the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Forthcoming Symposium on Merold Westphal's Whose Community? Which Interpretation

In the months of November and December we will be hosting a symposium here on the Church and Postmodern Culture blog to engage Merold Westphal's latest book--and the latest book in the Church and Postmodern Culture series along with Graham Ward's The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens. Westphal's book is entitled Whose Community? Which Interpretation: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church, and touches on the following issues:

In this volume, renowned philosopher Merold Westphal introduces current philosophical thinking related to interpreting the Bible. Recognizing that no theology is completely free of philosophical "contamination," he engages and mines contemporary hermeneutical theory in service of the church. After providing a historical overview of contemporary theories of interpretation, Westphal addresses postmodern hermeneutical theory, arguing that the relativity embraced there is not the same as the relativism in which "anything goes." Rather, Westphal encourages us to embrace the proliferation of interpretations based on different perspectives as a way to get at the richness of the biblical text.

Here is the schedule of engagements with the book:

• November 14: Carl Raschke, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver
  ch. 01. Hermeneutics 101: No Interpretation Needed?
  ch. 02. Hermeneutics 102: A Little Historical Background
• November 21: Jim Chapman, Th.M. student at Duke University
  ch. 03. Against Romantic Hermeneutics: Away from Psychologism
  ch. 04. Objectivism and Authorial Privilege
• November 30: Andrew Talbot, PhD student at the University of Nottingham
  ch. 05. Revoking Authorial Privilege
  ch. 06. Rehabilitating Tradition
• December 7: Cynthia R. Nielsen, PhD student at the University of Dallas
  ch. 07. On Not Clinging to the Prejudice against Prejudice
  ch. 08. Art as the Site of Truth beyond Method
• December 14: Christina Smerick, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Greenville College
  ch. 09. Performance, Application, Conversation
  ch. 10. Conversation and the Liberal-Communitarian Debate
• December 21: Father Robert Coates, SSC, Vicar of St Augustine's at Bexhill-on-Sea, England
  ch. 11. The Church as Conversation
  ch. 12. Transcendence, Revelation, and Community

Please read along and join us in the conversation starting November 14th! If you don't already have the book yet, an excerpt containing the preface and first chapter may be obtained here on the Baker Academic website.

Caputo on Milbank and Zizek

"Church and Postmodern Culture" author John Caputo has provided an extensive review of The Monstrosity of Christ for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  The long, generous review essay ultimately (and not surprisingly) ends with questions like the following:

As I do not think that matter is ultimately the matter at issue for Milbank, or that Christ is the issue for Žižek, I am also overwhelmed by a compelling sense of how uncompelling is either view. What exactly is the compelling need we are under to agree with either one of these positions or to choose between them? Why do we have to love either one of these monsters? Why do we need the notion that at the metaphysical base of things there lies either a primordial peace or a primordial violence -- or a primordial anything, at least one that we could ever get our hands on? Why do the multiple repetitions of which our lives are woven need to be cast either as a downbeat and futile search that will be always frustrated or as underwritten by an uplifting metaphysics of participation? Why inscribe either absolute contradiction or absolute peace at the heart of things instead of ambience and ambiguity? Why chaos instead of the unsteady chaosmotic process of unprogrammed becoming? Why not see life as a joyful but risky business that may turn out well or badly, a repetition forwards in which I produce what I am repeating, in which I invent what I am discovering, but in which I am divested of any assurances about what lies up ahead -- let alone deep down at the metaphysical base of things? Žižek's notion of the contingency of necessity is close to this insight, but he insists on treating the Deep Trauma like some Metaphysical Meteor that cratered downtown Ljubljana. Is this not just the search for a transcendental signifier all over again? Why do we have to believe that something deep is out there but alas it is lost and we are hopelessly searching for it? That is repetition as reproduction. Why not rather say that by searching for it, it is there, produced by the repetition? The repetition is generative, engendering, positing something not merely as a dream but by the dream, the active dreaming of the dream, the dreaming up, which gathers momentum as we dream, repeat, desire, pray and weep, over the coming of something whose coming we are engendering, or is being engendered, as the very structure of desire. Dreaming is the pharmakon, a risky supplement, a joy that flows through our veins that is liable to poison us if we are not careful. Nothing is lost from which we have been traumatically cut off. This is just desire desiring, what desire does, how it works, its happy work, and if desire is a fault, it is a happy fault.

Why not adopt the post-metaphysical idea that gives up searching for all such primordial underlying somethings or other?

I'm not convinced that metaphysics and Jesus are as antithetical as Caputo goes on to suggest, nor am I sure that theology is as marginal and distrusted as he claims in his conclusion.  (Impressions here no doubt depend on the circles in which one runs; but I think it would be hard to be a regular reader of the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, or even the New York Times and suggest that theology is some quaint backwater pursuit.  I'd think if we sampled those pages 30 years ago, that claim would have been more true.)  But in any case, despite quibbles, Caputo's review repays a read. 

