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Modes of Connecting Faith and the Arts: a Comparative Theological Assessment

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Modes of Connecting Faith and the Arts: a Comparative Theological Assessment Modes of Connecting Faith and the Arts: A Comparative Theological Assessment by Matthew Kaemingk When one asks a Christian artist to reflect on how their faith and their art interact, inform, and influence each other, one can expect a wide variety of responses. As a theological observer and a friend of artists, I have become fascinated by the wide pluriformity of responses and what these responses have to teach us about what it means to be a person of faith in the arts. David Miller’s recent book God at Work charts the past one hundred years of the faith and work movement in modern America. Throughout the book Miller analyzes a diversity of ways in which Christians, in a variety of vocations, live out their faith in the workplace. Miller categorizes their particular modes of faith-work integration into four unique points of emphasis: the expression of faith at work, the ethics of faith at work, the enrichment of faith at work, and finally the experience of faith at work.1 Expression Ethics Enrichment Experience Matthew Kaemingk 2 What follows is an appropriation of David Miller’s quadrilateral and an experimental “mapping” of artistic reflections on the relationship of art and faith. This method of mapping and assessment obviously has important limitations.2 However, it is believed that through Miller’s heuristic categories, a clearer understanding of the vast and often confusing terrain of art and faith discourse might come into clearer focus. Through surveying the variety of perspectives on faith/art integration, a secondary hope would be that artists who would find themselves primarily in one category of integration would be introduced to the richness of other quadrants. Throughout this analysis I have done my best to include the voices of Christian artists across a wide span of theological traditions and mediums including sculpture, literature, painting, film, theatre, architecture, and music. In my analysis of the four quadrants I briefly examine their general historical and theological contours along with their particular conceptual strengths, weaknesses, unique points of opportunity and danger. Implicit throughout the work will be the underlying argument that within each quadrant lay vital correctives to the weaknesses and blind spots inherent within the others. The article will close with an evaluation of the four modes of faith/art engagement and the brief proposal of, what we might call, a “binding alternative.” Ethics Artists and artistic observers who fall within the ethics quadrant can often be heard reflecting on the importance of artistic “integrity,” “responsibility,” “craftsmanship,” “excellence,” “justice,” and “holiness.” This group will argue, along with Nicholas Wolterstorff, that truly Christian artists “cannot divorce art from responsibility.”3 Like it or not, they claim, Matthew Kaemingk 3 the artist is an ethical agent who is tied to irrevocable obligations to God, other people, and the world at large. The artist is daily engaged in ethical decisions about artistic priorities, financial stewardship, acceptable subjects, themes, and materials. Artists must decide whether to engage primarily in artistic acts of beautification, protest, contemplation, wonder, or simply exploration.4 The modern conviction that the artist is amoral or ethically autonomous, that she has no ethical responsibility other than to create “art for art’s sake,” certainly does not meet with a warm reception in this group.5 One could divide this group into three levels of artistic ethical discourse: personal ethics, communal ethics, and global ethics. Those who emphasize a personal level of ethics ask questions that revolve around the moral integrity of the artist’s work and the artist herself.6 Those emphasizing communal ethics are concerned with the artist’s obligations to a specific audience, a community of artists, or a particular artistic tradition.7 They see the artist as needing to be obedient to something larger than themselves. Those emphasizing a global level of artistic ethics emphasize the artist’s Christian responsibility to engage in public issues like racism, poverty, immorality, oppression, violence, sexual promiscuity, etc.8 While ethical obligations for the Christian artist cannot be denied, this category of discourse is not without its dangers. The most prominent danger is, of course, the reduction of the aesthetic life to the ethical life. An artist is indeed an ethical agent. A work of art is indeed a creation with moral consequences. However, neither the artist nor the work itself can be reduced to the ethical.9 Faith is to be obeyed in the arts, but ethics does not exhaust the call and beauty of faith within the artist’s life. Matthew Kaemingk 4 Expression While those in the category of ethics stress the Christian artist’s responsibility to do “the good,” those in the category of