I’m just not convinced that the Protestant Evangelical Church can do art.  I’m not even sure what I mean by do in that sentence.  I’ve spent fifteen years studying religion and its relationship to the imaginative works of Western civilization, from art to literature to music.  I’ve read most of the Required Reading List of newer books about art and the Evangelical church: Rookmaker, Schaefer, Seerveld, Ryken, Wolterstoff, Veith, et alium.  I’m no art historian, and I’m no theologian, but I’ve written and taught on Christianity and the works of the imagination, and I’ve written a dissertation on how certain theological concepts can be found inside dramatic structures, and I’ve had lots and lots and lots of conversations with pastors and thinkers and writers and artists about the Evangelical church and art.  Based on all that, here seem to be the problems, stated roughly and generally (Below, P and E indicate Protestant and Evangelical, which are the only kinds of churches I feel comfortable addressing here, as a member and through my own experience.  Other churches have similar problems and solutions, but that’s not to be discussed here).

• Most PE churches are ugly.  Even the pretty (and old) ones tend to be iconoclastic.
• Most PE church members seem to enjoy very pedestrian works of art.  I say seem.  Maybe that’s okay.  Maybe that has more to do with our time in history and less to do with our intellectual lethargy as a church.
• Most PE preachers and thinkers and writers speak optimistically and positively of the church’s need to “embrace” and “celebrate” beauty, but there’s little exposition of A) how this is supposed to happen or B) what this means.
• The working worlds of quality art and quality literature and quality music happen quite independently of the PE church.  Perhaps this is how it should be, perhaps not.
• PE churches and organizations pay terrific lip-service to beauty and the imagination, but their literature, the writing and design of the publications they produce, the look and style of their facilities, etc., seem to indicate otherwise.
• Beauty and goodness and truth are proclaimed through the imaginative works of literature regardless of the PE church.  Great creators don’t worry about sanction or support from the church.  Are we in the PE church too consumed with talking about art, and should we concern ourselves with simply participating in it?  Which is to say, would the PE church’s “theology of art” work itself out if we would only learn and read and enjoy good art?
• How does an actual, physical church body “support” art?  By funding exhibitions in the fellowship hall?  By having groups attend good concerts and read good books?  Or does all that sound silly?

I could go on.  At this point, I am loathe to keep thinking about it.  As a writer, my preference at this point is to keep writing my book and making stories and let someone else worry about what it all means for the church.

Because he was too blind to see it himself, Pharaoh’s servants screwed up their courage to tell him:

“How long shall this man [Moses] be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the Lord their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?” (Exodus 10:7).

We tend to be the last ones to see our own ruin: “Strangers devours his strength, and he knows it not; gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knows it not” (Hosea 7:9).

There is a Christian institution I know that is the last to see that it has become a “horror…a reproach, a byword, a taunt” (Jeremiah 24:9). It continues to pipe out cheery newsletters, healing its wound lightly, “saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace (Jeremiah 8:11).

When I asked an insider why they don’t stop business-as-usual and call a week of prayer and fasting, he said they didn’t want the matter to spread beyond the boundaries of the community. That’s very different from King Josiah’s style (2 Kings 23), or Moses’ (Numbers 14), or Nehemiah’s (Nehemiah 9), who called for public, sackcloth-and-ashes repentance.

Esther also knew better than to make a move without insisting on three days of a fasting back-up (Esther 4:16). Zipporah averted her husband Moses’ ruin by quick, godly thinking (Exodus 4:24,25). And even an evil man in Luke 16 had the good sense to take drastic action to avert his ruin.

“A little folly outweighs wisdom and honor” (Ecclesiastes 10:1). It is a commonplace that “more is caught than taught.” Who will be attracted to the Lord’s kingdom when in the time of testing of our faith, we prove that we don’t believe a word of it?

Udo Middelmann writes in The Market-Driven Church about the fragmentation of modern Western life, and makes many Christians complicit:

“Christian schools, sports teams, companies, and publishing houses create their own market for their community. They function almost like a separate country with citizenship in the church. They are like a package of yeast that has no contact with the flour and will never make the whole loaf rise.”

This is a familiar critique of the Christianesque sub-culture, but Middelmann taps into two themes that might be troubling even to Christians who rankle at the foregoing accusation. First, he articulates a problem that perturbs communitarians and crunchy conservatives alike, which is the disposability with which many of us have come to view community. Frequent job changes and accompanying moves, changes in schools, changes in churches — all undermine the development of committed community, or what some think of as covenant community. “Christianity with its universal truth,” Middelmann writes, “is not the same as a church with its tribal truth.”

We’ve certainly seen this trend, and Christians by no means lead the way, though perhaps too many of us fail to distinguish ourselves. Aside from less commitment to community, there are the multiple televisions in each home, cell phones for each member of the family, fewer and fewer meals eaten together, stringent stratification by age (my wife and I chuckle when critics of home-schooling make the socialization argument, as if it’s normal for a child to spend most of his waking hours surrounded by people exactly his age), a dramatic rise in Internet usage — all forces lending themselves to the fragmentation of community.

