Art, Action, and Revival

In many ways the world of art and the Christian church are parallel universes. Both are concerned with becoming the point of social, psychological, and spiritual integration for individuals and for society. Both are committed, at least in principle, to confronting the human tendency toward uncritical conformity and stasis with a renewing vision f the world and its meaning.

Today, both are experiencing a crisis of vision that calls into question their relevance to the culture. How will art and Christianity answer the “So what?” and “Who cares?” addressed to them by America in the 1980s? And, more important, to what extent will their answer be dependent on the conscious interaction of their parallel concerns?

Some might assume that Christian artists are already strategically positioned to bring light to the world of art, and are currently helping to enhance both the worship life and the public mission of the church. One need only point to the burgeoning interest over the past few years in incorporating artistic expression into liturgy and worship as well as into the social agendas of a great many churches. Plays and musicals are eagerly being staged in churches that, just 10 years ago, wouldn’t have let them in the door. Even many conservative churches are welcoming dance as an appropriate part of worship with open, if somewhat hesitant, arms.

The radical discipleship movement, noted in the past for its dismissal of the arts as self-indulgent in the face of the enormity of other agendas, has recently begun to appreciate the necessity of art as a factor in the pursuit of Biblical justice. And the swelling ranks of organizations such as the National Sacred Dance Guild and spin-offs in the U.S. of London’s Arts Centre Group indicate that this growing interest is a nationwide phenomenon.

These and countless other evidences are certainly encouraging to those who have yearned for the arts to be allotted their rightful place within the life of the church. Perhaps the Christian artist’s battle for legitimacy is finally coming to an end—with the recognition that art-making is not equivalent to leisure and that the artist’s investment of hours and energy may be worth more than token financial compensation.

Encouraging signs, yes. And so much so that one hesitates to insert any criticism of the way the arts are functioning within the churches for fear of either stunting the growth of what has been planted or uprooting the tenuous hold that the arts have established for themselves. Yet, as one who has been active as both an artist and an arts advocate within the church for a number of years, one question persistently haunts me in the midst of all this artistic hoopla. Is any of this really art?

In asking such a question I am not referring to the artificial tensions between “high” and “low” art. I am not expressing either a disdain for “popular culture” or an aesthetic elitism. The question as to whether art is happening in the church has more to do with an intuition that corresponds with the experience of coming across a freshly shed snake skin in the woods: there is the undeniable evidence of art, though with a certain critical substance lacking. Put another way, the forms—dance, theater, music, painting, etc.—may be being accurately reduplicated, but one senses that their ornamental role has superseded their more primal function as art.

If that intuition is accurate, its implications reach far beyond the concerns of a given church’s worship committee about the appropriateness of next Sunday’s program of liturgical dance. They reach, in fact, to the core of the question of both the arts’ and the church’s relevance. And that question itself can no longer be stated in a way that assumes the church’s constancy as a cultural institution: Are the arts relevant to the church? The converse is of at least equal importance: Is the church relevant to the arts— and hence, to human culture at all?

In the end, those questions will have to be answered by Christian artists themselves, more through their work than by attempts to justify that work theologically. For the present, however, the first task for the Christian artist seems to be a kind of recovering of lost ground—ground lost to the contrived and culturally determined strictures that Christian artists have struggled against for the better part of the last century. This ripening into full contemporaneity with the present implies two things. First, recognition that Western art history of the 20th century (and its attendant body of theoretics) has been virtually ignored, with the exception of a very few voices, by the American church. Such insularity has produced an aesthetic anachronism in Christian thinking about the arts that severely limits the church as it begins to explore its relationship to art. Remedying that situation will require some catch-up work: hard study and disciplined exposure to current artwork in a variety of media.

