Sound Minds, Suspicious Hearts, and Sensitive Souls: Toward a Theological Aesthetics Within the Restoration Movement

CHRISTIAN SCHOLARS CONFERENCE

SOUND MINDS, SUSPICIOUS HEARTS, AND SENSITIVE SOULS:TOWARD A THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS WITHIN THE RESTORATION MOVEMENT

JUNE 3 - 5, 2010

BY ASHLEY GAY

These poems, these poems,these poems, she said, are poemswith no love in them. These are the poems of a man who would leave his wife and child because they made noise in his study. These are the poems of a man who would murder his mother to claim the inheritance. These are the poems of a man like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not comprehend but which neverthelessoffended me. …These are the poems of a manwith eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s hands, woven of water and logicand hunger, with no strand of love in them. These poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant as elm leaves, which if they love love only the wide blue sky and the air and the ideaof elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said, and not a beginning. Love means loveof the thing sung, not of the song or the singing. These poems, she said.... You are, he said,beautiful. That is not love, she said rightly.1

I read this poem by Robert Bringhurst and became sorely

aware that, for some, beauty is as suspect as the academy, as

1 Robert Bringhurst. “These Poems, She Said.” The Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178483 (accessed April 26, 2010).

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dubious and disconnected from their realities as the church. Is

self-love the only fruit of art? Is institutional preservation

the only end of learning?

But I thought if I sowed scholarship and reaped beauty with my toil, it would

nourish love. The voice of Bringhurst’s poem accuses: Singing the

songs of love is not love. Studying love is not love. Abandonment

and remove in the name of beauty or reason or religion…is not…she

said. The voice of this poem catches the artist at its worst.

‘She’ calls beauty’s bluff. But this is not simply an indictment

of the artist’s remove. At its worst, our scholarship “with eyes

like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s hands” cuts from

the voices of every age, bartering in ideological economy. But to

what end? We can exegete down to the gnawed bone of the Biblical

corpus. And have not love. We can create and call upon BEAUTY in

the name of God. And that alone, “is not love, she said rightly.”

Is ‘she’ right?

Unaccompanied, the “heartless birdsong” of heedless

certainty cannot capture the love of God’s revelation; the

“unmeant elm leaves” of forms—ideological or material—must be

inspired. Without love’s animation, forms cannot transfigure into

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revelatory expression. Love makes living the vessels of our arts,

our thoughts.

But how to fully engage this love, to perceive its contours?

This is not simply a task for the formulas of a sound mind or the

evasions of a form-suspicious heart; it requires a sensing

spirit. By placing Alexander Campbell in conversation with Hans

Urs Von Balthasar, I will sketch the role of theological

aesthetics in perceiving love’s revelation. And in dialogue with David

Lipscomb, I will engage George Steiner and Amos Wilder’s

approaches for participating in love’s claims. In conclusion, I will

gesture toward an aesthetic of Christian witness where encounters

with and embodiment of Divine love reveal the inseparability of

form and faith, flesh and spirit.

Campbell and the Sound Mind - Rational Reduction

If a genuine relationship exists between theology and

aesthetics, faith and form, it hinges on Christ’s incarnation: on

the spiritual and natural world enjoining to realize God’s vision

of love.2 While at Glasgow University, the young Alexander

2 But how must this be achieved? Accounting how the broader church has understood the glory of God, Von Balthasar questions: “Should we go the way ofKarl Barth, who rediscovers the inner beauty of theology and revelation itself? Or…may it not be that we have a real and inescapable obligation to

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Campbell envisioned spirituality and aesthetics as divinely

entwined. In an essay entitled, “On the Purposes Served in our

Constitution by the Reflex Sense of Beauty,” he articulates the

aesthetic position behind his poetry. Note in his description the

revelatory quality of nature:

Doubtless the wise Author of our nature has not endowedus with any faculties of mind or body that are not useful to us…that we might be capable of admiring the works of creation, and therein behold the wisdom, power, and goodness of the Author; that we might be enabled to observe the grandness, sublimity and beauty of all his works, and receive pleasure in contemplatinghis goodness in thus preparing an habitation for us.3

He perceived God’s art as nature and love joining in

providence: God’s goodness and wisdom inscribed in the sensorial

world. Under the instruction of Professor Jardine, Alexander

Campbell united “the power of receiving pleasure from the

beauties of nature and of art” with the beauties of moral action,

the fruits of love.4 However, as Campbell’s aesthetic sensitivity

probe the possibility of there being a genuine relationship between theological beauty and the beauty of the world?” Hans Urs Von Balthasar. The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 80.3 Robert Richardson. Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, Vol. I. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1868), 134-136.4 Eva Jean Wrather, Alexander Campbell: Adventurer in Freedom, A Literary Biography (Ft. Worth: TCU Press and the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 2005), Wrather, 81. See also Alexander Campbell’s own words about the fine arts: “They are poetry, music, painting, sculpture, engraving, architecture of the different orders—to which I will add good manners.” Alexander Campbell.

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became more entrenched in Common Sense philosophy, his artistic

attraction to unity and harmony found their home in Lockean

epistemology. When Alexander’s “sublime” nature met with Locke’s

empiricism, he came to value rational observation over aesthetic

encounter.5 Consequently, his rhetoric regarding revelation

vacillates between the aesthetics of love’s abundance and the

role of reason’s measure.

