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Christ and the Arts: An Interview with Jerram Barrs (Part 2)

Interview by Matthew Claridge–

See the previous part of this interview here.

What’s your take on the age-old debate over the regulative and normative principle of worship? Any thoughts on the proper role of art in corporate worship?

I taught a course on Worship for many years at covenant Seminary which is, as you know, a Reformed Seminary. Naturally, then, I passionately believe in the Regulative Principle. Let me explain simply what this principle entails for the sake of the readers. The Regulative Principle teaches us that just as we are to structure the leadership of our churches in obedience to the patterns taught by Scripture, so we are to offer  God worship that accords with the pattern that he has laid down in Scripture. So, as I taught on worship, I asked, “as we look at the way the Lord describes worship in Scripture, what are the fundamental principles which ought to shape the way we prepare worship services and the way we think about our worship?” This idea is not to be considered narrowly. The Bible does not tell us anywhere how long a worship service is to be, or how many hymns to sing, or how long a sermon is to be, how they are to be structured. On a deeper level, we should ask, “what is a biblical way of worshiping God?” On that basis, we can set out some principles that are at the heart of worship. First, there is the redemption that Christ has won us, because without his sacrifice there is no acceptable form of worship. Second, all worship ought to be faithful to God’s word; there should be nothing that would be in disagreement with Scripture. The context of every hymn we sing, or prayer we offer is its faithfulness to the content of Scripture. And so on. I would actually set out a list of about nine principles about how we should think about structuring worship.

But within this pattern of the regulative principle there is a great deal of freedom in terms of what we can use for worship. For instance, there is great freedom in the kind of melodies we can use, to freely draw from every moment in the life of the church, to use melodies that actually fit the songs we are singing. The church has always done this. We are not required to find out what kind of melodies that David used 3000 years ago, and only use those melodies today. In fact, if we could find them we probably would consider them rather strange to our ears. The Bible does not require us to reconstruct what worship was exactly like in the 1st century or any other century.

Accordingly, culturally appropriate worship is a biblical principle. Again, think of the Psalms and proverbs, which I brought up in a previous question, which are cultural forms that God gladly allowed his people to use. In the same way, our worship should reflect the forms that are culturally appropriate for our own day. People don’t need to come to church and hear something entirely alien to them in terms of music, or in terms of the clothes we are wearing. They need to be able to come to church and hear something that they recognize. I think of Paul’s words in 1Cor. 14, “if I am worshiping God in another tongue, or language, which no one can understand, then the unbeliever will come and say when he attends, ‘there is nothing here for me,’ and go out.” In which case, I am basically judging the unbeliever by saying, “we don’t want you and we don’t have anything for you.” So as the church in every generation must translate the Word of God, so our sermons, prayers, and hymns should be translated into an idiom that is accessible to people around us.

A wonderful example of this comes from Calvin at the time of the Reformation. In Geneva, for the first time, Calvin commissioned psalms that would be sung in the poetic form and language of the people of Switzerland. Rather than using Latin, which no one could understand, Calvin insisted that worship had to be reformed and thoroughly biblical which meant it must be understandable. Furthermore, Calvin didn’t feel compelled to use a Hebrew poetic idiom when translating the psalms. Hebrew poetry doesn’t have rhyme or a regular meter to it. European poetry does, and Calvin translated the psalms into French with a regular rhythm and rhyme. He commissioned a court composer from France who had been converted to the Reformed faith to compose the melodies to the psalms. Some of these melodies we still sing today, most famously the Old One Hundredth—“all people that on earth do dwell.” Some people at the time objected, “this music is inappropriate for worship. These are nothing but Geneva Jigs.” But Calvin was doing something very biblical here, using a poetic form and language that was accessible to his contemporaries. This has to be done in every generation if we are to obey the Regulative principle.

What is the proper role of art in corporate worship? Again, we must turn to the word of God. In the OT, we see the Temple and tabernacle being build after the pattern of a heavenly temple in heaven which Moses saw on Mt. Sinai. In that temple there are all kinds of beautiful art, all kinds of sculpture, engravings, and fabrics. Moses is called to find artists who are good at what they do who are filled with the Spirit of God. David’s gifts as a song and melody writer were used in the worship of the Temple. And still today, God calls us to use our creative gifts in the worship of Him. Nothing’s changed there.

In the context of church worship, we need to use hymns that not only have faithful content in them but also represent good poetry and good melodies. We want to entourage Christians to write good poetry, hymns, and produce good art for corporate worship that is simply good and beautiful in its own right. We should not encourage Christians to think, “because I love God, you must put up with my performance whether I am in tune or not.” That wouldn’t be pleasurable or profitable to anyone. Now, we have to be careful here, because there are many people who cannot sing in tune and their worship is still acceptable to the Lord, but we don’t ask them to lead the music. That wouldn’t be sensible. We don’t judge people who are not musical and say they can’t worship God acceptably. Of course they can. But they are not asked to lead the singing, or play musical instruments. We are going to ask someone who can do it well like David, or Bezaleel, or Asaph who was appointed to lead the worship because he did it well.