Second, Christian artists must arrive at a sophistication in understanding their own work that parallels, while not necessarily replicating, that of contemporary secular artists. Accomplishing this will mean paying attention to a number of ways of interpreting the Bible, both ancient and modern, as well as exploring the relationship between such current trends as metaphoric criticism and the secular postmodernist aesthetic that has defined most significant work produced in this country for the past 25 years. Areas as diverse as international ethics and ethnopoetics, liberation theology and performance art, the ancient creeds of the church and the development of chance procedure in current art, will have to be viewed in relation to one another as a way of enlarging the boundaries of our notions about art. Such juxtapositioning has been common fare in contemporary work for years. Seeing the same sort of thing accomplished within a distinctly Christian framework is to look into a realm of heretofore unexplored possibilities.¹ And although it might seem an overstatement of the obvious, much work remains to be done in understanding the interdependency of a firm allegiance to the gospel of Christ and a principled commitment to artistic integrity. These and a great many other areas will have to be engaged in the formulation of an aesthetic that will be foundational for Christian artists who seek to have relevant impact on both the church and contemporary culture.

Art and Pseudo-Art

To contribute to that aesthetic foundation, I want to suggest a framework for discussing whether or not art is actually happening in the churches, and why that’s an important question. The obvious starting point will be the attempt to discover just what it is that “art” is supposed to do. From there the discussion will draw in two categories of normal Christian experience—prophetic action and revival—both of whose internal and external dynamics mirror the operational criteria of art.

R.G. Collingwood, writing in 1937, concludes his ground-breaking work, The Principles of Art, with this paragraph:

The artist must prophesy … in the sense that he tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts. His business as an artist is to speak out, to make a clean breast. But what he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets. As spokesman of his community, the secrets he utters are theirs. The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death. For the evils which come from that ignorance the poet as prophet suggests no remedy, because he has already given one. The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness.²

I want to focus briefly on this passage as a good entry into some basic considerations for any definition of art.

Collingwood presents this statement as a summary to a long and perspicuous argument aimed at showing (among other things) that the business of art is not to entertain, or to embellish or illustrate a point external to itself. In fact, the external “object” of a work of art may be entirely incidental to the main point of the work. By embedding the role of the artist in the community—as the artist’s appropriate audience— he presents the role of art as being the establishment of a special sort of relationship between artist and audience that has an inherently revelatory function. The business of art, at its most basic level, is to facilitate encounter and disclosure of “the secrets of their own hearts.”

This process of encounter and disclosure, which is the essence of art, suggests a new way of knowing that is indispensable to sane human existence. Yet it is so far removed from the level of perception at which we normally operate that it takes this extraordinary act, “art,” to shock our tired epistemology like a flash- flood washing out the ruts from a well-traveled old road. Hence, Collingwood concludes his analysis with the somewhat surprising comparison of art to a medicine for an endemic flaw in the human condition—the corruption of consciousness. That last point bears further reflection.

If art is to be posited as the remedy for the “corruption of consciousness,” we should ask just what aspect of consciousness it is that art affects. Or, more accurately, what is the way into the multidimensioned human consciousness that art addresses? Borrowing the philosophical approach, it seems clear that art, as an external phenomenon, acts most directly on the interface of consciousness and the world, that is, perception. That being the case, it does not appear unjustified to narrow the focus of Collingwood’s “corruption of consciousness,” rephrasing it to read “the stasis of perception.” Almost everyone will understand what that phrase means from personal experience.

It’s a common enough experience to catch oneself in the midst of walking around in a kind of perceptual oblivion. We use cliche expressions; we take a beautiful day for granted; we just don’t notice the sunset. We tend to gravitate toward the lowest common denominator of stimuli, and our perception seems to crave the formulaic and routine. We avoid perceptual responsibility and hence our perceptions become generic rather than specific, utilitarian rather than illuminating.³ And, at the day-to-day level, this all goes on unconsciously, so that we actually believe we’re informed by watching the network evening news. Perception shrinks from fresh engagement with the world and takes refuge in stasis. And every part of life suffers for it.

