Protestant Theology and Bad Taste

God in the Gallery was destined to ruffle the feathers of Reformed and evangelical theologians used to talking about the visual arts on their home court, in front of their own fans, and with their own refs Rookmaaker, Schaeffer, and Wolterstorff calling the fouls. Yet I underestimated just how problematic God in the Gallery was to the larger project of Protestant theology. This larger project is limned by the Schleiermacher-Barth axis of thought, the nineteenth century Liberal Protestant dismissal of the Trinity and the draining Christianity's dogmatic content to the Neo-Orthodox creative "rescue" of the person of Jesus Christ and "orthodox" Christianity in the first quarter of the twentieth. Despite the fact that Barth actually does believe in Christ as the God-man, the Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God, and has produced significant insights into election, this axis is two sides of the same coin. And it has Kant's face on it. And as Kantian currency it trades in reason not mystery, explanation not experience.    

This academic Protestant establishment has a deep iconoclastic tendency that has become only more explicit throughout the twentieth century. (By "academic" I mean theology and philosophy produced for the academy not for the Church or in the Church. To be sure, academic theologians of this brand do indeed enjoy speaking "to the Church," but that is a different matter altogether.) As I visit evangelical and Protestant colleges, interact with Protestant theologians and philosophers, and read the reviews of God in the Gallery, I have been come to realize just how deep-seated and institutionalized this iconoclasm is. It is dressed up in various ways and appears in numerous guises but in the last analysis Protestant theologians and philosophers use the visual arts merely to offer illustrations of truths they have discovered elsewhere and, if they had their druthers, they would declare, as Barth did, that no symbols and images be found inside any Protestant worship space, lecture hall, or seminar room. And if they absolutely have to be there, they are there only for decoration or instruction, not to be looked at intensely, or to declare their aesthetic presence in their own voices. True, some Protestant theologians and philosophers will tell you how much they like the visual arts but it does not take long to discover, either through a few questions or a glance at their office walls, that they have very little understanding of artistic practice. And this is not necessarily their fault. With Thomas Kinkade paintings of light, Bob Ross reruns on PBS, Sister Wendy Beckett, silly behavior in the contemporary art world, cranky nature of Conservative cultural politics, and even the "educational" work of art museum docents, the larger culture has no idea of what serious artistic practice is and what it requires of the viewer. I have come to believe that what the larger culture understands about painting is not simply deficient. It is wrong. 

Protestant iconoclasm breeds bad taste. In his sublime The Beauty of the Infinite, Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart offers perhaps the most devastating criticism of Nietzsche offered to date: Nietzsche has terrible taste. For Hart, it is his aesthetic that undermines his anti-theological philosophy. This could very well be said about the entire project of Protestant theology that has emerged along this Schleiermacher-Barth axis. It fails Hart's taste test.

Hart does not dismiss Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida. He listens to them patiently and intently and then scolds them for not having refined enough palettes to recognize that the Church Fathers and the Biblical witness are a much more robust foundation than Kant and the whitewashed sanctuaries of Enlightenment reason.

Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has claimed that he developed his systematic theology as a meditation on St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Compare Jenson to Barth. In what I find to be a shockingly nasty little essay, "The architectural problem of Protestant places of worship," Barth consigns the worshiper and the preacher to an empty, presumably white box in order to hear the preached Word of God. And so I find myself predisposed to being attracted to Jenson's Systematic Theology while being repulsed by Barth's Church Dogmatics. Is this an unfair assessment?  Probably. 

And yet. The Seventh Ecumenical council Nicaea II (787 AD) affirmed the necessity of the veneration of icons of Christ, the Theotokos, and the saints as a means to preserve the mystery of Jesus Christ as the God-man. In some ways, Nicaea II is simply an affirmation of the traditional aesthetic taste of the Church. To dismiss it as "merely" about images, symbols, and the like, which are barriers to hearing the Word of God, reveals bad taste. And in the context of Nicaea II having bad taste is much worse than it sounds. It reveals a lack of aesthetic imagination. And without an aesthetic imagination, embodied in and shaped through icons, how can we appreciate—see—God's mysterious and beautiful work in the world through Christ?  Nicaea II claims that bad taste, in this context, is not a failure of culture, it is a failure of dogma. It is heretical.

