Comments on: Conservative Aesthetics?

By: Commonplace Book 9/17/09 » Brett A. Stroud

Commonplace Book 9/17/09 » Brett A. Stroud — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:34:07 +0000

[...] Conservative Aesthetics by Timothy Bartel (Some thoughtful engagement with Matthew Milliner on the task of culture making.) [...]

By: Martin Mills

Martin Mills — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:07:09 +0000

“This problem lies in the difference between the art that replaces traditional doctrine and values and the art that doctrine and values plan for and protect.”

Tim, While yours may be an accurate (if grossly oversimplified) characterization of ‘liberal’ art, I doubt that the theology represented on this blog is adequately resourced to compliment a cultural imperative towards the arts.

The political/theological cultivation of imaginative space requires honest discourse, and the integrity of any discourse is seriously compromised by a theological account of revelation which casts doctrine propositionally and understands theologizing as simply cataloging and synthesizing these ‘objective’ truths about God. Yes, we must talk about Scripture, but not at the expense of hermeneutics.

It’s not ‘post-structural’ (I read your post on Harry Potter) to attend to the way theology learns its own language. Often, talk of the ‘plain truth’ of Scripture is hegemony in disguise – a disguise which manages to sustain a certain level of church life, but which sets serious limits over and against the artist’s creative space. The kinds of ‘doctrine and values’ which you claim ‘plans for and protects’ artistic space in not well represented on this blog.

Evangelical ‘theologians’ should stop dropping the ball and start dropping acid. It would probably make for a better cultural compliment to the arts.

If the arts are to flourish as part of ‘evangelical culture’, a renewed theological focus is needed.

By: millinerd

millinerd — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:55:09 +0000

Thank you Tim for this incisive engagement. Your observation of a zero-sum game between religion and culture is provocative: Like an old Western showdown, religion and culture face off at high noon, one says to the other that “there ain’t enough room in this town for the two of us,” and then the guns blaze.

Your comments bring to mind Matthew Lee Anderson’s remark that “The new movement to become culture creators is driven largely by the rejection of the evangelical artistic sub-culture… But young evangelicals’ language about engaging the arts suggests that their new pursuit has little to do with excellence for its own sake – rather, artistic engagement is frequently subsumed under the hope and promise of cultural influence.”

As Anderson has indicated, the depth and breadth of cultural, Christendom [the non-coercive kind] seems to be part the solution; but this requires the long historical memory that recent fads in evangelicalism, even in evangelical academia, do little to encourage.

Incidentally, my follow up article was posted today at the Public Discourse: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2009/09/856