Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal: Essays in Reformational Philosophy 9780773550438

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Art, E du c at io n , a n d Cultural Renewal

Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal Essays in Reformational Philosophy

L a m b e rt Z u i d erva a rt

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 ISB N ISB N ISB N ISB N

978-0-7735-5041-4 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5042-1 (paper) 978-0-7735-5043-8 (eP DF ) 978-0-7735-5044-5 (eP UB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free The publication of this book is supported by generous grants from the Andreas Center at Dordt College and from the Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Zuidervaart, Lambert, author Art, education, and cultural renewal: essays in reformational philosophy /  Lambert Zuidervaart. Companion volume to: Religion, truth, and social transformation. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISB N 978-0-7735-5041-4 (cloth). – IS BN 978-0-7735-5042-1 (paper). – ISB N 978-0-7735-5043-8 (eP DF ). – IS BN 978-0-7735-5044-5 (eP U B ) 1. Christianity – Philosophy.  2. Reformation.  3. Art – Philosophy.  4. Education, Higher – Philosophy.  5. Popular culture – Philosophy.  I. Title. BR 100.Z 82 2016

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C2016-907537-0 C2016-907538-9

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

For Calvin G. Seerveld Mentor, colleague, and friend

Contents

Preface ix Note about Revisions  xiii Introduction: “The Point Is to Change It”  3

P art o n e  A rt, C u lt u r e, and Reformati onal Ae st h e t ic s 1 Toward a Shared Understanding of the Arts (1982)  27 2 Francis Schaeffer’s Worldview and Modern Arts (1984)  38 3 Transforming Aesthetics: Reflections on the Work of Calvin G. Seerveld (1995)  60 4 Art Is No Fringe: Introduction to The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy (2000)  76 5 A Tradition Transfigured: Art and Culture in Reformational Aesthetics (2004)  87 6 (Un)Timely Voyage: Calvin Seerveld’s Normative Aesthetics (2014) 97 7 Imagination, Art, and Civil Society (2015)  103

P art T wo  E du c at io n , Scholars hi p, an d t h e C o m m o n G o o d 8 Salt for Humankind: Challenges of Christian Scholarship (1982/2002) 129 9 Studying the Arts for Serviceable Insight (1983)  139

viii Contents

10 Teaching for Transformation: Philosophy in the Undergraduate Curriculum (1989)  146 11 Adult Children of the Enlightenment (1992)  154 12 Living Water: The Future of Higher Education in the Reformed Tradition (1998/2002)  160 13 Living at the Crossroads: Ethical Scholarship and the Common Good (2011)  170 14 Spirituality, Religion, and the Call to Love: On Being a Christian Philosopher (2014)  180

Publication Information  197



Notes 201



Works Cited  229



Index 245

Preface

This is the second of two volumes that collect my essays in and about reformational philosophy. Whereas the essays in Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation range across social philosophy, ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of religion, the essays in this second volume primarily address topics of the arts, culture, and higher education. Like the first volume, Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal aims to make my writings on topics in reformational philosophy more readily available to fellow participants in this tradition. But it also intends to introduce others to the contributions the reformational tradition has made to cultural reflection and critique, even as it presents my own ideas about the arts, higher education, and socially engaged scholarship. These ideas have taken shape within the matrix of higher education in the Reformed tradition. A graduate of Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, the Institute for Christian Studies (i cs ) in Toronto, and the v u University Amsterdam, I have spent my entire professional career at schools in this tradition: first, The King’s University College in Edmonton, Alberta (1981–85); then, Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1985–2002); and finally, i cs (2002–16). Whether in the classroom, on faculty committees, or within administrative and governance roles, I have had countless occasions to reflect on Reformed higher education and the project of Christian scholarship, to learn from colleagues, and to try out my ideas. I have also received many invitations to share my ideas at “sister schools.” In fact, just over half of the essays collected here began as such invited lectures. I shall always be grateful for the formation and encouragement I have received in these settings.

x Preface

Several essays in this volume have been published before. Chapters 1 and 9 originally appeared in Pro Rege, the quarterly faculty publication of Dordt College, and they are republished here with permission from the editor, Dr Mary Dengler. Chapter 5, first published by Faith and Philosophy, the journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and chapter 12, first published by Perspectives Journal, a journal of Reformed thought, also appear here with permission. Chapter 4 – originally the introduction to The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy, edited by Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (London: Macmillan Press; New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000) – is reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Chapters 3 and 6 first appeared as introductions to books published by Wm. B. Eerdmans and Dordt College Press, respectively, and they are republished with permission from the publishers. Complete details about the sources of these chapters appear in “Publication Information” at the end of this volume. I am grateful to all of the publications and publishers mentioned for permitting me to collect these essays into a new volume. In addition, I wish to acknowledge with heartfelt thanks the generous publication grants this book has received from the Andreas Center at Dordt College and the Priscilla and Stanford Reid Trust. I also want to recognize the assistance I have enjoyed while preparing to publish this book. Thanks to the research funding i cs gives its faculty members every year, I was able to employ two graduate assistants to review the essays collected here, recommend changes, and edit them for stylistic consistency. Master’s student Sarah Hyland began this process in 2013, and doctoral candidate Benjamin Shank completed it in 2015. PhD candidate Joe Kirby, who compiled the index for Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, also indexed the current volume. Thank you, Sarah, Benjamin, and Joe for your timely and insightful help. I am also grateful for the  encouragement and wise counsel of Mark Abley, the editor at ­McGill-Queen’s University Press who commissioned both volumes. Like Sarah, Benjamin, and Joe, I pursued graduate studies at i cs , albeit four decades earlier. Having received a ba degree in philosophy and music from Dordt College in May 1972, I moved to Toronto a few months later to take up graduate work in interdisciplinary philosophy, with a focus on aesthetics. Dr Calvin G. Seerveld, with whom I had come to study, had also just moved from the United States to Canada, to take up a new appointment as i cs ’s Senior

Preface xi

Member in Philosophical Aesthetics. Thus began an academic apprenticeship that would shape my entire life as a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual. During our first year together at i c s , Cal and I cut our philosophical teeth on the gnarly arguments in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. When my master’s thesis had digested these arguments to our mutual satisfaction, Cal turned me loose on the even more gnarly texts of Theodor W. Adorno. Then he sent me off to Berlin to work with Carl Dahlhaus, Germany’s leading music aesthetician at the time, where I ended up writing a dissertation on Adorno’s general aesthetics, and not on his philosophy of music. Cal’s gentle and perceptive guidance brought me through this intellectual trial by fire; his strong embrace at the public defence of my dissertation in Amsterdam in 1981 warmly welcomed me into the professional community of reformational scholars. Since then Cal and I have become colleagues and friends. Yet he remains my intellectual and spiritual father, as anyone who reads this volume will notice. I cannot imagine my life as a scholar without his continual encouragement, empathy, and example. With deep and humble gratitude, I dedicate this book to i cs Professor Emeritus Calvin G. Seerveld, my mentor, colleague, and friend.

Note about Revisions

The date under the title of each chapter in this book indicates either the date when it was first published or, in the case of essays not previously published, when I presented it as a lecture or a conference paper. More details appear under “Publication Information” near the end of this book (the publications listed there are not included in the book’s bibliography). I have updated the endnotes in various chapters to indicate where some of my essays may be found in either this volume or the one that preceded it. I also have made other minor silent revisions to essays that have been published before – namely, chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 12. Where significant new material has been added, it appears in a clearly marked addendum.

Art, E du c at io n , a n d Cultural Renewal

Introduction: “The Point Is to Change It” The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. Karl Marx1

Karl Marx’s famous Thesis Eleven gives his own philosophy a new and revolutionary role. Up to now philosophers have been content merely to interpret the world, he says. Nowhere is this interpretive stance better stated than by G.W.F. Hegel, under whose influence Marx became a revolutionary thinker. The philosopher’s task, Hegel claims, is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the culture and society he or she inhabits: philosophy is “its own time comprehended in thoughts.”2 Following Hegel, Marx does not deny the need for a comprehensive understanding. In fact, that’s what Marx develops in his later writings. Yet he asserts the purpose of philosophy is not simply to interpret one’s cultural and social world. Rather, the point is to change it. If one agrees with Marx on this point, as I do, then one should also say why one’s world needs to be changed and which direction the needed changes should take. On my understanding, reformational philosophy aims to address precisely these questions, in the light of redemption.

1 . R e d e m p t iv e Phi los ophy As the introduction to a previous volume explains,3 reformational philosophy arises from the Kuyperian tradition within Reformed or Calvinist Christianity. This tradition views human life as part of a  good, broken, and yet redeemable creation. It urges Christians and their organizations to be agents of cultural renewal and social

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transformation. And it regards such redemptive agency as a response to the God who calls everyone to love God above all and their neighbours as themselves. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Kuyperian tradition gave rise to a full-fledged philosophy, articulated primarily by Herman Dooyeweerd (1884–1977) and Dirk Vollenhoven (1892– 1978). This philosophy has come to be known as reformational philosophy. The central contributions of reformational philosophy include: an ontological account of how created existence, including human culture and society, is governed by divine law; a social philosophy that ties questions of normativity to claims about the legitimate tasks of distinct social institutions; and a philosophical anthropology that insists on the deep unity of human life and its spiritual direction in response to the call to love. The upshot is an inherently interdisciplinary philosophy whose radically holistic and normative pluralism with respect to life, culture, and society serves a transforming vision. The introduction to Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation also indicates how I have modified reformational philosophy: by giving greater weight to the linguistic and hermeneutical character of human existence, by replacing a classical understanding of social normativity with an emphasis on societal principles and interconnected flourishing, and by extending Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven’s epistemologies toward an even more dramatically holistic and pluralistic conception of knowledge and truth. In all of this, however, I wish to rearticulate their central anthropological insight – namely, “that human beings, in all of their practices and institutions, are deeply spiritual creatures, centrally oriented and directed to respond to the call to love.”4 Classical reformational philosophy’s contributions to ontology, social philosophy, and epistemology, along with my own proposed revisions, provide a backdrop to the essays on art, culture, and higher education in the current volume. In some ways, however, the current volume also provides a backdrop to the essays in the previous volume. Chronologically, the essays in both volumes span the same decades of my work as a professional philosopher; biographically, I have always approached topics in aesthetics, cultural theory, and philosophy of education with a view to questions of ontology, social philosophy, and epistemology – and vice versa. Nevertheless, someone who reads both volumes will notice striking differences in content and tone. Unlike the first volume, the essays

Introduction 5

assembled here do not go into the technical details of reformational philosophy and, for the most part, do not address debates about such details. Ten of the fourteen essays in the current volume began as invited lectures for artists, faculty gatherings, or a general public. Three others began as introductions to interdisciplinary collections of essays. Only one, chapter 7, was written as a freestanding essay, but it also addresses an interdisciplinary audience. Because most chapters carry traces of the occasions and audiences they originally addressed, in introducing them here I plan to comment on their origins as well. What unifies this volume, like the one that preceded it, is an emphasis on spiritual orientation, cultural renewal, and social transformation. In the words of H. Evan Runner, who did more than anyone else to bring reformational philosophy to North America, all of life is religion or, in my own vocabulary, all of life has a spiritual orientation.5 I take this to mean that in everything human beings are, in all that we do, and in every relation we sustain, we respond, for better or worse, to God’s call to love. It also means no area of human culture and society lies beyond this call. Moreover, promoting renewal in the arts and culture and working toward the transformation of current societal structures belong to the task of philosophy as I envision it. That, in turn, implies the need to reenvision philosophy itself, including the tradition of reformational philosophy. As the summaries that follow show, the essays collected in this volume try specifically to reimagine reformational aesthetics and to promote cultural renewal in scholarship and higher education.

2 . R e f o r m at io n al Aestheti cs The seven essays in Part I reflect on the tradition of reformational aesthetics, and they say how I appropriate this tradition. They build toward chapter 7, in which I highlight the main themes of the books Artistic Truth and Art in Public.6 Let me begin with those themes, before I describe how chapters 1–6 help construct their reformational framework. Chapter 7 argues that the arts have very important social roles, thanks to their capacity for artistic truth and a public place in civil society.7 I describe artistic truth as a dynamic correlation between aesthetic validity and imaginative disclosure. By imaginative disclosure I mean the discovery and sharing of insights into ourselves, others, and the world via artistic media (musical, theatrical, visual, etc.). Such discovery and sharing are primarily nonpropositional. They

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happen within practices of imagination – expression, presentation, and creative interpretation – that rely on artistic media of imagination. More specifically, artistic truth occurs as authenticity in the artist’s relation to his or her art product, as significance in an art public’s relation to an art product, and as the integrity of the art product itself when it is an artwork. In all of these ways, art, when it is true, can help us come to terms with ourselves and our world, including its political and economic dimensions. It can disturb our sense of justice, for example, or call attention to unmet needs, or point us toward a better, more life-giving society. Far from being marginal, then, art, with its unique capacity for imaginative truth, is a crucial site for civic engagement. In fact, much of contemporary art is “art in public”: it has a public orientation, and governments are heavily involved in its production and use. I explain the public character of art by distinguishing and relating three societal macrostructures: the for-profit economy, the administrative state, and civil society. Of these three, civil society is the most conducive site for art that would be true, and this location gives the arts important roles in the pursuit of social solidarity and democratic communication. Accordingly, I argue that governments do well to protect and subsidize organizations in civil society that sponsor and promote art in public. Indeed, participating in such art is a cultural right that the state, as a social institution for public justice, is obligated to uphold. This leads me, in turn, to propose a very broad and comprehensive view of how people of faith should be involved in the arts. Chapter 7 suggests that, as an important social institution, contemporary art needs to be renewed; that art’s renewal needs to coincide with efforts to transform society as a whole, including its political and economic systems; and that people of faith need to cooperate with others in promoting such renewal and transformation. Preliminary glimpses of this emphasis on the renewal of art as a social institution occur in chapter 1. The chapter began as a lecture in May 1982 to faculty members in literature, music, theatre, and the visual arts at Dordt College, my alma mater. As a newly minted professor at The King’s University College in Edmonton who had earned a doctorate less than a year before, I was honoured to be the featured scholar at a three-day Arts Seminar sponsored by Dordt’s Fine Arts Faculty. The seminar aimed to help faculty members in the fine arts think through the curricular and pedagogical implications