Should we be concerned that few of these Protestant theologians, given their admirable zeal to engage in the most contemporary of thought, have not been capable of engaging the most contemporary of art at its highest level? This is the clearest indication that the Protestant academic establishment, liberal and conservative, is profoundly—not just slightly—iconoclastic. Art for them is at best a didactic tool, an "image" like the reproduction of Grünewald's medieval Isenheim Altarpiece that Barth pinned to the wall in his study. It is not a proactive means by which knowledge about the world is produced and experienced. Would that Barth had engaged the tradition of modern painting as he engaged the tradition of modern philosophical speculation. But to do so would imply the belief that painting could actually participate in theological reflection, not just illustrate certain of its points. And the Protestant tradition has cut itself off from that belief. In order to "save" Christ from Kant, it has applied various tourniquets to the Church. The result is a crippled and deformed Christian faith that is deprived of necessary appendages.  

This is why I find the Church Fathers and those theologians that engage them within the dynamism of the Holy Tradition so much more powerful than a positively tasteless Protestant theology that thinks that Barth actually "rescued" something. The Fathers don't seem to have much trouble writing about and pointing to images and icons as a creative and constitutive part of their theological reflection. I am reminded of German art historian Erwin Panofsky's powerful little study Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, in which he analyzes how the intricate beauty of the Gothic Cathedral is not merely an illustration of the aesthetic beauty of Aquinas's thought, but actively participates in shaping it. That brings an aesthetic mindfulness to Aquinas that makes his theological speculations even more compelling. And then I think about the frightening white box that Barth would have us sit in and the legions of contemporary Protestant theologians that have flocked to Barth as the starting point for their creative work. And I wonder. 

This is why I appreciate Liberal Protestant theologians like John and Jane Dillenberger and Paul Tillich. They at least engaged what was most contemporary in the art world. Unfortunately, most of their followers merely reified their historical tastes so that a watered down post Vatican II gestural, figurative expressionism has become the "court style" of Liberal Protestant theologians. In addition, my unsystematic and ad hoc use of the Church Fathers, the Russians Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov, and the Roman Catholic Christoph Schönborn, come directly out of my engagement with and response to modern and contemporary art on its own terms.

Catholic and Orthodox thought is most capable of offering a means to experience creatively modern and contemporary art primarily because they remain believers in art, believers in an aesthetics wrought in the Church, which thus grounds but does not limit the aesthetic outside the Church. This, however, does not mean that Catholics and the Orthodox have good taste simply by virtue of being Catholic and Orthodox. It does mean, however, that they have at hand the theological resources alive in their tradition that makes such taste possible and the theological capacity to participate in modern and contemporary art at the deepest levels.

At a symposium for art museum curators in New York City a few years ago, then-Seattle Art Museum director Lisa Corrin was asked how she developed her leadership skills. She listed a number of books written by the usually business guru suspects. And then she said, almost in passing, "and I look at the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres."  Would that a contemporary theologian be capable of saying something like that—that participating in the aesthetic life of a particular artist actually shapes one's thought and actions.   

But art and the aesthetic aren't that important, you say. Tell that to the bishops in the eighth century that came to Nicaea with their eyes gouged, arms amputated, and legs hamstrung because they dared defend a robust aesthetic as a fundamental part of the Church's witness of Christ to the world in the face of an imperial iconoclasm that claimed that such imagery was useless at best and idolatrous at worst and got in the way of an unmediated access to Christ. And in the Eastern Orthodox Church first Sunday of Lent commemorates the re-establishment of icons in Constantinople in the ninth century after a second round of violent imperial iconoclasm after Nicaea II. The Orthodox call it the "The Triumph of Orthodoxy," and regard the restoration of the veneration of icons to be the aesthetic affirmation of the Nicene faith.

When I speak at evangelical Christian colleges about God in the Gallery, I am often asked about whether the Protestant tradition offers resources for a robust experience of modern and contemporary art. My view is that it cannot and will not until it recovers and creatively appropriates, in some way, the deep aesthetic insights of Nicaea II. But until that happens, God in the Gallery will continue to irritate the academic Protestant establishment.