And we could wish that more scholars of Caputo's stature would take the time to review the work of their peers.  As I've noted elsewhere, I think book reviews are a crucial aspect of scholarly discourse and we abandon such labor at our parallel.  Unfortunately, the culture of scholarly reviewing seems to leave this important work to graduate students and emerging scholars, for whom a published review is a kind of early, "mini-publication" for a CV.  As scholars become established, they don't "have" to do such work any more.  But a different sort of "ought" suggests they should.  I'm grateful for Jack taking the time to do such work.  May his tribe increase.

Read the rest of Caputo's review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity: A Review

The following review of Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity comes to us from Dr. William Keenan, who is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University. He has published extensively on aspects of culture and beliefs and is currently engaged in research projects on atheism and on art.

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Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom
Ernst Bloch
With an Introduction by Peter Thompson
Translated by J. T. Swann
2009 (July)
288 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84467 394 0 Ppk
Price: £14.99
ISBN: 978 1 84467 371 1 Hbk
Price: £55.00

Since its original publication in 1968, Ernst Bloch's Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom has been the book to deal with by any serious quester after knowledge of the deep symbiotic relationship between those über-'Others', Christianity and Atheism. As an unabashed utopian Marxist thinker, Bloch (1885 - 1977) eschews that 'excess of hyper-rationalism or dogmatic materialism' his more prosaic atheist stable mates generally bring to discussions of religion. In the words of Peter Thompson, Director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield, in his excellent Introduction to this long unavailable classic, 'Ernst Bloch and the Quantum Mechanics of Hope' (i – xxx, i):

(R)eligion as both debate and way of life has not crumbled in the face of an apparently inexorable rationalist, scientific, modernising Enlightenment and the globalisation of the market economy, but retains a potency and strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain.

Bloch himself rubbed shoulders with that unique coterie of enlightened radical Marxists - Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, for example. Perhaps we have the embryo of some such today in Eagleton, Badiou, Žižek, Habermas and others for whom religion-averse aggressive sorts of atheistic fundamentalism are as intellectually uncongenial as the 'exclusively modern phenomenon' (Habermas 2001: 10) of their religion counterparts. Marx's own dialectical understanding of religiosity, captured well in his open-minded insight into 'the opium of the masses, the heart of the heartless world' pervades Bloch's 'detective work', as he himself called it, on the emancipatory – for which, read 'heretical', a favourite Blochian trope – potential within Christianity. Bloch's exegesis of the Bible is an insider's hermeneutic, unlike that verstehen-free religion-cynical spleen of Hitchens, Dawkins, Gray and other high priests of resurgent Darwinism.

For Bloch, scripture is soaked through with hope-filled narratives of transgression that challenge the cold moralistic pieties and hot consumer excessess of the modern world driven by the Puritan ethic and its capitalist manifestations. Not only were Amos, Jeremiah and the psalmists of yore wont to sound war trumpets against greed and godlessness, Christ's life was a continual battle against systematic brutalization, exploitation and hubris, whether incarnated in, for instance, temple-franchised money lenders, pharasaical pride, or denial of the human rights of widows, prostitutes, lepers and the anawim of the earth. Before liberation theology, Bloch was. Before feminists picked up the revolution power in the peasant girl Mary's prayer, the Magnificat, with its promise that the Almighty will 'cast down the mighty from their seats … exalt the humble … send the rich away empty', Bloch was affirming the capacity, inbuilt within humanity since the Creation, to create Kingdom-life now, on earth.

As a thought mode, atheism is commonly understood to be radically different in domain assumptions from 'religion'. '(C)ompeting caliphates', Peter Thompson calls them (xiv). Bloch's approach is deeply imbued with his strong humanistic Marxist conviction that dogmatic forms of both atheism and church-orientated Christianity simply talk past each other in a dialogue of the deaf. His 'utopia of the light', as Bloch refers to it (p. 231), is, to borrow a Habermasian expresison, the 'ideal speech community' of the Enlightenment, not in the 'half-baked' (p. 7) compromised version found in 'rationalistic bourgeoise' (p. 8) contexts that fall short of his messianic vision of full-blooded participatory democracy in which all voices, including religious ones, might be heard and respected. He writes (p. 10): 'The Enlightenment, therefore, will be all the more radical when it does not pour equal scorn on the Bible's all-pervading healthy insight into man.'

Setting aside the somewhat outmoded sexist language in Bloch's expression here and leaving the matter of biblical 'health' to one side, an 'Amen' to that tolerant sentiment seems theologically and politically appropriate when pursuing a sense of atheism in a multi-faith world that would not take the form of an anti-religious knee-jerk reflex. Nevertheless, as we might expect of a believer but not a belonger, Bloch's nuanced analysis imports a pervasive anti-institutional religion refrain: 'the Church is the institution least founded on enlightenment' (p. 9). Bloch's desire for a 'processual' approach to the 'end of alienation', in critique of the 'programmatic' emphases of Heidegger, Bultmann and Barth, is to see 'an end to static metaphysics' (p.54). Writing in 1968, significantly enough, he remains pretty much silent on how the institutionalization of such logocentrism within anti-utopian – read, hope-less – forms of life wherever they be found are to be effectively contested.

Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom is a tough read, made so by the author's intellectual capaciousness and capacity to range cavalierly between the languages of theology, philosophy and critical theory of his times. Perhaps discursive modes, even thought styles, have moved on apace since the post-war period in which Bloch embarked on his courageous adventure to put the best fruits of Christianity and Marxism in the same basket. Though an Index would have been a useful resource in a book of such range and intricacy, the republication of this sparkling study is timely and sure to launch a new wave of interest in bridge-building – or bridge-destruction - either side of the religion-atheism gulf war. Bloch's approach is literary, elusive, lyrical and, at times, a tad, it must be said, lugubrious and long-winded. He does not provide a clear map of a road to reconciliation between Atheism and Christianity, the two great roaring beasts of the modern jungle. But that is not Bloch's intention in any case. Nor does his book necessarly help us re-examine the role of Marxism in the postmodern era. As a 'classic' it is too time bound for that. We need to read it in context. It maybe a tract more for its times than ours.

We do, however, obtain from the book what is of lasting value, namely, a sense that if we look for it we can rediscover within either of the caliphates of religion and atheism redemptive illumination and empowerment. Taken together, as Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom reaches out to do, there is potential for a new world in the making. This is a richly evocative, demanding book to think with about massively important matters at the heart of human culture. In a characteristic Blochian Christo-Marxian, therefore fully, radically dialectical, sentiment (Bloch 2009, p. 166):

(T)here seems to be quite as much love here for the oppressed as there is justice for the evil-doers and salvation for those who have been freed … the same apocalyptic light which shines with anger on the wicked also lights the way to the wedding feast of the elect.

In his novel The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie (2009: 55) has an interesting, ironic take on atheistic colonialization:

'If you were an atheist, Birbal, the emperor challenged his first minister, 'what would you say to the true believers of all the great relgions of the world?' Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly . 'I would say to them that in my opinion they are all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them. 'How so?' the emperor asked' All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal. 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.'

Reference

Habermas, J. (2001) Glauben und Wissen. Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 6

The final engagement of Daniel Siedell's God in the Gallery comes from Kevin Hamilton. He will be talking about chapter 6 entitled "Art, Liturgy, and the Church." Kevin Hamilton is an artist and researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he heads the New Media Program in the School of Art and Design. He works in gallery and public settings in a variety of media, and also writes on interface history, mobility, creativity, and cybernetics. Past projects can be viewed at www.kevinhamilton.org, and he blogs at www.complexfields.org.

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Chapter 6 of Dan's book outlines an ambitious and urgent task, a radical proposition for a project that is without precedent in my lifetime. "The task then," writes Siedell, "is to articulate the expansive aesthetics of the church." Key here is that he chooses to use the word articulate, and not invent, create, or transform. Also crucial here is the inherent failure built in to the act of articulating something that is also "expansive." Unlike so many (academic) efforts at articulation or description, the project Dan outlines is one that will remain incomplete, transitional, contingent. 

At the risk of merely rehashing Dan's fine work, I would like to underline some of the ways in which this call is likely to be misunderstood. The radicality of Dan's project might be overlooked by those for whom the church is a restricted space and time, a set of rituals and practices, rather than an expansive, inhabited manifestation of the Kingdom of God. If, like myself, your spiritual formation has been lacking in Ecclesiology, you might easily miss the excitement, urgency, and relevance of Siedell's call. Here are some points I'd like to stress as a cheerleader for this cause - perhaps others will disagree with my take on Dan's sketch.

1. God in the Gallery does NOT call for a new aesthetic that will "set apart" churches from secular institutions in matters of branding, education, art collection, consumption, or commission. To ask of the Lord "How should we see, and how should we see together?" is different than asking "What should I look at?" or even "What should the church look like?" We start from the bodies we have, the sensory experiences granted us by God's revealed Word and the Church's sacramental postures. From these rhythms and habits of perceiving, the senses we utilize or neglect as we reach to serve God and God's beloved ones, we will explore the aesthetic of being the church. Since we best understand these sensations and postures by living with others who also sense and sense differently, we will discover the "aesthetics of the church" in conversation with other aesthetics. But we will not orient ourselves according to any aesthetic product or affect.

2. Dan's project is also not a call for a visible, aesthetic or stylistic influence by Christians in the secularized spheres of Contemporary Art. If the goal of inventing an aesthetic risks missing the improvisational revelation of the Holy Spirit, then the goal of transforming an aesthetic risks adopting the body of the colonizer, for whom the senses are dulled, instrumental, and lacking in empathy. The "expansive" aesthetics of the church do not confine themselves to sanctuaries, to daily prayer, to Sabbath time. But neither do they aspire to transform "other spaces" into the domain of church - because there is no space outside the domain of the church. In seeking to "articulate" the church's expansive aesthetics, we will move into multiple spheres of influence and exchange, where Christ is recognized as Lord to differing degrees, but where Christ is King nonetheless. We can neither withdraw as a church from participation in defining art, nor can we approach this process as one to be commanded for God. 