Introduction 7

of the college’s new statement of mission and purpose. I gave four lectures in response to questions I had received in advance. These lectures became focal points for extensive plenary and group discussions. Pro Rege, Dordt’s faculty journal, subsequently published two of the lectures as essays. In the first lecture and essay – chapter 1 in this volume – an assigned question about “minimum common understandings” provided the launching pad for a quick journey through two seminal books published in 1980 by Calvin Seerveld and Nicholas Wolterstorff, the leading figures in reformational aesthetics. “Toward a  Shared Understanding of the Arts” uses their books to explore problems in defining what art is and in critically assessing its roles in contemporary Western society. Employing a dialectical method learned from Theodor W. Adorno to evaluate Seerveld and Wolterstorff’s contributions on these topics, the essay concludes that art is  a shifting sociohistorical constellation of features and factors whose economic underpinnings need to be exposed. This emphasis on the shifting sociohistorical character of the arts provides a guiding thread through following chapters until, in chapter 7, I show how to reconcile classical reformational philosophy’s emphasis on art’s definitive structure (art’s “qualifying” and “founding” functions) with a dynamic understanding of art’s societal embeddedness and historical evolution. My criticisms of Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) in chapter 2 are prompted by his lack of attention to art’s social roles and his inadequate grasp of art’s historical character. Titled “Francis Schaeffer’s Worldview and Modern Arts,” this essay arose from talks I gave in the early 1980s to visual artists at King’s Fold, a L’Abri-like retreat centre in Cochrane, Alberta, and at the University of California in Berkeley. Regarded as the guru of Christian fundamentalism at the time, Schaeffer had considerable cachet among artists who wanted to take their faith seriously but found their own religious communities unsupportive of or downright hostile toward the arts. As the 1980s wore on, his work became very widely influential among North American evangelicals and fundamentalists, especially on hot-button issues such as abortion and women’s rights. Because of Schaeffer’s stature and influence, and because his approach to the arts and culture has roots in the same Kuyperian tradition from which reformational philosophy stems, I felt compelled to give his approach careful scrutiny and to assess his contributions.8

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In one sense, Schaeffer shares my own emphasis on the sociohistorical character of art, for his commentaries on the arts emphasize a general historical narrative, and they support a larger sociocultural critique. Yet his narrative and commentaries are framed by what I  call a worldview philosophy, and this philosophy is intrinsically idealistic and dogmatic, as my essay tries to show. Schaeffer’s worldview philosophy allows him to treat all of modern art in exactly the same way, regardless of historical context, and it drives his commentaries toward the same predictable conclusions, regardless of the social roles that various art products and events perform. In that sense, his approach is both ahistorical and insufficiently attuned to art’s societal embeddedness. The result, I conclude, is an approach that, far from encouraging transformative faith-oriented contributions to culture, imposes a narrow view of “true truth” that unavoidably finds fault with almost all human efforts, whether artistic or philosophical or otherwise. Schaeffer’s approach values art primarily for its alleged ability to express the worldviews from which, supposedly, all thoughts and actions flow; it prizes or condemns art according to the propositional truth or falsity of the worldview it purportedly expresses. To my mind, reformational aesthetics is incompatible with Schaeffer’s approach. That is one among many reasons why, twenty years later, I published a book in which both art and truth receive a significantly different account from the one Schaeffer provides.9 Without mentioning Calvin Seerveld by name, my 1984 critique of Francis Schaeffer draws heavily on Seerveld’s work. Seerveld’s emphasis on the “allusive” and “nuanceful” character of the arts and aesthetic experience militates against treating artworks as mere vehicles of propositional content. His “anti-sympathetic” model of historical inquiry argues for appreciating cultural contributions in art and philosophy even as one tries to discern what spirits are at work in a particular historical period. Moreover, Seerveld’s engaged and literary way of interpreting texts resists any simplistic reduction of the scriptures to a worldviewish recipe book. These attractive features emerge in chapter 3, which reflects on Seerveld’s contributions. Originally written as an introduction to Pledges of Jubilee, the Festschrift honouring Seerveld when he retired in 1995, “Transforming Aesthetics” surveys his life and work, identifies central themes and claims in his scholarship, and then

Introduction 9

summarizes the other fourteen essays in Pledges of Jubilee. As these summaries show, Seerveld’s work has inspired creative and constructive scholarship in a wide range of fields, including art criticism and art history, biblical theology, cultural studies, film studies, literary theory and criticism, musicology, and, of course, philosophy and aesthetics. It also becomes clear that many in the next generation of reformational aesthetics share my desire to revise and adapt Seerveld’s insights in order to address contemporary issues tied to art’s sociohistorical character, including multicultural politics, postmodernism, and new understandings of spirituality and religion. The next two chapters place such issues front and center. Chapter 4 (“Art Is No Fringe”) is the introduction to a collection of ­essays stemming from an international and interdisciplinary conference that I directed at Calvin College in 1995. The collection, like the conference, examines intersections among the arts, community life, and a democratic society. Summarizing the essays in The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy, I describe the arts as a cultural quiltwork that connects sociopolitical struggles with the structure of society. Then I examine the political aesthetics of Abraham Kuyper, a shared source for many of the essays summarized. First I demonstrate and question Kuyper’s Calvinist ambivalence about the arts. Although his emphasis on “sphere sovereignty” gives the arts an important place in modern society, his semi-mystical view of their vocation would prevent them from seriously engaging contemporary issues. Then I connect this ambivalence with Kuyper’s conflicted stance toward democratic tendencies, which he applauded for pragmatic reasons but resisted because he could not embrace equality. The challenge for contemporary Kuyperians, I conclude, is to abandon the paternalism in Kuyper’s political aesthetics and to develop a more robust vision of cultural democracy. Chapter 5 (“A Tradition Transfigured”) says in greater detail what such a critical retrieval of Kuyper implies for reformational aesthetics today. Published by the journal Faith and Philosophy in 2004, this essay began as an invited paper for a 2001 conference on Christian scholarship, in a session on “New Directions in Christian Philosophy.” First it distinguishes reformational aesthetics from two other traditions: the evangelical and the sacramental traditions. Then the essay recalls debates among Hans Rookmaaker, Seerveld, and Wolterstorff, in order to chart three new directions for

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reformational aesthetics at the beginning of the new millennium: to move from an emphasis on worldviews and their supposed expression in artworks to explorations of how the arts help people interact in civil society and the public sphere; to replace a modernist emphasis on the artwork as such with a new emphasis on art as a social institution in which only certain products and events are constituted to stand on their own as artworks; and to shift from an emphasis on aesthetics, with its focus on artworks as aesthetic objects, to an emphasis on cultural theory. These new directions will help reformational scholars address more forthrightly questions concerning power and oppression in the arts, technological innovation, and the impact of economic and political systems on art and civil society. All three of the new directions are needed, I suggest, if reformational scholars wish to be agents of healing and renewal. This does not mean, however, that they should ignore the issues, introduced in chapter 1, of defining art and critically assessing its social roles. As the next two chapters show, the contributions of reformational aesthetics to addressing these issues remain central to my own work. Chapter 6, titled “(Un)Timely Voyage,” is a companion piece to chapter 3 (“Transforming Aesthetics”), but it goes into greater detail concerning Calvin Seerveld’s pioneering work on a systematic and normative philosophical aesthetics in the tradition of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven. Written nearly two decades after the Festschrift Pledges of Jubilee appeared, “(Un)Timely Voyage” introduces one of six recent volumes that collect Seerveld’s “sundry writings and occasional lectures.”10 Seerveld’s emphasis on a creational ordinance for aesthetic life, and his ontological account of the arts and “imaginativity” – the aesthetic dimension of life – make his aesthetics unfashionable among postmetaphysical philosophers who doubt whether there are universal standards for human life or whether these can be recognized. This has not stopped him, however, from developing a systematic account of the arts, the aesthetic dimension, and their roles in culture and society. Seerveld has spelled out in fresh and surprising ways what the universal aesthetic imperative means for the arts, for daily life, and for cultural practices and social institutions. In chapter 7 (“Imagination, Art, and Civil Society”), the last chapter in Part I, I say how my own recent work addresses these same issues, both continuing and revising the work of Seerveld, and of Wolterstorff too. Written by invitation for a new Dutch volume on reformational aesthetics, the essay first defines art, the aesthetic

Introduction 11

dimension, and their relationship. Then it uses these definitions to summarize central claims in my books on artistic truth and art in public, before it shows how these definitions and central claims arise from the reformational tradition in aesthetics. I follow Seerveld when I claim there is an ontologically distinct aesthetic dimension and when I characterize this dimension in terms of imagination. Yet I regard the aesthetic dimension not as a creational given but as a historically emergent nexus of practices through which people interact with each other and with things that function as aesthetic signs. I also follow Seerveld when I affirm that imaginative practices and their objects can be better or worse according to various aesthetic standards. Yet I anchor the validity of these standards not in a creational ordinance but in “imaginative cogency” as a historically emergent societal principle of aesthetic validity. In other words, I propose a sociohistorical ontology of the aesthetic dimension and of aesthetic normativity. Correlatively, I also characterize art as a social and historical institution whose nature and purposes are tied to the shape of society as a whole. Recalling the first chapter’s characterization of art as a shifting sociohistorical constellation, I argue that the development of fine art in the West has made two features of art especially prominent – namely, its artifactual character and its aesthetic character. These are precisely the features that stand out in Seerveld’s definition of art as technically founded and aesthetically qualified. Yet, to avoid making Western fine art normative for all art, I treat these features as ones that have become definitive and that could also fade into lesser prominence. So long as the social institution of art in Western society has these definitive features, however, art remains crucial for fostering and pursuing imagination in human life, just as imaginative pursuits remain crucial for art’s political, economic, and other nonaesthetic dimensions. This approach gives the arts a very important place in contemporary society. Hence the essays in Part I trace a trajectory from exploring problems in reformational aesthetics with respect to art’s nature and purpose in chapter 1 to proposing a sociohistorical account of art and the aesthetic dimension in chapter 7. I move from criticizing Schaeffer’s static emphasis on worldviewish truth (chapter 2) to offering a dynamic account of artistic truth. Having identified central themes and claims in Seerveld’s normative aesthetics (chapters 3 and 6), I incorporate his insights into a social ontology that, while

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still normative, pays close attention to the historical ways in which art and the aesthetic dimension have taken shape and could change. And I weave new emphases in reformational scholarship on issues of  cultural pluralism, technological innovation, and social justice (chapters 4 and 5) into a systematic account of how the arts can contribute to a life-giving society. All along the way, these essays seek to envision and enact cultural renewal.

3 . C u lt u r a l Renewal A desire for cultural renewal also motivates the essays in Part II, which focus on education, scholarship, and the common good. Chapter 8 (“Salt for Humankind”) sets the stage by exploring what it means to follow Jesus in the academic world. Originally presented as a 1982 keynote address to Christian school teachers in Alberta, it was revised into a talk for staff and faculty at The King’s University College twenty years later. The essay begins with the sayings about salt in the three synoptic gospels, where Jesus urges his followers to be renewing agents of purification, preservation, and transformation in society. Then I ask what it means to be such agents of renewal in higher education. In response, I recast reformational philosophy’s theme of creation, fall, and redemption in the sociohistorical language of creativity, alienation, and liberation. Christian scholars are called to practise and promote cultural partnership, social solidarity, and historical communion, I claim: to affirm the creation of culture as a good gift entrusted to all human beings; to recognize human needs and cooperatively attempt to alleviate human suffering; and to point such cultural partnering and social solidarity toward the complete liberation to which God’s Spirit moves human history. Then I offer suggestions about how to do this in the academic world. The essay begins, however, with alienation and solidarity, not with creativity and cultural partnership. In this way I modify, without rejecting, a  traditional reformational emphasis on the goodness of creation, and I give greater weight to the eschatological promise of complete liberation. This modification strongly inflects my understanding of ­cultural renewal, as is evident in subsequent chapters. Chapter 9 (“Studying the Arts for Serviceable Insight”) asks how undergraduate arts education can contribute to cultural renewal. Originally a lecture to faculty members in the fine arts at Dordt

Introduction 13

College in 1982, this essay questions what I regarded as an overly intellectualized notion of serviceable insight in Dordt’s official philosophy of education. At issue here is precisely the traditional reformational emphasis on an ontological grasp of creation’s structure – an emphasis the previous chapter modifies. Then I propose a different idea of serviceable insight, one that stresses keen perception and social justice. The essay first distinguishes insight within art from knowledge about art. Then it distinguishes and relates insight into art and insight beyond art by way of art. We acquire insight into art by engaging in the practices of art, such as composing, performing, and listening to music. Yet good arts education will prime such practices and such insight toward what lies beyond art, toward the rest of life, culture, and society. Insight gained in these ways can be highly serviceable for the sake of social justice, I argue, and is in fact required in order to pursue the solidarity, partnership, and liberation described in the previous chapter. Although I had not formulated my conceptions of artistic truth and art in public when Pro Rege first published this essay in 1983, the essay clearly anticipates those conceptions. The next chapter (“Teaching for Transformation”) considers the place of philosophy in the undergraduate curriculum at Christian liberal arts colleges in the Reformed tradition. Written in response to a substantial paper by the late Theodore Plantinga (Philosophy, Redeemer University College), and presented during a 1989 philosophy conference at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, this essay questions whether the role of introductory philosophy courses is to provide students with a Christian perspective. Chapter 10 begins by describing the transforming vision of life and society that Kuyperian scholars share. Then it indicates how differences in student populations, institutional requirements, professional training, and cultural strategies can lead to different ways of structuring and offering an undergraduate introduction to philosophy. My primary reasons for questioning the idea of providing a perspective have to do with what visions of life are like and what makes for good undergraduate teaching. Visions of life are not so much taught as they are caught, I suggest, and good teaching requires the philosophy instructor not to provide a perspective but to encourage, enable, and challenge students to take self-critical responsibility for the perspectives they already have. Next I state what topics I think an undergraduate introduction to philosophy should emphasize,

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describe the problem-posing pedagogy I find most appropriate,11 say which abilities such a course should nurture, and spell out five criteria for selecting course texts. I conclude with brief reflections on the constraints and opportunities created by a one-semester course. My reservations about “giving” philosophy students a perspective on life and society, and my wanting them to take critical responsibility for their own perspectives, reflect both wariness about fundamentalism and qualified appreciation for “secular” critiques of religious dogmatism. These attitudes receive additional articulation in chapter 11, titled “Adult Children of the Enlightenment.” During the seventeen years I taught philosophy at Calvin College, my colleagues and I often attended the annual conference for Christian philosophers hosted by Wheaton College in Illinois. In 1992 I was invited to respond to a conference paper by Wheaton College professor Bruce Benson, a friend who shares my interests in aesthetics and continental philosophy. Benson’s paper argued that both the eighteenth-­ century Enlightenment – represented primarily by Immanuel Kant – and certain postmodern critiques of the Enlightenment threaten to blackmail Christian scholars into either completely accepting or completely rejecting the claims of reason. Benson appealed to HansGeorg Gadamer’s measured embrace of tradition as a way to avoid both types of blackmail. In response, I argue that Benson caricatures Kant’s position, for he ignores Kant’s acknowledgment that church officials and civil servants should uphold their traditions when they perform their official duties, even though they should criticize mistaken aspects of those traditions when they write and speak in public forums. So too, Benson misconstrues Michel Foucault’s critique of positions that urge either complete acceptance or complete rejection of the Enlightenment project. Nevertheless, to the extent that Foucault, when searching for unacknowledged power plays behind every truth claim, fails to address the truth of such claims, I also find his position problematic – just as problematic as a Gadamerian appeal to tradition would be if it did not ask about the truth of a tradition’s purported insights. To my mind, the obligation to take a critical stance toward one’s own tradition, and to make the insights of one’s tradition available for reasoned debate in public forums, is an Enlightenment insight that Christian scholars should embrace. Indeed, it is an insight the Enlightenment learned from the Christian tradition.