expression stress the Christian artist’s responsibility to communicate “the true.” Artists who find themselves in the expression quadrant see their work as a medium through which they can express their faith-based convictions and experiences. While some “expressionists”10 opt for allusive and subtle modes of spiritual communication, others prefer a starker and more frontal approach. Members of this quadrant will often argue that the church needs “poetic” communicators like artists because the faith cannot be fully articulated with the wooden prose of pastors and theologians.11 These artists see their work as a medium through which previously inexpressible beliefs, convictions, and experiences can be made manifest.12 Jeremy Begbie’s exploration of Paul Tillich is instructive on this point. For, according to Tillich, “Art is truly religious not when it employs traditional religious subjects… but when it probes beneath the surface of the finite and brings to light the ultimate meaning which lies beyond and beneath all things.”13 Tillich “maintains that every artist’s work will to some degree display his ultimate concern and that of his culture.”14 Tillich even went so far as to argue that there could be “more of a quality of sacredness to a still-life by Cezanne or a tree by Van Gogh than to a picture of Jesus by Uhde” if in the colors and shapes of trees and fruit the artist’s soul finds itself more honestly and authentically depicted.15 In our contemporary age of irony, sarcasm, and cynicism, this group’s willingness to openly and publically express their most intimate spiritual experiences, emotions, and commitments is laudable indeed. Moreover, when one considers that the heart of the Christian Matthew Kaemingk 5 faith has consistently been marked by one of open and public witness, this group’s emphasis on the communication of the faith is certainly a compelling one.16 That said, expressivists find themselves running into a number of problems. The first is the danger that their art becomes didactic. The painter Edward Knippers notes that “Propositional theology usually makes a poor subject.”17 According to Knippers, art that can be reduced to a didactic message is none other than propaganda. For, in the case of propaganda, “I can look at the art object, get the idea, and then retain the idea with no further reference to the art object.18 Adrienne Chaplin and Hilary Brand warn that when artists are on “an urgent quest to present a message, the tendency can be to dive immediately for a specific symbol, metaphor or allegory as a vehicle for literal meaning… [they] end up trying to cram into art form something [that] cannot ever quite fit comfortably into the frame.”19 When an artwork is reduced to mere theological content, Adrian Plass laments, “complexity and creativity are sucked out of the message… leaving it so thin and pale, and yet so dogmatically assertive, that those who are exhorted to let it revolutionize their lives end up more annoyed than anything else.”20 Gregory Wolfe forwards Wim Wenders’s films and his more allusive expressivism as a helpful antidote for this didactic tendency. Wolfe explains that with, [S]omeone like Wenders, the frontal approach is doomed to failure: better to refract the ancient story in oblique ways through contemporary narratives that give us situations and characters to which we can relate. The invisible reality of faith is something best made visible when it haunts the edges of our consciousness and memory.21 Matthew Kaemingk 6 Enrichment Those in this quadrant emphasize one of two sides of an enriching relationship between faith and art—either their faith enriches their art or their art enriches their faith. We will begin by exploring the second. Those who report that their art-making enriches their faith can often be found speaking about how art functions for them as a medium of knowing, interpreting, and living in the world.22 The arts, they claim, can function as a form of spiritual revelation in which the artist comes to a greater understanding of God, life, and the world as a whole. Beyond revelation, they might also report that art making functions as a form of spiritual discipline or even sanctification. Madeleine L’Engle provides numerous examples of this understanding of “art enriching faith.” She reports that a great work of art not only interprets but also “enlarges our sense of reality.”23 Moreover, in the act of art-making and viewing, L’Engle argues that human beings are enabled, “to do all the things we have forgotten… to walk on water… [and] move, unfettered, among the stars.”24 Finally, she reports that “I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my Christianity… [they] restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith.”25 For artists in this group the material and the works themselves are not inanimate or passive—they actually “talk back.” These artists are embodying what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls a “conversation” with their materials.26 In this dialogue a genuine give and take is experienced.
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