The Seven Deadly Sins of Christian Contemporary Music
We live in a world of great urgency and need, of overwhelming concern and brokenness. It is a world that desperately needs to see and know mercy and justice. Almost every day, we at Evangelicals for Social Action hear story after story that only serve to illustrate our world's inexhaustible need. Stories of father's being forced at gunpoint to rape their daughters in Bosnia-Herzegovinia, stories of the immense suffering in Rwanda. Stories of the political and social turmoil in countries like Haiti. Stories of glaring and atrocious poverty and the problem of homelessness in our cities, of the rising toll of the abortion crisis, and the social collapse that fuels it, the rising costs and falling standards in health care and education. We see the continuing moral and spiritual collapse of our nation and, in many ways, feel powerless to address it.
We know very little except that it is a world that needs Jesus. That much is obvious. And in context of such desperate need, the reader of this volume is more than a little justified in wondering why in God's great name we're wasting so much paper discussing the arts. When the world is going to hell in a handbasket, do Christians, and indeed, does the world, need Rock and Roll?
I'll be honest with you. There was a time when I thought so, but I'm not so sure anymore. As I grew up through the 60's I watched two seemingly inseparable entities blossom to maturity side-by-side. On one hand, my child's eyes saw a growing awareness that things were not well with my world. Every day, I saw signs of it, the biggest of which were the kids, just a few years older than I, in the streets. Angry and frustrated, they marched, yelled, swore, ranted and raged, and mostly, they sang. While a whole generation seemingly lost faith in the world, they found faith and hope in their music. Their loud, angry, rebellious, intemperate rock and roll was at once a rallying cry and the very thing around which they rallied, at once giving them voice when they had no other, and shaping that voice.
And like most kids my age, I grew up believing in the power of Rock and Roll. Despite all the anti-rock preaching I heard in my Pentecostal-Fundamentalist religious context (or perhaps because of it), by the time I was a teenager I had no doubt that music had the power to influence and change lives, and that a song could free the mind from old things, plant new ideas, soften or break the heart. I believed, because I experienced. For me, and for thousands of other kids like me, nothing came close — except maybe the swaying rhythm of the sweaty, tie-loosening evangelist at summer camp—to the spiritual, Godly, enabling power, and the fear-inducing, gut-wrenching, heart-pounding, crotch-grabbing power of rock and roll.
We knew music could change the world, because it was changing us. And for those of us who were Christians, we knew that it could change the world for Jesus too. It was inevitable that the Jesus Movement gave us "Jesus Music"-- Contemporary Christian Music--the radical revival's attempt to co-opt the powerful music of the counter-culture. Larry Norman, Randy Matthews, Love Song, Mustard Seed Faith, Barry McGuire, and others began to define a whole new genre, a rock and roll that recaptured the spiritual roots the music had lost. And in the heady days of the Jesus movement, and those that followed, many of us believed that this would be a key tool to bring our generation to Christ.
But something happened along the way. Popular music in our secular culture stopped being the compelling force for change that it had become. While always profitable for the gangsters of corporate America, rock had been terrifying to them, none-the-less. Ed Sullivan insisted that lyrics be altered, pelvises be avoided, and songs be short. Despite the demand for songs of protest, radio managed to censor and ban the best of them, and for every anti-establishment song or group that forced its way into the popular consciousness, the establishment invented something - say a group like the Monkees - or capitalized on something - like a hair style or a dance - to deflect focus to the trivial. While I would not arguing that the trivial didn't exist innately in Rock music - it was after all a youth movement - I do believe that the brokers of its distribution handled it delicately and fearfully, aware of its explosive and disruptive power, and tried desperately to turn it into something less than threatening to the establishment.
