You make a great case for keeping both word and icon. I'm all for it, while recognizing that one or the other may tug more at the heart at any given time. That's fine too. I'd love to see you write a piece about inherited words versus personally generated words, and how that plays across American or just post enlightenment religion.
Like a good Anglican, I am a great fan of inherited words! :) Not that I'm against the spontaneous personal prayer, but that's a classic magisterial vs. evangelical "cut" I think.
Thank you for your thoughts and perspective. I was Southern Baptist for most of my "saved" life. But something was missing. I thought it was what I called "High Church" (thinking the quiet reverence in the sanctuary & reverent ceremony of the Catholic worship service). In my early 60s and as a recent widower, eHarmony happened. This led me to her (more formal) PCA church. WOW! Turns out I actually longed for more depth; depth in the WORD (doctrine & theology versus "Bible prescription" lessons in SS). Our PCA pastor's wedding gift was a copy of "The Valley of Vision" (Puritan devotions & prayers). After 15 years, we still read one of these in our morning devotions together; none seems "old," even when we've read it for the umpteenth time. They had a special gift with words. I carry some of their phrases in my mind, such as "Thy rod perfectly fitted to my back."
Yes, Presbyterians do have a more reverent order of worship, which I appreciate! These are the churches I'm joining while I wait for an Anglican option to make itself available in my area.
When the God we're trying to know is silent and invisible -- just as with anything else that is silent and invisible -- humans are going to be divided as to how we're going to define it. We're either going to rely on art or we're going to rely on word.
I have a friend who wept upon seeing Guernica in person. The arts so often communicate what words cannot. Though I've spent my life immersed in the arts, I don't seem to have the gene to respond often to abstract expressionism and its ilk.
Believe me, I wish I could "get" it and other such forms of artistic communication that evade me no matter how I try to understand them. Especially when the cool kids understand them and I do not. (that's when I comfort myself in the quiet assurance that the cool kids don't "get it" either. They just pretend to to stay in the club ... even with the emperor standing right if front of them, nekkid as a jaybird).
I can educate myself to appreciate the arts that I don't "get" but that's not the same thing as "getting" them. Nevertheless, I could tell you stories of folks who come away from viewing the seeming ineffable sharing essentially the identical responses. They do "get it". Art may not be very precise communication, but it's sometimes more effective. And just as often more precise than you'd first imagine.
Words aren't always the best conveyance.
I have a good friend who taught at Notre Dame for thirty years in their archeology department. He told me that the anthropology dept was using a book the theme of which was that the arts preceded the written word as a communicator -- not exactly as you might think -- as pictogram, but more generally as expression. As the written word became more common, art receded. It wasn't as necessary. But art still remains a communicator in ways that words cannot.
I've had to re-think human communication in big ways several times.
Still, anyone who thinks Catholicism and "High Church" has cornered the market on manipulating human emotion, or is even USING art hasn't heard the Bill Gaither Quartet sing "Oh Love That Will Not Let Me Go".
So now we live in a world where competing religious fads exist as spinning spectres on opposing horizons. And we internet denizens stand mesmerized between, dazzled by our choices.
Toward that end, I currently find myself torn between:
On the one hand watching the new iteration of Whitfield's "excitements" as currently recycled winsomely by the likes of Dreher and Kingsnorth (quite ironically. Because, while espousing what would appear to be stodgy liturgical order in their recent conversions to the Orthodox Church, they are nevertheless obsessed with "enchantments"...their writings rife with magic-speak).
Meanwhile, on the other hand, I observe the older, small "o" orthodoxy of relative certainty in the revelation as defended by Shane Rosenthal at the Humble Skeptic.
It's one of the most confusing, most vexing puzzles about this set-up.
I think I was in my twenties when I first hit on the notion that the arts were our most effective, most primal means of defining our invisible God. Because God won't show himself, we set our artists to the task of showing him to us. We want to see him. I'm sure we think it would help us believe in him if we could. It offers us the (false?) hope of a doubt-free existence.
I believe in the depravity of man -- but as I've aged that has taken on a nuanced spin. I once heard an interview with Marilynne Robinson. She said that she had considered herself a Calvinist, but in a moment of self-reflection, allowed as how she'd never read the Institutes. So she set about reading them in the original language. And there she noticed what she said was this nuance about "depravity" -- that it hinted "incapable" far more than "immoral" (or whatever else we might suppose "depravity" might mean).
That was added to my already arrived at conclusion: Maybe we are defined conditionally as depraved, but I believe what we really are is simply ignorant. We're ignorant and we need to survive. We're ignorant and we need to survive this world...and onto the next....and we don't know how.
