“We know what art is! It’s paintings of horses!”

Jack Donaghy

The assertion, “Theology is art” is as good a fault line as you’ll find dividing the splintered halves of what remains of Christendom. Recent events in my own denomination–the PC(USA)–are only the latest jolts issuing from the bad-tempered subterranean feuds over truth and authority that have caused all of western protestantism to walk lightly for the past three centuries.

On one side of that apparently widening divide are the Jack Donaghys of the fold. They, like the fictional NBC executive from the sitcom “30 Rock,” see “art” as self-centered, indulgent, and hopelessly subjective and are far more eager to be guided by reason and ratings in their deliberations.

Donaghy’s antagonists, TV writer Liz Lemmon and her cast of maladjusted writers and actors, is of course waving stupidly from the other side.

I’m a partisan in that dispute, and my first name ain’t Jack, Jack.

I am increasingly convinced that the Landon Whitsitts and the Mihee Kim-Korts of the church world are driving the caravan I want to join, even though there are other caravans to join, and even though these make better promises: of a re-polished establishment gauntlet; of relevance; of success. But as one who is continually being converted to a gospel that embraces doubters and exclaims “My Lord and my God!” at the spectacle of human weakness, I’m hopelessly attached to this rag-tag caravan of three-wheeled Schooners with their tattooed sails and artsy, bespectacled drivers.

Hence my affinity for the proposition about theology being art, even though (or perhaps because) I don’t consider myself an artist.  I just really want an artful theology. That’s what I’m after, really: theology done artfully. I guess if “Theology is art” is an argument in the indicative, then I want to give the “Let’s do theology artfully” pep rally in the imperative. And that starts by dealing specifically and confidently with artists.

By “artists” I don’t simply mean those recognized as “artistic” for their superior technical skill or for their temperament or for their acute sensitivity. I do mean them, maybe even primarily them, but I also and completely mean everyone else. I mean each adherent of the Christian faith as a theologian and therefore an artist.

If anybody should indeed care about an art-theology, then they must be made to care about art-theologians. We need to more and more situate the believing subject squarely in the center of whatever theological discourse is emerging. Claiming theology as art in a meaningful way probably means celebrating individual theologians’ experiential, limited, contextual, grasp of theology’s object, God, and not perpetuating anymore the modern preference for objective, dispassionate, propositional, wrapped-in-printed-text, discourse as more theologically reliable.

Such an embrace of subjectivity as a reliable carrier of truth will alarm those for whom the rules and conventions of theology hold primacy of place. And with what I hope is seen as an artful posture, I want to embrace their alarm and allow it to set some of the terms of an artful theology.

Because “artful” also means attentive to rules. An artful theology must be a conventional theology, and there’s no more critical convention of theology than the insistence upon talking about God. Theology is God Talk. That’s it. The moment we start talking about something other than God, the God Christians see revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, then we’re not doing theology any more.

Being versed in conventions needn’t mean cramming our heads with Barth and Augustine, though (it certainly could). Primarily, it means becoming thoroughly versed in the many and various best practices worked out over two millenia of Christian talk about God. For example: paradox. It’s a pretty reliable practice of Christian theology to make two apparently contradictory assertions at the same time:

Jesus is fully human.

Jesus is fully God.

That’s as conventional as Christian theology gets, and an artful theologian will not only be committed to the content of that convention but also to its carrier, to the form, the structure, of the paradox. And he will only depart from the tried-and-true best practices of theology when he has a really good reason to do so. He will, in the words of one Godly Play trainer, “Know the rules well enough to break them effectively.”

And, yes, please God may he break them. May he break them without telling us he’s breaking them. May he surprise us, scandalize us, delight us, all by spurning those dictates of God-talk that he learned in the academy, not because he’s intimidated by them but because he owns them and can restrain himself from mimicking them to please the ghosts of his systematics professors.

Improvise. That’s what I’m getting at. Artful theology is improvisational, which means that the artful theologian is one who is well aware that the discourse may get away from her. She knows that she’s not delivering a scripted monologue but participating in an unpredictable sketch about a milkman, a librarian, and a professional wrestler all on a boat together in the middle of an amusement park. Naked.

Here a caution is in order. Improvisational does not mean unprepared. The best improvisational actors are the most practiced ones. They are thoroughly prepared. Even though everything they do and say during a performance is spontaneous, it all issues from a rigorous routine of preparation that involves lots of repetition and doing things uniformly and predictably.

Finally, an artful theology will be a depressed theology, even a despairing one. The ear-severing Van Gogh will be more our model than the toothy-grinned Tony Robbins. Because art and theology both have to do with longing, and the artist or theologian who isn’t despairing probably isn’t longing. Exacting artists destroy more of their work than they display. This isn’t false humility or shrinking self-esteem, but captivity to unattainable standards of clarity, of depth, of rhythm of which we see only brief and fleeting glimpses. Which is maddening. And holy.

Posted this on Monday, asking, “Where are the adults in our young peoples’ lives who care about them for their own sake and not for some alterior, career-advancing motive?”

Went to the Emergent Theological Conversation on Wednesday to hear the likes of Tripp Fuller, Philip Clayton, and John Cobb talk about process theology. Clayton I found particularly compelling.Bought Kindle version of Clayton’s latest book, “The Predicament of Belief,” in which I discovered this quote while reading on Thursday:

One cannot assume, after all, that the mere fact of an agent’s taking an interest in the existence of other beings is morally admirable, even if it entails a certain amount of self-limitation on that agent’s part. One thinks of numerous mundane analogs: the farmer who shows concern for the well-being of his livestock only for the sake of maximizing his own financial gain; the would-be father who works long hours so he can start a family but who mainly wants children out of loneliness or for any of a host of social or cultural reasons; the teacher who pours her life into the minds of her students because she sees them as a way of establishing her career and exerting influence over the future of her profession. The motives involved in each of these cases are not obviously evil and do not involve any sort of deception; but neither are they altruistic.

Thought, “Hmmmm.”

Wondered if I could get Philip Clayton to be a volunteer leader of my youth group.

The student approaches the theater director and asks permission to miss a rehearsal in favor of the volleyball game.

“Absolutely not. The production needs you. You’ve had the production schedule for eight weeks. You must be at all of the rehearsals or your theater grade will be docked an entire letter.”

Discouraged, the student approaches her volleyball coach. May she, she asks, miss one of the week’s two games in favor of the theater production?

“What? Of course not. You’re a starter and a leader on this team. You’ve known our schedule since the start of the season, and you know the rule: miss a practice and you’re benched for a week. Miss a game and it’s two weeks. The choice is yours.”

The volleyball coach and the theater teacher never speak to each other about the student.

Our high school youth group has been talking about pressure: peer pressure, academic pressure, social pressure. High school students today are under an immense load of pressure, and I’ve noticed that this pressure is placed upon them by adults who are themselves feeling the heat of high expectations.

The teachers need to produce students who test and perform at a high level to meet rising standards of standardized test scores and artistic achievement, and coaches need to produce winning teams that play at a high level to justify their positions or get promoted to better ones.

Where, in this ecosystem, are the adults who relate to these teenagers as something other than as lines on a resume? Where are the adults who care about these students as people, who’s livelyhood doesn’t depend on the students’ performance?

Am I, a pastor to these youth, making objects of them in much the same way? Does my sense of success as a minister depend upon their attendance at youth programs? When they blow off youth group because they have six hours of homework, does my annoyance evidence traces of the same fear-based use of them for my own professional security?

How much of the landscape of youth performance and achievement, including at church, dehumanizes young people for the sake of adults’ survival?

Today we bring you our top five albums.

The album is a luxury in times like these. So much music–like so much life–is spliced up into episodic units for consumption during the commute or the wait at the doctor’s office. Maybe this has raised the bar for songwriting and maybe it hasn’t.  It’s definitely made it more difficult for a music consumer like me to experience a collection of 10-15 songs as a unified work. This list is something of an effort to listen to music with ears tilted in that direction.