It is the business of art, as medicine for Collingwood’s “worst disease of the mind,” to call the processes of perception themselves into question, in both positive and negative directions; to reorient perception, either away from or back toward the ordinary, so that the ordinary can be truly experienced; to repattern perception so as to create the conditions for a new way of seeing that is prevenient to, that precedes and helps induce, authentic encounter, and is, hence, part of the basis for both reconciliation and community. And, with all that in mind, the distinction must be drawn that says that either art works against the stasis of perception, or it is a product of that condition and, therefore, is not art.⁴

Some Implications of “Art as Such”

Two important implications can be drawn from making that distinction. First, art’s primal function in relation to perception is a strictly limited one. Art is more often about seeing than it is about what is seen. (The paradox is that, by virtue of that fact, art enables what is seen to be seen more acutely; it enables the artist to intend that very effect.) Moreover, art does not attempt to displace the functions of other forms of human communication, nor should it be expected to function as other forms do. Poetry is different from prose and should not be pressured to accomplish the same thing. Then, too, art is not equivalent to truth. Some art works to reorient perception on the basis of a false or inadequate epistemology.

Second, this basic distinction between what should and should not legitimately be called art seems to offer a final court of appeal for a variety of questions and disputes about art. Issues such as art’s relationship to beauty, or art as commodity versus art as a tree factor, or propagandists art versus “pure” art, may find a surprising resolution when held against the standard of art’s relationship to the stasis of perception. That distinction likewise becomes a crucial factor in informing our thought about art’s relationship to the Christian faith and the way in which art is functioning (if at all) within the church today.

Transposing the discussion into a Christian framework, the thesis may be stated like this: The purpose of art is to confront the stasis of perception. Stasis of perception is itself both emblematic and reinforcing of moral and spiritual stasis. And such stasis, or complacency, is the most effective buffer against Jesus’ call to conversion.

I am not suggesting, as some do, that a flaw in our way of perceiving—a focusing on the veil of illusion or maya—is at the root of human moral and spiritual difficulties. Rather, I suggest that our gravitation toward the “corruption of consciousness” is part of the legacy of the Fall, and that art, therefore, has a regenerative role to fulfill as part of the church’s outworking of redemption.

By its capacity to uproot the entrenched complacency of perception, art within the church can be among those factors that counter the moral and spiritual stasis that the church must continually resist in order to retain its relevance and integrity in the world. Returning to Collingwood’s paragraph, and simply substituting the word “church” for the word “community” wherever it appears, will open our eyes to some of what is discussed here.

I realize that some may take offense at the idea that art is essential for the outworking of redemption or to the maintenance of the church’s integrity. Certainly that offense is justified if what we are talking about are the depraved notions of art that are still clung to in so much of the culture at large as well as in so much of the church. We needn’t search very far, however, to find models that would allow the church to embrace art as we have been discussing it without qualification or hesitation, as those models embody the rudiments of the church’s own claim to existence. Two of these that I want to pay special attention to are the prophetic (including the prophetic legacy to the church) and what is commonly called revival or awakening (which is taken to imply repentance and conversion).

The Prophetic

If what art does is to reorient and repattern perception, creating the conditions for a new epistemology, then what the prophetic does is similar. In fact, all we’ve said about the conditions for recognizing art as such bears a strong resemblance to factors present in much of the formal methodology of the Old Testament prophets. It will be important for us to begin to discern the sort of perceptual aesthetic at work in the prophets as an essential way into any further discussion of how art as such may be expected to function as an integral component of Christian discipleship.

We get a head start in this discussion by referring to some particular actions that God commanded the prophet Ezekiel to perform, recorded in Ezekiel, chapters four and five:

And you, O son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and portray upon it a city, even Jerusalem; and put siege-works against it, and build against it. and plant battering rams against it round about. And take an iron plate, and place it as an iron wall between you and the city; and set your face toward it, and let it be in a state of siege, and press the siege against it. This is a sign for the house of Israel. Then lie upon your left side, and I will lay the punishment of Israel upon you; for the number of days you lie upon it, you shall bear their punishment. For I assign to you a number of days, three hundred and ninety days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment; so long shall you bear the punishment of the house of Israel. And when you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah; forty days I assign you, a day for each year. And you shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, with your arm bared; and you shall prophesy against the city. And behold, I will put cords upon you, so that you cannot turn from one side to the other, till you have completed the days of your siege . . . (4:1-8).

