Crux

Winter 2010 Vol.46, No.4

A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion published by Regent College

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ISSN 0011-2186

Contents CRUX: Winter 2010, Vol.46, No.4

A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion published by Regent College

Articles Exploring the Continent of Loneliness James M. Houston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 James 1:27 and the Churchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Call to Mission and Morals Mariam Kamell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Nails in the Soles of My Shoes: The Art of Flamenco Dance as Gift Constance Chan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Poetry Balance Lance Odegard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 The Acacia Wood: Ethiopia, 1983 Sarah Crowley Chestnut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Bird Feeder Sarah Crowley Chestnut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Book Reviews For The Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts

by W. David O. Taylor, reviewed by James Watkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 The Death of Christian Britain Reconsidered: Three Reviews reviewed by John Conway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Advertise in CRUX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

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Cover illustration: The painting, Monk by the Sea, by Caspar David Friedrich (1809) shows Friedrich as a monk. Being alone is not the same thing, necessarily, as loneliness. Jim Houston discusses loneliness at length in his article in this issue.

Exploring the Continent of Loneliness James M. Houston

Jim Houston is Board of Governors’ Professor of Spiritual Theology, Regent College.

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f you have seen the film The March of the Penguins, you can visualize the extraordinary instinctual behaviour of penguins in the most hostile of environments, the ice-bound continent of Antarctica. Their march has been recorded as follows: some seventy kilometres to their breeding grounds, their mutual care of the one egg, the march back of the females to the sea to be replenished, their return to feed the hatched chicks, then the need of the males to take the same march to the sea and back for their replenishment of food. All this is a march of over 350 kilometres, just for the purpose of the reproduction of one chick for each couple of penguins. Yet we do not use the category of “loneliness” for all these efforts of penguins in the isolated continent of Antarctica. For animals live instinctual lives, not fully conscious as human beings are. They have very limited thinking, and very limited desires. What enlarges human consciousness so much more is that we both “think” and “desire” so greatly. It is inner thought and desire which isolate human beings so much from each other, like a vast interior “continent,” which can often be metaphorically “frozen.” Indeed, philosophers can speak of the unutterable and the unbreakable isolation of human consciousness.

The metaphor of “a continental condition” contrasts with that of being “oceanic.” For even a “continent” has limits to be mapped; it is not boundless and therefore chaotic, like “the sea” as interpreted in biblical imagery. Then

indeed, only Christ can walk on “the sea”; it is beyond human control. Vast as the exploration of loneliness may be, we are still able as moral agents to face its challenges. But in the Eastern religions of pantheism, there is the absorption of “the one in the many,” as if the human being is drowned in an infinite ocean. This cosmology makes such an exploration of loneliness meaningless. For there can be no legitimacy to desire, nor to think as a unique individual (ipse), which are what makes loneliness such a powerful and basic reality of the Western human condition, despite our sharing “sameness” (idem) as human beings.

Contemporary Features of “the Lonely Crowd” In contrast to so many aspects of the hu m a n c ond ition t h at h ave b e en extensively studied, loneliness has received relatively little attention until now.

Perhaps the first significant study was that of David Riesman in 1953.1 It seemed prophetic of the impending loneliness that technology would produce through urbanization and other cultural forces of the modern world. More restively in recent years, churches too are being afflicted by the crowd mentality of feeling aloneness among its members, perhaps in reaction to our move away from modernity as featured by “mass culture” and our entrance into a more intensely individualistic culture with the “Electronic Revolution.” Christians then, like the rest of society, do not like to be “programmed,” in what portends to be a 2

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“community.” To pun famous lines of the poet T.S. Eliot: Where is the friendship I have lost in fellowship?

Where is the mutuality I have lost in programs?

The cycle of the church’s calendar, Takes me further from God and nearer to “success.”

Within the broader dimensions of the secular world, we see the innumerable consequences of the alienation of the human spirit. To defend against it, we have multi-billion-dollar industries of therapy, dating services, entertainment, drug addiction, pornography, and much else. Too many marriages are panaceas for loneliness, and then fail for this reason.

So we may state it as a principle that “a marriage started in loneliness easily ends in the loneliness of not being known.”

The fear of loneliness can inhibit solitude, driving us into a continual motion of busyness, of impulsive behaviour, and of irresponsible sexual behaviour.

Indeed, pornography is a clear index of loneliness in society. Wounded loneliness can desensitize people by making them embittered, wholly self-centred, hardened, and even criminal in the quest for revenge.

We have probably little idea how much loneliness there is within our criminal sector of the population.

We must also recognize the great significance of being unforgiving in wounded loneliness. This does not only isolate us from each other, but from ourselves inwardly as well. For those who cannot forgive themselves tend to deepen their own sense of worthlessness, which isolates them and inhibits connectedness with other people. At the same time, a bitter spirit toward others also intensifies loneliness.

Loneliness is frequently identified with a sense of personal failure, so it is denied perhaps, or at least viewed as something that would be painfully exposed. It is also multiple in its aspects, and therefore a “slippery” connotation, with many

ramifications. Thus to assert loneliness has become a premise for the need of the study of psychiatry. This indicates how basic and wide-ranging its pathological manifestations are within us all. It reflects also on how intrinsically social we are as human beings to feel the converse adversity of feeling “alone.” We know well the illnesses associated with loneliness, such as depression, hostility, alcoholism and other forms of addiction, poor self-esteem, psychosomatic ill nesses, a s well a s t he pathologies of paranoia and schizophrenia, a nd most tragic of all, suicide.2 In ou r c ontemp or a r y world, t he more we live t e c h n i c a l l y, t h e m o r e we exag ger ate a ll t hese expressions of being “the l o n el y i n d iv i d u a l.” We may shudder indeed, at the prospects around the corner of entering into a “robotic society” as Japan appears to be the first to face that by 2015/2020.

In contrast to all these contemporary expressions of loneliness, previous cultures provided more shelter from loneliness, such as extended family life, kinship or tribal bonds, roles of patronage, mutual obligations, interdependence due to sharing of limited tools, a nd so on. Thus we can still map geographically, by coefficients of loneliness, its differing intensities. Perhaps Japan and North America today exhibit the most intense forms of loneliness, whereas rural Africa has the least. Urbanization explains much, but today, the global spread of electronics makes problems of loneliness more ambiguous and more complex than ever. For if Charles Dickens saw that he

Within the broader dimensions of the secular world, we see the innumerable consequences of the alienation of the human spirit.

To defend against it, we have multi-billiondollar industries of therapy, dating services, entertainment, drug addiction, pornography, and much else.

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was living in the best of times, as well as the worst of times, whatever future prognostications we can make, that is surely the most certain: the future will become increasingly more ambiguous. So this now challenges us to examine and to explain the features of loneliness, both positively as well as negatively.

a “basic existential loneliness” for all of us, but there is also “the anxiety of loneliness,” which is a defence against feeling socially lonely.

We can all become “peopled-out.”

Interactive social exhaustion can shallow our lives, and make us superficial and unreliable. Words become cheap when they are unreflective and incessant. The Desert Fathers exemplified for us the value of solitude and silence. They did this to “know themselves,” cultivating the “double knowledge” of “knowing God” and “knowing themselves in his sight.”

Then they could progress to experience “vomiting the false self.” In such ways, we too can begin to cultivate more selfunderstanding, as we reflect upon and face more honestly our own inner lives. This is how we gain wisdom in the cultivation of more self-understanding under God. Conversely, we can intensify our loneliness when we do not know how to appreciate and to live with our own inner solitary condition. Perhaps we are afraid “to be with our selves” because we lack the humility or the moral courage to face ourselves, or indeed do not wish to know ourselves more truthfully. Then inner, personal loneliness can be much worse than having to cope with social loneliness.

So we need to trace the differing human categories of “loneliness.” Basic factors that tend to promote human loneliness are our very abilities to think, to desire, and to seek power. Indeed, we observe that to be human is intrinsically to experience diverse forms of loneliness. But why do we call it “the continent of loneliness”? Or why do we ever want to map it out? Perhaps it is because we live in a therapeutic culture that publicizes as never before such emotional disorders as “attention deficit.”

For to enlarge self-consciousness is to exaggerate the dimensions of loneliness we may experience.

Worse still is the terrifying record of the past century. For in our times, a “black hole” has appeared on our cultural radar screen, in the ghastly inhumanity

To Be Alone May Not Mean Being Lonely In 1972, Clark Moustakas was one of the first writers to distinguish two categories: of being “alone” and being anxiously “alone.” The former is the objective realit y of being without others, without company; the latter is what he called “the anxiety of loneliness.”3 The latter puts up many defenses that attempt to eliminate loneliness, or by constantly seeking remedies.

In the Western world this has become a multi-billion-dollar industry of many professional activities: the whole music industry, film-going, therapy and counselling services, addiction treatment centres, old age retirement homes, s u i c i d e h o t- l i n e s a n d prevention centres, spa-clubs, matchmating services, art classes for self-esteem, self-help books, and so on.

Yet visiting a retreat centre, perhaps a monastery, or a health spa for spiritual or physical renewal are positive ways of needing to be alone. Artists, musicians, writers, all know the importance of being alone to further their creativity. As the former Archbishop of Westminster Basil Hume used to say, “no one can afford to live in the market-place of life, who does not spend time in the desert.” Gaining insights for reflective conversation, or depth of character, or for communion with God, all require that we cultivate interiority of character. Indeed, only those who can cultivate solitude in creative ways can overcome loneliness. So not only is there

We can intensify our loneliness when we do not know how to appreciate and to live with our own inner solitary condition.

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Wealth The first time I ever publicly addressed a group on loneliness was in 1976, at the home of Mrs. Mary Rockefeller in New York, at a weekly women’s Bible study she shared with a group of her friends. As very wealthy ladies, they all shared the distrust of many who claimed to be their “friends,” when wealth created such a barrier of distrust. Years later, I met again a member of the group in a very different setting.

“Oh, you are the speaker that spoke on loneliness,” she remarked, and encouraged me to explore this topic further, which I have now done, half a century later!

to other human beings, of the Holocaust; it will not disappear! At Budapest a few years ago I met a Christian psychiatrist who specializes in autism in children.

She began to share with me her story, as a Jew, both of whose parents perished in the gas chambers during the Holocaust.

“Oh yes,” I responded, “will you not then be exploring this continent of loneliness for the rest of your life?” “Indeed, I am in constant exploration,” was her response.

She was bereft as a small child in being an orphan, telling me, “that’s my name, Loneliness; I have no other name.” Then she added, “the fact I became a Christian only intensifies what the meaning of the Holocaust must mean for me, isolated within my own people, as well as from the rest of the human race. For I suffer also the guilt of being alive, when all of my immediate family perished without a trace.

I shall never fully end in this world what that journey means to me, across that vast continent within my inner life.” She then began to write to me of the utter emotional exhaustion that each letter caused her to experience, in describing her journey of remembrance. Yes, she knew, more than most of us, what it means to explore that continent of loneliness.

Here we shall explore five aspects of human loneliness: 1. Personal experiences of loneliness that help us map out categories and causes 2. The existential condition of our “fallen nature” 3. The rational and philosophical exploration of our isolated consciousness as a “thinking self” 4. Desire and loneliness 5. Contemplation as the “divine end” of loneliness

Beauty Soon after 1976, I spoke with a very beautiful Australian student at our college, and commented that she must be very lonely. “How do you know me so well, when we have only just met?” she responded. “Because beauty isolates you,” I replied. “Men will misunderstand your desire for friendship as the desire for sex, and women will be jealous of your looks.”

A similar story was told me by a handsome Brazilian student whose mother had fussed over her “beautiful boy” ever since he was a child. “I never felt that my mother knew who I was,” he told me, “since she was only concerned about my outward appearance.”

Intellect A third feature of loneliness is illustrated by a brilliant surgeon who responded positively to a sermon on loneliness that I had given in a local church in Vancouver. Over forty years later, this friend commented to me that this was an address he had never forgotten, for it had helped him to understand his own laconic behaviour. His academic brilliance bored him, making him feel indifferent about his career. Why? As a precocious child, this had rapidly separated him from his family. He never felt that those nearest and dearest to him really knew him, and their admiration of his outward successes seemed only to intensify his loneliness.

Personal Experiences of Loneliness As soon as we begin to reflect on the question “how lonely am I?” we recognize it has a context, and indeed a narrative, or a series of narratives. The following are some I have personally encountered.

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Crime A fourth occasion was in Washington, DC, when my friend and I were in line, waiting security clearance to enter the White House for a Christian gathering of some of its staff. “The security police must have been given very high authority to let you in,” I joked. For my friend had been a leading member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s in Mississippi, where the F.B.I. had determined the chaos was at its worst.

Having attempted to lay a bomb at the home of a Jewish banker, this man and his companion were gunned down by F.B.I. agents. His friend was killed, and he was sentenced to thirty-five years, with three years in solitary confinement.4 He still carries an inner capacity for loneliness— far greater than most of us—which is sensed even in the way he talks slowly, as from inner caverns within his soul.

increases as the snow melts in the spring, after the intense cold of a very long winter. In my loneliness, I have bottled up so much over the years, which adds to the pressure and generates so much anger, bitterness, and cynicism inside of me.

It spills over and penetrates so much of what I do. I feel I waste so much time not doing anything because I somehow lack the context that can give purpose to my actions. I may want to read a book—but which one should I read? Why? What purpose do I have? So I read a lot of detective novels.

There is so much to unpack in my friend’s lonely life, surrounded as he is with a beautiful family and a loving wife who is a Christian psychotherapist, all so ironic for my friend, locked up in his own prison cell of inner loneliness.

Fear of Failure My fifth example comes from a recent email from one of our alumni, who wrote to complain of his lonely, inward sense of paralysis.

