Christian Language and its Mutations

Essays in Sociological Understanding

David Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780754607403
• eBook ISBN: 9781351951821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christian Language and its Mutations explores how Christian language alters in various social, cultural, historical and religious contexts. Having delineated the core language of Christianity, David Martin analyses how it mutates in different historical and social contexts, notably: peace and war; the arts - particularly painting and music; the sacred space (the city) and the sacred text (the liturgy); education; and the global situation of Christianity and contemporary secular society - evangelicalism, rational religion, Pentecostalism and Base Communities. Presenting a unique perspective to show how and why Christianity alters according to context, this book will prove insightful and accessible to students, clergy and general readers alike. David Martin is Honorary Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, UK. He is the author of some two dozen books, including many landmark titles in the sociology of religion.

PART I
FUNDAMENTALS

Introduction to Part I

An opening chapter ought to explain itself, but it may still help to indicate a programme.

I am addressing a problem highlighted by the exhibition ‘Seeing Salvation’ which is the effective removal of an acknowledged Christian presence and discourse from the public realm, including education, so that even its explicit opponents barely know what they are talking about, and the degree to which Christians themselves are surprised and moved on the rare occasions they actually encounter it, even if they have regularly attended worship for decades. Christian language, then, is either remote, or too familiar. Hence the capacity of ‘Seeing Salvation’ to move and surprise Christians aided, of course, by a superb presentation and fearless attention to the meaning of the exhibits on the part of the Director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor. He made it clear that art-historical comment would not be divorced from theological meaning in accordance with the unspoken rubric requiring religious faith to be kept segregated under the head of culture. Much of the second half of this chapter is given over to trying to expound a verbal equivalent of the imagery exposed in ‘Seeing Salvation’ (as indeed is the companion volume Christian Language in the Secular City).

However, demand for segregation itself introduces the topic of secularization, not only in contemporary Britain, but in the long durance of European civilization. Here ‘Seeing Salvation’ raises two fundamental problems. One is how far Christianity was a cultural phase, though over a millennium long, undergoing a secularization which decisively superseded it, conspicuously so in the eighteenth century (as discussed by scholars like J.G.A. Pocock) and still very much in evidence. The other is how far Christianity can be translated, either into universal human terms, or into the attenuated theologies of the nation and/or nature. The position taken here understands Christianity as sui generis and its sacred iconography as resistant to full-scale translation (or demythologization). The Church is one of a kind. This position also presupposes, as against Harnack, that the externalized shell of rite and icon cannot be peeled away either from an essence or a primitive original. One should always be ready to examine carefully any argument pointing to what is right at the core or right at the beginning, or both.

Chapter 1

The Language of Christianity¹

A major problem with the language of Christianity is its over-familiarity to some and remoteness to most. What you use constantly lies too close for appraisal and what you rarely, if ever, encounter, consists of fragments detached from grammar and context, discrete ‘beliefs’ to be tested for plausibility at the bar of common sense and prejudice. Twice, while a visiting scholar in 2000, at the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, Italy, I was asked to explain what Pentecost was. The ‘cultured despisers’ of religion see no special reason to read serious explorations of Christian discourse and prefer to regale themselves with cartoons of its absurdity. As for the daily newspapers they peddle habitual scorn, especially about Christianity, since it is difficult to defend what look like vestiges of previous dominance. In the ‘spirituality’ sections of bookshops you find little, but bizarre, journalistic exposés varied by scholarly promotions of gnostic wisdom or ‘mystic’ junk. There is not much on the shelves by way of a serious and popular presentation of Christianity, apart from Evangelical works in specialized shops.