3. Lastly, I don't think Dan's call requires that church members embrace the languages and postures of Contemporary Art. As Dan's own critical/hermeneutic work on the artwork of Celaya demonstrates, we will discover the aesthetics of Christ's church throughout creation, wherever humans struggle to understand the potential of molded matter for communication, revelation, celebration. We will have to remain in relationship to multiple and diverse aesthetics. There is much to be discovered in this task through engagement with "low" culture as well, in the design of everyday consumer products, in mass media. Potential for discovery lies even in an individual church body's vernacular history of struggle with color, light, shape and form. I agree with Dan that many Christians have lost out in their ignorance of the worlds of Contemporary Art, where expert craftspersons have been learning for decades about how aesthetics emerge. But if the church is to remain in conversation with multiple sites of origin in the articulation of aesthetics, then the worlds of Contemporary Art will comprise only part of these important sites. In fact, one topic worth discussing is whether the church's most focussed engagements with Contemporary Art - organizations like CIVA or IAM - might be too narrow in scope (as broad as they are). Though I wholly concede that there is too little knowledge of Contemporary Art within the church, I submit that the church should avoid mimicking existing disciplinary structures. 

As a young art student first introduced to Modern Art as a collective process of invention and discovery, I was thrilled by the "blank slate" of it all. After Duchamp, it seemed, after Lenin's revolution, after Picasso, Pollock, or the Critical Art Ensemble, Art could be ANYTHING. Late-modern criticism of this project helped me better see the destructive nihilisms of this project, the impossibility of a blank slate. Even better, re-engagement with the church has shown me the strongest living example of humble discovery in relation, over hubristic invention from scratch. If, as Yoder said, "there is no scratch from which to start," then the project proposed in God in the Gallery stands to serve as a radical answer to modernism, and the current place of art in global commerce. 

There is a nagging, and ominous problem here, however. If there is no domain that is outside the church from the perspective of a body of people seeking revelation, there certainly are "outsiders" to such a body. The church can only be the church as its doors are open to all God loves - and so the project of "articulating the expansive aesthetics of the church" will only happen as the body is, well...expansive. For all kinds of reasons that are outside the domain of Dan's book, the church I know seems closed to many with whom we should be in conversation. I hope that humble confession and prayerful correction of this will be part of the project, as I approach it.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 5

Dayton Castleman is an artist who works in sculpture and site-specific installation. He grew up in New Orleans, and has large-scale public work in Philadelphia. He received his BA from Belhaven College, and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor of art and design at Trinity Christian College near Chicago. His website can be found at http://www.daytoncastleman.com

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"I love you, but, inexplicably, I love something in you more than yourself, and, therefore, I destroy you." – Jacques Lacan

I am in the final weeks of curating an exhibition comprised entirely of artist-made piñatas. The piñatas will be up for auction over the course of the show, and the exhibition will culminate in a public ceremony. At the ceremonial event, the auction winners will be given a choice: smash the piñata they have won, revealing what it contains for all onlookers, or take the piñata home intact, preserving it unbroken. This dilemma is heightened by the fact that the artworks of several artists in the show are valued in the low to mid five figures.

The piñatas in this exhibition are not likely to be filled with candy, but with something intended to shed light on the artist’s concept or purpose for the piñata’s external form. The dilemma for the auction winner is that getting at this “deeper meaning” of the particular art object requires its physical destruction, while a decision to preserve the piñata intact protects an investment, but limits its potential for broader societal value. Yet even if the piñata is sacrificed, the societal value of the object is left open for said society to judge. It is entirely possible that the opening up of the piñata could result in a complete debacle comprised of public disappointment with what the contents reveal, the perceived failure of the artist, and a perceived lapse in judgment on the part of the one who elected to obliterate what may have been a perfectly nice little sculpture.

Central to this simple project of mine is the question of who controls an artwork’s purpose, meaning and value—a question that I think is at the heart of Daniel Siedell’s chapter on Art Criticism. Siedell introduces the chapter by calling attention to the fact that it is the “disparity between the art and what is written about it—how it is interpreted—that is off-putting to many otherwise earnest art viewers.” If the work of the art writer can be confusing and off-putting to the art viewer, imagine how infuriating this might be to the artist whose own work is placed under the critical knife. Yet this frequently tumultuous relationship between the artist, the critic, and the public—mediated by art objects—is a central one in any engagement with contemporary art.

As a person who identifies primarily as an artist, it would be all too easy to offer a dismissive rant about the art critic’s lack of concern for the artist’s intention, or the public’s general lack of an informed interpretive framework. This would be easy, because these things are true, and Siedell devotes quite a bit of the chapter to unpacking why this is so in regard to art criticism. His purpose in this is to argue that in order for art criticism to be useful, one must be clear about what modern and contemporary art criticism’s ultimate goal is, and he acknowledges that the “history of art criticism suggests that the ultimate goal of the art critic is to achieve and then sustain authority as an art critic.”

