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The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
How do beauty and creativity help us know God? And how does the beauty of God's creation re-enchant the world as we know it? In today's episode, David White shares how aesthetics, playfulness, and creativity can be reclaimed in churches and in classrooms. White is an author and educator who focuses on theology, discernment, and culture. He's Professor Emeritus of Christian Education at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Youth and Theology. You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. You have what I might say is one of the most intense titles of a book that I've read in a while. The book is called Tending the Fire That Burns at the Center of the World. And I'm curious if you would get us started by just sharing why it was so significant for you to write this book right now.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
The title comes from a quote from Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was a theologian in mid-20th century. His fear was that theologians had turned theology into a desiccated butterfly collection. And so theology was just turning the leaves of a collection and reviewing dead ideas. And he insisted that theology is the fire and light that burns at the center of the world. So his project was to try to reclaim that sense that theology is alive and that it burns, that it has something, there's some imminent, something compelling and imminent about theology. So that's what's at stake for him, and that's sort of what's at the heart of this book project. What I'm doing in this book is trying to explore what it would mean to think through beauty as the distinctive way of knowing that is decisive in the Christian tradition.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
I think that the choice of beauty as a way into that question is in a lot of ways unique given how modern and intellectualized and in some ways flattened even our ideas about beauty have become. So can you walk us into that by telling us about something beautiful that you've experienced?
Speaker 2 (02:35):
So as a child living where I lived, we didn't have, professional baseball was not part of the world that I lived in, but I did listen to baseball games every Saturday morning while I was doing the chores around the house. And my family would always have a baseball game—it was usually the Yankees playing—on our little Lucite tube. And so I would listen to baseball games, and I was always intrigued by the voices of the announcers and the descriptions that they would recount. But it wasn't until I was like eight years old where my uncle got tickets for me to go to a game in Baltimore, the Baltimore Orioles, and I got to sit behind home plate and see my first baseball game.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Oh, you even had good seats.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Had good seats. And just the whole experience: the growling organ in the background, the floodlights and the hot dogs and all of the crowd noises and the orange dirt rising and the rosin bag. Then when the players run on the field with their uniforms, I'm just immediately sort of captured by the ballet of it all. And then when the game starts, I recognize this organic relationship between all of the players. And so just in that encounter, I found it so compelling that when I went back home, I begged my father to get me a baseball mitt and played baseball for the next 12 years of my life. And my point is that it would not have been the same experience had my father or my uncle simply given me a rule book of baseball or given me a history of baseball. There was something compelling about seeing the ballet, seeing the relationships, and how in this event the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and everyone is participating in something larger than themselves and it's, it's a compelling experience.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yeah. It also strikes me, David, as you talk about that kind of the materiality is a word that you use a lot, but also just the physicality of entering into that. And it's not just body, but it's also emotion that happens when you enter into a sport like baseball.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well, there comes a point in baseball and in jazz playing jazz guitar where you sort of lose your sense of self. You sort of become part of the music, you become part of the game. And so there's something going, there's these peak experiences of my life experience where we become part of the music, we become part of the game.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, there's a phrase, and I believe you were quoting someone that there's something about beauty that causes a surplus of aliveness. That phrase stuck with me.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah. That's from Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Justice [sic]. And so she and others have tried to provide a kind of phenomenology of beauty: what happens when we have these experiences of beauty? And she tells the story of, I believe it's actually a story that she's telling about someone else. I can't remember the person, but she is out on her deck after having a day that's fraught with faculty politics and murmurings and grumblings and conflict. And she's out standing out on her deck and she looks up into the sky and she sees a flight of kestrel birds. And then she says that immediately her attention is absorbed into the beauty of the kestrels and all of the cares of her, the conflicts of the day sort of drop away for a moment. And I think there is a sense in which experiences of beauty, they're charged with significance and with mystery, but they also sort of refocus our attention away from, again, our egos.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