And they succeeded. Playing on the counter-culture's self-absorbtion and natural hedonism, (and its collective revolutionary exhaustion) corporate America not only helped mute pop music's subversive voice, they became an essential part of its voice. The danger associated with rock gave way to its immense profitability. It's rebel ends gave way to simple rebel posturing and bad hair, sex (to find free love) gave way to disco and one-night stands, drugs (as a way to enlightenment) gave way to cocaine to keep you intense, and (revolutionary) rock and roll gave way to corporate sponsorship of tours. All the form, all the fashion, and very little of the substance. Rock and roll, in just a few short years, went from a force that terrified our parents, preachers and politicians, giving voice to our protests, threatening and mocking and exposing our false values and tearing down our institutions, to being the voice of the establishment, reinforcing our values, false and otherwise, and resisting institutional change. In short, as the Boomers grew up, sold-out and grew established, their music did too.
Two examples from recent pop history will suffice. Anyone who watched, in October of 1992, the 30th Anniversary Tribute to Bob Dylan, (arguably the most important protest singer-songwriter of the 60's and perhaps this Century) could not avoid the painful irony of seeing Sinead O'Connor, regardless of how naive or misguided she might have been, being booed off the stage by a crowd angry with her now notorious ripping of the Pope's photo on Saturday Night Live. It was, after all, an act of protest! That same fall, one of Bill Clinton's key election strategies had been the courting of the MTV generation, through appearances on the Video network and Arsenio Hall. While 25 years earlier association with the rebellious rock generation would have been political suicide (remember Eugene McCarthy?), in 1992 it was essential to victory, a fact which is verified by Clinton's choice of which Ball to attend first on inauguration night - The MTV Ball.
With secular pop music rarely dangerous, Contemporary Christian Music thought itself ready to make a difference. But as it evolved against the backdrop of conservative evangelicalism, CCM was forced to defend its very existence, and its initial evangelical impulses--impulses rooted as much in the 60's counter-culture that the Jesus movement left as in the new religion they embraced--were often eclipsed by its struggle to survive. As Contemporary Christian music began to grow, we were bombarded with assaults from pastors and lecturers who were intent on showing CCM's evil, "pagan" (read: "jungle") roots. [The debate against Contemporary Christian music within the evangelical church, if nothing else, serves to illustrate just how much vestigial racism remained in its underbelly, with most of the arguments against "Christian rock" centering on the question of the "beat" and its alleged demonic and pagan roots. We were told that rock was "race music," and its syncopation was the frontdoor to demonic possession and the backdoor to sexual promiscuity, sure to drive men and women into an orgiastic frenzy. Without rock and roll, we were assured, the "chaos" of the 60's would never have occurred, chaos that included, for most of the anti-rock preachers I heard and read, disruptive elements like the civil rights movement.]
Mired in these debates, the focus of Contemporary Christian music became its own legitimacy. CCM radio became a haven of inoffensive production, (with guitars and drums toned down as if to prove to the barons of evangelicalism that it wasn't really rock and roll), with lyrics designed explicitly to be so theologically and socially safe that the country's youth pastors could only hum along in bland approval. Contemporary Christian music quickly became, instead of an aggressive and relevant evangelistic tool, what can be best described as a soundtrack to the most mediocre of teen curricula, or worse, poorly conceived syncopated up-dates of our hymnody, designed to preserve our fading influence with our own. Even as popular music began to be embraced by the mainstream of the evangelical church, CCM continued its self-absorption (with some obvious and extraordinary exceptions), and became almost solely the realm of the evangelical sub-culture (not counter-) that now supported it, irrelevant to most of those whom it originally hoped to reach.
This is best exemplified by two examples, one historical, the other personal. In the early 80's, several secular recording companies began to take notice of the burgeoning Contemporary Christian music industry, (in 1981 CCM outsold both jazz and classical music) and either purchased or created their own "Christian" labels. Despite their marketing knowhow and industry finesse, and even their lack of ethics, they were never able to really make a dint outside the evangelical world. The wave of "crossover" fever that accompanied this rush was over by '87, and Christian labels began an even more rigorous policing of the "Christian" content of their artist's lyrics. The reality was that by 1985, Contemporary Christian music had become its own world. Meanwhile, in my work as a youth minister and radio producer, I often tried to introduce youth to Contemporary Christian music, especially those from churches outside of evangelicalism. Kids who were not initiated in the language of our sub-culture, and who were not immersed in its us-versus-them dualism almost always found Contemporary Christian music to be at best silly, and at worst, deeply offensive.