Nostalgic Loneliness As an immigrant from Oxford, England, to Vancouver, Canada, in 1970, I vividly remember the need to repress “the loneliness of nostalgia.” I forbade myself the luxury of thinking about the green lawn of an Oxford college that my “new friends” would never share. The Portuguese immigrant in Brazil still uses the term marinan to communicate his sigh for his own beloved seacoast where his forebears lived. Yet such nostalgic loneliness is now widely expressive of a society increasingly mobile, intensified by air travel, tourism, and multiple relocations of jobs.

Nothing has indeed happened in terms of growth and maturing since I was at Regent, so I am becoming aware of some major obstacles to permanent change and growth. I have come to realize that I have no burning passion, nor any sense of purpose in my life. Things have to be “necessary” in order for me to feel it is okay to do it. For I fear failure, I only highlight failures, I only see failures. And the best way to avoid failure is to do nothing—except that, too, is a failure.

So I become a very lonely observer of life—and often a very critical one—seeing my self as the only one who truly knows. (How I can perceive of myself as being a failure and always right at the same time is beyond me!) Now in middle life, I feel the pressure building inside of me, like the pressure on a dam

Professional Loneliness This results from increasing specialization, so that families and friends can never quite share in such pursuits. However, while job satisfaction used to be considered a value in itself, now interpersonal life has intensified, so there is a much higher expectation to conquer social isolation within one’s profession. Prominent public figures can achieve this at the cost of their inner “widowhood” of their spouses, never able to share much of their working 6

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alone (ipse) and one that is socially related (idem). It illustrates the basic observation at the beginning of our creation: “The Lord God said, ‘it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner’” (Gen. 2:18). Created in the image of God, we have inherited a relational nature.

day, which so preoccupies them. With all the diversification of sports, hobbies, and entertainment, there is also “the loneliness of interests” not shared even with spouses or within one’s own family.

Family Brokenness Yet perhaps the most poignant form of loneliness is that induced by the breakup of family bonds. A seventeen-year-old girl, forced to leave home, recounted that all her belongings were thrown from her bedroom window into the yard below. She said, “I have never felt so utterly alone as when I had to pick up all my dresses and things from the ground and drive off without a ‘goodbye’ to my parents.”

Sharing our feelings and experiences of loneliness may be analogous to taking an imprint of our fingerprint; it expresses who we really are. It recites our relational narrative. It is as if all of us have two names, one that is inwardly alone and one that is socially related.

Our Existential Condition of “Fallen Nature” When Adam and Eve were seduced to believe “you shall be as gods,” their envy, rivalry, and rebellion against their Creator alienated them. “Where are you? ” wa s Go d’s questioni ng of their separation. The subsequent expulsion from God’s presence is perhaps what condemns all of us, since then, as sinners, each to have our own isolated consciousness. Certainly, the first consequence was for our first parents, within their inner isolation, to now each blame the other for its occurrence. Likewise, their sons became alien to each other, Cain killing hi s brot her i n f u r t her envy. Ever since, the pagan heroic culture, now being revived in our contemporary Western society, is prompted by the envy of having no bounds between the divine and the human. So each isolated monad wants to be given god-like powers over the other. Each lonely self wants to be different, not to contribute to the well-being of others, but to gain god-like qualities for the kingdom of the autonomous Self. Simon Gordon, in his book Lonely in America, has put it succinctly: “To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone, and

Being Prophetic My final example is about the cost of being honest within professional or religious life.

This I have shared a little about in Joyous Exiles.5 I never set out to have a so-called “prophetic ministry.” But people have kept telling me that is their impression. They imply that when you stand against being “a party man,” or against “popular consensus,” or when you see the surrealism of much public Christian life, or when you explore the underground of conventional life, and when doing so is politically inexpedient, then you will tend to become unpopular or even ostracized. The writings of a Hebrew prophet, or a more modern one like Søren Kierkegaard, should not be a daily diet, but only taken occasionally as a medicine pill, I have been advised! Having a “personal” rather than an “institutional” identity does make you stand apart from the crowd, which is happily engaged in unreflective consensus.

All of these diverse incidents and experiences illustrate that to be lonely is to be human, perhaps even when trying to be a more genuine human being, or a more honest Christian. Indeed, sharing our feelings and experiences of loneliness may be analogous to taking an imprint of our fingerprint; it expresses who we really are. It recites our relational narrative. It is as if all of us have two names, one that is inwardly 7

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heave my heart into my mouth.”9 Then King Lear condemns himself by his actions and thoughts, to suffer the ultimate loneliness of madness, in making all of his human relationships into the alchemy of “things.” Cordelia’s distress is that she is incapable of relating to her father how profound her love really is, to the point that he naively accepts his other scheming daughters’ falsity, instead of trusting the true feelings of Cordelia’s unutterable love. In his own alienation, he is incapable of seeing her heart, of knowing her feelings, and of appropriating them within his own heart. This literary example is not extreme. Increasingly in our culture, families have never experienced love—whether in friendships, or in marriage, or in their family life. For all tokens of “love” are communicated by “things,” whether a banquet of food, expensive jewelry, or a good education.

So, today, many secular writers are writing about the categories of loneliness in the human condition. The novelist and writer Thomas Wolfe, having lived such an emotionally turbulent life, has articulated what we may all feel deeply within our own hearts. In his moving essay, “God’s Lonely Man” in The Hills Beyond, Wolf says:

to be in this interior circle is to be lonely. To be lonely is to have failed.”6 Secular philosophers thus give us the bleakest imaginable analysis of loneliness, for God is deliberately excluded from their realm of human relevance. They cite Shakespeare’s King Lear as the paramount exemplar of loneliness, since Shakespeare deliberately excluded any reference to God in his play. It was so frightening that there is only one recorded play of it, during his lifetime, on December 26, 1606, when it was given at the court. For King Lear’s world is about “things,” objects that are parceled out by the king to his three daughters, in a hostile, impersonal world of Nature. So Lear asks his daughters, “which of you shall say I love you most? ” The eldest daughter, Gonerill, replies sycophantically, that she loves him “more than words can wield the matter,” and Lear responds by showing her on a map the areas he will distribute to her. The second daughter, Regan, then claims that her only joy in life is to love her father, so she too is given her third of the realm.

But Cordelia, his favourite, youngest daughter, refuses to answer in the manner of her sycophant sisters, stating: “Nothing, my lord.”7 As David Wildberm has noted, the phrase “nothing” on Cordelia’s lips implies her profound honesty. 8 For it is not a rejection of her father’s love, but rather it expresses her transparent truthfulness, to affirm that love is not a “thing,” nor can love be merely an “object” to discuss and to rationalize. Rather, it is a profoundly connected relationship, which alone can overcome loneliness. But her father wholly misunderstands her response. So he adds, “Speak again,” to which Cordelia elaborates: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot

Secular philosophers give us the bleakest imaginable analysis of loneliness, for God is deliberately excluded from their realm of human relevance.

The whole conviction of my life rests now upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and a few other solitary people, is actually the central and inevitable feature of human existence. All the hideous doubt and despair, all the confusion of the soul that a lonely man must know, is bolstered by no other knowledge than that which he can gather for himself, by his own eyes and brain, sustained and cheered by himself.

He has no creed, but faith in himself, and often that faith deserts him, leaving him aching and filled with impotence. And then it seems to him his life has come to nothing, ruined, lost and broken, and past 8

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easier with practice.”11 Given such extreme solipsism, one wonders why such writers ever bother to author books at all!

As Kierkegaard put it, “the thinker is an absentee person,” implying that in being a “person,” one has more social obligations than a “thinker” realizes he or she has.

A scholarly friend of mine once looked up from his desk to see his wife collapse on the floor in front of him with a heart attack. “Jean,” he asked, “what are you doing lying on the floor? ” We call such lonely spouses, “scholars’ widows.”

When King Lear raised his hands to look at them, he wondered if they really belonged to him. At least the radical doubt of René Descartes did not cause him to question whether he was existing in his own selfconsciousness. But Lear was an absurdist rather than a rationalist, in interpreting res cog itans as a kind of machine of the “thinking t h i n g.” H e r e C o r d el i a proved a better philosopher.

The contemporary, popular neu rologi st A ntonio R. Damasio has interpreted Descartes’ Error in his book about emotions, reason, and the human brain, as making the mind bodiless.12 But perhaps it is actually the opposite error, of making the mind too embodied. This has the effect of suppressing the poignancy of loneliness, as if one is only a brain machine.

Loneliness for Lear was also the loss of personal identity, as he asks: Does any here know me? This is not Lear: Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus?

Where are his eyes? ...

Who is it that can tell me who I am?13

redemption, so that morning bright, with its promise of new beginnings, will never come upon the earth again, as it once did.10 Here we are dealing with somebody who has no hope, and therefore whose isolation is that of the despair of an atheist.

He states, then, that loneliness is not a shallow feature of our social condition.

Rather, loneliness is constitutional to what it means to be a human being, and it stems from our ability to exercise selfreflection and self-transcendence.

Philosophers objectify rationally what can only be experienced relationally. So they conclude that to be self-conscious is to be utterly alone. They prefer the philosophical certainty of unbridgeable loneliness, to the experiential risks of love reaching out over the void.

The Isolated Consciousness of the “Thinking Self ” But our therapeutic culture tends to be like Lear, in teaching us to exercise selfexamination in a clinical manner. Likewise, philosophers who have studied loneliness— actually only very recently—do the same thing. For they objectify rationally what can only be experienced relationally. So they conclude that to be self-conscious is to be utterly alone. They prefer the philosophical certainty of unbridgeable loneliness, to the experiential risks of love reaching out over the void. So the solipsist (=solus, alone; ipse, oneself; literally “alone with oneself”) is an extreme form of being “the thinker.” Or the “sceptic”—engaged in distrust, in looking, considering, questioning critically—also tends to live in the lonely environment of the mind.

Taken f urther, writers like D.C. Dennett, in Consciousness Explained (1991), and Susan Blackmore, in Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (2005), merely equate the sense of the self with brain actions. Our feeling of being a self is itself mirage-like, and if you don’t take your selfidentity very seriously, you will not suffer loneliness too much either. It sounds very close to Zen Buddhism, except that it is supposed to be up-to-date neurology. Susan Blackmore assures us that at first this is difficult to take, for “it means that every time I seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction and not the same ‘me’ who seemed to exist a moment before, or last week, or last year. This is tough, but I think it gets 9

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tour of the Inferno, there is a progression of more intense expressions of loneliness until its end point, which is the abyss of a frozen lake where Satan lies in its depths wholly ice-bound.

So the literary critic Harold Bloom reacts by confessing: “The experience of reading King Lear is altogether uncanny. We are at once estranged and uncomfortably at home; for me, at least, no other solitary experience is at all like it.”14 Loneliness for C.S. Lewis has been autobiographically outlined in his last novel, Till We Have Faces, where the lack of recognition of one’s true identity or of having “a face” by which to be really recognized, results in having only a mask or series of masks to hide behind. In the Common Room culture of an Oxford College, this was only too familiar to Lewis. The moral is that only the selflessness of true love grows a face, to shine and to be known transparently. In contrast, our alienation from others needs to be hidden by a mask, the prosopon, which is, significantly, the origin of the Greek tragedy. It is an ironic origin, for what it meant to be “a person” in the Greek culture was merely to be the bearer of a mask in the drama.15 Heidegger sees “being-in-the-world” as always a struggle against loneliness, and as being against death also. For death is the final form of loneliness. Death then, is the absolute end of daily loneliness, making it absolute, complete, and final.

According to Camus in his novel The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the rationalistic sense of absurdity is expressive of the absoluteness of loneliness. He would then link it with suicide as the attempt to reach a final resolution. Few of us like to face too much reality, and certainly not to gaze into the abyss, as such extreme forms of loneliness can become. Yet the rejection of God has to be the absolute reality of loneliness. As the present Pope, Benedict XVI, has recently said: “where God is absent, hell appears.”

For that is the meaning of hell: absolute loneliness. Peter Kreeft has put it similarly, “hell is total loneliness.” Both writers are reflecting on Dante’s Inferno, where close to the entrance to hell is ironically a comfortable academic community of scholars. As Dante is conducted in his

Desire and Loneliness If we dare not “think” too much, in order to avoid the loneliness of solipsism, then we find we also dare not “desire” too much, to avoid the loneliness of personal disappointment. At least that is what I found myself doing at Christmas time, as a small child. With my birthday at the end of November and Christmas round the corner, it was a time for intensified desiring, for two presents, not just one!

I learned to remind myself, don’t desire too specifically, keep it vague! So the fairy child in W.B. Yeats’s play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, sings sadly, “the lonely of heart is withered away.” For if desire is not understood, then it is not just “desire” which “withers away,” but “the heart” too.

And the deepest desires we have are to be understood, to be known and to know, to be loved and to love.

René Girard has explored how human desire is the basic drive we have in relating with others. But it isolates us also, because it confuses desire with envy. Desire is always reflection on desire, leading then to an aggravation of its own self-enveloped symptoms. It does not have the ability to reach out selflessly, but “it is founded on the double bind … so that desire gains nothing by getting to know itself better and better. On the contrary, the more this knowledge is extended and deepened, the more capable the subject becomes of causing his own unhappiness, since he carries to a further stage the consequences of the founding contradiction—the more he tightens the double bind.”16 Just as we can think in isolation, we can also desire so enviously. Thus envy is the dominating mask of desire. It distorts relationships into alienation. For then we see what others desire, and in mimesis we desire too. Then we are trapped into miming others, instead 10

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The Contemplation of God as the End of Loneliness For atheists like Sartre, self-definition implies “I am what I have.” 21 Thus to let go of “having,” as Jesus challenged the Rich Young Ruler to give up everything he possessed, threatens us with ultimate loneliness, of being “nothing.” This is death. But if “being” is not confusedly identified with “knowing” and “desiring,” then it changes our identity and relationships radically.