Introduction 15

What about the Kuyperian tradition in higher education? What are its insights and blind spots? What contributions has it made in North America, and which ones should it make in the future? These questions bubble to the surface in chapter 12, titled “Living Water: The Future of Higher Education in the Reformed Tradition.” Originally presented to faculty and staff members at Trinity Christian College in 1997 and The King’s University College in 2002 and published in Perspectives (formerly The Reformed Journal), this essay describes a dialectic between the opportunities and the risks facing undergraduate colleges in the Kuyperian tradition. Then it advocates three ways in which these schools should respond to their dialectical environment. The first response is to develop a critically contextual approach to education and scholarship, one that uncovers sociohistorical tendencies and structures in order to understand, evaluate, and transform the professions and disciplines into which these schools induct their students.12 The second response is to renew the best aspects of Kuyperian pietism and social activism by incorporating them into a more encompassing vision of cultural renewal and social transformation. The third is to revisit the sources of Kuyperian Christianity, making them accessible to people who do not participate in this tradition while embracing the best elements of other traditions. In the end, I suggest, citing Jürgen Habermas, the best way to maintain a tradition is to renew it through self-criticism and through dialogue with other traditions. The pathways recommended for Reformed colleges in chapter 12 receive a wider mapping in chapter 13, titled “Living at the Crossroads.” The essay began as a public inaugural address given in October 2011 to donors, invited guests, and representatives from many different schools and agencies at a banquet celebrating the establishment of the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics (c p rse ) at the Institute for Christian Studies (i cs ) in Toronto. As the founding Director of c p rse, I used this occasion to describe environmental, economic, and political dead ends in Canada and the United States, to identify mission drift, systemic pressures, and entrenched patterns that disturb North American universities, and to propose a different path for university-level research and teaching, one I call ethical scholarship for the common good. The essay envisions scholarship that consciously pursues an obligation to be socially trustworthy, responsive, and accountable and

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that continually orients itself toward the interconnected flourishing of all earth’s inhabitants. After pointing to pioneering efforts along these lines both at the University of Toronto and at Reformed liberal arts colleges, I then lay out what this vision means for the research c prse should nurture and sponsor. Like the graduate programs at ic s, such research will use philosophy to illuminate central questions in other disciplines and pivotal issues in contemporary society. It will stay attuned to matters of spiritual orientation, the public contributions of organized religions, and the need for interreligious dialogue. And it will focus on issues of social ethics, asking whether and how contemporary cultural practices and social institutions either enhance or undermine the common good. In these ways research that pursues a Kuyperian transforming vision can shed light on current dead ends and point both society and higher education in new directions. The final chapter, titled “Spirituality, Religion, and the Call to Love,” offers a personal account of what this vision means for me as a Christian philosopher in the reformational tradition. In the autumn of 2014, during my last semester of scheduled classroom teaching at ic s, I received an invitation to address the annual seminar for doctoral candidates on Scripture, Faith, and Scholarship. I decided not to give a highly academic lecture but to speak from the heart, reflecting on the life of faith and asking how my work as a philosopher fits in. First the essay explores the relation between spirituality and religion. In response to many who experience organized religion as a barrier to spirituality, I make a dialectical claim: spirituality without religion is hard to sustain, but religion without spirituality is not worth sustaining. Then I reflect on relations among scripture, faith, and worship in the Christian life. To be a Christian, I propose, is to let the Christian community’s inscripturated stories of faith and shared rituals of worship set one’s spiritual orientation in all of life, insofar as these stories and rituals disclose the God of love. The  scriptures-within-worship provide a decisive touchstone for this orientation. Next I describe the task of Christian scholarship and indicate how my own work receives guidance from the Kuyperian tradition. Unlike some other Kuyperians, I emphasize the relevance of worship for philosophy. I also urge Christian philosophers to remain open to being spiritually reoriented by God’s call to love as it resounds

Introduction 17

within the very stuff of creation and human life, including the contributions of other philosophers. Christian philosophy, I conclude, is a spiritually oriented response, both in practices and in results, to the God of love, faithful to the scriptures-within-worship, and ever open to the surprising ways in which God calls and guides and inspires people to follow Jesus along the pathways of love. That’s what it means for me to be a reformational philosopher.

4. A rt, R e l ig io n , a n d the Li turgi cal Turn Readers who are unfamiliar with the reformational tradition might wonder how it relates to other religiously inflected traditions of scholarship. They might also wonder how such other traditions inform my own work as a reformational scholar. In response, given the themes of this book, I could discuss different philosophies of culture and of higher education, in conjunction with different strands of social thought. For example, I could try to situate reformational reflections on Christian scholarship in a wider field of contributions by various Catholic and Protestant scholars. Others have done this already, however, and I am not sure how much would be gained by my summarizing their work,13 although I will comment later on a recent “liturgical turn” in Protestant understandings of higher education. The field of aesthetics is a different matter. The past three decades have seen a remarkable upsurge in reflection on aesthetic topics across many religions,14 including various traditions within Christianity, and I am not aware of attempts to spell out relations between specifically reformational aesthetics and these other Christian traditions. Although chapter 5 (“A Tradition Transfigured”) briefly nods toward evangelical Protestants and progressive Catholics as the two Christian groupings closest in spirit and in institutional affiliations to reformational scholarship, it does not make substantive comments about what it calls the “evangelical” and “sacramental” traditions in aesthetics. The chapter does emphasize, however, that reformational aesthetics is primarily philosophical rather than theological. This fact is central to situating my own work in a larger landscape. For the primary upsurge in reflection about aesthetics among other Christian scholars has been more heavily theological than philosophical, with much of it self-labelled as either “theological aesthetics” or “religious aesthetics.”15

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First I should clarify, however, what the primacy of philosophy in reformational aesthetics does not mean. It does not mean that the Reformed tradition going back to Jean Calvin (1509–1564) has made no contributions to theological aesthetics. Reformed liturgy, psalmody, and poetry have enriched the aesthetic lives of many worshippers. Leading Reformed theologians such as Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950), and Karl Barth (1886–1968) have offered highly influential reflections on beauty and art. And contemporary contributors to theological aesthetics include Reformed theologians such as William Dyrness and John W. de Gruchy.16 Such contributions to theological aesthetics from the Reformed tradition provide context and support for more specifically philosophical work in reformational aesthetics. The primacy of philosophy in reformational aesthetics also does not mean that it either pays no attention to theology or aims to replace theology with philosophy. Clearly, to orient aesthetics toward cultural renewal and social transformation, as the reformational tradition does, is to presuppose and express a theology of creation and redemption. Further, although this theology has many points in common with Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, and evangelical understandings, it also has distinctive features that help explain both its strengths and weaknesses when it comes to matters aesthetic – including, of course, the iconoclasm for which Calvinists are most (in)famous.17 The primacy of philosophy does mean, however, that foci and debates in theology and religious studies do not set the agenda for reformational aesthetics. You will not find extended discussions of, say, divine beauty or the incarnation or the Trinity in the aesthetic writings of Seerveld and Wolterstorff – nor in my own, for that matter. This marks a striking difference from most forms of theological aesthetics, whether it be Hans Urs von Balthasar’s elaboration of “the glory of the Lord” and its contemporary adaptations,18 or Richard Viladesau’s reflections on “the beauty of the cross,”19 or the extended commentary on Cristo Compañero in Roberto S. Goizueta’s liberation theology of aesthetics.20 You also will not find much attention in reformational aesthetics to the sorts of topics that prevail in religious aesthetics, such as the correlations between types of religious experience and stylistic elements in art (e.g., Paul Tillich),21 or the religious meaning achieved through the making of art (e.g., Frank

Introduction 19

Burch Brown),22 or the types of spiritual transcendence in supposedly secular modern and contemporary art (e.g., Wessel Stoker).23 Instead you will find, for example, Seerveld’s repeated rejections of “the curse of beauty” as an unholy mixture of bad theology and outdated metaphysics that prevents Christians from developing redemptive art and a sound normative aesthetics.24 You will also find Wolterstorff’s concerted philosophical attack on “the Grand Modern Narrative of the Arts” as “a powerful hindrance to an accurate and adequate understanding of the interaction between art and religion.”25 Although Seerveld’s successors in reformational aesthetics at ic s – Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin and Rebekah Smick – do not appear to share his allergy to beauty speculation, they too are wary about using theology to do what is properly philosophical work.26 Three issues are at stake in the philosophical emphasis of reformational aesthetics. One concerns the appropriate scope of academic fields and disciplines. A second has to do with the nature and social roles of both the arts and the aesthetic dimension. The third issue pertains to the nature and social roles of religion. Although the chapters that follow touch on each of these topics, and although I have treated some of them at greater length in other publications,27 let me briefly explain how my approach differs from most efforts in religious and theological aesthetics. To begin, I am puzzled by the common tendency to use the terms “religious aesthetics” and “theological aesthetics” interchangeably. These strike me as distinct pursuits, albeit interconnected. The distinction goes back to one between religious studies and theology. I regard religious studies as the interdisciplinary investigation of religion as a global social and cultural phenomenon, in all of its historical and contemporary manifestations. Such investigations need not be theological, although they can be, and what they study includes vastly more than the explicit theologies attached to some (but not all) religions. In the context of religious studies, it makes perfect sense to ask whether and how the arts contribute to religious life and whether and how specific religions contribute to the arts. It also makes sense to inquire into the aesthetic dimension of religious organizations and practices and to consider how this dimension takes on different contours within different religions. Such questions and inquiries make up the core of religious aesthetics, as I understand it. Theology, by contrast, pursues disciplined, critical, and constructive reflection on the stories, rituals, and meaning of a particular

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religion. When the religion studied takes certain “sacred writings” to be its authoritative touchstone, then the theology of that religion will also include such reflection on its scriptures. This is certainly so of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies, where scriptural studies are central to the entire enterprise. The focus on a particular religion gives theology a narrower scope than that of religious studies; in the case of scriptural religions, theology also has textual constraints that are less pronounced in religious studies. These differences between theology and religious studies suggest in turn that, unlike religious aesthetics, theological aesthetics, properly so named, does not study how religion in general intersects with art in general or with the aesthetic dimension in general either. Rather, theological aesthetics should ask how the stories of faith and rituals of worship in its own religion both employ and affect the arts and aesthetic practices. Nevertheless, many scholars of “theological aesthetics” construe it so broadly that it becomes the umbrella for any and all faith-­ oriented attempts to either undertake or investigate the arts and aesthetic practices. So, for example, if scholars in non-theological disciplines who self-identify as Jewish try to work out the implications of their tradition for understanding the arts, they will be said to engage in theological aesthetics. Or if artists of Christian persuasion try to live out their faith in their professional work, they will be said to have or to need a theological aesthetics. The result, in my view, is both an unhelpful inflation of theology and a damaging deflation of the life of faith. Theology does not need to be the queen of the sciences: a democratic pluralism of disciplines will serve us just fine. Moreover, there is much more to living out one’s faith in either the arts or scholarship than simply aligning one’s work with theological insights. Philosophers, too, can live out their faith in their scholarship without seeking the imprimatur of theology. Of course, if they strive to orient their work to the Jewish or Christian or Islamic faith tradition, they will need to be somewhat conversant with their religion’s scriptures and theology. But they do not need to take up the foci and debates of theology. Reformational aesthetics flows from an attempt to orient philosophical work to the Christian faith tradition. It is primarily philosophical rather than theological. It is not an attempt to do theological aesthetics under a different name. And it definitely is not interested in offering a “theological philosophy” of either the arts or the aesthetic dimension.

Introduction 21

The central topics of reformational aesthetics concern the nature and social roles of both the arts and the aesthetic dimension. These philosophical topics are unavoidable in either “religious” or “theological” aesthetics as well. Whether one wants to say in general how the arts and religion intersect or to uncover intersections between specific arts and a particular religion, one needs to offer or presuppose a philosophical definition of art and a philosophical understanding of art’s place in society. Scholars of religious and theological aesthetics need to decide whether to develop their own conceptions of these matters or simply to borrow philosophical conceptions from elsewhere. As we can see from both Seerveld’s critique of beauty speculation and Wolterstorff’s attack on modern autonomism, reformational aesthetics tries to do the philosophical spadework that both religious and theological aesthetics would need. Seerveld and Wolterstorff might disagree in their definitions and social understandings of art and the aesthetic dimension, but they agree on the necessity of taking a philosophical approach. There is another side to such necessity, however. For one can hardly investigate relations between religion and art or the aesthetic dimension without having a conception of religion and its place in society. Here, too, one needs to either presuppose or offer a philosophical conception of what religion is and why it matters. My own conception, which I explain elsewhere,28 regards religion as a distinct, multi-dimensional social institution that has acquired its own legitimacy and worth within a larger array of differentiated social institutions, including the social institution of art. The legitimacy and worth of religion hinge on its being the social institution within which, amid both good and evil, people can worship together and place hopeful trust in their source of ultimate sustenance. The central practices of religion involve both the rituals of worship and the stories of faith. Accordingly, if scholars in theology or religious studies want to study intersections between religion and the arts or the aesthetic dimension, then they should primarily focus on the aesthetic elements within religious rituals and stories – elements of style and metaphor, for example – as well as on how the arts (music, drama, dance, visual arts, etc.) support the (re-)enactment of such rituals and the (re-)telling of such stories. Secondarily they could also study “religious” elements within the arts – elements of celebration and prophetic critique, for example – and could consider how patterns of religious observance help shape artistic

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practices. I see no systematic reason, however, why such secondary topics need to be studied by scholars in theology or religious studies rather than by other scholars. If one does not try to circumscribe the social institution of religion along such lines, and if one does not tie theology and religious studies to the investigation of this social institution – admittedly from many different angles – then pressure will mount to have religious and theological aesthetics encompass all of life and become the umbrella for any faith-oriented attempts to undertake or investigate the arts and aesthetic practices. This is so partly because people tend to confuse religion as a social institution and spirituality as the passionate quest of an entire human being or community or culture or society for what matters most, the all-encompassing direction in how we connect with others. It is also so because, in the Christian tradition, at least, people have equated the life of faith with participation in the practices of religion, especially as these are developed and maintained in ecclesiastical organizations. Consequently, religious aesthetics expands to cover all the ways in which spirituality shows up – i.e., all the dimensions and institutions of human life, including the political and the economic – and theological aesthetics pretends that the only way – or at least the best way – to be true to one’s faith tradition in matters artistic and aesthetic is to align one’s artistic and aesthetic practices with religious rituals and stories. Similar issues arise in the field of higher education, where Protestants recently have moved from a more belief-based “integration of faith and scholarship” to a more practice-oriented “integration of liturgy and learning.” In the 1990s such scholars as Mark Noll and George Marsden urged Christians in the academy to bring a specifically Christian framework of beliefs to their work in the various fields and disciplines.29 More recently, however, James K.A. Smith, David Smith, and others have encouraged them to align their teaching with specifically “Christian practices.”30 The practices in question are not, say, the patterns of action among Christians who are farmers or parents or citizens and who seek to be faithful in their practices of farming, parenting, or political participation. Rather, “Christian practices” are understood to be primarily liturgical – prayer, lectio divina, following the liturgical calendar, and the like – although some authors expand the list to include “spiritual disciplines” such as hospitality and testimony.31 The

