I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

…Moses, unlike most writers in Scripture, would stop the narrative to break into [poetry], a kind of poetry called parallelism, which is when you say something and then repeat it using different phrasing. [The] way Moses wrote wasn’t unlike the way people who write musicals stop the story every once in a while to break into song.
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The reason Moses would do this… is because there are emotions and situations and tensions that a human being feels in his life but can’t explain. And poetry is a literary tool that has the power to give a person the feeling he isn’t alone in those emotions, that, though there are no words to describe them, somebody understands.
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I wondered if when we take Christian theology out of the context of its narrative, when we ignore the poetry in which it is presented, when we turn it into formulas to help us achieve the American dream, we lose its meaning entirely, and the ideas become fodder for the head but have no impact on the way we live our lives or think about God. This is, perhaps, why people are so hostile toward religion.

A great, albeit indirect, argument for reconciling art and the gospel. Like Schaeffer said, evangelical Christians “have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life” rather than embrace it as a fundamental tool to help comprehend that which is beyond our words, formulas and theology.

Anyone that knows me knows I’m not a big fan of western Christian culture. I never cease to be amazed at its countless attempts at creating “Christian” clones of “secular” things so that all good churchgoers can keep the sinful things of the world at arms’ length while still enjoying what mainstream culture has to offer, albeit rather cleaned up.

Seeing how that’s about all the personal commentary I can muster after midnight on a day where I worked far too much, here are some fun quotes from talks I heard from Calvin College’s 2007 Festival of Faith and Music that relate to what I’m talking about. Enjoy:

Has forming Christian pop culture solved the problem? You’re less safe when you think you’re safe.

Ken Heffner

This reminds me of the warning I give to kids I know that are about to attend Christian universities: Don’t let your guard down.

The church creates a subculture and refuses to compete. But the church wants desperately to fit in. The church is a teenager.

Michael Kaufmann

The irony is not lost on me. A culture is created with the purpose of protecting its people from the world. Then, in an attempt to market said culture, they try to prove to newcomers and inquirers that they’re just like everyone else.

Unfortunately the church has adopted a grid that limits creativity & imagination, disregards values such as authenticity and originality and instead champions notions of excellence and perfectionism.

Michael Kaufmann

This directly relates to a major theme in Francis Schaeffer’s short book, Art and the Bible, which I’ve talked about before. Maybe I’ll discuss that theme at greater length later when my brain is in better working order.

So there you go. A few quotes for you to ponder and play with. Thoughts?

A few years ago when I started to work out a Christian epistemology and a Christian concept of culture, many people considered what I was doing suspect. They felt that because I was interested in intellectual answers I must not be biblical. But this attitude represents a real poverty. It fails to understand that if Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just “dogmatically” true or “doctrinally” true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.

The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, true to the ultimate environment — the infinite, personal God who is really there — then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth. Such an attitude will give our Christianity a strength that it often does not seem to have at the present time.

Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

A very short book that has done more to help me get perspective on faith, art and life in general than almost anything else in recent memory.

Has the Church — or more specifically, evangelical Christian culture — perpetuated the idea that challenging norms and asking “dangerous” questions is a bad thing? To me that’s what it feels like, but I could be wrong.

I haven’t read Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible yet, but having seen a handful of quotes, I was inspired to leave a couple of them here because they tickle a part of my brain that’s been going crazy lately.

As evangelical Christians, we have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life. The rest of human life we feel is more important. Despite our constant talk about the Lordship of Christ, we have narrowed its scope to a very small area of reality. We have misunderstood the concept of the Lordship of Christ over the whole of man and the whole of the universe and have not taken to us the riches that the Bible gives us for ourselves, for our lives, and for our culture.

The Lordship of Christ over the whole of life means that there are no Platonic areas in Christianity, no dichotomy or hierarchy between the body and the soul. God made the body as well as the soul, and redemption is for the whole man.

A large part of growth in Christ is learning how to not compartmentalize one’s self. We far too often resort to using a movie’s rating, the lack of an “explicit content” label on a CD or the consensus as to whether something is “Christian” or not to decide what we consume. I wish it were that simple.