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It is a pleasure to present a special guest post from my good friend Joan Gass, a rising junior at Yale University. Joan is one of the other Peer Liaisons in the Chaplain’s Office, and she’s spending her summer in Tunisia. She’s documenting her travels on her blog, and I’m very happy to have her permission to reproduce this insightful essay on the crucial role of modern religious artwork. And be sure to check out the version of the post on her blog for another wonderful selection of artworks.
Due to my inability to master simple stick-figure drawings, I have a huge respect for artists. Especially this one. I first encountered this painting in the Vatican Museum in the “Religious Modern Art” section. It’s a little blurry, but the painting is a depiction of the crucifixion, and the man on the right is the a painter, holding a pallet and a paint brush, looking at Jesus. I think it is a beautiful social commentary about the nature of creating art, implying that we project ourselves, our expectations, our bias, our experiences into artwork (and many other things, for that matter). This insight was particularly refreshing after the previous 2 hours I had spent in the Vatican Museum.
Walking through the Vatican Museum, which contained literally miles of art from Ancient Rome to the Renaissance, it was interesting to think about what type of situations and people were missing. In particular, there was a notable lack of people of color. Almost every figure depicted reflected the stereotypical Italian form – fairly light skin, brown hair, (and, if you are looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a particularly muscular body).
Perhaps, in some sense, this is to be expected. Italian artists used friends and family members around them as inspiration – a fairly ethnically homogenous set of models. In many ways, it reminds me of the blue eyed, nicely combed wavy brown haired and paled skinned Jesus of my childhood. This, however, is far from a historically accurate physical representation of any first century Palestinian nomad, who would have had much darker skin, dark eyes, and most definitely less styled hair.
So clearly art reflects a particular social context in which is created, but I think that also has implications for shaping our worldview and expectations today. It concerns me that this homogenous representation of religious artwork in so many ways seems to reaffirm social hierarchies of class, race, and gender. For some, the artwork in the Vatican contains absolutely no significance. But for others, such as myself, the Vatican Museum represented some of the same problematic depictions of religious artwork throughout childhood and in popular culture.
While I was in the Sistine Chapel, my audio guided tour talked about Michelangelo’s theology, how he viewed the body as a source of hope in creation despite great brokenness (as seen in the tortured bodies of The Last Judgment). This reflects a larger trend in Christianity, to see parts of humanity as redeemable — this is present in everything from the importance of the humanity of Jesus to the common themes of transformation and renewal. But I think it does violence to these ideas when the images that are used to convey this sense of hope and renewal don’t actually reflect the diversity of human life.
After all, to represent excerpts of the life of Jesus and parts of the New Testament in a way that actually reaffirms social inequality in their physical forms seems highly inconsistent with the narrative of a God that breaks through social expectations, gender norms, religious barriers, and constantly challenges systems of domination. I’m not advocating a return to a “historically accurate” portrayal of Jesus. Scholars greatly disagree on the physical depiction of Jesus, which is probably a good thing. I’m advocating that we should embrace diverse depiction of religious figures. What better way to affirm the radical inclusiveness of the gospels?
This is why I fundamentally think modern religious art is so important.
Modern religious art provides a space to break away from expected, and at times outdated, forms of religious imagery – to allow viewers to encounter divinity in their lives and their own communities as they have the chance to see their own reflection in the artwork.
Yet there needs to be more. Chagall merely brings attention to the process of creating religious art. For more boundary-pushing artists, I highly recommend:
Janet McKenzie’s Jesus of the People, winner of the National Catholic Reporter’s competition
Crucifixion by Sandra Yagi
Kittredge Cherry’s book “Art that Dares,” a Lambda Literary Award finalist
Of course, some will consider these images blasphemous. But I think its important to remember that, historically, we have taken plenty of liberty in our traditional religious imagery, which is unquestionably reproduced because it preserves dominant power structures. If Jesus can be blue eyed and white, Jesus can certainly be depicted as black, arab, gay, female etc. And after centuries of exclusion and violence perpetuated by the church through racism, sexism, and homophobia (just to name a few), such art certainly captures the essence of the gospel by affirming the inclusion of those who have been marginalized.
While modern religious art might present new representations of old stories, such representations that break down social expectations, inequality and social injustice should certainly be celebrated, not shunned and condemned, by our religious communities.
These were my musings as I walked through the Vatican. I’d love to hear your thoughts! And below I’ve included some of my additional favorites from the modern art collection in the Vatican Museum.
Follow Joan’s travels and musings at joan-tunisia.blogspot.com.
Adam Gopnik, “What Did Jesus Do?” in The New Yorker, May 24, 2010: 
If one thing seems clear from all the scholarship, though, it’s that Paul’s divine Christ came first, and Jesus the wise rabbi came later. This fixed, steady twoness at the heart of the Christian story can’t be wished away by liberal hope any more than it could be resolved by theological hair-splitting. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief. It can be amputated, mystically married, revealed as a fraud, or worshipped as the greatest of mysteries. The two go on, and their twoness is what distinguishes the faith and gives it its discursive dynamism. All faiths have fights, but, as MacCulloch shows at intricate, thousand-page length, few have so many super-subtle shadings of dogma: wine or blood, flesh or wafer, one God in three spirits or three Gods in one; a song of children, stables, psalms, parables, and peacemakers, on the one hand, a threnody of suffering, nails, wild dogs, and damnation and risen God, on the other. The two spin around each other throughout history—the remote Pantocrator of Byzantium giving way to the suffering man of the Renaissance, and on and on.
Thoughts?
Also posted here.
Recently I’ve been reading J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement, an exploration of atonement from an Anabaptist perspective that assumes the nonviolence of God. Weaver discards both traditional Anselmian substitutionary atonement and Abelardian Moral Influence atonement, embracing instead the earlier conception of atonment (popular with the church fathers) “Christus Victor“. In Christus Victor, Christ’s death is seen as a ransom to the Devil; Weaver reformulates this theory as “narrative Christus Victor”, explains the death of Christ not as a desirable facet of God’s plan for humanity or as instance of “divinely-sanctioned violence”, but rather as the inevitable result of a life lived in opposition to the violent powers of oppression in the world. The Resurrection thus demonstrates that the rule of these powers is shattered forever, and that the Kingdom of God is breaking into the world. Narrative Christus Victor emphasizes the entire life and work of Christ as central to the concept of atonement — not just the crucifixion and resurrection, which are here viewed as the natural result and final victory, respectively, of Christ’s message.
In three consecutive chapters of the book, Weaver examines the challenges to traditional substititonary atonement made by black theology, feminist theology, and womanist theology. Contextual theologies are especially valuable in considering the nature of Christ’s work becuase all three grow out of the historical situations of oppressed groups — exactly the sorts of group that Jesus himself focused on (Luke 4.18f). These examples of what might be termed “theology from the margins” all deal significant blows not just to traditional atonement, but also to traditional conceptions Christology.
Black, feminist, and womanist theologies stand largely outside of the doctrinal tradition of the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds, and a central point that Weaver makes is that these creeds are just as contextualized and just as much a product of specific historical circumstances as are the theologies of various oppressed groups. In other words, the Nicene-Chalcedonian tradition is not a definition of “universal orthodoxy” any more than, say, the writings of James Cone, but the white European church has long assumed that this tradition is normative because of its status as the church of the privileged. All three of the contextual theologies that Weaver discusses note that the Christology embodied in the Nicene-Chalcedonian tradition de-emphasizes the ethical character of the Incarnation in favor of abstract metaphysical definitions (hypostasis, etc.). Indeed, the portion of the Nicene Creed that talks about Jesus skips straight from his birth to the crucifixion, without so much as a mention of his ministry. Black theology in particular notes that the philosophical abstraction of traditional orthodoxy allowed slave owners and other oppressors to be “good Christians” while systematically ignoring Christ’s ethical message.
