Beauty, Culture, Contextualization: pt 2 of "A Gospel-Centered Vision For The Arts And The Church"

Below you’ll find the second set of notes from Worship & Arts Pastor Mike Cosper’s three breakout sessions from the Acts 29 Network’s recent LEAD conference in St. Louis:

Beauty, Culture, and Contextualization
Culture is what emerges naturally as the result of humans being fallen image bearers in God’s world. This means that culture exists anywhere there is a human being living, eating, sleeping, working, and breathing. This exists in the most educated and least educated, most populous and least populous contexts. Culture simply exists; there is no avoiding its existence. What varies is the kinds of culture.

The Cultural Hierarchy

• Often, the word “culture” is treated like a treasure – something one “has” or “doesn’t have” or else one “gets” or “doesn’t get” culture. According to this definition, culture is usually relegated to the realms of academia and the “high art” tradition.
• The Historic Roots of “High” Culture
  • See Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence Levine
  • Consider the long, slow adoption of Jazz in academia
• Other cultural hierarchies exist
  • i.e.: Emerging or Subcultural hierarchies, where the “cutting edge” is treated as superior.

Beauty and Morality in the Arts

• Plato’s Ideal of Beauty
  • Beauty was an abstract perfection towards which all other beauty reached.
• C.S. Lewis’s conception of beauty: Beauty produces a longing for us, which is a longing for the beauty of God – the beauty of holiness.
  • For Lewis, Schaeffer, Rookmaaker, and others, beauty is an absolute whose roots are in God.
  • According to them, all pursuits of beauty in the arts are lisping attempts at expressing that absolute.
  • Some lisp more than others – a moral hierarchy of beauty.

The implication that emerges if beauty is an absolute that is tied up to the nature of God is that beauty is then a moral issue.

• Western Classical music is deemed beautiful, therefore Eastern music and folk music is less beautiful and therefore less moral, and now we have grounds to tell those doing eastern music and folk music that they are in sin, need to trade in their bouzouki for a viola and repent.
• Who is the arbiter of beauty?
• Aesthetics are profoundly cultural
  • i.e., Eastern and Western Aesthetics

Aesthetic Beauty and the Holiness of God
Harold Best emphatically tells us in Unceasing Worship that the beauty of holiness, and the beauty of God, is something profoundly beyond aesthetic beauty. The beauty of holiness kills. No one has seen it. It’s a radiance and glory unmatched by anything in creation. Aesthetic beauty, on the other hand, is always relative, always subjective, always (in some way) culturally conditioned. When we make aesthetics absolute, we make the mistake of attaching truth (an absolute) to aesthetic beauty (a relativity).

Some questions to consider if beauty is an absolute:

• In the mind of God, who is more beautiful – my daughter or yours?
• In the mind of God, what is more perfect – the aardvark or a volcanic rock formation?
• In the mind of God, what is more beautiful, blues, bluegrass, or Celtic music?
• I love Woody Allen movies. My wife hates Woody Allen movies. In the mind of God, who is right?

We tend to moralize our preferences, and the institutionalization of “Western Classical” culture has enabled the moralizing of certain preferences to a very, very high degree. So the “worship wars” had a huge body of literature on the side of traditionalism and classicism, because that stylistic choice (in terms of the music) had arranged an aesthetic hierarchy around itself. At the end of the day, though, the hierarchy was artificial if the texts of the music were the same. The theological flaw in contemporary worship was not the presence of guitars, distortion, or even bad melodies. The theological flaw was in the lyrics. Musical preferences are culturally formed and amoral (not immoral).

EXPLORE PART ONE OF THIS SERIES: “A THEOLOGY OF CREATIVITY”