoll

The Usonian Church

I often say that ecclesiology is what keeps me up at night.

I’ve spent the majority of my life in churches that assumed we can and should shape the church to suit our tastes and conveniences: We create the kind of youth ministry that keeps our teens docile, we build facilities that cater to every self-serving multi-purpose imaginable, and we change the time and place of gatherings to accommodate our devotion to other cultural phenomena (like football and Friends). If the congregation is largely white and middle-class then the church ends up looking like a discreet warehouse in the suburbs because that reflects the ideals of middle-class American industrial success. Similarly, the worship looks like a Fleetwood Mac or Coldplay concert (depending on the church’s age) because that reflects white, middle-class ideals for a tastefully edgy kind of musical experience.

To a certain extent this is good because the church must be contextualized into a given culture. That is, after all, the task of the missionary (1 Cor 9:20). But at some point this becomes a problem. If your church looks like a Wal Mart, walks like a Wal Mart, and quacks like a Wal Mart…isn’t it really just a Wal Mart? Is it still a church? Is it a place where God is re-making you into His image, or have you merely re-made Him in your own image of cozy American consumer success (can I supersize that for you)? This is how we shape the church to suit our needs and tastes.

But what if church shaped us? Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, architecture, art, Church, consumer church, Culture, Frank Lloyd Wright, spiritual formation, Usonia