As James S. Dunne observes, “It is as though my own being is given me when I give away all I have, and so it is that I receive. I exchange ‘having’ for ‘being,’ and when I do, I come to understand abundant life.” 22 For what has changed are all one’s relationships, with oneself, wit h ot her people, a nd with the world. It is like the epiphany experience of Moses at the burning bush, when all the individual fears, inward inadequacy, and social timidity of Moses became enf lamed and radically transformed, in his divine encounter with the “I Am What I Am” (Ex. 3:14).

For at that point, Moses’s identity as “I am as I have or desire to be” was burnt up as ashes, in the presence of the “I Am” himself. Then as the apostle himself experienced too, “by the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect” (1 Cor. 15:10). It is significantly in the light of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that the apostle can affirm this as his own “burning bush” experience. For the death of the old “self” is certainly implied in

of relating with others by allowing them possession of their own desires.

D e si re, t hen, i s a laby r i nt h of pathways, with many blind alleys and dead ends, where we become isolated and stranded in bitterness and other negative emotions: the estranged members of a family, the broken marriage, the alienated single man or woman, the social failure, and many, many more human examples of pathos. Just as “thought” can become too intense without relationships, so too “desire” can be a destructive end in itself. The real purpose of desire is to cease from desiring, as the end of the journey is arrival at the destination. In his novel, Charles Williams narrates about a stone called The End of Desire, as like the philosopher’s stone of alchemy.

It provides the ability to fulfill whatever articulated wish its possessor desires.

The result is social chaos, for the stone turns everything into boundlessness. At the end of the story, only a simple man who is transformed by the courage of selfless action, and a devout woman who is willing to endure suffering, are “capable of receiving under those conditions the End of Desire.”17 As Bernard Shaw observed, “there are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.”18 We are frustrated when we don’t receive it, and then we are disappointed when we do. All these disappointments intensify our inner loneliness, for we cannot share envy without shame, and we cannot express unrealistic desires without folly.

Yet we can “let go” of possessive fantasies of loneliness, when we free ourselves from unrealistic reveries and false desires. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer experienced in the prison camp before he died, “we can have abundant life, even though many wishes remain unfulfilled.”19 For as Augustine expressed in his famous statement: “God made us for himself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in God.”20 That is to say, God is the end of both knowing and of desiring.

Just as we can think in isolation, we can also desire so enviously.

Thus envy is the dominating mask of desire.

It distorts relationships into alienation. For then we see what others desire, and in mimesis we desire too. Then we are trapped into miming others, instead of relating with others by allowing them possession of their own desires.

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Paul’s renunciation, as indeed in Moses’ encounter with Yahweh.

Ultimately, then, “loneliness” is a Godshaped vacuum within us, which only God can fill. As George MacDonald has noted, “In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God alone can enter.”23 Reflecting that inner chamber of the heart is the “new name” Christ’s presence gives to us, just as Simon became Peter, and as Saul became Paul. Then when we allow “Immanuel” to be always with us, loneliness is dissipated like morning mist in the rays of the sunshine of his love.

What replaces our inner loneliness is the awareness of divine recognition of our “uniqueness,” truly of being “called by name,” where “being” requires no other “knowing” or “having” than God’s own presence. God, then, is the end of desiring, as of knowing. For in “knowing as we are known,” the heart’s longing is fulfilled, desire is completed. God is now our most intimate knowing, our ultimate desire. For without God, desire is a cul-de-sac, or like a wager that always loses.

So our inner conviction that loneliness spells the sense of courting failure is a true one. Without the place of God within our lives, we are condemned to continuing loneliness.

Opening ourselves then to the mystery of God, letting his presence abide with us always, ruminating constantly in his Word, these attitudes move meditation into contemplation. It is the experience of receiving and exchanging God’s love, alone with the God Alone—alone in his holiness, yet never alone in his triune mystery of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So

then, I can never be alone in his abiding presence. Yet I can never experience more my own uniqueness than in his love—but now no longer alone.

Thus the psalmist exclaims to the Lord: “In thy presence is fullness of joy” (Ps. 6:11). Joy is the antidote to loneliness. For it experiences our emancipation from being self-grounded, to becoming “in Christ, a new creation.” It challenges the perversity of associating personal uniqueness with a life-sentence of aloneness. For joy is gift.

Joy is shared. Indeed, joy is the celebration of eternal life. It is expressive of the contemplative life we have with God, where I can exercise my longing desires to desire him alone. The popularity of great literature, as Elaine Scarry points out in her book Dreaming by the Book,24 is because we can identify with the characters of a story in such a way that we enter their world, are introduced into their fictional social relationships, and experience all they experience emotionally, so that at least momentarily we forget our own forms of loneliness. But reading about the narratives of biblical characters gives us so much more inspiration, since they lived under the reality of God’s abiding presence. Then all fiction evaporates before the presence of the love of God, to dwell securely and fully in his eternal friendship. What greater promise can we give our alienated world today than the pledge of Jesus to his disciples: “Lo I am with you always.”

What replaces our inner loneliness is the awareness of divine recognition of our “uniqueness,” truly of being “called by name,” where “being” requires no other “knowing” or “ having” than God’s own presence. God, then, is the end of desiring, as of knowing.

Endnotes 1 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1953).

2 Richard Stivers, Sh a des of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

3 Charles E. Moustakas, Loneliness and Love (Eaglewood Heights, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1972), 20.

4 James M. Houston, Letters of Faith through the Seasons (Colorado Springs: Cook Ministries International, 2007) 2:75–76.

5 James M. Houston, Joyous Exiles: Life in Christ on the Dangerous Edge of Things (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006).

6 S. Gordon, Lonely in America (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1976), 15.

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7 Shakespear, King Lear, 1i.92.

8 David Wildberm, Shakespeare’s “Nothing” in Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997).

9 Shakespear, King Lear, 1i.95–7.

10 Thomas Wolfe, The Hills Beyond (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941) 11.

11 Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81.

12 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Putnams/ Avon, 1994).

13 Shakespear, King Lear, 1iv.

14 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 476.

15 John Zizoulas, Being as Communion (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1985).

16 René Girard, Things Hidden from before the

Foundation of the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 298.

17 Charles Williams, Many Dimensions (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 198.

18 George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (London: Constable, 1930), 171.

19 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 234.

20 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions 1.i.

21 Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1966), 724.

22 James S. Dunne, “The Ways of Desire,” Cross Currents, Winter 1990.

23 C.S. Lewis, ed., George MacDonald: An Anthology (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), 28.

24 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999).

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Poetry

Balance Lance Odegard

You were standing in the bus aisle, trying to stay up as you found a few moments to read the Chinese translation of Why Mars & Venus Collide that you had checked out from the library, when I saw the tenderness of your hope and I wondered if he ever saw this, saw you swaying in the balance, trying to hold on.

Lance Odegard (MCS, Regent College) lives in East Vancouver with his wife, Aimee, raising their three kids, writing poems and stories, and pastoring with the Artisan community.

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“Title 1:27 and the Church’s Call to James author Mission and Morals Mariam Kamell

I

focus on the issue of moral purity and try to avoid any contact with anything “worldly,” thereby becoming isolated communities indifferent to the needs of our world. Lee Adams in Relevant Magazine describes youth ministry thus:

n 2006, the New York Times ran an article titled “Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers.”

It began, “Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.… Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be ‘Bible-believing Christians’ as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.”1 While many authorities rightly criticize the 4 percent statistic, evangelical churches are noticing a trend in which youth are leaving the church or denomination in which they were raised, as well as evangelicalism more broadly, upon leaving for college. Many feel that they no longer need the church, that the concerns of the evangelical church are irrelevant to the problems of the world, or that their faith is just more “real” outside of the church. While many classify themselves as “Christian,” they see no need to attend a church that is, they think, disconnected from the world they are inheriting.

One reason many in this younger generation feel disillusioned is what they perceive as the church’s social “irrelevance.” The indictments come freely: “conservative” churches appear to

The expectation for many student ministries [is to] train the students to be “good,” to avoid sin at all costs. Don’t have sex. Don’t use bad language. For God’s sake, don’t get tattoos. Many train their students to do nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to rock the boat. Many train them to do nothing, and frankly, they become quite good at it. They learn it from their parents, and unfortunately, they learn it from their youth pastors.2 His indictment is that by this concern with a specific type of moral purity, namely passive purity, the church is modeling to our youth that good Christians do nothing.

As these youth head into college and the working world, a “do-nothing” faith seems pointless and so they leave it behind.

On the other ha nd, ma ny more “liberal” churches have focused on issues of social justice to the neglect of purity, and young people look at these churches as mere social action clubs. They ask why they should attend church when there are plenty of other organizations that work toward social justice in their schools and in the world at large. Church, without following God’s command to “be holy as I am holy,” devolves into just another 15

Mariam Kamell is a postdoctoral fellow in New Testament studies at Regent College. She did her PhD at the University of St Andrews and her MA at Denver Seminary, where she was involved with the inner city church, The Scum of the Earth.

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people, whether across the world or across the city—to live one’s life with minimal possibilities of being personally disturbed. Personal peace means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the result will be in the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren.

Affluence means an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity—a life made up of things, things, and more things—a success judged by an ever-higher level of material abundance.4

club or social event no different from the world, even if their goals of helping society improve are admirable. Between these two extremes there are many good and healthy churches that seek to emphasize both moral purity and social justice.

Karl Barth understands the dichotomy of moral purity and social activism as a theological failure to understand the unity of justification and sanctification. This leads to two corresponding errors in practice : to the idea of a God who work s in isolation, and His “cheap grace” (D. B o n h o e f f e r), a nd t herefore a n i nd ole nt q u iet i s m, where the relationship o f ju s t i f ic at io n t o sanctification is neglected; and to that of a favoured man who work s in isolation, and therefore to an illu sor y activism, where the relationship of sanctification t o ju s t i f ic at io n i s fo r go t t e n.… W h at is faith without obedience? And conversely: What is l ib er at io n for new action which does not rest from the very outset and continually on the forgiveness of sins?3 Barth notes these same two tendencies described in the introduction, which he labels “indolent quietism” on the one hand and “illusory activism” on the other.

Francis Schaeffer, in How Should We Then Live, charges American culture as having adopted

It seems that in many ways the church in North America reflects the values of its culture, and as a result has lost both its concern for the widows and orphans as well as its “unstained-ness,” or moral purity.

James comments in 1:27, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”5 It seems that in many ways the church in North America reflects the values of its culture as described by Schaeffer, and as a result has lost both its concern for the widows and orphans as well as its “unstained-ness,” or moral purity. It is only by keeping both of these in tension that the evangelical church will regain its ability to speak into the world and transform our culture by overcoming the apathy of “personal peace” and the selfishness of affluence. Taking James’s twofold command seriously, I suggest, would help correct many of the problems within the church as a whole.

First, James lists caring for the “widows and orphans in their affliction” as essential to God’s will for his people. The concept of “widows and orphans” was a simple way to signify the helpless, the hopeless, those without resources. In a patriarchal society, a child without a father was considered an orphan, even if the mother still lived.

With no man to represent them, widows and orphans had limited access to the resources of their community. From early on we can see the concern for these groups in the church’s praxis, as described by the struggle to care for them fairly in Acts 6:1–7. Those in the social group that were more familiar (the Hebraic Jewish

impoverished values: personal peace and affluence. Personal peace means just to be let alone, not to be troubled by the troubles of other 16

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widows) received more of the resources than those in the group that were the less known (the Grecian Jewish widows). The church proactively responded to pleas for fairness and sought how best to distribute supplies equitably to all in its care. Thus, although the text had already stated that “they had everything in common,” the text continues with this special mention of the early church’s concern for the most helpless of their society.

Throughout the epistle of James there is likewise special concern for the poor, since issues of wealth and poverty form one of the three main themes of James.6 The concern begins most clearly in 1:9, though arguably poverty may be included among the “trials” of verse 2. In verses 9–11, James declares the transience of riches and the lofty position of the poor. Johnson notes that James does not use this passage for any sort of direct exhortation. Rather, this passage functions as “the stating of basic principles concerning the human condition before God,” 7 which, given James’s subsequent allusion to Isaiah 40:8, reminds us it is only God’s perspective that matters.

If God sees fit to honour the poor with an as yet unseen high position, having a godly perspective means holding this view within our current reality.

The discussion of favouritism in 2:1–7 argues against currying favour with the rich at the expense of the poor. James declares that God’s standard for judgment is different from our natural one when he states in 2:5: “has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?” The rhetoric implies that the readers already knew God’s standard and should have adopted it, but have failed. People from the two-thirds world challenge readings of this text that understand the term “poor” as referring to piety or humility rather than to financial poverty. For example, Maynard-Reid argues that “for [James] the rich are outside the sphere of salvation and faith.”8 Unlike Maynard-Reid, I do

not think God’s preferential option for the poor demands that no rich person could be saved, for James is discussing those who have become rich by oppression and injustice. Likewise, the poor who inherit the kingdom are qualified as “those who love” God.9 His challenge, however, that “we must read James rigorously without imposing contemporary concerns upon the book and its author,” is quite fair.10 James’s statement in 2:5 mandates that Christians honour the poor as God does, rather than follow the world’s lead and favour the wealthy, as already forbidden in 2:1.11 James’s reference to the command to “love your neighbour as yourself,” a command originating in Leviticus 19:18 and reissued

by Jesus, creates a legal and gospel norm for our actions.

