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Those of us in the church have, at one time or another, been in a conversation with other church-goers about how strange some of our language is.  We have big words with complex meanings, mostly derived from Latin (the church’s language for over a thousand years), such as justification, sanctification, incarnation, and other words ending in -ation.  We also have some odd metaphors – some clean, like the washing away of sins.  But other metaphors can quickly turn gruesome, like when sin is washed away by the blood of the lamb. 

Gross.

Inevitably, when we’re in these conversations about how strange the church’s language is, the defualt strange-word-of-the-church is narthex.  Fortunately, the kind folks over at Language Log have uncovered and explicated its mythic past.

In response to Sam Hamstra’s modest proposal in The Banner a couple months ago (which I blogged about here), fellow seminarian Meg and Back to God Hour English Language Ministries Leader Steve have put together a new blog that aims to be “a clearing house for various instances of Reformed thinking, writing, and ranting online.”

Check it out: A Modest Rejoinder

I stumbled across an article in the April 8 edition of the Washington Post, and I’ve heard at least two profs of mine refer to it, so I thought it was blog-worthy.  In fact, after two weeks to ponder it, I think this article is a serious contender for Best Article Ever.  It begins thus:

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

The article describes an experiment, where world-famous violinist Joshua Bell starts busking in a metro station in Washington, D.C..  He played some of the most difficult violin pieces ever composed.  Normal concert-goers would pay $100 per ticket to hear him play; how much would passers-by throw into his open case?

Not much, it turns out.

I wonder if the church reacts to God’s beauty in much the same way that passers-by reacted to Joshua Bell’s performance.   One of our confessions describes our end and chief goal as one of enjoying God and glorifying God forever, i.e. contemplating the beauty of God.  It seems, however, that the church is not content to allow this kind of contemplation to remain the end goal.  Contemplating and enjoying God turns into something utilitarian, like evangelism, spiritual and church growth, etc.  If anything, the article seems to indicate that we lack the capacity to appreciate beauty and often can’t even recognize it when profound beauty is right in front of us.

Last night I dropped off a book at the public library at the corner of Alger and Eastern.  The library was closed, so I went to the drive-through.  I pulled my car next to the book receptacle and noticed a sign that said “Drive Through Drop-off.”  Below that sign was a slightly smaller sign that presumably said the same thing… in braille!!!

I recently read an interesting article by Jamie Smith in the latest issue of Uncompressed (a new publication from Calvin’s SAO devoted to music, art, and culture; warning: large pdf file). In it he argues for a more rigorous notion of discernment within Reformed circles in order to counter our tendency toward engaging only the easiest parts of culture. He writes,

“I fear that the leveling tendency of Reformed aesthetics has brought about a ‘dumbing down’ of discernment and cultural engagement. And that, without question, is a loss. We’ve spent so much time valuing popular culture, it has come at the expense of the riches of ‘high’ culture. We’ve devoted so much ink and energy to convince students that God shows up in the frames of American Beauty or the lyrics of Johnny Cash that they’ve stopped looking for him in the genius of Bach’s motets or the romance of Rossetti’s poetry.”

At the end of the article, he asks rhetorically,

“What if we marshaled our energetic passion for culture and began to channel more of that towards an appreciation of ‘high’ culture? What if we spent a little less time watching movies and a little more time reading poetry and literature? What if we traded some of our iPod space devoted to Sufjan and carved out some more room for Vivaldi? Wouldn’t that be counter-cultural and resist the sound-bite-ization of a commercialized culture? What if the church could be an agent of and invitation to ‘high’ culture? Might it be the case that sometimes, redemption is redemption from the hegemony of popular culture?”

On the one hand, I agree. It’s true that it takes more time and energy to read Shakespeare than to listen to Sufjan, and it’s probably more rewarding in the long run.

But on the other hand, I’m suspicious of viewing certain segments of art, music, literature, or film as “high” culture and others as “low” culture. To a certain extent, these distinctions represent a false dichotomy to begin with and more often represent judgments about the people who prefer a particular kind of music, art, etc. One of my professors once regarded rap music as inherently inferior to classical music. But such a view mistakenly overlooks the skill required to rap (one that I don’t possess). It also it’s not too great to move from thinking less of a sub-culture’s music to thinking less of the people of that sub-culture.

Moreover, experts in Bach and Vivaldi probably aren’t in much of a position to judge the merits of Sufjan or the Beatles or U2. And U2 listeners probably couldn’t fully appreciate the art of blues improvation. Bach and the Beatles and BB King each represent very different genres, and each genre contains its own set of criteria for determining what’s good and what’s not. (The same thing happens with worship music – the Hymn Society and the worshiptogether.com folks make implicit judgments about the other’s music, yet both sides routinely fail to realize that they cannot always evaluate the other’s music with the same criteria they use to evaluate their own. I imagine that many worship wars have been started because churches don’t take notice of this distinction, either.)

It’s my own opinion that certain aspects of popular culture can be more fully appreciated not only before but also after investing enormous energy. For example, lots of people like U2 and the Beatles, but only a minority can speak in depth about their music or skill. I imagine that most of the original listeners of Bach and Vivaldi didn’t appreciate their music any more than most modern listeners appreciate U2 or the Beatles.

Smith’s article reminded me of a paragraph in Laura Smit’s book, Loves Me, Loves Me Not, where she encouraged her readers to abstain from movies with sexual scenes, regardless of the quality of the movie as a whole. I wonder if these two articles – and probably others, too – represent the beginnings of a backlash to the movement that has emphasized discerning culture too much. Perhaps the discerning-culture-movement has become so strong that, as Smith suggests, it has become its own hegenomy. It seems that we have engaged culture so much that we’ve forgotten what it means to be counter-cultural.