And so we look to God and he has graciously revealed himself. Somewhat. Enough to redeem us. Enough to buy back our souls. But here we remain. Still largely ignorant. And still wanting to see God.
And face it: We -- most of us, if my read is right -- just don't want the hard work of scholarship. There's an incredible amount about God that is knowable in the revelation -- but it's hard work to decipher.
So, we return to the artists for a quick fix.
And (again), face it: The church decided in this moment -- this decision to let scholarship take a back seat and move the artists to the fore -- that we were heretofore going to present the church as an alternative to the world of altered states. We set the artists to the task of competing with the world of sex, drugs, thrills. Dopamine.
And by "artists", I'm including not just the obvious -- the music, the architecture, the imagery -- but the entertaining and educational pastors that have grown the megachurch phenomenon of my lifetime.
Well, the church may get you high, but as Ogden Nash observed: Liquor is Quicker. The church isn't going to win the contest of altered states.
But I think this is right -- almost every church I've ever been part of is still, in some manner, using the arts to present our invisible God to us. And when we go to a different church and their artists present a stranger, we cannot connect.
For fifty years my sister-in-law was a pastor's wife in a protestant church of the holiness tradition. About ten years after her husband retired and died, the church she helped him build up decided to "update". They took out the pews and the organ, the altar, the kneeling bench, they leveled the floor brought in portable seating. They put the obligatory coffee bar in the lobby.
God doesn't live there anymore. That's how she feels.
I wouldn't go hurtfully there and point out to her the obvious -- that God wasn't in her trappings any more than he is in the current set-up.
Actually -- I do agree with her to a certain degree. I do think many churches have very sound reasons for the art they use to represent God. And I do think that the thoughts behind the earlier iterations do reflect what God wants from a church -- especially in worship. But I will grant that the latitude is so wide that it might appear meaningless. In fact, I'm one who believes that denominationISM is a gift from God.
But I would just say that whatever art we are inviting in -- be it architecture, decoration, music, rhetoric....any art -- it should be soundly grounded in revelation. That would be putting the horse before the cart. Art springing from theology rather than theology springing from art.
I would say who rather than what: My wife's Grandma Smith.
I don't think I can say it was one thing, in one particular way or another. More "word" I suppose, because the things I knew, or thought I knew, came mostly by hearing or reading, but I was also shaped by experience and environment.
What Grandma Smith did was simply ask me a question, a question that I thought I knew the answer to, and simultaneously couldn't honestly answer.
"Are you a Christian?"
I wrestled with it, or it with me, for days. Days of thinking, reflecting, and Bible reading.
Then I believed.
I would say I encountered The Word, in the many ways He sent it to me, and in the Grandma who stood in my path.
I think there's an ultra-low church ethos that says that the aesthetics don't matter at all rather than the aesthetics should not trump the substance where you can only have one. The fact that a concentration camp barracks (Corrie & Betsie ten Boom teaching from their smuggled Bible) can be a place where the Gospel is heard clearly doesn't mean it's the ideal place. A truly generic office space may be all that a church can afford or use, but that doesn't mean that it's ideal.
Re: the 2nd Commandment, I'm a hardline absolutist regarding the Godhead and depictions, including for educational purposes, but that constraint means everything else that's part of the created order CAN be useful or aesthetically beautiful, and those can be a variety of styles. Natural light is hugely valuable, color is nice - or conversely elegantly done white like in colonial Anglican chapels, architectural and furnishing richness provides depth, and so on.
Some of this is budgetary to be sure and might be worse over the coming years with declining craft skills, but this is my classic example of beautifully Protestant architecture: https://ipcsav.org/. On the other hand, if a Monastery in Idaho(?) can use 3D CAD software to come up with a modern cathedral, I think we can and should do better than HGTV, the local Mariott Conference Center, or a movie theater for church architecture.
I also appreciated the discussion about the weaknesses of modern Protestant or evangelical storytelling. There is indeed dangerously little "Show, Not Tell," and I'd say it borders on being unfathomable. Pilgrim's Progress is almost painfully point to point allegorical at times, but no one could say it lacks vivid imagery that captures the imagination. There's definitely something lacking in our modern times both with words and with images.
Actually the edition from the 20s is 1928. That's the one I grew up with, but the 1662 one is very similar. I'd have to look up what their differences are but to me they're more or less interchangeable. Anything after 1928 is inferior.
You make a great case for keeping both word and icon. I'm all for it, while recognizing that one or the other may tug more at the heart at any given time. That's fine too. I'd love to see you write a piece about inherited words versus personally generated words, and how that plays across American or just post enlightenment religion.