For example, when addressing the Henry Female Seminary,

Campbell casts each soul as “in a particular scene and in a

particular act of the great drama of humanity.”6 He frequently

appeals to this “drama” of creation as a revelation of God’s

love. And just as human love cannot be reduced to the

“philosopher’s reason,” Campbell claims that humanity cannot

“Literature, Science and Art.” Lectures and Addresses. (St. Louis: Christian Publishing Co., 1861), 136. Jardine and Campbell inherited this concept from achampion of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, Thomas Reid. “Good taste….is closely connected with Good Morals and Propriety of Conduct.” (Wrather, 81).5 This rationality soon accompanied his distaste for “theological trappings and supernatural assumptions.” (Wrather, 42.) Alexander was already suspiciousof his father’s Calvinistic understanding of personal salvation; as opposed tothe sign of spiritual brokenness, he sought rational subscription to God as the salvific assurance or “call.” Eva Jean Wrather writes: “The actual decision [of his call to ministry], Alexander did not doubt, came from his ownvolition and its seat was the intellect, not the emotions.” (Wrather, 64).6 Alexander Campbell, “Woman and Her Mission,” Popular Lectures and Addresses (St. Louis: Christian Publishing Co., 1886), 221.

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reason the love that originates and perpetuates its existence.7

He declares that revelation alone makes God’s love known.

According to Campbell, God reveals Himself “in providence, in

moral government, and in redemption, present[ing] to the senses

of man, to the reason of man, to the conscience of man, or to the

affections of man, nothing in the abstract, but every thing in

the concrete.”8 Campbell describes these concrete manifestations

of love in aesthetic categories:

There is not in the universe a more positive, a more substantive, a more real existence than love; for God is love. …And the whole universe is but an outburst of love. God did not create the universe because he had wisdom to do it or power to do it; for neither of thesehas a distinct positive existence…Love, at the true stand-point of vision, is the only self-existent entityor ideality, or conception, or positive principle, or actual, indestructible fact in imagination's boundless,measureless, endless fields of thought…It is the brightest star in the diadem of love that it is, of necessity, the one only self-existent and necessarily indestructible reality in the entire area of rational thought. And, just at this stand-point, we apprehend--we do not say comprehend--the beauty, the truth and thewisdom of that oracle--that God is love. (John iv. 8-16.) Heaven itself is but the theatre of love. There is

7 “Reason but measures, compares and decides upon given premises. Imagination is, indeed, in a certain limited sphere, creative. But [imagination] forms images, and only images. It creates not one original idea. It can abstract andcombine, in new forms and modifications, the images of human experience and observation…. [But] revelation alone meets the present conditions of our being.” (“Woman,” 213.)8 “Woman,” 220.

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no other theatre of its full development, manifestationand enjoyment than heaven itself.9

Campbell utitlized concepts such as the “theatre of

Christendom”10 to preserve the grandiosity of God’s love.11

However, Campbell also placed God’s love on the small stage of

reason, proclaiming, “We must study love.”12 He maintains that

scripture’s revelation of God’s love must be handled by “None but

pure, enlightened, conscientious, spiritually-minded men [who]

advocate or execute an exact, faithful, perspicuous and

intelligible version of God's oracles.”13 Thus we find him

describing the universe as “God’s library” of books that make

known, if somewhat illegibly, God’s presence.14 In this library,

Campbell finds the Bible (“God’s autobiography”) supremely

illuminating to the “well-cultivated mind” and the “well-educated

Christian.”15

9 “Woman,” 222.10 Alexander Campbell, “Address to the Bible Union Convention,” Popular Lectures and Addresses (St. Louis: Christian Publishing Co., 1886), 591.11 With aesthetic flourish, Campbell envisioned creation as “the most sublime and potent speech ever made…the beautiful portraiture of its Author.” (“Bible Union,” 564).12 “Woman,” 223.13 “Bible Union,” 584.14 “Woman,” 220.15 (“Woman,” 221-222.) Amos Wilder reminds that this emphasis on enlightened rhetoric finds its roots in the Reformers who “knew that God persuades us through language that ‘moves’ us (‘movere, delectare, docere’). [After all],

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For example, in his address to the Bible Union Convention,

Campbell posits that humankind must unite in the true word as

translated by the superior English language16 and then current

European hermeneutics.17 Thus equipped with a “sound mind” of

hermeneutical reasoning and a “splendid education” within the

right language, mankind can convert nations.18 But conversion to

what—an Enligthenment methodology? A love for a particular

translation?

Thus Scripture becomes not a theatre of love, but a

singularly interpreted, English-translated set of stage

Luther called the Holy Spirit a ‘rhetorician.’” But as theologian and poet Amos Wilder advises, when rhetoric is a tool for reason alone, it would seem to belittle “the eye of vision in favor of the ear of obedience.” If this theology is traced to its end, it could result in anthropological reduction—inwhich case we understand God’s love in terms of our own reasoned interpretations. Amos Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), 54.16 “Judging from this acknowledged fact, it must be admitted that, as the English people stand at the top of the ladder of modern civilization, their mind, their language and their religion must have a paramount influence upon all the nations and people of the globe.” (“Bible Union,” 574).17 “The labors bestowed upon the original text, in ascertaining the genuine readings of passages of doubtful interpretation, and the great advances made in the whole science of hermeneutics--the established laws of translation--since the commencement of the present century, fully justify the conclusion that we are, or may be, much better furnished for the work of interpretation than any one, however gifted by nature and by education, could have been, not merely fifty, but almost two hundred and fifty, years ago. The living critics and translators of the present day, in Europe and America, are like Saul amongst the people--head and shoulders above those of the early part of the seventeenth century.” (“Bible Union,” 582).18 See “Bible Union,”—especially 570, 577, and 599.