To make it onto this list, an album has to be enjoyable from beginning to end–no skipping around to the three of four tracks on it I like. By that standard the first one on the list blows all the others away. Something of a perverse irony registers at this point, because a really good album demands a sustained investment of attention, and lacking the emotional or intellectual energy, or lacking the time, for such an investment means that a great album doesn’t get listened to all that often. It’s like a really good wine or a limited edition Snickers Dark.

The other side of that perverse irony is that albums containing a couple of dynamite songs may never get the benefit of a complete listen. That’s why an album like Thao and Mirah isn’t on this list, because I didn’t have the patience to give every track not titled “I Dare You” a fair shake.

Here they are, then: the five albums from 2011 that I’d feel most confident putting on without interruption for a long road trip, a party, or a quiet evening at home. Here’s the link to Landon’s list (bonus points for whoever finds the Album on both our lists)

1. Destroyer, “Kaputt”

It’s almost hard to tell independent tracks apart on this album, and the whole thing feels like it could have been released in 1986. But that doesn’t make it gimmicky. It’s smooth and melodic and catchy and engaging and so, so interesting from beginning to end.

Sample: “Savage Night at The Opera”

2. Bon Iver, “Bon Iver”

I resisted this one because indie music fans are supposed to adore Bon Iver in the same way Star Wars fans are supposed to worship George Lucas. But resistance is futile. It’s so good. Justin Vernon’s falsetto, the electronic tinkering, the marching band-like percussion–it’s very compelling, and there’s no one track that takes attention away from the others, even if “Holocene” got a Grammy nomination (a fact that is supposed to enrage the bearded bespectacled faithful?). Whatever. This album is full of depth and texture, and it’s beautiful.

Sample: “Holocene”

3. David Bazan, “Strange Negotiations”

That David Bazan was the frontman of a Christian rock band and now writes songs full of profanity was an intriguing intro to this record back in June. I totally missed his first solo album, but music writers had a blast writing it up as Bazan’s break-up with God. Bazan’s reasons for falling out of faith (if that’s indeed accurate) are his own, and, frankly, I don’t really care. “Strange Negotiations” is a gritty product in its own right, and it is diminished by parsing its tracks for evidence of a religious beef. I listened to this album almost daily for about two months and kept discovering lyrics and notes I hadn’t appreciated before. It’s pretty intellectually rigorous (“I know it’s dangerous to judge/but man you gotta find the truth and when you find that truth don’t budge/until the truth you’ve found begins to change/and it does, I know”), which is what I most like about it.

Sample: “People”

4. The Decemberists, “The King is Dead”

The last time I got all geeked up for a Decemberists release I was left feeling flawed because I didn’t like it, and there’s this flannel-clad vibe out there that leads you to believe that if you don’t like The Decemberists it’s not a flaw in the music but in your intellect. “The King Is Dead” is the most mainstream thing The Decemberists have ever done, so I’m a little embarrassed to have liked it so much. On balance, it’s not as epic as “Picaresque“, and it doesn’t have any fist pumpers like “The Rake’s Song,” but it’s supremely listenable without compromising the narrative identity that makes this band such a cultural gem (i.e. “We all do what we can/we endure our fellow man/and we sing our song to the head frame’s creaks and moan”). Also, I saw them in concert this year, and the broad smile that show put on my face for two hours hurt for a week).

Sample: “Calamity Song”

5. Dolorean, “The Unfazed”

It doesn’t feel like an album like this is written with year-end-list ambition. It’s full of uncomplicated melodies on which hang cigarette pack lyrics delivered by serviceable vocals. I feel like any two of those qualities without the third would make “The Unfazed” pretty pedestrian, and, thankfully, that’s strictly hypothetical. All the tracks on the album gel together in a really pleasant whole that’s not overly ambitious. I don’t know how many times I put this record on at the house on a constant loop, humming along to melodies for which I hadn’t yet learned the words. Also, I felt like I was recommending the album to almost everyone I talked to about music all year.

Sample: “If I Find Love”

There you have it. Thanks for reading and listening. Please chime in with your favorite music of the year.

