Welcome to the first of the coffee houses for
Summit 2010. My name is Richard Beck and I work
in the psychology department here at ACU.
And some of you I know because you've been
students of mine but some of you are out of
town and don't know my face.
And Dan asked about my Bandana so this is my
Shane Clayburn nod.
The other day at the church I had warmer
glasses too and I had those on too. It was a
little too obvious.
So anyway let me let my friend probably
introduce himself.
My name is Dan Regreger and some of you all are
my students too. It's great to see you all.
It's kind of funny because Richard can
out-Bohemian me any day.
He's a psych professor and I'm the art
professor so I feel pressure to be hipper than Richard.
But if you know Richard you know that's not
possible. Happy to be here.
So anyway Dan's also the only professor on
campus who might catch Dress as a Pirate any
given time.
That does happen.
Anyway welcome to our presentation night. This
is called Leaving Eden.
And what I want to do, I think my part is on
the front end here.
I'm going to give you kind of an orientation of
what we're trying to do.
As a coffee house most of you will realize that
the coffee will be going on.
So we're going to use these mics and try to
project over the steam milk.
Let me tell you what we're going to do.
And then Dan will walk you through a series of
images and pictures.
And there might even be a form for you to sign.
Federal advisory now is what we'll warn about
that when we get there.
And so these are supposed to be I guess edgier.
But you modified the slides so I don't know.
We'll see.
Anyway and I will jump in occasionally as Dan
talks as well.
So let me tell you kind of what this is about.
This began as a research collaboration a couple
years ago.
I was interested in a Christian approach to aesthetics.
Now being an art person I need some guidance.
It initially began in a study right now that's
now under review called Death Art in the Fall.
Material management perspective on Christian
aesthetic judgments.
And it's where Dan and I kind of we're trying
to look at the psychology behind what we just
call Christian bookstore art.
And last summer this last summer we presented
in Nashville about some of this on what we call
the Thomas Kinkade effect.
And so some of this is coming out of that.
It's different though if you heard it's in Nashville.
So let me give you a frame here.
The theme for summit is this idea of being
resident aliens.
1 Peter.
We heard that tonight if you were in Moody with
Rick Ashley.
And obviously there's two he mentioned two
impulses that we struggle with.
And one is I think he called I was writing down
some notes up there.
He called it this idea of pulling into a
Christian ghetto.
And the way I think about that is kind of
creating a quarantine.
So as people living in Babylon.
At the very end of 1 Peter, Peter describes
living in Babylon.
Writing from Babylon.
And so we consider ourselves as strangers in Babylon.
How do we live?
And one option is to pull inside a pretty
ghetto of Christian community into a kind of a
holy quarantine.
You might put it that way.
And so I'm going to call that the Edenic impulse.
The idea of trying to create an Eden on earth
and then trying to live in that Eden.
And I think Rick talked about some of the
problems with that.
And one of the problems that he did not mention
that Dan and I talked a great deal about.
Is the degree to which when Christians do that.
When we pull in to create a paradise on earth.
We try to represent a paradise on earth.
Outsiders begin to perceive Christians as not honest.
As inauthentic.
That they don't really have anything to say
about when life gets really, really, really dark.
Because Christianity is kind of all sunshine
and light.
And you can kind of see that impulse in some of
Christian art.
Not just visual art, music, and also theater as well.
But it doesn't engage the brokenness of the world.
And so the theme that our talk tonight is
called Leaving Eden.
The idea is to leave the ghetto and go out into
the world.
And we might call that as opposed to this kind
of Eden impulse.
We might call it the missional impulse.
To live scattered amongst the nations.
And Rick had this really kind of powerful
ending there, right?
He said, with that little girl with the
flashlight saying,
Mommy, can I go find some darkness?
And I think that's the missional impulse.
To go out and find some darkness with light.
But you all don't have to go find darkness.
Because Dan McGregor and I bring our own darkness.
So we're going to, at some point on one of our moves.
We're going to actually look at darker art.
And that will be the more difficult aspects of
the presentation.
That will be parts that we'll be able to kind
of pull away.
And again, I agree not to linger too long in
those images.
But the idea is that we need to kind of go out
and see.
And ask some art questions about that art as well.
The way I see that, and Rick and Brady were
talking about this at the end of the presentation.
Is if we are sent out into the world.
Amongst brokenness and in the fall.
That there are some certain skills that we need.
To find grace and beauty out there.
In what might seem to be a fairly ugly place.
And so I'm going to call those a set of
hermeneutical skills.
We need a set of skills to interpret the world
through the eyes of the gospel.
Very often, if you're motivated by kind of the
endemic impulse.
The idea is that we're always worried.
That the culture will read the gospel subversively.
That somehow those new atheists and those
people out there are going to look at the
Christian life.
And they're going to read it subversively.
We're going to see some art that maybe is
trying to do that.
My suggestion for us tonight is that I think
the gospel is the deeper story.
And that it is more subversive than anything
the world has in play.
One of the things we need to do is to train
ourselves to use the gospel to read the world subversively.
And we will show you a couple of points where
we think that might be possible.
Now, as we do that though.
As we think about these hermeneutical skills.
There's a variety of challenges that we're
going to face.
And the metaphor I'm going to use.
I told Dan I'm going to use rubber bands all night.
And I stole these from my son Aidan.
Is that I think the question will be.
When we go out there and we use the gospel to
read the culture.
Is this question how elastic is the gospel?
I think some of us think the gospel is not
elastic at all.
It's fairly rigid.
And it can't accommodate anything.
And I think that's a hermeneutic from kind of
this eugenic impulse.
But I think the missional kind of gospel.
It has some elasticity out there.
And that we can wrap the gospel around certain
things in the world that might seem strange at first.
But the question though for us is.
At what point.
Yeah, I want to do this.
No, I'm going to do it.
Maybe I can.
At what point.
Oh, right.
Anything for a good visual aid.
Right, at what point.
So trying to see the gospel in everything.