In addition, Ezekiel is told to bake an “unclean” bread as his only food during the period of this prophecy, and to eat it in the sight of all the people. He is then commanded to shave off all his hair and beard, divide it into three parts, burning one third in the fire, striking one third with a sword, and scattering one third to the wind. At that point the prophecy is completed.⁵

Writers such as Northrop Frye, Sallie McFague, and others have recently reminded us that the rise of continuous prose as the dominant literary form of Western civilization since the 16th century may seriously hamper our ability to understand the Bible because the Bible has only the most tenuous semantic relationship to prose as we know it today. Add to that the fact that we are conditioned to think of modern expository prose as the only form really able to tell the “truth,” and it’s no wonder that our typical responses to the Bible tend toward the extremes of either dismissing it as a literary relic or forcing it to act like didactic prose through hyper-literalistic methods of interpretation. When approaching a passage such as the one quoted above, we may easily miss many of its levels of meaning because we are unaccustomed to looking for meaning in such a metaphoric set of actions. In this case, however, we may be able to trick ourselves into an understanding of what was really going on in Ezekiel’s performance.

Shopping Meets the Prophetic

Imagine yourself walking through a part of your city or town where you regularly go—let’s say your favorite grocery store. One day, as you’re going about your business, you notice a man doing something around a mound of earth adjacent to the entrance to the store. He is dressed normally, and is not especially unkempt. In fact, there is nothing really unusual about his appearance at all, and you observe that his movements around the mound are very careful and deliberate. As you move closer, you see what he is doing. At the top of the mound he has set up a ceramic slab with a bas-relief representation of your city on it. Surrounding the “city” are hundreds of toy soldiers, along with miniature jeeps, tanks, jet fighters, rocket launchers, etc. The man’s attention is completely absorbed with moving the toy props in a methodical, relentless assault on the city.

You are careful to keep your distance and avert your glance as you pass him by. “All the lights are on, but nobody’s home,” you think as you walk briskly into the store. You do your shopping, leave the store (he is still there doing the same thing), and go home.

A few days later you are at the store again, and so is the man. Only now he is lying on his left side, facing the ceramic sculpture of your city, but with a sheet of steel imbedded in the mound between him and the city, so that he cannot see it. All the toy soldiers and hardware are in place as though poised for a final assault. But the man remains motionless.

Perhaps it’s because you like the produce, but you continue to shop at the same store over the weeks and months ahead. And every time you do, he is there. One day you realize that it’s been a year since he first set up his mound in front of the grocery store—although by this time you hardly pay any attention to him at all except to notice how long his hair and beard have grown. You know by now that he’s no threat, so you go about your business as usual.

A month and a half later you are on a shopping trip to the same store. As you pull into the parking lot, you give your customary glance over to the location of the man on the mound. But today something is different. He has turned over to his right side. What’s more, he is held to the ground with cords, as if the tiny soldiers had come to life in the night, and as the Lilliputians did to Gulliver, bound him so that he cannot move. You see him vaguely struggle against the cords, but not hard enough to free himself. Your interest in him is rekindled, and you wonder how long this stage can last.

While at first you thought he was just crazy, this latest development gives you the idea that what he is doing is intentional. And in some ways, that is more frightening than if he were simply a harmless madman. You pay much closer attention to him now. And you notice that you’re making more trips to the grocery store than are really necessary.

Another month and a half goes by. You decide to go to the store, having long since stopped hiding from yourself your anxiety about the man. You’re worried about him, and even tried speaking with him, although he didn’t answer. When you arrive, a large crowd has assembled. The police are there. Your worst fears well up within you. As you get closer you see him, now standing in the midst of the crowd, brandishing a sharpened bayonet. But now his face and head are shaved and he’s apparently done it himself with the bayonet! At his feet lies all his hair, separated into three piles. He takes one pile over to a small fire he has built on the mound and burns it. The acrid smoke causes the whole crowd to wince. He takes the second pile, places it carefully away from the gathered crowd, and begins to attack it with the bayonet, striking it again and again. The police are just beginning to move in when he stops. Suddenly, he scoops up the third pile and, whirling around, throws it into the air. That done, he stops, looks once at the crowd, and begins walking away. The police catch up with him, and he is taken into custody.