Like a good Anglican, I am a great fan of inherited words! :) Not that I'm against the spontaneous personal prayer, but that's a classic magisterial vs. evangelical "cut" I think.
Thank you for your thoughts and perspective. I was Southern Baptist for most of my "saved" life. But something was missing. I thought it was what I called "High Church" (thinking the quiet reverence in the sanctuary & reverent ceremony of the Catholic worship service). In my early 60s and as a recent widower, eHarmony happened. This led me to her (more formal) PCA church. WOW! Turns out I actually longed for more depth; depth in the WORD (doctrine & theology versus "Bible prescription" lessons in SS). Our PCA pastor's wedding gift was a copy of "The Valley of Vision" (Puritan devotions & prayers). After 15 years, we still read one of these in our morning devotions together; none seems "old," even when we've read it for the umpteenth time. They had a special gift with words. I carry some of their phrases in my mind, such as "Thy rod perfectly fitted to my back."
Yes, Presbyterians do have a more reverent order of worship, which I appreciate! These are the churches I'm joining while I wait for an Anglican option to make itself available in my area.
PCA & OPC are good. Not PC/USA.
When the God we're trying to know is silent and invisible -- just as with anything else that is silent and invisible -- humans are going to be divided as to how we're going to define it. We're either going to rely on art or we're going to rely on word.
I have a friend who wept upon seeing Guernica in person. The arts so often communicate what words cannot. Though I've spent my life immersed in the arts, I don't seem to have the gene to respond often to abstract expressionism and its ilk.
Believe me, I wish I could "get" it and other such forms of artistic communication that evade me no matter how I try to understand them. Especially when the cool kids understand them and I do not. (that's when I comfort myself in the quiet assurance that the cool kids don't "get it" either. They just pretend to to stay in the club ... even with the emperor standing right if front of them, nekkid as a jaybird).
I can educate myself to appreciate the arts that I don't "get" but that's not the same thing as "getting" them. Nevertheless, I could tell you stories of folks who come away from viewing the seeming ineffable sharing essentially the identical responses. They do "get it". Art may not be very precise communication, but it's sometimes more effective. And just as often more precise than you'd first imagine.
Words aren't always the best conveyance.
I have a good friend who taught at Notre Dame for thirty years in their archeology department. He told me that the anthropology dept was using a book the theme of which was that the arts preceded the written word as a communicator -- not exactly as you might think -- as pictogram, but more generally as expression. As the written word became more common, art receded. It wasn't as necessary. But art still remains a communicator in ways that words cannot.
I've had to re-think human communication in big ways several times.
Still, anyone who thinks Catholicism and "High Church" has cornered the market on manipulating human emotion, or is even USING art hasn't heard the Bill Gaither Quartet sing "Oh Love That Will Not Let Me Go".
So now we live in a world where competing religious fads exist as spinning spectres on opposing horizons. And we internet denizens stand mesmerized between, dazzled by our choices.
Toward that end, I currently find myself torn between:
On the one hand watching the new iteration of Whitfield's "excitements" as currently recycled winsomely by the likes of Dreher and Kingsnorth (quite ironically. Because, while espousing what would appear to be stodgy liturgical order in their recent conversions to the Orthodox Church, they are nevertheless obsessed with "enchantments"...their writings rife with magic-speak).
Meanwhile, on the other hand, I observe the older, small "o" orthodoxy of relative certainty in the revelation as defended by Shane Rosenthal at the Humble Skeptic.
It's one of the most confusing, most vexing puzzles about this set-up.
I think I was in my twenties when I first hit on the notion that the arts were our most effective, most primal means of defining our invisible God. Because God won't show himself, we set our artists to the task of showing him to us. We want to see him. I'm sure we think it would help us believe in him if we could. It offers us the (false?) hope of a doubt-free existence.
I believe in the depravity of man -- but as I've aged that has taken on a nuanced spin. I once heard an interview with Marilynne Robinson. She said that she had considered herself a Calvinist, but in a moment of self-reflection, allowed as how she'd never read the Institutes. So she set about reading them in the original language. And there she noticed what she said was this nuance about "depravity" -- that it hinted "incapable" far more than "immoral" (or whatever else we might suppose "depravity" might mean).
That was added to my already arrived at conclusion: Maybe we are defined conditionally as depraved, but I believe what we really are is simply ignorant. We're ignorant and we need to survive. We're ignorant and we need to survive this world...and onto the next....and we don't know how.
And so we look to God and he has graciously revealed himself. Somewhat. Enough to redeem us. Enough to buy back our souls. But here we remain. Still largely ignorant. And still wanting to see God.