Comments

[Brian Moss]

This sounds like the beginnings of a sequel! You are moving from the Gallery to the Church and I think you are right to surmise that the distance between the two is closer than we thought. You have provoked this fan of Barth and Rookmaaker yet again. While I remain Reformed (and hopefully still reforming!) I heartily agree that my ilk need not dismiss the image-makers of today or we are going to continue to suffer for it. The Chief Artist works in both Word and Image; why do we continue to dismiss one for the other?

[wayne]

word.

I've felt similarly going from growing up in one Protestant tradition (what's aesthetics?), moving through a Reformed tradition (heavy figurative expressionist aesthetic - what's up with that, btw?) in college, to a growing appreciation of Catholic and Episcopal (although still Protestant) appreciation of aesthetics in worship.

It's great to hear it articulated so thoroughly.

It seems like the desire is there for a lot of churches (in a lot of denominations), but without having any idea where to start. Re-visiting Nicea II is hopefully a good access point.

[Kevin Gosa]

Is it ironic that the intense rejection of the icon so prominent in Barth and other Protestant thinkers on the one hand, is on the other matched only by their fanatical embrace of Bach and Mozart?

That, with an almost iconographic aesthetic, Mozart could rapture the heart of these iconoclasts must be an example of the humorous grace of the Divine.

[daniel a. siedell]

Thanks for your comments Brian. I appreciate your thoughts and your work.

[daniel a. siedell]

Wayne, Yes, the desire is there for Protestants but not the resources. And so most start outside the Church and bring them in.

Kevin, Yes, it is indeed ironic that the same man who wants us worshiping in a white box can write such a gloriously beautiful meditation on Mozart.

[PD Young]

perhaps what we have today is iconophobia...

why do you think that there has been a surge of Christians engaging literature in the last few years but art history remains lagging behind? I don't even know of a single graduate art history program at an evangelical/protestant school. All we have is "theology and/through the arts" programs which always ends up doing a bad job of both.

[daniel a. siedell]

Yes, Paul, there is most definitely a fear of images, and it strikes deep into the anti-sacramental heart of the Protestant tradition. No, there are no graduate art history programs at evangelical/protestant schools. In fact, there are very few art historians who are trained in modern and contemporary teaching at any of these schools.

[PD Young]

a question for clarification: are you aiming at churches and worship services or the problem of christians' skepticism towards the "art world" as a whole?

[daniel a. siedell]

Good question. They are intertwined to me. The Reformation problems with the image play themselves out in the Enlightenment and secular culture. And so the problems I see are the same in the Church as they are in the secular art world.

[Christopher Benson]

Mr. Siedell: When I read this post, I was compelled to ask: (1) Why hasn't this man left Protestantism behind for Catholicism or Orthodoxy? Do you plan to convert?

(2) What is your opinion about the treatments of visual art in VISUAL FAITH, authored by William Dyrness, and THE BEAUTY OF GOD, edited by Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands, and Roger Lundin? Do you find these treatments more satisfying that Rookmaaker, Schaeffer, and Wolterstorff?

(3) With the exception of Lutherans and Anglicans, I am under the impression that most Protestants reject Nicea II. You claim that the rejection of Nicea II has cut Protestants off from theological resources that make good taste possible. Maybe. But are there theological resources within Protestantism that could make good taste possible? You seem to rule this out.

Are Protestants wrong for rejecting a practice (icon veneration) which has no biblical warrant? Are Protestants wrong for contending that Nicea II is not infallible nor authoritative like the Holy Scriptures? Was Calvin wrong for arguing, in the words of Charles Partee, that "worship and honor blend into a single action. Therefore, he does not accept a distinction between latria and dulia. One cannot worship God and pay homage to saints [or icons] without taking away some of the honor that belongs solely to God"?

Tony Lane, professor of historical theology at the London School of Theology, writes about Nicea II in A CONCISE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT. How do you respond the following?

• Is the worship of icons idolatry? To the iconoclasts it was. They invoked the second commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them” (Exodus 20:4-5). The iconodules maintained that the worship of icons was not idolatry because, unlike pagan worship, it was not the worship of false gods. (This and other iconodule arguments was put forward by John of Damascus, among others.) This raises an important question: does the Bible prohibit the worship of idols only because they represent false gods, or is it also illegitimate to worship the true God this way? The iconodules invoked the principle that “honor paid to the image passes on to the original.” But this was one of the arguments used by pagan idolaters and rejected by the early Fathers, such as Augustine: “[Those pagans] seem to themselves to have a purer religion who say, ‘I worship neither an idol nor a devil, but in the bodily image I behold an emblem of that which I am bound to worship.’ . . . They presume to reply that they worship not the bodies themselves but the deities who preside over the government of them” (Expositions on Psalm 113).

