Senses of the Soul

Art and the Visual in Christian Worship

William Dyrness

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781556358647
  9781498211024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498270274
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Senses of the Soul explores the way art and visual elements are incorporated into Christian worship. It incorporates research conducted in Los Angeles congregations. Through extensive interviews in a sample of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox congregations it looks into the way visual elements actually become part of the experience of worship. By looking at attitudes and experiences of beauty, art, and memories, it suggests that believers appropriate images and aesthetic encounters in terms of imaginative structures that have been formed through worship practices over time. By comparing responses across denominations, the book proposes that people receive visual elements in ways that have been shaped by long traditions and specific background beliefs. In addition to discussions of the differences between the major Christian traditions, the book also examines the relation of art and beauty to worship, the role of memories and everyday life, and the power of images in spirituality and worship. By its focus on the worshiper, the book seeks to make a contribution to the growing conversation between the arts and Christian worship and to the process of worship renewal.

chapter 1

Introduction

Experiencing God through the Visual: A Methodological Inquiry into Imagery and Worship1

Recently Chuck Smith Jr., pastor of a large Calvary Chapel in Southern California, dedicated his Thursday evening teaching session to the role of art in the Christian’s spiritual life. He had a short time previously traveled in Russia and fallen under the influence of Orthodox icons. On this evening his purpose was to help people see that art created with a “spiritual intention” could remove the veil that keeps us from seeing God’s glory as this was manifested supremely in Jesus Christ. He began by noting that Jesus, in an important sense, was an “icon of God.” An icon, he says, is the spiritual life of God revealed in human flesh. In a distant echo of John of Damascus, speaking during the eighth-century iconoclastic controversy, Pastor Smith goes on to argue that an icon can become “a means for God’s grace flowing into our lives.” Spiritual art, he concluded, can take us into uncharted realms.2

This kind of exploration on the part of Protestants is increasingly common today. A generation ago it would have been unthinkable for a Protestant pastor to discuss icons with his congregation. But things are changing in Protestant attitudes toward icons and, indeed toward the visual arts in general. Still Pastor Smith was clearly struggling with vocabulary—what precisely, one wonders, does he mean by “spiritual intention,” and “means of grace,” or “icon of God”? This and the spirited discussion that followed his talk—he recognized that some (mostly former Catholics!) were probably put off by his discussion—indicates that Protestants have a good deal of work to do to develop a theological rationale, and a suitable language, for the use of pictures in their worship.

Recent Scholarship on the Use of the Visual in Religious Traditions

How does one go about discovering how Protestants like Chuck Smith are developing their rationale, and refining their language, for using visual elements in worship? Clearly, since his interest in icons and religious imagery is not untypical, and many in his congregation were raised as Catholics, any study of these issues would have to involve churches from the Orthodox and Catholic traditions as well. The first recourse for a theologian was to scholarly discussions by historians and theologians about the tradition(s) Pastor Smith represented. The use of art in Christian Churches has of course a rich history, and the bibliography reflecting this history is large. Some awareness of this tradition of study is obviously important for addressing current questions. An outline of Protestant (and Catholic and Orthodox) attitudes toward art and the visual is attempted later in this chapter.

In reflecting on these questions, however, it soon became evident that this secondary research had to be supplemented with primary research. It was not enough to ask scholars how people were supposed to understand visual elements, it seemed more important to ask how actual participants in worship actually received their traditions in so far as the visual was concerned. For help in this enterprise, I turned to scholars making broader use of social science methodologies in the study of religion in general, and of the visual in religion in particular.

Fortunately, scholars of religion have recently begun to pay significant attention to the material and visual culture of believers. While the study of religious visual culture has not yet become a field of study on its own, scholars have begun to provide methodologies by which to approach these questions—primarily various qualitative approaches based on ethnographic observation and interviews.3 These studies moreover are heir to important advances in the study of culture more generally.

A major component of this new approach has gone under the name of “cultural studies” which is a broad interdisciplinary approach to culture and cultural products that seeks to understand these in more holistic ways. Traditional approaches to, say, works of art, have focused almost entirely on their production. Art history monographs have studied the backgrounds and careers of artists as a means of understanding particular works of art. Scholars in cultural studies have sought rather to understand the whole trajectory of cultural artifacts from production and distribution, clear through to the uses to which these objects are put.4 Rather than seeing popular culture as an expression of a “hegemonic” mass culture, for example, cultural studies scholars (following the lead of anthropologists more generally) pay attention to the way people become agents in using this material to construct meaningful lives. An example of the application of this interdisciplinary approach, applied to religion, is Colleen McDannell’s important study of the material dimensions of religious practice.5 There she focuses on what she calls the material culture of various religions—the objects, images, and even the clothes—that believers use to support and express their religious convictions. People build religion into their personal and family landscape, she argues. These artifacts interact and fit into a “system of exchange organized and given meaning by individuals.”6