He explores the roots of this in his discussion of the Harold Rosenberg—Clement Greenberg debate, and the eventual establishment of Greenberg as the twentieth century’s preeminent voice in art criticism, in whose work it becomes clear, Siedell points out, that “ultimately, the subject of art criticism is the art critic.” Yet central to Siedell’s argument is that while art criticism’s self-reflexivity may be a given, this should not be perceived as grounds for dismissing its central role in modern and contemporary art. He writes:

“This in no way diminishes the significance of art criticism. In fact, it reveals it to be a creative endeavor with its own genres and traditions that are parallel to—not derivative of—the art it engages. Both artists and critic are engaged in the act of creation, engaged in the act of discovery through their practice. If, however, the critic’s task is, following Edward Said, “to advance human freedom and knowledge,” the art critic’s challenge is to use art to show how both art and criticism can serve these noble goals, to use criticism to demonstrate art’s broader significance, and finally, to model how art should be taken seriously.”

Implicit in this paragraph is that what is often at issue in the art world is control and power. The trouble with a great deal of interaction around art is that, far from being simply a critical problem, each party represented—the artist, the critic, and the observer—would prefer to be the one that the whole endeavor revolves around. This may be one of the places that a “Nicene Christian faith” would offer a unique model for understanding art. Siedell, in fact, appropriately borrows Trinitarian language in referring to the “hypostatic union of form and content” in the art object—language that could be extended to the web of human relationships that comprise the world of modern and contemporary art. A willingness to “love your neighbor as yourself” would likely result in a rich and unique contribution to contemporary art culture.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 3

Today's engagement of Daniel A. Siedell's God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art comes from Bruce Ellis Benson. He is engaging chapter 3 entitled "Enrique Martinez Celaya's Thing and Deception: The Artistic Practice of Belief." Bruce Ellis Benson is Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL). He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry (IVP, 2002), The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge, 2003), and Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Indiana, 2008). He is co-editor of The Phenomenology of Prayer (Fordham, 2004), Hermeneutics at the Crossroads (Indiana, 2006), Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love’s Wisdom (Indiana, 2008), Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo (Brazos, 2008), and Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology (Fordham, forthcoming 2009), in which his essay “Chrétien on the Call That Wounds” will appear. He is an editor of the new Eerdmans book series titled “Envision: New Trends in Christian Theology” and Executive Director of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology (SCPT). He will be a visiting professor at the University of Leuven in the 2009-2010 academic year.

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Recently, a colleague from the English department at Wheaton made the point in conversation that a novel has a way of getting at the reality of ethical life in a way that philosophy generally cannot. In watching a character forced to make difficult ethical decisions—with all their varied gradations of “good” and “bad,” not to mention conflicting demands—one gets a much more profound sense of the complexity of trying to live virtuously than a philosophical theory can provide. One can, to be sure, cite a text like Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death as providing a particularly nuanced moral account. But, as if to prove my colleague’s point, Derrida needs the story of Abraham and Isaac precisely in order to tease out those complications.

In effect, Dan Siedell employs Enrique Martínez Celaya’s painting Thing and Deception to complexify such assumed binaries of belief and unbelief (as well as such opposites as banal and profound, truth and superstition—though here I will focus on belief and its supposed antonyms of unbelief or doubt). By observing what Martínez Celaya both does and says, Siedell shows us that defining “belief” and “unbelief” is, to say the least, complicated. One can hardly do Thing and Deception justice by way of description, so I urge readers to study the image for themselves. What is one to make of this veiled chocolate Easter bunny that has clearly been broken yet reassembled? That the words “Needed Proof” are inscribed below the bunny makes this even more complicated. Now, it’s important to know at the outset that Martínez Celaya is not just trying to be “clever.” As he says elsewhere: “So many contemporary paintings have this wink to say we’re both in on the joke. Any time I find myself being witty or clever, I paint over it” (see “Layers of Devotion (and the Scars to Prove It)"). So one needs to take Martínez-Celaya very seriously.

One of the complications here is that Easter bunnies are, in one sense, like Santa Claus: they are the secular counterpart to Jesus’s resurrection as Santa is the counterpart to his birth. But, since one can talk about “believing” in either Santa or the Easter bunny themselves, there are at least two levels of belief at stake in this painting. Siedell says that the words “needed proof” are “ironic, for who ‘needs proof’ when trading in the currency of chocolate Easter bunnies?” True, no “proof” is needed for the existence of a particularly chocolate bunny, but there is something like “proof” involved for the existence of the Easter Bunny. As it turns out, children do come to doubt both Santa and the Easter Bunny, so the secular symbol (if that is the right way to put it) can itself be doubted and thus be the subject of unbelief. Given this, it is interesting that the painting is titled Thing and Deception—not Bunny and Deception or Christ and Deception. We are not really sure what this “thing” is, and that makes the counterpart “deception” all the more enigmatic.

Yet now we face a further ambiguity, for Thing and Deception was first exhibited in an installation titled “Saint Catherine Watches Over Me.” That Saint Catherine is remembered for converting fifty pagan philosophers who were commissioned by a Roman emperor to convert her puts yet another spin on this piece. How exactly is Saint Catherine “watching over” Martínez Celaya? Is she trying to convert him? One might be tempted to ask who is trying to convert whom. It is significant that Martínez Celaya chooses a piece of kitsch related to his childhood “framed by kitsch” (as he puts it), though he later comes to see the painting as more about his future than his past. Siedell interprets this as moving from more explicitly religious subject matter to a more explicitly religious overall structure of his work and thought.