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directions. Why this reduction? Campbell clarifies that love is

for heaven’s theatre; and perhaps therefore too corrupted by

earth to be known in all its “principle” and “reasonability.”19

Reasonability? Abstract principle? What of the dynamic revelation

Campbell found in nature’s beauty? What of the love that Campbell

claims as substantial, exceeding our theories and philosophical

definitions?20

Von Balthasar and the Sensitive Spirit - Aesthetic Apprehension

The reduction of love’s revelation to mere study under an

Enlightenment hermeneutic approaches what theologian Hans Urs Von

Balthasar calls anthropological reduction: man’s reason becomes

the “measure [of] the revelation he encounters.”21 Von Balthasar

and Campbell concur that revelation is prime; but they differ in

19 “While we thus seek a fulcrum and a lever to lift us up to an adequate conception of love in its essence, its origin and end, we must descend to the atmosphere of earth and to the circles of our fallen humanity, where love is rather a passion than a principle, an impulse than a law of reason, of God, ofheaven and of happiness.” (“Woman,” 222.)20 “The philosophy of the universe is a sublime philosophy. It is the philosophy of love. And, pray, what is love? How would you, young ladies, define it? Young gentlemen talk about it learnedly, and sometimes philosophically; but they do not comprehend and realize it as you do. Oh, say you, we have not had much experience on that subject, and with us 'tis all theory.…But we are not inquiring into a theory, good or bad, sound or unsound:we are inquiring into a substantive, real existence.” (“Woman,” 222) 21 Love Alone, 32. Von Balthasar continues, “This reduction culminates in Kant. For him, everything that is humanly knowable in the strict sense is restrictedto the synthesis of sensible intuition and concept.”

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their appraisal of images, of form. For Von Balthasar, “human

experience and observation” is not the sole aim of the image;22

rather, the image, or more accurately the form, remains

significant in training the “eyes of faith” to perceive Christ as

love.23 Faith’s perceptive capacity begins with an aesthetic

sensibility—a perception of Christian love through God’s

revelatory contours.

For Von Balthasar, the contours as revealed in “God’s

presentation of himself to human beings on the stage of nature”

give him grounds to assert that:

Christianity, as a genuine revealed religion, cannot bea communication of knowledge, a “teaching,” in the first place, but only secondarily. It must be in the first place an action that God undertakes, the playing out of the drama that God began with mankind in the OldCovenant…[And] just because God’s covenant is in his battle of love with sinful man does not mean that this battle of love can be understood and assessed by man.24

22 Campbell writes, “Imagination is, indeed, in a certain limited sphere, creative. But the very word itself annihilates its claims to originate. It forms images, and only images. It creates not one original idea. It can abstract and combine, in new forms and modifications, the images of human experience and observation. But beyond this its power reaches not. “ (“Woman,” 213)23 As Von Balthasar writes, “All this can be verified in the historical existence of Jesus; this special, unique logic, “christologic”, is penetrable to those who do not close their eyes to it.” A Theology of History. (San Francisco:Ignatius Press, 1963), 21.24 Love Alone, 70-71. See the continuation of this argument, “….It would be a peculiar lover who sought to measure the love of his bride by how much her love benefited or injured him. God’s action on man’s behalf is, instead,

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Therefore, God is best understood in the dramatic revelation

of Christ.25 According to Von Balthasar, God arrives in an

intentional and self-interpreted manifestation—His love as

fashioned in the form of Christ. After all, as he writes: “If God

wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this

love has to be something that the world can recognize.”26 But Von

Balthasar warns that after perceiving this love, we risk reducing

it with our reasoned schemas.27 How then do we catch words

(fleeting and faulty though they may be) that we might build

understanding and proclaim His revelation of love? 28

‘intelligible’ only insofar as it is not understood and justified in terms of incomplete anthropological and cosmological fragments; in the light of such standards, it cannot but appear as ‘foolishness’ and ‘madness.’”25 I employ drama in Balthasar’s usage, as described by Rowan Williams. Rowan Williams, “Balthasar, Rahner and the apprehension of being,” Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (London: SCM, 2007), 96.26 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1963) 75.27 I am reminded of Gabriel Marcel’s words in the Gifford Lecture series aboutknowing otherness: “Here is a person of whom we have a detailed knowledge, with whom we have lived, whom we have seen in many different situations. But it may happen that we are asked to say something about him, to answer questions about him, to offer a necessarily simplified opinion of his character; we offer a few adjectives, ready-made, rather than made to measure.This summary, inexact judgment of our friend then, within ourselves, begins toform what I have called a simulacrum.” Gabriel Marcel. “Chapter III: The Need for Transcendence.” The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950. http://www.giffordlectures.org (accessed online February 15, 2010).28 “For neither the world as a whole nor man in particular can provide the measure for what God wishes to say to man in Christ; God’s Word is unconditionally theo-logical, or, better, theo-pragmatic: what God wishes to say to man is a deed on his behalf, a deed that interprets itself before man

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Von Balthasar suggests that this expansive, inexhaustible

love is best approximated in aesthetic encounters. Like beauty’s

transcendent presence held in a masterful symphony, or the soul’s

presence housed in our companion—God utilizes (but cannot be

readily reduced to) forms. God’s revealed love is not unlike our

encounters of beauty: compelling, not compulsory; tangible, but

not comprehended by formal properties alone; open and bare, but

not altogether permissive. As Von Balthasar writes when comparing

God’s love with beauty’s otherness:

Such a convergence of what I cannot have invented and yet at the same time what possesses compelling plausibility for me is something we find only in the realm of disinterested beauty….In both cases [of mutual love and aesthetic encounter] “to understand” what reveals itself does not mean to subsume it under mastercategories; neither love in the freedom of its grace nor the beautiful in its gratuitousness are things “to be produced”…least of all on the basis of a “need” on the part of the subject.29

Against cosmological reduction, God is not equated with our

“master categories.” Against anthropological reduction, God is

for his sake (and only therefore to him and in him.). What we intend to say about this deed in this book is that it is credible only as love—specifically,as God’s own love, the manifestation of which is the glory of God.” (Love Alone, 10).29 Love Alone, 53.

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not rationally constructed in order to feed human need. 30 This is

not to say that we are like the Athenians, worshipping an unknown

God. Yes, God does not need us and our perceptive constructs. 31

And yet, God’s love took on form,32 entering into our history

that we might seek and find Him—only to discover that He was

never far.33 As Von Balthasar and Paul respect, God is wrapped in

mystery; though Christ has lifted the veil to reveal God’s love.

It remains a treacherous assumption to view scripture as a

self-evident proof or Christ as a rational construction of

history. Faith is not a comprehensive computation; it is a

30 As Von Balthasar documents in Love Alone is Credible, Christians have historically communicated God’s revelation of love in two problematic ways: through cosmological and anthropological reduction. Both tendencies fail to acknowledge God’s revelatory prerogative, instead relegating His superabundantlove to the trends of man’s finite understanding. “Man is caught in a strange predicament: he can, if he is honest, “conceptualize” God only as Wholly-Otherrather than as worldly being. And yet, if in spite of this God should become manifest, he still desires to see him only as a kind of superabundant fulfillment of all cosmology and anthropology. For he cannot leap over his spiritual horizon on his own; only the Wholly-Other can make this possible.” (Love Alone is Credible, 72).31 NRSV, Acts 17:24-29.32 Love Alone, 56.33 NRSV, Jeremiah 31:31-34, Romans 2:15. God is in fact so close, that He has engraved his love in our hearts. His revelation of love, as imagined by Von Balthasar, is the core convergence of all creation. The smallest and only indivisible part of us is Christ. The indivisible center of Christ, as the innermost form, thereby shapes and informs successive layers. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Convergences (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969), 135.

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response to love, enabled by grace, made possible by freedom.34

For Von Balthasar, aesthetic constructs do not render impotent

historical reality; spiritual beauty does not shun time-space

form.35 Rather, the two kingdoms (earthly and heavenly), the two

timelines (human and divine) are wed in Christ.36 Each has their

proper integrity—material is neither absorbed into spirit, and

spirit is neither collapsed completely into form. Likewise,

Christ is neither mere metaphor (“heartless birdsong”) nor

rational reduction (“water and logic and hunger”).37 Von

Balthasar sees the distinctive poles of history and divinity,

form and spirit, as inseparable. They are not simply fused

together in an undifferentiated union. They are married in

34 “Indeed, the Christian says that this mystery is not locked within itself but is revealed and sent to the world in Jesus Christ. This mystery can be accepted as true and thus can be believed as it reveals itself only in free decision, supported by God's grace. But in saying this, it must be stressed that this whole process of integrating fragments of being cannot be a strict 'proof'' for the truth of the Christian faith. If such a proof existed, the act we call faith could be put behind us. But as we know, this holds true for human relations [of love], too...the communication of personal truths between two human beings always includes a moment of trust at precisely the point where there can be no occasion for doubt.” Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Epilogue (San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press), 38.35 See John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” a hazard to those who would focus on the analogies of beauty and artistry, to the neglect of tangibility, comprehensibility, corporeality. John Updike. In Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent andEaster. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2008), 261-262.36 As in Revelation 21:237 Bringhurst, “These Poems, She Said.”

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revelation of God’s love, the only closure their covenant: posing

a heuristic spaciousness in faith—a final transformation wrought

by love that is not a deliverance from finitude but a

transfiguration of finitude.38

Lipscomb and the Suspicious Heart – Convenient Condemnation

Yes, materiality is destined for finitude—in a schema that

ignores the transfiguration and resurrection of Christ. Certain

of death and trusting of eternity, the Christian asks: Can an

image, a ritual, a word and all its limitations contain the spiritual, the infinitude of love?

David Lipscomb says no and yes.

For example, in his teachings on worship, he distinguishes

between the form-limits of Judaism’s ritual practices and the

form-freedom of Campbell’s sparse aesthetic. Discounting Old

Testament forms of praise, he quotes Campbell’s belief that

instrumental music is “sensuous, wholly appealing to the fleshly

feelings, and [thus] suited to the fleshly institution of Judaism

[and] ill suited and wholly antagonistic to the spiritual nature

of the kingdom of Christ.”39

38 Epilogue, 38. 39 David Lipscomb, “Music, David, and Instrumental.” Questions Answered: By Lipscomb and Sewell. Ed. M.C. Kurfees (Nashville: McQuiddy Print, Co., 1921), 451-453.

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Articulating a suspicion of aesthetics and its accompanying

‘fleshly’ passions, Lipscomb suggests that God’s love enters

human hearts by our transcendence of ‘fleshly’ worship.40 He

claims that the sensorial elements of Judaic worship “[were]

intended to impress the worshipers with the idea of might, power,

and grandeur; to excite feelings of awe and fear in the

worshiper; and to govern man through these rather than through

love.” 41 In his reasoning, aesthetic influence governs through

compulsion, not compelling love. It is problematic enough to

claim that the senses have no place in worship; unavoidably, we

house our souls in jars of clay--thinking, sensing,

impressionable clay. But graver still to claim: that form has no

place in perceiving God’s grandeur; that awe has no place in

encountering God’s love. Though Lipscomb acknowledges that love’s40 And yet, Lipscomb concedes that musical tastes in particular and sensuous feelings in general are not inherently “good or bad.” In fact, he writes that music “vocal or instrumental” can “mold the character for good…impress[ing] religious truths.” However, after Lipscomb acknowledges this as a “logical conclusion,” he makes a startling move for the Restoration Movement. Citing Proverbs 3:5, he thwarts this conclusion by claiming our inability to reason God. And where he attempts logic, it is contradictory: one moment using scripture, another moment discounting scripture depending on his presupposition. Compare his opening presupposition and its executed logic. David Lipscomb, “Instruments of Music in the Service of God.” Gospel Advocate, Vol. XLIII, No. 44 (October 31, 1901), 696. alongside David Lipscomb, “Music, David, and Instrumental.” Questions Answered: By Lipscomb and Sewell. Ed. M.C. Kurfees (Nashville: McQuiddy Print, Co., 1921), 451-453.41 “Music, Controversy...” 455.

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praise demands our best offerings, he warns against offering up

our senses as part of the spiritual engagement.42

God’s covenant through Christ need not diminish or deify

human experience; as much as God’s love crucifies our entire sin,

it claims our entire selves. As we are commanded to love God with

our all,43 this does not exclude the dedication of our bodies as

temples. Lipscomb believes that God addresses the Christian’s

heart directly44—bypassing “sensual elements”; however, he

portrays God’s love in sensual diction: man is “drawn by tender,

gentle cords of loving sympathy;” his heart is “touched” by God;

God “appeals” to man.45 Lipscomb utilizes imagery of the loving

father and child, the lamb and Calvary; he recalls the sights and

sounds of theophany and calls us to imagine “the shed blood of

42 He quotes and confirms Isaac Errett’s reasoning that if the arts “assist rather than hinder this great object of uniting the whole congregation in worship, the most serious objection to them is removed. The religion of Christdemands our best offerings.” Lipscomb confirms honoring God’s love with our best—even in taste and talent; then confessing that he has neither, Lipscomb claims that aesthetic considerations have no place in love’s worship. “Music Controversy.” Questions Answered, 453-458.43 NIV, Luke 10:27, 1 Corinthians 6:19.44 It is as if Lipscomb anticipates Amos Wilder’s critique of the neoorthodox shortcoming (perhaps a lens for the dangers of Restoration “common sense” hermeneutics): “It is not the human heart that is addressed but the will aloneor some abstract core of freedom.” (Theopoetic, 54).45 “Music, Controversy…” 456.

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him who loved us” in baptism and communion.46 And yet, after

recalling these meaningful rituals and representations of God, he

looks down on the sensuous and fleshly “formalism of Judaism” as

incapable of involving the heart. 47

Rituals and forms require our intentional discernment, not

our indiscriminate fleeing.48 Can you imagine Lipscomb refusing

the Lord’s Supper because it is too tangible, or refusing Christ

as The Word Made Flesh? Of course not. But that is because to

these forms, these matters of flesh, he brings his heart—the ears

and eyes of faithful love.

Steiner, Wilder, and the Poetic Engagement – Enunciation/Annunciation

As in the case of the artistic encounter and instances of

mutual love, the otherness we attend animates in our receptivity.

Whether or not the arts appear in the Sunday service, they are

integral in forming a worshipful posture: a receptivity and

response to the expression of what is perceived by the mind, but

46 “Music, Controversy…” 457. 47 He posits that the Jewish institution held “little direct appeal to the conscience—the heart, the spiritual faculties—of man….He was a God of might tothe Jew; to the Christian he is a God of tender love and pure sympathy for hisweak and erring children.” “Music, Controversy,” 456-457.48 See Donald Davie’s words from “Old Dissent, 1700-1740” as quoted in Nicholas Worterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 1980), 190-191.

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outside the mind—what is self-experienced, and yet substantially

other. The ability to attend God’s love predicates itself on this

opening: reason’s will accompanied by faith’s willingness and

love’s attentive longing.