I’ve left myself one music blogging indulgence, though: the year-end lists. I love year-end music lists, like this one. I used to pilfer these lists in January and get caught up on all of the previous year’s music. Then I decided to make myself into a more proactive music consumer and to measure that standard by my ability to assemble my own list in December. This is my third set of lists.

This list has the added benefit of being something of a collaboration with my musical compatriot, Landon. The two of us text one another music recommendations a couple of times a week, and so we decided to share our year-end lists as well. Here’s the link to Landon’s top 5 song list.

Two lists, then, both of them super short: top 5 songs and top 5 albums of the year. This post is the songs.

1. “Country Clutter” by Dolorean

“You know good n’ well/the way you treated me.”

It’s been my go-to since it came out in January.

2. “How Dare You?” by Thao and Mirah

“I swear it happens better/when it happens again.”

I listened to this about 15 times during a July trip to San Diego and back.

3. “We Don’t Eat” by James Vincent McMorrow

“We don’t drink until the Devil’s turned to dust.”

Landon and I actually discovered this one together when he was in CA last January. It stuck all year.

4. “Don’t Move” by Phantogram

“I’m not your drinking problem.”

This track is the perfect length for my commute to the church.

5. “Bye Bye Baby” by Hayes Carll (skip ahead to 0.50 for the start of the song)

“You kissed my hand and said you were beside me.”

What can I say? I’m a sucker for a banjo.

That these are my favorite songs of the year simply means that these are the ones I listened to most often, the ones I sought out, either by skipping to that song in my car or navigating to it on MOG or Rdio. There’s a much longer list of great tracks from 2011, and I’m happy to share that, but the fun of this exercise is having to choose five.

What are your top tracks from this year?

Watch here tomorrow for the top 5 albums of the year.

That defeat indeed came to pass, and that leads me to a make a companion observation. If loyalty can be measured by doubt, then it can also be measured by pain. I watched most of yesterday’s game, and even though the scenario unfolding before my eyes was the very thing I predicted, I still hated it and I still hung on every snap in the hope that I would be wrong.

This, then, is what loyalty is made of, in sports (and who knows what else?): sincere doubt and sincere hope operating in tandem.

I got serious Bronco fan creds.

And I’m not buying Tim Tebow. I don’t think that makes me a bad fan, but a good one.

In sports, as in much of life–relationships, politics, even faith–doubt  and skepticism are better measures of loyalty than outright defense. Tebow and the Broncos have become the staging ground for a vigorous cultural conversation about doubt and faith, as evidenced by Les Carpenter’s column this morning that declares:

I believe we have evolved from apes. I believe in dinosaurs. I also believe the earth was created from debris surrounding the sun that clumped together into a spherical shape. And I believe it all happened in more than seven days. But I also believe in Tim Tebow because there is no scientific explanation for what is happening to the Denver Broncos

What is happening is really remarkable, and a fan’s dream. Who doesn’t want their team to be the subject of every national sports talk show? Tebow, the unproven superstar celebrity, took over a 1-4 team and has lead a 6-1 resurgence, including a never-before-seen string of comeback wins: road wins, wins wrested from the jaws of defeat in the final two minutes, overtime wins. All of a sudden, the Broncos are leading their division and stand a very, very good chance of making the playoffs. Impressive stuff, to say the least.

Yet the teams the Broncos have beat in this stretch have a combined record of 39-52 (including losses to Denver. The record absent games against the Broncos is 39-46). The NFL is a tough league, but it needs to be asked whether slogging through a below average field to emerge the best of the worst deserves all the accolades.

The pattern is well-known by now. Tebow and the Broncos offense spin their wheels for three and a half quarters while the defense keeps the game close, setting the stage for some improbable last minute heroics. The heroics are great, but how heroic is it to merely stay in the game against bad teams so that you can pull off a buzzer beater? It’s kind of like the outfielder who loafs after a routine  flyball only to make a spectacular diving catch. The fans love it, but it shouldn’t have had to be spectacular.

