Faithful Words
On Christian orthodoxy and the verbal arts, and finishing my MFA.
Hi, all. A few weeks ago I completed an MFA in Creative Writing through Seattle Pacific University. It was wonderful. Eventually, once I’ve wrangled my thoughts, I plan to share about my time in the program. For now I offer the following essay on the relationship between Christian orthodoxy and the verbal arts (i.e. creative writing). May it prompt you on. As always, thanks for reading. —CB
Faithful Words: On Christian Orthodoxy and the Verbal Arts
In recent decades, a considerable discourse exploring the intersections between art and Christian faith, both broadly construed, has emerged at popular and academic levels. A consensus of this movement would suggest that the creative life and the life of faith share much in common—a reverence for transcendence, for example, or a general affinity with mystery. One prominent voice within the conversation is Jeremy Begbie, Thomas A. Langford Distinguished Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School and lifelong musician. Of late Begbie has focused his research on the relationship between the arts and credal orthodoxy, persuaded that immersion in the Church’s Scriptures and theological traditions is not only beneficial to artists of faith, but essential for their faithful witness.
The following essay traces Begbie’s primary line of argument from his 2018 book, A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts, as it pertains to the verbal arts in particular. After placing him in conversation with several other relevant scholars, I offer a few provisional remarks regarding credal orthodoxy’s possible role in shaping contemporary poets of faith.
In brief, A Peculiar Orthodoxy attempts to demonstrate how Christian doctrine can fruitfully inform the arts, and vice versa. The book is a collection of Begbie’s essays that support this thesis by highlighting artists, musicians, and writers whose works exhibit high artistic merit because they bear witness to the Trinitarian God and the gospel of Jesus Christ in compelling ways.
A maestro in the arts-faith field, Begbie admits in his introduction that he compiled the essays, in part, to redress a shortcoming within the scene, viz., a dearth of “scriptural imagination” among artists and scholars, which imagination he defines as “a sustained immersion in biblical texts that enables us to perceive and live in the world in a way that is faithful to Scripture’s theological coherence.” So far from stifling creativity, credal orthodoxy enables the artist to participate in God’s redemptive activity.
Moreover, Begbie observes among artists of faith a pervasive suspicion toward doctrine. Doctrine, after all, defines, demarcates, and answers; art opens, explores, and wonders. Undergirding this suspicion, according to Begbie, lurk deeper assumptions about the inefficacy of propositional language to describe or explain the world, much less God. In this postmodern view, “language is necessarily an attempt to enclose, grasp, and control,” such that to speak or write about anything is, at best, an exercise in negative theology and, at worst, a kind of epistemological subjugation of the “other.” (Hence the preference in some circles—including some churches—for instrumental music and other nonverbal art forms, which seem to leave more interpretive breathing room.)
Christian Wiman is one contemporary exponent of this line of thought. Himself a gifted poet and a Christian, Wiman has written in several places on the inadequacies of classical orthodox language to sustain the life of faith. For example, in his poem “A Heresy” he imagines how he might have replied to a woman who once called him a heretic in public. He would tell her, “there are only heretics; that humans—mere and / mirrored creatures that we are—move toward God in language, / and to speak language is to profane him.” In his prose, Wiman has written extensively on the mystical need for silence as a kind of remedy to our broken religious language, especially, using Begbie’s exact phrase, our “propositional language about God.” In one essay he explains:
We need to be shocked out of our easy acceptance of—or our facile resistance to—propositional language about God. Besides being useless as any definitive description of God, such language is simply not adequate for the intense and sacred spiritual turmoil that so many contemporary people feel.
Wiman acknowledges the necessity of religious language—even doctrine—but likens them to “worn and inadequate” equipment for approaching “the abyss” (i.e., God). That the Church must articulate creeds and catechisms is evidently a tragic consequence of our finitude, for Wiman, perhaps the supreme example of what Derrida called “the violence of difference, of classification, and of the system of appellations.” Contemporary art may give voice to the “intense and sacred spiritual turmoil” that many feel today, but not orthodoxy.
