Belief Enriches Art - The Guardian 27 August 2010

Belief enriches art
We need to get beyond the cultural cringe of modern Christianity to understand great art
• Maggi Dawn guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 August 2010 11.44 BST

The question: What is the point of Christian arts?
I'm inclined to think that dividing works of art up into sacred and secular is a somewhat arbitrary exercise. Of course we commonly use a kind of shorthand to describe work that deals with certain subject matter as "religious art". But beyond that, what might make a work "religious" exactly?
If it depended upon the artist being devout, a great deal of religious art would no longer qualify, while many secular scenes would – Caravaggio's paintings of biblical scenes, for instance, would be out, while Van Gogh's Starry Night would be in. But the meaning of a work is in any case as much dependent upon the interpretative frame given to it by the listener, the reader or the viewer. A work might be "sacred" simply because it is being viewed through the eyes of faith.
I'm not sure, then, that it's a simple matter to say what makes a work religious, but what I am sure of is that ignoring the religious content in works of art does diminish their sense. That's not to say you have to buy into the belief system, but without a working knowledge of Christianity, much of the art, music and literature in this corner of the world remains a closed book to the viewer.
Early last year in a Guardian interview Andrew Motion, then poet laureate, lamented the increasing level of biblical illiteracy he found among his students. Reading literature, he said, "…requires you to know things about the Fall, who some of the people in the Bible are, ideas of sinfulness and virtue. It's also essential for Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, and needs to be there in the background of the modernist period." He called for teaching of the Bible to be included in general education, not for religious reasons, but because "…it's an essential piece of cultural luggage."
I couldn't agree more. Without knowing Genesis you miss many of the undercurrents to Chaucer, Milton and Dante, say nothing of modern writers like Steinbeck and T S Eliot; and without the gospels a good slice of Shakespeare is torn from its roots. "Measure for measure" makes us think of Shakespeare; his audience would have thought of Jesus.
Last year I went to two large exhibitions of Van Gogh's paintings, each of which included several of Van Gogh's paintings of "the Sower" – a subject he returned to a number of times. The galleries had provided many good notes, showing the influence of other painters he had followed, how he had developed the theme over time, and how his use of colour changed between the paintings. Yet nowhere was there any comment on the fact that, as can be seen from Van Gogh's letters, an important inspiration was the parable of the sower, which he spent much time contemplating, and regarded as a metaphor for his own work.
Van Gogh's work is evidence of the fact that good art goes beyond merely illustrating or re-telling an old story; it creates a dialogue with its sources, taking an old established idea and giving it a new twist. I recently studied various poems, paintings and sculptures of the annunciation, a story originally told in Luke's gospel. Many medieval depictions of the annunciation show Mary's meek submission to the will of God, but more recent works subtly shift her role so that she is seen as a woman empowered to choose her own destiny. Both Noel Rowe's Magnificat and Edwin Muir's Annunciation suggest that God doesn't hold (or hold on to) all the cards but takes the highly risky and self-effacing strategy of placing the destiny of the world into the hands of an unknown peasant girl. This is the glory of art – to overturn the well-worn tracks of unchallenged ideas and make us see the world through new eyes.
There is a "cultural cringe" about Christianity at present; in a post-Christian age many people want to distance themselves from a religion they no longer wish to be associated with. The place of religion in public life needs to continue to be negotiated, but it would be a mistake, in my view, to let such discussion extend to cutting ourselves adrift from layer upon layer of understanding of our cultural heritage.

The End -

Shortly after immigrating, a trader from Warsaw was given a field in the Yehuda Clan district, as a loan and for safekeeping. He planted an apple orchard and came, in thirty years of apple growing, to appreciate pastoral life so much that he said he'd developed a sense of belonging to the land which actually meant a sense that the land belonged to him. This farmer then sold what he had come to call his field to a developer because, as he put it, "In the end, all must bend before greed."

.. from "Picnic Grounds a novel in fragments" by Oz Shelach ISBN 0-87286-419-7

Salvation

"Salvation is not "going to heaven when we die", but 'BEING RAISED TO NEW LIFE IN GOD'S NEW HEAVEN AND NEW EARTH'

This is found in Bishop Tom Wright's book SURPRISED BY HOPE - p210 in the chapter entitled Rethinking Salvation: Heaven and Earth and the Kingdom of God.

The implications of this are more than profound, giving a total new perspective on NOW and the FUTURE. Christians are to be living signs of the new in the here and now. Jacques Ellul declares this in his seminal book "The Presence of the Kingdom"

I have included this post in the JOURNEYS LESS TRAVELLED, section because most Western Christians believe and operate on the going to heaven when we die agenda.