Martínez Celaya definitely sees Thing and Deception as part of a religious context, but then he wonders if it can find a place (to quote him) “in the new sanctitas of the Modern art gallery.” This raises the problem of the competing “religious beliefs” of the gallery and the church. In Martínez Celaya’s Guide (his own fictitious dialogue between an artist and an friend), it is telling that the friend (who is also a voice of Martínez Celaya) says the following to the artist: “For someone who claims not to be religious, you speak in a way that sounds very religious to me.” What are we to make of this “religiosity”? Siedell interprets Martínez Celaya as attempting to avoid being either a “believer” or an “unbeliever,” and Siedell characterizes Martínez Celaya’s work and thought in terms of both negative theology and spiritualistic (rather than “religious”) piety. Siedell draws a comparison to he takes to be high art’s way of belief by way of incarnation to the incarnation in Christianity. Instead of “believing” in terms of doctrines and propositions, Martínez Celaya believes by incarnational practice, what Siedell means by the “artistic practice of belief.” Analogously, Siedell claims that Christian icons and the Eucharist “not only require faith, they also generate and sustain it.” But, again, it is unclear to what extent “religious” or “artistic” belief is involved here.

One has to wonder how strongly Siedell intends to assert his closing observation that “Thing and Deception narrows the gap between belief and unbelief, banal and profound, art and religion, sacred and secular, truth and superstition, revealing each to be two sides of the same precious coin.” No doubt, these gaps are questioned and even narrowed by Martínez Celaya. Yet it all depends on what kind of “belief” and what kind of “unbelief” constitute each side of the coin. Clearly, there must be some genuine content to the belief in order for it to be the flipside of unbelief or doubt. Thus, when Siedell says that the painting and the Eucharist “require the eyes of faith to see what is truly present,” I am inclined to agree and yet also point out that what is present in the Eucharist is more defined than what is present in the painting. So the analogy only goes so far. Of course, given widely differing beliefs within the Christian community of what is “present” in the Eucharst, perhaps the analogy goes further than we might think.

In any case, once again, it is something other than a philosophical theory—here, a painting and the reflections on it by both its thoughtful painter and an astute art historian—that helps us get at the complexities of the daily reality of epistemological life, complexities that are no less real or problematic than those of the ethical life.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 2

Today's second engagement with Daniel A. Siedell's God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art comes from Matt Milliner, who writes on chapter two entitled "A History of Modern Art." [Part I by James K. A. Smith may be found here.]  Matthew J. Milliner is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Princeton University. His blogger profile continues: "In a previous life he graduated from the same town's Theological Seminary. In the life before that he was a Youth Director at Media Presbyterian Church (PA). In the life before that he went to Wheaton College (IL). In the life before that he went to Haddonfield Memorial High School (NJ). In the life before that he was born and raised mostly in Jersey. In the life before that he did nothing, because the Origenist doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul was condemned in 553AD." Matt blogs at http://millinerd.com.

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The fact that I have no authority to make grand pronouncements will not keep me from doing so: God in the Gallery is the starting point for the future of the Christianity and art conversation, at least (or especially) in the North American evangelical, not to mention post-evangelical, milieu. I am consequently grateful to participate in this forum which, following James’ opening remarks on the importance of informed engagement, now proceeds to the topic of “modern” art, which I understand to be distinguishable from postmodern or contemporary art (beginning c. 1960), a topic which Siedell addresses in later chapters.

An analogy to describe Siedell’s aim in this chapter can be found in the task of historians, such as Edward Grant, who seeks to show the undeniable, but normatively ignored, Christian backdrop of modern science. But while there are many scholars at work correcting the doggedly secularized narrative of science, there are far fewer, if any, doing the same for the history of art, let alone the history of modern art. Siedell seeks to fill this lacuna, describing his agenda as follows: “A history of modern art can be written that reveals that Christianity in all its myriad cultural and material manifestations is never absent from the modern artist.”

To accomplish this, Siedell begins by relating modern art’s introduction to the American public in Manhattan’s 1913 Armory Show. He then takes two figures who bookend modernism - Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Alfred J. Barr Jr. (1902-1981) – and highlights the overlooked Christian aspects of their given perspectives. Likewise, Siedell marshals Peter Berger’s post-secular sociology, and theologian Graham Ward’s contention that “the saeculum [has] no autonomous existence” to buttress his transcendent reading of modernism. Siedell has just scratched the surface. We can hope that he, or someone inspired by his account, will extend this traditionally religious (not merely “spiritual”) reading of modernism into the book length treatment it deserves. New Republic art critic Jed Perl seems to already be moving in that direction, as has Steven Schloesser with his book Jazz Age Catholicism (albeit in a way that encompasses literature and music as well as art). However the religious account of modern art is broached, an inevitable discovery awaits: A double-barreled attempt to reconcile Christianity (specifically Catholicism) to modern art has long been on offer in the careers of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson.

