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METHODOLOGY AND THEOLOGY IN THE (VISUAL) ARTS

One of the most important questions faced by anyone thinking about theology and the visual arts, is the question of why in the Protestant tradition the ear has been privileged over the eye as the means by which God can be accessed in worship and devotion. What is at stake theologically by this favoring of the oral? And what might it mean to consider an alternate, broader, perspective of theological experience in which the oral and visual are seen to interact (as in fact they always do)? There are many historical reasons for this oral prejudice, but for our purposes I will leave those to one side and focus on the uniquely theological issues behind the question. Even this is difficult to do, for these (apparently) simple questions hide a nest of theological assumptions—about God, revelation, and the nature of salvation. But I want to focus in particular on what we will call theological experience—that is, the way the believer comes to know God (in the biblical sense of knowing) through the “hearing of the word.”

Calvin first expressed the Protestant view this way: “Whatever men learn of God in images is futile, indeed false, the prophets totally condemn the notion that images stand in the place of books” (Inst. I, xi, 5). By contrast God has bidden that “in the preaching of his Word and sacred mysteries…a common doctrine be there set forth for all. But those whose eyes rove about in contemplating idols betray that their minds are not diligently intent upon this doctrine” (I, xi, 7). The suggestion that preaching is a better antidote than images to our human tendency to let our mind wander in worship, I will leave to one side, for the point Calvin wants to make is primarily theological rather than pastoral. As he goes on to say, the pure preaching of the word provides a way in which God can be grasped by a faculty that is “far above the perception of our eyes” (xi, 12), which is the faculty of faith. Interestingly he argues that in preaching “Christ is depicted before our eyes as crucified” in a way far superior to a “thousand crosses of wood and stone”(xi, 7 emphasis added), though this depiction is inward—before what we have come to call “our mind’s eye.”

Now the question that comes to mind when I read this is: However important this conjunction of hearing and faith of the preached word and the “inner eye” may be, why does this common connection necessarily exclude the role of other media in bringing people to faith? Indeed, Why is the ear any more suitable than the eye to receive truth? Has not the corruption of sin affected what we hear as well as what we see? Or to put this in a more positive way: Since we have so miserably lost our way in the labyrinth of sin, as Calvin liked to say, can we not use all the help we can get, whether visual or oral (or even kinesthetic or gastronomic!), to point us in the right direction?

Indeed, I believe Calvin’s own theology not only allows for the visual but actually encourages it. Creation itself, Calvin says, is a theatre for God’s glory: “Let us not be ashamed to take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theatre” (I, xiv, 20), and “There is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most beautiful system of the universe in its wide expanse without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness” (I, xi. 1). Calvin of course is on solid biblical ground here. In Romans 10, where Paul seems to take the most Protestant line in saying “faith comes by what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ” (v. 17), he goes on immediately to ask, but have they not all “heard”? “Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world,” he says, quoting Psalm 19. What are these words? They are the splendors of creation which themselves preach the goodness and mercy of God. So Calvin says preaching depicts things before our eyes; Paul reverses it and says things before our eyes can preach.

Whatever else this connection of the verbal with the visual order of creation means, at least it implies that verbal communication depends on its creaturely (and thus its visual) context. While it is surely the case that creation could not communicate anything to us apart from our experience with actual language and voices, the fact is that the visual and the oral are constantly interacting in our experience. We, surely, could not speak of the “voice of nature” without having had the experience of real voices and words, but the reverse is true as well. The very development of language and thought depends on visual reality and metaphor (cf. M. Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason [University of Chicago Press, 1990]). Recent studies have argued that similarly our emotional life is dependent on our being embodied. Therefore the visual and emotional are also inextricably related (cf. A.R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens [Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1999]).

In this respect, I note that theologians’ experiences frequently belies their theory. In words that echo the line of theologians since Calvin, J.I. Packer argued, “Those who make images and use them in worship and thus inevitably take their theology from them, will in fact tend to neglect God’s revealed will at every point. The mind that takes up with images is a mind that has not yet learned to love and attend to God’s word” (Knowing God [Hodder and Stoughton, 1978] 53). But not long ago I heard him express the way a recent experience of seeing a dancer in the ballet, Swan Lake, moved him to see more deeply than ever before the meaning of grace. Now one might say that he never would have had such an experience apart from a long encounter with the written and preached word. But the very fact of the experience indicates that the visual (and dramatic) can at a minimum complement and deepen what we have heard in preaching.

After all it is not sounds and voices that save us but the reality of the love of God as this is expressed in Jesus Christ and mediated by the Holy Spirit. And this can come to us through a variety of media. In his discussion of the icon and the western tradition of art, P. Evdokimov quotes the iconoclastic Synod of Paris in 824: “Christ did not save us by paintings…” (The Art of the Icon [Oakwood Publications, 1990] 167). To this Evdokimov retorts: “Nor by a book, we might add.”

Both sacred icons and sacred books, however, are potential vehicles for the greater reality of grace. This of course calls for qualification, for Scripture is not sacred to Protestants in the same way that icons are to the Orthodox, or the Koran is to a Moslem. Still, Scripture is, Protestants believe, a unique vehicle of the Holy Spirit, but is it the exclusive vehicle of that Spirit? Barth argued that the Bible “becomes the word of God,” when God brings home to the reader (or hearer) God’s reality in the text. Evangelicals were horrified at this supposed confusion between, “revelation” and “illumination,” but Barth’s point is an important one. Revelation, even the revelation of Scripture, does nothing in itself to “save” people, apart from something happening with its truth. The experience of all believers will include an elaborate list of the ways the Spirit “brings home” this truth: seeing oneself in a new way when hearing a parable, sitting in an evangelistic rally, putting a stick in the campfire, experiencing the birth of a child, watching a sunset, or even a ballet. All of these involve imaginative projection, visual images, and dramatic events. Where they are not actual dramatic events or works of art, they include constituent elements of such works. Are these experiences not theologically significant?

The truth is, of course, our history and traditions have, for the most part, had any specified role for the arts (or the visual) leached out of them. So even when we love art and practice it as Christians—as is more frequently happening —this is only tangentially related to our worship or devotional lives. Only a revolution in our church and worship lives can change this—something for which many of us work and pray. But at least this brief discussion may have gone some way toward showing the theological problems to such a revolution are not insurmountable.

By William A. Dyrness, Professor of Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary, and author of Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue (Baker, 2001).