In an interesting redaction of the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of the Nazaraeans adds to the story of the rich young ruler an explanation for Jesus’ command to the man to sell his possessions. The story runs: “[Jesus] said to him: Go and sell all that thou possessest and distribute it among the poor, and then come and follow me. But the rich man then began to scratch his head and it pleased him not. And the Lord said to him: How canst thou say, I have fulfilled the law and the prophets? For it stands written in the law: Love thy neighbour as thyself; and behold, many of thy brethren, sons of Abraham, are begrimed with dirt and die of hunger—and thy house is full of many good things and nothing at all comes forth from it to them!”12 While this shows the editor’s desire to explain an uncomfortable saying of Jesus, it also helps contextualize our understanding of the command “love your neighbour as yourself.” This command cannot be adequately fulfilled as long as there is economic disparity and the ones with means fail to address the problem. As the rich keep getting richer,13 Christian leaders and teachers have a responsibility to speak the prophetic message of the God who has a special concern for the poor, the message of social equity and responsibility 17

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in a culture that favours the rich. One aspect of staying “unstained from the world” includes intentionally not accepting the world’s preference for the wealthy and beautiful people, but living in accordance with God’s compassion for the poor.14 Hartin comments, “James shows that the religion of Jesus and of the prophets is one that puts concern for the poor at the heart of its message.”15 James concludes this pericope: “so speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty [or freedom].” To this, Johnson notes, “the law of freedom can liberate those who fulfill it but it also serves … as a solemn threat of eschatological w rath to those who transgress it.”16 This “law of f reedom” refer s to the Torah as moderated through the new covenant of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection,17 and provides the normative base for our actions, as in 1:22–25.

James makes it clear that this law is one of freedom for the one practising it, echoing the covenantal l aw s o f D eute r o no my where obedience promised life and freedom. James does not promote a postLut hera n concept of impossibly dema ndi ng works-righteousness, but rather, as he graphically depicts in 1:13–18, he views us as subject either to sin or to God. Sin’s law is death brought about by our own desires; God’s law is freedom brought about by our obedience.18 James does not seek to promote a negatively conceived “legalism,” for his use of nomos (“law”) refers to the law of God as revealed through Moses, the prophets, and Jesus himself, something now made internal and possible through the implanting of the word. To be subject

to God, in James’s thought-world, means covenanting obedience to his commands as revealed in Scripture and the Son. Contextually, James makes clear that an essential component of fulfilling this law of freedom is showing mercy to the poor. To this, James offers both a warning and a promise when he says, “For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment” (2:13). Martin warns that “the severity of this verse must not then be diminished,” since failure to show mercy indicates a dead faith useless for salvation.19 Both halves of 2:13, however, are important: the warning of stern judgment to any who fail to keep the law of love toward their neighbour, but also the promise of mercy triumphant to those who live out mercy according to the law of freedom. Linguistically, James leaves it open to question whether it is our acts of mercy, or God’s response of mercy to our actions, which triumphs over God’s strict justice. Perhaps that was intentional on the part of the author: our feeble acts of mercy bring about God’s greater response of mercy.20 This discussion of judgment and mercy leads into the debate of faith and works. In 2:14–26, the very first example of the dichotomy, or rather, the logical impossibility of any dichotomy between faith and works, is a failure to show practical mercy to a person in need. James illustrates clearly that mere words are useless to a person in need. Secondarily, he demonstrates that he views practical caring for the poor as an essential indication and outworking of a faith that saves.

Ultimately in 5:1–6 James enters a final prophetic diatribe against those who are wealthy but who live solely for themselves and their own pleasures and in the process create more pain for the poor under them.

His description, “you have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence,” censures those who feel they deserve and have a right to their own personal peace and affluence regardless of the cost to or the needs of others. This text also parallels

One aspect of staying “unstained from the world” includes intentionally not accepting the world’s preference for the wealthy and beautiful people, but living in accordance with God’s compassion for the poor.

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in our relationship with God, that taints us and makes our purity a mockery. Like a bride who wishes to claim her status as rightly married and yet also to hold on to other relationships, Christians who have accepted the world’s standard and goals for life are tainted and can no longer claim moral purity. A friend from seminary who pastors in rural Ohio commented,

the words of Jesus in the Gospel of the Nazaraeans.21 The point of 5:1–6 is most likely to encourage the helpless concerning God’s justice in this situation, but it paints a very ugly picture of what indifference to the plight of the poor looks like to God. Since we now read James as what Elsa Tamez calls an “intercepted” letter,22 in the West we bear the responsibility for communicating a text that calls for judgment on the very people who fit into James’s understanding of wealthy. It is an uncomfortable place to sit.

On the other hand, while it is not as obviously a dominant theme throughout the book, James also states that God desires moral purity from his people. He describes this as “keeping oneself unstained from the world” in 1:27. At first glance, this might well sound like justification for Christians to attempt to isolate themselves into communities formed solely of other Christians, but in truth, this is not how James defines being “unstained.” For one, he has already indicated a need for caring for the poor and helpless of society.

Moreover, according to his theology, what stains a person is to be “double-minded,” loving the world and then attempting to also follow God.23 It is the one who is rich but who does not boast “in his humiliation” (1:10), the one who is tempted and blames God for the temptation (1:13), the one who discriminates in favour of the wealthy (2:4), the one who envies and seeks to fulfill selfish ambition (3:14–16; 4:1–3), the one who lives in luxury and ignores the needs of the poor (5:1–6): these are the ones condemned throughout the book as having been “stained” by the world.

The passage that perhaps gives the clearest explanation of what it means to be actually stained by the world is 4:4–10.

In 4:4, James indicts his readers: “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” It is friendship with the world that causes us to be considered adulterers

[We] strive to live a simple life.…

It’s hard, especially in our community, which is marked by two very evident qualities: “churched” and “affluent.”

These two qualities have meshed into a way of life that, in our community, is never questioned. Second homes, huge fancy SUVs, lavish vacations to escape either the oppressive heat/ humidity of the summer, or the long, cold winters; all are considered completely sensible and appropriate uses of money.24

Like a bride who wishes to claim her status as rightly married and yet also to hold on to other relationships, Christians who have accepted the How is it that Christian world’s standard culture, at least in America, and goals for life has reached the point that my friend can observe that are tainted and “churched” and “aff luent” have utterly meshed and yet still claims to announce the can no longer claim message of the kingdom of moral purity.

God? Perhaps it is because t he church ha s adopted without question the values of our surrounding culture, values that Schaeffer called impoverished: making “personal peace” and “affluence” the signs of God’s favour. Over a century ago, Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist and clergyman, warned against this personal-comfort mentality, cautioning his audience to “watch lest prosperity destroy generosity.”25 This warning has proven remarkably apt for the American church, given various observations that Americans have failed to increase their percentage of charitable 19

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giving in any proportion to the growth of America’s gross national product.26 In light of our cultural syncretism, James’s call to repentance in 4:7–10 provides a fitting response to our failure both to maintain moral purity as differentiated from our culture and to truly honour the poor with God’s mercy.

Consistently throughout Scripture there are texts that counteract the prosperity gospel, but for the sake of our comfort we often neglect these dif ficult passages.

T hu s, even t ho u g h we may—in areas of sexuality or tattoos—look like we have maintained moral purity, in terms of one of the Bible’s most dominant themes— concern for the poor—we are stained. While James does indicate several other areas involved in moral purity, namely, controlling one’s tongue, not breaking the Torah in areas such as murder or adultery, not being selfish or self-serving, I have focused here on the ethics of social justice because it is both a major theme of James and one of the major indictments against the North American church by its youth. Moral purity cannot exist independently of an active concern for the poor; likewise, concern for the poor without attendant moral purity in other areas of corruption by the world does not satisfy God. The two must be held in balance in the church, and here balance means 100 percent of each; for when one or the other fades into the background, then we lose true religion as defined by the prophetic voice of James.

The world is in dire need of a church that takes this call to religion seriously.

Currently, youth who fill the so-titled

Emergent church indict the traditional church for failing to care for the needs of an ever-more-global culture.27 People in their twenties are reevaluating and questioning the traditions they were given by the church. For example, they were taught that morality was important but see that current divorce statistics within the church match those without, that desire for wealth appears as strong within the church as without, and that religious leaders are as tainted by scandals and lust for power as political ones. As a result, they reject the morality they were taught. They see the imbalance of a church that fought vehemently against abortion but failed to fight as vocally for AIDS orphans and against poverty not only in the rest of the world but also in our own country, cities, and slums. Because of such inconsistencies, they accuse the existing church, fairly or not, of failure to be God’s hands and feet to the world. Tragically, many also decide that Christianity itself must be the failure point. Of those that remain within the faith, many opt to start over within the Emergent movement, where social justice is in the forefront as an essential element of faith. The danger for the Emergent movement is in swinging the pendulum too far and failing to retain moral purity, thus still failing to attain to “true religion.”

The Emergent movement needs to be wary of falling into the trap that Schaeffer saw happen to previous movements seeking to change the American culture: “As the young people revolted against their parents, they came around in a big circle— and often ended an inch lower—with only the same two impoverished values: their own kind of personal peace and their own kind of affluence.”28 James’s message of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy needs to be heard in all branches of the church today. This is not an argument for a religion of social justice, because actions separated from the good news of the gospel are futile salvifically, but rather this is a call to return to the prophetic role of the church in the world as the outworkers of God’s vision of

Leaders of all levels in the church are responsible (see James 3:1) to help move believers beyond Barth’s dichotomy of “ indolent quietism” and “ illusory activism” into a process of true sanctification.

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feeding the poor, housing the homeless, visiting the sick, clothing the naked. There are many organizations within the broader community of faith working toward these goals, and perhaps part of the role of evangelical leaders may be to make them more accessible, emphasizing the issues they deal with and encouraging people to put their faith into action by working alongside these organizations. Even better would be if the church itself made these organizations redundant! Leaders of all levels in the church are responsible (see James 3:1) to help move believers beyond Barth’s dichotomy of “indolent quietism” and “illusory activism” into a process of true sanctification.

However we go about embodying the message of James, the church in North America must recognize that the influence of the world has made its way into the church, leading us to prize our comfort above the uncomfortable message that “the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower” (James 1:10). The church as a whole needs to remember that in God’s eyes, moral purity does not exist apart from a deep and practical concern for the poor, and conversely that, apart from a holy life, social justice corrupts into futile works. Where we have allowed the moral stain of greed into our churches and personal lives, where we have accepted the world’s values as our own, we must repent.

The God who by his grace gave birth to his people by the word of truth, and whose mercy triumphs over judgment, requires of his people an active purity paired with an active mercy. Through this mission, the church, whether evangelical, Emergent, or of any denomination, provides purpose and hope to disillusioned Christians and non-Christians of all ages, causing the light of God’s grace and mercy to pour through the church to the needy world. As Mayor said in his influential commentary over one hundred years ago, “The only religion which is of value in the sight of God is that which influences the whole

life and activity (i. 27. 4, 22–25, ii. 12–26, iii. 13, 17, iv. 11, 17). Faith, love, wisdom, religion—all alike are spurious if they fail to produce the fruit of good works.”29 Truly, if faith without works is dead, so also is the church.

Endnotes 1 Laurie Goodstein, “Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers,” The New York Times, October 6, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/ 06/ us/06evangelical.html?ex=1161144000&en=1fdb6bd beacdecc9&ei= 5070.

2 Lee Adams, “The Art of True Rebellion,” Relevant, http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/ church/features/2433-the-art-of-true-rebellion.

3 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Part 2, eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 505.

4 Francis Schaeffer, How Then Shall We Live, in The Complete Works of Francis A Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, vol. 5, A Christian View of the West, 2nd ed. (Winchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1990), 211.

5 All Scripture references are from the ESV. David J. Roberts (“The Definition of ‘Pure Religion’ in James 1:27,” ExpT 83 [1972]: 215–16) argued nearly thirty years ago that this verse made no sense in relation to James’s concern for practical piety, based on a misunderstanding of James’s expression “keep oneself unstained by the world.” He argues, “Keeping oneself from the world would, it seems, prevent the Christian from putting his faith into action” (216), and thus advocates a variant reading which urges the reader “to visit orphans and widows and to protect them in their affliction from the world” (215). He was quickly and ably refuted by Bruce C. Johanson (“The Definition of ‘Pure Religion’ in James 1:27 Reconsidered,” ExpT 84 [1973]: 118–19), who notes that “it is one of the characteristic marks of early Christian paraenesis to exhort to both good works and a pure disposition of personal piety” (118).

Darien Lockett (“‘Unstained by the World’: Purity and Pollution as an Indicator of Cultural Interaction in the Letter of James,” in Reading James with New Eyes, ed. Robert L. Webb and John S. Kloppenborg [London: T&T Clark, 2007], 49–74) continues the defense for the importance of moral purity to James.

6 Peter H. Davids, The Epistle of James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 29; Ralph P. Martin, James (Waco: Word, 1988), lxxxiv; Franz Mußner, Der Jakobusbrief (Freiburg: Herder, 1975), 80; Douglas J. Moo, James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 35.

7 Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 191 (original emphasis).

8 Pedrito U. Maynard-Reid, Poverty and Wealth in James (reprint; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 63.

9 See Moo, James, 107.

10 Maynard-Reid, Poverty and Wealth, 63.

11 It seems reasonable to distinguish between 21

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James 1:27 and the Church’s Call to Mission and Morals

honouring and favouring, for the latter is not encouraged either toward the wealthy or the poor since chapter 2 starts out by explicitly stating “do not hold the faith … in favoritism.” While the subsequent example shows favouritism toward the wealthy, perhaps that is because favouritism generally goes that way, but James might well condemn scholars like Maynard-Reid who go to the other extreme.

Leviticus 19:15 clearly forbids partiality to the poor or the great. See Luke Timothy Johnson, Brother of Jesus, Friend of God (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2004), 132.