Thus, Amos Wilder urges that we awaken a capacity to imagine

in order for love to take root. Perceiving a present atrophy in

visionary spirituality, he calls us to faithful imagination—an

“openness to the possibilities of transformation.”49 He

acknowledges that the imagination of the Spirit cannot simply

keep company with the artist’s Muse (though they are related and

ought to chat). Likewise, imagination cannot stop at beauty

without also tending to the “transfiguration of the actual world.” What is

needed today, Wilder claims, is “a better theology and a better

aesthetic. A better theology will not identify religion or

Christianity with any and every fervid or didactic impulse, nor

with any and every experience of Beauty of the Spirit.” In this

dual offering and discernment, we must bring not simply our

caution, but our vision.50

49 Wilder, Theopoetic, 99.50 Amos Wilder. “Christianity and the Arts: The Historic Divorce and the Contemporary Situation.” The Christian Scholar, Vol. XL: No. 4 (December 1957), 268.

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Historically within the Campbellite tradition, vision and

imagination have been relegated to adolescent naïveté. Campbell’s

biographer, Robert Richardson, represents this view when he

commends Campbell’s exchange of poetry for preaching:

The true poet must possess…delicate perceptions of beauty and of harmony, and that vivid imagination to which these are allied…[creating and giving] unity and life and action to its productions, so as to make "things that are not" seem "things that are." It is by no means to be regretted, however, that Alexander Campbell did not devote himself to poetry. He chose themore congenial pursuit of truth, and a nobler and far more important field of labor, where success was to be rewarded not by mere human applause or the fading garland of the poet, but by the praise of God and the crown of immortality.51

Though some poets may write for worldly approval, the ‘poet’

Richardson describes seems involved in an “important field of

labor” no less worthy of the praise of God. Richardson’s depicts

one who not only imagines a world transfigured from its fallen

state, but seeks to create the realities of this vision in life

and action! These actions would seem not unlike those of a

preacher, a theologian—indeed the place of a Christian. It is

this ability to not only imagine beauty and harmony, but to

perceive and embody it in love, that Amos Wilder requests. He does51 Richardson, 133.

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not literally require a poet in the place of a preacher; but

neither does he want the church to shear the poet’s tendency from

the Christian’s task.52

Yes, the Calvinistic impulse to guard against “worldliness

and Vanity Fair” in worship is valid; but as we examine its

application in our own historically sparse aesthetic, we must ask

whether certain aesthetic inhibitions are anachronistic, even

spiritually deadening. Let us grant, as Amos Wilder does, that in

Scripture:

God speaks to the human heart and will, yet his persuasions are mediated through dynamic and dramatic language. Granted that he reveals himself in saving actions, it could only be by sacred recital invoking prophetic imagery that their import could be conveyed. Yet these oracles ha[ve] come to be read and studied inwooden and denatured ways…53

Wilder writes against wooden worship and legalistic living—

which I believe is Campbell and Lipscomb’s reading of Judaic

formalism. They see it as dead, not involving the heart and the

mind, compulsive law without compelling love. We must ask: do our52 “The real problem, evidently, is that of the alienation of the artist and the creative writer from the Christian tradition as a whole. On the one hand their gifts have not been available to the Church in the service of the ecclesiastical arts. But more significant sill, much of the really creative work of the modern age has not been inspire by or oriented to Christian presupposition.” (Wilder, “Christianity and the Arts…” 263).53 Theopoetic, 49.

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worship services—(and greater yet, the Presence-permeated forms

of our life!) serve as contact zones where “we, who with unveiled faces

all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing

glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit”?54 This is the true

question of theological aesthetics. It is not a question of

doctrinal presupposition so much as divine participation. This

participation—which surpasses any “‘bare facts’” or “alleged

objectivity of detachment”—is what Von Balthasar combines in his

dual sense of aesthetics.55 Our participation with the divine

involves the “theory of vision…a theory about the perception of

the form of God’s self-revelation” and the “theory of rapture…a

theory about the incarnation of God’s glory and the consequent

elevation of man to participate in that glory.” 56 The aim of

theological aesthetics—of vision and rapture—is for revelation

and faith to meet, as creature and Creator respond to one another

in love.57 The artistic experience of divine love is one of

response, engagement. It is a creative love that “produces an

54 NIV, 2 Corinthians 3:18.55 Hans Urs Von Balthasar. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. I: Seeing the Form.(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1982), 125.56 Seeing the Form, 125.57 As the Psalms imagine: “Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other.” NIV, Psalm 85:10.

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image of [man] with which the beloved would not credit himself,

and when love is genuine and faithful it gives him the power to

come closer to this image or make himself like it.”58 When we

engage with the vision of God’s love, our response is to embody

it.59 As Amos Wilder reminds: “Our visions, stories, and utopias

are not only aesthetic: they engage us.”60

The church’s ability to make evident and beautiful its

holiness remains its hope for engaging unbelievers. Ideally, the

Christian life, as it bears fruit, provides an aesthetic

encounter of Christ’s likeness. However, over fifty years ago,

Amos Wilder perceptively assessed that: “The church today has

widely lost and all but forgotten the experience of glory which

lies at the heart of Christianity….That the plenitude is so

widely smothered in the creaturely condition only enforces the

special and irreplaceable role of religion in witnessing to

58 Convergences, 129.59 NRSV, Galatians 2:20. See also Von Balthasar’s words, “The creature, who isable to read this picture of the manifestation of the glory of God, knows thathere all truth and therefore all beauty lies, that he owes it to himself to surrender in love to this archetype, because he owes Christ his being and existence and can therefore only glorify Him in an ascent [and assent] to Him in his life and work.” in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol III: Studies in Theological Style – Lay Styles. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 391.60 Amos Wilder. Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), 79.

