A Stroll Down Amnesia Lane

One week from now I'll have my Oral Comprehensive Exam (a.k.a. OCE, a.k.a. Exit Interview) at Briercrest. As the name implies, the OCE is an oral exam where I have the chance to give a comprehensive "synthesis of the materials I have studied, and demonstrate my ability to integrate this into my on going ministry." This is the last step of a hundred mile journey for me.

To prepare for this exam, I've been reviewing old assignments, papers and projects that I've done over the last five years. There's some stuff I cringe to read, some stuff I'm surprised to read, and some stuff, try as I might, I have a hard time convincing myself I ever wrote. In the interest of having some company on this little stroll down amnesia lane (to quote Dead Poets Society), over the next few days, I'll be posting short excerpts and quotes that stand out to me as significant from this five-year scrapbook of reading and writing about ministry.

The first comes from a paper I wrote early in my program, in which I examined the role of the arts in the community of faith. It was a really significant study for my own heart and sense of calling as a Christian artist:

A common feeling among many evangelical artists [is that] to be acceptable within their faith tradition, their artistic calling will have to be rejected, subdued, or at best reduced to a kind of stale utilitarianism. However, to attribute these feelings to a lack of a “good theology of art making” [in the church] is to ignore or deny the significant work done by artists and theologians to develop just that. The estrangement experienced by Christians seeking also to be artists is perhaps more related to a general misunderstanding of the artistic vocation itself than it is to a lack of a useful theological aesthetic. … A way forward might be found in a practical re-visioning of the role and function of the artist, one that clearly embeds him within the Christian community and informs both his artistic endeavors and the community’s response to it.

This means addressing the fact that the modern conception of “the arts”—that they exist primarily as modes of self-expression for the artist, or that they exist for the sake of their own, self-referential aesthetic contemplation—is neither biblical nor theologically grounded. Instead, a theological conception of art must be primarily ecclesiocentric, understanding it as deriving its aesthetic meaning in direct relation to the communal experience of fellowship, worship and sacrament, legitimating the artist’s vocation in the context of the community of God's people. This is to recognize that the idea of the artist as distinct from artisan—our modern stereotype of the artist as an isolated voice in culture who uses his medium philosophically to "say something"—is really a conception of art spawned in the Renaissance, nursed through the Counter-Reformation and come of age with Romanticism, but often estranged from an historically Christian or biblical view of the arts. On such a foundation we have erected an institutional edifice some centuries old, in which art is dissociated from the practical life of people in community, cloistered instead in the shrines of galleries where it is exhibited for the sake of its own contemplation, expected primarily to evoke a subjective visceral or conceptual response, and vaguely disdained if it too closely resembles craft, or ornament, or folk-art. The effort to articulate an ecclesiocentric aesthetic is in fact an effort to return to a more integrated model whereby the arts become less the means of esoteric expression for the individual, and find their meaning instead in the symbolism, craft, ornament and even folk-traditions whereby the community expresses its experience of fellowship and worship.

Well, it sounded good at the time.