• What was the earliest Christian practice? There is little doubt that until the fourth century the Christian Church was predominantly opposed to any direct representation of God or Jesus Christ. In the fourth and fifth centuries a change took place. As paganism declined as a rival religion, so Christians began to adopt pagan practices and arguments concerning images. The Neo-Platonist theory of images was adopted – they are the bottom rung of an ascending ladder which leads at the top to the direct contemplation of God himself. If there is any danger in images it is not that they lead to idolatry (as in the Old Testament) but that they might distract one from ascending higher up the ladder. The iconodules made up for the lack of early tradition on their side by appealing to the idea of unwritten tradition, and (in good faith) to forgeries, such as the writings of “Dionysus the Areopagite.”

• What is best for simple folk? The iconodules saw icons as the books of the unlearned, as the way to bring spiritual realities home to them. The iconoclasts retorted that the simple could not distinguish between worship offered to an icon and worship offered to God himself, or between the veneration due to a saint and the adoration due to God alone. Icons would therefore lead the simple astray into idolatry.

• Both sides sought to accuse the other of heresy concerning the person of Jesus Christ, although neither side questioned the truth of the first six councils. (After more than two hundred years of intense controversy on this doctrine it was natural that any other debate should be referred to it and seen in terms of the doctrine of Jesus Christ.) The iconodules claimed that the incarnation is the warrant for visible representations of God – in Jesus Christ the invisible became visible man. They accused the iconoclasts of docetism – of not taking seriously the humanity of Jesus Christ. They also accused them of Manicheism (the denial of the goodness of physical creation), since they would not allow material representations of Jesus Christ. The debate was polarized in that neither side allowed the possibility that there could be representations of Jesus Christ without being worshiped (as with a modern visual aid).

Lane concludes:

The seventh general council falls into a different category to the first six. These were serious attempts to come to terms with the central biblical doctrines about God and Jesus Christ. The seventh, by contrast, is an attempt to justify a relatively late practice which at best has no biblical warrant and at worst is blatantly unbiblical. Protestantism in general has tended to approve the first four councils (Nicea to Chalcedon) and, to a lesser extent, the next two (both at Constantinople), but to reject the seventh.

[daniel a. siedell]

Chris, Thanks for your post. I've followed the discourse over at Evangel around Matt Milliner's posts.

1) I was raised in the Biola-Wheaton evangelical tradition but my family converted to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod five years ago in part as a response to our growing realization that Christianity is a sacramental and liturgical practice within which belief is sustained and grown. I seem pulled to Eastern Orthodoxy. But that is a very different from converting or from deciding to call oneself "something else" or deciding to go to a different church the next Sunday.

2) I like Bill Dyrness's work very much. But his interests have more to do with the visual arts within the context of the church. However, he and I are in the process of co-authoring a book that "fills out" Rookmaaker's blindspots. Bill's means to fill out Rookmaaker is not Calvin but the Catholic Revival in the early part of the 20th century (i.e., Jacques Maritain). Our tentative title, "Modern Art and the Life of a Culture." But I do tend to see Bill's work and many others very much tied to a Reformed approach that simply doesn't interest me as much anymore and which I find less useful.

3) Protestants are always worried about the simple folk misunderstanding the complexities of the Christian faith and wanting to "simply it," "clarify it," so they don't get confused, whether it's the veneration of the Theotokos or icons, justification/sanctification, or what have you. I find it condescending and a product of the Protestant academic establishment. We always tend to distort the fullness of the Gospel, whether were simply folk or academic elites. The simple folk don't have a corner on distortion market.

4) The biblical "proof" of icons is that Christ is the living eikon of God. When we feed the hungry and cloth the poor we are doing it to Christ, and when we persecute the Church (as St. Paul did), we are persecuting Christ.