The next day you read a small notice in the newspaper about the arrest. The man identified himself as the pastor of a well-known church in the city. No charges were pressed, and he was released. You decide to go shopping. Yet when you arrive you discover that the grocery store is no longer a grocery store, and shopping is no longer shopping. Both have been transformed by being placed within the context of the man and his actions. Or, more accurately, you have been changed.

Intention, Disruption, and Life at the Margin

By transposing Ezekial’s prophecy into our own context, we are forced to deal with the text in a new and perhaps discomforting way. While it is clear that Ezekiel himself knew the meanings behind his actions, the text gives us no indication that he was to offer any verbal interpretation of what he was doing. Instead, there seem to be two distinct, though interactive, levels of intention propelling his performance. First is God’s intention toward Ezekiel that he understand the levels of imagery and symbolism that were to determine the structure of his actions (390 days on his left side = the number of years of Israel’s punishment, etc.). That level is the skeleton of the performance—invisible to Ezekiel’s audience, though essential in determining the form the actions would take.

Second is the intention toward the audience, who were in much the same position as you the observer were in relation to the man outside the grocery store. That level is reminiscent of Jesus’ decision to speak in parables, revealing the meaning of only a few of them, and that only to his closest disciples. (It’s certainly no coincidence that Jesus appropriated both the phrases “Son of man” and “whoever has ears to hear, let them hear” from the book of Ezekiel.) Ezekiel’s intention toward his audience was evidently not to disseminate the predictive information he had been given, but rather to encounter his people at the level of their entrenched and corrupt conventional consciousness.

The methodology of that encounter has three features which, I believe, must be grasped in order to understand not only this passage, but also the prophetic tradition itself.

1. The images that Ezekiel used are evocative, but remain unexplained. Elements as familiar, and certainly as emotionally laden, as the image of the city, the siegeworks, and the figure of the prophet himself, were repositioned in a relationship to one another that was at once highly suggestive and conceptually obscure. The elements, so juxtaposed, became a metaphor for a meaning much larger than a didactic reference to any one of them could convey. That is why, I suspect, the interpretation of the performance is never given. If the metaphor were to be explained, it would be reduced to the level of mere information, which, given the level of the people’s difficulty in hearing as suggested by the context, would have been easy to reject out of hand as the opinion of a doomsayer. The metaphor would thus be stripped of its power to confront the root of corruption that had taken hold in Jerusalem. The performance seems designed to obscure the predictive information upon which it was based in order to address that factor within the people which would, if left unchecked, bring what was predicted to pass.

2. Ezekiel strategically inserted his action as a disruptive element in the flow of the dominant conventional consciousness. The people had allowed themselves to adopt a set of conventional assumptions, taken for granted by everybody, that functioned to blind them to their own corruption. The prophet responded by breaking with the convention, affronting the dominant assumptions with the strength of his metaphor, and by simply refusing to go away. Like the man outside the grocery store, over a period of time Ezekiel recontextualized the dominant conventional consciousness so that it must operate in terms of his own actions, rather than vice versa. My guess is that apart from its purely symbolic reference, Ezekiel’s act of turning over to his right side after thirteen and a half months on his left was perceived as a significant metaphoric development, formally working against the tendency of the conventional consciousness to accommodate his action into its own set of objectives. By acting as a disruptive element in the network of the mutually reinforcing social and moral assumptions of his audience, Ezekiel took the first step in pointing to a larger reality than the one allowed by the dominant consciousness.

3. Ezekiel assumed the role of the victim, and spoke from the margins of his society to its center. His action excluded him from the benefits to be derived from participation in the network of dominant assumptions. That made his action free. By assuming a stance both metaphorically and conceptually “outside” the city, the prophet was able to say without words what everyone should have known already, and what they did not know only because they had agreed to forget it. By locating outside the margin of respectability, Ezekiel refused to participate in that collective agreement.

We should not assume that the prophet here had any special insight, or that the word of God was available to him only. God commanded Ezekiel to act on the word in a specific way. But what he knew—or found out—by placing himself at the margins of the dominant conventional consciousness is precisely what those who have been forced to the margins have known all along. Ezekiel was acting on behalf of that faithful remnant. Hence, his methodology was inherently compassionate, in that it brought the prophet into an almost automatic solidarity with those who had been marginalized and rejected by the dominant conventional consciousness.