Anyway, this isn’t a sports blog, so to my point: I don’t think all of this is real, and I expect the reckoning to come next Sunday when the Broncos play an elite team, the New England Patriots. Yet I’m contesting that this disbelief is an exercise in loyalty to my team. There are a lot of factors beyond Tim Tebow’s leadership and (wince) “belief” that are contributing to what’s happening, and I think the faithful fans are the ones who can take an honest look at reality and celebrate their team’s wins while still expecting them to lose.

Which I do. Next Sunday. Against New England.

The church application here is that things go right and work well in our faith communities for lots of reasons, many of them practical and many of them mysterious. The same thing happens in the lives of our people, and it is a good pastoral care to help people take a clear-eyed account of a complex reality before urging them to “let go and let God.”

A good pastor can say, “There’s a lot going on here that we can’t see and don’t understand. Some of that may be God’s doing, and some of it may be sociology/psychology/economics/(insert your academic discipline here) playing out in was that other people do understand.”

A faithful thing to do, then, is to help people listen to those other people and try to learn from them, rather than viewing their account as lacking in faith.

The Theology Draft does three things: it addresses the question of a theological standard (namely, confessional statements) for the New Reformed Body, articulates some Essential Tenets, and then asks some critical questions about the theological practices that will shape the group’s life together. I don’t consider myself a participant in the Fellowship, but I’m taking them at their word that they want public input.

I’m most interested in the Essential Tenets. The current Book of Confessions of the PC (USA) is the proposed answer to the question about standards and statements, which is sure to please many and rankle others. The third section of the Theology Draft sketches out the “theological friendships” that the Fellowship hopes will become a normative part of the life of pastors and elders in their new denomination. But, to me, the Essential Tenets are what deserve the closest attention.

And not really the tenets themselves. I have plenty to say about them, but I think the most significant fact is that they’re offered at all and that they’re given such weight  in the Polity Draft. The Fellowship clearly expects adherence to these tenets to create a kind of theological cohesion that they are disappointed does not presently exist in the PC (USA). I have serious doubts about that expectation, both in its intent and likelihood.

As to their intent, the authors of the Theological Draft write in its foreward:

a collection of confessions lends itself to the wisdom of identifying what is essential within them. our theological ideas and inclinations as a church are far too diffuse to unite us. we reject the proposition that theology divides. instead, we affirm the proposition that truth tends toward unity, yet we are the first generation of presbyterian officers who do not have in the same ordination question the words truth and unity. identifying essentials necessarily and rightly focuses our theological conversation and our life together.

That “a collection of confessions lends itself to the wisdom of identifying what is essential within them” is a questionable assertion. The move to name essentials within the Reformed theological heritage strikes me less as an imperative driven by wisdom as one driven by efficiency. An agreed upon list of essentials is a useful rubric for determining membership in a body and for establishing the boundaries of its teaching. But I don’t think it follows that wisdom dictates such a move.

Wisdom compels people toward what is good, right, true, just, and honorable–not necessarily what is essential. There’s a lot in the Book of Confessions that is good, right, and true, and our life as confessional Christians ought largely to be taken up with mining that gold for Christian formation and mission. But the essentialist project wants instead to select a few confessional gems and convert them into plastic rulers for measuring fidelity to the covenant of church membership and ordination. To do so cheapens them.

Here, then, is my greatest objection to the Theology Draft: it’s inelegant. It’s a rude instrument for assessing (or even coercing) the “rightness” of faith. It’s full of the language of Reformed theological tradition (see the wordle below) and sentences like, “In his essence, God is infinite, eternal, immutable, impassible, and ineffable.” But it reads like an ordination exam. It reads like something written by someone who’s hand shakes as they write because their disapproving teacher is lurking behind them and peering over their shoulder.

This is how Essential Tenets must read, like traffic citations. And that’s why I don’t like them and don’t want them. But to those in the Fellowship who seek in them a ground of covenantal unity and who will press them into the service of concentrating a self-selected group of Christians into a theological corps bound together by its agreement in faith’s fundamentals essentials, may you find what you seek.

The Fellowship Theology Draft as a wordle

The entire Book of Confessions as a wordle

I tweeted my highlights of the document on my first read-thru, and you can see those quotes here.