Snap it.
And we're going to have some art that maybe
walks to that edge tonight.
Because that's an important question.
It's an interesting question.
It's an art question.
Is there some place the gospel just cannot go?
Are there just some place in the world that are
God forsaken?
And so what's going to be interesting this
evening I think.
Is that as we go through these slides and talk
about it.
You're going to feel different degrees of elasticity.
There are going to be moments when you're going
to feel like I think the gospel can easily get
around this artistic depiction.
And then some of you are feeling like that's
really a stretch.
I can see what you're doing.
I appreciate the attempt to see the gospel in that.
But that goes too far.
And I think that's the struggle for the
missional impulse.
At what point have we become the world and not
light in the world?
And that's that challenge.
That's the tension.
So the way I want you to see tonight is as a
case study.
It's not just about art, although it is.
But it's a case study that can be applied to
all kinds of different things.
And one of the questions asked this evening was
what kind of music do we listen to?
That's a hermeneutical question.
What kind of lives do we lead?
When does something not stop becoming Christian anymore?
At what point is the relevancy impulse
compromising the salt and light?
We don't have any answers.
All we're doing tonight is trying to walk you
through our thoughts about some art as a
hermeneutical case study
because we think it's these skills, these
skills of description that are what are needed
to be able to describe life,
even life in Babylon, even life out of Eden in
a gospel-oriented way.
And so we're going to walk you through some of
our thoughts and ask three moves.
The first move will be Eden.
And then we'll go into the fall.
And that will be dark.
And then we'll have some transitional things
that might seem to be on the edge.
And this is where the elastic will be a bit stretchy.
And then we're going to end with some art that
Dan has selected for us tonight that kind of
shows artists
who are actually trying to be honest about the
brokenness of the world.
They're trying to find redemptive things in it.
So I'm going to turn it largely over to Dan,
and I will cut in when I think I have something
relevant to say.
So thank you for being here.
Let Dan kind of start us through our
presentation this evening.
Good deal.
Is there like light control?
Can we like turn on some lights in this area?
This is like, I always put a door unit. Thanks.
I have the challenge.
I always got a parents light, too.
It's great.
Two librarians.
I think that.
I teach an 8:00 class on Monday, Wednesday,
Friday in a darkened room.
And I'm just obsessive about making sure the
room is dark so everybody can see images.
So that's always the first thing I look to.
I want to start off, I guess I should tell you
all a little bit of the objectionable content
that may be ahead.
There is some mild nudity.
I should let you know that.
It's kind of distant, fuzzy nudity.
But just be ready for that.
And also there's some art that just in terms of
the choices artists have made,
it's pretty offensive to many Christians at
first blush.
So this does not constitute an endorsement on
my part in not saying frame this stuff
and put it in your house.
But I just want you to be ready.
Okie dokie.
We are going to start off in Eden.
And Eden is going to be a code word for
Christian bookstore.
So I want to first ask you guys a question.
When I say Christian bookstore art, what are
some things that come to mind?
What do you think of?
Raise your hand and tell me.
Jesus dying on a cross.
A picture of Jesus dying on a cross.
Shepherd taking care of the sheep.
Ok, a shepherd taking care of the sheep.
Scripture references.
Scripture references, good.
What else?
Thomas King K.
Waiting for it.
Yes sir. Peace.
Any images of peace?
The Byzantine paintings of Mary and holding Jesus.
Ok, like icons.
Mary holding Jesus, yeah.
Anything with a lion, especially in newer art.
There's a lot of lions in Christian art.
A lot of lions, like the lion of Judah.
Jesus is the lion.
How would you all describe this art?
What kind of emotional qualities does it have?
You've already said peace.
What else?
It brings a smile to your face.
It warms your heart.
Ok, that's good.
I want to start off with a little bit.
How many of you have ever been to a Christian
bookstore before?
And you've looked at the pictures.
And that's kind of like, this is our chance to
shine as artists, right?
Because Christians don't really have many of
their own galleries and their own art museums
and that sort of thing.
So in order to bring this tonight, I snuck into
a Christian bookstore with a camera and
secretly took pictures.
And Brother Beck has done the same thing.
So you're looking for the manager.
And if any of you all own a Christian
bookstore, this is not an attack on you or anything.
I've spent a lot of money in a Christian bookstore.
So let's look at some examples.
This is kind of a kitchen section of a
Christian bookstore.
I know it may be hard to see.
There are little wooden spoons of scriptures on them.
There's a little chicken on a plate that says
this is the day the Lord is made.
So the idea of putting a scripture cut on
almost anything, and it's available for you to buy.
Just real quickly, I'm going to go through some
examples of Christian art.
This is an Andrew Wyeth painting.
And without Andrew Wyeth's permission, or the
Wyeth estate's permission, Wyeth died a couple
of years ago,
they took this painting and they put a
scripture on it.
In fact, they didn't even really put a
scripture on it.
They cut a hole in the painting in the lower left.
And it says, Lord your God is with you, he will
quiet you with his love, which just comes up in
my eye.
This is one of the things that we see in
Christian bookstores, first of all.
We see a really prevalent sense of the word.
Scriptures are put onto things.
Very rarely do images stand on their own.
There always has to be this extra thing that's
put in there to make sure you get the Christian message.
And the implicit message is that art is not
powerful enough to carry a message on itself.
And another thing about it is it's explicit.
There's no room for interpretation.
The art tells you what it's supposed to mean. Absolutely.
One of the things artists like, we like ambiguity.
We like multiple meanings in things.
And generally Christian art sort of hits you
with a hammer.
And there's no room for multiple interpretations.
It's kind of like you need to get this
interpretation from me.
This is by a painter named Nathan Green.
He's called the Senior Partner.
And we have a businessman introducing Jesus to
one of his customers.
And Jesus is shaking his hand.
And actually this was matted.
It's kind of hard to see, isn't it?
This is matted in the Scripture, because
remember images cannot stand on their own.
Unending riches, honor, and success are mine to give.