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it.”61 Wilder attributes this lack of glory to a misstep into

religion as will and reason. 62 Many in the church bemoan the

absent will of ‘today’s unbelievers,’ the unreasonable claims of

‘postmodernism.’ But according to Wilder, the church has been its

own smothering threat to the gospel’s receptivity.

A world dulled to aesthetic epiphany has no place for

theophany. In the accounts of Scripture, when the righteous meet

God—in His providence, His messengers, His Son—they respond: some

wrestle, some stutter, some gasp, some argue, some plead, some

praise. But when the unrighteous come upon the glory of God,

their hearts are hardened, their minds are darkened. Their

spiritual senses disengage—they become “senseless, faithless,

heartless, ruthless.”63 They become as inanimate as the idols 61 Theopoetic, 8.62 “Our Protestant population has indeed had its own forms of ceremonial expression and its own imaginative piety. But these have been so sober that they have often failed to satisfy the human need for celebration and spontaneity…[And] in some legacies of American Protestantism, reason shaped faith at the expense of more vital and plastic expression….some will still recall the powerful voice of John R. Mott. He began his typical address to hisgreat audience with the words: ‘Christianity first and last is a matter of theWill!’” (Wilder, Theopoetic, 42-43.) If congregants believe that they can reason or will their way to God in worship, what happens when something in their experience outside the church walls eludes logic and strength of will? Surely the sinful impulse, as described by Paul in his letter to the Romans, resists reason and wiggles free of will. What of the congregant who desires to be opento the Lord's change in their life, who wants to experience the surprising joyof Christ's transforming love? 63 NRSV, Romans 1:18-32.

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they worship, as abstract as the ideologies to which they submit,

because they no longer sense the real presence in form.

To prevent this spiritual disengagement, literary critic

George Steiner holds up the arts as a means for communication

with God and communion with one another.64 Against

deconstructionist dismantling of form and meaning, Steiner posits

that the “real presence” of aesthetic encounter liberates the

possibilities of meeting and meaning. As in our brushes with

divinity and the longing call of human love, forms call us out of

the boundaries of self to shared experience and exchanged

meaning. He writes:

Theology and speculative metaphysics engage the possibilities of meeting or of non-meeting with the ‘other’ in its transcendent guise. The second analogy is that of the erotic, of our meeting or refusal of meeting with the other in the incidence of love (or of hatred). Analogously, the reception or denial of the

64 “There was presumably, no need of books or art in Eden. That which has beenindispensable thereafter has communicated the urgency of a great hurt. It is in the perspective of death—how can we die, how are we able to?—that Western consciousness has spoken, has sung its realizations of love and of caritas. A ‘high seriousness’ of questioning and immateriality, in the true sense of thatmost radical word, inhabits what we recognize as lasting in the acts of art and in our readings of them….Its is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech-acts except that of monologue which has generated our arts of reply, of questioning and counter-creation.” George Steiner. Real Presences. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 224-225.

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aesthetic presence engages an exchange of liberties, liberties given and taken.65

As aesthetic encounters make room for this engagement, they

welcome (not weaken) the sense of something Wholly Other. Art

intrudes upon our created lives; its real presence summons us and

engages us with its search, its questions.66 Like a god dwelling

in our fallen pockets of paradise, summoning us from our hiding,

art asks, “Where are you?”67 Steiner summarizes the aesthetic

encounter as an Annunication via form’s enunciation.

The voice of intelligible form, of the needs of direct address from which such form springs, asks: ‘What do you feel, what do you think of the possibilities of life, of the alternative shapes of being which are implicit in your experience of me, in our encounter?’ The indiscretion of serious art and literature and music is total. It queries the last privacies of our existence. This interrogation…is no abstract dialectic.It purposes change…Again, the shorthand image is that of an Annunciation, of “a terrible beauty” or gravity breaking into the small house of our cautionary being. If we have heard rightly the wing-beat and provocation of that visit, the house is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before.68

65 Steiner, 154.66 “Aesthetics means embody concentrated, selective interactions between the constraints of the observed and the boundless possibilities of the imagined. Such formed intensity of sight and speculative ordering is, always, a critique. It says that things might be (have been, shall be) otherwise.” (Steiner, 11.)67 NRSV, Gen. 3:968 Steiner,142-143.

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It is simply not enough to be a created being; we are called

to creative becoming. This process, Word Made Flesh, is what

Steiner’s calls poiesis: “meaning made form…the processes of

transformation which the aesthetic sets in motion.”69 Like a

steadfast God that loves and leads us from our lesser selves, art

has the capacity to invade “the last privacies of our existence”

and purpose change. Trespassing to transfigure us, the aesthetic

encounter can question and transform our choices.70 In this

sense, beauty’s call is not unlike love’s summons to the soul and

God’s action in the world. What we choose to hear and hone in

these revelations, these “wing-beat and provocation” moments in

turn becomes an artistry of lived response.

