Senses of the Soul: Art and the Visual in Christian Worship

By William Dyrness

Senses of the Soul explores the way art and visual elements are incorporated into Christian worship. It incorporates research conducted in Los Angeles congregations. Through extensive interviews in a sample of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox congregations it looks into the way visual elements actually become part of the experience of worship. By looking at attitudes and experiences of beauty, art, and memories, it suggests that believers appropriate images and aesthetic encounters in terms of imaginative structures that have been formed through worship practices over time. By comparing responses across denominations, the book proposes that people receive visual elements in ways that have been shaped by long traditions and specific background beliefs. In addition to discussions of the differences between the major Christian traditions, the book also examines the relation of art and beauty to worship, the role of memories and everyday life, and the power of images in spirituality and worship.

By its focus on the worshiper, the book seeks to make a contribution to the growing conversation between the arts and Christian worship and to the process of worship renewal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781498270274

William Dyrness

William Dyrness is Senior Professor of Theology and Culture in the School of Mission and Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of Poetic Theology (2011) and most recently The Origin of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe (2019).

Book preview

Senses of the Soul

Art and the Visual in Christian Worship

William A. Dyrness

2008.Cascade_logo.jpg

SENSES OF THE SOUL

Art and the Visual in Christian Worship

Art for Faith’s Sake 1

Copyright © 2008 William A. Dyrness. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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isbn 13: 978-1-55635-864-7

eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7027-4

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Photography by Kim Daus.

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Dyrness, William A.

Senses of the soul : art and the visual in christian worship / William A. Dyrness.

Art For Faith’s Sake 1

xvi + 182 p. ; 23 cm.

isbn 13: 978-1-55635-864-7

1. Christianity and the arts. 2. Christian art and symbolism. 3. Christian worship. 4. Protestant Churches—California—Los Angeles. 5. Catholic Church—California—Los Angeles. 6. Orthodox Eastern Church—California—Los Angeles. I. Title II. Series

br115. a8 d97 2008

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

art for faith’s sake series

series editors:

Clayton J. Schmit

J. Frederick Davison

This series of publications is designed to promote the creation of resources for the church at worship. It promotes the creation of two types of material, what we are calling primary and secondary liturgical art.

Like primary liturgical theology, classically understood as the actual prayer and practice of people at worship, primary liturgical art is that which is produced to give voice to God’s people in public prayer or private devotion and art that is created as the expression of prayerful people. Secondary art, like secondary theology, is written reflection on material that is created for the sake of the prayer, praise, and meditation of God’s people.

The series presents both worship art and theological and pedagogical reflection on the arts of worship. The series title, Art for Faith’s Sake,¹* indicates that, while some art may be created for its own sake, a higher purpose exists for arts that are created for use in prayer and praise.

forthcoming volumes:

Charles Bartow

Poetry

1*Art for Faith’s Sake is a phrase coined by art collector and church musician, Jerry Evenrud, to whom we are indebted.

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Virgin Mary figure, Holy Family Catholic Community, Glendale

5a.JPG

Side Chapel, St. Andrew’s Catholic Church, Pasadena

Preface

This is a study of the use Christian believers make of art and visual elements in their experience of worship. It is based on research conducted in a sample of Southern California congregations from the summer of 2005 through winter 2006. The questions that lay behind the research have occupied my attention over several decades. My doctoral research conducted at the University of Strasbourg 1968–1970 sought to explore the general relation between theology and the visual arts and focused on the work of the Catholic painter Georges Rouault. ² As a Protestant, I found it striking that a Catholic painter could find such ample resources for a visual interpretation of theology, while my own heritage offered little support for such efforts. In further study at the Free University of Amsterdam under Hans Rookmaaker, I began to explore issues related to the Protestant, and in particular, the Reformed Protestant heritage. But partly because academic interest in such conversations was not great at that time, I turned my attention to other theological (and administrative) concerns. It was not until the late 1990s and, especially with the founding of the Brehm Center for Worship Theology and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2001, that I was given opportunity to return to these questions and explore them in depth. ³

It soon became apparent to me that the more pertinent questions related not to the relation between theology and art in a general sense, as I had believed, but more particularly to the way theology was appropriated, for example, in worship, and how its practices made use of images—or were forbidden to do so. My historical research led me to believe that the Protestant tradition came to espouse a particular imagination that included—more prominently than is usually assumed—attitudes toward the visual. In Reformed Theology and Visual Culture I argued that the imagination of a religious tradition describes the way people give shape to their world, in particular through the images and practices that embody this world. This imagination, reflective of long processes of development, issues in a characteristic way of laying hold of the world and of God, and comes to expression in a peoples’ material culture and rituals—especially in their worship.⁴ I found the Protestant imagination sought to shape the world by an inward picturing of life that supplanted traditional external means of apprehending God. While this made certain traditional uses of the visual impossible, it opened the way for other ways of giving shape to the world. While I found ample historical and theological evidence for my thesis, I had no way of knowing whether such imaginations continue to function today, and, if they do, what form they take in terms of worship practices.

A grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to the Brehm Center in 2003 gave me opportunity to test these ideas in a sample of ten congregations in Southern California—four Protestant and three each from Orthodox and Catholic communions. Given the current revival of interest (and debate) about the nature of worship, much of which centers around the use of musical or aesthetic media in worship, it seemed an opportune time to explore these questions with ordinary worshipers. With input from theological advisors we selected ten active congregations that were roughly representative of their traditions’ attitudes and use of the arts. In the case of the Protestant congregations, we selected churches that had made or were making some use of the arts in their worship or their congregational life more generally.

Questions were drawn up to elicit attitudes toward the arts, beauty and visual elements in the interviewee’s personal and corporate worship. Preference was given toward more general questions that allowed respondents to fill in the details of their own visual preferences, and the relationship of these to their faith and worship practice. A sample of six congregants and two leaders—either pastors or worship leaders—was selected to interview from each congregation, in hour-long interviews. In this selection we attempted to be broadly representative—of gender, ethnicity, age, and experience in the church—while selecting respondents who had some interest in the questions we were asking. Interviews were conducted between June 2005 and March 2006. The protocols for congregants and leaders, and a list of participating churches are provided in an appendix.

There are obviously serious limitations to such a selection process that must be acknowledged. First, while being generally representative of their Southern California setting, no claim can be made that these persons speak for their tradition more generally. In our samples we engaged in what is called purposeful sampling. This is designed to understand certain select cases in their own right rather than to generalize to a population. It looks for important shared patterns cutting across cases.⁵ Moreover there is an obvious bias in the study toward the attitudes of Protestants, with the samples of Orthodox and Catholic believers used to provide important and suggestive points of comparison. In the nature of the case, the research perspective represents the location of the researchers in an Evangelical Protestant seminary and my own previous scholarly reflection on the Protestant tradition. So we make no claim that Orthodox or Catholic representations in the study are anything but provisional. And even our Protestant sample is not fully representative of Protestant congregations. Since our sample necessarily included churches engaged at some level with the arts, it was not necessarily representative in other ways. For example we ended up with churches more toward the Evangelical end of the theological spectrum and those influenced perhaps more by Calvin than, say, Luther. Obviously with other samples, including for instance tall steeple mainline churches, or Lutheran congregations, the results may well have been different.

Still the harvest of eighty interviews represents a significant sample of worshipers reflecting on their worship and its use of the visual. While leaders in some cases were professionally trained, the bias of the selection (and interpretation) was toward the voice of lay Christians in the three traditions. Listening to them provides the means of sketching out a vernacular theology of worship and the visual, something, that, to my knowledge, no one has attempted to this point. At the very least suggestions emerge which will provide insight and, perhaps impetus, for further research.

The scholarly context and resources used in the research is given in more detail in the introduction. After that there are chapters on each of the traditions, followed by chapters on particular issues that emerged during the course of the interviews: the relation of beauty to worship, the question of art and worship and finally the power of images. The central chapters on the major traditions are presented largely in terms the respondents themselves laid out. Only in the conclusion do we return to the more general questions raised in the introduction, and ask how these questions are answered, or reframed, by the results of the interviews. All quotes attributed to the respondents are taken from transcripts of the interviews; outside the introduction and conclusion, footnotes have been kept to a minimum in order to allow the voices of the respondents to stand on their own.

A project of this kind accumulates many debts. The major expression of appreciation has to be to the large group of respondents who eagerly gave their time and reflections. They represent for us a large body of committed and enthusiastic believers who love their congregations and appreciate its worship. They are all represented by pseudonyms in the narrative; only the pastors, as public figures, are represented by their own names. We are also grateful to the pastors and leaders not only for giving their time for interviews, but, without exception, supporting the project by opening doors (often literally) in their congregations. They too represent an admirable group of winsome and dedicated leaders. Another earlier version of the introduction will be published in a book Worship that Changes Lives, edited by Alexis Abernathy, forthcoming from Baker Academic, and I am thankful for Robert Hosack for permission to use parts of this here.