My paths are those of justice and truth.
Those who love and follow me are indeed
wealthy, and I will fill their treasuries.
So the idea that you sign on to Christianity
and your treasuries will get filled.
It harkens back sort of to some prosperity
gospel stuff you may have heard over the past
few years.
The prayer of Jebedah is expanding your
territory, that sort of thing. Dan?
Was the Senior Partner picture with that at?
Yes, it was.
Yeah, because I actually took a picture of it
in the frame that it reflected a whole lot.
And so I pulled that off the internet.
By the way, if you happen to have any of these
things hanging in your office or home, I'm not
attacking you, all right?
We're going to look at some Thomas Kincaid.
I have a couple of Thomas Kincaid books at home.
And I have a little picture of him.
He actually...
Yeah, you caught it.
This is the sort of thing we see in Christian
book scores.
We see this very didactic art, doesn't let the
picture stand on its own, kind of hits a
message pretty hard.
No room for multiple interpretations.
When we get to Thomas Kincaid, we very much see
sort of triumphalistic, optimistic view to the
exclusion of anything else.
You look at Thomas Kincaid's art, and he has
done hundreds and hundreds of pictures.
He has never done a depressing picture.
Moreover, he's never done a picture that
suggests that there's anything wrong with the world.
He's never suggested that the world has fallen,
that Adam and Eve ate the fruit and screwed
things up for all of us.
Here are a couple.
And if I'm completely honest, and I don't say
this around my colleagues very much,
I look at his little worlds, his little
cottages in the mountains and stuff, and I
think, I'd kind of like to live there.
It's very peaceful.
I mean, he knows how to hit emotional triggers,
and I will shamelessly admit to that.
This would be kind of a bad cottage to live in,
though, if you have a lot of rain.
This is the Good Shepherd's Cottage, and this
is the cottage Jesus lives in.
He's coming out the front door and all the sheep.
I think he's inviting the sheep into his house,
which instantly, for me, would make it not Eden.
But again, you get this idea. This artwork
occupies a space in an unfallen world, okay?
A world where sin and depression and suffering
do not exist.
Here's some, kind of along those lines, here's
some things King Cate has said about his work.
I like to portray a world without the fall.
My paintings are halfway between a memory and a daydream.
I try to produce a recreation of the past
without the hard edges.
I've spent these years trying to share my very
own idiosyncratic and emotionally charged
visions of an earthly paradise, okay?
Now, if you took that at face value, kind of
the word I would apply to that is heresy, right?
It's not telling the truth about how the world is.
Now, you could say he's looking ahead, right?
He's looking ahead how Heaven's going to be.
He's looking back to, I don't know, to maybe
what things will be like when Jesus comes back,
if he does new things with his world. Or, you
know, he might just wipe it out altogether, get
rid of his bad heart.
But if, you know, there are ways you could put
a spin on that.
When I look at that, I think, that is not the
world that I live in.
The world that I live in is full of problems
and issues, and I'm sad sometimes, and I'm
lonely sometimes, and I'm depressed sometimes.
Here's actually a catalog from the show of his,
Tom's Kincaid, Heaven on Earth, right?
So this very much explains his philosophy.
There's, you know, one of the labels that's
applied to Christian art at large, and Tom's
Kincaid in particular, is the word sentimental.
And one of the things we want to talk about is
this idea of sentimentality and sentimental art
coming at a price, at a cost.
Oscar Wilde actually alludes to this cost.
A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to
have the luxury of an emotion without paying
for it, okay?
So in a similar way, Kincaid's pictures exist
as if there has never been a fall,
as if there's never been hundreds of years of
wars and people wrestling with things.
He fast forwards ahead to Heaven.
Flannery O'Connor, Catholic writer, addresses
this problem as well.
She says, sentimentality is an excess, a
distortion of sentiment, usually in the
direction of an over-emphasis on innocence.
We lost our innocence in the fall, and our
return to it is through the redemption which
was brought about by Christ's death and our
slow participation in it.
And this is really what I want you all to see.
It's actually another color, but it's hard to tell.
Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in
its concrete reality and an early arrival at a
mock state of innocence.
Okay, she's writing this in the 1960s, but I
feel like this could be an art review about
Thomas Kincaid's work, okay?
The idea of passing, sort of skipping the whole
thing about our world being fallen and arriving
in an earthly paradise.
Now, that's sort of one kind of ghetto or one
sort of wall we could establish in this
discussion, okay?
Art that never acknowledges the hard things in
this world.
I want to establish now another wall, and this
is what Richard was alluding to when he said,
art that fully participates in the darkness of
the world.
I'm going to call this Babylon, making it
relevant to our first theater name.
Before we get to the Babylon, let me just point
out, because I think it's a good point to talk
about the research we did.
One of the things that we were interested in
is, you know, why, what my psychological behind this.
One of the things we did in our study is we
primed death anxiety in participants and asked
them to look at kind of neutral art or
Christian art.
And one thing we found in the study was that
the people primed on death anxiety are much
more likely to prefer Christian art.
The point is that there seems to be a consoling
function in some of our aesthetics.
And that's okay, right? Consolation is
something that we often need.
The question is, it's okay to think about hope.
I think like that idea of skipping over too
quickly to that.
We can leave people behind who are kind of
mired in difficult situations.
If we only read the Psalms of praise, we're
missing most of the Psalms.
And they're moving through lament to get to
praise at the end.
But there's an earn. It's not a cheap sentiment
tally. It's been earned at the back end.
That praise is costly and effortful rather than
kind of a denial, an ostrich-like, ghetto-like effect.
And I think there are two kind of possible
casualties to this.
One, I went through a period in my life where I
was really depressed.
I was coming home from work every day and crying.
I was wrestling with some emotional and
spiritual stuff during this time.
The last thing I wanted to listen to was
Christian music on the radio.
Because all those people seemed to have their
stuff together and didn't seem to have any problems.
