A spirituality of rock - part three...

NOTE:  This is part  three of an on-going series taken from chapter one of While My Guitar Gently Weeps: A Spirituality of Rock Music.

Conrad Ostwalt asked a question that deserves a deeper consideration re: the so-called secularization of contemporary Western society:

Does this mean that religion, far from losing power through secularization, might actually be more potent in our culture than ever, albeit without the official backing of institutions? The possibility exists that religion dissipated throughout the culture, arising authentically in the hands and creations of representatives who are removed from the restrictions of orthodoxy, can become a religion that empowers and functions to grant meaning to a more diverse population than can official religious bodies alone.

This has certainly been my experience coming to faith as a child of the 1960s. It also seems to be that for every subsequent generation a spirituality of rock emerges that advance the compassion of Christ beyond the confines of the institutional Church.  Curiously, however, most Christian communities have been slow to grasp - let alone celebrate or embrace - this truth.  Evangelicals and fundamentalists have tended to avoid and even reject this aspect of popular culture as sinful and corrupt. Retreating into "Christian" entertainment ghettos is their pale response to grappling with the extravagant challenges the Spirit brings to those who engage the Living God in rock music.  Mainstream Catholics and Protestants, while less parochial in their appreciation of God's presence in art, classical music and even cinema, have also carefully avoided embracing rock music as a place where the voice of the Lord might be heard.

(NOTE: This is one observation that has changed over the past 10 years with a variety of religious writers now exploring the value of U2, Springsteen, Johnny Cash, etc. Clearly the work of IAM - the International Arts Movement - and IMAGE Journal have made important contributions to this shift.)

There are three fundamental reasons for the avoidance and tension between the Christian tradition and popular culture in general and rock music in particular: the historic desire to maintain a distinctive Christian culture that repels the corrosive and corrupting influences of pagan society, a deep seated uncertainty over human sensuality and an almost inbred addiction to mediocrity that is a natural consequence of the "Christ against culture" worldview articulated by H. Richard Niebuhr.  In his ground breaking study, Theology and Popular Culture, Kelton Cobb, Hartford Theological Seminary Professor of Theology and Ethics notes that since the Patristic era the Church has been conflicted over the notion that "it is not off-limits to speak of culture, and of diverse cultures, in terms of divine providence or as embodiments of God's ideas - at least cautiously."  Tracing this split to the witness and wisdom of both Tertullian (160-225 CE) and Augustine (3540439 CE), Cobb writes:

Tertullian had such a high regard for divine revelation as found in scripture that he discounted the value of all things pagan, even its best literature. The poets and playwrights, along with the actors, charioteers and wrestlers, he concludes, are destined for that greatest of spectacles, the fierce fires of divine judgment... "If one longs for the excitement of the shows," he wrote, "one longs to be satisfied by a crass imitation of the deeper excitement of a life lived for God, where true drama consists in the struggles to overcome sin." In this, Tertullian established for Christianity one pattern of response to the surrounding culture: it is a land of alluring idols to be avoided. Contact with the culture on its own terms is defiling. As H. Richard Niebuhr concluded, Tertullian serves as "one of the foremost illustrators of the anti-cultural movement found in the history of the church." In this, the Church is an alternative society, an ark of redemption drifting upon a sea roiling in sin.

This perspective born of a hostile Roman culture filled with countless physical and spiritual seductions as well as political and economic temptations, finds nothing holy or redemptive about anything in the status quo. To be faithful to Christ requires a radical rejection of popular culture and a commitment to live spiritually and socially at the borders of society.

As a strategy for maintaining spiritual integrity in a discrete and dangerous milieu, Tertullian's argument has merit: the Desert Fathers and Mothers sought solace within it after the collapse of Rome's Empire; the early Monastic movement used it to guide their construction of new communities and faith; Anabaptists have drawn wisdom for it's waters as have modern Russian, Asian and European believers during times of oppression and tyranny. Problems arise, however, when the wisdom of one generation is mechanically and even fearfully embraced by people of faith in another time and place.

If the Reformation anthem, "ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed and always reforming)" means anything, it is the one size of theology, church governance or social justice does not fit all seasons or contexts. Sometimes, as John Calvin wrote in his 1543 essay, "The Necessity of Reforming the Church," the Body of Christ must be "reformed" in order to restore "the church to its true nature, purified from the innovations that riddled the church through centuries of inattention to scripture and theological laxity." At other times, "new occasions teach new duties and time makes ancient truth uncouth, they must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth" as James Russell Lowell said so well in his hymn, "Once to Every Man and Nation," of 1891. Rigidity and lack of contextual nuance is the first problem with embracing Tertullian's position in every generation.

It would seem that Augustine offers an antidote to this rigidity in his ability to see the vitality of popular culture as well as the dangers implicit in any uncritical appropriation.  Cobb writes: In Augustine's terms, while the earthly and heavenly cities had two different ultimate destinies, for the present they are mingled together from the beginning down to the end... they are entangled together in this world and intermixed until the last judgment effects their separations. Additionally, Augustine, like St. Paul before him, was willing to celebrate truth and beauty wherever they emerge - in literature, poetry, mythology, theatre or music - as intrinsic to God's creative nature:  "Wherever we may find truth, it is the Lord's."

Richard Holloway, former Anglican Bishop of Edinburgh, put it like this:

Some mistrust God's extravagant gestures and unnecessary flourishes. Their tragedy is that they ignore God in creation: God is also the Lord of the dance, God of the feast, God of play, inspirer of poets and musicians, artists of creation, mad genius who painted the canvas of the sky. Poet Robinson Jeffers notes: "It is not by his high superfluousness that we know God? For to equal a need is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling rainbows over the rain and beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows on the domes of deep sea-shells, and make the necessary embrace of breeding beautiful as fire. Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom nor the birds without music... such is the extravagant kindness of God.

It is precisely this commitment to contextualizing theology while carefully discerning the presence of God in popular culture that gives Augustine: "a strategy for the appropriation of pagan religious symbols and all varieties of popular art."

(And to this I will share more tomorrow...)