The Prophetic Fulfilment of Art

In looking at those actions of the ancient prophet Ezekiel from our perspective in the latter part of the 20th century, A.D., two astonishing facts stand out. The first is the high degree of resonance between Ezekiel’s “aesthetic,” if you will, and that of some of the most revolutionary movements in Western art history. From Rembrandt’s decision to paint in terms of light and darkness, against the conventions of linear perspective and form; to the impressionists’ assault against a decadent romanticism; to Dada’s attempt to liberate art, and hence, human life, from its commodity status; to early expressionism’s pulling away the mask of social responsibility to reveal the darkness of the human heart; to post-modernism’s eschewal of the contrived and pumped-up in art and life, in favor of the immediate, the accessible, and the (sometimes intolerably) real; to the most current advocates of “art as life,” who are seeking to overthrow the inevitable co-optation of art by eliminating the enshrined and separate category of “art” altogether: all of these could well have been—each in a way consistent with the demands of its epoch—inspired by the methodology we discovered at work in Ezekiel’s performance.

Indeed, the paragraph cited above from R. G. Collingwood could just as well have been lifted from an exegesis of Ezekiel 4 and 5. Certainly it was precisely the stasis of perception that was the target of Ezekiel’s aesthetic intent. What is astonishing is that the degree of artistic integrity that these movements have been striving for was realized in the work of Ezekiel in the sixth century B.C. And, of course, Ezekiel is not alone among the prophets whose work functioned in the same way.

A second cause for astonishment is the fact that the full prophetic legacy has passed to the church, and that the prophetic function of the church is mandated by the giving of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2, interpreted as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel 2. Given the primacy of metaphor as the mode of prophetic disclosure in the Old Testament, not to mention in the teaching and acts of Jesus, one might expect equivalent emphasis within the Christian church. It seems plain enough, from what we’ve been considering, that the Christian artist has a principal role to play in the church’s obedience to its prophetic mandate.

Which brings us back to our original question as to whether or not art as such is happening in the churches. Not only is that question crucial to understanding the crisis of vision that both art and Christianity are currently confronting in our culture, but it may also turn out to be the bellwether of a flock of questions being raised about the North American church’s faithfulness to its Biblical roots. For when the church opts, either implicitly or explicitly, for a definition of art as a redemptive factor for extant culture rather than as a confrontative factor aimed appropriately against the entrenchment and self-idolatry of extant culture, it strips art of its ability to facilitate encounter and disclosure of “the secrets of their own hearts.” When art fails to (or is not permitted to) function relevantly, or when the attempt is made to define art’s existence for its own sake, it will inevitably degenerate into the ornamental and decorative—“resulting,” as artist Randy White says, “in overproduction of mediocre art and overstimulation of apathy in the public.” If there is any crisis of vision that art is facing in the churches today, it derives from this allegiance to conventional perception and the complacency of artist and audience alike.

Revival 

Perhaps we may adapt Walter Brueggemann’s words on the task of prophetic ministry to the vocation of the Christian artist:

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us. Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing. in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated. . . . The alternative consciousness to be nurtured, on the one hand, serves to criticize, dismantling the dominant consciousness . . . (to) engage in a rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things. On the other hand, that alternative consciousness serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move … to live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give….⁶

In our culture today we witness the ascendency of the uncritical and the psychology of the herd. This dominant, conventional consciousness is certainly alive and well within the churches.

The first task to which Christian artists are called involves the production of work that uses the givens of that dominant consciousness as its motivational underpinning. It seems almost premature to speak about the other side of Brueggemann’s dialectic. Yet within the poetics of despair we often find the prophets themselves strangely evoking the energy of the renewal of hope. Perhaps, for the Christian artist, the way to make art out of the perception of the conventional consciousness will be that once the mutual reinforcement of the herd psychology is broken, then alternatives may be evoked where none could previously be seen, so that the despair created by the disruption of the conventional may turn to the energy of personal revolution (repentance). It is at that point that prophetic art becomes revival art: where the reorientation and repatterning of perception creates the conditions for the acceptance of what amounts to a new epistemological basis for life.