And all I wanted to do was read about
Christians who were depressed and also having
problems so I didn't feel so alone.
I never felt more alone than when I was
listening to Christian music and thinking,
what is wrong with my spiritual life? Everybody
else has it together.
So I think one casualty of art or culture that
is universally triumphalistic or optimistic
is Christians in the church who are struggling
saying, what's wrong with me? I'm not feeling
this way.
Another casualty is people who are outside of
Eden, right?
People who are outside of the church looking in
saying, do these people ever go through
anything hard?
Are their lives like perfect and sugary all the time?
Now, don't go home and throw away your Thomas
Kinkade pictures.
It's totally okay to have art that makes you happy.
What we're arguing is the problem is just
everything in a Christian bookstore tends to be
of this filth.
I would also say it's not just that, but also
being unwilling to allow other artists to do
that work.
Does that make sense? So it's not just that you
have to do this.
People are different, but being a willingness
to tolerate people who are trying to move in
these directions,
and even though it's not my thing, recognizing
the need for artists to be out in that space.
Absolutely. So if that's one sort of line, one
sort of heresy, let's look at another sort of heresy,
the other end of things, the art produced in
Babylon, as it were.
These are going to be artists with a worldview
that is utterly nihilistic.
They say the world is a broken place, and
there's not a trace of redemption in the world.
Well, I'll just show you the art instead of
explaining it.
Joel Peter Wittgen is a photographer who deals
exclusively in darkness.
His camera, his eye, is almost exclusively
drawn to freaks and broken people.
This is one of them. I'm going to show you some
of his milder images.
He's a really good photographer, actually, technically.
He takes a lot of pictures of surface freaks.
But if you look only at his work, you would not
think there's anything normal, good, or
peaceful about the world.
Usually opposite of Thomas P. Gates.
Yeah, absolutely.
What he's really known for, and this is
extremely transgressive, is having access to
courses in certain countries.
He's made deals with the morgues in some cities
in other countries, not in the United States.
He has access to unclaimed bodies.
He has dismembered those bodies and assembled
them in strange still lifes.
I'm going to show this to you, and then I'm
going to move on.
Here's a severed arm that is arranged with some
other things, some grapes, a clock, that sort
of thing.
This is pretty transgressive, not just in terms
of content, but in terms of what he's actually
going through to make the pictures.
Let me just bring up something. Dan and I were
looking at his office on this.
This is one of those things where the Gospel is stretchy.
We were looking at that picture in the Momentum
Mori tradition, with the dead arm and the clock.
Dan and I sat there and said, you could
probably work your head around that as kind of
an Ecclesiastes kind of thing.
Like a meditation on death or something.
At that point, we're sitting there looking at
ourselves going, but have we gone insane?
Have we gone too far to try to redeem something?
Does that make sense?
That's one of those things. How far can you go
to read the Gospel and everything?
This art pushes it to the edge. We don't have
any good answers about that, but moving on.
This next artist is an English painter named
Francis Bacon.
He's going to be less shocking than the severed
arm, I think.
Bacon has the view that people are animals.
People are exactly the same as animals.
There is nothing unique or sanctified or
special about human beings.
It's interesting, his last name is Bacon, which
is like a piece of meat, a very good piece of meat.
He paints people as if they're pieces of meat.
In fact, literally, if you did not get the
point, here is a man between two sides of beef.
It's our little introduction to Francis Bacon.
But when he paints people, they're extremely distorted.
Their faces are twisted, their bodies are kind
of curling.
He's really into the texture of the paint, the
meatiness of the paint.
People become lumps of muscle and flesh in his paintings.
Here is someone who is denying the idea that
human beings are anything beyond just this
physical matter, a bloody piece of meat.
I'm about to show you, ironically, one of my
favorite painters who makes some of the most
depressing pictures I've ever seen.
I hope you guys can see this. This is Aude Nurdrum.
He is a Norwegian artist who lives in Iceland,
and all of his pictures feel like cold and Icelandic.
He has a series of paintings, at least, that
depict people floating in a void, like they're
in outer space, in an utterly cold, empty,
lonely place.
This reflects his belief that we are utterly
alone in this universe, that we don't even
really have each other.
This piece is called String. It's really hard
to see, but we have a cluster of people in the
lower right.
We have another figure in the upper left.
There's a little tiny string that's about to
break as they drift apart.
People are isolated from each other.
This is the most depressing painting that I've
ever seen in my life.
To me, it cannot get worse than this.
Everybody's perking up.
It's really hard to see what it is. I'll show
you a detail in a second.
It is dark. If it depresses you, you can't.
It's dark.
I have a high threshold for this stuff.
This is called Burning Man, and it's a massive
canvas, several feet wide by several feet tall.
It's utterly black. It's one of Aude Nurdrum's
voids of black outer space.
In the center is a single, solitary figure.
Here's a close-up.
It looks like his hair is kind of on fire. His
hair is sort of burning.
Here's a guy. If you were to reduce this
painter's philosophy about the world to a
single image, it would be this one.
We're utterly alone. No other people, no God,
no nothing.
Not only that, but if we're alone, if we have
any companionship, it's the fire that's on our
shoulder or our thoughts that are tormenting us.
I look at these images and think, in the way
that Kinkade's images don't tell the truth, the
complete truth,
these images don't tell the complete truth
either, at least for the Christian.
We may feel lonely sometimes, but ultimately
we're not alone. Is there a question?
The only connecting point I can see is
obviously there are people who can look at that
and feel, that's me. That is me.
There we can connect with them through the artist.
I don't know if you all heard that, making the
point that people look at this and say, that's
exactly how I feel right now.
I feel utterly alone. There's a cathartic value
about this. That's a really good point.
To my mind, the problem is when you look at the
artist's entire body of work.
That's the same thing with Kinkade. If he was
just painting, if some of his pictures were all
happy cottages,
I don't know, I wouldn't maybe be so hard on him.
A lot of times you have to look at the corpus
of an artist's work.