Scheeben, Gügler, and the Transfigured Form – Co-Creators/Created

Despite Campbell’s frequent appeals to reason, he remarks

that God’s revealed love exceeds the heights of reason, the best

fruits of imagination, and the greatest poetry.71 And yet, 69 Steiner, 187.70 “…any thesis that would, either theoretically or practically, put literature and the arts beyond good and evil is spurious.” (Steiner, 142).71 Campbell articulates, “The simple fact of an incarnation of the Supreme Divinity in our humanity, is more suggestive of the space occupied by man in the bosom of his Father and his God, than all the volumes of the highest reason, than all the poetry of the loftiest and most fruitful imagination, unfolds, or can unfold in the largest series of ages yet to come, or

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insofar as these forms (ideas, images, words, our lives)

represent the incarnation, they are supreme in their

“suggest[ion]” of God’s love.

As God’s creation and co-creators, we navigate a process not

unlike theologian Alois Gügler’s definition of art—a “conscious

exteriorization of the inner fullness in the ‘form’ which must,

of course, never be lacking, since art may only be found where a

‘living entity’ mediates between pure life and lived life.”72 In

other words, to be God’s art is to be like Christ: embodying the

“inner fullness” of love, mediating between God’s pure love and

existential execution. In the form of Christ, we strive to be

conscious mediators: reconciling forms with faith, flesh with

spirit, created with Creator. 73

Admittedly, our role as witnesses resembles but in no way

replaces Christ as God’s ultimate revelation of love.

Incorporating Scheeben, Von Balthasar nuances Gügler’s romantic

equating of Christian embodiment with Christ’s incarnation. conceivable by our contracted vision.” (“Woman,” 216.)72 The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, 99.73 See Von Balthasar’s understanding of the theological triad: meditation, proclamation, and dialogue (Convergences, 61-67.) Applying this framework to Scheeben’s: Christians engage in the meditation of purity, proclamation as conscious exteriorization, and dialogue as the living negotiation between these two.

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Scheeben finds the analogue of our incarnation within

transfiguration: a process whereby nature is impregnated by

grace, and thus bears the fruits of the Spirit.74 This

willingness to be impregnated, to give one’s life to

“transformation into the objectively good and beautiful,”

predicates itself on the consent of faith. We are asked to be as

God’s fruitful womb: canvassing the contours of His presence,

bearing Christ’s disarming love.75

David Bentley Hart articulates this love as the “Christian

use of the word ‘beauty’ [which] most properly refers to a

relationship of donation and transfiguration, a handing over and

return of the riches of being.”76 Von Balthasar likewise points

to love’s transfiguring beauty in Scheeben’s theology of

sacrifice.77 Like Christ, our transfiguration requires a kenotic

74 The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, 111.75 In this transfiguration of our schemas and our selves: God’s “self-showing”serves as the basis of our beauty; His “self-saying” establishes the founding truths of our faith’s expression; His “self-giving” in Christ becomes our comprehension of love. See the chapters on “Self-Showing,” “Self-Giving,” and “Self-Saying.” Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Epilogue. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 59-88.76 David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publshing, Co., 2003), 18.77 See also Love Alone is Credible—especially his explorations of the aesthetics of Christ’s love (“Love as Form,” “Love as Deed,” and “Love as Justification and Faith”).

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response to God’s love. Our transformation into God’s likeness

requires our sacrifice not in the sense of self-emptying, but

rather a “‘transfiguration’ through love: the outpouring of the

gloria Dei over the whole substance of the creature, which by

sacrificing and surrendering itself makes room in itself for the

divine fire.”78 We must permit God space to invade us that we

might be transfigured.79 As in my encounter with the other voice

in Bringhurst’s poem, to love God is to listen, to let Him break

and enter—to claim and change all forms.

We return to Alexander Campbell’s bold query, which is not

unlike the critique of our opening poem’s voice: “Do you think

that religion is a mere way of talking or educational art,

received by tradition from our forefathers? God forbid! It is a

substantial thing, solid as the adamant, lasting as eternity,

bright and glorious as the Divine Author and object of it.”80 God

is more substantial than our conversations, our teachings, our 78 The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, 115.79 As Von Balthasar writes, taking on the voice of Christ, “All the world’s form is to me but matter I inspirit. My action is not grafted from without to the old life, to the old pleasure-gardens of Pan; being the very Life of life,I transform the marrow from within. All that dies becomes the property of my life. All that passes over into autumn runs ashore on my spring….I am the Resurrection….I am the transformation.” Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Heart of the World. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979), 77.80 Richardson, 145.

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traditions. Though we have historically used “various abstract

dogmatics” to define our difference and contour the singularity

of Christ, Von Balthasar echoes Campbell’s implications of

substance and irreducibility.81 He calls for an embodied dogma

that joins flesh and spirit, asserting: “Only those theologies

became vitally effective in history which bore their spirituality

not as an addition, but within themselves, which embodied it in

their innermost being.” 82

Bringhurst’s unnamed ‘she’ reminded us that our poems, our

embodied beliefs, are more substantial than our constructed art

and our instructed reasons. The world will know if the spirit of

love is absent from our scholarly letters, our images, our lives.

And yet: if bearing the unmistakable fruits of love, these forms

are valid vessels of God’s revelation. Ideally, forms exist as

revelations and responses of God’s call to humanity. May our

forms, and the poiesis of our living, surprise the speaker of

Bringhurst’s poem: uniting the artist’s beauty and the scholar’s

truth with the unmistakable call of the Spirit’s love.

81 Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Convergences: To The Source of Christian Mystery. (San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1983), 44.82 Convergences, 44.

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