You spend a lot of time talking about the beauty that's seen in the form of Christ. Can you say more about that?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
An assumption of the patristic theologians and medieval theologians, at least up until the modern world, they all would have assumed that especially through the Patristic era, there is a kind of Neoplatonism that is in the background of a lot of patristic thought in which the three transcendentals—truth, goodness, and beauty—are an attempt to describe what is ultimate: God. And as Christians adopt these ideas, those are ways of characterizing God and truth, goodness, and beauty becomes, these three are convertible with each other. As we get closer to beauty, we also see goodness. As we get closer to goodness, we also see truth. As we get closer to truth, we see goodness and beauty. These are convertible, but they also, for the patristics, they also are ways of characterizing all of being. Anything that has being in some sense can be characterized as having unity, goodness, truth, and beauty.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
And so that's sort of the background for all of this. But by the time we get to the Patristic era, the Christ event becomes a way that, to characterize the beauty of God that is made visible for us in the Christ event when Christ becomes human. And so there's a sense in which patristics see Christ as manifesting that perfect beauty of God. And the other thing that there is to say about this is that, again, the beauty of Christ is bound up with the love of Christ. So there is no sense in which love can be understood without beauty and beauty without love. And so these ideas are all bound up together for the patristics. And so when we encounter Christ, we're encountering at once perfect beauty, truth, and goodness. And love is sort of the paradigmatic example that's made visible in Christ.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
And of course, Christ, the embodied Christ, is also incarnation. You also talk a bit about excarnation, and so can you talk about that juxtaposition and how Christ gives us an entryway into greater physicality and materiality through incarnation?
Speaker 2 (11:00):
So for Charles Taylor, we've already talked about disenchantment and how Charles Taylor talks about a world that has been disenchanted, the modern world has been disenchanted. But he also says, contained in that idea of disenchantment is the idea of excarnation. And this is an idea that's been embraced by William Cavanaugh and others. And what they mean by this is that we have, for many different reasons, we have become, we're set at a remove from the created beauty of the world, the beauty of the world. And so because of technology, we're set at a remove from the lived world and its manifold engagement with things in the world. For example, we have HVAC, and so we need not even think about building fires or chopping wood or the land that grows wood or the skills that it demands of us, or even the social world that's created as we gather around the fire.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
And so when we lose those worlds of experience, we're set, and so the world becomes invisible to us. It becomes in the background of our experience because HVAC does now what we used to do when we built fires. And so you could make the same argument about microwave food. We now, with microwaveable food, we don't have to know much about growing food or even where our food comes from or how it is shipped to us or even commercial exigencies. All we do, we know how to do is go and pick it out of the frozen food case and stick it in a microwave and prepare it. And what's lost there is a whole world of experience that engages with knowing something about the land, knowing something about how to prepare food, even traditions of families sharing roles of washing dishes and setting the table and having a tradition of gathering around the table, the social event that's involved.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
So there's a world of experience that's lost increasingly by these technologies. And I don't want to overdramatize that, but Albert Borgmann is the person who has sort of made this point more emphatically. So we live in a world that’s sort of at a remove from the world. And I would even say that neoliberalism economic policy has served in a sense to set us at a remove from the world. So now the profit motive sets us at, when everything in the world is reduced to profit, we no longer have to care about the wrong materials or the environmental degradation or the sweatshop labor that produces our goods. When everything is reduced to commercial ends and profit, we become excarnated. We become, in some sense, set at a remove from the world. So anyway, in a nutshell, that's what I'm talking about when I say excarnation. This is how the term is used by Charles Taylor and William Cavanaugh.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Which is a huge juxtaposition of course, to the idea of incarnation. But what you're describing does seem to resonate deeply with this loss of connection both to creation and to other people, those who farm the land or perform other services that become invisible in a culture like ours. You do provide some really helpful practical strategies for Christian leaders who are captivated by this idea of fostering imagination, engaging in art and aesthetics. And I'm curious if you could provide us with an example or two to spark our imaginations for how this might play out, whether in worship or in a classroom.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Drawing from Jamie Smith, and I think Jamie Smith has done us a service in his books, Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom. I think he's done a great service at showing us why, how worship in its tactile and aesthetic forms are so important. He says that by making our faith so cerebral, we have been trucking water to the wrong fire, that Christian faith lives, and when it animates the whole body, the soul, our bodies, and he draws the analogy, he says, liturgy is sort of like as a child riding our bicycles through a neighborhood so frequently that we internalize that neighborhood in our bones with every cycle stroke we internalize it with our bones so that if somebody drove up to us and asked us, “Where's Elm Street?” I might not be able to answer where Elm Street is because, but I could take you there on my bicycle because I know that world in my bones.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
So I think we have to return to, to remember that worship is not just three songs and a lecture, that our worship has to be more sensory. And that at its best, it includes everything: the architecture, the sights, and the smells. It includes the gestures of passing the peace, turning to each other. It includes our bodily gestures in prayer and even raising our hands in celebration. And it includes, it has to include, I would argue, so John Milbank uses the term “making the word strange,” which has sort of captured my imagination. And he's making the point that there's some text, some biblical text, some ideas that we have traversed so frequently. We've heard so many lectures on the Good Samaritan that once someone even starts reading that passage, we skip ahead to, we know what the moral is, we know that passage.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, check, got it.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
We think we can check out. And so we've sort of internalized that already, and we just sort of get to bypass any kind of deeper exploration of the text. But what Milbank is getting at is that there's something important about engaging a sort of poetic sensibility where we're always sort of playing with the text and exploring it in different terms and using different images to explore the text and even maybe different ways of acting it out, maybe different ways of using theater or art or music in exploring a text. So I think that has to be part of the church's sensibility going forward, is just, I remember in our seminary, we have quite a few poets here, and I remember a few years ago, one of our poets, Paul Hooker, he translated the Easter Vigil, translated the Easter Vigil into a poem, a cycle of poems that we, as the faculty and students, we sort of divided up the poetry and we rehearsed and we read that poetry in a way to sort of make the word strange, to try to say in a new way, say with new ideas, what is in the tradition.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
And so I think that has to be part of our sensibility is, I'm not arguing that we abandon the text or that we abandon our sense of the historical rhythms of worship. But I do think there is a place for playing with them, for sort of turning things inside out, looking at them differently, and even engaging them differently. So anyway…
Speaker 1 (21:08):
I love that idea of play and delight and how they can find a home in worship or in the classroom. I'm wondering if any other example comes to mind that you found to be especially playful or delightful.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
I don't know about you, but when I was in the middle of the COVID pandemic, when we were all sort of quarantined to our homes, and one of my habits or pastimes was, I found myself looking at YouTube videos, especially videos of flash mobs, right? And so…
Speaker 1 (21:49):
I was not sure where you were going to go with that, so…
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Flash mobs. I just found them so fascinating. So you have, invariably, you have some context where it's an airport or some sort of European square or some public setting where people are sitting drinking coffee, or maybe you see a businessman on his lunch break poring over papers, or you see a mother sort of scolding her child or whatever you see. And then suddenly, one by one, these strangers offer their gifts of music and song. And as you look at the crowd, you see people, smiles breaking out. You see people tapping their toes, you see people singing along, people even beginning to dance along. And when the music ends, as you look around, you can tell that they don't want it to end, that they want this to continue. And you can sense that something real has happened, that the gift of this music has somehow brightened the day and lifted the mood of these people.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
