Traditionally, Anabaptists have been wary of the visual arts in worship. This article, however, observes that modern culture presents unique challenges that were not present during the early Anabaptist opposition to the arts and that can be met by artists. Thus, the article calls for a union of art and ethics and a dual concern for both the transcendent and immanent, resulting in the intentional and imaginative use of the visual arts in worship.
Our problem with the arts is rooted in our rather uncritical adherence to Anabaptism. Any resolution must begin with a recognition that the Anabaptists joined other reformers in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. All the senses were employed in Roman Catholic faith and worship. But in the interest of reforming the church of the day, or even recreating the New Testament church, a significant narrowing occurred; the Word—the written Word and the heard Word—became the front and center focus for the mainline reformers. The Anabaptists added a significant qualifier: the acted Word, or better, the incarnate Word.
In the reformation process, what happened to all the other senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste? Particularly for the Reformed and the Anabaptists, these senses were at best adiaphora, at worst dangerous distractions from the true Christian faith. The arts were thus casualties of the Reformation, and to this day they struggle to regain legitimation within the reformational traditions—not least the Mennonite tradition.
Proposal with Reference to Mennonites and the Arts. A series of theses—not ninety-five, only an immodest eight—outline a modest proposal regarding Mennonites and the arts.
Thesis I: All theologizing, and all thinking about the Christian faith, is relative to a context, to a historical situation. Language, culture, economic conditions, and political dynamics shape the questions and provide a contour to the answers.
The discussion of Mennonites and the arts in our day is not without context, not without history. Certain internal and external dynamics to the Mennonite tradition bring us to this moment when artists consider their corporate place in the larger Mennonite community. Space need not be taken here to analyze why this discussion arises now rather than some years ago. A comparative note may, however, be interesting. Whereas in earlier centuries the arts flourished among the Mennonites in Holland, they are less prominent today. The current renaissance of the arts among Mennonites is primarily a phenomenon of the immigrant Mennonite cultures like those of North America. Why this is so is a question for another essay.
Thesis II: Anabaptist theology in the sixteenth century was defined, at least in part, over against a Roman Catholicism that was rich in its sense of the transcendent world and its aesthetic correlates, but weak in its response to the immanent world and its ethical correlates.
The restitutional impulse tends to overreact, to confuse manifestation with essence. The Anabaptists largely assumed traditional theological commitments; they assumed the reality of the transcendent order, so they paid little attention to such matters. In order to recapture ethics, they abandoned aesthetics. The two were considered alien to each other. Anabaptists joined Zwingli in his iconoclasm, smashing organs and even, for a time, negated the legitimacy of singing. Aesthetic perversions required the exorcising of the aesthetic, they seemed to say. (This is detailed in Rodney J. Sawatsky’s “Symbol as Reality: Christianity as Art” an unpublished lecture presented to the symposium on “The Arts and the Prophetic Imagination: Expressions of Anguish and Hope” at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, January 13, 1991.) The degree to which the aesthetic served as a necessary pillar of the transcendent was apparently unrecognized. Transcendence, however, was not their problem.
Thesis III: Mennonites, in their quest to be faithful to their Anabaptist origins, have wrongly assumed that they must continue to emphasize precisely what the Anabaptists emphasized because they have failed to contextualize theological emphases. Accordingly, four centuries later Mennonites still do not have a place for aesthetics.
The Editorial Committee of the recently published Mennonite Encyclopedia V did not include an article on aesthetics. I must, as a member of that Committee, take part of the blame for this omission. My sense is that even Mennonite artists tend to reduce aesthetics to ethics, and so they too may not have noted this oversight. If Mennonites think in terms of the classical trinity of the good, the true, and the beautiful, they have a limited place for beauty and are concerned primarily with the good. This parallels another tendency among Mennonites, namely reducing theology to ethics or collapsing the question of truth into the quest for goodness. Such narrowing of the agenda fails to consider the late twentieth-century context and functions as if the sixteenth-century worldview remains alive and well.
Thesis IV: Since the world in which or over against which we shape our theology is so profoundly different today than in 1525, we are not faithful to our forefathers and foremothers by repeating their response to their culture. Indeed in our day, we may well need to say precisely the opposite of what was said on some matters in the sixteenth century. (For a parallel discussion see: Walter Klaassen, “The Quest for Anabaptist Identity,” in Anabaptist-Mennonite Identities in Ferment, Leo Driedger and Leland Harder, eds. [Elkhart, Indiana: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1990].)