Introduction 23

underlying philosophical position here, as Jamie Smith puts it, is that human beings are “liturgical animals.” They are “creatures who can’t not worship and who are fundamentally formed by worship practices.”32 This shift in emphasis from religious beliefs to liturgical practices opens up exciting new areas for exploration in curriculum and pedagogy. Yet it also seems to reinforce a tendency among Protestant scholars to privilege religious practices (whether patterns of belief or patterns of ritual) in the life of faith. The result in the long run could very well be a problematic “structural sacralization” of higher education – i.e., an attempt to fit all of life and all of learning under an ecclesial umbrella.33 Moreover, the underlying philosophical claim that human beings are liturgical animals draws attention away from the fact that they are also social, political, and economic animals. It also threatens to make one dimension of life – the religious dimension – definitive for all other dimensions. In other words, there seems to be a failure to distinguish between the spiritual orientation of life in its entirety, on the one hand, and, on the other, the religious (including liturgical) dimension within which, together with other dimensions such as the social, political, and economic – and the aesthetic dimension too – people pursue and find their spiritual orientation. Like Jamie Smith, I regard worship as central to religion. I also think it is more formative in the life of faith – and thereby in faithoriented teaching and scholarship – than older Protestant models of Christian higher education have acknowledged. Yet I do not regard liturgical practices as decisive for the life of faith, including faithoriented art, education, and scholarship. Rather, what is decisive is the spiritual direction that people of faith pursue in their diverse practices, institutions, and interpersonal relations, some of which are religious, but many of which are not. Human beings are not first and foremost liturgical animals. They are holistically responsible and responsive creatures, both “gifted and called to love God, others … and all creation,”34 and to do so in all the various practices, institutions, and relationships that make up the fabric of their lives. That is why, as the last chapter in the current volume shows, cultural renewal also is a personal matter, although it is not only that, and one’s own orientation in life has everything to do with what one  hopes to offer a wider culture, including the discipline and

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profession of philosophy. Social transformation, cultural renewal, and personal rebirth are of a piece; at bottom they all spring from a spiritual source. In trying to reenvision reformational aesthetics, and in proposing new ways to meet the challenges of academic work, the essays in this volume emerge from a deep desire to heed the call to love.

Part One

Art, Culture, and Reformational Aesthetics

1 Toward a Shared Understanding of the Arts (1982) 1 . In t ro ducti on The first question discussed during Dordt College’s Arts Seminar in 1982 needs some interpretation. When we ask “What are the minimum common understandings we need in order to discuss the nature of art?” we should understand what we are trying to find out. I do not think this question is meant to imply that our discussion can only occur on the basis of certitudes that can be known directly, without inference. If the question does imply the need for such foundational certitudes, then we should reexamine the foundationalist theory of theorizing criticized in Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason within the Bounds of Religion. I also do not think the question implies that our discussion can be worthwhile only to the extent that we already share the same sociohistorical context, way of life, perspective, methods, and concepts. If the question does imply the need for an initial consensus, then we should reexamine the claims of common sense and the attendant problems of relativism.1 It makes little difference whether “we” are simply the persons in the same room or are all those persons interested in discussing the nature of art. In either case, and in any case, the discussion could never begin if it had to presuppose self-evident certitudes or an achieved consensus about the nature of art. It is obvious, however, that, despite a lack of basic axioms and of broad consensus, the discussion is well underway not only at Dordt College but also in the history of Western society. That is the first matter we need to understand, not in order to discuss, but as we discuss art. Though conversations about art might

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move us toward a shared understanding, no common understandings are needed in order to discuss the nature of art. We might need patience, intelligence, creativity, an ability to solve problems, or developed interests. But a common understanding we do not need, at least not in order to begin. A movement toward a shared understanding will bring us in the vicinity of four issues having contemporary interest and a long history. They are the problem of defining art, the place of art in history and society, meaning and truth in the arts, and the processes of artistic and aesthetic education. In this essay I concentrate on some philosophical definitions of art and the roles of art in society. My method is to comment on writings by Calvin Seerveld and Nicholas Wolterstorff.

2 . P ro b l e m s in Defi ni ng Art According to George Dickie, “the questions included within the field of aesthetics have developed out of twin concerns in the history of thought: the theory of beauty and the theory of art.”2 We can locate the more precise origins of aesthetics in developments during the eighteenth century. Via discussions of taste, the theory of beauty ­began to be superseded by a theory of the aesthetic. Through the complex process sketched by Paul Oskar Kristeller, poetry, music, architecture, sculpture, and painting began to be grouped together as core members of a class called “art,” “fine art,” or “beaux arts.”3 And, as Rémy Saisselin has argued, philosophers began seriously “to introduce new philosophical concepts into the realm of taste and the fine arts,” often to the linguistic confusion of far too many amateurs and art critics and to the aesthetic edification of too few practicing artists and connoisseurs.4 It is no coincidence that these developments occurred in the same century as the American and French Revolutions, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the initial solidification of a capitalistic economy. This is not the place to explore connections among the rise of aesthetics and the processes just mentioned. But we do well to realize that the philosophical issues we’re considering are largely legacies of the eighteenth century. It also is no coincidence that in our day, when hard questions are being asked about liberal democracy, technological progress, and advanced capitalism, much philosophical effort is given to



Toward a Shared Understanding of the Arts 29

reexamining the very concept of art, clarifying the concepts used by art critics, and bringing aesthetics closer to aesthetic experience and artistic practice. One could speculate that aesthetics might be coming of age as one era ends and a new one begins. One need look no further than the writings of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith to realize the increasingly central role the arts could play in our society.5 The more central they become, the more need there could be for an aesthetics come of age. Provided we are not undone by voodoo economics and nuclear insanity, the current maturing of aesthetics could mark a social and cultural turnaround not envisioned by the confident aestheticians of the eighteenth century. Among North American Christians with a “conversionist” bent,6 aesthetics is also coming of age. This event is noticeable in publications by Calvin Seerveld and Nicholas Wolterstorff. I find evidence of maturity in the ability of both scholars to get beyond pious slogans without hiding their Christian commitment. I also find evidence of maturity in their challenging traditional aesthetics and their joining current philosophical efforts at reexamining, clarifying, and making aesthetics practical. 2.1 Seerveld’s Modal Aesthetic Theory Seerveld’s essay “Modal Aesthetic Theory” tries to circumscribe the field of aesthetics.7 It does this by arguing for the presence of an ­aspect to the world and human experience, an aspect that would be properly called aesthetic and that could not be properly reduced to sensory, technical, logical, or other aspects. Seerveld tries to make his case by appealing to art as evidence for the fact that there is an irreducible aesthetic mode. Thus Seerveld’s article tries to specify and connect two of the “essentially contested” concepts in aesthetics today: “art” and “the aesthetic.” Seerveld’s argument is not without problems. The main logical difficulty is that his argument begs the question, for his definition of art assumes the presence of an aesthetic aspect. Thus to cite art as evidence for the presence of an aesthetic aspect is simply to beg the question of whether there is an irreducible aspect properly called aesthetic.8 Besides this logical difficulty, there is a larger theoretical issue at stake here. Seerveld calls this issue “the methodological problem of definition.”9 “Essentialists” and “operationalists” have reached a

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stalemate over defining the nature of art, according to Seerveld. Essentialists take art to be a primary reality whose essential nature has to be posited rather than analyzed ad infinitum. Operationalists argue that, as a matter of fact, to try to define art’s essential nature is to misconceive the concept of art. Two results of this misconceiving are definitions both too broad and too narrow as well as confusion of classificatory criteria for calling something art with evaluative criteria for calling something good art.10 For example, Clive Bell takes significant form to be the defining property of any work of art. He thereby excludes many objects that others would consider works of art, and he leaves few ways to exclude many objects with significant form that no one would consider works of art. In addition, though presented as a necessary and sufficient condition for classifying objects as works of art, “significant form” actually functions in Bell’s theory as a criterion for commending certain objects, such as the paintings of Cézanne, and condemning other objects, such as the sentimental, illustrative painting that dominated English taste in the early 1900s.11 Though Seerveld describes a stalemate, his own approach to the problem of defining art is clearly more essentialist than operationalist. He proposes “allusiveness” as the distinctive feature that essentially characterizes all art and the entire aesthetic aspect. This move prompts a number of questions. Isn’t “allusiveness” too elusive a concept to serve as the linchpin for an aesthetic theory?12 Is there anything allusive about what most aestheticians describe as aesthetic experiences and aesthetic qualities?13 Furthermore, does not Seerveld’s proposal force him into problems similar to those noted in Clive Bell’s theory? Isn’t allusiveness avoided in many works of art, such as paintings by Ellsworth Kelly? Wouldn’t it be improper to label many obviously allusive objects works of art? Isn’t Seerveld trying to hit both classifications and evaluations with one definitional stone? 2.2 Wolterstorff’s Functional Philosophy of Art Unlike Seerveld’s approach to defining art, Wolterstorff’s is more operational than essentialist. Art in Action begins by describing works of art as “objects and instruments of action” that are “inextricably embedded in the fabric of human intention.”14 Though universal to



Toward a Shared Understanding of the Arts 31

humankind, the arts have no single overriding purpose. They “play an enormous diversity of roles in human life.”15 At this point an essentialist critic could object that Wolterstorff is skirting the question of what art is by concentrating on what art does. But Wolterstorff does define what art is, even though he seeks a definition suitable for the purposes of his discussion rather than the correct definition. For those purposes Wolterstorff uses two definitions of art. First, “an art is a skill, a craft, a competence in making.” This definition goes back to the Greco-Roman concepts of techne and ars.16 Second, Wolterstorff also employs a modern concept of art that groups together “music, poetry, drama, literary fiction, visual depiction, ballet and modern dance, film, and sculpture.”17 He has these eight phenomena in mind when he uses the term “(fine) art.” “An art is a fine art in a given society,” he says, “if in that society products of that art are regularly … produced or distributed with disinterested contemplation as one of the primary intended public uses.”18 From an “array of interconnected concepts” about works of art Wolterstorff selects the following as most useful for his purposes: a work of art is “a product of one of the (fine) arts.” He claims this definition allows him not only to “speak of aesthetically poor works of art,” and thus to avoid confusing classification with evaluation, but also to “speak of liturgical art,” and thus to avoid excluding from the category of art certain objects that do not have disinterested contemplation as their primary intended public use.19 There seems to be some fuzziness here in Wolterstorff’s otherwise lucid account. Although he wishes to challenge the modern tendency of tying art to aesthetic contemplation, his preferred definition of the work of art – as a product of a fine art – obviously derives from that very tendency. Given his preferred definition, how can he avoid the following consequence? For him to call a piece of church music a work of art would be to say that this piece is a product of an art (music) whose products in our society are regularly produced or distributed for disinterested contemplation. If disinterested contemplation is not the primary intended public use of the piece in question, then why even bother to call it a work of art? Why not just call it a piece of church music or, perhaps, a liturgical composition? Again, given the apparent fact that much music in our society is used for entertaining, setting moods, and advertising

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commodities, but not for aesthetic contemplation, why bother to call a piece of Top 40 rock a work of art? Why not simply call it a piece of rock music? Quite apart from the matter of correctness, one could question the appropriateness of Wolterstorff’s definitions for his own discussion. I have been using Seerveld and Wolterstorff to illustrate the problem of defining art. On the one hand, we have noted problems tied to an essentialist assumption. If one assumes that a single feature such as allusiveness essentially characterizes all objects called works of art, then one’s definition tends to become both too broad and too narrow, and too confusing with respect to classifying and evaluating objects as works of art. On the other hand, we have noted problems tied to an operationalist assumption. If one assumes that “art” is a word with numerous uses and a concept with various meanings, none of which is most nearly correct, and if one decides to use whatever concept seems appropriate to the discussion at hand, then one’s definition tends to become so indefinite that at certain points the definition is no longer useful. I suspect both sets of problems could be shown to be legacies of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Seerveld’s philosophical tradition goes back to Germanic speculation, described by Saisselin as “an aesthetics for angels” prone to “the essentialist fallacy.” Wolterstorff’s philosophical tradition goes back to British empiricism, described by Saisselin as “an aesthetics for economists” prone to “the naturalistic fallacy” of confusing art with sensate nature. In both eighteenthcentury cases, says Saisselin, “aesthetics is led away from the arts” in their historical nature.20 During the nineteenth century, however, philosophers as diverse as Hegel and Comte began to insist on the historical and social character of art. Their insistence has helped bring aesthetics closer to the arts. Few serious philosophers of art today would overlook the fact that whatever art is and whatever art does, it undergoes significant changes in history and belongs to specific societies. In their own ways, Seerveld and Wolterstorff also acknowledge art’s sociohistorical character. Seerveld tends to interpret this character as a response to an abiding order, to “cosmogonic, structuring guidelines.”21 Wolterstorff tends to interpret this character as a factual given that elicits various responses. These tendencies will emerge more fully as I turn now from the problem of defining art to questions about the arts in history and society.