And we don't know what concrete effects this might have on the businessman. Maybe the businessperson goes back to their office and treats their coworkers better, or maybe the mother looks with different eyes on their child, with caring eyes. So we don't know what the concrete effects are, but I have this dream that the church can be like that. I have this dream that the church enters the world tearing up false treaties that we make with these political parties, that we somehow enter the world and say something new, say something that causes people to dance and to sing and to not want the music to stop. And that causes them to want to emulate, to take that music with them into their lives. So anyway, I know that may be a little meta for this.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I've always wanted to find myself in the context where a flash mob happened. It's never happened to me yet, but I'm hopeful someday.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Here at the seminary, we have a wonderful music worship professor Eric Wall, who, almost every chapel service is like that. You never know where the music is going to come from. You never know who is going to be speaking the poetic words. It just really is. And so my sensibilities have been informed by Eric in some sense.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah, that's beautiful. I think one challenge that I hear is to pay attention and to almost more assume a posture of delight and expectation in the world around us. That's at least an encouragement that I'm kind of picking up from our conversation.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah. I think in the book I refer to Alexander Schmemann and his notion that worship is another world. When we enter into worship, we are entering into a world that is already being redeemed. It's already sort of taking on the resemblance of the reign of God. And so we enter into this world of delight and joy. And he also says that we, along with other patristics, we go to worship each day to try to say the name God better. One day we go and we think we have said the name well, only to take a step back and to realize, no, that we have not exhausted the ways of saying the name God, and that we need to go back tomorrow and try to say the name better. That's what I see: worship as sort of this ongoing attempt to try to say the name better, to try to give new words, give new expression, new sounds, new visual experiences to expose the world to this living God.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah, that's great. So at the beginning, you kind of walked us into a consideration of beauty through baseball. I'm wondering if you can walk us out of this conversation by sharing with us about your golden retriever, who I was also surprised to encounter in the book.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
I've always had border collies all of my life and border collies are very athletic, and you throw the frisbee and they'll chase frisbees forever. But in our old age, Melissa and I are in our sixties now, and so we wanted a dog that was not quite as athletic. And so we got a golden retriever, Lulu, as a puppy. And sure enough, Lulu is sort of like a big sofa cushion. She sort of sets, ensconces, herself on some part of the furniture, and we pass by her many times a day and pat her and give her treats and say nice words to her. And then at night, she comes and jumps on our bed and says our prayers with us. And then several times a day we take her on walks, the morning walk especially, I take her out. And in the book, I've sort of imagined this walk as part of my spiritual formation.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
And Lulu is my spiritual guide. So Lulu guides me around my neighborhood, and she teaches me to see things that I would not have seen otherwise. She teaches me to see frogs and egrets and birds and certain flowers that she likes, or certain patches of grass that she likes to roll in, certain neighbors that like to feed her and give her treats. And she especially likes college students who pass through our neighborhood on the way to University of Texas. And so Lulu sort of every morning takes me on this tour of her parish, and she is day by day teaching me to see things. And in the book, my confession is that my heart is opening ever so slightly because of Lulu. And I talk about her as a kind of emissary from a more benevolent kind of planet who has come to heal my twisted heart and the hearts of those whom I love. And that is her role in my life, in her beauty, I cannot help but, I cannot help but see her through the eyes of beauty. And I cannot help but name her in these creative ways. And so creativity is a part of what we're up to, as well. We're not just about beauty, but we're about responding to beauty creatively.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Yeah. David, it's striking to me that you started in a place of seeing the world as a child with this sense of wonder in beauty, and then now being able to see that through creation or through others. And that seems so connected to me.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
One of the things that we are all so keenly aware of is just how polarized we are in this culture today. We live in these camps where we have identified and frankly objectified each other as liberal, conservative, theologically, politically. And we have forgotten how to see each other as mysteries. We have forgotten how to see each other as guides, as spiritual guides. And so what I'm trying to reclaim here is this sense of depth that each of us, we should not be reduced to ideologies. I am more than my political commitments. I am more than that, and you are more than that. And I need to learn to linger with you long enough to see the depths of what you offer to my spiritual growth and fulfillment.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm your host, Sherry Oosting. Our editorial and production team includes LaDonna Damon, Armond Banks, Madeline Polhill, and Garrett Mostowski. Like what you're hearing, subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Thanks for listening.