One useful result of this combination of ignorance and scorn is that Christianity regains the advantage of surprise it must have had when come across by cultivated Romans in the earliest centuries. Of course, they too were scornful, as is indicated by a third-century schoolboy graffito in the Palatine Museum in Rome showing a monkey on a cross. When Roman senators heard of this new faith from their converted wives it must have struck them as very strange, as well as disconcertingly all-embracing.² The proclamation of the human face of God in the person of a Jew executed on the margins of the empire was hardly the most attractive of the available eastern cults. Mithraism would suit society and its soldiery much better. Indeed, almost any God would suit imperial power or republican virtue better than Christianity, as Machiavelli and Rousseau were later to discover. It is bad enough to replace proper manly pride with humility but an injunction to call no man father or master is likely to rip society apart and ‘turn the world upside down’.

In the year 2000, the National Gallery in London put on an exhibition of images of Christ called ‘Seeing Salvation’.³ I want to use this exhibition, a cultural event in its own right, to raise some questions, before coming directly to Christian language. The exhibition attracted large numbers and its presentation of Christianity created an atmosphere of serious curiosity. Educated people take art and its icons very seriously but the presentation of these works in terms of a coherent iconography set in theological context required a shift of focus. Here were issues of historically located meaning, such as the dual nature of Christ, clearly dependent on the reanimation of a forgotten Christian language.

Neil MacGregor, the Director of the Gallery, made a strategic decision to go beyond the usual art-historical questions of style and provenance and risk an art-theological interpretation. For example, his commentary interpreted the deposition of Christ from the cross as the dead body already become the Eucharist⁴ (and so placed finally in the hands of his friends). But such creative interpretation apart, a much larger question was raised by the suggestion in the commentary that this birth and this death, this presence and absence, this innocent humanity on trial, could be given a universal meaning quite apart from particular belief.

Yet if one could indeed discern universal implications, why did the exhibition effectively end in the seventeenth century? The problem was faced glancingly with a final room containing some modern works and entitled ‘The abiding presence’, but clearly the body of Christ simply ceased to be a preoccupation of European painting. You can trace that change in any art gallery, first with the humanization of stylized icons and the beginning of pagan subjects, followed by an ever-widening range of topics, such as portraiture, domesticity, objects, the city and landscape. The unifying sign fragmented.

Inevitably one relates the final shift away from the body of Christ to the particular kind of secularization occurring (say) between 1680 and 1720 which begins the Enlightenment, and was identified by Paul Hazard as the crisis in European consciousness.⁵ Marcel Gauchet in his remarkable The Disenchantment of the World even argues that the great work of Christianity was over by the eighteenth century, a very French view perhaps, but one that raises the crucial question whether the universal language of Christianity is well and truly dead.⁶

Since the bulk of the painting in ‘Seeing Salvation’ came from the late medieval and Renaissance periods the emphasis was decidedly Catholic but there could be a further reason for that lodged in the nature of Protestantism. Without supposing that the Protestant faith in the heard Word was always hostile to the visible image there was surely an attenuation of the Christian repertoire of signs at the Reformation. In mid-sixteenth century England, for example, one sees a shift in the mode and subject matter of liturgy and the arts, such as the subject matter of Holbein.⁷ One had better be cautious about viewing a ‘religious’ movement like the Reformation as also a preliminary secularization, especially recollecting the persistent religious reference (even today) of English poetry, or Rembrandt, or the tradition of Passion Music summed up in J.S. Bach, but there is maybe something to the idea when it comes to the representation of Christ’s body.⁸ Perhaps God remained incarnate in the words of preachers and poets – and musicians, but not in the visible flesh and tangible bread. It is all very complicated but there could be at least two stages between us in what Leo Steinberg calls our ‘modern oblivion’ and the reanimation of Christian language.⁹

This exposure of salvation as seen historically by the eye of faith also raised the question of a cut-off point at the beginning as well as one at the end. There is, of course, no authentic original image of Christ, and the images presented are bound to come from the fourth century AD on, when Christianity had acquired an orthodoxy and a developed iconography, such as the Good Shepherd, the Lamb and the Anchor. The images gather round the birth, death and resurrection of Christ and so around the nodal points of immanence and transcendence, humanity and difference, presence and absence.

