Crying for a Vision and Other Essays

I once heard a story about two Rabbis arguing about an Old Testament prophecy concerning the Messiah’s entry into Jerusalem. One was arguing that a donkey was too lowly a creature to be carrying the Messiah. The second Rabbi replied by asking what kind of creature might be appropriate for such an important task, going on to ask, rhetorically, if a horse of a hundred colors would be sufficient.

The earlier arguments about what art is `good for’ have faded somewhat. They have given way to a number of new questions about Art and the arts in the church. Some of the questions are reminiscent of the story above. What approach to the arts is most appropriate for expressing Christian value? Do we use our expressive skills to uncover the hidden beauty and radiance of an `ordinary’ down to earth world, or do we shape and bend our language ‘til it points to a transcendent, luminous alternative?

How we imagine the church and its relation to the Kingdom usually has some bearing on the place we give to the arts. Some of us are cognizant of how arts and media have now soaked into the fabric of every day life, and are looking therefore for media rich ways of engaging the marketplace in order to express and communicate Christian value. Others value the arts above and beyond the mere pragmatics of communication. Art, they suggest, has its own place in a social and cultural order that unfolds under the present/ future reign of God.

However we think about art, we admit that the question gets a bit more complex in this new century. We now live in a world that strikes an uneasy balance between global connectedness and cultural diversity. Each community in the global family brings different traditions, worldview, values and questions woven into its forms of cultural expression.

Some of us have wrestled with the arts in order to make our faith relevant to our context and audience. Others have drawn upon those biblical passages that speak of worship and God honoring cultural expressions from every tribe and nation, and have gone beyond contextualized bridge building towards an understanding of the coming Kingdom (and its first fruits now) that includes redemption and restoration of many different cultures. Still others have suggested that God’s providential common grace lights up all good art, whether it is spiritually motivated or not.

If this were a painted surface, then all three of those `colors’ (and perhaps at least 97 more!) would make their contribution, harmonizing form and content, ground and figure in an overall composition. If this were a piece of music then each thread of melody would unfold, sometimes to be a dominant theme, other times to be harmonically supportive of the other threads. I suspect that we could move through a variety of art forms in search of the metaphoric and symbolic ways in which each one would appropriately honor the diversity of the above approaches and the unity of the overall artwork.