With both its sociological and financial moorings in an easily offended religious ghetto, the imagined Contemporary Christian music mission field became, all to quickly, simply the Contemporary Christian music marketplace. And with that, many would argue, it died.
And so, for those of us disillusioned by the impotence of Contemporary Christian music, the question becomes can Contemporary Christian music be rescued--resurrected--from its demise? Can it be the force for conversion, for social change, for the radical calling of the Kingdom that it once envisioned itself to be? Can it be a relevant, engaging, transforming force in our culture?
I believe it can, but only if it faces its sins. It must face the sins that have at once made it a powerful force within the evangelical world and yet have kept it from relevancy, both within and outside of that community, and as art and as mission. It must face its sins, and begin to call the church to do the same. For the reality is that its sins are the very sins of the evangelical culture that nurtured it into its deformed and irrelevant shape. What's wrong with Contemporary Christian music is what's wrong with evangelicals. We have surrendered to Sins of Misplaced Value, Marketplace Sins, and Spiritual Sin.
Sins of Misplaced Value
1. We have Equated Spirituality with Rhetoric.
2. We have Equated Holiness with Separation.
3. We have Embraced Technique over the Spirit.
Sins of the Marketplace
4. We have Spiritualized Commodity
5. We have Commodified Spirituality
6. We have Elevated Artist over Art
(Celebritization)
Sins of the Spirit
7. We have Fled the Cross
1. We have Equated Spirituality with Rhetoric.
2. We have Equated Holiness with Separation.
3. We have Embraced Technique over the Spirit.
Growing up defensively in an atmosphere where its very survival hung on its ability to legitimate itself in the eyes of the church, there is little surprise that Contemporary Christian music became enamored with safety as quickly as it did. While its secular cousin could rail against the establishment quite freely (indeed, this was half of rock and roll's appeal), Christian rock had a more difficult time maintaining an anti-establishment stance. Besides, the criticism leveled at CCM called into question the legitimacy not just of their art, but their salvation as well.
Born out of revival fervor, and desperate for fellowship, (and rightly so), the Jesus Movement quickly adopted the popular theology of the one segment of the american religious establishment that embraced them: contemporary, "new" evangelism. This theology almost entirely dismissed the structural critique of the counter-culture, and in so doing the Jesus Movement accepted an agenda that for the most part hung on a narrow understanding of personal conversion that was replete with the separationist baggage of fundamentalism. Conversion was first a miracle of grace, yes. But it was one that demanded three specific evidences: a rigid and biblistic confessional orthodoxy; an understanding of personal holiness that was external, separatist and easily verified; and evangelicalism's preoccupation with "results," a subtle emphasis on quantification that equated success with growth.
For the burgeoning Contemporary Christian music industry, the legitimizing process began almost immediately. With the embrace of accepted evangelical rhetorical forms, and (for the most part) an abandonment of the social agenda that marked the counter-culture, Contemporary Christian music made itself (somewhat) acceptable to the evangelical world. There were of course, exceptions. Both Larry Norman and Randy Matthews, the founding fathers of CCM, filled their songs with the language of the street (remember "gonorrhea on Valentine's Day") and references to social issues, including homelessness, racism and the war in Viet Nam. Later, artists like Steve Taylor, Rez Band, and Mark Heard peppered their songs with social commentary. But as time progressed, and more and more money was made in Contemporary Christian music, "issues" songs became exceedingly rare. By the mid-Eighties, the thematic narrowing of Contemporary Christian music had become the rule, and those who veered from the accepted path simply were not played on the radio. The price was clear--make a living in Christian music, or sing about issues of conscience, justice, or even love. The business of CCM was not about these things.
This was complicated by the divergent and sometimes contradictory demands placed on Contemporary Christian music by popular evangelicalism. The demands for holiness, understood by most as "separation from the world," seemed to predicate against using "worldly" music, a critique it met in CCM by its constant missionary posturing and its artistic reluctance. "All things to all men that some might be saved," they would quote, despite the fact that the "world" couldn't buy the music--it was sold almost exclusively through Christian bookstores.