Throughout A Peculiar Orthodoxy, Begbie offers numerous responses to the aforementioned problem of verbal language in the arts; I will mention just two.
The first is a classical dogmatic claim about the incarnation: that God assumed full humanity in Christ in order to redeem the full human, including human language. Begbie writes: “Our speech, no less than any other dimension of our humanity, has, in this speaking person, the Word-made-Word-user, been purged and renewed, reformed and reshaped.” It hardly needs to be added that this does not mean human language can encompass or contain God—only that, through Christ’s accommodating incarnation and the sanctifying work of his Spirit (notice the Trinitarian framework) human words can participate in God’s new creation.
Accommodation is a key theological concept here. Begbie notes that, by situating language within the scope of God’s redemption, some readers may be tempted to overestimate their verbal “grasping powers” once more. Like all divine revelation, though, the redemption accomplished through Christ’s incarnation is an expression of God’s free self-disclosure. God graciously stoops and appropriates human language to accommodate for what Calvin called “our feebleness.” Calvin and Begbie would agree with Wiman that our words are worn and inadequate tools, and that we have no hope of knowing or speaking truthfully about God outside of this initiation of grace. But because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, our words can and will be sanctified as we are refashioned in the image of Christ, who is God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…
The upshot is twofold: on the one hand, all spiritual knowledge remains limited and contingent on God’s revelation. “Divine self-disclosure prohibits divine self-enclosure,” writes Begbie. To put it painfully, we know of God what God reveals of God, and no more. On the other hand, not only does Christ permit us to speak about God without profaning him; he frees us to know and love God with our language (not a bad definition for theology), fragile as it will doubtless remain. In his response to Derrida’s theory of language, Christopher Watkin explains why a claim like this one is not as cavalier as it might sound:
To say things about God, especially if those are things that he has previously said about himself, is neither to pin him down nor to define him in a restrictive way. Content is not the enemy of freedom when it is the content of absolutely personal character. God is not pinned down by whom he reveals himself to be.
And the Church has long held that the incarnation of the Word of God is the radiance of God himself. Christ is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3a, ESV). Now, how might such a belief shape one’s own creativity?
Begbie’s second reply to the problem of verbal language in the arts draws on the work of seventeenth-century poet George Herbert, who was also agnostic toward verbal language, though for different reasons. Many Christians during Herbert’s day were skeptical of the very idea of devotional poetry, given its figurative and imaginative character. This metaphysical poet feared obscuring the truth with his work, not because language is inherently oppressive of impotent, but because sin corrupts language like everything else. Begbie points to Herbert’s poem “Ephes. 4. 30” as an example of this struggle, as well as an example of Herbert’s reliance on the Holy Spirit to purify his verse without completely overriding his agency.
“From Herbert’s viewpoint,” Begbie writes, “the Spirit’s sanctification does not entail the diminution of humanness.” Instead, once more, imperfect human language learns to participate in goodness and truth, part of which involves embracing a full range of artistic devices and trusting God to work through, not despite, them—such that, “the order of poetry enacts and (potentially) mediates God’s ordering activity.” Herbert thus models how a robust account of divine-human agency, rooted in a particular doctrine of Sanctification, serves to ground and direct one’s artistic work toward new imaginative horizons.
Begbie’s point is not about channeling (or defending) theological precision via one’s art, though theological precision certainly matters to credal orthodoxy; the point is that Herbert’s “scriptural imagination” provided fertile soil for a lifetime of creativity that remained faithful to Scripture’s theological coherence and has, in turn, tilled the imagination of readers henceforth. This idea—about the generative agency of true art—has been a central concern of contemporary poet Scott Cairns, whose work we will now turn to as a concluding example of credal orthodoxy in action within the realm of the verbal arts.