All this is not to say that the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds lack value in seeking to understand the person of Christ. But I believe that the Christology embodied in these statements is incomplete, and indeed is rather unimportant when compared to the things that are left out — especially ethics. Those of us who don’t hail from marginalized groups (i.e., those of us who are born into privilege) must recognize that our theological tradition is contextual too, and that its defects (especially its separation of metaphysical Christology from ethics) have been used to inflict oppression and injustice against others, including other Christians. We must supplement our philosophical Christology with what I would term a “narrative Christology”, a doctrine of Jesus that focuses on his ministry and life, which embodied a particular ethical message that should be normative for all Christians. A properly-formulated narrative Christology would reflect the insights of the contextual theologies of the oppressed and would help return the privileged segments of the Church to a fuller knowledge of what it means to be Christian.
Narrative Christology could very well be non-creedal, drawing from the Gospels alone rather than from “standardized” statements. But if a creed were needed (either for liturgical purposes or to help elevate narrative Christology to the status of the Nicene-Chalcedonian tradition), I would suggest one like this:
We confess Jesus Christ of Nazareth, born of Mary in the lowliest of places and amidst the oppression of Empire. We confess his message, a proclamation of good news to the poor, of liberty to captives, of sight to the blind, of freedom to the oppressed.
We confess that Jesus Christ of Nazareth resisted the temptations of the systems of the world. He healed the sick, cast out demons, fed the hungry, and preached to the poor. He brought a message of peace into a world of violence and a message of love into a world of legalism.
We confess that Jesus Christ of Nazareth challenged the hypocrisy, corruption, and oppression of the religious and political leaders of his day, and that he announced a new Kingdom in the midst of the old. We confess that for this, he was arrested, brought to trial, and crucified, the death of a criminal or insurrectionist.
We confess that Jesus Christ of Nazareth arose from death. We confess that in his resurrection he triumphed over the powers of oppression and evil that had killed him, and that in his resurrection he demonstrated the final efficacy of the message he proclaimed.
In the life and the resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth we place our faith. Amen.
Narrative Christology, whether in creedal or non-creedal form, thus fills a critical gap in the most emphasized parts of traditional Christology. It is my hope that methods of Christological exploration like the one I describe here can be used to bridge the gaps between the theology of the church of privilege and the theologies of the oppressed. Vox victimarum, vox Dei.
On his blog Unorthdoxology, David Henson recently asked a question: What if God had become woman instead [of man]? I’ve asked questions of this sort myself, such when I pondered the possibility of Jesus returning as female in the Second Coming. But now, triggered by Henson’s post and by some reading I’ve been doing, I want to address a much more fundamental question. Why, the first time around, did God decide to become man? For someone like me, who believes that the Bible teaches the full equality of men and women (and who believes that God transcends gender), this is an important question, with real implications for understanding the Incarnation.
The past week or so I’ve been reading Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be. Wink is brilliant. This is the second book of his that I’ve read (the first being the short work Jesus and Nonviolence), and already he is one of my favorite theologians, with N. T. Wright and Stanley Hauerwas. The Powers That Be is based on his award-winning Powers trilogy, and concerns Jesus’ message about what Wink calls the “domination system” of the world. Wink puts forward a view of the powers of the world as fallen but redeemable, and advances a methodology of nonviolence to further the redemptive grace and love of God.
I haven’t finished reading the book, but I have completed Chapter 3, which details Jesus’ answer to domination. The chapter has a section on Christ’s interactions with women. It blew my mind. I had already figured out that Jesus treated women unconventionally for his day (read John 4), but it wasn’t until I read Wink’s analysis last night that I understood the full extent of the Gospel portrayal of Jesus’ radical notions on the value of women. As Wink writes, “his approach to women had no parallel in ‘civilized’ societies since the rise of patriarchy over three thousand years before his birth”.