This need not have resulted in the malaise that followed, save one thing: each of the demands, through time, were taken to unintended ends. The reality is that Contemporary Christian music began not only demanding theological uniformity from its artists, but also that they address only theological themes. This began to happen in several ways. Contemporary Christian music that strayed outside the realm of the overtly spiritual (whether musically or lyrically) was questioned as "worldly." Artists were discouraged, both directly--by evangelical gatekeepers--and indirectly--through market forces--from writing about anything other than their "relationship with Christ," and musicians were discouraged from technical flare by leaders concerned that they might "indulge the flesh" and divert attention from Christ. (For example, Phil Keaggy's guitar heroics were discouraged by the Christian community in which he lived in the mid-seventies, while DeGarmo and Key's early flirtations with "positive pop" or "message music" were labeled as "compromising" the gospel message.) Fundamentalism's immensely unhealthy and unbiblical distinction between that which is sacred and secular--the kind of platonic dualism that divides everything into camps that has reached its zenith in artists like Carman and writers like Frank Perretti--was absorbed by CCM almost as soon as it became an industry. Only that which spoke directly and prosaically to the "spiritual" concerns of the Christian ghetto supporting it was regarded as "Christian;" that which didn't was suspect. The irony of course, is that it is easy to write theologically correct songs, songs that use buzz words and hooks and enough "us versus them" rhetoric to make Youth Pastors take notice, tell their youth groups, and buy the records. Any deeper arbiter was forgotten. Theological formula became just that: a safe and easy passage to truth. Artists were discouraged from new takes on either their faith or experience of it. Eventually, and for the most part unintentionally, the new industry began to let two things happen. It began to let artists record for it without any real sense of or care for the depth of their faith, and it began to trust in technique and technology, over against the authenticity of the artist's soul.
This was dangerous on several levels. First, it contributed to the further ghettoization of the Christian community. Instead of reaching out, Contemporary Christian music withdrew from the world. Thus we perpetuated a vision of spirituality and discipleship that not only unsatisfactorily answered the questions that the world around us asks, but often ignored the questions altogether, insisting that they are suspect at best, or evil. Second, it limited the realm and growth of spiritual reflection and perpetuated a kind of evangelical neurosis. With only explicitly "spiritual" themes allowed on Christian radio, much of our life was seen as distinct from the spiritual, untouched by grace, despite the Spirit's obvious demands on those "unspiritual" areas. Our very humanity, for many young Christians raised in popular evangelical culture, became to be seen as a hindrance to faith. Third, it stymied critique. Because of the evolution of an evangelical formulaic orthodoxy in Contemporary Christian music, much of its initial reforming content was lost to the church, replaced by a series of "positive" messages that in reality simply affirmed our own "correctness." The artist, instead of being free to reflect and respond as a spiritual being was forced to write and perform as a "thing"--a kind of caricatured, cartoon cut-out of what a Christian is, telling us what we already knew. And those who didn't play that game, were marginalized, vilified, or ignored.
It is plain that the prophets of the Old Testament--the artists, poets, performance artists and songwriters of the Hebrew scriptures--faced those very same tensions. Over and over again, we hear the prophets being pressured by God's people to"...tell us good things. Tell us the right things. Tell us what we want to hear." What is also plain, is that Contemporary Christian music as an industry, faced with these pressures, did just that.
But the call of the artist is neither to tell us what we want to hear, nor is it to tell us it in a form/way we like it, or makes us comfortable. It is simply to tell the truth, and tell it in a way that will force us to hear it.
And that demands new telling. One of the great failures of our demands on Contemporary Christian music, and on the artists themselves, has been our reverence for old symbols. Few of us have to be reminded of how powerless words can become when over or misused. Wonderful, potent metaphors like "born again" have almost completely lost their meaning outside (and at times within) our evangelical sub-culture. One of the artists' tasks is to help us find new metaphors and symbols (or recast the old ones in more potent forms), and thus help give them meaning. Instead of looking for ways to speak powerfully and freshly, we have simply re-said old things safely. And in doing so, we made the content of our art--the Gospel itself, intersecting our lives--of no consequence. We have settled for cliché, the pedestrian, elevated the trivial, and created a pornography of the Spirit. We have done what God refused to do: we have made creation and the Gospel something safe. By refusing to risk new visions and metaphors, by demanding that our art, and the art that we embrace, fit narrow formulae and patterns and comfortable visions, we have demanded an art that, instead of freeing truth, has confined it, and in turn, confined its hearers.
