Column Entry, “It’s All Poetry, Isn’t It?”, by Chase Mitchell

Column: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story

December entry: “It’s All Poetry, Isn’t It?”

Column Description: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story is a monthly column that illuminates old and new ideas about media ecology from a Christian perspective. Dr. Mitchell will explore what it means to bear God’s image and Christian witness in a mediated world, with a particular focus on the relationships between theology, media, and orthopraxy across different Christian traditions.

By Chase Mitchell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Media and Communication, East Tennessee State University

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A few weeks ago, I was in a Sunday-morning Bible study with a small group of men. We were discussing how believers could be led astray in an increasingly secular culture. Specifically, we talked about how the Church should equip her members to maintain faithful witness.

I ventured something like: “A good place to start would be to take Scripture seriously.” I might have elaborated a bit, I don’t remember, but the subtext was, basically, that some Christians reject certain passages of Scripture that are either offensive to the culture or embarrassing to the believer. Or if they don’t outright reject it, they dance around whatever issue is at stake.

I probably could’ve worded my comment better, but my intent wasn’t polemical. I wasn’t about to start ranting about “those liberal churches” that don’t take Scripture seriously. Rather, I was hoping that my suggestion would stimulate conversation about how to graciously and winsomely engage culture without forfeiting Biblical revelation.

After a beat, one of the men smiled and said, “Love God and love your neighbor. The rest is poetry.” Everyone at the table understood the rhetorical move he’d made. Although he didn’t openly rebuff my call to “take Scripture seriously,” his response was indeed a pushback. It was winsome, no doubt, and on some level of course I agree with him. Jesus himself tells us that the Law and the Prophets are summed up in these two commands. But I think, too, that my Bible-study-brother is missing something important.

Let me explain.

At my home church one is always in mixed company. It’s the only congregation I’ve been a part of that’s pretty much split 50/50 between conservatives and liberals. (I understand that can be an unhelpful binary, but you know what I mean.) I tend to think that such demographic parity can make for a healthy church so long as the Word is faithfully preached. If congregants’ views are measured in light of Christ, that is, and not according to believers’ individual theological (or political) inclinations, a fellowship of Left and Right can foster spiritual growth. In the best of cases, iron sharpens iron.

There is a danger with congregational pluralism, though. Just as believers sometimes capitulate to the culture when faced with “offensive” or “embarrassing” Christian doctrine, we can also tend to obfuscate key tenants of the faith when in the company of other Christians who—we know or suspect—are either too liberal or too conservative to agree with us. We don’t like ruffling feathers.

To give one example: The question of same-sex marriage is an “unsettled” debate in our church, at least within the membership. The denomination of which we are a part has its official view, a view that is shared by many in our church, but it’s well known that others in the congregation have a different perspective. And so the issue is rarely (openly) discussed. When it is brought up, winsomeness is the watchword.

Winsomeness is a good thing. It’s too often in short supply amongst Christians. But it can also become idolatrous if nuance and sophistication are set over and against truth. One can be faithful by being winsome, it’s true, but winsomeness is not always evidence of faithfulness. When everyone is winsome all the time, faith discourse can become reductive; we gradually whittle away at the list of acceptable (non-contentious) issues, and learn to abide together by avoiding the particulars of doctrine that make us uncomfortable.

In this recent case, the gentleman who replied to my exhortation to “take Scripture seriously” did so in the most winsome way possible. He advocated for his position on Scripture’s role in mediating the life of faith and did so by affirming what all Christians believe: love God and love your neighbor. Short, simple, agreeable, and to the point. Hard to argue with such a presentation of the Gospel, right?

It’s true that to love God and our neighbor are the most important commandments. But commandments are always couched in story. Upon learning the Biblical story—of Israel’s God, of Jesus, and of the Church—one finds that to obey those commands is to step into that tale. To be a Christian is not, primarily, to accept a set of propositional statements or doctrine; rather, it is to participate in a narrative; and not just any story, but a poetic one.

Poetry is irreducible. For example, I could try and distill the meaning of T.S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland” into a kitschy rhyme—Roses are red, violets are blue, war is hell, and that’s the truth. This does, in the barest sense, capture the “essence” of Elliot’s masterpiece. But by stripping the original of its particularities, by taming “The Wasteland” in an attempt to “extract” its meaning, I’ve lost its depth, its beauty, its…well…poetry. Form matters.  As Marshall McLuhan put it: the medium is the message.

This is what happens when we try to “boil down” the Faith, whether for winsomeness’ sake or to make things, we think, simpler. It doesn’t just devalue Christianity’s rich aesthetic quality, but also flattens its theological content. What (some) Christians miss is that the Faith’s narrative—its poetic quality—is inseparable from its truth claims.

Some theologians, like Kevin Vanhoozer, avoid this pitfall. He writes: “Biblical authority involves not only revealed information but also large-scale patterns of information processing, like narrative, a cognitive strategy for grasping meaningful wholes.”^[1] In other words, we need to take the particularities of Scripture seriously because the story it tells is theologically constitutive.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, the twentieth century Catholic theologian, observed similarly: “The form of revelation is not an external shell that can be discarded; it is intrinsic to the content. The Word became flesh; the form is part of the message.”^[2] But even Balthasar, whose thick ecclesiology laid great emphasis on form and on Tradition—on beauty, on drama, and on the importance of the sacramental/liturgical life of the Church—said that “Love alone is credible.”

Indeed. But if we fall into the trap of reducing the Faith to its “essence” because we think it’s a winsome way to avoid offensive Biblical/Traditional particulars, we’ve lost the plot.

Notes

^[1] Kevin Vanhoozer (2011). Love’s wisdom: The authority of Scripture’s form and content for faith’s understanding and theological judgement. Journal of Reformed Theology 5(3), 247-275.

^[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, p. 150.