Toward a Shared Understanding of the Arts 33

3 . T h e A rt s in H is tory and S oci ety Adapting a scheme suggested by Harold Osborne, we may distinguish three sorts of Western theories about art in society.22 There are instrumental theories, derived in part from pragmatic interests. There are referential theories, derived in part from cognitive interests in art as a reflection or copy. And there are formalist theories, derived in part from an aesthetic interest in art. This does not mean, however, that only instrumental theories speak to the roles of arts in society, or that only formalist theories speak to the aesthetic features of art. For example, though Wolterstorff has an instrumental theory of art, he pays close attention to the aesthetic qualities and merits of artworks. Though Seerveld has a more formalist theory of art, he tries to place the “artistic task” in the context not only of “aesthetic life” but also of contemporary society. The terms “instrumental” and “formalist” indicate certain emphases having historical weight rather than exclusive types having pure representatives. Interestingly enough, both Wolterstorff and Seerveld display considerable interest in art as a reflection. Wolterstorff writes at length about “the action of world-projection.”23 Seerveld’s “allusiveness” indicates a fundamental concern for references made within art. The one takes artistic reference to be an instrumental action. The other takes artistic reference to be a primary characteristic of “art-as-such.” 3.1 “Art-as-Such,” Culture, and Reconciliation Seerveld’s notion of “art-as-such” has some limitations built into it, however, some of which one can find in other formalist approaches to art’s place in history and society. Three issues trouble me the most. In the first place, Seerveld speaks of the emergence of art-as-such in modern Europe as a “proper historical differentiation” having a “historically normative feature.”24 This seems to mean that fine art for aesthetic contemplation as developed in Western society represents the best or preferable shape for art to take. Backed by a conception of “cosmogonic structuring … which prompts … the gradual unfolding of creation’s … richness,”25 such a claim suggests the theory that whatever is, or whatever has come to be, is right. Would Seerveld wish so easily to legitimize the status quo? Seerveld’s account of art’s development is anchored in his understanding of the “cultural mandate.” This understanding raises a

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second issue in his approach to art’s place in history and society. I have no problems with saying that from the beginning of recorded history God has asked human beings to cultivate the earth to God’s praise. But I refuse to conclude directly from this statement that “art is one way for men and women to respond to the Lord’s command to cultivate the earth, to praise [the Lord’s] Name.”26 If sin and evil are as vexing as Seerveld claims they are,27 then the first point to be made is not that art is a way to honour God’s request. Instead the point to be raised first is whether today artistic activities of any kind can contribute to the liberation and reconciliation for which all creatures continue to groan. If artistic activities can contribute, then how, and what sorts of artistic activities would be most strategic? If we do not place concern for liberation and reconciliation first, then it is easy for our artistry and aesthetics to become complacent toward the real suffering and struggles taking place in today’s society. To counteract complacency, perhaps “conversionist” Christians should speak more often of concrete strategies for liberation. When Seerveld does speak of such strategies, a third issue appears. Explaining “obedient art,” he writes: “A communion of Christian artists instituted to work under the new testamented ministry of reconciliation will break new ground, at sharp odds with the secular world … To ‘reconcile’ means to pull out of unrighteous forming hands whatever they are busy with and bring it back to the Lord, back in line with [the Lord’s] ordinances.”28 To my ears this explanation sounds uncomfortably close to the program of the Moral Majority – kick out the secular humanists! Might we be facing too facile an equation of the antithesis between good and evil with the distinction between Christian and unChristian? Seerveld himself recognizes that the Holy Spirit does not restrict the Spirit’s reconciling activities to the things done by people who call themselves Christians. Were this recognition fully operative, however, greater emphasis might fall on Christians making contributions to contemporary culture and society and cooperating with those groups and individuals among whom the Spirit’s activity is most evident. Perhaps the times in which we live push alternative Christian organizations to turn into forces of reaction despite their stated intentions. In that case Kuyperian conversionists should be reconsidering their cherished notions of the cultural mandate and the antithesis.29



Toward a Shared Understanding of the Arts 35

3.2 Liberation and the Institution of High Art Raising the question of strategy is a major contribution of Art in Action. In the chapter titled “Liberation” Wolterstorff writes: “So the question confronting the Christian struggling to act obediently … is the thoroughly concrete question of how, if at all, he or she should participate in our social institution of high art. On the way to answering this question the Christian may find it important to pose the abstract question: Is there a place in the Christian life … for art as such? But answering Yes to that question leaves [one] far short of knowing how [one] should participate in the institution of high art as it finds shape in our society today.”30 Wolterstorff’s approach here corrects abstract attempts by some Kuyperians to legitimize artistry by way of the cultural mandate. Rather than legitimize artistry, Wolterstorff develops a social theory posing critical questions. This development is a breakthrough in Christian aesthetics. Nevertheless, some reservations do need to be stated about his descriptions and conclusions concerning “high art.” Wolterstorff describes Western society’s institution of high art as “the characteristic … patterns of action pertaining to the production, distribution, and use” of any artworks “used (in the way intended by artist or distributor) almost exclusively by the members of [our cultural] elite.”31 Salient features of the institution are a separation of art from life, the immensity of diverse repertoire, an emphasis on aesthetic contemplation, the religion of liberating creativity, and an interiorizing of the artistic community.32 These features are accompanied by aesthetic impoverishment in everyday life. To Christians, Wolterstorff proposes a double strategy: for the sake of aesthetic excellence in daily life, liberate life from high art’s blinding spell; and, when participating in the institution of high art, assess priorities, struggle to integrate artistic goals and Christian commitment, and resist any claims for the ultimacy of art.33 It is not readily apparent, however, why the institution of high art should trouble us. Wouldn’t most of us prefer art’s aesthetic use by intellectuals over self-aggrandizement by aristocratic patrons or indoctrination by an ecclesiastical hierarchy? Isn’t there something profoundly democratic and enlightening about Western society’s high art, in contrast to its “works of popular art,” which are largely kitsch, and to its “works of the tribe,” which function as commercial

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propaganda? Wouldn’t Wolterstorff’s descriptions of high art be more telling if they were set beside such features in our “low” art as the substitution of entertainment for life, the immensity of standardized repertoire, an emphasis on commercial success, the religion of passive conformity, and the heroizing of “stars”? Surely aesthetic squalor cannot be blamed on high art’s spell, nor can aesthetic excellence be attained simply by disenchantment. Surely a critique of high art should not dispense with a critique of low art, nor should Christians be content with restrained participation that does nothing to transform our society’s entire institution of art. Let me suggest that all our forms of art hang together in an economic subsystem within advanced capitalism. This subsystem effectively absorbs or marginalizes most serious artistic challenges to the status quo. At the same time the subsystem ensures that most artworks serve to ratify the status quo. Traditionally aesthetic theory has played a key role in this subsystem, our society’s institution of art. To penetrate that institution, aesthetic theory must resist being lured by “high art” into stressing consumption and educational status as defining factors in the institution. “Aesthetic contemplation” by an “intellectual elite” does occur in our society’s institution of high art. But a critical aesthetics should push past these factors to the often destructive economic processes of production and distribution behind them. Despite Wolterstorff’s discussion of “production, distribution, and use,” his critique of high art stops short of the economic base and the unusual commodity character of all art in our society. It seems to me that only by exposing the economic underpinnings of art can we develop an aesthetic theory both comprehensive enough to explain how our entire institution of art has developed and penetrating enough to indicate what should be done with it. To begin such an account, I, for one, would turn to the work of Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.34

4 . C o n c l us i on By now I hope we have come indirectly to three understandings about the nature of art. First, art is not something for which noninferential axioms and broad consensus hold, not even among Christian aestheticians of common Reformed persuasion. Second, both as a concept and as a phenomenon, art undergoes continual changes, some of which amount to redefinitions of art itself, and art



Toward a Shared Understanding of the Arts 37

undergoes these changes among various social institutions from which art itself cannot be extricated. Finally, art is eliciting from contemporary Christian scholars attempts at defining it and locating it that let it be illuminated by the light of Christ’s liberating the entire world. From these understandings I would derive the hypothesis with which I wish to conclude: Art is a social, cultural, and historical phenomenon as well as concept. It has gradually come into existence; it has acquired definite contours within certain societies, cultures, and historical phases; and it can acquire different contours as those societies, cultures, and historical phases change. In a word, art is a shifting constellation for which neither essentialist nor operationalist theories suffice.

2 Francis Schaeffer’s Worldview and Modern Arts (1984) Francis A. Schaeffer is the “guru of fundamentalism,” according to Newsweek magazine: Schaeffer, 70, is the newest celebrity in the fundamentalist firmament … t v preachers vie to get him on their shows, evangelical magazines feature his craggy face on their covers, and at fundamentalist schools, students quote him almost as often as Holy Writ. Schaeffer’s latest book, “A Christian Manifesto,” published last year, has sold 290,000 paperback copies – including 62,000 distributed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s OldTime Gospel Hour – and has been called “a battle plan for the rest of the century” by Moral Majority spokesman Cal Thomas. And for skeptics who think that a fundamentalist philosopher is a contradiction in terms, there is now “The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview,” a five-volume set of commentaries on everything from medieval theology to punk rock. “Dr. Schaeffer,” declares fundamentalist Bill Bright, head of the Campus Crusade for Christ, “is one of the greatest men of our time.”1 Continuing in a somewhat disparaging tone, the article summarizes Schaeffer’s message and questions his scholarly credentials. Many North American Christians, however, whether “fundamentalist” or not, will not be so quick to dismiss Schaeffer’s contribution. Not only does it represent a force to be reckoned with in an increasingly politicized and polarized church, but also it unmistakably urges Christians to come to intellectual terms with contemporary culture and society.



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Nowhere is this appeal more clear than when Schaeffer writes about the arts. Four books in particular are worth noting: The God Who Is There (1968), Escape from Reason (1968), Art and the Bible (1973), and How Should We Then Live? (1976). Using these four books as my point of departure, I wish to discuss Schaeffer’s main concern, his assessments of recent culture, and their philosophical underpinnings. More specifically, I shall summarize and evaluate Schaeffer’s understanding of the relationships between modern arts and “worldview.”2 In this way I hope to prompt discussions not only of Schaeffer’s work but also of the question he often addressed: How are Christians to live today, particularly in the arts?

1 . C o m p r e h e n s iv e Apologeti cs To describe Francis Schaeffer as a “conservative Christian fundamentalist”3 is inadequate. Schaeffer consciously aligns himself with the Protestant Reformation, especially its Calvinist stream. His theological moorings lie in the American Presbyterianism of figures such as Charles Hodge, J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til, and Gordon H. Clark.4 In his opposition to liberal and neo-orthodox theology in the church, Schaeffer resembles older fundamentalists; in his opposition to “secular humanism” in the public arena, he resembles more recent fundamentalists. He is an evangelical in his emphasis on “the personal experience of conversion, the high authority of the Bible, and the mandate to evangelize others.”5 Yet both his fundamentalist oppositions and his evangelical emphases are steeped in historic Calvinism. His work is best described as that of a Reformed evangelical apologist. Schaeffer’s main concern is to give a contemporary Christian apology. His apologetics has two sides: an intelligible defence of the historic Christian faith, and a forthright commending of that faith in a way that speaks to his contemporaries. He says both sides require historical and philosophical understanding of “the thought-forms of our own generation.”6 Furthermore, neither defense nor commendation can be merely verbal: “speaking historic Christianity in the twentieth-century climate” goes hand-in-hand with “personal and corporate living into the twentieth-century climate.”7 Thus Schaeffer has a comprehensive concern – namely, to present historic Christianity in an intellectually informed and culturally relevant manner. The comprehensiveness of Schaeffer’s approach helps explain the appeal and impact he and the L’Abri Fellowship have had among

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serious questioners, Christian and non-Christian alike. This comprehensiveness defies the label “conservative fundamentalist.” Schaeffer has consistently tried to understand intellectual trends and to speak and live a comprehensive Christianity into our time. The background to this attempt and to Schaeffer’s talk about modern art lies in his general assessment of Western culture. Nevertheless, the comprehensiveness Schaeffer desires seldom displays the accuracy and originality it would seem to demand. His writings do not meet the standards of contemporary scholarship, whether in theology or in history, and certainly not in philosophy. That makes them easy game for heavily armed academics, and ­sitting ducks for target practice against the New Christian Right. Sometimes, however, I wonder whether academic integrity and social concern are the banners flying above Schaeffer’s opponents, or whether they launch their attacks because someone has dared to ask what happened to those banners. It is not easy, of course, for professional philosophers to hear a “folk philosopher”8 call their work “antiphilosophy.” Yet to discount his description because he lacks professional credentials would be a form of ad hominem argument that even the most amateur philosopher should consider illegitimate. I would submit instead that if Schaeffer’s writings merit comment, then they deserve interpretation and evaluation, not simply dismissal. I wish to attempt this with respect to the relationship between “worldview” and modern art, looking first at how he assesses Western culture.

2 . C u lt u r a l Des pai r The subtitle of Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? recalls three well-known works in intellectual history: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. At one point Schaeffer actually suggests that the five attributes Gibbons ascribes to Rome in its decline also characterize Western society today.9 Similarly, the sombre tone prevalent in the three works mentioned characterize Schaeffer’s own book, subtitled The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. The historical account given there is not much different from those found in Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There and Escape From Reason. According to Schaeffer’s account, Roman civilization, “the direct ancestor of the modern Western world,” had “no real answers to the



Francis Schaeffer’s Worldview and Modern Arts 41

basic problems that all humanity faces.”10 These problems come down to the following four: • •

• •

the relationship between a finite creation and an infinite Creator; the position of human beings in a finite creation toward an infinite Creator; the absolute standards of truth and goodness; the unity of human knowledge and the human person.11

Answers to all four basic problems emerged in early Christianity: “The effects of the weaknesses of Roman culture speaks [sic] of the strength of the Christian worldview. This strength rested on God’s being an infinite-personal God and his speaking … in ways people could understand. Thus the Christians not only had knowledge about the universe and mankind that people cannot find out by themselves, but they had absolute, universal values by which to live and by which to judge the society … in which they lived. And they had grounds for the basic dignity and value of the individual as unique in being made in the image of God.”12 In the Middle Ages, however, there was “an increasing distortion away from the biblical teaching” as well as a “gradually awakened cultural thought and awakened piety.”13 Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) marks the watershed in Schaeffer’s historiography. From Aquinas flow two cultural streams. The one, “humanism,” emerges from the Renaissance to swell into a raging torrent. The other, “historic Christianity,” develops in the Protestant Reformation but slowly subsides into a mere trickle. Schaeffer appreciates Aquinas’s emphasizing the ordinary, in keeping with Christian teachings about creation. But he says Aquinas’s (alleged) separating of “nature” and “grace” made human intellect and individual things autonomous, in the sense of making them “independent.” In this way philosophy could be cut loose from the Bible; human beings and their acts could be separated from the “universals or absolutes which give existence and morals meaning”; and a path opened “for people to think of themselves as … the center of all things.”14 When Schaeffer discusses the Renaissance, he focuses almost ­entirely on the work of prominent artists. Art from Giotto’s Last Judgment (1304) to Michelangelo’s David (1504) displays not only the increasing acknowledgment of nature’s “rightful place,”15 he says, but also the growing tendency for nature to “eat up” grace:16 “It is crucial to notice that with Masaccio [1401–1428] … art could still