What I had not considered before is a second theme I took from Middelmann, which is that many churches contribute to this fragmentation not just by marketing themselves to the point that they favor acceptance over truth, but in the way they splinter families with a variety of targeted programs. Many churches offer programs based on age or life status (married, single, divorced, handicapped, adopted), and they all but remove children from the worship service. “Where church used to bring us together from different situations under the teaching and blessing of one God,” writes Middelmann, “church now meets the perceived needs of fragmented people.”

At first I was taken aback. What’s wrong, after all, with tailoring programs to people to meet them where they are? What if some of us prefer to read in a small group, instead of these ubiquitous how-to-make-your-marriage-better books, something by Kierkegaard? Or what about those who have been abused and find strength in sharing their stories with others? And why should children have to sit through a sermon on works versus grace? Isn’t the church, after all, the people of God?

Middelmann has a compelling answer, however, which is that as a culture we have become obsessed with our individual stories as it is:

“We may be focused on our own painful story; yet the Bible places it in the context of history (his story), so that we understand what is the problem of mankind, not just my personal and immediate sensation. Healing comes from God’s work for us, not from feeling better about ourselves.”

Church, in other words, may not be as much about us as we think. I for one need to hear that quite often.

The Belgic Confession gives the “marks of the Church” as “pure doctrine of the gospel,” “pure administration of the sacraments,” and “church discipline exercised in chastening.”

I don’t know how that makes you feel but it makes me feel like walking out and heading to an AA meeting. Or anyplace with warm blood running through veins. I picture a dour, bearded man scowling down at me from a 17^th century portrait. (Of course, one must make allowances for cultural fads in language, and for the fact that Confessions were generally reacting against something.)

Who says these are the “marks of the Church”? What about “hotness” and “love”? God says if it doesn’t have these it’s not a Church, no matter how good the doctrine: he will remove its lamp stand (Revelation 2:5; 3:16). 

It will be protested that the above are subsumed in the Belgic “marks” — which reminds me of the man who quieted his wife’s plea that she felt unloved by dragging his marriage certificate out of mothballs and proving his love by pointing to his 20-year-old signature.

Well, who reads Confessions anyway. But if they ever revise them, I hope they throw a few more things in. I like what Ray Stedman writes in Authentic Christianity:

Many think the mark of an authentic Christian is doctrinal purity….People who equate orthodoxy with authenticity find it hard to even consider the possibility that…they may have missed the deepest reality of the authentic Christian life. 

 Guess what he lists as mark #1 of a life in Christ: “unquenchable optimism.” Now that speaks to me.

In The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen considers the well-known parable from the perspective of Rembrandt’s famous painting. In so doing, he notes that while he first identified with the prodigal, a blunt but well-meaning friend suggested that perhaps he had more in common with the resentful son of the story.

It’s always hard, isn’t it, hearing something harsh — because it is painfully true — from a friend? We don’t all have a friend like that, but we should, if only to give voice to what we ignore when it is whispered by the Holy Spirit. The problem is that we also have, many of us, one or two friends who imagine they are that person. You know the type, the let-me-get-in-your-face-so-we-can-get-real person who is more passive aggressive than introspective, but who can’t stop spouting that iron sharpening iron verse.

Obviously, though I have lived much of my life as the prodigal son, the judgmental, withdrawn, irritable son rears his ugly head more often than I care to admit. So as Nouwen describes how the second son resents the attention the returning son has received, I see myself.

I also see the Church, in our more selfish moments. Nouwen writes of the sin often evidenced by the righteous: “It is far more pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue.” Thus do good works lead to frustration when people don’t reform, or piety to pride, or faithfulness to disdain for unchurched heathen who are getting all the attention from the Emergent-Church types these days.

“The parable that Rembrandt painted,” Nouwen says, “might well be called ‘The Parable of the Lost Sons.” I hadn’t thought about it, how one can get lost while dwelling on his own land, or become alienated from a father while living under his roof.

And surely this must be a harder sin to overcome, Nouwen claims: “the hardest conversion to go through is the conversion of the one who stayed home.” It puts me in mind of the scene in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, when the hunted priest is in a prison cell with the dregs of humanity, but also with a pious woman who condemns him when she learns that he is a drunkard:

“God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? … salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer…”

No wonder Christ warned that the way is narrow. We can stray onto the path of the prodigal, or worse, dwell on our father’s land doing good works, but let grow up in our hearts the dark cancer of a Pharisee. Why is the latter worse? Consider for whom Christ reserved his harshest words. Or recall that the prodigal realized he was lost. The angry son thought he was in the right. Did he ever go back into his father’s house, to join the feast? We don’t know. And yet, Nouwen says, the encouragement in the story is that the father is always there, ready to welcome his children with open arms, if only they will lay down their pride and rebellion. Which is easier said than done, and usually said about other people, rather than ourselves.

Over at The Washington Post’s On Faith blog, Jacques Berlinerblau, program director and associate professor of Jewish Civilization at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, cleverly lists what he considers are Barack Obama’s opportunistic options as the senator seeks out a new place for him and his family to worship: Join a white blue-collar congregation, attend a non-radical African-American church, try a different religious tradition each week, convert to Judaism, or just denounce religion altogether and go secular. Be sure to read his rationale for each of these faith “strategies.”

