I want to introduce you to a movement called the International Arts Movement. Here is a link. Here is what they say they are about... and keep going to see their videos at the end.
The world is not as it ought to be. We long for meaningful existence and involvement in our culture - to be part of a story greater than ourselves. But too often our reality is a broken and fragmented story in which dignity and value are stripped from humanity.
Art, as a universal language, can begin to address this dehumanization. The world needs artists and visionaries to lead the way in seeing beyond the trivial to the transcendent, bringing synthesis to fragmentation and hope to despair.
International Arts Movement is a non-profit 501(c)(3) arts organization acting as a catalyst to inspire people to engage culture’s spheres of influence. IAM presents lectures, performances, exhibitions, screenings, projects, and workshops. Our programming and resources equip the creative community to generate good, true, and beautiful cultural artifacts: sign-posts pointing toward the “world that ought to be.” Through understanding the culture that is and looking toward what could be, we hope to rehumanize our world.
We are guided by the belief that the Judeo-Christian story of creation and restoration is a narrative in which all humanity participates and is the foundation by which we flourish. We look to these scriptures as our framework for wrestling with the questions "why art?” and "what does it mean to truly be human?"
I have done some reading of Francis Schaeffer (active around 1960-1980) lately, and he is quite an incisive observer of culture; he makes some significant statements about how we have, as a society, gotten to where we are today. I know that what immediately follows here may be a gross oversimplification of his argument from "The God Who is There", but I will risk it...
For hundreds of years, especially through the Enlightenment and up to around 1900, man - and specifically philosophers - have sought some way to understand and organize and find unity in all of human existence. There is, of course, the Christian narrative of how the world came to be and what it means. But there was also a Humanist quest to start simply with the Self and through reason and observation build up a whole, unified system of understanding the world from the human self alone. The problem was this - all the philosophers would propose different circles, overlapping at times, that were meant to serve as summative explanations of the world. In this humanist tug of war, each successive generation experienced a growth from and destroying of the explanative circles drawn in the last generation. Until they kind of realized that it was going to be impossible to build a complete system starting only with the Self and using only reason and observation.
Despair! They realized they couldn't do it; they realized the limitations of reason, and for the most part, at least in those who were being honest enough to pursue their thoughts to their logical conclusions, realized the deep despair that was there. It is devilishly hard to forbid God in your system, then to try to find an independent basis for meaning by using only reason.
And then comes along a man named Hegel who proposed what is known as the dialectical method of finding truth. That is a complicated way of saying that man had abandoned the self-evident definition of truth - that when something is true, its opposite is false. For example, if God exists, he cannot not exist. Truth came to be a thing synthesized through conversation. (The emerging church would be a big fan of the dialectical method.) Let's not say anyone's wrong really, but let's try instead to pull together all these truths and synthesize them in some unique and creative way. It kind of sounds cool, and especially so to itching ears that hesitate to stand for difficult truths, but in the end this dialectical doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well.
A little while after Hegel, a guy named Kierkegard came in and proposed (not knowing what would be the repercussions) existentialism. Man had realized that he could not start with himself and build up a comprehensive understanding of the world through reason. And yet he still felt a need for meaning - existential meaning, Kierkegard would say. Existentialism said that the power and meaning to be found in life is found primarily in the act of choosing. You validate yourself and create meaning in the existential act of choice. To get to those places where meaning is found, where things like love were experienced as real, you had to abandon mere reason and make an existential leap. Simply leap out and choose to believe. To be sure, this idea can appear romantic. But it has led to some practical problems.
Existentialism, as just described, is basically man being torn in two. He could use his reason, and he could exercise faith, but the two were never allowed to touch. Christian faith then comes to be seen, not as belief in something that is really true, but an exercise of the will to choose to believe in some particular thing no matter what. Schaeffer outlines in detail the slide into existentialism, which first started with philosophers. It spread naturally from the philosophers to the artists. From the artists to the musicians. From musicians into the general culture through all sorts of media. Finally, when the whole of society bought in, so too did far too much of the Christian church. If you divorce the concept of truth - universal, absolute, God-is-really-real, truth - from the Christian faith, it becomes a sort of powerless psychological game, in which you can play word games and use the connotation of words like "Cross", "faith", and "Jesus" to whip up emotions and bring about desired actions. It is more faith in the act of faith itself, and less faith in a Jesus who is really there.
I relate all that to say this: as Christians we cannot neglect what is going on in the culture around us. If we had, as the Church, had seen the slide happening in other parts of the culture, we might have spoken into that culture better and kept our churches from sliding, too.
Art matters. I will not say so much about it here, but I will let a couple of these videos speak for themselves. God is God of all, and he is therefore God of our art. Where the loss of truth had such a negative impact on the arts, it can be part of the calling of the Body to redeem art. That will sound awesome to some of you because you get art. You like it, and you like what it's about. That might seem like a rally cry for the calling on your life. For others of you that will sound silly; but don't let it! I will probably do another entry to explore this further, but when we create, we reflect as image-bearers of God his own creativeness. I think the Body is meant to portray Christ to the world, and it does this certainly through caring for the poor, discipleship, evangelism, and all sorts of things. It does it through serious involvement in our world. But it does it as well through simply being and enjoying God. As Durwood Knight would say (perhaps gotten from someone else), "We are human beings, not human doings." We are so busy being productive that we might fail to show God's own joy in his creativity. The Spirit will, of course, give us the balance between our work and our play, and I don't think he would have us veer off exclusively into either of these categories. And so let us show forth Christ's supremacy even in our play!
I pray this entry might be a means God's grace to you in a freeing way, that it might open your eyes to more possibilities in the way of God's working through you in his world. I pray, too, that you would perhaps pass this along to others who might benefit; I am not exactly connected well in the world of art, but I know some of you are more so, and there are, I am sure, people who would get excited about being part of an art movement for God's glory. (Also, as a note to those who may be confused: IAM talks about rehumanizing the world. This is not the Humanism that Schaeffer decries. It is, instead, the exact opposite. We most understand our human-ness when we understand our Creator, and when, being knit into a Gospel community of true shalom, we begin to really love God and others in brokenness, we find what it means to be truly human. That is what we were meant to be in the garden. Who we are in light of who God is - that is the rehumanizing exploration of these artists.)
This first video is from a conference IAM hosted. The speaker talks about the relationship between art and the faith community.
The following is Makoto Fujimura's introduction to the conference Encounter in 2009. He is the founder of the movement, and he is a member of Tim Keller's church in New York. Speaking isn't his main passion, but he is very intriguing and provides a good introduction to these ideas.
Grace be with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment