[This is the second part to this post.]
I could prattle on a great deal longer about my former days, but the light I am hoping to shine from that journey looks like this:
You can tell a great deal about how a person understands God, the world around them and what God is doing in that world by the way they handle products of human culture, things like movies, books and music. By just this little bit, you can evaluate the health of some core level, fundamental beliefs a person has about God Himself.
Here’s why: in the Scriptures, God is revealed to us as one apart from whom, or outside of whose hand, nothing happens. Because of His sheer “bigness,” there are no places and no productions we can facilitate that don’t ultimately yield clues about Him somewhere. Everything humans do is thus something for which we cannot avoid saying, ”God has given humanity some extraordinary gifts, and He does amazing things”.
Unless of course we believe that God is as ashamed, confused, and mixed up about our brokenness as we are.
Unless of course we humans in our infinite wisdom have tinkered with the details of that soul-shuddering “bigness”.
As a function of our own confusion and befuddlement over the majesty of a God who isn’t scared off by the shatteredness of what He’s made, it comes naturally to us to simply contrive one who is as mixed up as us.
Anne Lamott has a classic quote, wherein she says that, “You can safely assume you’ve made God in your own image when it turns out He hates all the same people you do.”
(Feel free to substitute verbs like ”is confused by,” “despises,” or “regrets” to get my point.)
If God is only as big as those few places where you don’t see His image being soiled in the culture, I think He’s been recast into something vastly inferior. This comes very naturally to us, so at precisely this point we need to examine ourselves on a regular basis. It is of such a soul-level, natural inclination to refashion God in terms we can understand better that it really is not tough at all to understand the devastating tumble Christians began making in the early 18th century toward understanding God as being “alive” in one arena of human experience but far from other ones.
This yielded of course the perfect storm then in which the worldview that understood God as only “able to be found” in stuff made by Christians and for Christians came into play. That in turn yielded the perfect ecosystem of slick producers and rapt consumers, with quasi-liturgical code language, an inexhaustible client base, and no doubt most worrisome of all, the supposed Biblical and theological frameworks to sign off on every bit of it.
The end result of all that, hear me boldly say, equals an extraordinarily small view of God, one with an ominous wind at its back as it drools downward upon idolatry, heresy and every step between and beyond.
That, my friend, is the recipe for the pitiful wretch before which I began bowing in August of 1996, and in whose honor I burned those 100-some odd CD’s the following winter.
Yet, with the correct glasses on, we Christians can learn to spot and trace the things God has astir below the surface of our culture by discerningly engaging the good and the bad things of human culture. I truly do hold that there is no end to the insights we can get about God, people, and ourselves from reading the non-Christian culture around us. Is it Scripture? No way. But if what we’re pulling from what others, gifted by our good God, is in fact true, then it’s gonna line up with Scripture, and what we learn of our world, when compared to Scripture, can only make us better stewards of God’s creation and better at offering Him the praise He’s due.
A friend sent me this quote some years ago, and it seems apt right now:
“It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weakness but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
As we process God’s dare to do the work of deep and honest interaction with the culture around us, we learn to strip and pluck the nuggets, the reminders, of God’s beauty and hand of grace at work in our world. In so doing we find confirmations, reminders, and deeper reflections upon the Scriptures we so cherish. When, grounded in the Scriptures, we engage our world and trace how others have made use of the breath of life God has given them, we risk a far better understanding of just how terrifying the life of faith can in fact be. Sometimes, we’re reminded of just how shallow our faiths are, and most times we reflect anew at the goodness of our King.
In the same way that secluding oneself in a world informed by only positive and encouraging Christian music distorts one’s perspective into one that believes that the deep mysteries of an authentic faith could possibly fit in four minutes and three verses, equally distorted is on in which we try and imagine a world in which God is elusive in the secular arts. Truths about God are no less removed from a movie like “Juno” than grief and Tough Questions are removed from the worlds from which Christians produce art. If God is true, and what He is doing cannot be frustrated, why do we insist that it is best that we hide from those things?
With all that said then, I hope you will take the risk of seeing what truths about God you can find in movies like “The Shawshank Redemption,” or books like Eric Clapton’s autobiography, or an album like Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue“. Trying or not, conscious or not, and willing or not, culture simply reflects God’s handiwork amongst us Down Here. My question is, do you have enough faith to risk what you might find?
What everyone’s saying