12 Origen, Com. on Mt. 15.14 on 19:16ff. in the Latin rendering, in Craig A. Evans, “Images of Christ in the Canonical and Apocryphal Gospels,” in Images of Christ: Ancient and Modern, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 34–72.

13 Luisa Kroll and Allison Fass, “Billionaire Bacchanalia,” Forbes.com, March 27, 2006, http:// www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0327/111.html.

They comment: “In its inaugural ranking of the world’s richest people 20 years ago FORBES uncovered some 140 billionaires. Just three years ago we found 476. This year the list is a record 793, up 102 from last year. They’re worth a combined $2.6 trillion, up 18% since last March. Their average net worth: $3.3 billion.” Today Forbes breaks their rankings into categories like “America’s Richest Billionaires,” “Europe’s Richest,” “Youngest Billionaires,” and “Eligible Billionaires” because it is not practical to list them all in one document (see http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/10/worlds-richestpeople-slim-gates-buffett-billionaires-2010_land. html?partner=popstories).

14 Mark Proctor (“Faith, Works, and the Christian Religion in James 2:14–26,” EvQ 69 [1997]: 307) likewise draws a link between moral purity and social concern. “James argues throughout his letter that the Christian faith should express itself through charitable acts of hospitality.… For James, the Christian lifestyle should be one that aims at ameliorating social pain and marginality: to be holy is to be hospitable, to be pious is to be pragmatic.” In relation to the laws of Deuteronomy, Peter T. Vogt (“Social Justice and the Vision of Deuteronomy,” JETS 51 [2008]: 44) observes that “there is a profound theological motivation for that ‘humanitarian’ concern, as care for the marginalized groups and the poor is established as an important measure of how the people of Israel were doing at being the people of Yahweh.”

15 Patrick J. Hartin, A Spirituality of Perfection: Faith in Action in the Letter of James (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1999), 159.

16 Martin, James, 71.

17 Moo, James, 32; Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (London: Routledge, 1999), 141.

18 This contrast appears also in the two wisdoms of 3:13–18.

19 Martin, James, 72.

20 This is most likely an allusion to Matt. 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” See also Matt. 18:4.

21 See also Evans, “Images,” 67.

22 Elsa Tamez, The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works is Dead (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 2–7.

23 Did. 4:3–4 links favouritism (lépsé prosópon) to being double-minded (dipsycheis), potentially within the context of a legal setting. Audet, quoted in Niederwimmer, believes this to be “the situation of a judge who, in the presence of the parties, begins to weigh the consequence that his judgment will have for himself” (Kurt Niederwimmer, The Didache: A Commentary [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998], 107n40). Again the desire to show favouritism to the wealthy for financial gain is condemned.

24 Drew Moser, http://drewmoser.blogspot. com/2006/10/thoughts-on-simplicity.html. Compare this accepted lifestyle with C.S. Lewis, who argued for a generosity that is unreasonable on worldly grounds. “I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996], 82).

25 In Bob Kelly, Worth Repeating: 5000 Classic and Contemporary Quotes (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2003), 287.

26 See, e.g., Ron Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2005). In line with the concerns of this article, he commented in an interview in Christianity Today: “The heart of the matter is the scandalous failure to live what we preach. The tragedy is that poll after poll by Gallup and Barna show that evangelicals live just like the world. Contrast that with what the New Testament says about what happens when people come to living faith in Christ. There’s supposed to be radical transformation in the power of the Holy Spirit. The disconnect between our biblical beliefs and our practice is just, I think, heart-rending” (Ron Sider, “The Evangelical Scandal,” interview with Stan Guthrie, Christianity Today, April 13, 2005, http://www.ctlibrary.com/ct/2005/april/32.70.html).

27 Because “Emergent” has become a charged term, it is here used in the sense outlined by the Emergent Village at http://www.emergentvillage. com as a community of Christians who seek to understand the church in a communal and missional way while “affirming the historic Christian faith.”

28 Schaeffer, How Then Should We Live, 215.

29 J.B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James, 2nd ed.

(London: Macmillan, 1897), cvii.

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Poetry

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The Acacia Wood: Ethiopia, 1983 Sarah Crowley Chestnut “And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked …” (Exodus 3:2)

He went before his brothers as scout. Sat below thorntrees to watch and wait. Took station in the bush to track boar— and other such bow-worthy prey. Years later he learns that like Moses, he went to the acacias to learn how to pray.

The fire of life, he recalls, that snapped in the tree, breathing a teeming presence like the sun rising hot from her ancient knees: unnamable insects emerging from leaves, branches birthing birds he’d never yet seen.

And the chameleon that came at the end of the day came naked in bright vermilion, swayed, spun a reel, turned on a leaf, raised a scaly praise with her scaly feet. He sat with his eyes on the tip of his tongue, his hush rose heavy a heavenward hum— smoking beats of his own silent song.

Sarah Crowley Chestnut (MCS, Regent College) lives in East Vancouver with her husband, Joshua, and their son, Jacob. She is attempting to simultaneously tackle the learning curves of new motherhood, sourdough bread baking, and the ways of Italian cooking. She blogs about the latter, a practice she hopes will not only hone her skills in the kitchen, but also her way with words ... and maybe even lead to the penning of future poems.

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Nails “Titlein the Soles of My Shoes: author Art of Flamenco Dance The as Gift Constance Chan

Constance Chan (MCS, Regent College) works on staff at Regent and loves living in the intersection between Regent, her church, and her flamenco dance community in Vancouver.

She is sad but thrilled to be moving to Spain in September to serve at Aslan Performing Arts Center in Madrid.

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Constance Chan’s Integrative Project in the Arts and Theology, completed in the summer of 2010.

A

rt is a “gift.”1 It is a gift among t he ot her g i f t s o f c r e at ion from our Creator God. Eastern Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann articulates this well:

The reading lists compiled by Begbie for the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St Andrew’s, for instance, do not mention any books that focus on theological understandings of dance.4 Consider also the Christian journal Image, “a literary and arts quarterly” with an emphasis on “outstanding fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, interviews, … dance, writing and visual arts”5: it has published only three articles on dance since its inception in 1989.6 This does not mean that Christian scholarship on dance per se is scarce. Much has been written about the use of dance— specifically liturgical dance—in the church. The Music and Dance of the World’s Religions: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Materials in the English Language lists sixty entries pertaining to Christian liturgical dance.7 This liturgical dance can be defined as “a religious or sacred dance, employing movement, attitude, and shaping that may be used in Christian services”8 that serves the worship of the church “by bridging the visible and the invisible world of the spirit.”9 The dearth of scholarship discussing theological understandings of dance is not in any way surprising. As noted by dancertheologian Sara B. Savage, “although dance in the Church has continued to appear at grass-roots level at various points throughout the centuries, there have been repeated clamp-downs on dance in worship since the time of the early Church Fathers.”10 Such an “antipathy [of the

All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God…. God blesses everything He creates, and in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”2

Dance, sculpture, music, and poetry are thus all artistic gifts given by God for his people saved “from the corruption and decay of the way of the world presently,” not only to be “a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos … but to be part of the means by which God makes [the renewal of all creation] happen in both the present and the future.”3 As 1 Corinthians 12 reminds us, the same Holy Spirit allots uniquely to different members in the body of Christ from the varieties of gifts—as the Spirit chooses. Gifts are distinctive in how they each contribute to the body of Christ, and there is to be no disparagement of any gift. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Cor. 12:21 RSV).

However, the church does not seem to know how to think about the gift of dance.

Little is written on the theology of dance.

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rightful response to his gifts would be that of opening our hands to receive. What does it mean then, to see dance as a gift from God and to receive from it? Can we receive anything of worth from dance? In this article, I would like to share, based on my own experiences with and reflections on the particular dance of flamenco, what one can and does receive from this gift.

Alt hough f la menco hails from Andalusia in southern Spain, it is not of Spanish or Andalusian folk origins.14 Instead, it is closely identified with the nomadic g y psies who developed, if not created, f lamenco out of the base materials of a complex Andalusian mu sical cult ure — rich with divergent Moorish, Jewish, and Mozarabic folk influences.15 Employing song (cante), dance (baile), guitar (toque), and rhythm (jaleo), with cante as “centerpiece,”16 this is “an art that evolved as the music of outcasts, of people harassed by the law or hounded by the Spanish I n q u i s it i o n a n d l iv i n g outside the pale of society.”

It is, therefore, “primarily a tragic expression of the human condition,” or else, “by reaction, festive.”17 Flamenco dance evidences itself as a gift in two main ways. First, flamenco can be spiritually formative, a gift that encourages the people of God to live more embodied, fuller human lives maturing into the fullness of Christ. Second, flamenco is a gift to the people of God in its prophetic dimensions.

Church]… towards movement and dance ” was not Christian but derived from Greek dualistic conceptions of the “materiality” of the human body as distinct, problematic, a nd inferior to the soul.11 Scholar Celeste Schroeder agrees, explaining that “because the church predominantly has felt uncomfortable with the body, to encourage interest in dance as an art form and to establish a comfortable relationship between dance and the Christian faith has been difficult.”12 What is surprising, however, is the contrast between the lack of Christian scholarship on the theology of dance and the substantial volume of writings on liturgical dance. It seems premature to be prescribing ways of using dance in worship and evangelism when we are not too sure how to think of dance Christianly. I wonder if this is indicative of a Christian tendency toward devaluation of the human body, causing us to attend less to what the phenomenon of a dancing human body really is and focus instead on what we can make the human body mean to us, or how we can control and use its movement in dance. In our haste to discuss Christian usages of dance, are we ironically treating dance less as a gift from our Creator God and more as a neutral, malleable commodity that can be used to satisfy good or bad desires?

C.S. Lewis once recommended, when we approach any work of art,

What is surprising is the contrast between the lack of Christian scholarship on the theology of dance and the substantial volume of writings on liturgical dance. I wonder if this is indicative of a Christian tendency toward devaluation of the human body…

we must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there.

We sit down before the picture [or the dance] in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive.

Get yourself out of the way.13 A gift entails both a giving and a response to the giving. Since we affirm the goodness of the creation gifts God has made and blessed humanity with, the

Flamenco as Spiritual Formation Sara Savage reminds us that humans learn and mature not only through verbal 25

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resource in the Christian conversion process in which Christians “come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, … to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13 RSV).

In the flamenco classroom, the joy I receive regularly—not from doing anything arduous for God at all, but from the very movement of my limbs to music in dance—is sensitizing me to my Creator’s delight in me, his creation. In this delight, I am starting to believe an important truth about this God I profess to trust. The three-in-one God of the Bible is the God who, though sufficient in himself, cries out, hurt by his people Israel’s rejection: “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?” Here, Hosea 11:8 (NIV) speaks of God’s passionate love for us. He loves us and wants us to love him back. God does not just “love” me in a disinterested manner or tolerate me benevolently because he is God and bound by his loving, merciful, and longsuffering nature to do so! No, receiving the unearned grace of joy through flamenco dancing is regularly training my mind to grasp as my body feels the mysterious truth that God likes me.

propositions that are communicated to them, but also through “person knowledge”—the type of knowledge we have of other persons, the kind of knowledge infants first acquire of the world through movements of “bodily interaction[s]” with other human beings.18 In making us more aware of and attentive to our bodies, “dance can … confer upon us more of ourselves with which to resource [the ‘person’] knowledge of the Son who has become incarnate.”19 Knowing God entails the gaining of such person knowledge of Christ, as theologian Karl Barth helps us understand.

God’s independence, omnipotence, and eternity, God’s holiness and justice and thus God’s deity, in its original and proper form, is the power leading to [the] effective and visible sequence in the existence of Jesus Christ: superiority preceding subordination. Thus we have here no universal deity capable of being reached conceptually, but this concrete deity—real and recognizable in the descent grounded in that sequence and peculiar to the existence of Jesus Christ …. When we look at Jesus Christ … we know decisively that God’s deity does not exclude, but includes His humanity …. [In fact] his deity encloses humanity in itself.20

The Prophetic in Flamenco Flamenco dance can be prophetic in at least two ways. The body is the “canvas” for art-making in flamenco and in all other dance forms. This common characteristic of dance draws our attention to the human body, acting as a prophetic corrective to the myriad wrong ways of perceiving the human body today. Secondly, specific to flamenco, in its imitation of life, flamenco can be prophetic, teaching us to love the particularities of real human bodies, while confronting us squarely with the existence of pain and suffering in this fallen world of ours.

This humanity “enclosed” in God’s deity is the particular life of the God-man Jesus Christ who lived at a particular time in history. To know God, then, is not just to know of God through propositions, but rather to gain person knowledge of the particular God-man Jesus Christ— to experience his very presence, his love, and his ways mediated to us even today through the Holy Spirit.

