Matter Matters | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.
I love how this article points to one of the great paradoxes of Christianity, that we are both physical and spritual. Too many times in my life I have heard the “spiritual” aspect overemphasized:
This is no news flash: We live in a body-obsessed culture. Materialism—the conviction that only matter can be proven to exist and that belief in transcendence is at best a fond hope, and at worst a dangerous delusion—is the spirit of our age. Ironically, it leaves us with no spirit at all, just our bodies and their appetites, unbridled and insatiable. No wonder we approach the fridge—and each other—with a predatory eye. We’re just trying to survive.
I believe that the only cure is to embrace nonmaterial reality as an integral part of the universe and ourselves. The conviction that we cannot be reduced to bodies is foundational to my worldview.
with little mention of the importance of the physical:
I suspect that my longstanding protest against materialism has made me susceptible to another time-honored heresy: Gnosticism, the belief that matter is inherently evil. Gnostics wondered how a perfect God could be defiled in imperfect human form. Gnosticism had to be struck down repeatedly in order to reach an orthodox understanding of the Incarnation: Jesus was fully God and fully human. The Word became flesh (John 1:14).
The Incarnation shows us that matter is not all there is. But it also shows us that matter matters. Jesus came a long way to take on our molecular structure. He pointed to other kinds of existence, telling his disciples, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about” (John 4:32). But he also fully inhabited our bodily reality, so much so that many of his miracles involved food, drink, physical healing, and even resurrection. One of his final earthly acts was to cook fish on the beach for his friends.
It’s not easy to reconcile these two, but I think it is vital. There are real serious implications here for the visual/plastic arts, and how the artist could be seen as an integral part of the Christian community. Our physical reality effects our spiritual well being, and art/design/architecture are fields in which study that relationship. I think the Protestant community (I know, huge sweeping generalization) is willing to affirm this fact in some instances–we are happy to call on the architect to design our worship spaces–but not in others–we tend to be less enthusiastic about how the artist/ designer can affect our daily lives (i.e. we are not serious about having art in our homes), or how the artist/designer might be valuable in missions. It’s interesting to me how we seem to talk about missions as either material (need for clothing, food…etc) or spiritual (need to spread the gospel) but we rarely consider visual art, a discipline which attempts to bridge the material and physical, as important.
Filed under: Art Stuff
Two thumbs up for this post.
I realized on my own, introvert that I used to be, the seeming contradiction between spirituality and the incarnation (though I wouldn’t have used the word incarnation at the time) in high school as I struggled to decide on a major. Architecture was a very worldly pursuit it seemed. Maybe I should just work in youth ministry or at a Bible camp.
And even though we’re not shy to hire an architect to design our Christian places of assembly, we don’t do those spaces justice (either the architects or the building committees) when we create cheap, ugly, unenduring buildings that look like the mutant child of a warehouse and an office building.
Thanks, pcN, for your input- and congrats on your recent move. As a young Christian I also struggled with the idea that art was a “worldly” pursuit. I think it’s natural for youth group biblical teachings overemphasize the spiritual at the expense of the material, as there is so much fear that the material is dominating young adult life (I’m not saying these fears are unjustified, mind you).
And I totally agree about the architecture. It is certainly possible to have a vibrant, spiritual community in any structure, but that doesn’t mean that our worship space is unimportant, or should be “cheap.” Our little church in Wheaton, AllSouls, is in a little, unispiring “Baptist box,” (all we can afford in the crazy real estate market here) but our community, under our pastor’s leadership, has done a lot to transform that space, by carefully designing the space to integrate with worship, and through art (we have a 4′ wide crown of thorns that hovers over the altar, stations of the cross, and a contemporary painting by my friend Joel Sheesley in the narthex).
Saw Joel’s work at JBU last year and liked it. Wish the church we were at down there had such a vision though. They have an artistic vision, just that it’s strapped in by conservatism, so to speak.