4) I think Lane's thesis, as defined as it is by defending Calvin's use of the Fathers, proves my point about the Protestant academic establishment. Given what the framers of Nicaea II and its defenders a generation later (St. Theodore the Studite) said, I find it difficult to simply decide that Nicaea II is "different." The framers themselves believed they were simply affirming aesthetically what was implicit in the Creed. And the Western and Eastern Church agreed. And agreed for over six centuries. And do Protestantism emerges from such a consensus. So, Nicaea II is part of our legacy, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we believe it or not. Or think it's very important. The Reformers did not have full access to the resources of the Eastern Fathers, including the discourse in and around icons (St. Theodore the Studite, for example). Luther and Calvin can be forgiven. We cannot.

My point, as a Protestant, is simply for other Protestants to take the Council and the discourse of its defenders more seriously as helpful partners in working through the complexities of aesthetic practice in an iconoclastic age.

[Andrew Nicodemus]

Thank you for raising these matters. There are many things I would like to respond on but here are a few of my thoughts.

I love history and I love the history of art. I am also Protestant, reformed and a lawyer and have been for 27 years. But my experience has been and still is that there is nothing in comparison with knowing Christ. And so many of these so called artistic creations down the centuries seem but a shallow pointer to, a pale reflection of anything in comparison to His beauty and glory. As revealed by the record of His earthly existence in the Bible and as now ministered to us through the Holy Spirit, as you would expect me to say.

And yet, my interest is such that I am prepared to take a holiday in Italy to visit some of the Catholic Churches and their works of art. To go to Malta to see the two Caravaggios there, to be a frequent visitor to the Barber Institute of Art, etc, etc. The important point here is that as it says in Hebrews, Jesus Christ is the person through whom the world has been made, thereby reminding us of the beautya nd nobility of creation and that everything therefore is available to be enjoyed.

It is very easy to portray the issues, as you appear to do, as one of two extremes but that is not necessarily the reality. I can remove the “salvation through icons” approach and yet still like to look at icons and other works of art and even revel in the variety of gifts and expressions and opinion they convey, and be able to take art tours of galleries. Likewise, I can stop assuming that just because it is art, it suddenly has a licence to impress me without any credible evaluation. The issue of Barth is his existential nihilism. I certainly would not identify with anything he says about the insides of Churches. And yet I don’t then have to resort to icons or sacramentalism as a means for getting closer to God but neither does that mean that I cannot appreciate art and see it as a means of enhancing my life even my experience of knowing Christ. To have created a building within which to worship that seeks to honour God through the architecture and even stained glass windows is as much part of my discipleship as anything else, surely!

I fear that you have not given sufficient weight and respect to the breadth of and love of learning and therefore knowledge about a wide variety of subjects even amongst the reformed pew sitters like myself. Perhaps we should become friends and you may have less of a jaundiced view of me and my ilk.

[daniel a. siedell]

Thank you for your comments, Andrew. I appreciate your personal observations about art. I don't deny that we Protestants can appreciate the visual arts, find them entertaining and perhaps even edifying. But we don't consider them in a sacramental way that defines the Eastern tradition. I find that interesting. Our Christian faith is profoundly mediated, that is, our experience of Christ and the Holy Spirit is not "direct" from "mind to mind" but comes through material means, that is, through the Preached Word, through Baptism, through the Eucharist, through prayer, etc. The only difference from the Protestant view and the Eastern Orthodox view is not a difference between an "unmediated" faith and a "mediated" one. But rather the kind of mediation that is acknowledged.

Again, Andrew, thanks for your comments and observations.

[Keelan]

If we recognize that much of American contemporary culture is indeed a product of protestant traditions, whether acknowledged/realized or not, we might see that the problems you identify Dan are even bigger than the protestant theologians themselves. It explains, at least in part, the broader American art-as-entertainment disposition. So thinks the evangelical architect.

[Maxidus]

gunshot! pow-pow-pow!!!
in Jamaican culture, at a music festival or session, the "rude boys" or the "bad man" would raise there guns and fire shots in the air at the approval of a performer's song and music presentation on a stage, or even when the "sound" (dj group) played music at a party or session that the crowds went crazy for. often lighters would be raised and set ablaze as well. now, the norm is to to shape the hand like a gun raised in air and vocally imitate those sounds.

i ring out shots: "ramp-pa-pam-pam" to this post!