Steve Thorngate writes about a recent conference for liberal Christians hosted by the Plymouth Center for Progressive Christian Faith.  He makes a good point when he says that, if there’s nothing distinctive about liberal, pluralistic, mainline Christianity, then there’s no surprise that nobody listens to them.

A Christianity this pluralistic is unlikely to alienate its allies. But is there anything distinct about it? The Christian right’s unique focus on personal piety and morality, narrowly defined, reshaped conservatism. But progressive Christians are broadly inclusive and care about the same political issues as other progressives. Their action alerts often read like MoveOn’s, but with scripture. Why should anyone care?

A good question.  Especially when their conferences include exchanges like this one:

The conference also featured several non-Christian speakers, including Rabbi Or Rose of Hebrew College. “As a Jew,” Rose noted, “I can’t accept that Jesus is the incarnate God.”

“Some of us Christians don’t believe that, either,” a woman responded, to murmurs of agreement. It was a telling moment, as many Christians see this as the singularly defining element of the faith.

Liberal Christians seem to have a good sense of the needs of communities and how the church should be serving them, but it’s a sense that’s founded on secular ideology masking as old-timey faith.  I’m all about justice, for individuals and for societies.  But it’s a justice founded on the absolute lawmaker and lawgiver, not on radical egalitarianism and utopianism.

Last Wednesday, a group of prominent Evangelicals released An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment. The Steering Committee includes this impressive list: Os Guinness; Timothy George, Dean, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University; Rich Mouw, President, Fuller Theological Seminary; and Dallas Willard, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California. Guinness says the Manifesto is a proposal for how to address the public stalemate of the culture wars:

On one side is a vision of a sacred public square, in which one religion or another is privileged (though not established) - usually associated for better or worse with the religious right.

On the other side is a vision of a naked public square, in which all religions and religious symbols are excluded from public life.

The Manifesto, then, proposes to solve that problem.

As an open declaration, An Evangelical Manifesto addresses not only Evangelicals and other Christians but other American citizens and people of all other faiths in America, including those who say they have no faith. It therefore stands as an example of how different faith communities may address each other in public life, without any compromise of their own faith but with a clear commitment to the common good of the societies in which we all live together.

For those who are Evangelicals, the deepest purpose of the Manifesto is a serious call to reform-an urgent challenge to reaffirm Evangelical identity, to reform Evangelical behavior, to reposition Evangelicals in public life, and so rededicate ourselves to the high calling of being Evangelical followers of Jesus Christ.

A very interesting document, complete with its own study guide. Read it, and comment. And see more WORLD coverage of this here, here, here, here, and here.

Every church has a temperature. It is the subtlest of things. A church’s temperature is not identical to its doctrine, its creeds, or even the sermons or the hymns — which may be biblical enough. Neither is it articulated outright, but is nevertheless somehow well understood. It is, I would say, a silently collective agreement about the degree to which God is who he says he is; an unspoken consensus of what it is we really believe around here. And it is, for all its tacitness, remarkably specific.

I liken it to the way a child learns language. The outsider to that language group will observe it best perhaps — the way the mastery of a person’s mother tongue is not some general mastery but a mimicry perfected to the most infinitesimally precise imitation of inflection.

So with a church’s or denomination’s culture. We in any given culture have discerned from a thousand subtle cues how much to believe in Jesus and how much not to. That is, how far to go, and how much farther would be fanatical. We imagine all the while that we are holding to the whole counsel of God. But in fact, we have our chosen texts, verses, and emphases that we carefully stay within and keep recycling.

For instance, our church’s woman’s Bible study once did the book of James. When we came to chapter 5, we taught on verses 1 through 13 but skipped over 14 and 15 before completing the rest. No one noticed. It was not a conspiratorial thing, nor a cynical omission. Just a temperature, I would say.

Hanna Rosin reviewsa new book by Daniel Radosh called Rapture Ready!, a book about Christian pop culture.  The review, and presumably the book, ask the question: Can Christians participate in pop culture and still be good Christians?  And the corollary question is, can Christians make their own pop culture without it being kitschy?

In the ’80s, Christians were known as the boycotters, refusing to see movies or buy products that offended them. They felt about commercial culture much the way a Marxist might: that it was a decadent glorification of money and meaningless human relationships. Then, sometime during the ’90s, when conservative evangelicals started coming out of their shells, they took a different tack. The boycotters became coopters and embarked on the curious quest to enlist America’s crassest material culture in the service of spiritual growth.

A good review and book to read.  Rosin thinks there’s hope for us poor believers, at least for the youth among us.

Raised on iPods and downloadable music, they find it difficult truly to commit to the idea of a separate Christian pop culture. They might watch Jon Stewart or Pulp Fiction and also listen to the Christian band Jars of Clay, assuming the next album is any good. They are much more critical consumers and excellent spotters of schlock. The creators of Christian pop culture may just adapt and ease up on the Jesus-per-minute count, and artistic quality might show some improvement.

But never underestimate the bad taste of good people.