Transforming Culture: Art as a Gift, Calling & Obedience

Plenary #1 – Andy Crouch, Art as Gift, Calling & Obedience

Andy is perhaps best known as a columnist for Christianity Today; however he has started other magazines, written extensively on matters of faith and culture. His message was one of the best I’ve heard on the subject—compelling, intriguing, and engaging. Buy it and listen to it at least twice.

I. God is a Culture-maker. Andy began with some reflections on Gen 2:4-17. He main point in this part was that God is both a Creator and a Culture-maker. Although this was the weakest part of his address, he offered several insightful observations.

• When God created ex nihilo, he also created ex creatio, out of creation. As the first act of culture-making he made a garden.
• God placed “useless” elements in the garden–gold, bdellium, onyx–that were superfluous, not elements designed primarily for their usefulness but rather for their beauty, i.e. we build out of granite, not gold. Note the biblical celebration of that gold, “And the gold of that land is good.”

Defined culture with Ken Myers’ definition, which he remarkably stated was the “best” definition: “Culture is what we make of the world.” This witty definition connotes both the material and intellectual dimensions of culture, culture that is produced and culture that thought. Andy proceeded to place Art within the framework of culture noting that Jesus took, broke, and blessed culture on night he was betrayed—bread and wine, not wheat and grapes.

II. The Uselessness of Art. “The way we make art is the truest diagnostic test of our underlying beliefs about culture.” “Art” is “those aspects of culture that can not be reduced to utility.” Why have wallpaper when wallboard will do, why craft a careful sentence when a stupid one will do, why buy a thin laptop when a think one will work just fine?” Art transcends utility and cannot be translated without losing meaning. Art is not useful; it is better than useful! So it is with Christian worship. “We stake our worship every Sunday on the belief that God does not require us to be useful to him nor does worship have to be useful to us.”

III. Art is play and pain. We play not entirely like children but like children. “It’s not fully adult to play.” We fly through the 18th century rooms at the Art Museums to quickly arrive in the Impressionist rooms, but even the Impressionists confronted pain. Only the gospel can engage in art playfully and painfully without bowing to naivety or sadism. Pop culture falls short of real play and sincere pain.

Closing remarks: “I hope for nothing less that the recognition of Christ body among us, broken and beautiful, in play and pain. We are here to discover Christ taking, blessing, breaking and giving…here to be slightly more like Christ…to rekindle our capacity to be beautifully un-useful to God.”