We live in a world where a transcendent and a personal God is not assumed. The opposite is true. We are the measure of all things; we will make and remake the world; we are the creative and the creators; we will mold, make, and realize ourselves. If there is a god at all it is a god of self, of nature, or of community, or of justice. All is immanence! Human action and human beings are all.
The Anabaptist concern to recapture a place and role for the immanent, for human decision and human action is victorious in our day, but with the victory has also come defeat. For the Anabaptists, ethics were always related to God; they were a response of obedient faithfulness to God. The transcendent referent of our action is, for the most part, lost in modernity.
Sadly, the sense of a transcendent God is being eroded not only outside but also inside the church. We struggle against great odds to maintain a sense of the superhuman dimension in our understanding of reality. Theology is so readily reduced to psychology and politics. Perhaps this is why some are drawn to Anglicanism, Pentecostalism, or even the occult, where transcendence still seems a reality.
Hence to be countercultural, to challenge the world, to be nonconformist, to be biblical, to be faithful to Jesus today will necessarily mean being different from the reformers of the 1500s. Today we need less human action and much more of God’s reality, or better said, we need to place all human action in relation to God’s reality.
Thesis V: Words, literal words, are very limited vehicles to communicate transcendent reality. Metaphors, symbols, icons, and harmonies nurture the imagination with rumors of angels. If ethics were a necessary corrective in the sixteenth century, aesthetics is the necessary corrective for the late twentieth century.
Our artists carry a heavy burden in our day. We need them today more than ever before to create new metaphors, symbols, and icons that connect us spiritually, emotionally, and imaginatively with the God who is beyond our grasp.
Thesis VI: While in the sixteenth century we emphasized ethics and basically negated aesthetics, today we should not follow suit by emphasizing aesthetics to the exclusion of ethics. The two need not be and ought not to be over against each other, but rather close partners in the Christian cause.
Yet, Mennonite aesthetics has too often been subsumed under ethics. Out of their own sense of alienation and marginality in relation to both the church and the larger society, as well as out of their own sensitivities to the injustices around them, Mennonite artists have repeatedly painted the picture of human brokenness and played the sounds of human discord. Their message has been that of the ethical prophets crying “woe, woe.” Surely little can sensitize as profoundly to human evil as the arts can.
But does our world not know all about brokenness? Is such imitation of brokenness really prophetic, or is it simply falling into lockstep with cultural inertia? What we lack is a vision of peace and of wholeness rising out of the ashes. We have all kinds of pretty and nice and superficial, but above all, we lack beauty! We desperately need a recovery of aesthetics.
Thesis VII: The modern assumption that aesthetics is all in the eye of the beholder must be challenged. Aesthetics in this century has been completely relativized. Beauty no longer is premised on any objective criteria. Subjectivism and individualism reign. In turn, self-indulgence is the constant temptation of the artist.
If the arts can be a major means to regain a sense of the transcendent in our materialistic, scientific, technological world, then art and the artist will necessarily move beyond subjectivism and individualism to consider both the larger community and a more objective understanding of beauty.
Art, by definition, is a lonely task. It is not a function of a committee. It is an expression of individuality, of individual imagination and creativity, but not necessarily an expression of individualism. Art at its best is not created simply for the artist, or for fellow artists, but for the edification of the larger human community.
Regaining some objective criteria for beauty is difficult. Yet we desperately need to try. Ethics have faced the same morass. Yet ethicists, especially Christian ethicists, have refused to opt for a complete relativistic subjectivism. Surely Christian artists must do the same with aesthetics.
The cultural norm says aesthetics is dead. A countercultural response insists that normativity in the arts as in ethics is alive and well and living in the Christian community.
Thesis VIII: A primary arena, although definitely not the only arena, for the artist’s call in the postmodern world is in public worship. It is in and through worship that the God who is not limited by time and space, by human action and imagination, is best known (See John Rempel, “Christian Worship: Surely the Lord is in this Place,” The Conrad Grebel Review: A Journal of Christian Inquiry 6 [Spring 1988]: 101-118).
Words are of great importance in worship. Our preaching and our prayers desperately need to relearn the power of well-crafted and well-delivered words. Indeed words, both written and spoken, need to be reclaimed for their symbolic and poetic possibilities and power. Yet words are limited. The nonverbal arts offer us vehicles to realize the reality of the transcendent more powerfully than can any preached word.
If the arts are to fulfill their calling in worship, they will point not to the artist, but through the art to God. This kind of art in recent decades is relatively rare. But it is the kind we all long for, and which is vital to a renewal of a multidimensional cosmos in which God is alive, moving, and being.