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have moved toward either a biblical or a nonbiblical concept of nature and the particulars … Immediately after Masaccio the die was cast … Man made himself increasingly independent and autonomous, and with this came an increasing loss of anything which gave meaning, either to the individual things in the world or to man.”17 In direct contrast to the Renaissance, according to Schaeffer, the Reformation did find a way to acknowledge the ordinary without positing autonomy or losing absolute standards for meaning. This way can be summarized in the slogans Sola Scriptura – the scriptures only – and Sola Gratia – God’s grace alone.18 By taking the Bible as the final authority for knowledge and life, the Reformers accepted God’s revealed will as the absolute standard, and they received “true truth”19 concerning the basic problems mentioned earlier. By seeing God’s grace in Jesus Christ as the only way to come to God, the Reformers could find a basis for human dignity in our being created in God’s image, without either ignoring human cruelty or making human beings the autonomous source of meaning. These teachings provided great impetus for significant contributions in the arts and sciences, for political freedom without chaos, and later for occasional corrections of social abuses such as slavery and the “noncompassionate use of accumulated wealth.”20 Although Schaeffer does not wish to portray the Reformation as a golden age nor its overall impact as solely salutary, he does tend to locate the movement of decline within the Reformation’s supposed “antithesis”: “The humanistic elements which had risen during the Renaissance came to flood tide in the Enlightenment … And if the humanistic elements stand in sharp contrast to the Reformation, the  Enlightenment was in total antithesis to it. The two stood for and were based upon absolutely different things in an absolute way, and they produced absolutely different results.”21 The Enlightenment resulted in bloody revolutions in France and, much later, in Russia, and a “breakdown” in philosophy and science. Schaeffer contrasts these results with England’s so-called “Bloodless Revolution” and the American Revolution as well as the work of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and James Clerk Maxwell. Unfortunately, when Schaeffer tries to tie this contrast to the “­total antithesis” between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, his account becomes little less than mythological. Nowhere is this mythological tendency more apparent than in his account of the four philosophers who “directed the shift” from optimism to



Francis Schaeffer’s Worldview and Modern Arts 43

pessimism among humanists about our autonomous, rational ability to provide “a unity to all of knowledge and all of life.”22 Schaeffer fails to note or explain the fact that three of these philosophers – Kant, Hegel, and Søren Kierkegaard – grew up in devout Lutheran homes and struggled throughout their lives with historic Christianity’s answers to the problems Schaeffer considers fundamental. To portray their work as humanism gone to seed is surely too simple. Schaeffer sees in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Kant a formalizing of modern humanism’s separation of autonomous human freedom from autonomous nature, of values from facts. From Hegel comes the idea that truth and goodness are to be found in synthesis rather than on one side of an antithesis, an idea Schaeffer regards as fundamentally anti-rational and misguided.23 In Kierkegaard he finds the first complete divorce between rationality and meaning, such that any hope for final answers is restricted to an irrational “upper story.” Following these four philosophers, modern humanism retains a belief in human autonomy but maintains “total separation between the areas of meaning and values and the area of reason. Reason leading to despair must be kept totally separate from the blind optimism of non-reason. This makes a lower and an upper story, with the lower story of reason leading to pessimism and men trying to find optimism in an upper story devoid of reason.”24 For Schaeffer this total separation and the rapid replacement of the upper story’s furniture characterize modern philosophy and theology. The separation remains constant, although the content of irrational hope changes: self-authenticating acts (Jean-Paul Sartre), revelatory dread (Martin Heidegger), final experience (Karl Jaspers), first order experiences through drugs (Aldous Huxley), oriental religious experience, art (André Malraux and the later Heidegger), and mystical personages (the later Salvador Dalí). A similar separation, which Schaeffer terms “the existential methodology,” enters theology via Karl Barth. The gradual result, which Schaeffer bemoans, has been threefold: •

•

The Bible no longer is seen “as giving truth which can be stated in contentful propositions” and as giving “moral absolutes.” Words such as “God” no longer have “certain content” but merely provide the “basis for a contentless religious experience within which reason has no place.”

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No theological basis remains “for applying the Bible’s values in a historic situation, in either morals or law”; instead, “highly motivating religious words out of our religious past” are “used for manipulation.”25

Based on this survey of Schaeffer’s writings, one can summarize his general assessment of Western culture in six points. •

•

•

•

•

•

All human beings face basic problems concerning God, humanity, unity, and standards for thought and life. Unlike Roman civilization in general, early Christianity had adequate solutions, as provided by the Bible, God’s Word. These solutions weakened in the Middle Ages, were rejected in the Renaissance, and were revived during the Reformation. The supposed solution of the Renaissance was humanism, “a value system rooted in the belief that man is his own measure, that man is autonomous, totally independent.”26 This supposed solution gained the upper hand in Western culture during the Enlightenment, only to show itself to be a pseudosolution in the philosophies of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. The outcome has been a complete separation between rationality and life’s meaning as well as an increasing despair concerning our ability to solve the basic problems we face.

According to Schaeffer, such “modern fragmentation” and “modern pessimism” have spread from the European mainland to England and North America, “from philosophy to art, to music, to general culture (the novel, poetry, drama, films), and to theology,” and from “the intellectuals to the educated and then through the mass media to everyone” (except “a certain age group of the middle class”).27

3 . M o d e r n Art Chapter 10 of How Should We Then Live?, titled “Modern Art, Music, Literature, and Films,” tries to document the non-­philosophical and non-theological vehicles of this modern “perspective” of pessimism and fragmentation. Let me summarize this chapter before I examine the basis for Schaeffer’s assessments of modern art.



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With respect to painting, Schaeffer mentions five stages in art’s becoming “the vehicle for modern man’s view of the fragmentation of truth and life.”28 •

•

•

•

•

Naturalists stressed pictorial representation at the expense of meaning. By “naturalists,” Schaeffer probably means realists such as Gustave Courbet. Impressionists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet were so faithful to what their eyes received that the question arose “as to whether there was a reality behind the light waves reaching the eyes.”29 Post-Impressionists such as Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin tried “to find the way back to reality, to the absolute,” but they failed. Cézanne, for example, tried to reduce nature to “its basic geometrical forms,” but “this gave nature a fragmented, broken appearance.”30 Picasso’s Cubism, initiated in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906– 07), developed a “new technique of fragmentation” that “fits the worldview of modern man. The technique expressed well the concept of a fragmented world and fragmented man … In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon people were made to be less than people; the humanity had been lost.”31 Dadaists such as Jean (Hans) Arp and Marcel Duchamp carried the techniques and worldview of fragmentation to their conclusion – namely, “the final absurdity of everything, including humanity” as well as “art itself.”32

The musical vehicle of pessimism is said to follow a similar progression. Beethoven’s last String Quartets “opened the door to twentieth-century music”;33 Mahler presents the ambiguity of accepting human mortality and nevertheless striving for immortality; Schoenberg introduces music that is “‘modern’ in that there [is] perpetual variation with no resolution”;34 Webern composes music characterized by an “indefinable quality of ‘hovering suspension’”;35 and John Cage produces music by chance to express his belief that we live in a universe of chance. Like the artistic progression, this musical line gives sequential expression to a modern worldview first articulated by philosophers, who “first formulated intellectually what the artists later depicted

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artistically.” The musical changes mentioned “were not just changes of technique; they expressed a worldview and became a vehicle for carrying that worldview to masses of people which the bare philosophic writings never would have touched.”36 At the same time, the techniques and worldview in question fail to fit the universe. Jackson Pollock might have tried to paint by chance, but “as the dripping paint from the swinging cans moved over the canvases, the lines of paint were following the order of the universe itself.”37 Unlike industrial designers, John Cage the musician may try to produce by chance, but Cage the mycologist, when hunting for mushrooms, takes no chances. For Schaeffer, “The universe is not what Cage in his music and Pollock in his painting say it is. And we must add that Cage’s music does not fit what people are, either.”38 Later, but even more pervasively, “poetry, drama, the novel, and especially films carried these ideas to the mass of people in a way that went beyond the other vehicles we have considered.” Now there is “an almost unified voice shouting at us a fragmented concept of the universe and of life … It is difficult not to be infiltrated by it.”39 And while neither existentialism nor “linguistic analysis” in philosophy gives “the answers people need, but each in its own ways generates confusion about meaning and values,” important philosophical concepts “increasingly … come not as formal statements of philosophy but rather as expression in … general culture.”40 As examples, Schaeffer cites “major philosophic statements” in films during the 1960s by directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luis Buñuel. In Blow-Up (1966), “Antonioni was portraying how, in the area of non-­reason, there are no certainties concerning moral values, and no human categories either.”41 In Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf (1968) we find that the leap into the upper story leaves us not only without “human or moral categories” but also with “no categories upon which to distinguish between reality and illusion.” Yet even Bergman “cannot really live with his own position,” for the music of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in Bergman’s film The Silence interferes with the statement this film tries to make that God is dead and the universe is silent.42 Lest we think Schaeffer is simply indulging in philosophical speculations, the last paragraph of chapter 10 drives home a point developed in the following chapters and in A Christian Manifesto:43 “These philosophic films have spoken clearly about where people



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have come. Modern people are in trouble indeed. These things are not shut up within the art museums, the concert halls and rock festivals, the stage and movies, or the theological seminaries. People function on the basis of their worldview. Therefore society has changed radically. This is the reason – and not a less basic one – that it is unsafe to walk at night through the streets of many of today’s cities. As a man thinketh, so is he.”44 Simplifying, but not oversimplifying, we can summarize chapter 10 as follows: •

•

•

•

•

Philosophers such as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard formulated a humanistic worldview characterized by fragmentation and pessimism. While later philosophers refined this worldview, art, music, and general culture increasingly conveyed it to a wider audience. As the conveying increased so did new artistic techniques of fragmentation and irresolution. Neither these techniques nor the worldview they conveyed can fit the universe and the nature of human beings. Nevertheless, “an almost monolithic consensus”45 has developed, one that easily infiltrates even the most wary and has dangerous consequences in daily life.

One could raise numerous objections to Schaeffer’s treatments of specific artists and works. To say, for example, that Cézanne’s attempts at reduction “gave nature a fragmented, broken appearance” is clearly inadequate if not altogether incorrect. To write that “Schoenberg totally rejected the past tradition in music”46 is to declare one’s own ignorance about Schoenberg’s work and the musical tradition to which he knew he was fully indebted. To consider John Cage’s discriminating approach to mushrooms a refutation of his “theory of the universe”47 is to misunderstand the point of Cage’s aleatoric music – Cage did not consider all chance operations equally appropriate for letting the universe have its say, nor would his eating the wrong mushrooms have been an effective protest against human overdetermination. Rather than interfering, Bach’s Goldberg Variations make the silence extremely poignant in Bergman’s film. The objections could continue. My main interest, however, concerns the basis for Schaeffer’s assessments rather than their specific merits. That basis is the relationship between worldview and art.

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4. W o r l dv ie w: H is to ry and Phi losophy Earlier I claimed that Schaeffer’s main concern is to present historic Christianity in a manner that is intellectually informed and culturally relevant. My summary of his discussion of art makes clear that the notion of “worldview” is central to this comprehensive apology. In fact, one can describe Schaeffer’s approach to modern arts and to culture as a whole as a combination of “worldview history” and “worldview philosophy.” In the opening pages of How Should We Then Live?, for example, Schaeffer claims that the “flow to history and culture has its wellspring in the thoughts of people.” Similarly, a person’s “presuppositions” – “the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview” – lay a “grid” or “basis” for all that person’s thoughts, values, decisions, and actions.48 Although “most people catch their presuppositions … the way a child catches measles,” more thoughtful persons choose their presuppositions after considering “what worldview is true.” The few basic options available “will become obvious as we look at the flow of the past.”49 The last paragraph of the final chapter returns to these themes: “People function on the basis of their worldview more consistently than even they themselves may realize. The problem is not outward things. The problem is having, and then acting upon, the right worldview – the worldview which gives men and women the truth of what is.”50 Accordingly, Schaeffer treats the history of Western culture as the development of a few basic worldviews, and his positive proposals come down to a statement of the right worldview and some of its implications. Readers of Schaeffer’s works will look in vain, however, for his own reflections on the historical background and philosophical rationale for emphasizing worldviews in historiography and philosophy.51 The absence of such reflections lends a touch of irony to Schaeffer’s unsympathetic evaluation of Kant and Hegel. Without their contributions, as revived around the beginning of the twentieth century, Schaeffer’s own approach would hardly be imaginable, nor would his own assessments of Kant and Hegel make much sense. From Kant comes the modern notion that human forms of perception and thought lay a grid for all experience and actions. From Hegel comes the attempt to encompass broad stretches of history as outworkings of the intellect (Geist). Wilhelm Dilthey later fused Kant’s notion and Hegel’s attempt in a Weltanschauungslehre or



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“theory of worldviews.” Dilthey, however, was only one of a host of thinkers around the beginning of the twentieth century who emphasized what Schaeffer calls “worldview.” Perhaps this fact helps explain the lack of reflection on “worldview” in Schaeffer’s writings. Perhaps the worldview stressing worldviews was so prevalent in Schaeffer’s intellectual context that he could catch this emphasis “the way a child catches measles.” Whatever our explanation might be, we need to consider the truth or falsity of Schaeffer’s emphasis, especially with respect to modern art. I intend to do this by pointing out three sets of problems in Schaeffer’s approach. These problems may not be peculiar to Schaeffer’s approach. They probably characterize most combinations of worldview history and worldview philosophy in the interpretation of modern art. I choose to give them tongue-in-cheek titles: fishing expeditions, filming with fixed cameras, and weighing photographs. More respectable labels for these problems are idealism, dogmatism, and presuppositionalism, respectively.