This research would not have been possible without the active participation of our student research assistants and the staff of the Brehm Center. We are grateful to Research Assistants Samuel Bills, Patronella Bosshardt, Grete Gryzwana, Jered Gritters, Rebecca Heneise, Chris Min, Nate Risdon, Heidi White, and Senior Researcher, Leah Buturain Schneider. The staff of the Brehm provided countless hours of support for the project. Grace Dyck, Erin Dunkerly, Lynn Reynolds, Kathleen Tiemubol and the many who worked to transcribe the interviews have earned our deep gratitude. The Executive Director of Brehm, Dr. Fred Davison was consistently supportive. We profited from senior consultants from the various traditions which contributed to an initial February 2004 symposium during which plans for the research were laid out: Dr. Lisa Deboer (Protestant); Fr. Robert Hale, OSB, and Leah Buturain Schneider (Catholic); and Fr. Antinious Henein, Fr. Michel Najim, and Anthony Shenoda (Orthodox). We were fortunate in being able to obtain the services of a first-rate photographer, Kim Daus-Edwards, who was able to make a visual account of the environment of these churches. The photographs reproduced in the book are hers. In addition other academic colleagues have been generous in support and suggestions: Todd Johnson, Clayton Schmit, Robert K. Johnston, Donald E. Miller, David Morgan, and John Witvliet. Colleagues from the churches were especially helpful in selecting and contacting respondents: Christene Sloan, John Tibura, Guy Higachi, Youssef Rassam, and Cathy Davis. My special gratitude goes to my spouse, Dr. Grace Roberts Dyrness, who trained the research assistants and kept me from many mistakes in the course of the study. Finally, all of us are grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation, and especially Dr. Michael Gilligan and Lynn Szwaja, without whose support this study would not have been possible.

2. This research was published as Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation.

3. See Visual Faith: Art, Theology and Worship in Dialogue and Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards.

4. See Dyrness, Reformed Theology, 3–7, especially 6.

5. Isaac and Michael, Handbook, 223.

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Altar and Sanctuary, Holy Family Catholic Community, Glendale

chapter 1

Introduction

Experiencing God through the Visual: A Methodological Inquiry into Imagery and Worship¹

Recently Chuck Smith Jr., pastor of a large Calvary Chapel in Southern California, dedicated his Thursday evening teaching session to the role of art in the Christian’s spiritual life. He had a short time previously traveled in Russia and fallen under the influence of Orthodox icons. On this evening his purpose was to help people see that art created with a spiritual intention could remove the veil that keeps us from seeing God’s glory as this was manifested supremely in Jesus Christ. He began by noting that Jesus, in an important sense, was an icon of God. An icon, he says, is the spiritual life of God revealed in human flesh. In a distant echo of John of Damascus, speaking during the eighth-century iconoclastic controversy, Pastor Smith goes on to argue that an icon can become a means for God’s grace flowing into our lives. Spiritual art, he concluded, can take us into uncharted realms. ²

This kind of exploration on the part of Protestants is increasingly common today. A generation ago it would have been unthinkable for a Protestant pastor to discuss icons with his congregation. But things are changing in Protestant attitudes toward icons and, indeed toward the visual arts in general. Still Pastor Smith was clearly struggling with vocabulary—what precisely, one wonders, does he mean by spiritual intention, and means of grace, or icon of God? This and the spirited discussion that followed his talk—he recognized that some (mostly former Catholics!) were probably put off by his discussion—indicates that Protestants have a good deal of work to do to develop a theological rationale, and a suitable language, for the use of pictures in their worship.

Recent Scholarship on the Use of the Visual in Religious Traditions

How does one go about discovering how Protestants like Chuck Smith are developing their rationale, and refining their language, for using visual elements in worship? Clearly, since his interest in icons and religious imagery is not untypical, and many in his congregation were raised as Catholics, any study of these issues would have to involve churches from the Orthodox and Catholic traditions as well. The first recourse for a theologian was to scholarly discussions by historians and theologians about the tradition(s) Pastor Smith represented. The use of art in Christian Churches has of course a rich history, and the bibliography reflecting this history is large. Some awareness of this tradition of study is obviously important for addressing current questions. An outline of Protestant (and Catholic and Orthodox) attitudes toward art and the visual is attempted later in this chapter.

