The church, broadly speaking, both influences and is influenced by the attitudes of the society around it. Because of our collective discomfort with the arts, both the church and the world tend to think about them in ways that are problematic for artists as well as, ultimately, for society at large and the church in particular. Sometimes, we instrumentalize art, turning it into a means to achieve didactic, propagandistic, or other pragmatic ends. At other times, we commercialize art, turning it into a commodity to be bought and sold, with little or no regard to its intrinsic worth. In other circumstances, we demonize art, seeing only its potential as the object of idolatrous worship, on the one hand, or as the tempting purveyor of other illicit thrills, on the other. Too often, we trivialize art, seeing it as the province of children or as a recreational activity for adults with both time and money to spare from what are regarded as more important pursuits. Finally, we may spiritualize art, ignoring its sources in the concrete materiality of life while believing that art will somehow save us from ourselves, or that artists have a better pathway to God than everyone else.
Too rarely, we see art as an answer to a real—though hard to define—human need, as a legitimate response to God’s call on all our lives to love and serve the world. Many of the ways in which art has been characterized are misunderstandings about the nature and function of art, or address some kinds of art while ignoring others. These mischaracterizations divert us from recognizing how the arts actually help us to understand, interpret, and communicate our experience of the world around us. Instead, they either strip the arts of their genuine power or elevate them to a status that they do not deserve. Such ideas also tend to alienate artists, who think about an artwork in terms of how it operates on the senses; how it fits into its historical, physical, and spiritual context; or how subtle changes to visual, auditory, or physical configurations can shape our experience and touch us at the deepest places of our being. In this chapter, we will consider the ways that churches and artists tend to talk past one another when they think about and use art, and begin to sketch the outlines of a deeper conversation.
Instrumentalizing Art: Reducing Art to a Single Meaning
Art speaks to the senses in ways that are too complex and subtle to be able to fully define in words. We respond physically and emotionally to the colors, shapes, textures, rhythms, timbres, pitch, or other aspects of a painting, a song, a poem, a film in ways that are difficult to describe, but still very real. These responses contribute to our sense of the meaning of the piece, frequently below our conscious awareness, even more than any overt subject matter that might be implied or overtly stated.
Too often, however, art is reduced to its supposed message, as though an artwork were simply a kind of shorthand or diagram for an intellectual idea. While it could be argued that even diagrams are a type of artwork, these tend to be dry, simplistic, and as unambiguous as possible. When a multivalent, well-wrought artwork is treated as a diagram, the very sensory qualities that the artist labored to create are ignored. This happens, for instance, when the words to a hymn are changed for didactic reasons and without equal regard to how they sound or the ease with which they can be pronounced near one another. Too often, such changes alter the aesthetic integrity of the hymn to the extent that people find it impossible to sing.
Too often, artists and theologians seem to talk past one another. My theologian friend who had wondered why anyone should care about art continued to think about the question, responding to my reply with another idea:
I asked myself, What is art? I answered myself, Art is a human construction. What kind of human construction? Communication. What kind of communication? Communication about what matters in itself and thus distinct from illustration, which points to something else that matters. So what matters in and of itself?
On one level, my friend was trying to make an important distinction that artists, themselves, are often at pains to figure out how to explain. Why is illustration often considered to be something less than real art? What is the difference between the kind of art that is seen in museums and the kind of art that is seen in most churches? Why does the art world often disdain Christian art, dismissing it as mere illustration?
One answer to these questions has to do with the observation that illustration relies on its connection to a verbal description or story outside itself, while contemporary museum art is expected to say something profound without an external narrative. This distinction is, in part, what my church friend meant when speaking of “what matters in and of itself.”
However, while what art has to say may correctly be understood as communication, it can be misleading to define art in that way. The problem is that when art is defined solely as communication, it is too easy to reduce any given artwork to its supposed message. This kind of oversimplification is rampant in the church, which too often rejects complex, multivalent artworks in favor of tendentious, single-message lessons. As soon as we say that art is communication, and leave it there, we omit all the other things that art also is and that other forms of communication are not.
Many of the roots of equating art with communication may be found in the Reformation. Although there is a popular conception that the Reformation was an iconoclastic movement, that is only partially true. Many Reformers did reject the use of religious images, especially those that they understood to be used in idolatrous ways, but others accepted or even encouraged their use. Both visual art and hymnody, for example, were permitted in many places. However, these arts were accepted primarily as didactic tools rather than for their emotive or symbolic qualities. This bent towards didacticism tended to strip art of all of its affective qualities, reducing it to a visual analogue, a one-for-one translation of discursive language. This is exactly what my friend describes as “illustration.”
A comparison of the spare woodcuts that accompany many Reformation texts with the lush, heavily emotive contemporaneous art of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation will reveal not merely stylistic difference, but distinctive theological difference as well. The Reformation images are often black-and-white woodcuts accompanying texts. Made with the explicit intention of minimizing their ability to evoke emotion, they simply underline the point already made in words. As William Dyrness points out, for instance, regarding Zwingli’s vernacular work on the Lord’s Supper,
which would have been read in many homes, the title page is adorned with simple images . . . These images portray and elaborate this special meal in a clear and simple way that would have been accessible to all who participated in the worship experience. It was teaching by pictures the narrative connections between these miracles and the communion meal . . . . Clearly the images here play the role of helping people envision the theological meaning proclaimed in the preached word and in the sacrament.5
For the Reformers, images were not expected to point to any reality beyond the narrative that was depicted, much less participate in such a reality sacramentally. Instead, they were meant to be memory aids for the marginally literate, somewhat like the schematic a-is-for-apple images in picture books for young children.
Hymnody, too, was enlisted in a program of inculcating specific creedal and historical understandings. As theologian, musicologist, and liturgical scholar Robin Leaver notes, Martin Luther insisted that “unison congregational song was a powerful demonstration of the doctrine of universal priesthood, since every member of the congregation was involved in the activity.”6 Leaver quotes from a 1523 letter from Luther to fellow reformer George Spalatin in which Luther praises Spalatin for his skillful and eloquent use of the German language, and asks him to turn psalms into songs suitable for congregational singing. However, Luther cautions,
I would like you to avoid new-fangled, fancied words and to use expressions simple and common enough for the people to understand yet pure and fitting. The meaning should also be clear and as close as possible to the psalm. Irrespective of the exact wording, one must freely render the sense by suitable words.7
Such singable psalm texts, or metrical psalms, quickly became the primary musical form used in worship