For example, in Luke 13 Jesus heals a women, and thereafter calls her a “daughter of Abraham”. Wink notes that this title is found nowhere else in ancient Jewish writings; by inventing it, Jesus made the radical claim that women were coequal with men (“sons of Abraham”) in the Covenant with God, not participants in the Covenant through their husbands or fathers. An even more disquieting (for patriarchists) statement by Christ is found in Mark 3. Jesus states that “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”. Wink writes: “Note the deliberate omission of the father…. That this omission … is no accident is shown by Jesus’ statement ‘Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father–the one in heaven’ (Matt. 23.9). In the new family of Jesus there are only children, no patriarchs.” Christ makes these claims not to devalue the legitimate role of fathers in families, but rather to utterly undermine the oppressive patriarchal domination systems that characterized ancient Israel.
This leads me back to my original question: Why did Christ come as a man? –especially in light of his clear hatred of patriarchy and his loving treatment of women? I believe that it is this very rejection of patriarchal oppression that explains God’s choice of gender for the Incarnation. Had God been born a woman, her rejection of patriarchy could indeed have spurred women to action, and ultimately led to female liberation; yet, in a patriarchal culture, it would have done nothing for men. But in the context of the first century, the repudiation of male domination by a man would have brought notice and even wonderment (see John 4.27) among other men. The Kingdom of God alone can set the oppressed and the oppressors free. God could have easily freed women by coming by as a woman (for obviously women do not need men to save them); but Christ came as a man so that, by treating women as equals and modeling their liberation, he could also free men from a system that was turning them into oppressors and thus was destroying their humanity. Jesus’ message, a message made possible by his maleness in the Incarnation, does the impossible: it redeems us all, liberating women and men alike.
I recently read Philip Hefner’s short book Technology and Human Becoming, which deals with the theology of technology. Central to Hefner’s work is the idea of technology as a ‘sacred space,’ wherein religious and spiritual questions take on meaning as full and as varied as in any other context.
Hefner also deals with the theological implications of cyborgs, the melding of human and machine, understood both in the most basic sense and as an emerging aspect of human becoming resulting from integration of technology into our lives. Noting that we are all turning into ‘techno-humans’ and that Homo Sapiens is becoming Techno Sapiens, the author ponders a critical and fascinating question: ‘If the techno-human, the cyborg, is created in the image of God, what does that tell us about God?’
I would add another question: What does that tell us about the Incarnation? For in the Incarnation God became man, and thus presumably if the Incarnation were to occur today instead of 2000 years ago, God would become techno-man (or techno-woman). And furthermore, if today the human race is moving towards ‘Techno Sapiens’ and away from the Homo Sapiens of twenty centuries back, what relevancy does the actual historical Incarnation have for us, for the cyborgs that we are becoming?
I believe that, in a very real sense, if humans are becoming machines, then the God-human, Jesus Christ, can be approached as a God-machine in our lives. For ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’; in a purely historical sense, this means that the Word became bone, muscle, sinew and skin, but in a broader theological sense it means that the Word became whatever it is human beings are. Human beings are changing, but this change does not alter the relevancy of the Incarnation.
I addressed a similar question a while back, in response to a blog post by Rev. Jeremy Smith. He wrote, One of the tenets of Christianity is that Jesus is God-with-us, Emmanuel, human. How do we preach the Incarnation in a world where we can craft virtual space so easily and completely? My response to the question I pose now is the same as that to the question he posed then. We must conceive of the Incarnation as story, as a narrative truth that, though historically grounded, transcends the confines of historical detail.
Thus it might be appropriate someday for us to understand John 1.1-4,14 like this:
At time t=0 there was Information, and Information was with God and Information was God. Information was at time t=0 with God. All software and hardware was programmed and manufactured by Information, and without Information nothing was manufactured and constructed. In Information was intelligence and awareness, and intelligence and awareness was the light and electricity of cyborgs.
And the Information was programmed into hardware and software and resided amongst us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of an inventor’s only prototype, full of grace and truth.
