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?

God is a weak man’s salvation.

A while back a good friend got me a coffee table book full of bathroom graffiti. Everything from the profane to the profound was compiled in this giant collection of colorful photographs, and the above quote appeared amongst some of the more profound.

On the surface it’s immediately offensive to anyone calling himself a Christian. But if one thinks about that statement for a moment, it speaks the Gospel as briefly as one possibly could: We are weak men and God is our salvation. I don’t think it could be put more humbly.

There’s no way to know if the person who scrawled that comment on a bathroom wall was aware of its double meaning, but the irony of a statement that is both extremely proud and extremely humble makes me smile.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink

A decent, boiled-down pop psychology book that basically comes down to that point. We trust our judgment and critical thinking skills too much based on the endless supply of information at our disposal, then forget that the time investment required to understand that information is where the best, instinctive discernment comes from.

At least that’s what I got out of it.

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.

Ryan Catbird of Catbird Records wins the award today:

Q: Are you posing for the cover of Italian Vogue?

If the answer is “no,” then you can probably stop this whole “pursing-your-lips-whenever-someone-takes-your-photo” thing, I think.

The curse of the Myspace/digital camera age. Even I did this occasionally for a while, and I hated myself for it. Somehow I broke the habit. It just goes to show how we are so easily and subliminally influenced by the most trivial of things.

Found this quote via The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning:

Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?

Eugene O’Neill, The Great God Brown

For me, the question becomes: Why am I afraid to take risks that are required to continue on a path to where I want to be and, quite possibly, where God wants me to be? Lord, help me to put myself on the line when it’s easier to be comfortable.

An addendum to yesterday’s rant:

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

Miguel de Unamuno

This book just jumped on my “to-read” list.

Music doesn’t represent any tangible, earthly reality. It represents things of the heart, feelings which are beyond description, beyond any experience one has had. The non-representational but indescribably vivid emotional quality is such as to make one think of an immaterial or spiritual world. I dislike both of those words, because for me, the so-called immaterial and spiritual is always vested in the fleshly — in “the holy and glorious flesh,” as Dante said.
[...]
I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism, but I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.

Oliver Sacks

Maybe Sacks’ atheistic views will help to provide some perspective on my search for reconciliation between art and faith. I don’t think any belief can be fully understood without understanding its major opposing beliefs.

Once again, someone takes my opinion on art and how Christian culture has a distorted perception of how it is to be viewed:

What I take this to mean is this: it is the power of the creative medium, in creativity and ambiguity itself, to ask questions, to evoke thought, rather than just give answers. It is my fervent opinion that the ultimate role of the artist in culture is to provoke a response in the audience, to cause the listener, the viewer, to wrestle with concpets of life, love, regret, salvation, and eternity so that the author himself fades into the background of the work itself, thus leaving the greater question with the mind of said audience.

Andrew Schwab

I seem to be putting puzzle pieces up here, provided by others, that express what I believe in ways I am not yet capable. At some point I’ll make an attempt at putting the pieces together in hopes that someone else might identify with where I am.

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.