Dance, in drawing our attention to our body parts, our movements, our emotions in the present moment of movement, makes us more receptive to gaining more person knowledge of Christ. Dance is thus a valuable

The Prophetic Corrective to How We See the Body Flamenco shares in common with other dance arts the use of “human movement” as the “one necessary condition of dance.”21 26

Nails in the Soles of My Shoes: The Art of Flamenco Dance as Gift

Dance is thus valuable as an artistic gift that “awaken[s] … our kinesthetic sense in a moment of time,” a kinesthetic sense that can refer both to “the dancer’s inner body-awareness of movement, particularly in relation to space, energy, and size of movement,” 22 as well as the audience’s neuromuscular “identification” with the “leaps, turns, lifts, dives to the floor and stillnesses of performing dancers.”23 In viewing a dance, or in our own actual dancing, we are therefore following C.S. Lewis’s use of Samuel Alexander’s philosophical terminology, “contemplating” or “attending to” the human body and its movements, instead of merely “enjoying” or experiencing these actions.24 This is unlike many non-dance human activities that we engage in daily. We do not, for example, heed how our limbs traverse space and make contact with the ground when we are walking to a bus stop. Instead, the object of our attention in such walking is, possibly, the ground we walk upon and the things around us; or we might be thinking of matters totally unrelated to the walk—a conversation with a friend, plans for the evening—the possibilities are endless. In enabling us to look with fresh eyes at human movements that are often taken for granted— unheeded unless disabilities or pains force us to pay attention—dance is therefore a gift, allowing not only a mental reflection on human bodies as a medical student might study anatomy, but also a somatic contemplation of specific bodies in a specific time and space.25 When I am dancing flamenco, I am focused on the very movements I am doing at that moment in time. I am thinking and sensing when and how my feet are executing even the smallest movements—the hitting of the back of a heel or the slapping of the front of my foot against the floor. I am also willing myself to move in the right way, in precision to the rhythm of the guitar music. This contemplation provokes awe at the endless patterns of footwork made possible with just the use of two feet, with

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toes in front, rounded by heels at the back!

As I dance, I also feel the tiny muscle in my underarm. I am thankful for this small part of my physique that enables me to keep my elbows up in the right flamenco arm postures. It is dance that shows me there is value in even the unassuming parts of my body that are hardly noticed in everyday life.

The contemplation of the dancing body does not only provoke an appreciation of the body as verbalized after-thoughts. Rather, I ex p er ienc e a del ig ht— difficult to rationalize, even as I move my limbs. In the weeks leading up to my dance school’s last production, all the students practised the same choreographies over and over again. There were days when I was extremely tired, and the notion of running through a physically demanding choreography yet again was not at all appealing. Yet there was a n odd satisfaction a nd delight experienced when I started to dance through a c h o r e o g r a p hy a g a i n .

There seems to be a joy in embodiment that cannot be equaled when I only “mark out” steps to conserve energy or execute the dance in my mind. This helps me understand American modern dance icon Martha Graham’s comments about the ef fects of prolonged dance training.

In viewing a dance, or in our own actual dancing, we are therefore following C.S. Lewis’s use of Samuel Alexander’s philosophical terminology, “contemplating” or “attending to” the human body and its movements, instead of merely “enjoying” or experiencing these actions.

You will know the wonders of the human body, because there is nothing more wonderful. The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to your head; look at the way the hairline 27

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grows; think of the little bones in your wrist; think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It’s a miracle. And the dance in all those areas is a celebration of that miracle.26

Tertullian goes even further to say that “the flesh is the hinge of salvation” (Caro Cardo Salutis).30 God presented salvation through the physical crucifixion of the God-man Jesus Christ. Furthermore, “no soul whatever is able to obtain salvation, unless it has believed while it was in the flesh”; and the soul also “fatten[s] on God” through the reception of physical sacraments—“the flesh feed[ing] on the Body and Blood of Christ.”31 I might seem to be belabouring the point here, but the goodness of the human body cannot be stressed less.

As Eugene Peterson reminds us, the “great danger … which people who live by faith are especially prone” is not so much that “we will reduce everything to matter, eliminating spirit,” but that “we will shortchange matter and indulge ourselves in an immaterial world of idea and fantasy.”32 The lingering dualistic attitudes toward the human body in the church, as mentioned earlier, suggest that Peterson’s concern is not ungrounded.

The church needs to keep at bay Gnostic, dualistic heresies about matter that distort how we view God’s creation and that also impede a rightful understanding of the incarnation of Christ, his bodily resurrection, and, following Christ, our own eschatological resurrection in altered bodies of “incorruptible physicality.”33 The goodness of the human body must also be maintained and declared, not only against insidious Gnosticism in the church, but also vis-à-vis a hypersexualized gaze on the human body.

In discussing his filmmaking, feminist director and film scholar Peter Gidal opined in 1980 that he “[did] not see how there [was] any possibility of using the image of a naked woman … other than in an absolutely sexist and politically repressive patriarchal way,” due to the difficulty of “separat[ing]” such images “from [their] dominant meanings.” 34 These “preexisting meanings,” as cultural sociologist Wolff spells out, arise from voyeuristic perceptions of the female

The church needs to keep at bay Gnostic, dualistic heresies about matter that distort how we view God’s creation and that also impede a rightful understanding of the incarnation of Christ, his bodily resurrection, and, following Christ, our own eschatological resurrection in altered bodies of “incorruptible physicality.”

Indeed, dance can remind us and teach us to rejoice in the important Christian truth that God creates humans with physical bodies that are good.

As Pope John Paul II remarked in his discussion of the first Genesis creation account, the goodness of creation was noted “in the cycle of nearly all the days of creation a nd reaches its culmination after the creation of man: ‘God saw ever yt hing t hat he had made, and behold it was very good’ (Gen. 1:31).” 27 John Paul II’s conclusion was thus the “certainty that the first chapter of Genesis … established an unassailable point of reference and a solid basis for a metaphysic and also for an anthropology and an ethic, according to which ens et bonum convertuntur [being and the good are convertible].”28 Since what is created, including the human body, is good, we now await, in the aftermath of the Fall and the victorious c o m plet io n o f C h r i s t ’s salvific work on the cross, not the discarding of bodies, b ut t hei r “re demption” (Rom. 8:23).

Further, in the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us as Jesus Christ (John 1:14), we also receive affirmation of the goodness of human bodies that “God uses … and delights in doing so.”29 28

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of the body,” 40 but a condemnation of lust in the human heart, which, Christ highlights, is connected to the sense of sight.41 For the Christian, then, it is not the body that is problematic but this eroticized perspective, often unquestioned in mainstream society, of the body as first and foremost an object designed to seek and offer genital sexual intimacy and satisfaction.

Both the Neoplatonic distrust of the body sometimes seen in the church and the hypersexualized conception of t he body expressed in diverse ways in mainstream society are reductionist, seeing the body as “less than” what God created human bodies to be. Dance, in allowing us to contemplate the goodness of human physicality, can serve as the two touches we need from Jesus to see human bodies rightly and not as “trees walking around!” (See Mk. 8:23–25.)

body “as sex object, as object of the male gaze.”35 These dominant, hypersexualized ways of understanding the female human body might be what philosopher Antonio Gramsci called hegemonic, but they are certainly not the only ways of seeing the female body and are at odds to an outlook that is baptized, transformed by Christ and aligned to the Christian story.

While feminist critique has raised social awareness and resistance to this male gaze in recent decades, it is the underpinning anthropological assumption generating such a hypersexualized gaze that Christians must reject. This is the assumption that humans are characterized first and foremost by lust and hence “naturally” react to everything they perceive with lust. John Paul II attributed such an assumption to the influence of Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion”36 —Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche—who went beyond “judg[ing] and accus[ing] [the human] heart of what corresponded in biblical terms to “the pride of life” (Nietzsche), “ the lust of the eyes” (Marx), and “the lust of the flesh” (Freud)” to subjecting the heart to “a state of continual suspicion.”37 Referring to Christ’s words in Matthew 5:27–28, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” John Paul II explained that Christ judged the heart but also “appeal[ed]” to it.38 In Christ’s words then, we see that “lust … does not constitute the fundamental and perhaps even unique criterion of anthropology and ethics” or “the very core of hermeneutics of man … although … [this is] certainly an important coefficient to understand[ing] man, his actions, and their moral values.”39 The hypersexualized voyeuristic gaze should not thus be assumed to be the natural way of perceiving human bodies, but a deviation from the norm.

Fu r t her, Joh n Pau l II help s u s understand that Christ’s judgment in Matthew 5:27–28 is not a “condemnation

The hypersexualized voyeuristic gaze should not be assumed to be the natural way of perceiving human bodies, but a deviation from the norm.

The Prophetic “Excess” in the Flamenco Imitation of Life Flamenco is also prophetic in a second way. Dance, as dancer and researcher Susan Kozel highlights, has mimetic potential. She explains, the “logic of the body unfolding in dance theater is that of analogy, or, to use a richer word, mimesis.” This “mimesis” is not merely the “identical reproduction or simple imitation” where art imitates life, but there is also “always a moment of excess or a remainder in the mimetic process, something that makes the mimicr y different from that which inspires it, and which transforms the associated social and aesthetic space[,] … a distortion [that] is inherently physical, affecting the situation of bodies in time and space.”42 Similarly, flamenco produces an excess in its mimesis of life that prophetically challenges how 29

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I see and interact with other real human beings in this real world.

To start, flamenco rejects what Wolff describes as the “[d]ominant [Western] ideals of the ‘perfect body’” that ignore the reality of human beings with “diversities of shape and size” and “the functions of corporeal existence (eating, excreting … aging, illness).” 43 Flamenco instead presents and honours dancing bodies of all sizes and ages, not just balletic “youths in top condition with willowy, asexual physiques.” 44 Andalusian poet and flamenco aficionado Federico García Lorca once enthused about the dancing of “an eighty-year-old woman [who] won first prize at a dance contest,” although “she was competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists supple as water. … All she did was raise her arms, throw back her head, and stamp her foot on the floor.”45 We also see in Carlos Saura’s flamenco film El Amor Brujo (1986) a striking scene during the wedding of Candela and José where five or six elderly women, wrinkled, of ample frames, danced f lamenco with minimal movements— harmoniously, joyously, and with spirit. In watching f lamenco, one lear ns to love and affirm the particularities of real, human bodies—in their various shapes, sizes, and ages.46 Further, the female flamenco dancers might even, at times, resemble the socially subversive “female grotesques at carnival[s],” the “unruly women in popular uprisings in seventeenth-century England,” or the “women hysterics” in their display of excited energy.47 Flamenco is a dance that encourages—in fact prizes— the authentic expression of deep anguish and even hysteria. D.E. Pohren states that “profound or deep flamenco (jondo or grande flamenco)” is the “deep-rooted

base” of the art and, in Pohren’s rather blunt fashion, “the means by which a manic-depressive society expresses its black moods.”48 Truly excellent jondo flamenco baile, cante, and toque requires the “elusive duende”49—an artistic ideal that refers to a “power,” “a struggle, not a thought”50 that, according to Lorca, involves four elements: “irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.”51 Lorca offers a portrait of a singer seized with duende: As though crazy, torn like a medieval mourner, La Niña de los Peines leaped to her feet, tossed off a big glass of burning liquor and began to sing with a scorched throat: without voice, without breath or color, but with duende. … [It] made the listeners rip their clothes. … And how she sang! Her voice was … a jet of blood worthy of her pain and sincerity, and it opened like a ten-fingered hand around the nailed but stormy feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni.52

In watching flamenco, one learns to love and affirm the particularities of real, human bodies—in their various shapes, sizes, and ages.

In jondo flamenco in particular, the expression of authentic pain that speaks to the audience and draws the audience into the pain is certainly valued. The expression of pain is sought in the artistry of flamenco, over and above other possible aesthetic values, such as symmetry, harmony, pleasing bodily poses and arrangements, the effective communication of a specific story or message through a dance, and so on. The visual presentation of flamenco is thus not necessarily pretty or graceful, but can instead be seen as “ecstatic”53 or even violent and hysterical.

Flamenco can then “render visible the suppressed” in society,54 asking of us hard questions. Why are overtly suffering bodies not seen more often on stage or even in the theatre of life? Why are we so uncomfortable with pain? Flamenco indicts society’s attempts to hide evident signs of weaknesses and gloss over the tragic in life arising as consequences of sinful action on the earth, post-Fall.

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been a real blessing to me over the last two years. In receiving this gift, I feel I am no longer the same person who took that first flamenco dance class. The gift has mediated Christ’s grace to me. It has and is continuing to transform me. Soli Deo Gloria.

This past year I had the chance to learn two choreographies in the jondo flamenco forms, the solea and the seguirilla.

In needing to convey the tragic in a mimesis of life through these flamenco forms, these dance practices have given me an opening through which I can “practice solidarity,” as I dance flamenco, with the persecuted Jews, Arabs, and Gypsies who have profoundly shaped the art of flamenco. Each flamenco dance practice offers me the chance to remember and to weep with these initial flamenco artists, many of whom were often “condemned to serve in the galleys, in chain gangs, and in the Spanish army in America, were prohibited to talk their own language, … suffered the death penalty, often by torture, for just belonging to a wandering or outlawed band [of people].”55 In dancing flamenco, I mourn too, that Christians in the past have mistreated gypsies, rejecting them as the “cursed descendants of Cain, condemned to wander the world.”56 This challenges me to consider the rejected in the society I live in today, bringing to mind my friends at my Vancouver church, Mosaic, many of whom have no homes, struggle with addictions of various kinds and mental disabilities, and are burdened by scars of past trauma.

Through flamenco, I feel the privilege of being able, even in a little way, to emulate my Lord Jesus Christ in his identification with those who suffered. After all, Christ willingly became human and subjected himself to homelessness, accusations of lunacy, and rejection from friends and family; he suffered finally the physical torture of crucifixion, in order that he may identify with those who suffer in these ways.

Flamenco is thus sensitizing me not to avert my eyes from the marginalized in society and their oft-hidden suffering. Flamenco also speaks to me the truth about God’s heart for the weak. “He will take pity on the weak and the needy and save the needy from death” (Ps. 72:13 NIV).

The gift of flamenco in its spiritually formative and its prophetic aspects has

Endnotes 1 Andy Crouch, “The Gospel: How Is Art a Gift, a Calling and an Obedience? ” in For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, ed. W. David O. Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010), 29.

2 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments an d Orthodoxy (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 14.

3 N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hop e: Ret h in k ing He ave n, t h e Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 30.

4 Jeremy S. Begbie, “Theology/ Arts reading lists,” Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts, http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/ itia/reading/arts.html.