5 . F is h in g E xpedi ti ons Sometimes detectives and lawyers go on “fishing expeditions”: during interrogations they depart from their stated objective and use questionable methods to uncover incriminating evidence. At times Schaeffer’s approach to modern art resembles an investigator’s fishing expedition. In Schaeffer’s case, however, the methods are questionable precisely because the stated objective itself is questionable. Schaeffer explicitly aims to show how the modern worldview of pessimism and fragmentation has spread from philosophy to art, music, and “general culture,” and thereby to society as a whole. This objective is questionable at conceptual, historical, and philosophical levels. Conceptually, Schaeffer’s investigation of modern art is far from clear. What exactly is a worldview, and what counts as an artistic expression of a worldview? Is a worldview an individual person’s set of presuppositions about life? If so, then this would suggest that artists engage in fairly deliberate reasoning about life when engaged in making art. Do they, as a matter of fact? Perhaps a worldview is not an individual’s presuppositions but the general intellectual tendency of a cultural period – the Zeitgeist, to use a  Hegelian term. If so, then one would expect to find it not so much  in individual works or even in one artist’s total output as

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throughout the cultural products of a time. How could this expression be documented apart from exhaustive treatment of an entire period? Again, maybe Schaeffer means by worldview a full-fledged philosophy. If so, then we run into the problem that only philosophers write philosophies properly so called, philosophies as argued theoretical statements of ontology, epistemology, and the like. Most artists and arts are quite far removed from philosophy in this sense. How, then, can philosophies find expression in art? Schaeffer tends to use “worldview” to cover all three of these matters – presuppositions, Zeitgeister, and actual philosophies. This tendency can scarcely avoid conceptual confusion, a confusion compounded by Schaeffer’s failure to spell out what can count as an artistic expression of a worldview. These confusions open the door to arbitrary methods – the author can pick and choose illustrations at whim, without explicit justification. Documenting the spread of a worldview to modern arts is also historically questionable. Given the immense complexity of civilizations, when and why is one justified in singling out worldviews as the wellsprings of cultural development? Given the prominence of social factors such as industrialization and the growth of capitalism in modern Western society, why should one approach our recent history, including modern art, with the tools of worldview history? Moreover, what evidence is there that in modern history, worldviews have spread in the manner Schaeffer describes: philosophy – art – music – general culture – theology? Does Schaeffer’s approach allow for adequate historical understanding? Is it a defensible method of writing history? I suspect many art historians would consider it an attempt to catch minnows with harpoons. Pushed even further, the conceptual and historical questions already raised bring us into the philosophical problems of idealism. By “idealism” I mean “the view that mind and spiritual values are fundamental in the world as a whole.”52 This view achieved modern philosophical prominence through the writings of German Idealists such as Kant and Hegel. Most modern “worldview” approaches to art have idealist assumptions and are indebted to German Idealism. Schaeffer’s approach is no exception, despite his objections to Kant and Hegel. I am less interested in Schaeffer’s indebtedness, however, than in the specific shape of idealism in his approach to art. This shape appears most clearly in “Some Perspectives on Art,” the second essay in



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Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible. Most relevant here is the first section, where Schaeffer discusses the intrinsic value of art. “A work of art has a value in itself,” he writes. This value is that of creativity, which “has value” both “because God is the Creator” and because creativity is intrinsic to being human and being made in God’s image. In art this creativity comes down to our transforming something nonhuman into works expressing the humanness of human beings.53 More specifically, works of art have value neither solely for their own sake nor merely as vehicles for particular messages, but rather as expressions of worldviews that show through the entire body of an artist’s work. The argument, then, is that artworks have the intrinsic value of creativity, and artistic creativity is fundamentally the expression of a worldview through an entire body of works. On Schaeffer’s idealist account, art’s intrinsic value lies in its ability to express the worldviews from which human thoughts and actions flow. By calling this account idealist I am not saying it is completely mistaken. On the contrary, much can be said in its favour. Schaeffer’s account of art’s value corrects both formalist and instrumentalist approaches to art’s value. Formalists tend to value art solely for its internal aesthetic and formal qualities. Instrumentalists tend to value art solely for its nonaesthetic usefulness. Unlike both of these approaches, Schaeffer’s account emphasizes both art’s intrinsic value and its larger context and functions. Having said this in favour of Schaeffer’s idealism, however, I also wish to suggest that his account of art’s value is problematic. Let’s consider more carefully the claim that art’s intrinsic value lies in its ability to express the worldviews from which human thoughts and actions flow. I have already noted that Schaeffer’s notion of worldview is ill-defined, encompassing as it does individual presuppositions, broad Zeitgeister, and actual philosophies. I have also suggested that a worldview approach to history may not be appropriate. More important, I have serious reservations about the whole assumption that human thoughts and actions flow from worldviews, no matter how one defines these. On this assumption, mind and spiritual values are always and everywhere fundamental. Rather than unleashing a full-scale attack on idealism, however, let me question the claim that art’s intrinsic value lies in its supposed ability to express human worldviews. The claim is problematic on two scores. First, it devalues art and second, it employs a fuzzy notion of “expression.”

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Locating art’s intrinsic value in its perspectival expressiveness devalues art’s sensuousness, exploratory character, technical rigor, and social functions. The consequences of this devaluation show up in many of Schaeffer’s assessments of modern art. One example may suffice. When Schaeffer discusses Marcel Duchamp and Dada, he says Dada expresses the view that everything is absurd.54 But Schaeffer fails to mention that the Dadaists were carrying out a provocative protest against an absurd First World War and against a complacent bourgeois mentality that failed to recognize the war’s absurdity, as well as society’s irrationality. Schaeffer completely ignores Dada’s significant social function of protest. Moreover, his valuation of art employs a fuzzy notion of “expression.” What does it mean to say a work of art expresses a worldview? Even if Schaeffer used the term “worldview” consistently to mean a person’s most fundamental beliefs about life and reality, questions like this would arise. Does Schaeffer mean to suggest that artists always intend to present their fundamental beliefs in their work? Clearly this is not so, and even if it were so, this would not entitle us to conclude from the works themselves exactly what beliefs the artist intended to present. Perhaps Schaeffer means that, even if artists do not intend to present worldviews, artworks are always expressive of artist’s fundamental beliefs. Again, in many cases this is not so, simply because, as Nicholas Wolterstorff points out, “there is not always a close fittingness between the character of the work, and its maker’s Weltanschauung.”55 Perhaps the most that Schaeffer can legitimately claim is this: artworks are always expressions of their makers’ fundamental beliefs in the sense that interpreters must refer to those beliefs in order to give a full account of the existence and character of artworks. In other words, artworks always are the way they are because of artists’ fundamental beliefs. This may be so, but, as Wolterstorff mentions in his illuminating analysis of “expression,” “an appeal to the Weltanschauung helps account for the work only in the most general and nonspecific way.”56 It is precisely such generality that characterizes Schaeffer’s accounts of modern works of arts and makes them unsatisfactory. One can expect to meet a similar problem whenever cultural critics locate art’s intrinsic value in its supposed ability to express worldviews. They will be going on fishing expeditions, interrogating an artwork simply to confirm their suspicions, without paying close attention to the work in its fullness. All too frequently, as we shall see, the result is hermeneutical dogmatism.



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6 . F ix e d C ameras If a director filmed a crowd scene with stationary cameras, the movie would miss much of the action. Perhaps the most troublesome feature of Schaeffer’s approach to modern art is its tendency to apply a few inflexible categories to all the arts in all their historical stages. It is as if he has filmed with fixed cameras. Whatever has not happened in front of these cameras simply does not show up in Schaeffer’s account. Thus one finds his various books using the same examples to make the same points in the same way. Once one knows his main categories, one can almost predict what he will say, even when he treats a new example. His approach lacks imagination and flexibility. The fixed camera in Schaeffer’s interpretations of modern artworks is the category of perspectival truth. His interpretations focus primarily on the truth or falsity of the worldviews expressed in works of art. He spells out the basis for this emphasis in sections 4, 5, 7, and 8 of Art and the Bible. According to the fourth section, art “may heighten the impact of the worldview” but art “does not make something true. The truth of a worldview presented by an artist must be judged on separate grounds than artistic greatness.”57 What are the grounds for judging artistic greatness? Schaeffer offers four standards of judgment. Three are presented in section 5: “technical excellence,” “validity” (the artist’s honesty “to himself and to his worldview”), and the integration of content, message, or worldview with form, vehicle, or style. “The greatest art fits the vehicle that is being used to the worldview that is being presented.”58 Yet one must judge the truth of the worldview itself on separate grounds. In fact, the truth or falsity of a worldview is Schaeffer’s fourth and ultimate standard for judging a work of art. Schaeffer goes on to catalogue four kinds of artists, implying that there are four corresponding expressions of worldviews: (1) the born-again person doing art “within the Christian total worldview;” (2) the non-Christian expressing his or her “non-Christian worldview;” (3) the non-Christian doing art under the influence of a “Christian consensus”; and (4) “the born-again Christian who does not understand what the total Christian worldview should be  and therefore produces art which embodies a non-Christian worldview.”59 Two main points become apparent in sections 4 and 5. One is that Schaeffer’s aesthetic gives greatest emphasis to worldviews, their

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truth or falsity, and their artistic expression. The other point is that, although he does not wish to ignore technical excellence and artistic integrity, he distinguishes them quite sharply from the worldview being presented. The sharpness of this distinction, as well as its fragility, becomes obvious in Schaeffer’s discussion of the Christian artists and modern art in sections 7 and 8. Because artistic styles undergo legitimate change, he says, Christian artists should try to present the Christian worldview “in the art forms of the twentieth century.” Otherwise Christian artists will not be heard. Besides, “there is no such thing as a godly style or an ungodly style.” At the same time, however, styles are related to artworks’ worldviews. For example, the “fragmented form” of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” “matches his vision of fragmented man.”60 Schaeffer concludes: “Therefore, while we must use twentieth-century styles, we must not use them in such a way as to be dominated by the worldviews out of which they have arisen. Christianity is a message with its own distinctive propositional content … Therefore, an art form or style that is no longer able to carry content cannot be used to give the Christian message.” Accordingly, “totally fractured prose or poetry,” while not wrong in itself, is inappropriate for Christian writers because “it cannot carry intellectual content.”61 Schaeffer’s conclusions here might strike us as a bit odd. Hasn’t he claimed all along that “a worldview usually does show through,” even when the message is that “there is no meaning”?62 How then can a particular form or style be unable to “carry content”? Furthermore, hasn’t Schaeffer said that works of art are not merely vehicles for particular messages? Why then does his advice to Christian artists seem to assume that their primary task is, after all, to communicate a message having “propositional content”? Adequate answers would require us to inspect Schaeffer’s notions of “truth” and “propositional content.” Short of doing that now, we can summarize and evaluate Schaeffer’s reasons for focusing on perspectival truth or falsity. First, he thinks artistic greatness and perspectival truth must be the overriding concerns when Christians evaluate art, with perspectival truth being the most crucial. Second, he not only distinguishes sharply between ­expressed worldviews and artistic forms, styles, or techniques of expression but also ranks the latter according to the extent that they can express a true worldview. In other words, Schaeffer believes that



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perspectival truth is the most crucial standard for judging art, including artistic forms, styles, or techniques. This belief is the fixed camera of his own interpretations, and a major source of their limitations. The camera is not completely out of focus nor devoid of film. By making perspectival truth the most crucial standard, Schaeffer corrects prevalent tendencies to consider all works equally important and to concentrate solely on technical details. So too, by ranking artistic forms, styles, and techniques according to that standard, Schaeffer counters the tendency to approach art as a neutral enterprise having little to do with truth and human commitment. The problem, however, is that the focus of Schaeffer’s camera is narrow, and its position is rigid. Let me explain. In the first place, Schaeffer’s interpretations of modern art have an extremely limited focus. His interpretations are on the lookout for perspectival truth or falsity – nothing more, nothing less. Consequently many other matters, important in their own right, are simply overlooked or ignored. The only artworks worth discussing are those that clearly illustrate the worldview Schaeffer is commending or condemning. The only aspects considered in these artworks are those that help make the perspectival point. Often Schaeffer concentrates on the subject matter or theme of the artwork. Where this is not possible, he interprets techniques as outworkings of worldviews, as he does in the case of Eliot’s poem. Schaeffer even resorts to the highly questionable practice of drawing conclusions about a work’s worldview from stories about the artist’s life (think of John Cage’s mushrooms). In the second place, Schaeffer’s interpretations of modern art are rigid. Because he knows beforehand what worldviews are possible and which of these is true, he does not need to accommodate his interpretations to the artworks. Because he works with a sharp separation between truth and falsity, his interpretations are in black and white. There are few shades of grey. Thus for example, all the modern works discussed in How Should We Then Live? are portrayed in black: they express modern pessimism and fragmentation, period. All along, of course, Schaeffer assumes that there is an absolute, unchanging standard of truth and that he himself knows what that standard is. This assumption is not unrelated to the narrowness and inflexibility of Schaeffer’s interpretations. I do not think one can adequately explain such narrowness and inflexibility by saying

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Schaeffer is not the brilliant scholar some of his admirers claim him to be. Even if he were a brilliant scholar his approach would still be rigid, for it is fundamentally dogmatic. It is so naively convinced of the rightness of its own position that few other positions can be classified as anything but wrong. Such classification extends not only to “non-Christian worldviews” and their outworkings but also to a large share of Schaeffer’s own fellow Christians. Notice that I do not connect Schaeffer’s rigidity with his having firm convictions. These any good thinker will have. Dogmatism arises not from firmness of convictions but from naiveté with respect to those convictions. Schaeffer’s writings show naiveté in their lack of self-reflection upon his own premises, in their inadequate justifications of his position over against other positions, and in their reluctance to acknowledge the contributions of others. All these deficiencies take their toll in his interpretations of modern art. At best, these simplify. At their worst, they severely distort. As we shall soon see, Schaeffer’s standard of truth is the distorting lens.

7 . W e ig h in g P hotographs Thus far I have summarized and criticized Schaeffer for making the expression of worldview the locus of art’s intrinsic value and for considering the truth of a worldview to be the most crucial artistic standard. But what is the standard by which we can judge a worldview’s truth or falsity? Schaeffer’s answer in Art and the Bible is “the Scripture” or “the Christian worldview.” The greater the work of art, “the more important it is [for Christians] to consciously bring it and its worldview under the judgment of Christ and the Bible.”63 In evaluating artworks, Schaeffer’s ultimate concern is to weigh them in biblical or Christian balances. The ninth section in Art and the Bible voices a similar concern for Christian artists. They must present “the Christian worldview” and, in doing so, they must not major in minors. For Schaeffer the Christian worldview neatly divides into “a major and a minor theme.” The minor theme is “the abnormality of the revolting world,” both of humanity as a whole and of the “sinful side to the Christian’s life.” The major theme is “the meaningfulness and purposefulness of life” because there exists a God who has created us, whose character is “the moral law of the universe,” and who has offered redemption



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in Jesus Christ. For Christian artists in general this worldview means “the major theme is to be dominant – though it must exist in relationship to the minor.” Modern art expressing a non-Christian worldview “has tended to emphasize only the minor theme.” If Christian artists were to follow this tendency they would “add to the poorness and destruction of our generation” rather than “living by the law of love.”64 Given Schaeffer’s concern, one can only wonder how he would evaluate the works of major twentieth-century Christian artists such as the author Flannery O’Connor or the painter Georges Rouault. Have they majored in minors, or have they presented a Christian worldview significantly different from the one Schaeffer describes? In any case, Schaeffer clearly claims that there is, and always has been, only one true worldview, one whose dominant theme is “the meaningfulness and purposefulness of life,” one that provides a sufficient basis for humanity’s “significance,” for “optimism,” and for the existence of “love,” “true morals,” and “creativity.”65 Schaeffer claims even more, however. He claims that this true worldview, or the Bible to which it adheres, is the standard for judging the truth or falsity of any worldview. In this final claim we find the lens of his fixed camera and the ultimate concern of his entire apologetics. In 1968 Schaeffer called this approach a presuppositional apologetics, which he said “would have stopped the decay” spreading in twentieth-century Christianity.66 In his claim about the standard of truth we encounter both the ultimate concern of his apologetics and the difficult problem of presuppositionalism. Before I explain this problem, let me mention the strength of Schaeffer’s claim. Many people today might think that any commitments are fine, so long as these are commitments of one kind or another. They might also suppose that truth, like beauty, is simply in the eye of the beholder. Not so, says Schaeffer. Even in art, some commitments are true and others are false. Furthermore there is an absolute, unchanging standard of truth, and human beings can have sure knowledge of that standard. Thus he counters the tendency towards lazy relativism in knowledge – the attitude that my opinions are o k and yours are o k and the whole world is o k since we’re all o k . Unfortunately Schaeffer’s view of truth is not o k; it is plagued with the problem of presuppositionalism. By “presuppositionalism”

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I mean a theory of knowledge that does two things. First, it turns certain stated beliefs into the absolute standards of all truth. Second, it considers any claim to knowledge to be less than true unless that claim demonstrably presupposes the stated beliefs. For Schaeffer the absolutely essential stated beliefs are that God exists, that in the Bible God has revealed “true truth”67 about God, humanity, history, and the universe, that this revelation has propositional content, that there are absolute standards for knowledge and conduct, and that, according to the laws of classical logic, if one thing is true then its opposite is false. I do not have the space here for an adequate explanation and evaluation of Schaeffer’s presuppositionalism. The main problems, as I see them, are these two. First, Schaeffer’s theory is so indebted to one of the traditional philosophies of truth that his theory cannot do justice to the Bible’s teachings about truth. Second, some of the stated beliefs Schaeffer holds to be absolutely essential are neither selfevident nor agreed upon by all Christians at all times. On the one hand, he runs the risk of passing off a certain Aristotelian theory of truth as God’s Word. On the other hand, he runs the risk of setting up his own convictions as the truth and the Christian worldview. A side effect of presuppositionalism shows up in Schaeffer’s approach to modern art. In Art and the Bible it often appears that Schaeffer secretly wishes artworks would make explicit statements in propositional form: “God exists,” “Life is meaningful,” “Right is right, and wrong is wrong.” He appreciates, for example, the “firm core of straightforward propositions” in Shakespeare’s dramas and bemoans the loss of “symbolic vocabulary” in modern abstract art.68 We noted earlier his contention that “totally fractured prose or poetry cannot be used to give the Christian message for the simple reason that it cannot carry intellectual content and you can’t preach Christianity without content.”69 To the extent that Schaeffer expects explicit statements from artworks, his interpretations will try to do the impossible. Trying to assess artworks by the standard of explicit statements is like trying to find out how heavy a rock is by weighing its photograph. Furthermore, because so many modern artists have consciously rejected the demand that their artworks make explicit statements, Schaeffer’s approach becomes doubly inappropriate. His criticisms of “absurdity” or “irrationality” in modern art sound at times like the frustration of someone weighing the photograph of a painterly rock.