That is a Christ of the creed, incarnate, crucified, resurrected, ascended, yet for post-Protestants such Christianity as they retain is quite differently focussed. For some it is the Golden Rule and the injunction to be kindly and neighbourly to the troubled, impaired or impoverished, for others an idea of a better society of peace, reconciliation and forgiveness, for yet others a spirit of universal benevolence, freedom and truth; and for none of these is the Christian community with its developed language all that important, except as a useful welfare organization which channels good deeds through wasteful mumbo-jumbo and incidentally consoles the weak-spirited.

Perhaps the closest a thoughtful post-Protestant might come to the meanings central to Christian art would be found in the idea of the shared gift and the common meal. That, surely, is a very close translation of Christian language, though not one requiring God or a faithful community. It is an extracted essence in universal human terms which you can entertain without any passage through the waters of baptism from darkness to light and death to life, or any identification with Christ in his own passage through a baptism of suffering, dereliction and death into life eternal.

What might one say about this particular close translation by a sympathetic observer? Perhaps this: that Christianity has become a matter of free-floating and therefore evanescent notions rather than a transition and an enactment undertaken and undergone in company, and a reception into your own hands of ‘grace upon grace’. What goes on in a house of God by way of coming together for a shared meal under the rich covering veil of signs of love and self-offering is at best sympathetically understood without participation. Anybody might come to this idea of the loving gift and the gift of love through the offering of the body, and even do so much more directly without any cue from a religious institution. No doubt this profound idea was for centuries transmitted by institutional Christianity, but there is nothing necessary about the particular outward forms bearing this inner and universal kernel. Indeed, as Harnack would have emphasized, there is much that is untoward in its institutional dogmatism and intermittent fanaticism, not to mention its role in doubling for social authority and so emphasizing reproduction at all costs undertaken in a ‘correct’ form of family. Communication by way of a gracious gift kindly received and requiring nothing beyond response is perfectly possible without intervening rites and communicants. ‘Freely you have received, freely give,’ says the Scripture. But it is all available without mediation or disbenefit of clergy or church, though in fact it is virtually impossible to abstract oneself from a Christian context to find out how natural and obvious it really is.

We have imagined, then, a close translator of Christianity in terms of a universal humane essence. He or she might even have walked through ‘Seeing Salvation’ as a kind of extra-liturgical pilgrimage, letting the signs speak of everything that matters most. They would signify the holiness of the gift of life in the presentation of the Mother and the Child and in the faithful self-offering of a man under trial, even unto the death of the cross. It could well have been with such a person in mind that the commentary carefully highlighted the universal while remaining faithful to particular meanings.¹⁰ Not to do that would, of course, violate their witness, as if in an enlightened age and in spite of our pretended relativity, we all have better access than they to what these great artists really meant.

The tactical prop provided by ‘Seeing Salvation’ can now largely be dropped, leaving us to explore one or two important questions: the first concerns the original and starting point of Christianity and its simple inner kernel, and the second what may be its eventual terminus.

If we begin at the beginning it immediately becomes apparent that the question of the primitive or original is not the same as the question of the inner kernel, and neither need be simple. What I have in mind here are some loosely linked suppositions likely to be taken for granted in a popular and semi-Protestant culture. They are that a special authenticity attaches to the most primitive layer on which everything else depends, that the original gospel of Jesus must have been simple, that this is identifiable as the inner kernel, and that the universality of the kernel turns on its simplicity. Obviously I cannot deal with this ‘can of worms’, though we can probably set on one side the idea that the teaching of Jesus is at all simple, even though ‘the common people heard him gladly’. If one thinks only of the range of meanings that critical scholarship attaches to the clea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements and Cognate References
• Dedication
• Part I Fundamentals
• Part II The Religious-Political Tension
• Part III The Religious-Aesthetic Tension
• Part IV Sacred-Secular Dynamics in the City
• Part V Internal Adjustments To Modernity
• Part VI Alternative Responses to Modernity
• Index