5 Image (Center for Religious Humanism), “IMAGE Journal: A Quarterly Like No Other,” http:// imagejournal.org/page/journal/.

6 Ibid., “Contributors Index,” http://imagejournal.org / page /jour nal/contributors / contributors%5B@ ContributorsCategories:dance%5D. Compare this to the thirteen articles published in Image on the much younger art genre of film.

7 Ezra Gardner Rust, The Music and Dance of the World’s Religions: A Comp reh en sive Annot at ed Bibliog raphy of Materials in the English Language (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 213–221.

8 Thomas A. Kane, “Celebrating Pentecost in Leauva’a: Worship, Symbols, and Dance in Samoa,” in Christian Worship Worldwide: Expanding Horizons, Deepening Practices, ed. Charles E. Farhadian (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 164.

9 Ibid., “Liturgical Dance,” The Dancing C h u r c h A r o u n d t h e Wo r l d , h t t p : / / w w w. thedancingchurch.com/index.html.

10 Sara B. Savage, “Through Dance: Fully Human, Fully Alive,” in Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts, ed. Jeremy S. Begbie (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000), 68–69.

11 Ibid., 68.

12 Celeste Snowber Schroeder, “Movement:

Why are we so uncomfortable with pain?

Flamenco indicts society’s attempts to hide evident signs of weaknesses and gloss over the tragic in life arising as consequences of sinful action on the earth, post-Fall.

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The Language of Dance,” in God Through the Looking Glass: Glimpses From the Art, ed. William David Spencer and Aida Besançon Spencer (Grand Rapid, MI: Baker Books: 1998), 118.

13 C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 19.

14 Robin Totton, Song of the Outcasts: An Introduction to Flamenco (Portland: Amadeus Press, 2003), 14.

15 Marion Papenbrok, “History of Flamenco,” in Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, ed. Claus Schreiner, trans. Mollie Comerford Peters (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1990), 40.

16 Claus Schreiner, “Introduction,” in Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, 24.

17 Totton, Outcasts, 26.

18 Savage, “Through Dance,” 66.

19 Ibid., 67 (original italics).

20 Karl Barth, “Essay Two: The Humanity of God,” in The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas (Atlanta: C. D. Deans, 1960), 48–50 (my italics).

21 Julie Charlotte Van Camp, “Philosophical Problems of Dance Criticism” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1981), 30.

22 Schroeder, “Movement,” 117.

23 Judith Rock, “Dance, The Heart of the Matter,” subsection in “Symposium: Redeeming the Time,” Image 42 (Summer 2004): 45.

24 C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 205–207.

25 I am not claiming here that the gift of dance is exclusive in its potential to bring us to an attentive consideration of the body (this could occur in other physical activities as well), only that dance is distinct from many other gifts of creation in this way.

26 Martha Graham, “I am a Dancer,” in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, by Alexander Carter (New York: Routledge, 1998), 67.

27 John Paul II, “Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis— Analysis of the Biblical Account of Creation,” in The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997), 29.

28 Ibid.

29 Schroeder, “Movement,” 122.

30 Tertullian, The Resurrection of the Dead, 362.8.2, quoted in William A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, vol. 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Order of St Benedict, 1970), 148.

31 Ibid.

32 Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 1988), 171.

33 Wright, Surprised by Hope, 156.

34 Peter Gidal, transcription of a discussion following his article “Technology and Ideology in/ through/and Avant-Garde Film: An Instance,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St Martin’s Press,

1980), 169, quoted in Mary Anne Doane, “Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body,” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 217.

35 Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics,” in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies in Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 82.

36 Paul Ricoeur, Le conflit des interpretations (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 149–150, quoted in John Paul II, “Blessed are the Pure in Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount: The Power of Redeeming Completes the Power of Creating,” in Theology of the Body, 165.

37 John Paul II, “Blessed are the Pure in Heart,” 166.

38 Ibid., 167.

39 Ibid., 166.

40 Ibid., 162.

41 Ibid.

42 Susan Kozel, “The Story is told as a History of the Body”: Strategies of Mimesis in the Work of Irigaray and Bausch, in Meaning in Motion, 101.

43 Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporeality,” 88.

44 Madeleine Claus, “Baile Flamenco,” in Flamenco—Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, ed. Claus Schreiner, trans. Mollie Comerford Peters (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1990), 95.

45 Federico García Lorca, “Play and Theory of the Duende,” in In Search of Duende, trans.

Christopher Maurer (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1998), 54.

46 This is not to say that the flamenco perspective on life is to be embraced in every way. Deep sexism could be the rationale behind the acceptance of ageing female bodies dancing flamenco as well. Fonseca points out that within Gypsy cultures, “old women … gain status” because “their sexuality is [no longer] a threat” and “[in] becoming physically more like men, they overcome the social inferiority of their sex” (Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey [New York: Vintage Books, 1995], 80). Since the gypsies are now the “main perpetuators and interpreters” of flamenco, it is not unlikely that such a mentality would have shaped the values of flamenco (D.E. Pohren, Art of Flamenco [Jerez de la Frontera, Spain: Editorial Jerez Industrial, 1962], 39).

47 Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporeality,” 88.

48 Pohren, The Art of Flamenco, 43–44.

49 Ibid.

50 Lorca, “Play and Theory,” 49.

51 Christopher Maurer, preface to In Search of Duen d e, by Federico García Lorca, trans.

Christopher Maurer (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1998), ix–x.

52 Lorca, “Play and Theory,” 53.

53 Totton, Outcasts, 59.

54 Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporeality,” 89.

55 Pohren, Art of Flamenco, 40.

56 Fonseca, Bury Me Standing, 88.

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Bird Feeder Sarah Crowley Chestnut “… do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink …” (Matthew 6:25)

Now the sunflowers are summer’s skeleton, rattling their poverty, hanging by their heels from the front porch beam.

No more seedy carrion to nourish the plum tree wrens, and yet, every now and again, one hungry soul will pummel the remains, pluck out one last deeptucked innard, feast madly, all the while swinging wildly on the dark bones.

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Book Reviews

For The Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts

make use of, foster, and develop the arts within its midst. Such a collection de ser ves to b e celebrated, studied, criticized, and questioned.

That a book of this nature is needed is, to my mind, obvious.

But W. David O. Taylor, in his introduction, describes this need so well that it is worth dwelling on briefly. He writes, “Protestantism— in my case evangelical Protestantism— handed me neither a big picture (a theology) nor a sense of how art and the church hold together (a tradition). …

Many of us, in fact, have felt the lack of a comprehensive, systematic, integrating, and grounding vision” (21). It is the practical component—the tradition— that is the focus of this book, although all of the essays are very thoughtful in their theological engagement. The contributors to this book are people who have tried things, with varying amounts of success, and are willing to share their stories. Pastors and artists working in the church will benefit immensely from this book because it offers practical ideas and personal anecdotes. Although Taylor’s quote specifically mentions “Protestantism,” this book carries the potential to appeal to the other traditions as well.

The essays are organized topically as follows: “The Gospel” (Andy Crouch), “The Worship” (John D. Witviliet), “The Art Patron” (Lauren F. Winner), “The Pastor” (Eugene Peterson), “The Artist”

W. David O. Taylor, Editor Baker, 2010 $16.99 CDN 208 pages ISBN-10: 0801071917 This remarkable collection of essays edited by W. David O. Taylor is the result of the 2008 conference “Transforming Culture: A Vision for the Church and the Arts” organized by Taylor and held in Austin, Texas. I say “remarkable” because, to my knowledge, there is not a single resource available to the Christian church like this book. Certainly there are “theologies of art” (e.g., Calvin Seerveld, Jeremy Begbie, and Richard Viladesau), artists who reflect upon what it means to be a “Christian artist” (e.g., Madeleine L’Engle and Flannery O’Connor), and art historians who remind us of the religious significance of human artistry (e.g., Hans Rookmaaker and Daniel Siedell). But the contributors to this book tackle head on what often falls outside the purview of these other texts. These essays are a treasure trove of practical insight and wisdom into the ways and means by which the contemporary Christian church can 34

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(Barbara Nicolosi), “The Practitioner” (Joshua Banner), “The Dangers” (W. David O. Taylor), and “The Future” (Jeremy Begbie). The first and last have much greater theological content and underpin the practical nature of the others. The topical arrangement offers a kind of comprehensive feel, which is, of course, misleading. This book is certainly not intended to say all that can be said about how the church uses the arts, and it is not difficult to think of areas not covered by this book, such as the place in which the church worships, or the relationship between art and sacrament.

One way of reviewing such a book would be to take each essay in turn.

Instead, I propose that we consider two important themes—the art and the artist—that connect various essays together and that have been important mainstays in the “Christianity and the arts” conversation. I want to draw out various ways this book furthers the conversation, and also how it shows signs that the conversation is maturing by allowing space for a diversity of positions.

First, the art. Why should Christians produce and use art? Andy Crouch’s essay on “The Gospel: How Is Art a Gift, a Calling, and an Obedience?” provides a theological framework for culture, and, specifically, the arts. He points out that God gives Adam a garden, and that without this cultivated environment Adam would have no moorings, no place to live, and, perhaps, no way to survive (32). He goes on to note that the garden is valued not simply for its usefulness, but also because it is beautiful. Underlying Crouch’s understanding of art is this value—intrinsic and inherent—that he perceives in the garden. He writes, “Art is, perhaps, one way of naming everything we as cultural beings do that cannot be explained in terms of its usefulness” (36).

Similarly, Barbara Nicolosi in her essay on “The Artist” writes that art “is useless— except as a vehicle for the beautiful. It is gratuitous” (110).

But several contributors found room to celebrate the usefulness of art. John Witvliet’s essay “The Worship: How Can Art Serve the Corporate Worship of the Church? ” is framed by a question that assumes art will be put to service—that, within the context of worship, art will have a function. He offers principles, supported by real examples, of how art can be used well within the context of worship. Lauren Winner, in her essay on “The Art Patron,” warns much more directly against “defences of art that are grounded in notions of art’s very uselessness,” because they may obscure that “very often, there is a purpose to art” (80). Beauty and utility need not be dichotomized: “Even in God’s creation, beauty has a purpose; in nature, beauty helps species survive” (80). W. David O. Taylor helpfully draws our attention to six dangers of artmaking in the church.

He points out, from the perspective of an experienced pastor, that making use of art in the church requires careful consideration and deliberation. Art is not to be valued uncritically, but it also should not be reduced “to its usefulness to certain church tasks”(154).

Second, the artist. Who is an artist?

What do they do and how can the church help them? A peculiar feature of this book is its tendency to treat artists as a homogenous group, as though they all generally do the same kind of thing and have the same sort of personality.

To some extent, such an approach is helpful and necessary. But, in some cases, contributors to this book appear guilty of allowing the stereotypical Romantic artist to colour their answers to the question “who is an artist?” For example, Barbara Nicolosi’s essay on “The Artist” offers to help Christians recognize artists in their midst. I had not thought that recognizing artists would actually be a problem, and it would seem strange to do the same with dentists or accountants. At the heart of her essay is the assumption that “the artist” is a unique kind of 35

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Book Reviews

individual whose behaviour and lifestyle may be difficult, different, and bizarre, but that needs a loving and supportive community. She goes so far as to say that “artists genuinely perceive spiritual realities” that (presumably) other people do not or cannot perceive. For Nicolosi, the artist plays a prophetic role and so has a special relationship to God: “When an artist pursues the beautiful, he or she opens a channel of revelation between God and humanity” (106).

The Romantic vision of the artist that Nicolosi offers is balanced, however, by more concrete reflections and personal stories about artists. Eugene Peterson’s essay on “T he Pa stor” of fers some fascinating stories from the pastor’s perspective about artists he has known and worked with. In particular, his story about Gerry Baxter, a church architect he worked closely with, is fascinating and a (potentially) helpful model for pastors who want to work closely with an artist on a single project. Joshua Banner, minister of music and art at Hope College, discusses the problems and possibilities of nurturing artists into a place where their art can be used to serve the church. From the perspective of his practical experience, Banner suggests that pastors avoid the distinction between “good” and “bad” art, and focus instead upon “preparation and a lack of preparation for an audience”(139).

Taylor of fers an insightful personal anecdote that illustrates why art, in this case drama, can go wrong in the context of Christian worship. These anecdotal

accounts of the artist paint a more humble picture than the Romantic vision suggested by Nicolosi, and they are to be valued, among other reasons, for their reminder that artists are human beings like the rest of us.

This book fills me with a great deal of hope for the place of the arts within the Christian church. Not only because of the thoughtful consideration of the role art can play within the Christian church, but also because the diversity of voices within this edited volume suggests that the discourse about the arts within the Christian community is maturing and moving forward. Nevertheless, there is much more to be done. Specifically, this collection might be improved by bringing more careful, philosophical considerations of the nature of art and artistry together with its practical guidance. With Jeremy Begbie, whose essay is titled “Looking to the Future: a Hopeful Subversion,” I am optimistic about the future, not because I can see what is coming, but because of the Holy Spirit’s “hopeful subversion … a future interrupting, erupting into, the present through God’s Spirit; a future we do not have to generate out of our own resources, but a future promised by God and available now” (167). ~James Watkins is a PhD student in theology at the University of St Andrews, where he participates in the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. He holds an MCS in Christianity and the Arts from Regent College, and a BA in Studio Art from Wheaton College.

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The Death of Christian Britain Reconsidered: Three Reviews

happened—and by his assertion that the principal cause lay in the decision-making of young women.

T heir aba ndonment of t he habits and thought-forms of their mothers and grandmothers, who had for so long sustained both the moral forms and the institutional life of the churches, was the key factor. In the remarkably short period of the 1960s, all this was to be eroded. It was a sudden and drastic process, which Brown described as the de-pietization of femininity and the de-feminization of piety. These provocative assertions were part of his subtitle’s “Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000.”

