Christian Drama
Christian drama refers to theatrical works that are based on Christian themes, stories, or characters. These plays often explore moral and religious themes, and are performed within a Christian context. Christian drama has a rich history, with roots in medieval mystery plays and morality plays, and continues to be a significant genre in contemporary theater.
4 Key excerpts on "Christian Drama"
eBook - ePub- David F. Ford(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...2 Drama in Bible, Theology,and Life Drama has proved to be a remarkably fruitful way of conceiving Christian theology in recent decades. It is closely related to the popularity of narrative, with which it shares many elements. Drama, like life, unfolds over time. It can have plots and sub-plots; major and minor characters and events; clashes of people, ideas, and perspectives that may or may not be resolved; loose ends and mysteries; intensive dialogues, soliloquies, and cries; prose, poetry, and song; wisdom and foolishness; tragedy and comedy. It is able to convey the dynamic particularity of human existence, with its physicality, surprises, initiatives, contingencies, necessities, tensions, and multi-leveled complexity. It may present large overviews of life or delve into the intimate interiority of one character, but its core perspective is that of characters and events in interaction, irreducibly social. As it unfolds, a drama invites us to become engaged, to inhabit its world, and to look toward its as yet open ending. Looking at this manifesto, drama can be seen as an integrator of many of its concerns. Good drama performs the elements of creativity explored in the previous chapter: it is creative expression that offers rich thought (think of all those quotations from Shakespeare; but, even more, of his dramatic conceptions, conveyed by the ways his plots are constructed and his characters develop), and in the way the mode of dramatic engagement shows the past in interplay with the present. The next chapter employs drama as its core concept in trying to describe what is most essential to Christian theology across the centuries. Furthermore, the fivefold sensibility described in chapter 4 is the least required to do justice to the richness of drama. Drama in itself includes assertions and imperatives, questions, explorations, and desires, and it stimulates all those and more in its audience, as it takes them up into its future-oriented action...
eBook - ePubLiving Theodrama
Reimagining Theological Ethics
- Wesley Vander Lugt(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In addition, liturgical dramas and medieval mystery plays sustained theatre within the Christian tradition and provided a precedent for positive theatrical expression. 4 Although the relationship between Christianity and theatre remains strained in some circles, the involvement of Christians in religious and mainstream theatre is flourishing and considered a godly vocation. 5 Another indication that the anti-theatrical prejudice is crumbling among Christians is the greater number of Christian scholars pursuing interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and systematic theology, biblical studies, ethics, worship, and other areas of Christian thought and practice. In fact, a cursory glance over the landscape of Christian theology will reveal a “theatrical turn” throughout the last several decades. What accounts for this theatrical turn? What motivations and methodologies are guiding Christian theologians and ethicists in their dialogue with theatre? Although there are a myriad of motivations, the rest of this section will outline nine movements that have influenced the theatrical turn, highlighting the foremost scholars advancing interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and theatre. From Theatrical Social Science to Theatrical Theology The theatrical turn in Christian theology is intertwined with the more general theatrical turn in the social sciences. Psychology was the first discipline to draw deeply from theatre, with Jacob Moreno in the 1920s pioneering a new method he later called “psychodrama.” As an original approach to group therapy, psychodrama valued the power of spontaneous encounter and experimented with role-play and improvisation. 6 Later developments, such as drama-therapy and socio-drama, blurred the lines between psychology and theatre by seeking self-transformation through performance. 7 Since performances of the self always occur on a social stage, a similar dialogue with theatre emerged within sociology, with G.H...
eBook - ePubGlimpses of the New Creation
Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts
- W. David O. Taylor, Jeremy Begbie(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Eerdmans(Publisher)
...C HAPTER 8 Worship and the Theater Arts The story of God is theatrical. Every part of it could be its own play. Alison Siewert, Drama Team Handbook The theater of God in which the drama of Jesus Christ was played out was already in existence before the church fathers began to exhort the Christians to go to the theater of God: Christian Drama had begun with the memorial act of the breaking of bread of the Last Supper. Christine C. Schnusenberg, The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama I’m baptizing you here in the river, turning your old life in for a kingdom life. The real action comes next: The main character in this drama—compared to him I’m a mere stagehand—will ignite the kingdom life within you, a fire within you, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. Matthew 3:11 (The Message) In his introduction to Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, Samuel Wells suggests that the disciplines and practices of improvisation “resemble the disciplines and practices of Christian ethics sufficiently closely.” 1 Improvisation, he explains, is a matter of steeping oneself years “in a tradition so that the body is so soaked in practices and perceptions that it trusts itself in community to do the obvious thing.” 2 What does this have to do with corporate worship? Wells answers: “For Christians the principal practice by which the moral imagination is formed, the principal form of discipleship training, is worship.” 3 In worship “Christians seek in the power of the Spirit to be conformed to the image of Christ—to act like him, think like him, be like him.” 4 Our formation into the image of Christ through worship does not, in point of fact, happen spontaneously or effortlessly. It happens instead through careful, intentional effort...
eBook - ePubPerforming the Sacred (Engaging Culture)
Theology and Theatre in Dialogue
- Johnson, Todd E., Savidge, Dale, Johnston, Robert K., Dyrness, William(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Baker Academic(Publisher)
...Art and morality may pull in opposite directions, but they are bound inextricably together by love, and through their tension living works of art may be created. The theatre arts are rooted in our humanity. Both actors and audiences must be present in their bodies and spirits for theatre to happen. What passes between them (the text of a play, a characterization, etc.) is on both ends, the senders and the receptors, a product of their humanity. A relationship is established, however fleetingly, and like all relationships for a Christian, this one is governed by the greatest commandment: to love. Such an ideal is not achievable without the empowering presence of the Spirit of God, and only in submission to God will the Christian artist and audience satisfy God’s demands. Realize that you are summoned to a task far beyond your strength. Get to know yourself so well that you cannot contemplate yourself without flinching. Then there will be room for hope. In the sure knowledge that you are “obliged to do the impossible” and that you can do the impossible in Him who strengthens you, then you are ready for a task which can be performed only through the Cross. 21 The Christian at Church: Being a Worshiper The role of theatre in the context of church services is part of a larger discussion among Christians on the very nature of worship, approaches to corporate worship, and the relationship of churches to the surrounding culture. Sometimes lost in this discussion (or debate) is the reality that worship is not confined to a church service, and for the Christian artist the very act of creating theatre can be an act of devotion to and worship of the Lord. Frank Burch Brown offers ways in which art can be worship: We can dedicate art to God, address art to God, consecrate it, receive it on God’s behalf, invite God to share the enjoyment, and look at it as something from God...