Unfortunately, much of what passes as art in Contemporary Christian music is about imposing meaning on our lives, or worse, is entirely distinct from them. Our concern with a holiness not rooted in relationship and love has led us on a journey to escape our experience, rather than find redemption in it. While this is in part a product of bad eschatology, it is also a precipitator of it. When we understand holiness as purity at the expense of or separation from something--be it either relationship, or creativity or reverence for creation or contact with it--it is inevitable that we will not only ghettoize our community, but our lives as well. Certain areas of our humanity become "off-limits" to our thinking and reflection. What is intended as a pursuit of purity becomes an escape from ourselves, or worse, our desire to show ourselves as better than the world.
So how does art pursue true holiness? Because holiness is about the Truth entering into our experience and transforming it, Christian art--including popular music--must be world-ly, earthly and earthy. It must be about life--all of life--even the parts we don't like. It will not avoid or seek escape from experience, (whether that escape comes in ignoring or denial of parts of our humanity or in preoccupation with an other-worldly theology), but will instead embrace it, love it, and seek its redemption. And while this is in no way meant to excuse the Christian artist from the pursuit of purity, it ought to free us from the notion that there are certain subjects inappropriate for our art. What will distinguish us will not be what we examine, but the love that infuses our vision of it.
There is no better theological foundation for this kind of theology of art than the incarnation of Christ himself. 1 If the Creator would not stay outside of creation, than those of us who would follow our Christ cannot seek to avoid it either, especially as we reflect on the meaning that Christ gives it. Whatever the nature of the purity we seek, it will be a purity in the midst of life.
And that is the call of the Christian, and specifically of the Christian artist. To illustrate, embrace and incarnate our experience, all of it, including our joy, pain, longings, failings, dreams, hopes, sex, spirituality, and seek its redemption. One writer has put it this way:
What I'm suggesting is that art, outside the realm of human suffering, is not art. It's a counterfeit--shallow, oppressive, and senseless. But that doesn't imply that art's value is only as a vehicle. Art is more substantial than that. It's very content or substance is the human dilemma. And no canvas or lyric is finally born. We are constantly in process.... 2And that process demands that art, like true holiness, be an act of love, one that is willing to be soiled by association. And that process of incarnation is what gives art--music--the possibility of reaching beyond itself to the human soul.
There is further mystery yet. In following the incarnation, we follow a way that subverts the preoccupation with technique that our popular culture, and Contemporary Christian music, has obsessed on. The way of Christ is the renunciation of power, while the way of CCM (and most media ministries, and indeed, our entire Christian popular culture) is the manipulation of it. We have been so convinced as a culture that the "bread and circus" approach is what garnishes results that we have created a "pop" Christianity that actually despises simplicity and spontaneity. Listen to popular Christian radio, go to a concert, complete with pyrotechnic wonderment, or watch a modern worship band and tell me I'm wrong. We have learned to use our flair, formulae and flash to get what we want from our audiences. Technology allows us to do that--create a substance-less wonderment and emotion in those we dazzle. Far too often, we manipulate and control our audiences so that no feeling or response is left to chance. What our firm orthodox formulations can't do, our flashpods, key changes, and amplification can.
Several years ago I used to do a seminar on rock music for churches and youth conferences (I was for it). On occassion, I would begin the workshop with a time of worship, usually with a band. We would sing one song--first slowly, then building the tempo to a high level of energy, then pulling the band out for an a capella turn. In the tradition I was working mostly in, this would lead to an extended period of (very) vocal worship. When we had finished, I would point to three members of the audience with whom I had met at random before the seminar began, and ask them to read the paper that I had given them. They would then read what I had told them would happen--an almost verbatim account of the worship just transpired. What the audience believed to be a very spontaneous moment I had, to a large degree, created. What to them felt like a pure moment of communication, was in reality a kind of manipulation.
