Culture and questions (6): Tim Keller
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I found this quote today from Tim Keller, which fits nicely with what we’ve been saying here over the last few posts…
What is contextualization?
…
I propose the following definition: Contextualization is not ‘giving people what they want’ but rather it is giving God’s answers (which they may not want!) to questions they are asking and in forms that they can comprehend. “Contextualization” ‘incarnates’ the Christian faith in a particular culture.
(Taken from this talk & pdf; HT: reformissionary)
Keller makes the interesting addition that not only does the gospel answer a culture’s particular questions, but it also presents particular challenges to each culture.
Culture and questions (5): being relevant
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Growing out of recent posts, here’s my proposal:
True relevance depends on changing the questions we answer,
rather than changing the answers we already have.
It seems that there is an endless debate in the church over whether being relevant is a really bad thing or a absolutely vital thing. I want to suggest that we can attempt relevance in many ways and the consequences depend on the route. Look for relevance by changing the answers and you risk losing what you have without actually addressing the needs of those around. But do the hard work of listening to new questions and broadening the answers to meet the new needs and you will find new depth as well as serving the culture.
Grace
Posted by Paul | Filed under photos
This is already elsewhere on the site, but the Easter allusions make it an appropriate time for a re-post…
Tags: photos
In defence of sad songs (late finish)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Over at Diary of an Arts Pastor, David Taylor has an interesting post on The Art of Lament. This reminded that I started on this subject, but — lamentably — never really got to the end of my thoughts. So here are a couple of brief ideas that should have been included…
The first is a quote from U2 sermons blog (quoting, in turn, Douglas Blount):
…for U2, “all roads to the Gospel lead first through the blues… gospel without blues leads to self-deception.”
… which, I guess, is the up-swing of what we’ve said previously.
The second is William Edgar’s suggestion (during the talk Heaven in a Nightclub) that jazz is able to express true joy because it has faced up to the darkness and despair in life. In contrast, a lot of current praise music only gets as far as happiness.
Maybe we can link these two fragments together: In a recent interview, Simon Mayo suggested that one of U2′s attractions is their joy. And certainly, for me, little praise music reaches the joy of, for example, Magnificent. Perhaps this is the result of a willingness to take the road that passes ‘first through the blues’.
Or, to be seasonal, we find the full joy of Easter Sunday only when we’ve truly engaged with the darkness & despair of Good Friday. (For more on this, see Robin Parry’s post on Tenebrae.)
Art for Good Friday
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
For Good Friday, take a moment to look at Arulf Rainer’s Wine Crucifix on the Tate site. I visited Tate Modern earlier this week and was struck by this piece. (To be honest it loses a lot in the repro for the web and really pays a visit. Which makes writing this post rather frustrating.) In the back of my mind, I had hoped that my trip to the London galleries would provide an appropriate Easter image. This proved to be the slightly-unexpected fulfillment.
The violence communicated by Rainer’s painting and the way it is hung (between two similarly styled paintings to give a triptych or Golgotha-like feel) really drive home aggression of Good Friday. Something missing from many of the more traditional, realistic (and frequently serene) portrayals.
Tags: art
Crouch on what’s important
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
This seemed obliquely relevant to recent posts…
We are not devoted to the preservation of a single culture, but to incarnation and transformation within every culture. So we need one another to help determine the “important” and “unimportant” features of any given culture.This will be an inherently multicultural exercise, because sorting out the important from the unimportant cannot happen in isolation or from a distance. … Only together can we discern the deeper significance of any given cultural practice, its redemptive possibilities, and its tempting distortions of the life that really is life.
– Andy Crouch
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...