In the 1990s David Morgan began to make use of this approach in studying the response to popular religious imagery.7 In his book Visual Piety, building on the cultural studies approach, Morgan gathers testimonials of people’s response to popular imagery such as Warner Sallman’s famous “Head of Christ.” He found these images became “collective representations” for believers that express deeply felt interactions with the unseen world. Rather than privileging aesthetic contemplation, which, Morgan argues, reinforces class prejudices and overlooks the richly engaged character of religious experience, he shows how popular imagery features the comfort of the “half forgotten texture of everyday life.” Most important for our purposes, in showing the way images can make space familiar and personal, he helps us understand their role in making beliefs functional.

In 2003 Robert Wuthnow brought these questions to a wider audience in his major study of the relation between art, music, and spiritual vitality in American religion, All In Sync. Wuthnow finds a correlation between a high interest and involvement in spiritual practices and involvement in the arts, which leads him to argue that arts may be a potential source for the revitalization of religion. He hypothesizes that spirituality, which has experienced such a renaissance in America, needs “carriers,” which the arts can provide. They are, he believes, “a significant . . . influence generating interest in spirituality.”8 His study is especially interesting for the study of visual elements in Christian worship, because of the way he examines spirituality in its connection with organized religion. Serious interest in the arts, he finds, is correlated to an equally serious involvement in particular religious traditions and the basic acceptance of Christian beliefs. His findings provided suggestive impetus for studies like the present one. Somewhat problematic, however, is Wuthnow’s use of the arts, understood in a more formal way, including experience, education and—often—involvement at various levels, whether as consumers or creators. In this sense, his work, unlike Morgan’s, does not make extensive use of the cultural studies approach that we have outlined. Wuthnow is clearly sensitive to the fact that art needs to be put into a broader framework. At one point he notes, for example, “material culture links the public dimensions of community life with the private experience of its members.”9 But his focus on the arts, rather than visual culture more generally, does not allow him to take advantage of this in exploring how believers make use of a wide variety of visual and dramatic elements—in addition to art and music—in appropriating religious traditions. One of the surprising findings of our research was the complex relationship between art and Christian practice on the one hand, and the difficulty of isolating what we might call art or images, from general visual and religious practices on the other. This issue is explored in more detail in ch. 6.

Mark Chaves makes a similar case for the importance of the arts in his study of American congregations.10 He goes so far as to claim that, the arts, along with social service and civic engagement, constitute one of the central practices of congregational life. Indeed, discarding the outdated distinction between high and low culture, worship services “are constructed in part out of artistic elements such as music, drama and dance.”11 His study leads him to conclude that places of worship are “prominent sites of artistic consumption.”12 Working largely from survey data, Chaves helpfully signals the importance of the arts for congregations, but he does not elaborate their meaning for the experience of worship.

More helpful in this respect is David Morgan’s recent work, The Sacred Gaze, which addresses the question of the visual mediation of belief as the place where belief happens, in the broader context of what he calls religious visual culture.13 His study inquires into the way the sacred gaze invests objects with spiritual significance, and how images in turn function in “maintaining . . . a sense of order in a particular time and place.”14 Of particular significance is his description of practices of interpretation which a culture provides to explain, not what an image is, but what it does.15 Ranging widely over the geographical and religious landscape, he proceeds to develop a typology of the various functions images fill in religious culture.

Asking how people develop practices of visual interpretation provides important equipment for approaching our sample of Christian worshipers. We hope to build on the work of these scholars, though we will nuance their work in ways that are appropriate to the study of Christian worship in a theological context. For example, Morgan sums up his approach by noting that “a sacred gaze applies itself directly to the task of belief.”16 We want to pursue this insight further by asking the reverse question, how do specific belief structures provide, not simply strategies of interpretation, but normative expectations about what is seen? We will argue, on the basis of our research, that ecclesiastical traditions, as these are embodied in worship practices, shape believers’ “background commitments”—habits of thought and practice that influence what is seen and how visual culture is appropriated. We will seek to demonstrate how strategies of visual interpretation develop in terms of this larger context. Second, a focus on visual culture alone risks reducing what Morgan acknowledges is the richly engaged character of religious experience. In our study we realized early on that we neede...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Protestant Worship
• Chapter 3: Orthodox Worship
• Chapter 4: Catholic Worship
• Chapter 5: “God Gathers Us All Through Beauty”
• Chapter 6: Art, Worship, and Everyday Life
• Chapter 7: The Power of Images
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography