Start:Stop - Show us how our humanity can be made ‘salty’

Bible readings

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. Matthew 5. 13

Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another. Mark 9. 49 & 50.

Meditation

What does it mean to be a Christian at work or in society? For many of us this may be the question with which we struggle most within our faith. One of the key metaphors Jesus uses to help us think through this question is that of salt. Salt flavours, preserves and (in ancient cultures) purifies food. Jesus’ teaching about salt suggests that Christians should have a similar role in their society and communities. Gerard Kelly has unpacked this as meaning that “every gift you have been given … your intelligence and artistry; your creativity and character; your strength and stamina – these have been given to you so that you can work with God to unlock the full potential of his [world].” (G. Kelly, Humanifesto, Spring Harvest, 2001)

H. Richard Niebuhr proposed five different relationships that the Christian can have with our culture. These are Opposition; Agreement; Christ above culture; Tension; and Reformation. In reflecting on these options and thinking which comes closest to Jesus’ call for our lives to do the job of salt in our society, Steven H. VanderLeest, Jeffrey Nyhoff, and Nancy Zylstra apply these categories to something which is a standard part of our workplaces, the computer (Being Fluent and Faithful in a Digital World).

The first two options Niebuhr gives us are the extremes. Opposition means that the Christian opposes all cultural artefacts as "worldly." For information technology, this would mean that the Christian would see the computer as just one more instance of depravity, one more example of how sin infects everything we do. Agreement takes the other extreme, where Christians find their religion to be fundamentally compatible with the culture around them. Here, the computer is simply an extension of God's good creation, put here for us to develop and use as we wish.

The last three choices are somewhere between the extremes. The "Christ above culture" option was advocated by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas would look at the computer and see it as a fine product of culture, but, as such, it could never approach the sublime beauty of Christ. The tension option, advocated by Martin Luther, places the Christian in a tension between Christ and culture. We are in the world but not of it and must be careful not to estrange ourselves from the world, but at the same time not to embrace it either. In short, we are citizens of two worlds that are often at odds with each other. Applied to information technology, the computer may be used, but with care not to indulge too deeply.

The final option is for a transformational, or re-formational approach. The Christian must recognize three truths: first, that culture is a manifestation of God's good creation, an outgrowth of human creativity and community; second, that sin deeply infects every part of the creation, including human culture; and third, that we can redeem culture in the name of Christ. This redemption is a transformation of culture by seeking, enhancing, and celebrating the original good we find in cultural artefacts while identifying the effects of sin (and working to reduce those effects). The computer is, therefore, an extension of God's good creation and thus has wondrous potential. However, it also exhibits the deep effects of sin. Christians are thus called to transform information technology in the name of Christ.

It is this transformational, or re-formational approach which seems to reflect most fully Christ’s teaching about salt. So let us reflect for a moment on the power of salt to preserve from rot, and to bring out the many flavours of food. As we do so, let us ask God to show us how our humanity can be made ‘salty,’ both in its role on the earth and in our workplaces (Humanifesto).

Prayer

Transforming God, may we bring out the many flavours of our culture and workplaces by seeking, enhancing, and celebrating the original good there, while preserving from rot by identifying the effects of sin and working to reduce those effects. Enable us to use every gift we have been given; our intelligence and artistry, our creativity and character, our strength and stamina, to work with God to unlock the full potential of this world.

Show us how our humanity can be made ‘salty’ in our role on the earth and in our workplaces.

Gifting God, let us all take time to look deep within ourselves and discover the gifts you have blessed us with. May we take the time to direct our lives in a way that best uses our own unique combination of gifts. May our education help us discover where our strengths and interests lie. May our faith guide us in realizing our gifts. May we always be open to the direction of the Spirit and never forget the love you have for each of us. May we use our gifts for the benefit of others and for the common good.

Show us how our humanity can be made ‘salty’ in our role on the earth and in our workplaces.

Grant us a vision of your world as your love would have it: a world where the weak are protected, and none go hungry or poor; a world where the riches of creation are shared, and everyone can enjoy them; a world where different races and cultures live in harmony and mutual respect; a world where peace is built with justice, and justice is guided by love. Give us, through Jesus Christ, the inspiration and courage to build it.

Show us how our humanity can be made ‘salty’ in our role on the earth and in our workplaces.

Blessing

Being granted a vision of our world as God’s love would have it, unlocking the full potential of this world, using every gift we have been given, using our gifts for the common good. May all those blessings of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.

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Mark Heard - Treasure Of The Broken Land.

Of beauty and affirmation (3)

W. David O. Taylor has posted 9.5 Theses about beauty at Diary of an Arts Pastor. These derive from conversations with friends over a series of texts - ranging from Aquinas to Milbank while taking in a lot of Von Balthasar along the way - which have focused their attention on questions surrounding art, aesthetics and beauty.

His provisional conclusion has been that the centuries-long discussion about art and beauty, specifically about art's relationship to beauty, is a dizzying mess. His theses question the assumption that art and beauty self-evidentially go together and set out factors which are important if art's relationship to beauty is to be defined while still not giving up on beauty altogether, because the world would be much poorer without it, theologically as well as actually.

What he thinks he has learned principally is "to slow down - to read things three and four times if necessary, to look and to look again, to understand the author carefully before I make judgments (a basic requirement of charity), and to not be afraid, as hard as it is, to keep asking simple questions, however "obvious" or "silly" they may seem, and when I feel overwhelmed to not panic but to recognize that these authors deserve the respect of careful, slow, patient study."

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McIntosh Ross - All My Trust I Place In You.

Of beauty and affirmation (2)

I'm currently reading It was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God which returns me to my earlier reflections on the nature of beauty because the book contains a chapter on 'Beauty transfigured' by Adrienne Chaplin.

Chaplin begins with some art historical reflections by arguing that the concept of beauty has been absent from and even inimical to modern art. Beauty has been associated with the sentimental and shallow while the purpose of modern art was to subvert and to shock. She quotes Barnett Newman as saying, "The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty."

This changes, she suggests, in the early 1990s as art critics and others begin discussing the concept of beauty once again. She contrasts the Regarding Beauty and Sensation exhibitions suggesting that Sensation was "the last gasp of the modernist belief in art as agent of social confrontation and change, while Regarding Beauty heralding the beginning of a renewed focus on beauty and "aesthetic" experience."

This latter perception would seem to be disproved by subsequent events as the Sensation artists went on to become major figures within contemporary art retaining their ability, as has contemporary art generally, to shock. At the same time, beauty has not generally become a major strand of artistic creation or criticism in the way that Chaplin envisaged in 2000. In her comments on modern art, Chaplin does not seem to acknowledge the interest, attraction or beauty which modern art sees in the 'found object' or the 'ready-made' or the way in which later generations see beauty in art which was once perceived as 'ugly' or 'shocking', as is evidenced by the repeated success of exhibitions showing work from the early to mid modern period.

Chaplin then highlights the confusion which exists regarding definitions of beauty. Entering this debate means entering "a complex interdisciplinary web of theories and views". Where, she asks, "in this jungle of views and opinions should Christians position themselves?"

Firstly, she suggests we need to question aspects of our own tradition including abandoning the Platonic conception of "a two-tier world in which earthly beauty is either a mere shadow of or a pointer to another higher world of capital B beauty." Beauty, she writes, "whatever may eventually decide it means, is an integral feature of the one world created by God and deserves to be honoured exactly as such." Secondly, we need to nuance the idea that God is beautiful as this is a term very rarely used of God in the Bible and which is often seen as "frivolous, seductive or deceptive." A more accurate attribution to God, she argues, is that of glory but glory seen in relation to the self-sacrificial love of Christ which "passes through the ugliness of the cross."

Chaplin then undercuts this significant perception by stating that, "although this account of the "beauty" of Christ may help us gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of the cross, it does not help us very much with the question of beauty in art or nature." I would say exactly the opposite, that this perception helps us to see the beauty of modern art which embraces offence, pain, darkness, death, and ugliness.

Next Chaplin highlights the definition of beauty given by Aquinas as "that which pleases when seen." She nuances this definition by stating that "something may please because it is striking, or stunning or just plain intriguing"; it does not have to be ""pleasing" in a conventional or confirming way." Again, this would seem to encompass the possibility of finding beauty, as modern art has done, in pop, kitsch, the ready-made, and the found object but Chaplin's contrasts in this section - strip malls, highways, subway platforms - suggest not. These are "ugly urban scenes" where there is nothing that "calls for our more focussed attention." Modern art, I suggest, operates within Chaplin's nuanced version of Aquinas' definition but disagrees with her examples of ugliness on the basis of her own definition of beauty.

Aquinas' statement is not, to my mind, a definition of beauty because it depends entirely on subjective responses which will differ instread of providing objective criteria on which many can agree. Chaplin notes that beauty "always appears in particular historical and social contexts" and so is "not the same for everyone at all times" meaning that "we cannot point to an objective feature of something beautiful, which can be considered to constitute the kernel of its beauty." So, if Aquinas' statement is useful to us but not as a definition, how is it to be understood? I would suggest that it can be understood as a way of seeing; an affirmative approach to life which is looking for what we perceive as pleasing, attractive, intriguing, striking or stunning (to use Chaplin's phrases). 