But secularization is both a complex as well as an emotive term. There have been at least two rival and opposed assessments.

On the one hand, almost all church-goers, including the professional clergy and their supporters, have deplored the loss of faith, the decline in church attendance, the erosion of social and personal values, and the abandonment of the so-called Christian identity of the nation. These developments were often associated with the growth or urbanization and modernization, so that the myth of “the unholy city” with its dark satanic mills could be contrasted with the simple purity of rural life centred around the parish church or chapel on the village green. On the other side, the champions of secularization saw this as a revolutionary advance into the modern age, when the individual is liberated from superstition or the shackles of clericalism.

Secularization is a salute to reason, to intellect, and to progress. By the midtwentieth century, virtually all British intellectuals subscribed to this ideology. Yet it took the impetus of a social revolution in the 1960s, which freed British popular culture from what Brown believes was the misery of a restrictive Christian discourse, often backed by the state. For at least a century this discourse had governed all aspects of self-identity and expression, community-regulated leisure, and domestic

The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000

by Callum Brown Routledge, 2nd edition, 2009 320 pages ISBN: 0415471346 $39.95 CAD Ten years ago, Callum Brown, who is Professor of Religious and Cultural History at Glasgow’s second university, Strathclyde, published his controversial book The Death of Christian Britain. It has now been republished in a second edition, with an additional chapter taking issue with some of Brown’s critics. This is not an ecclesiastical history. It has little to do with the churches as institutions or their theologies. Rather it is an impressionistic exposition about what Brown calls the Christian discourse among the British population in the period from 1800 to the present. He seeks to show that for the first 150 years, this discourse, particularly as seen in the writings and preaching of the evangelical sections of the various churches, provided an identity, a mental structure, and a moral code of behaviour for the majority of the population. This generally held discourse, he believes, is what made Britain a Christian country.

But this is no longer the case. “The culture of Christianity has gone in the Britain of the new millennium. Britain is showing the world how religion as it has known it can die.” The impact of these challenging views was only made more strident by his claim that this “death” could be precisely dated to the 1960s—that is, had already 37

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life. Its repressive features, in the name of adherence of Christian morality, had imposed great suffering on minorities and miscreants, such as homosexuals. It had strictly limited the range of opportunities, especially for women. It was the rejection of these bulwarks of Christian piety, so Brown believes, which so rapidly led to the death of this kind of Christian culture in Britain.

Brown’s critics were quick to attack him for his reductionism and for his monocausal explanation for the demise of the Christian discourse. But it is noteworthy that Brown also took issue with much of the methodology employed by many sociologists of religion. Particularly he disputed the widespread teleological theory whereby religious decline was seen as the inevitable and linear obverse of the rise of rationality and science. Brown disputed this timeline by pointing to the undeniable revival of religious life in Britain in the immediate post-1945 years. So too he challenged the views taken by many leftwing social scientists who drew their analysis from Marxist theory. According to this paradigm, Christianity’s hold was largely class-based, and would and should disappear once the class struggle was overcome and modernization ensued. But the subsequent discrediting of Marxism and its theories of modernization now requires new coherent explanations for the apparent changes in Britain’s religious adherence.

from the ideologically based theories or the sociologically based statistics of the proponents of secularization. Instead they sought to stress Christianity’s continuing influence on culture through literature, art, and architecture. As well, they found Christian moral ideas as forming the background for many economic developments, as well as protest movements. Above all, they seek to claim the continued relevance of Christian values in Britain’s national identity.

Christian Britain is not dead, they assert.

There is no corpse in the Library. Rather, these essays contain countless examples of how Christianity has continued to infuse public culture, though the authors admit that the cultural strength of religion must be separated from its institutional strength or decline.

By rejecting any teleological approach, the authors argue for a wide variety of positive adjustments in British religious life, pointing particularly to the number of subcultures brought in by recent immigrants. There is considerable mention of “transformations” in the chapters of this book. Many of the contributors rightly point out that the 1960s were indeed years of change and challenge in Britain.

The national identity, and with it the many religious associations it held, were transformed in more ways than allowed

by Callum Brown. The loss of empire, the spectre of nuclear annihilation, t he aw a r e ne s s o f wo rld poverty, and the wholly new relationship with Europe all posed questions that included a religious dimension. Above all, these were years in which religious certainty faded, to be replaced by a far more questioning discourse. It was not surprising that Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God should prove to be the best-selling theological work of the century. The abandonment of the ideal of authority and the disappearance of a deferential society

Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives Edited by Sarah Williams et al.

SCM Press, 2007 308 pages ISBN: 0334040922 $35.29 CAD Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives is the product of an Oxford conference and one of the editors is Sarah Williams of the Regent College faculty. The contributors sought to escape 38

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CRUX Winter 2010/Vol.46, No.4

both clearly affected the position of the clergy. So, too, the rise in the general standards of education meant that many more individuals than before claimed an independence of mind that no longer looked for paternalistic guidance from the churches or their ministers.

There was in fact a process of spiritual fragmentation when the institutional church, with its rituals and dogmas, no longer received automatic assent.

This development proved to be far more corrosive of belief patterns than the alleged impetus of women’s sexual liberation. There were indeed, as Mark Chapman points out, many churchmen who welcomed a transformation of their spirituality, and who looked for more releva nt for m s of Ch r i stia n witness, stripped of the Victorian trappings of religion. Some were to welcome the abandonment of dogmatic theologizing, and were to cultivate a more vague religion of love and service of fellow men and women. But others still recognized t h e n e e d t o m a i nt a i n t h e importance of the transcendent in both personal and public life. They were to argue that the churches should continue to have a prophetic and critical role over against all idealistic political or social proposals. If the churches limited themselves to being agents of social reform, they would have lost a dimension of incomparable worth. Transformation should be achieved without sacrificing the essence of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

And institutional diminution was not necessarily a pointer to social relevance.

In the view of these authors, the wishful thinking of doomsayers, predicting religious and moral decline, has to be challenged. Little evidence exists that the national standards of personal morality have declined, even when the churches’ previous emphasis on puritan-style sexual ethics has been overtaken. Instead, newer issues such as nuclear armaments, climate change, or world poverty are clearly

able to arouse strong moral reactions, derived certainly from Christian roots.

The discursive Christianity of the British nation still continues in a variety of different ways. A transformed view of the sacred and an ardent desire for genuine spiritual experience still persists, even if bearing little resemblance to the masternarrative of former years. The authors’ conclusion is that Christianity in Britain has been better able to respond to changed circumstances than grand narratives of decline or death have allowed. The picture they uncover is one of innovation and exploration, not of atrophy or paralysis.

In short, they believe Christian Britain is not dead but that it will continue to be reshaped and redefined in the years ahead.

England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church 1900–2000

by Keith Robbins Oxford University Press, 2008 544 pages ISBN: 0198263716 $182.95 CAD How Christianity interacted with broader social and political movements in the twentieth century is the focus of Keith Robbins’s magisterial study of the Christian church in the four countries that form part of the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church 1900–2000). Robbins is a distinguished scholar of church history and a former university president. He is very much aware that England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland all have a long history of dialogue between Christianity and its surrounding culture. The varieties and the peculiarities of this relationship lie at the heart of his book. Christianity has been embedded in Britain for over sixteen hundred years, during which it has been shaped by 39

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numerous, frequently conflicting impulses.

The dialectic between past and present has produced radically different situations and seemingly incompatible belief-systems. Yet Robbins seeks to write trans-nationally and trans-denominationally since he believes he can see the unity in this diversity.

This is no ordinary textbook. The reader should be warned not to expect any systematic delivery of names, dates, places, or statistics. Instead, it is a large-scale portrait, or rather a series of large-scale portraits, in chronological order, bringing in aspects from each of the national church settings. Robbins paints with a variety of multi-coloured brush strokes, each drawn from his immense fund of knowledge and reading. His style is allusive, following in the footsteps of G.M. Young and Owen Chadwick. Readers are therefore expected to have considerable knowledge already in order to appreciate his nicely pointed comments.

Robbins naturally takes issue with Callum Brown’s over-simplistic assessment.

Rather, he believes, the churches have always lived in an ambiguous and often awkward symbiosis with their environment.

The issue is how this relationship can be fully described given the complexity of the churches’ institutional life and the variety of ways in which the different sections of the population both contribute to and are drawn from the church communities. A “typical” church, he believes, is elusive, but he seeks to integrate in a comprehensive and ecumenical whole the various strands, both from within and outside as well as from above and below.

His task has been complicated by the fact that most church histories have been written from the perspective of one or other denomination to confirm their legitimacy and authority, and to impugn the claims of others. Robbins seeks to rise above this fray and adopts an even-handed ecumenism. He is ready to understand, though not necessarily to endorse, those viewpoints he sees as narrowing down the Christian message because of a particular

theological or social slant. All have, he believes, to be accommodated as part of Christian Britain, even when discordantly opposed to each other, as for example in twentieth-century Ireland. So his volume is irenic and suitably comprehensive, and his wide-ranging sympathies can open new horizons of insight.

For the first half of the century, the question of how the churches related to concepts of Britain’s national identity and to its military and political fortunes was a constant preoccupation. In England the established church had little debate about where its duty lay, but increasingly more debate occurred about the ethical values such nationalism propagated. In Ireland, the Catholic faith had no such priority. It saw itself as the church of the victimized population, creating barriers against unwanted and alien onslaughts. But both sides saw their stance as upholding their Christian witness. The bitter divisions in doctrine and practice that had accrued since the Reformation still prevented unity.

But increasingly all churches faced parallel challenges confronting what came to be known as the tide of secularization. Yet in 1914 all the churches in England, Wales, and Scotland, and in some parts of Ireland, especially the north, enthusiastically backed the war effort including its appeal to nationalism, militarism, even jingoism.

Only a tiny handful saw pacifism as the true Christian discipleship. But the subsequent mass slaughter on the battlefields thereafter caused a major and irreversible crisis in the credibility of the Christian witness and led to long-lasting disillusionment with its institutions and personnel—and not only in Britain. To many observers, myself included, this post-war disenchantment marked the onset of the death of Christian Britain. But Robbins rightly points out that the churches were too closely integrated into their host societies to be able to develop alternative theologies or practices.

The clergy particularly could not escape the role of being public cheerleaders for the war effort. But the price was fateful.

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During the Second World War, most church leaders were more cautious. Bishop George Bell urged the government to ensure the war was waged in a Christian fashion on behalf of the Universal Christian Church, and not just for the advance of national interests. The Pope, in the impartiality of the Vatican, upheld the cause of peace, despite being under relentless pressure to join one side or the other. No German church leader ever opposed the regime or its wars of racial annihilation. Attempts to justify such events as Auschwitz or Hiroshima merely discredited those who tried. Such horrendous crimes only revealed the Christians’ impotence and their creeds’ irrelevance. But, as both Brown and Robbins show, in the post-1945 period, the desire to rebuild Britain on the basis of Christian family values brought about a revival in many denominations.

The more critical questions were subdued or postponed. The churches existed in a widespread state of cognitive dissonance.

Only in the 1960s did these issues become insistent. Many younger people, of both sexes, then found they could no longer support the supposedly hypocritical and compromised churches, which should be left to die out. Secular skepticism was more honest.

There was, however, one part of the British Isles, in the last half of the century, where Christianity and the churches were of crucial significance, though hardly in any laudatory sense. Robbins’s treatment of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland is brief but succinct. Undeniably, the situation in Ulster reinforced his main contentions.

The province’s deep-seated religious factions and rivalries were inextricably interwoven in the political and social fabric. The conflicting religious traditions were not just a propagandistic cover for more vital economic or political struggles.

Rather the intensely held folk memories of each side’s religious traditions gave the conflict its enduring and intractable quality. Cromwell mattered. Even more significantly, the conf lict continued

even though the church leaders on both sides came to deplore the violence and bloodshed. But they were not heard. The clergy’s authority was one of the casualties of this un-Christian fratricidal strife. All this was part of a wider process.

Across Britain in the latter part of the century, authority figures in both church and state were rejected. As prosperity grew, so did the notion of self-help spirituality. Britain became a marketplace for competing yet negotiating moralities.

Many church leaders recognized they had been improperly coercive in the past. And while the Pope still called for obedience in matters of personal, especially sexual, morality, he increasingly called in vain and could no longer be seen as the voice of Christendom. The final years of the century were therefore years of institutional and ethical unsettlement.

Questions were increasingly posed about the identity and viability of churches, but not severely enough to overthrow the historical divisions embedded since the Reformation. The failure of church unity plans meant that the churches remained rooted, for better or for worse, in their cultural inheritances. And their discordant voices meant that they lost more of their moral authority, along with their disappearing membership. Britons became much more pluralistic in their religious views and spiritual searching.

Thus Robbins finds himself at least in partial agreement with the more guarded of Callum Brown’s assessments. He writes, “This was a period which witnessed the increasing marginalization of religion from British public life, intellectualism and popular culture.” And yet, a wide survey conducted at the turn of the century found that 77 percent of the population reported themselves as having a religious affiliation, the majority of whom declared they were Christians. This was perhaps based on a diffuse understanding of what Christianity meant and entailed. But it could indicate that the notion of the death of Christian Britain had been overstated. Christianity 41

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could still be regarded as a significant contributor to national life, even if its institutional expressions were fragile. The secular state cannot be regarded, in Robbinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s view, as the desirable terminal conclusion of two thousand years of Christian presence

on Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s soil. The pluralistic spiritual patterns that currently prevail may yet hold out other possibilities. ~ John S. Conway is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of British Columbia.

42

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Winter 2010 Vol.46, No.4

A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion published by Regent College