hughbiquitous

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

—Umberto Eco

Eco thinks it is not the world that is terrible, but our drive to make sense of it. It strikes me that he is cutting off the limb he is sitting on: in saying this, is he not attempting to make sense of the world?

…[T]his idea that we live in a postmodern culture (and so, as a result, we must lay down our weapons of rationality, objectivity, and logic in order to meet the felt needs of people) is a Satanic deception that is inviting the church to commit suicide. …[T]his postmodernist stuff is really just the old-line modernism pretenting to be dead so that we think it’s no longer a threat, but then coming back around in the masquerade of postmodernism, saying, “you don’t need to worry about that old modernism anymore; you don’t need to worry about logic, rationality, and evidence,” and thereby get us, actually, to commit intellectual suicide ourselves.

—William Lane Craig, Beyond the Big Bang, speaking at the 2004 European Apologetics Network, June 6, 2004 (MP3 download)

Here’s the full quote:

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Kevin Schultz has been pondering whether “Christian Entertainment” is an oxymoron, and some good discussion ensued. Then I came across this on Justin Taylor’s blog this morning:

C.S. Lewis said we don’t need more Christian writers; we need more Christians who can write. Lewis and Tolkien wrote 50 years ago and are still influential today because their work had spiritual, intellectual and creative ballast. They would not have imagined operating in the kind of parallel universe that Christian media has become. They were mainstreamed. Last year alone their works sold in the millions.

At the risk of sounding uncharitable—50 years from now, how many copies of Left Behind and the Purpose Driven Life will be sold? Our popular culture is impoverished and the “Christian media culture” is satisfied to make money by serving crumbs off the table of that fallen culture, often dumbing down our faith in the process. Until we experience a spiritual, intellectual and creative renaissance, both culture and the parallel universe of Christian media will serve thin gruel, entertaining ourselves to death.

– Dick Staub, quoted in RELEVANT Magazine

This brought a few things into clear focus for me.

“Art” and “Entertainment” are two very different things.

Art appeals to the imago Dei, reminding us that we are clay in the hands of a divine Potter who creates works of unspeakable beauty. In that sense, art can be redemptive and inspiring.

Mere entertainment tends toward banality, narcissism, cynicism, and ontological insignificance. It sears that part of our consciences that is conscious of glory, majesty, and honor; it darkens our sense of virtue and propriety; it chases away our aspirations to do mighty deeds in the service of our sovereign; and it salves any remaining sense of remorse over our wretchedness.

It is a stinging indictment of our culture that the two are so easily conflated.

Our cultural bankruptcy as Christians is a sign that we have been taken in by the sacred/secular split.

By regarding some things as “Christian” and other things as “secular,” we too easily accept trash (so long as it’s Christian) and we too easily reject treasures of God’s grace (because they aren’t “Safe For The Whole Family™”). There is not one artistic masterpiece nor one work of genius that should not redound to the glory of the One who supplied the grace that made it possible. Likewise, as Abraham Kuyper said, “In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, ‘That is mine!’”

We are far too easily pleased.

You know what’s coming, but there’s no better way to say it:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased.

– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The church has abdicated her gravitas.

By becoming merely entertaining, increasingly banal, broadly insignificant, and uninspiringly content with her aspirations to mediocrity, the bride of Christ has become utterly dismissible. This is what Christ died to produce?

Weightlessness and glory are incompatible. If we are going to spread God’s fame in the world Christ died to redeem, we must not allow his bride to become inconsequential, apathetic, and feckless. Let us be emissaries of His glory who commend His character and His Kingdom for the greatness and the majesty that are His.

…The evangelical church lacks “a spiritual gravitas, one which could match the depth of horrendous evil and address issues of such seriousness. Evangelicalism, now much absorbed by the arts and tricks of marketing, is simply not very serious anymore”… And serious it should become.

I’m tempted to quote the whole review, and the reviewer (Doug Groothuis) was tempted to quote the whole book. David Wells’ Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ In A Postmodern World looks to be a must-read for this summer.

Gene Edward Veith concisely notes that postmodernism’s attempt to discount meaning is perhaps an tacit admission that meaning matters.

The problem has to do with our inability to understand things that are crystal-clear, yet leave us scratching our heads. Postmodernism tends to abandon objective meaning, preferring subjective interpretation instead. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, requires a humble embrace of the mystery and submission to what is clear… (more…)