In reflecting on these questions, however, it soon became evident that this secondary research had to be supplemented with primary research. It was not enough to ask scholars how people were supposed to understand visual elements, it seemed more important to ask how actual participants in worship actually received their traditions in so far as the visual was concerned. For help in this enterprise, I turned to scholars making broader use of social science methodologies in the study of religion in general, and of the visual in religion in particular.

Fortunately, scholars of religion have recently begun to pay significant attention to the material and visual culture of believers. While the study of religious visual culture has not yet become a field of study on its own, scholars have begun to provide methodologies by which to approach these questions—primarily various qualitative approaches based on ethnographic observation and interviews.³ These studies moreover are heir to important advances in the study of culture more generally.

A major component of this new approach has gone under the name of cultural studies which is a broad interdisciplinary approach to culture and cultural products that seeks to understand these in more holistic ways. Traditional approaches to, say, works of art, have focused almost entirely on their production. Art history monographs have studied the backgrounds and careers of artists as a means of understanding particular works of art. Scholars in cultural studies have sought rather to understand the whole trajectory of cultural artifacts from production and distribution, clear through to the uses to which these objects are put.⁴ Rather than seeing popular culture as an expression of a hegemonic mass culture, for example, cultural studies scholars (following the lead of anthropologists more generally) pay attention to the way people become agents in using this material to construct meaningful lives. An example of the application of this interdisciplinary approach, applied to religion, is Colleen McDannell’s important study of the material dimensions of religious practice.⁵ There she focuses on what she calls the material culture of various religions—the objects, images, and even the clothes—that believers use to support and express their religious convictions. People build religion into their personal and family landscape, she argues. These artifacts interact and fit into a system of exchange organized and given meaning by individuals.⁶

In the 1990s David Morgan began to make use of this approach in studying the response to popular religious imagery.⁷ In his book Visual Piety, building on the cultural studies approach, Morgan gathers testimonials of people’s response to popular imagery such as Warner Sallman’s famous Head of Christ. He found these images became collective representations for believers that express deeply felt interactions with the unseen world. Rather than privileging aesthetic contemplation, which, Morgan argues, reinforces class prejudices and overlooks the richly engaged character of religious experience, he shows how popular imagery features the comfort of the half forgotten texture of everyday life. Most important for our purposes, in showing the way images can make space familiar and personal, he helps us understand their role in making beliefs functional.

In 2003 Robert Wuthnow brought these questions to a wider audience in his major study of the relation between art, music, and spiritual vitality in American religion, All In Sync. Wuthnow finds a correlation between a high interest and involvement in spiritual practices and involvement in the arts, which leads him to argue that arts may be a potential source for the revitalization of religion. He hypothesizes that spirituality, which has experienced such a renaissance in America, needs carriers, which the arts can provide. They are, he believes, a significant . . . influence generating interest in spirituality.⁸ His study is especially interesting for the study of visual elements in Christian worship, because of the way he examines spirituality in its connection with organized religion. Serious interest in the arts, he finds, is correlated to an equally serious involvement in particular religious traditions and the basic acceptance of Christian beliefs. His findings provided suggestive impetus for studies like the present one. Somewhat problematic, however, is Wuthnow’s use of the arts, understood in a more formal way, including experience, education and—often—involvement at various levels, whether as consumers or creators. In this sense, his work, unlike Morgan’s, does not make extensive use of the cultural studies approach that we have outlined. Wuthnow is clearly sensitive to the fact that art needs to be put into a broader framework. At one point he notes, for example, material culture links the public dimensions of community life with the private experience of its members.⁹ But his focus on the arts, rather than visual culture more generally, does not allow him to take advantage of this in exploring how believers make use of a wide variety of visual and dramatic elements—in addition to art and music—in appropriating religious traditions. One of the surprising findings of our research was the complex relationship between art and Christian practice on the one hand, and the difficulty of isolating what we might call art or images, from general visual and religious practices on the other. This issue is explored in more detail in ch. 6.

Mark Chaves makes a similar case for the importance of the arts in his study of American congregations.¹⁰ He goes so far as to claim that, the arts, along with social service and civic engagement, constitute one of the central practices of congregational life. Indeed, discarding the outdated distinction between high and low culture, worship services are constructed in part out of artistic elements such as music, drama and dance.¹¹ His study leads him to conclude that places