And yet, these figures have long been outside the Protestant purview, making Siedell’s Protestant reading of modernism unusual. Perhaps overly determined by the more negative Protestant perspective (Siedell seems to have Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of Culture in view), God in the Gallery aims to actively oppose it. Siedell contends that when Christians adopt a negative stance towards modernism, they play into secular hands: “Neither secular scholars nor conservative Christian critics want Christianity in the history of modern art.”

Still, as Siedell unfurls his more positive take on modernity, he does not strike a Tillichian bargain, that is, he refrains from writing a theological blank check to high culture. Instead, Siedell actively opposes the Liberal Protestant paradigm that he has criticized in this forum before. To use a familiar analogy, Siedell founds his cultural engagement upon the rock of the Seventh Ecumenical Council’s iconic Christology, in contrast to vague theologies of culture which have, in retrospect, proven to be houses built on sand. In practice, this means Siedell both permits a quintessentially modern artist such as Mark Rothko only an “undetermined iconicity,” while allowing Rothko’s participation in the economy of the icon nonetheless. While some might suggest this is not dissimilar to Maritain and Gilson’s modernist reconciliation strategy, the case could also be made that it constitutes an improvement.

Refreshing as I find Siedell’s perspective to be, I conclude with a criticism: A student who reads this chapter and plunges into (what’s left of) the world of modern art in search of - to use the book’s guiding analogy - altars to an unknown god, would be like a young evangelical who reads his way into Anglicanism through the poetry of George Herbert, only to then open last week’s newspaper. St. Paul may have found one agnostic altar amongst literally thousands of Athenian idols, but Siedell seems to take this exception to be the rule. He cites Augustine and Origen’s strategy of “despoiling of the Egyptians;” but it should also be noted that heated debate with Varro (constituting a hulking chunk of City of God) and Celcus (Origen’s longest treatise) were their more normative modes of cultural engagement. Many modern artists knew exactly what God they were seeking to offend. Accordingly, an equally appropriate exemplar to illustrate Pauline engagement of modern art would be not only the altar to an unknown God from Acts 17, but an approximately contemporary creation: The famous “ass-Christ” graffito, (beating Serrano to the punch by two millennia), instructively inscribed, “Alexamenos worships his god.”

But to press this point too hard would be unfair: Siedell, who has himself admitted “sharp sympathy pains” with those who dismiss the art world wholesale, anticipates it. He is, of course, aware of modernism’s anti-religious strain, but suggests we don’t take the bait: “Even as rejected, [Christianity] lingers to haunt the avant-gardist, for it will not be rejected completely. Ultimately, it cannot.” Still, the Christian must reserve the right to reject some strands of modern art (due, perhaps, as much to boredom as offense). This is to say, Siedell’s positive perspective should be read alongside, not in replacement of, the previous, more dismissive accounts of modernism that he seeks to correct – accounts which, I like to think, retain their value.

Please note: My more full-length review of God in the Gallery can be read at First Things.

On "Analytic Theology"

I have absolutely no investment in maintaing a rigorous analytic/continental divide in philosophy or philosophical theology.  Indeed, since arriving at Calvin College--a historically "analytic" department--I have received a remedial education in analytic philosophy and have found colleagues who are very interested in philosophical exploration that crosses these contingent boundaries.  No one, of course, can master everything so we'll all have our particular universe of discourses with which we're familiar.  But I am constantly encouraging graduate students to learn a second philosophical language, as it were, as soon as possible.  It seems clear to me that philosophical reflection on faith will be best served by a "big tent" approach.  (For an example, I would point to D. Stephen Long's brilliant new book, Speaking of God.) 

With that in mind, readers might be interested in Gordon Graham's honest, forthright review of Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea (eds.), Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (Oxford UP, 2009).  Graham persistently asks: "Just what is 'analytic theology?'"  He's not sure we ever really get an answer--though that's not a reason to avoid the collection.  Here's a snippet:

What is analytic theology? Rea offers us a succinct characterization:

analytic theology is just the activity of approaching theological topics with the ambitions of an analytic philosopher and in a style that conforms to the prescriptions that are distinctive of analytic philosophical discourse. (p. 7)

This brief statement, of course, only becomes fully informative if we are told what the 'ambitions' and 'style' distinctive of analytic philosophy are. Rea has things to say about this. Indeed he sets out two ambitions and five points of style. Even before we consider this further explanation, however, perplexities arise that, in my judgment, the ensuing essays intensify rather than dispel. They do so not because of disagreements between the authors, but because of their uncertainty as to how this new terminology is to be used, and what its significance is exactly.