Your book is entitled “echoes of Eden.” This title captures for you a way a Christian might approach his art. What is that approach?

I don’t know if the term is original to me, certainly the concept is not. Nevertheless, it captures something that I think is very important. All human beings live in the world that God has made. They are all made in the image of God, whether they know it or not, whether they worship God or not. We are created by God to reflect something of who is, and part of the way we do that is by being creative, exercising dominion over the world.

All of us, in addition, to living in a world and being persons made my God, we all have a common history. That history is recounted for us in the bible. Whether a person accepts this or not, the truth is that everyone has this same history. This history begins in Eden, in a world that was perfect as it came from the hand of god. That was the original home of the human race. Secondly, the truth of all human beings is that we are all rebels and sinners against God, so we are living now in a world that is flawed and fallen. We are living in a tragic reality. The tragedy of sin and brokenness, alienation, and death is a daily reality for everyone in this world. Finally, there is a new world coming when Christ comes to establish his kingdom, restore all things, and make all things new.

Those three truths, that we come from Eden, that we have lost Eden, and that we long for the restoration of Eden—the recognition of those realities is true for all human beings, even for those who are not Christians. This is the truth about the human condition. And all great art, whether it is produced by Christians or not, is going to reflect elements of that true story. This is what I mean by “echoes of Eden.” In all great art there is going to be a sense of the beauty of this world and human life. There will be a deep enjoyment of the objective beauty of reality and of the goodness of life which comes for Eden, our original home. Secondly, all great art is going to have a sense of the tragedy of our present condition. Things are not the way they are supposed to be. The life of this world is tragic. Death is an enemy to be feared and is utterly destructive. All human beings experience death as a tragedy. Thirdly, all great art also has a longing for things to be set right. There are redemptive and restorative themes.

The Christian as he thinks about the arts needs to be telling the truth about reality. Christians who are painting, composing, or writing should not be sentimental and pretend that everything is lovely. Sometimes you can go into a shop that sells what people think of as Christian art and its just kind of pretty, and sentimental, with a kind of pretense that everything is fine. That’s not true, everything is not fine. We find the same, unfortunately, in many sermons and hymns we sing that are sentimental and shallow rather than actually dealing with the tragedy of human life and giving the biblical answers to that. I redemption God is overcoming and resisting evil, He is not pretending it doesn’t matter. He takes evil wit the greatest seriousness, so much so that he has given his own son on the cross to deliver us from it. We cannot be sentimental as Christians.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Christian and a poet in the 19th century. He wrote some poems which are sometimes called the “Terrible Sonnets,” which are expressing the bleakness of his life. What he is doing in those poems is dealing very seriously with the reality of sin in his own heart. They are very powerful poems, and they don’t all need to have the answer in them just like the book of Ecclesiastes. It points to the answer, but they don’t give us the full answer to the sense of vanity or God’s works of redemption. It sets up the problem very bleakly, and sense of expectancy for God to work. The work of one’s whole life will point to the redemptive work of Christ, but I may produce particular works that are rather bleak.

  It seems evangelical attempts at creative arts is often stuck on the idea that the gospel must be explicitly described or delineated in any production if it is to be “Christian” art. How explicit does the gospel need to be? Should “evangelism” be a recurrent motive of a Christian artist?

Its really not an either/or. There’s a wonderful essay by this by Dorothy Sayers entitled, “Are Playwrights evangelists.” Her answer to that is “no.” First of all the playwright, like a cook, a pilot of a plane, or an engineer, or a farmer, are asked to do their work well to the glory of God and for the edification of other people. That is the first calling of the artist, to do their work well. My first calling is not to be an evangelist. Think of the example of Christ. I don’t think any Christian would dare to criticize the life of Christ, but he spent far more years being a carpenter and a fisherman than a evangelist. We have to assume that as a carpenter and fisherman, he saw his calling to serve God, his neighbors, and to do his job well. Later he was called by his heavenly Father to devote three years of his life to the task of evangelism, and he did that wholeheartedly. But he wasn’t serving God more faithfully during those three years that he had been in the years when he was serving as a fisherman and carpenter. I think it would be blasphemous to suggest that he was.

