Sunday 29 July 2012

Blinded?

"Such a fatal kiss stolen from heaven's lips" Magenta - Broken








It's an argument fraught with pitfalls and betrayal, broken lives and erroneous theology... the signs are all clear, 'cliffs ahead - turn back or face deadly perils'. That's the reasoning commonly advanced when concerned people come across anything that seeks to advance any 'redemptive' message with regards to a Christian involvement in culture and especially with regards to creative nudity... don't go there, plain and simple.


There's no doubt we can suffer harm when we 'engage' with this world of ours - just getting on with the normal business of the day can be pretty distressing some days - but we can equally be scarred by an approach that withdraws from life and creates a notion of spirituality and piety that pretty well denies the value and the goodness of the material purely on the basis that it can be detrimental.


Nudity (as opposed to imposed nakedness) is beautiful, and that is why art has celebrated the human form throughout the history of our race, so is such an expression entirely wrong? That certainly does not seem to join too well with either the essential manner of our being (as defined in the creation record) or the celebration of the sensual or erotic as found within scripture itself - these gifts are good, it is purely the way we set about using them which really produces their rightness or their spoiling.






In ancient Greece, as in other cultures, nude images were fashioned to convey a manner of beauty and perfection which expressed the divine, and as such, sought to woo society into a veneration of gods (ideals) that could be achieved by the thinking and expression of that culture - a march to an ascendancy of our own doing. In the art of the Renaissance, the goal was often entirely different - to express how God, enveloped in humanity, had come to save (reconcile and redeem) mankind and the world which had been bound in futility because of our rebellion (and therefore, couldn't facilitate our own schemes of perfection). Art, then, can be used either to bind us to broken ideals or to point towards a deeper, truer understanding of ourselves and our world.


Such a consideration, of course, is fraught with troubles. If Christians can embrace a value to the unclothed body outside of the marriage chamber, then that has to mean we cannot discard the nude in art to this waste bin of 'damaged goods' beyond the reach of our engagement with life. It means we have to take on board early nude baptisms in the church, early use by Christians of the Roman baths, early Christian images that depict the naked form. It means we have to accept the illustration of the Christian life of the runner, discarding anything which would slow his advance (including clothes in the ancient world) to win the race and gain the prize, or the focus of all, Christ Himself, naked and crucified, 'placarded' before us in His death and at the heart of the Gospel, to save and rescue the world God loves.




Perhaps this is why so many in the church today wish to place any engagement with art in a 'Sunday school' imagery category... it can be used, so long as it's not too real (lots of 'meek and mild' images), and certainly nothing that points too 'graphically' at the grime and grit of life. It's not too hard, when this approach becomes key, to understand why we have so little to say to the everyday realities around us.
Christ was a man found amongst the great 'sinners' of His time, and speaking from there to the pious concerning the nature of their great blindness. Paul clearly taught the early church not to distance themselves from the immoral around them, but to hold out the word of life amidst a corrupt generation -
is that what we're about when it comes to using a medium like art? Could our church or ministry ever nurture or encourage a Michelangelo or a Bach? Where are the communities which show the vitality of a Christian spirituality that shouts God is in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself?


The genuinely spiritual has to honor and enjoy whatsoever is good and honorable, and praiseworthy, and the 'glory' of the human body is most certainly part of that, within the wonder of the union between husband and wife, yes, but also, in the redemption of our bodies for the day coming when all of creation is renewed in Christ Jesus.


Using any gift to encourage wickedness or wrongdoing is indeed contrary to what Christ has done, but burying the gifts He wishes us to use well is equally as dangerous as squandering them.


The world needs to be 'romanced' by the beauty He has given to us in our times. It's often a case that what's required is not prohibition to a realm, but seeing what's there 'with better eyes' than we have before.







Images of Magenta by Howard.