“When Therefore He Was Raised From the Dead, His Disciples Remembered”
November 12, 2011
Ben Meyers has given yet another penetrating reflection on Christian art. This time, comparing the Icon of the Holy Cross to Grünewald‘s own great work. We are privileged to hear his considered reflections. I would like to disagree, though, with one of his central indictments against the icon.
“Is not history – the history of Jesus – completely fixed and immobilised in this representation? Is it not suspended in eternity like a beautiful figure inside a glass ball?”
For Ben, as with certain Protestant aesthetics, the icon represents our own fantasies, a muting or even denial of the via crucis.
“The presence of the saints makes the cross safe, familiar, and accessible. There is, the icon assures us, a proper human posture that corresponds to the event of the cross.”
I would like to suggest, though, that the reverse is actually true. It is the unceasing and unthinking (because no meaning can be made of the Cross) gaze upon the dead flesh that completely fixes and immobilizes the history of Jesus. There is, on this take, no history for Jesus after the cross. The truth of God is utterly and without reserve made manifest in this one moment. There is nothing of God left and no true thing can be known of God — only the ‘brute fact of the cross of history’ remains. It is important here that Grünewald depicts below the crucifixion, not death, hell, and the grave, pierced by the cross as for the icon, but simply the idolotrous veneration of the corpse of Jesus. The body can be done away with now; sealed up in stone, covered and abandoned. The disincarnate word has now the characteristic of geist, it can be spoken everywhere, but felt nowhere.
But for the icon, the revelation of the cross is not an end. It is not the last word. Ben’s own words are, perhaps, telling. The icon speaks of truth, but Grünewald of fact, of immediate presence, but not of relationship nor therefore of reconciliation. The icon in fact speaks of new life, of freedom, of movement, of the continued unfolding of what has happened. We find this iconic truth in the icon of the Nativity. In the Nativity, the whole history of Jesus is shown. There is no fixed point at which to rest. While the center is, of course, Jesus, our eyes are led to the Cross, to Hades, to a post-birth washing, etc… Here, who Jesus is cannot be reduced to any one part of his life or death, and the circular pattern of the icon, forever drawing our attention to Jesus and forever drawing it out to the entire and inexhaustible scope of salvation, forecloses the possibility that Jesus is to be found alone in one historical place. It is also to be found in the Gospels, in for instance, the quote of John which entitles this reflection. The dramatic date of the crucifixion indeed was as it is for Grünewald, and we dare not make it otherwise. It was, for the moment, absolute negation, total abandonment, sheer meaninglessness. As the women looked on, it could have been nothing but this. (It is curious that attention is not drawn to the whole Grünewald altarpiece which also includes an overwhelming resurrection scene. A consideration of the whole work leads more to my interpretation of the icon, that even of the Altarpiece is iconic.)
Yet for the icon, as for St. John’s Gospel, that was not the whole truth, because Jesus now can be known in greater depth than he could otherwise ever have been known had he remained on the hard wood of the cross. There is more to learn about what has happened. Jesus’s identity can be, in fact, added to, learned about — his life is not confined to a single corpse now, it has been broken and can therefore be distributed and ingested, nourishing and revealing, judging and reconciling.
The resurrection, the via gloriae, is not the abandonment of real material history. As John Updike, himself a barthian of sorts, knew. In his Seven Stanzas at Easter he comments,
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
The dead god, the one who remains in the tomb, is rather the one who can now be done with. The rotting body of Jesus is, for Updike, what secures our fantasies because to us the resurrection is an offense.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
The cross is still the door, there is simply no other path to new life than through death.
But ‘Death, be not proud.’
Around the Interwebs
August 6, 2010
- David CL Driedger has two posts up introducing a recent collection, The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation. Sounds glorious by the way he de-scribes it.
- Pastor Carol Howard Merritt writes about an encounter she had a party recently:
“I was at a party, holding my plastic cup of beer and talking to a stranger in a crowded house. She was in thirties, like I was. “So, what do you do?” she asked. “Where to do you work?”
I smiled because this part of the conversation can become really interesting. I’m a five-foot tall woman, who’s part of a generation that considers itself “spiritual but not religious,” so people don’t usually expect my answer: “I’m a pastor.”
“Oh my God,” she responded. “I never knew why anyone would go to church. But last year, my mom got sick. She’s divorced, and I’m living hundreds of miles away from her, so I didn’t know what we were going to do. And her church totally took care of her. They brought her meals. They drove her to the doctor. They called me when anything out of the ordinary happened.”
“Yeah. That’s what the good churches do.”
“Really?” She looked completely confused as she continued, “I had no idea. You should really advertise that.”