The Art of Revival

In the first recorded evangelistic sermon, Peter dismantled the long-held assumptions of his audience in order to energize them toward the possibility of a new way of being in an America to the Jesus movement and relationship with God. The dynamics inherent in that exchange can be seen to reappear again and again at strategic points where God’s Spirit is poured out on the church. From the conversion of Saul to the early Christians’ refusal to serve in the Roman military; from the spirituality of the desert fathers and medieval mystics to the Protestant Reformation; from the First and Second Great Awakenings in England and today’s massive response to Jesus’ gospel for the poor in the Third World—and, I daresay, in the heart of every individual converted to a life of Christian discipleship—in all of these cases the allegiance of both the individual and the group consciousness to the conventional ordering of things is dismantled in order to “make straight the way of the Lord” as he does his work of regeneration. Further, I believe it can be shown that the role of metaphor in conveying this energy of revival is primary.

It is no coincidence that we should discover that the operational criteria of art resonate so strongly with the dynamics of revival and conversion. Human life is essentially metaphoric life, despite our current passing (that is, if it doesn’t prove to be fatal) fascination with scientism. If, then, human metaphoric life is to be confronted in its corruption (sin) and renewed in a relationship with God, the set of processes and actions which bring that about will be definable as art.

That is why I believe that an art, coming out of the churches, which confronts the stasis of perception while creating the conditions for a new way of seeing (and knowing), will not only fulfill some of the deepest yearnings of artists themselves—for ability to interpret their world with relevance and integrity—but will be essential to the ongoing revival of the church and its mission.

All artists make use of the raw materials of revelation. When a piece of art succeeds, it does so because of its revelatory function. The art of the prophets succeeded as revelation because it was able to incite the truth in its audience. And part of our doctrine of inspiration must include the observation that it was able to do that only because it first functioned as art.

(Reprinted from Radix 17:1)

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¹For an excellent cataloguing of elements and trends in contemporary art vis a vis the role of the Christian artist, see “Crying for a Vision” by Steve Scott, in Radix 13 n.5 (1982):9-13.

²R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 336. The current secular definition of “artist as prophet” is, of course, problematic on a number of levels even within its own context (not to mention the difficulties it creates when transposed into a Christian framework). Yet while it is seminal to the idea of artist as prophet, the prior 335 pages of Collingwood’s argument form a context for the paragraph cited that would necessarily exclude much of the current form of that idea.

³This can have enormous consequences, as in the case of the nuclear arms race where the generic perception of “Russians” or “Communists” replaces the more attentive, specific perception of the Soviet people as being as complex in their fears and hopes as we are, and where the illuminating perception of what is at the root of the arms race is traded in for the more utilitarian “intelligence reports” aimed at guaranteeing that the U.S. will win any possible conflict.

⁴I find that drawing these distinctions about art often produces a certain discomfort in the reader, as though we have (a) left all the fun behind, and (b) excluded almost everybody from the rarified sphere of ART. I believe that this discomfort can be cured by simply countering two common misconceptions that we have all inherited from our culture, and which predispose us against serious consideration of art as such:

1. While it’s true that entertainment is not, ipso facto, art, the truer thing is that art can be the most entertaining thing there is. Go out and enjoy some.
2. We are so accustomed to the idea that artists think of themselves as an elite class that the process of drawing careful distinctions about art frightens us. In fact, by embedding the work of the artist in the community, and by avoiding questions of “excellence of craft” and the like, I believe that the present argument calls for art that is thoroughly populist. Although not everything that is intended to be art actually turns out to be art, everyone has the potential to function as an artist irrespective of questions of technical training, economic status, access to higher education, etc.

 ⁵A number of commentators are reluctant to assume that this sequence of actions was ever actually performed. One suspects that this opinion derives more from a variety of possible commentator biases than from any corroborative data, as the text itself offers nothing that would cause us to question the prophet’s obedience. Even so, that is not the central question. The text provides a fairly detailed script for a performance that embodies certain methodological features that would cause it to work in a particular way in relation to its audience, whether or not the performance ever actually took place.

⁶Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia. PA.: Fortress Press, 1978), 13-14.

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