So it’s a question of what is my calling. If I am called to be a chef, to cook food well, it doesn’t become valuable if I write John 3.16 on every piece of food I produce. I am simply called to be a good cook, and then as a cook, as I have opportunity in talking to the people I work with, I am called to share the gospel simply because I love my neighbors. That sharing of the truth must not interfere with the truth. When I was a pastor back in England, there was a man in our church who painted houses for a living. He was constantly getting fired because he wouldn’t work hard. He spent his days, instead of painting houses, trying to evangelize his fellow house painters and those whose homes he was painting. And he was fired for this repeatedly. This was a tremendous challenge for us as a church, because there is a proverb that sums it the situation very well, “as smoke to the eyes and vinegar to the teeth, so is the sluggard to those who send him.” I tried to teach him, “your calling is simply to paint houses well. On your break, when you are having a coffee together, when its appropriate, share the gospel. Even then, you are not to shove it down their throats, but treat them with respect. You are to be an example to them in love and service.”

The same applies if I am called to be a artist. I am simply called to do my work well. And if the piece of work I am called to do is to proclaim the gospel, they absolutely “evangelism” should be a motive. Lets use an example here from Dorothy Sayers. Sayers did indeed write plays which proclaimed the gospel such as The Man Born to be King, which is a play about Christ. Another was called “Zeal of thy House.” If a particular play that she felt constrained to produce is a play that proclaims the gospel, then it is appropriate for it do so plainly and boldly. But she also wrote other kinds of books, such as her detective stories starring Lord Peter Whimsy. As detective mysteries, she does not preach the gospel in them because that is not their purpose.

Another example would by Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I know a number of people who became Christians through reading this trilogy. The Lord of the Rings is not an evangelistic work in the slightest. There is only one place where the name of God is mentioned, when Gandalf confronts the Balrog in the mines of Moria. What Token has done is written a per-Christian myth. He is writing as a Christian and the book is filled with echoes of Eden, of the glory of creation as it originally was, the terrible state o things now, and the longing for things to set right. The whole movement of the story is guided by restoration, the coming of the true King, and the destruction of the Ring of Power. It may not be an evangelistic work, but it’s a book that tells the truth. (1:13:20)

I think a lot of Christians struggle with rectifying C.S. Lewis’ “pagan pre-figurment of Christ” approach with Paul’s statement that all myths are inspired by demons (1Cor. 10.20-21). There doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground here. What possible justification can there be for incorporating pagan or un-Christian elements in our creative arts when we are told to “hate even the garment stained by the flesh” (Jude 23)?

Yes, your question brings up very explicitly a passage from 1Cor. 10 where Paul is talking about idolatry and the worship offered to pagan deities is actually directed to demons rather to God. And so Paul’s point is that we are not to join in with pagan idol worship. Some Christians have used such a text to reject how Rowling, Tolkien, or Lewis have used “non-Christian” sources in their books. However, I do not think that is a fair criticism.

One of the things I have tried to do in the book is to show that the biblical writers themselves very happily use elements of pagan mythology to communicate biblical truth. One example in the OT is when the prophets and psalmists utilize pagan stories about Leviathan, the great seven-headed dragon of the watery deep, to talk about God’s ability to vanquish his enemies—enemies such as the heavenly demonic forces or pagan rulers in this world who have made themselves enemies of God. The old Testament writers use these mythical stories to express in a colorful, poetic, and dramatic way something the nature of the world’s opposition to God and God’s ultimate victory.

In the NT we find the apostles doing the same thing. The Apostle John in Revelation 12 also uses the pagan myth of the seven headed dragon to talk about the enmity of the devil against God and Christ’s work of overcoming him. Now why do the biblical writers do this and why would it be appropriate for Christian writers to follow this example? The reason is simply this: those pagan stories are not entirely fictitious, they have elements of the truth about the human condition in them. And so in the story of the seven-headed dragon, an idea which you find in Egyptian and Babylonian mythology as well as many others, there is an echo of the truth about the devil, the original enemy of God.

In many pagan stories there are echoes of God’s original promise that he would send a redeemer into the world. That is why sacrifices have been performed all over the world recalling, however dimly, the sacrifice which God gave in the garden of Eden. It is because of this element of truth in pagan religion and mythology that it is possible for a Christian to take some of those elements to communicate aspects of the gospel through them. As Tolkien wonderfully wrote, “Christ is the true myth.” He didn’t mean by that Christ’s work was mythological. His point was quite the opposite. His point was that all fairy stories and myths have fragments of the truth still in them, but Christ is the reality. He is the fulfillment of all those longings in pagan mythology.

And so we can use elements of pagan stories like John did in Rev. 12. We can use them cheerfully, knowing that they have an element of truth in them, not because we are saying the whole thing is true or we want to join in the worship of the pagan, but because we are saying there are things here that will help us communicate the truth about Christ.

Matthew Claridge is married to Cassandra and has three children, Alec , Nora, and Grace. He is an editor for Credo Magazine and is Senior Pastor of Mt. Idaho Baptist Church in Grangeville, ID. He has earned degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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