And face it: We -- most of us, if my read is right -- just don't want the hard work of scholarship. There's an incredible amount about God that is knowable in the revelation -- but it's hard work to decipher.
So, we return to the artists for a quick fix.
And (again), face it: The church decided in this moment -- this decision to let scholarship take a back seat and move the artists to the fore -- that we were heretofore going to present the church as an alternative to the world of altered states. We set the artists to the task of competing with the world of sex, drugs, thrills. Dopamine.
And by "artists", I'm including not just the obvious -- the music, the architecture, the imagery -- but the entertaining and educational pastors that have grown the megachurch phenomenon of my lifetime.
Well, the church may get you high, but as Ogden Nash observed: Liquor is Quicker. The church isn't going to win the contest of altered states.
But I think this is right -- almost every church I've ever been part of is still, in some manner, using the arts to present our invisible God to us. And when we go to a different church and their artists present a stranger, we cannot connect.
For fifty years my sister-in-law was a pastor's wife in a protestant church of the holiness tradition. About ten years after her husband retired and died, the church she helped him build up decided to "update". They took out the pews and the organ, the altar, the kneeling bench, they leveled the floor brought in portable seating. They put the obligatory coffee bar in the lobby.
God doesn't live there anymore. That's how she feels.
I wouldn't go hurtfully there and point out to her the obvious -- that God wasn't in her trappings any more than he is in the current set-up.
Actually -- I do agree with her to a certain degree. I do think many churches have very sound reasons for the art they use to represent God. And I do think that the thoughts behind the earlier iterations do reflect what God wants from a church -- especially in worship. But I will grant that the latitude is so wide that it might appear meaningless. In fact, I'm one who believes that denominationISM is a gift from God.
But I would just say that whatever art we are inviting in -- be it architecture, decoration, music, rhetoric....any art -- it should be soundly grounded in revelation. That would be putting the horse before the cart. Art springing from theology rather than theology springing from art.
I'm so out of it I don't know what "drip" means in this context. Is it like "swag?"
Yeah that's probably an acceptable synonym. :D I think with a particular emphasis on fancier clothing.
Not dismissing any of these things, but I am so grateful that I came to faith outside the church, gives me a different perspective.
But you were responded to some manifestation of it or other right? What played a role in your conversion?
I would say who rather than what: My wife's Grandma Smith.
I don't think I can say it was one thing, in one particular way or another. More "word" I suppose, because the things I knew, or thought I knew, came mostly by hearing or reading, but I was also shaped by experience and environment.
What Grandma Smith did was simply ask me a question, a question that I thought I knew the answer to, and simultaneously couldn't honestly answer.
"Are you a Christian?"
I wrestled with it, or it with me, for days. Days of thinking, reflecting, and Bible reading.
Then I believed.
I would say I encountered The Word, in the many ways He sent it to me, and in the Grandma who stood in my path.
We do not deserve our Grandma Smiths!
I think there's an ultra-low church ethos that says that the aesthetics don't matter at all rather than the aesthetics should not trump the substance where you can only have one. The fact that a concentration camp barracks (Corrie & Betsie ten Boom teaching from their smuggled Bible) can be a place where the Gospel is heard clearly doesn't mean it's the ideal place. A truly generic office space may be all that a church can afford or use, but that doesn't mean that it's ideal.
Re: the 2nd Commandment, I'm a hardline absolutist regarding the Godhead and depictions, including for educational purposes, but that constraint means everything else that's part of the created order CAN be useful or aesthetically beautiful, and those can be a variety of styles. Natural light is hugely valuable, color is nice - or conversely elegantly done white like in colonial Anglican chapels, architectural and furnishing richness provides depth, and so on.
Some of this is budgetary to be sure and might be worse over the coming years with declining craft skills, but this is my classic example of beautifully Protestant architecture: https://ipcsav.org/. On the other hand, if a Monastery in Idaho(?) can use 3D CAD software to come up with a modern cathedral, I think we can and should do better than HGTV, the local Mariott Conference Center, or a movie theater for church architecture.
I also appreciated the discussion about the weaknesses of modern Protestant or evangelical storytelling. There is indeed dangerously little "Show, Not Tell," and I'd say it borders on being unfathomable. Pilgrim's Progress is almost painfully point to point allegorical at times, but no one could say it lacks vivid imagery that captures the imagination. There's definitely something lacking in our modern times both with words and with images.
Bethel, in your opinion what is the best edition for the book of common prayer? Is it 1922?
Actually the edition from the 20s is 1928. That's the one I grew up with, but the 1662 one is very similar. I'd have to look up what their differences are but to me they're more or less interchangeable. Anything after 1928 is inferior.