In his essay, “Elemental Confusion: Towards a Sacramental Poetics,” Cairns suggests that every artist bears a creative responsibility toward his or her prior tradition, including theological traditions. Not only must the artist know his heritage; he must build upon it through his work.
This is the gift that tradition bestows upon the individual artist: an immense wealth that must be used. The servant mustn’t squander what has been given as if it were of no account, nor should he bury it in hopes of keeping it safe, unchanged but unused; instead, the good steward must receive the inheritance as his own and use it unto great increase.
Like the servant in Jesus’ parable, reprimanded by his master for failing to properly invest his talents, the retrospective artist views tradition as something to be venerated and preserved, but not augmented. Poetry of this sort Cairns calls “denotative,” i.e. words that serve as signs of past events—even seismic or mystical events—but fail to communicate something fresh in the present. By contrast, Cairns advocates for an artistic relationship with tradition that is more than merely retrospective, but prospective and therefore generative for readers, viewers, listeners, etc.
True to form, Cairns has drawn on his own Judaeo-Christian roots to develop his prospective view of creativity, relying on a Hebraic understanding of words as active agents or things-in-themselves, as opposed to a Platonic notion of words as static symbols of things only. Cairns takes words to be multivalent powers, perpetually capable of provoking new applications and, more importantly, new creations in readers. This he names the poetic: “the presence and activity of inexhaustible, indeterminate enormity apprehended in a discreet space.” All art can be poetic in this sense—a made thing capable of further making—including, of course, poetry. Like good tradition, a good poem refuses to exist only in the past; with every utterance it occasions a responsive flight of the imagination.
Perhaps an example will prove instructive at this point. Take Luci Shaw's poem "But Not Forgotten":
Whether or not I find the missing thing
it will always be
more than my thought of it.
Silver heavy, somewhere it winks
in its own small privacy,
playing
the waiting game with me.
And the real treasures do not vanish.
The precious loses no value
in the spending.
A piece of hope spins out,
bright, along the dark,
and is not lost in space;
love is out orbiting, and will
come home.
By my lights, the most provocative, and prospective, line break in this poem comes at the start. Why cut line two at "be"? Standing alone, "it will always be" communicates something unique—that this "missing thing" will continue to exist whether or not the speaker finds it. But when we move our eyes to line three, that meaning expands with the simple addition of the word "more." Shaw's careful line break enables us readers to juxtapose multiple insights—what it means for something lost to "be" and to "be more than my thought of it”—which is precisely how it exercises its generative poetic powers.
Cairn’s work on the poetic operations of language—rooted as it is in the Judeo-Christian creation story of the God who speaks contingent being into being—serves as a model of what Begbie called “scriptural imagination.” In the process, Cairns also adds a constructive response to the “problem of verbal language” in the arts: the right words will open up, not pin down, reality. So too with religious language. Orthodoxy (ortho-, as in straight, upright) is one way the Church has endeavored to articulate those words about God and God’s word that enable believers to faithfully indwell the order of the New Creation.
The “faith once delivered to the saints” is the cardinal inheritance poets of faith must learn to treasure and build upon. They will only ultimately succeed when, as Begbie puts it, their work directs our “eyes and ears to the skandalon” of the gospel, that beautiful, inexhaustible mystery at the heart of all Christian belief.
Bibliography
Begbie, Jeremy. A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018.
Cairns, Scott. “Elemental Confusion: Towards a Sacramental Poetics.” 2005, unpublished; used by permission of the author.
Shaw, Luci. Sea Glass: New and Selected Poems. Seattle, WA: WordFarm, 2016.
Watkin, Christopher. Jacques Derrida. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2017.
Wiman, Christian. “Varieties of Quiet” in Image Journal, Issue 73. https://imagejournal.org/article/varieties-of-quiet/. Accessed May 25, 2022.
Wiman, Christian. “A Heresy” in Survival Is a Style: Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.