A Third Way?

It has been a year and a half since I started this blog as a means to work through the implications of God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Baker Academic, 2008). It was written for a Christian, largely Protestant, audience that is interested in yet unclear about how to approach modern and contemporary art. And it was intended especially for those who felt dissatisfied by the Reformed approaches represented by Francis Schaeffer, H.R. Rookmaaker, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. I also kept in mind the possibility that curious secular critics, turned off by a Christianity that is too closely identified with Right-wing cultural politics, might find deeper and more refreshing theological waters in which to quench their thirst for things spiritual and offer a Christianity rich enough to believe in--or at least not despise. 

But in the end God in the Gallery was a personal project. It was an opportunity for me to step outside my work in the secular art world and offer a theological framework to account for my work as an art historian, art critic, curator, and educator, a framework big and deep enough to explain the existence of my work not only in Christian contexts, but secular ones as well. God in the Gallery is thus unlike most Christian approaches to art. On one hand it is not critical enough of modern and contemporary art and on the other it is not Christian enough—or, rather, not Reformed and evangelical enough—to satisfy the Christian scholars that think and write about art and theology.

To make matters more complicated, the theological framework that emerges does so in response to my engagement with modern and contemporary art. Moreover, I developed a love of modern and contemporary art before I developed a love of Christian theology. I was raised a Christian but I was raised in a tradition that did very little cultural reflection and so I had no idea how and in what way one "integrates" faith and learning or "thinks theologically" until I had already been converted to modern and contemporary art. Unlike those students who get a steady dose of worldview and faith and learning integration in Christian high school and then go on to a Christian college for an even stiffer dose, I found myself confronting these questions for the very first time through Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind on the eve of submitting my doctoral dissertation.

I tried to follow Noll's Reformed tradition for several years. I read Calvin, Kuyper, Van Til, Dooyeweerd, Schaeffer, Rookmaaker, Wolterstorff, Seerveld, Walford, and Dyrness.  But they failed to explain theologically how I as a Christian could love modern and contemporary art, criticism, and theory. They have helped many, many others. But they could not help me.

But when I discovered Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World, I was introduced to and initiated into a tradition of thinking theologically that seemed rich with implications for my work, which lead me to study the Church Fathers, the Ecumenical Councils, the Russian Orthodox tradition, and, of course, the veneration of icons. This was not merely an academic exercise. It struck at the heart of how I lived as a Christian. It also forced me to make some very hard decisions about how my family and I actually lived our Christian lives, decisions with which I continue to struggle daily.  And it transformed how I thought about and wrote about modern and contemporary art—not by undermining or rejecting it but by completing it, fulfilling it. My experience of Nicene Christianity from the perspective of the Eastern Church did not require that I reject the artists and works of art I had been studying. It provided a firm foundation that accounted for why I loved them in the first place.

In God in the Gallery I mix up all my interests, the Abstract Expressionists, critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, Marcel Duchamp, William Desmond, and Enrique Martínez Celaya with the Cappadocian Fathers, Alexander Schmemann, Pavel Florensky, and Nicaea II in an attempt to produce a single discourse. Neither conventionally "secular" nor conventionally "Christian," God in the Gallery suggests a third way. Cultural theologian Graham Ward in Cultural Transformation and Religious Practices (Cambridge 2005), argues for what he calls, a "new vernacular," that is

a language that is neither "churchy" nor "secular," for these are no longer the poles for its own self-understanding.  This will be a public discourse, inscribing a cultural ethics, in which the theological finds its place as a voice already engaged in contributing to the production of public truth.  (172)

Yet this new public discourse, this "third way" that God in the Gallery suggests, seems to have ruffled the feathers of the academic theological establishment for whom "theology and the arts" have defined the framework for thinking and writing about art from a Christian perspective. During the past year or so God in the Gallery has been often criticized for its theology. And until recently I have assumed this criticism to be the result of Reformed theologians who are nervous about icons and are irritated that I'm critical of one of their patron saints, H.R. Rookmaaker. But I have come to realize that it has less to do with Protestant reservations about Orthodox theology than with a concern to preserve a particular Protestant theological project, a project that has shaped conservative and liberal theology in the academy throughout the twentieth century and has consequently shaped the study of art. 

My next post will explore God in the Gallery in relationship to this Protestant theological project. In order to set the stage for the next post, read "State of the Art," a post I wrote a few years ago over at Baker Academic's blog site church and postmodern culture:  conversation.