All the paintings, all the sculptures, all the
photos an artist does, and to learn more about
the worldview.
Neuroderms is uniformly nihilistic.
Okay, now I'm going to show you all some
transitional stuff.
I very much invite Richard's comments on this.
This is art that is still reveling in, or at
least presenting, uniformly brokenness in the world.
But it seems like an art we can stretch the
rubber band around, or at least give a good go
at it.
Or try to view through a gospel lens. It may
lend itself more easily to a gospel reading.
We're going to jump back in time. I think this
is the only really old person we're going to see.
Francisco Goya, a Spanish painter from the late
1700s, early 1800s.
This is brutal.
Goya is someone who spends his entire career
highlighting man's inhumanity to man.
He's very cynical.
He sees injustice and he wants to shine a light
on it, but he doesn't really offer any answers.
This is an etching from his Disasters of War series.
This is Randy Harris' favorite artwork, which
tells us something about Randy.
I gave him a book of the Disasters of War.
It's image after image of people torturing each
other in terrible ways.
Here's a guy that is either being cut in half
or emasculated.
Here's another from the series.
Here are bodies that have been dismembered.
They're probably dismembered tonight.
They've been hung up on trees.
Y'all may have seen this painting before.
This is Goya's most famous painting called The
Third of May.
It depicts an execution of civilians by
soldiers who are faceless automatons.
Their backs are turned to us.
They point their muskets at these people.
They drug out of their beds at night, taken to
the outskirts of town.
The central figure, this guy in white, throws
up his arms in Christ-like pose.
Her eye goes to him.
This is an example, to my mind, of art that is
bleak in its view of people.
This is me stretching a rubber band around it.
I have a sense that Goya is indignant about this.
He's making a moral judgment and saying, this
is bad.
He's trying to put that in our face.
And maybe call us to action.
I don't think he's offering very many answers,
but I do have a sense of moral indignation in
his words.
This is art in Babylon that I feel like I look
at that and say,
maybe every now and then we should show this in
church at a lament service.
If we're praying for people who are dying in
civil wars around the world,
there may be a place for us.
I think that's the question, is what place in
the Christian consciousness, in the way we talk
to each other,
that some of the very worst things, from sex
trafficking to brutality beyond imagining,
that Christians need to recognize that that
exists, if even to think about the victims in
that sense.
Now, obviously, a steady diet of that would be
difficult, but somebody probably needs to pay
attention to that.
And where does that fit in Christian discourse?
That's a good question as well.
Here's a tough one.
Have any of you seen this photograph before?
This is a photograph, yes, some of you have in
my class.
This is at the center of culture wars in the
late 1980s.
It's a photograph by Andres Serrano.
I'll just spell out the title for you.
I don't enjoy saying it, P-I-S-S Christ.
That's the name of it.
It is a photograph of a small plastic crucifix
that's been dumped in several gallons of the
artist's own urine.
And he shot a picture of it.
There is, again, this is the center of all
sorts of controversy.
I think there was a senator who actually tore
up a reproduction of this photograph on the
floor of the Senate.
Yeah, it was debated on the Senate floor.
And it involved taxpayer funding.
Now, here is an image that immediately is in
your face in terms of its title, in terms of
once you find out what it's about.
It's funny because I'll pull my students in
class and show them, not show them the title,
not tell them anything about it.
And I'm like, what do you see?
And they say crucifix.
How many of you are offended by this?
Nobody's offended by it.
And then I tell them, OK, it's actually urine
that this cross is holding in.
Then a lot of people get offended real quick.
It's kind of interesting.
But this seems like a piece calculated to
offend, right?
And I would argue that this is a great example
of art having a life of its own.
I was showing this in class one day and said,
yeah, think of this.
A lot of people were offended.
And one guy raised his hand and said, I think
this is a profoundly Christian word.
Talk about it.
Do tell.
And he said, no other artwork that I've ever
seen captures the scandal of the incarnation as
well as this does.
The shocking idea that God would come down and
literally take on flesh and sweat and use the
bathroom and have to sleep and eat to stay alive.
The idea that God would do that, we have tamed
that idea and we have made it not shocking like
it was when Jesus was walking the earth.
Because wasn't that one of the reasons that he
got crucified?
He claimed to be God.
And here's a man who's a sweaty, sometimes
smelly man we can see.
And he claims to be God.
And the students said, this piece gets at that
better than anything else I've ever seen.
It's like, wow, class over.
And one of the things I would suggest to you is
that art can have a life of its own.
Once an artist makes something, an artist has
sort of things that he or she puts into a work
that are conscious thoughts.
But once an artwork is put out there, it is
suddenly open to a lot of interpretations.
It's open in part to what the viewer brings to it.
And I think this is an example of perhaps, to
my mind, an artwork that's perhaps calculated
to be offensive.
But the gospel comes in and scandalizes it and
says, no, this is perhaps a perfect
illustration of what we should be thinking.
Some of you who are students, freshmen, you
would talk about this in the first spotlight.
But I'm also a disgust researcher.
And one of the interesting things about
contamination psychology is that there's a
thing called negativity dominance.
That if you take a piece of feces and touch it
to a cheeseburger, the cheeseburger is ruined.
The feces isn't rendered delicious without the contact.
And that's why it's called negativity dominance.
So when the negative touches the positive, the
negative has the power and contaminates.
And the reason why I bring this up is because
this is what is playing with you, right?
What has the power?
It's urine in the crucifix.
And the contact is scandalous because what?
The cross can't handle that?
Is the weaker entity here, or the student I
see, is flipping that around?
And that's one thing you all see all the time
in the gospels, right?
However, Jesus makes contact with sinners,
everybody is using negativity dominance.
Why do you associate with tax collectors and sinners?
His contact with the pollutant, like this
cheeseburger illustration, renders you polluted.
That's the way contamination works.
And what I told the students a couple weeks ago
is what does a church look like if it follows
the rhythms of that psychology?
The power is with the world.
It's the contaminating influence.