I don’t care much for the whole re-naming-liberal-protestantism-”progressive Christianity”-and-see-if-no one-notices thing, but I really like most people who self-identify as such and among them, Pastor Merritt, who advocates strongly for rejuvinating the Mainline and putting trust in the younger creative pastors.
- The Other Journal has a bit up about the “Righteous Rich in the OT” by Christopher J.H. Wright and I thought it very suggestive for political theology despite the fact that “list exegesis” is from the devil himself.
- Apparently there’s a site where you can download a ton of low-fi arrangements of classic tunes by some spectacular indie artists…for FREE!
- Ben Meyers tells things from multiple perspectives.
- David Congdon reviews an Arcade Fire concert in which Spoon opened. He captures why Arcade Fire is among the greatest bands of the ’00′s
I’ve been wanting to reflect on blog writing for some time, especially in the wake of reading the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lost Icons: Reflections On Cultural Bereavement, and David Horstkoetter of the blog Flying Farther inspired me finally to do so. Consider this a reply to his post.
It is impossible for me to reflect on blog writing without it simultaneously being a reflection on learning to think theologically. The blog has now been running for two years and we’ve topped 400 posts just recently. In these two years, especially the last one and half, I’ve just begun to read academic theology (see this post for an account of that reading). So though the original contributers and I started right off the bat talking about various theological topics, I had (and still have) no sufficient ability even to think the thoughts ‘properly.’ I’m just an undergrad who reads theology in his spare time.
But that hasn’t stopped me from acquiring ‘opinions’ and having them strongly. (I was just rereading some of Ben Meyer’s old posts and while reading this one was uncannily reminded of myself several times throughout.)
For better or worse, and I can think of few worse ways of learning theology than by reading it by yourself with no teachers and blogging your opinions, this is how it has been for me.
Yet there have been many surprising positives to my experience blogging and it is on account of these that although I’d like to stop for a few years, I would in the end regret it (I think). Before proceeding to explicate these I want to relate my blogging career to something that Rowan Williams made a big point of in his book.
Learning to speak properly and ‘responsibly’ is a very large part of becoming an adult. This learning allows one to negotiate the complex web of relations and responsibilities that accompany adult life. And in this adult world one is expected to be able to be ‘held responsible’ for what they say. This means that part of being a ‘youth’ is being allowed to have ‘irresponsible speech;’ speech where you can play with ideas, words and expressions, where you can be given the space to learn the rules of ‘language games’ with the sort of room needed to grow and play; a youth ought not be held ‘accountable’ for all the things they say.
Not too long ago I stated in my Twitter feed and Facebook status that I have tended to learn by expressing an opinion strongly, encountering the feedback and correction of other people, engaging in ‘argument,’ and finally by reflection, ascertaining whether or not the things that I ‘believed’ and said were in need of correction or augmentation. On another day I proclaimed that I often read old blog posts and realize that I disagree with some of them entirely and some in part.
I am not claiming that I cannot at all be held responsible for the things I’ve said on this blog…in many ways other than the craft of theology I am an adult; nevertheless it has been the case that blogging has been an exercise in speech where I hope and somewhat expect to be given the freedom to say naïve and sometimes foolish things because with respect to such speech I am still very much a child. It has been, in all the best senses of the term, a ‘game.’ A ‘game’ I have very much enjoyed sharing with my many and various interlocuters from whom I’ve learned a great deal.
It is in this learning that blogging has had and continues to have value for me. Over time, both here and on other sites, I’ve picked up many friends and ‘playmates.’ Many of them are PhD students at prestigious universities and some of them are even seasoned pros. What I have lacked in class time from professors and peers I have supplemented with all these. Sometimes I’ve been quite afraid and intimidated because many have done me the favor of ‘taking me seriously;’ that is, even if some of the things I’ve said are crazy, they’ve taken the time to engage me without treating me like an infant. It is my hope that they’ll still give me a couple years of ‘play time’ without expecting me to join the varsity team.
But if I might be so bold I’d like to say that this ‘playful irresponsibility’ is intrinsic to theology blogging and blogging probably ought never to be held to very high standards. There is an ad hoc and unedited nature to blogging, even on some of the better sites. While it may be the case that after an engagement we realize that something profound or challenging was said and learned, as a general rule, it seems dangerous to me to hope for peer reviewed linguistic and academic accuracy even of people capable of such art.
Additionally, blogging has greatly honed my ability to write. My basic grammar, syntax and stylistic skills have increased since I started.
So cheers to all my internet friends and mentors…I am truly grateful for the chance I’ve had to grow up amongst such people and for all the emails, book recommendations, bibliographies and comment threads…To many more!
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