Here is one example. In his essay "How Philosophical Theology Became Possible", Nicholas Wolterstorff seeks to explain the remarkable change in status that philosophy of religion underwent in the 20th century. Having had virtually no place in the intellectual world of logical positivism, fifty years later it had become one of the most vibrant areas of Anglo-American philosophy. Part of the explanation (in my view) must lie with the influential work of a few highly gifted philosophers who took religion seriously (including Wolterstorff himself, of course). Wolterstorff's own explanation, however, lends special weight to the collapse of 'classical foundationalism' in epistemology. Once the long held belief in a single epistemological litmus test was abandoned, the way opened up for philosophers trained in the style and methods of logical empiricism and conceptual analysis to take religious beliefs as properly basic, and explore the implications and possibilities of doing so. For my own part I find this explanation very convincing, but how does the possibility of philosophical theology relate to the project of analytic theology? In the concluding paragraphs Wolterstorff addresses this issue briefly. Having noted that contemporary philosophical theology is now no less concerned with traditional questions in the doctrine of God than it is with the arguments of natural theology, Wolterstorff says "Is it philosophy or is it theology? What difference does it make. . ? Call it what you will" (p. 168). But it does make a very great difference from the point of this volume. If philosophical theology of the kind that the collapse of foundationalism made possible is indistinguishable from analytic theology, then the theme of the essays in Part I is empty, because analytic theology is nothing new, and has been carried on with vigor for the last four decades or more.

Continue reading Gordon Graham's review of Analytic Theology.

On the Horizon: God in the Gallery Symposium

Beginning on July 13th, we are set to have a new book symposium on God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, by Daniel A. Siedell, which was released in October of last year.  Here is the book description:

Unfortunately, within certain Christian communities, art is often viewed with skepticism, if not disdain. Art historian, critic, and curator Daniel Siedell presents a different perspective in God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art. The latest book in the Cultural Exegesis series, God in the Gallery is a welcome addition to the scant volumes that cover an evangelical reflection on the arts and the aesthetic life. Siedell ultimately contends that art is not antithetical or hostile to Christianity. Instead, it's in dialogue with it as well as a gift as opposed to a threat to faith. The author extracts insights about worldviews from thinkers ranging from Francis Schaeffer to David Naugle. Furthermore, he constructs a framework for interpreting modern art "in Christ." Siedell also examines the role of visual art in worship and Christian experience. The book is enhanced with images from such artists as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Enrique Martinez Celaya, and others.

Here is the schedule of engagements, forays, and excursions into Siedell's book:

July 13 - Ch. 1, "Overture"
     Introduction by Jamie Smith

July 20 - Ch. 2, "A History of Modern Art"
     engagement by  Matt Milliner

July 27 - Ch. 3, "Enrique Martinez Celaya's Thing and Deception: The Artistic Practice of Belief"
     engagement by  Bruce Ellis Benson

Aug 03 - Ch. 4, "Embodying Transcendence: Material Spirituality in Contemporary Art"
     engagement by  Jason Hesiak

Aug 10 - Ch. 5, "Art Criticism"
     engagement by  Dayton Castleman

Aug 17 - Ch. 6, "Art, Liturgy, and the Church"
     engagement by  Kevin Hamilton

Please read along with us and join in the conversation! See you then.

Christ, History and Apocalyptic: a week off for further thought

This week the Church and Postmodern Culture blog is taking a week off from having a new in-depth discussion on Nathan Kerr's Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission, and for a good reason: we're done!  We will return next week with a 'final' response to the conversation as a whole from the author himself.  Nate informs me that he welcomes the conversation continuing on the posts (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6), and he will continue to engage the conversation in comments until his post next week, where of course he will be commenting in that discussion as well.

In the meantime, I wanted to post some links to blog posts on Halden Doerge's excellent Inhabitatio Dei blog.  Over the last few weeks, Halden has been continuing the conversation on this blog onto his own, spawning new conversations on the issues raised here in an attempt to formulate and think through his own understanding of the issues raised in this symposium around Christ, History and Apocalyptic:

• Nate Kerr's Hauerwas: A Summary
• Mission and Apocalyptic Ecclesiology
• The Church as Polis? Some Biblical Reflections

In response to questions Steve Long asked here, Halden also has these three posts:

• The Church as Apocalyptic Event and Church Discipline
• The Church as Apocalyptic Event and Common Confession
• The Church as Apocalyptic Event, Baptism, Eucharist, and Discipleship

Further posts:

• Tim Furry: Christ, History and Apocalyptic: A Review (Part 1)
• Tim Furry: Christ, History and Apocalyptic: A Review (Part 2)
• Tim Furry: Christ, History and Apocalyptic: A Review (Part 3)
• Tim Furry: An Update on Part 3
• Nate Kerr (on Tim's blog): Nate Kerr's Response to the Preceding Dialogue
• Ben Myers: Nate Kerr: Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission, an excerpt and discussion
• Ben Myers: Once more with Nate Kerr: liturgy as dispossession

I'm not just trying to promote Halden's blog, as much as it deserves it: a simple search on Technorati simply turned up no other discussions (aside from mere linkage) forming around the posts engaging Kerr's book.*  Thank you all who have participated thus far, and stay around for more discussion until Nate posts a final response in this space early next week.

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*If, by chance, I've missed another discussion elsewhere, please let me know in the comments and I will update the body of this post to reflect where this discussion has been furthered on the blogs.