My point was a simple one--if a brutal one to make. Music (and art in general) can be exceptionally manipulative, and for the artist, the temptation is to rely on formulae, techniques and devices that "produce," rather than to rely on the purity of the art itself. I clearly do not believe that all worship is manipulation (even in the contexts I manipulated). Nor am I a ludditte. I do not believe that technology is necessarily a crutch for the artist--indeed, it is often an intricate component of the best art. But we must be aware of the manipulative dangers of technology, and careful to avoid them as we struggle to create faithfully.
The nature of creation and of art, as we have suggested, is the risk of being without power; it is about surrendering what we offer to the Spirit and to the listener. Christian artists ought to be most free in their expressions, because it is the Spirit that ultimately brings clarity, not their clever formulations. The abandonment of formula, separation and technique ought to be liberating affirmations of the Spirit's work in our world, and through his people. Where we have failed to do so, we have failed to let the Spirit work. But the sins of Contemporary Christian music have not been simply ones of misplaced value. As Contemporary Christian music grew up, it quickly became much more than just music: it became an industry. As it did so, it was tempted, and succumbed to three more sins that had long ago seduced the whole of the evangelical community.
4. We Have Spiritualized Commodity
5. We Have Commodified Spirituality
6. We Have Elevated Artist over Art (Celebritization)
These sins flow out of the uncritical wedding of commerce and faith, and from the evolution of the Christian community into a subculture, embracing the majority of assumptions of our society, rather than a counter-culture, challenging them. In this atmosphere, the Church can, and has, easily become a place where we are normal Americans, except with a quiet time, and we buy different stuff. The stuff we buy is sold to us, often by well meaning sorts, but more often by people who have recognized the potential for profitability in our ghetto. Just as brewers have aimed specific products, say Colt 45, at specific demographics, so to have some entrepreneurs aimed their items at evangelicals. Often, the products not only meet a "felt need" of the community's, they also reinforce it. Thus, much of the music flowing out of Contemporary Christian music not only speaks directly to evangelical prejudice, it reinforces it. Music is packaged not on its own merit, but as an alternative to the "world's." While in light of Ozzy Ozborne's bat biting or Madonna's on stage auto-erotic escapades this doesn't seem like such bad a thing, its effect has been to create an artificially escalated worth for the alternative product, and to perpetuate a fundamentally flawed interpretation of the world (the extreme secular/sacred split). We are told it is good to buy and listen to this thing because it is Christian, and bad to buy or listen to this other thing because it isn't. In this context, bad art is passed off as good art, solely because of its world view and sociological context, while good art is ignored or demonized for the same reason.
Perhaps more insidious, Christian record companies are forced, by their own rhetoric, to pretend that they are more (or less) than what they are--companies, trying to make money--instead guising everything they do with the ruse of "ministry." This is not to suggest that ministry doesn't occur, but it is almost always secondary to the business of running a profitable company. The reality is, with few exceptions, when an artist is no longer profitable, she is dropped from a label, regardless of her ministry value, or spiritual depth. Spirituality, real or otherwise, has become a marketing ploy that is not sustained by the market's pressures. While young Christians are told they should buy a disc because it is by a "godly" artist--a step precariously close to simony--the company is under no compulsion to retain the artist for that reason.
This is true for two ironically related reasons. Christian celebrities, by definition, are held up as super-citizens of the Kingdom, and therefore are often either: a) immune from scrutiny, and therefore allowed to live as both Christians and artists with little or no accountability for their lives or ideas; or b) held to such rigid scrutiny that they are neither allowed to be human or to experiment as artists and Christians. Celebrity is a subtle (albeit prestigious and sometimes lucrative) kind of objectification that allows the church to mimic the world yet still pretend itself distinct.