Here’s what the document looks like as a wordle:

Clearly the local congregation is the most important entity in the polity that will shape the Fellowship’s New Reformed Body. Fellowship leaders have said as much, and they’ve been accused of being Congregationalist in their polity. They’re rebutted that claim. At the very least, it’s fair to say that this polity draft establishes that its most important function is to serve the mission and ministry of local congregations.

For comparison’s sake, here’s what the PC (USA)’s Form of Government looks like as a wordle:

Congregation is one of the most prominent polity element there too.

Some of the highlights of what congregations do in this polity:

• receive, hold, encumber, manage, and hold property: 4.0101(a)
• prepare required annual review and mission narrative documents for the presbytery: 3.0103(m)
• request transfer or dismissal from their presbytery or from the New Reformed Body at a called congregational meeting: 1.0503(d)

The other big element in this polity is the presbytery. It defines a presbytery not as a “corporate expression of the church” as in the nFOG of the PC (USA), but as a “covenant community” of congregations. That may seem a pedantic distinction, but I think its significance lies in the fact that, as it does with members of congregations, the Fellowship polity makes voluntary participation in a covenant the substance of participation in a church body.

The presbytery also has a much more active role to play for the Fellowship in the coaching and encouraging of its pastors. The mechanism for this is a peer review process (2.0402) that must be completed at least annually by every installed pastor. The substance of the review is pastors’ health and  future ministry goals, as well as the sharing of best practices and insights.

The controversial stuff about church denominational affiliation pops up in the fifth chapter, titled “Ecumenicity And Union.” What’s described there is a process by which congregations or presbyteries may affiliate with the Fellowship’s New Reformed Body through a union arrangement or by joining a new entity called an Affinity Network. The process laid out requires a 2/3 majority vote of either the congregation or the presbytery respectively, as well as the consenting judgment of the PC(USA) body to which it is currently subject. And in the case where PC(USA) and Fellowship rules butt heads, “the less permissive rules shall govern”(5.0202 and 5.0203).

A few other interesting tidbits:

1. There’s no General Assembly. The Synod is the highest council in the NRB
2. Pastors “ordinarily” shall hold an MDiv. degree from an accredited seminary
3. No CPM: presbyteries come up with their own credentialing and calling mechanism for pastors
4. Members of congregations are called “Covenant Partners” (see note about presbytery membership above)
5. Honorably Retired pastors can’t vote at presbytery

Finally, a word about the Essential Tenets. I’ll review those next, but they appear in the polity draft often and they clearly play a unifying role. The Fellowship clearly expects members of churches, congregations, elders, deacons, and pastors to adopt the Essential Tenets they’re laying out, and even to do so “without hesitation” (2.0103c). The lack of a uniform theological standard has been a constant critique of this group, and this polity draft clearly intends to establish the Essential Tenets document as the norm to which everyone must subscribe in order to belong.

Now, a letter addressed to Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA) by none other than Desmond Tutu casts serious doubt on this “global church” position. Tutu is a retired Bishop of the Anglican Church in South Africa and a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his efforts to fight apartheid.  He wrote to Parsons to express his support for the PC (USA)’s recent change to its constitution that will permit gay ordination. Here’s an excerpt:

I realize that among your ecumenical partners, some voices are claiming that you have done the wrong thing, and I know that you rightly value your relationship with Christians in other parts of the world. Sadly, it is not always popular to do justice, but it is always right. People will say that the ones you are now willing to ordain are sinners. I have come to believe, through the reality shared with me by my scientist and medical friends, and confirmed to me by many who are gay, that being gay is not a choice. Like skin color or left-handedness, sexual orientation is just another feature of our diversity as a human family. How wonderful that God has made us with so much diversity, yet all in God’s image! Salvation means being called out of our narrow bonds into a broad place of welcome to all.

That a prominent churchman from another part of the global church community supports the change in ordination standards does not, of course, mean that the issue is settled. Many brothers and sisters across the globe do not support it and find it deeply offensive. But Tutu is an important voice of reason in the conversation. His letter disqualifies blanket appeals to the global church as, in and of themselves, conclusive.