And the only impulse we have is to remove ourselves.
But what's subversive about the gospels, every
time sinners make contact, think of the one
with the blood disorder, right?
Every time somebody unclean touches Jesus,
counterintuitively, scandously, they are purified.
And that's kind of one of those hermeneutical
skills that I think that student was showing
where I think this could be turned upside down.
I might say, I think the rubber band at this
point has been stretched too far.
But this is one of those pieces of art that Dan
think can be spun around in this kind of
subversive way.
Because I think it illustrates, right, even the
title shots, right, you have Piss and Christ,
and they're connected.
And it's that connection that's scandalous.
But where's the power in that connection?
It's not with Christ.
He has to be protected from our bodies at their
worst, basically.
One of the things I love too about Jesus is
he's a big fan of using sort of base materials.
Like, he spits in the ground and makes mud,
right, and puts that in a guy's eyes.
It's his blood that fixes this, right?
He uses bread and wine.
He uses all these very earthy kind of metaphors.
I just love that.
Oh, this is called My Sweet Lord by Cosimo Cavallaro.
And it is a crucified Christ made of chocolate.
This is kind of old chocolate.
It's getting kind of spotted.
Here's a fresher version of it.
It's in a gallery.
This piece is highly scandalous and
scandalizing when it was shown.
There were a lot of protests.
This is a built-on Catholic League guy was on
all the cable shows protesting this, in part
because it came out at Easter.
Jesus is made of chocolate.
He literally casts some chocolate.
The artist does this.
He makes little sculptures out of chocolate and
cheese and other things and features full nudity.
There's no loin cloth or anything.
And I was showing this to Richard Amals because
I thought it would be something that he liked
or would want to respond to.
And sure enough, he blogs about it and of
course has brilliant thoughts.
This idea, again, this idea of recapturing the
scandal of things.
It's about eating the body and blood of Christ, right?
And here that is in flesh or in chocolate.
I'm not going to say it.
And here is a Christ who is literally edible, right?
Remember when the early Christians were accused
of being cannibals.
Here's this cult that gets together and they
drink blood and they eat skin.
That was scandalous to people.
And I think, again, so much of the Gospel we
have tamed.
And this is in communion itself, the Eucharist
itself is something I think we've tamed a
little bit.
And we don't quite, aren't tuned in to what we're...
Remember that scene in the Gospels?
One of the Gospels when everybody leaves Jesus
and he just talked about,
you're going to have to eat my flesh and drink
my blood.
I think this piece helps me get around this.
Again, my rubber band can stretch around this piece.
Another thing, I think it's also, here's
another permanent little twist on it,
but I also think it's an indictment of the
commercialization of Easter.
Jesus is the big chocolate bunny now.
Think about Christmas.
Think about how the scandal of the Gospel has
been so tamed.
It's candy, it's Easter bunnies.
So I think there's also a shock there.
Have we done this to Jesus?
Turned him into the Easter bunny.
Is that resurrection now?
It's Easter baskets and chocolate.
And so maybe we need to be shocked about the
commercialization of that too.
So I think that's a way to look at it.
Similar thing about, jumping back to this real quick,
that's one of the other sort of analysis points
that's come out of this.
An indictment of idolatry, an indictment of
cheapening Christianity
by reducing its little plastic trinkets and
bumper stickers and that sort of thing.
You know, what are we doing to Christ when we
reduce Christianity to sort of gadgets
we can sell in the bookstore?
Okay, but we don't want to leave you guys in
the drags totally.
We don't want to leave you chocolate Jesus.
That's right, we don't want to end on that.
I've called some examples of art that I think
does a good job
of what Francis Schaeffer calls the major and
minor themes of Christian art.
Schaeffer says the major theme is the fact that
God exists,
God has created the world as good, and He has
broken into the world
and sought to redeem us and fix us and help us
with our sin issues
and use us as instruments to change the world.
So that's all the major theme of Christian art,
God's goodness.
The minor theme is the fact that we've screwed
things up, right?
We sin, we're fallen, we hurt each other, we're
selfish, we're greedy.
And Schaeffer argues that in order for
Christian art to be really true,
you have to have both of those themes in.
So I've chosen some art that I feel like
encapsulates both of those themes.
T-Bone Burnett, how many of you have heard of
T-Bone Burnett?
Music producer, I think he put together the O
Brother Workout soundtrack.
Anytime movies want roots music, they go to
T-Bone Burnett.
So Cold Mountain, I think that had a lot of
roots music on it.
He also claims Christianity as his faith, and
he says this, I love this,
and it kind of gets at the idea of major and
minor themes.
If Jesus is the Light of the World, there are
two kinds of songs you can write.
You can write songs about the light,
or you can write songs about what you can see
from the light.
That's what I try to do.
Again, that metaphor that Rick used tonight of
the flashlight going into darkness,
and Christian artists, whether they're
musicians or poets or writers or painters,
need to also paint the things that the light
shines into.
So this is some artwork that I think really
does that.
We'll start, oh, we'll start.
1920s, Georges Rouault, a Catholic painter in
the early 20th century.
Some art historians say he is the most
important Christian painter of the 20th century.
He was certainly one that's actually accepted.
Some of the only Christian art, I should say
20th century explicitly Christian art
that you see in art history textbooks.
Very devout Catholic.
Here's one of his images, De Profundis, taking
its, I guess that's Latin from that song.
It says, out of the depths I cried to you, O Lord.
I was thinking that scene in The Sixth Sense
when the kid's in the church.
He's reciting Latin, and that's one of the
things he's saying.
This is part of a series called Miserere that
Rouault did.
A lot of prints that show people suffering,
but Christ's redeeming presence being there in
the middle of the suffering.
It's a little bit abstract, you can kind of see that.
It's not super realistic.
Here's a man reclining in the foreground.
Perhaps he's sick, perhaps he's dead.
In the background we have this mysterious
collection of people.
Maybe it's his family talking about making
funeral arrangements,
or what do we do when your dad dies.
And there's the face of Christ perhaps on a
picture on the wall,
perhaps mystically sort of floating there.
But the idea is, even though this man is
suffering, Christ is there in the middle of the darkness,
in the middle of the suffering.
Another Rouault print.
I just wanted to show this to you because I
think the title is like the best title of any
artwork ever done.
And here's the title.
I know y'all can't see it.
The Just, like sandalwood, perfume the axe that
strikes them.
Here is a man, perhaps he's been martyred,
perhaps he's been shot.
And he's being supported on kind of his foot
end by a woman and a child.
And then supporting his arms is what appears to
be a figure with wings, an angel perhaps.
And again the face of Jesus is floating over him.
So this idea that suffering is in the world,
but Christ is in the middle of the suffering.
A German artist, one of my favorite artists and
one of the great female artists of the 20th century,
Pada Kolditz, German expressionist artist.
I'm not sure really where she was at with Christianity.
I hope she was a Christian.
She doesn't make explicitly Jesus work like
Georges Rouault does.
But one of the things that she's really attuned
into is the suffering of mothers.
And so here's her piece Mother with a Dead Child.
A woman holds her dead kid and you just get a
sense of sobbing, of shoulders shaking, of wailing.
Never, to my mind, nobody does lament like Pada
Kolditz, nobody.
And there's something so broken and intimate
about this piece.
And she has a lot like this.
But she can also turn and have some of those
wonderfully intimate images of mothers with
their kids.
She seems to see the world as both a place
where there can be great suffering and also
great kindness and gentleness.
And that goes to what you were saying earlier
about the whole span of the artist's work.
That any given piece might be broken, but that
she has moments like this as well.
So you look at the whole thing and you see
redemptive moments coming in.
And typically the artist I want to present to
you guys is broken and depressing and everything.
I've looked at a lot of your work and I can
say, yeah, you're pretty thoroughly depressing.
Ed Nippers, he's a Christian artist.
He's still alive today.
He teaches at Messiah College.
And he's probably the most controversial
Christian artist.
He paints his scenes out of the Bible or scenes
that could have happened in the Bible out of
his imagination.
And he typically makes the figures, including
the figure of Christ, nude.
He's really big and he's showing the humanity
of these Bible characters and reminding us that
Jesus was a human being, was a person.
And this is, I think, his most powerful painting.
It's called The Pest House, Christ Heals the Sick.
And here Christ is this powerful muscular figure.
He's the guy with his back turned to us.
And he is sort of stalking and storming through
this room full of lepers.
In fact, I get a sense.
I always think Jesus is so powerful in this
because he's carrying a guy under his arm.
You'll see that under his left arm.
He's hauling a leper under his left arm as he's
walking through this room.
He reaches out a hand with great authority.
And that hand almost seems to be glowing as he
stretches out to touch a guy with sores all
over his body.
When Nipper's painted this, he actually studied
some of the sores that are on people with the
AIDS virus and translated that onto his leper figures.
So here's a painting that is not flinched at
some of the horrors in the world,
but presents Christ as a redemptive presence in
the middle of the mess.
And I think that's incredible, incredible painting.
Can I pause on that?
One of the other studies that we've done at ACU
is on incarnation.
And obviously Christians have struggled with
the human body for a long time.
And so the Gnostics, the Deceitic heresies, all
have denied that Jesus really was fully human
or whatever.
And so what was interesting in this study is we
had participants read about Jesus participating
in various kind of bodily experiences
from illness or body frailties, metabolic functions.
And one of the interesting findings of the
study was that people, again, with higher death
anxiety, were much more resistant to those
incarnational images.
It seems like some of our squeamishness with
the body in Jesus' body is driven by our own
anxieties that this body is a mortal thing.
It's not strong enough to carry us to the other world.
And so we deny it.
And some of our anxiety about the body that
we're discovering, even with Jesus'
incarnational life, is driven, again, fear-based.
Not all, but some of it is driven by this
anxiety that if Jesus was flesh and blood, then
it seems like a poor vessel to get me to the
other side.
I sometimes think, maybe because I'm a dark
sort of person, I think we should think about
our own death more.
You have all these pictures from art history of
monks meditating, holding human skulls.
You go to Rome, and you go to this place called
the Cappuccino Cemetery, and there are all
these dead monks sort of propped up in these catacombs.
And you walk through it, and at the end there's
a statement that says,
what you are, we once were, and what we are,
you will be.
And the idea is to make you think about your
own mortality.
I think there's, if we say things like, I'm
going to die, and Jesus is going to resurrect me,
and we thoroughly believe that we would live
life a lot more fearlessly.
Tim Lowley, another Christian artist, there's
been some controversy with his work too.
He has a severely handicapped daughter,
physically and mentally handicapped daughter
named Temma.
And he had a whole series of works that focused
on his daughter, and unflinchingly looked at
her frailty and her brokenness.
And there was some controversy. People said
he's being exploitive of his daughter.
This is called Temma on Earth. His daughter is
lying on her side. She looks dead. She's not.
But it's a crack in the ground. Someone who's
utterly helpless, who cannot move herself.
She's utterly dependent on people moving her
around. I'm going to get back to that in a second.
She reappears in this painting called Carry Me,
where that helplessness is again shown, but is
shown in the context of community.
There she is. And she looks dead in all these
paintings, but she's not.
It almost seems like she has sort of a shroud
on, but her arms are kind of shriveled and they
retreat into her sleeves.
And there are six figures who flank her and
carry her, almost like they're lifting her up
to God.
Almost an image of intercession. I'm going to
jump back here.
This is another by the same artist, Proximity.
And it shows Lully or his wife, you can't
really tell, holding Temma, her head, in the
figure's lap.
And all around the edges of this picture, it's
been blurred. There's almost kind of a blur effect.
And the way I read this is the whole scripture,
or the song, His Eye is on the Sparrow, right?
I have a sense that this is God's eye vision
zooming into the earth, being aware of this
frail person.
And again, the title, Proximity, is a sense of
closeness. I really love that.
Mary McCleary. This is not a painting. This is
a collage of colored paper.
This is called Children of the Apple Tree. And
it's a meditation on the fallen nature of humans.
Here are these kids. And it's kind of like Lord
of the Flies meets the Garden of Eden.
Because these kids are dressed up almost like
savage rebels.
This one kid in the foreground has a mask, like
a bandit. He's carrying a rock and a knife.
Another guy behind him approaches with a staff,
like he's about to bonk him on the head.
And there's a kid on the left-hand side of the
picture that reminds us of the character Piggy
in Lord of the Flies.
You remember that? He's cleaning his glasses.
The idea that here we have, and there's a
garden in the background.
You see the walls, the hedges that have been
trimmed, and trees on the inside.
So this seems to be harkening back to Eden in
his imagery and saying, we're still dealing
with the same problem.
The same cyclical problem of sin and selfishness.
I think this is the last image. And we can look
at this and then invite some more discussion
and questions.
This is After Paradise by Joel Sheesley, a
Christian realist artist.
And it's a simple bedroom scene full of
incredible subtlety.
And if this is a terrible reproduction of it,
you really have to see it in real life for a
bigger picture of it.
We have a bed in the lower right, just the edge
of a bed.
We have a dresser and a lamp and a closet.
And on the wall by the lamp is a little print.
He's painted, it's kind of a painting within a painting.
It is a medieval, no, early Renaissance.
Image of Adam and Eve being tempted.
The servant is hanging out above Adam and Eve,
and Eve is reaching out to grab an apple.
I guarantee you cannot see it if you're trying
to look for it, because I'm up here and I can't
see it, but it's there.
And then there's a closet in the background,
and the door of the closet is a sliding door.
It serves as a dividing wall between two halves
of the closet.
One half has a woman's slippers and some
women's clothing in it.
The other half is the guy's side of the closet.
And I might add, the guy's side is much smaller
than the woman's side.
So the repercussions of the fall that we're
still dealing with,
this is kind of the rupture in relationships
between men and women that happens with the fall.
And I think this is a really subtle, beautiful
way of getting at that.
Do you want to say anything about this?
No, I just don't like it. I think it's profound.
So all this work, I mean, this is stuff that I
think does a great job, and a lot of this is by Christians,
does a great job of bringing in the redemption
and acknowledging the brokenness of the world.
And I hope that's something I do in my artwork
as a painter.
I know some of you here are maybe songwriters
and poets and writers and artists yourselves.
And I hope that's something that you'll carry
with you.
I also think, here kind of as my closing thing,
is I think, I mean, to be a Christian in the world,
I think is inherently a hermeneutical task.
I mean, if we experience a tragedy, there's a
car accident, there's a death, there's an illness,
you have to ask yourself, what does that mean?
What does this mean? What does this life mean now?
You know, you experience a divorce and you say,
what does this mean?
And we have to interpret the brokenness.
And so there's a couple of options.
I think we've been, those of you that have
experienced horrible grief
and have had people come up and just kind of
say, well, they're in a better place.
You know, don't grieve.
It's kind of that too quick move, right?
We talked about the very beginning, right?
Too quick moving to redemption and therefore
denying or kind of creating a sweet sentimentality.
Trying to do good.
Again, I don't think we're trying to criticize
any beauty or prettiness in the world or sweetness.
That is there, but what we're trying to talk
about is this task that we have and that's
difficult, right?
Some of the things I've shown you, you're like,
I don't see how any of that can be redeemed.
That's a challenge, right?
That's a challenge and that's that rubber band
that we were talking about.
And so I don't think there's any one answer
here to it.
But it is fundamental to just use this as a
case study and say, this is what life's like, right?
This is what life is like scattered among the nations,
trying to see the gospel in places where it's
really strange to find it here.
And that's inherently what the struggle was in
the incarnation.
Can anything good come from Nazareth?
Hermitically speaking, they can't, right?
Nothing good could come from there.
When Jesus touches sinners, he has to be contaminated.
And all of the gospel is subversive in that sense.
And so I think there is some elasticity and
some surprise even in the darkness.
That's my last thing, Daniel.
Yeah, I would say for those of you who are
ministers and church leaders,
one of the things I think of is the book of
Psalms, the Psalter, right?
The book of Psalms.
And I think about my own worship experiences.
And I think how many churches have I gone to
where I've actually had a lament service?
You know, it's kind of rare.
We typically want people to be happy when they
go to church.
But I sometimes wonder if our witness to the
world can be served,
not about being depressed all the time,
but occasionally maybe following the balance of
the Psalter
and with these Psalms that rail against injustice
or ask God, where are you?
You know, I've been crying out all day and I'm
not hearing from it.
I think that would, I mean, that's not really
the propaganda that we feel comfortable,
propaganda, showing to the world, right?
But I think it does show that we're people who
are not living in wallow land
and I think that's pretty important.
We're past our time, so we'll stay up here if
you guys want to,
does anyone want to ask a quick question or two?
I just wanted to add something.
I guess we have different points of view on
nudity, like maybe for artists,
when you look at a painting, it's nudity and
it's like, you know?
But then you get somebody who's not an artist
and they're like, oh my gosh, they're nude.
I mean, you guys have passed that.
They're showing the beauty of what God has done.
And also going to Goya's artwork with, I don't know,
some of that was disturbing back in maybe Da
Vinci's time.
That was the only way they could portray human
figures was using corks
because they didn't have females in it.
We'll have to come back next year and do
something on nudity.
Oh dear.
Anyway, any other things?
We'll stay up here if you want to visit with us.
We thank you for being here.
Enjoy Summit and good evening.
I think that Ironport goes on some of that.
You guys go out towards the Coliseum to the
field thing,
and the art and design department, Ironport, is
going out there.
You can see liquid metal, which is pretty cool
at night.
So I endorse that.
You all should go check that out.
Thanks for coming.