"Some would say that if Christian music has any appropriate subject, it would be to communicate the concerns that were of primary importance to Jesus.... Would not music that calls itself ‘Christian' take us into the chamber of human travail? Why else would it be called ‘Christian'? If the incarnation has any significance, it seems to be the unarguable truth that the Gospel is tethered to the Human reality." 3
But it is not enough to simply be about reality. Or even to embrace it. Art, especially Christian art, does not simply reproduce reality, but rather interprets it. It provides meaning. It sees life, and tries to make sense of it in a new way, and then gives it back to us to move us, and to be experienced again, through new eyes.
How does it do this?
It touches the heart, the soul, the center of our being. It speaks from great need to great need, and it refuses to be side-tracked from what is at our core, or be seduced by the immediacy of sensationalism or sentiment. It speaks to our mind, challenging and stretching us, speaking to our narrow, confining patterns of interpretation, and demanding they hear, see, and experience life in new ways, trying to make sense, and to find sense, even of and in non-sense. It brings creation, especially humanity, together, creating community, and reminding us of our common experience as humans created in God's image, on God's own Earth. Finally, it calls us to action, to not only understand experience, but experience it, to leap into our world with abandon.
But what about the content of meaning? What should art say about our world, and experience of it? This I believe, leads us to the seventh sin of Contemporary Christian music.
"It is the role of the artist to create new symbols, to show God to people in another way, to help them be aware of the world around them. The purpose of art is to make whole. The purpose of religion and redemption is to make whole." 4
Because of this, the Incarnation did not flee suffering; in fact, it is incomplete without it. And that suffering is pointed, and purposeful: it reveals the very heart and nature of God, and offers that God to world. The ultimate meaning of our existence is found only here, at Calvary, or when Calvary is made real. Here our status as creatures at once desperately in need and desperately loved is made clearly known. Here we learn that in spite of our rebellion and the pain we have caused our Creator, he has neither abandoned us to our choices, nor has he left us. And here alone can the artist find the redemption that God seeks to reveal in our experience. It is here that Hope is found.
Because it is committed to the cross, it is the nature of godly art to risk. For God, the act of creation was a glorious, beautiful, and dangerous thing. It was dangerous because it was free. Yahweh risked being misunderstood, abused, rejected, distorted, all that He might reveal himself, redeem his creation and show his love. For this reason, Christian art will always be a reflection on our experience of that person, that Truth, who has embraced us in the incarnation. Christian art is always about incarnation--En-Flesh-ment.
In this light, Christian art will never be simply about the clever or beautiful arrangement of the right words or images. Art, like the Christian life, cannot be just about right ideas, formula or proposition, to be simply repeated or claimed, affirmed or even understood. Art must arise from and be rooted in what is real, because art is fundamentally an exercise in interpreting our lives and the life around us. It must arise from wonder and hope and dreams of the transcendent, yes, but be always based in experience, flowing from and embracing the immanent. It is about finding meaning--hope--even in the bleakest of our lives.
What does that make the faithful artist, and indeed, the faithful Christian, then, in our world of false hopes and dreams? They are revolutionary. Their very existence challenges what has been, and threatens it with with exposure and with transformation. The genuine artist is absolutely free (not from the rules of craft, but from the artificial restraints of formula or tradition), because they have encountered the great mystery of a Creator God that has never once forsaken His creation, indeed, who has leapt into it incarnately, who has promised to redeem it all, and has promised to redeem it through the gifts of His own people. The genuine artist is free to offer up what they fashion out of the stuff of her life, to both her God and her brothers and sisters, and free to trust God to make it meaningful. And the genuinely Christian artist is one who lives in the light of the Cross, offering not only their art, but their lives, to God as vehicles of mercy, grace, redemption, and meaning.
The task of the artist then is plainly a revolutionary one. One of subversion. To make way for the new humanity--the Kingdom--by supplanting the old and offering glimpses of the new in the stuff they create. It is here, in these frail offerings, that the Spirit dwells and moves and calls and dances and inspires, where the Spirit takes our weakness and makes it strength. When Contemporary Christian music has transcended the status quo of our expectations and actually succeeded in touching, moving, challenging, and inspiring us, it has been when it has, in spite of all the baggage and sins of its context, done just that. And if it is to survive as anything other than a illegitimate and irrelevant child of American religion, it must reclaim its revolutionary, subversive, and incarnational calling.
Endnotes