So, we have two perceptions of beauty drawn from the Christian tradition which Chaplin articulates but does not clearly link within the argument made in this chapter. I, however, want to say that they are synergous; that an affirmative way of seeing is analogous to Christ's embrace of human pain and suffering in order to redeem it.

Chaplin ends her chapter on a similar note by highlighting a third exhibition, A Broken Beauty, in which was exhibited works which invite the viewer "to consider the body's capacity for beauty despite its brokenness, in the midst of its brokenness, and, ironically, because of its brokenness." I agree with this perception of beauty, which I think accords with what I have outlined above, but am unclear as to how Chaplin reaches this point through her use of the materials and ideas which she considers in this chapter.

Finally, I think that the picture she paints of modern and contemporary art in this chapter confuses the issue as, in my view, many of the perceptions of beauty which she wishes to commend to us are exemplified by the very examples of modern and contemporary art which she seeks to critique.

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Nickel Creek - Seven Wonders.

A plausible plausibility structure (1)

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.”

These lines from ‘God’s Grandeur’ reveal the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to be a late Victorian confident of the argument from design placing him very much in the mainstream of the Christian tradition. This argument, that the beauty and intricacy of the natural world (including that of humanity) must derive from an Intelligent Designer, can be found in both the Old and New Testaments and in Christian thought from Augustine to William Paley (an Anglican priest and older contemporary of Hopkins). Additionally, the same argument can also be found in the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle who were both significant influences on the development of Christian theology.

Thomas Aquinas, who drew heavily on Aristotle’s thought, developed, in the Five Ways, a series of natural arguments for the existence of God. The Five Ways began to be questioned in the seventeenth century following the development of the science of mechanics. This did not destroy the argument from design but did lead to its development being primarily by scientists rather than theologians (and thereby entwined with the belief that science provided objective knowledge of the world) and to differences in where its supporters chose to look for evidence of design.

Hopkins was, however, unusual in the late Victorian era in the confidence with which he held to the argument from design. More typical of late Victorian opinion was Alfred Tennyson when he wrote of “life as futile, then, as frail” because Man, who had “… trusted God was love indeed/And love Creation’s final law”, had now discovered that “Nature, red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek’d against his creed” and left him to “Be blown about the desert dust,/Or seal’d within the iron hills”.

As the archeological references in Tennyson’s poem show, the most significant threat to the argument from design came from the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Darwin’s hypothesis was that organisms and creatures evolved through a process by which random mutations that improved the chances of survival for an organism/creature were naturally selected as they enabled survival in preference to other weaker organisms/creatures.

For many, Darwin’s hypothesis was taken, over time and with developments, as objective proof that purposefulness in nature could be explained without there being a need to invoke a creator. This belief was also supported by David Hume’s earlier philosophical critique of the design argument in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

Dialogues had been posthumously published in 1779 but its arguments were not taken up on a significant scale until the following century. Hume argued that the design argument was based on an analogy between the world and the mind of God that had no rational basis. It was just as easy, perhaps easier, Hume argued to suggest from the way in which the world was formed that there were many gods or no gods and, therefore, he concluded that there was no reasonable basis on which we could “draw any conclusion about the origin of the world from the way we find it”. The combination of Darwin and Hume appeared to sound the death knell to the argument from design.

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Bob Dylan - Watching The River Flow.

Modern Catholic novels

I'm currently reading Marian Crowe's Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth which is an excellent analysis of four contemporary Catholic novelists - Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland and Piers Paul Read - demonstrating that the demise of the Catholic novel has not yet occurred in the UK, at least.

Crowe also provides a useful summary of the beginnings of the Modern Catholic Novel in the French Catholic Renaissance. She writes:

"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."

Crowe then describes the work of François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, the greatest novelists of the French Catholic Renaissance, before surveying the work of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark to give the background in the UK for the contemporary Catholic novels of the four novelists analysed in this book.

All of which is useful preparation for the Big Picture 2, a Diocese of Chelmsford Eastertide course which starts this Tuesday evening in Waltham Forest and in which I share the leadership with Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen. How can Christians respond to controversial art: protest or engagement? How have Christian artists expressed their faith through popular culture? How has Christianity influenced popular culture? How does popular culture portray or critique Christianity? These are some of the questions the course will explore using multi media resources with plenty of opportunity for discussion and practical response.

In one of my sessions I use the thoughts of US Catholic novelists, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, to introduce ideas on how to communicate Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:

“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The problem as O’Connor sees it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.

Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.

What O’Connor and Percy both seem to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.

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Woven Hand - Tin Finger.