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8 . C o n c l usi on Essays, like lines, eventually come to an end. I have given you very little of my own line on the topics Schaeffer discusses. It is there, however, hidden beneath my evaluations, waiting to emerge in discussion. Let me conclude with a quick review and one brief final point. I have followed Schaeffer on apparent fishing expeditions, looked at his fixed camera, and wondered whether he might be weighing photographs. I have challenged his idealistic locating of art’s value in perspectival expression, questioned his dogmatic emphasis on perspectival truth, and wondered about his presuppositionalist claims concerning the standard for judging perspectival truth. My final point is this. Showing certain of Schaeffer’s claims to be incorrect does not mean these same claims cannot also be correct in certain respects. What is untrue can also be or become true. That sentence sums up my fundamental disagreement with Schaeffer’s entire undertaking. By eschewing idealism, dogmatism, and presuppositionalism, and by giving reasons for criticizing them, one can remain open to Schaeffer’s contributions for faith-oriented engagements with modern art.

3 Transforming Aesthetics: Reflections on the Work of Calvin G. Seerveld (1995)

At a heady Reformation Day Rally during the early 1970s, John VanderStelt introduced a nervous philosophy and music student from Dordt College to a Trinity Christian College professor known as a leader of the so-called Reformational Movement. The fortyyear-old professor seemed more re­served than his colourful prose had led one to expect. Yet a breadth of knowledge and a depth of wisdom permeated his conversation. During that visit, as at so many encounters with students around the world, this professor’s challenging discourse instilled an irresistible sense of Christian vocation. In September 1972 the professor and student would meet again, now at the five-year-old Institute for Christian Studies (i c s ) , which had just moved to 229 College Street in Toronto. The professor was beginning nearly a quarter century as the first full-time Senior Member in Philosophical Aesthetics at i cs. I had the privilege of becoming one of his first graduate students.

1 . P o ly p h o n ic Wi s dom No one who has studied with Calvin G. Seerveld can deny the impact of his teaching. Fluent in several modern languages and well versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Seerveld would turn his graduate seminars into concerts of cross-cultural polyphony whose subjects came from central texts by major figures. Although Seerveld served as orchestrator and conductor, every student soon learned to



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play a part. One felt the push and pull of a common project whose significance far exceeded the particular task at hand. The diversity of intellectual interests among Seerveld’s students reflects his own restless curiosity in matters cultural and artistic. Writers, painters, dramatists, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, philosophy students, art historians, cultural critics – all came to study with him at i c s and to learn from one another.1 Seerveld’s graduate students have also come from many different religious and national backgrounds, matching the flexibility in his own embrace of the Reformed tradition. In the 1970s many were graduates of the three American colleges affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church (i.e., Calvin, Dordt, and Trinity). Soon, however, Cal was also attracting students from other church backgrounds, partly because of campus ministries in western Pennsylvania carried out by Pete Steen, Perry Recker, and the Pittsburgh Coalition for Christian Outreach. Students also began to arrive from South Africa, the Netherlands, and England. To all of these students Seerveld conveyed the worth and legitimacy of groundbreaking scholarship, despite suspicion or ignorance toward the arts in many Christian traditions, and amid societal problems and personal struggles that could often seem more pressing. He always held up the vision of Christian scholarship as a “diaconal service” on behalf of the church worldwide. *** Born in 1930, Seerveld grew up during the Depression and the Second World War on Long Island, where his parents ran a local fish market in West Sayville, New York. He entered Calvin College in 1948 when this small Midwestern liberal arts school was experiencing an enrolment boom, thanks in part to war veterans making use of the G.I. Bill. Seerveld studied English literature with Henry Zylstra and philosophy with Henry Stob and William Harry Jellema, three professors who deeply influenced not only Seerveld’s intellectual development but also the college as a whole and the Christian Reformed Church (c rc) for which the college trained pastors, teachers, and other leaders.2 In Seerveld’s senior year (1951–52), H. Evan Runner, a dynamic younger philosopher, joined the faculty. Runner would soon provide intel­lectual inspiration for the Reformational Movement, an offshoot of Dutch-North American Calvinism that emphasizes the

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transformation of society according to norms in the fabric of creation and by way of organized Christian efforts in politics, education, labour, and the arts. Although Seerveld did not study with Runner as long and as intently as did Hendrik Hart, James Olthuis, and Bernard Zylstra (younger contemporaries who also became senior members at i c s), the direction of Seerveld’s intellectual development was set when Runner pointed him to the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd and D.H.Th. Vollenhoven, the Dutch followers of Abraham Kuyper with whom Runner himself had studied.3 After a year at the University of Michigan to get an m a in English literature and classics, Seerveld headed for Europe to study philosophy with Vollenhoven at the Free University of Amsterdam (now called the v u University Amsterdam). During a five-year European sojourn (1953–58) he met and married Inés Cécile Naudin ten Cate, studied philosophy and theology with Karl Jaspers, Karl Barth, and Oscar Cullman in Basel, Switzerland, and did research in aesthetics with Carlo Antoni at the University of Rome. Seerveld received his doctorate in philosophy and comparative literature from the Free University in 1958 with a dissertation on the aesthetics of Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce.4 Seerveld’s work on Croce was cut short by a job offer to teach philos­ophy and English literature at Belhaven College, a small school in the heart of the old South at Jackson, Mississippi. Within a year he and his Dutch bride were on the move again, this time to Palos Heights, Illinois, where Seerveld became one of the first faculty members of Trinity Christian College, the newest c rc -affiliated college (Dordt College having opened as a two-year college in 1955). As he and Inés reared a young family of three children (Anya, Gioia, and Lucas, born in 1960, 1961, and 1962, respectively), Cal nurtured an entire generation of Trinity students from 1959 until the move to Toronto in 1972. Despite his location at small and newly founded schools in North America, Seerveld’s teaching and scholarship have retained the cosmopolitan range of his own graduate studies; he has frequently returned to Europe to do research and to speak at international congresses in aesthetics.5 At the same time, he has played an active role in North American aesthetics, frequently taking his graduate students to annual meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics, and serving from 1984 through 1987 as the co-chair of its Canadian counterpart.



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It would be hard to overestimate the scope and significance of Calvin Seerveld’s work. A gifted and respected philosopher, historian, teacher, and cultural critic, he is equally well-known as a stimulating lecturer and an indefatigable builder of Christian organizations. Cal has given selflessly of his time and talents to Christian artists and arts organizations, most notably the Patmos Workshop and Gallery in Toronto. He has played central roles in the formation of a fledgling college (Trinity), the growth of a unique graduate school for cross-disciplinary philosophy and theology (i cs ), and the founding of the bilingual Canadian Society for Aesthetics / Société canadienne d’esthétique. Trained in literature and philosophy, Seerveld has also composed songs, written psalm versifications, translated scripture, published on art history, and become a film aficionado. The bibliography in the Pledges of Jubilee volume shows that he has addressed an amazing variety of audiences – high school, college, and university students and faculty; trade unionists, cosmetologists, and media executives; church groups, pastors, and mission­ aries; radio audiences, television viewers, and newspaper readers; family conferences, cultural festivals, and scholarly meetings; artists, scientists, historians, philosophers, and theologians – not only across North America but also around the world. *** Given the range of Seerveld’s interests and the variety of his audiences, it may be presumptuous to identify central themes in his work as a scholar. Yet I think certain motifs in his published writings and certain inflections of the Reformed tradition mark his scholarship. Many of the motifs and inflections can be discovered in the inaugural lecture he gave upon accepting the chair of philosophical aesthetics at ic s in 1972.6 Let me mention three, and then identify his main contributions to the field of aesthetics. Like so many of Seerveld’s speeches, his inaugural lecture begins with a gutsy translation of scripture, in this case Psalm 147. Seerveld is one of the few philosophers in recent decades whose writings continually resonate with scriptural references. Indeed, he is one of the few to undertake fresh translations of scripture from the original languages and to attend closely to the literary structure and aesthetic nuances of the passages he quotes. This gives many of his speeches and writings a hortatory tone, as if they are an indirect form of argument. Although other philosophers may find such features puzzling

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or disturbing, they jibe with Seerveld’s own theories concerning literature and the arts, about which more will be said below. Continual engagement with the original scriptures gives a unique cast to Seerveld’s pursuit of Christian scholarship. Unlike many evangelicals who try to spell out a Christian worldview and then apply this to some topic or discipline, unlike many mainline Protestants for whom the inter­section between faith and learning arises from the scholar’s own character or practices, and unlike many Catholic scholars who orient their work to church teachings and the Thomist intellectual tradition, Seerveld’s scholarship drinks deeply from the wells of scriptural translation and med­itation. He does not deny the need for an articulated worldview or for proper character and practices, nor does he run roughshod over church teachings and intellectual traditions; instead he turns scriptural interpretation into the touchstone for all of these other matters. At the same time, however, he rejects any cookie-cutter hermeneutic that would turn scripture into a collection of proof texts or a batch of hard-baked axioms. Imagination and reliance on the Spirit figure prominently in his ­understanding of how scripture should be read, lived, and used in scholarship. Seerveld’s inaugural lecture moves directly from Psalm 147 to a  learned discourse on the “historical predicament” facing any Christian who wishes to help transform aesthetics.7 The lecture examines the modern setting in which aesthetics has become a distinct field of inquiry. Seerveld relates this development to cultural struggles over the independence and legitimacy of the arts, and he shows why, despite a problematic history, aesthetics merits the attention of  Christian scholars. If pursued in the proper fashion, according to Seerveld, “aesthetics can be a blessing to God’s people, society at large, artists too, every other science, and even other institutions within society.”8 Such use of history to get one’s bearings characterizes Seerveld’s work as a scholar. Seldom does he treat a topic or issue without studying the history from which it arises. The emphasis on history sets his work apart from many of his North American contemporaries in philosophy, who often treat historical inquiry as not properly philosophical and, accordingly, address philosophical problems in abstraction from their historical con­texts. Moreover, Seerveld’s historical accounts have a critical edge. They attempt to discern the spirits at work in human affairs and to sift the wheat from the chaff



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in what other scholars have achieved. To use Seerveld’s own coinage, his model of historical inquiry in philosophy is to read “anti-­ sympathetically.”9 He is a master of what Walter Benjamin describes as brushing history against the grain.10 A third characteristic of Seerveld’s scholarship, in addition to its en­gagement with scripture and its critical-historical bent, emerges in the section of the lecture titled “Rightful Task.”11 Here Seerveld notes the perpetual tension in Western culture between theory and practice, particularly in matters aesthetic and artistic. Yet he insists that the two can be mutually beneficial if their institutional contexts are transformed. This means, he says, that neither Christian theorists nor Christian artists should try to go it alone. They need each other, and they need the other members of Christ’s body, especially as these achieve institutional expression by way of educational, political, ecclesiastical, and cultural organizations. The same principle of mutual service within institutional contexts prevails in his sketch of an academic flower within the garden of various organized means of Christian endeavour. The flower’s three “aesthetic petals” are “modal aesthetics,” as the study of the aesthetic dimension of reality; theory and historiography of the arts; and hermeneutics, as the study of the principles of arts criticism. Although aesthetic theorists have the rightful task of piecing out the structure and role of the aesthetic dimen­sion as well as of the various arts, they must do so in collaboration with other disciplines and together with other scholars and practitioners of the arts: “The closest consultation on the definitive issues among art theorists, art historians and artists … not to speak of art critics and knowledge­able art viewers … such willing, communal research would be a mark of happy obedience and a step toward experiencing communion of the saints as a professional reality too, so that leadership in the area of art and literature could be a co-norming responsibility of practising art theorists, art historiographers, critics, and actual performing and producing artists.”12 It is common, of course, for Christian scholars and schools to pay homage to the principle of mutual service. What is striking about Seerveld’s bold sketch in 1972, and what distinguishes his subsequent work, is the thoroughness with which he pursues this principle in the details of his discipline. It is no accident that the contributors to Pledges of Jubilee come from so many diverse fields of study. Calvin Seerveld has always promoted collaboration within and among the fields of

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scholarship, even as he has single-mindedly given himself to fashioning a new approach to aesthetics. *** Four claims constitute the core of Seerveld’s contribution to his chosen field. The first is that the aesthetic dimension inheres in the fabric of created reality, and that aesthetic norms can be violated or ignored only at great cost to human culture and society. With this claim, Seerveld counters the tendency either to turn aesthetic activities and objects into poor imitations of a transcendent Beauty (e.g., Plato) or to treat aesthetic experience as a mere matter of personal preference (e.g., C.J. Ducasse). Seerveld’s approach provides a basis for calling people to lives of aesthetic responsibility and service. The second claim is that the arts, despite their tremendous variety and continual development, make up a unified family distinct from other branches of culture. The fact that the distinct lineage of the arts did not become obvious until modern times does not argue against their having a common and distinctive structure. This means that the arts can present a bona fide sphere for contemporary Christian endeavour, even though not every individual is called to be an artist. The third claim is that the aesthetic dimension encompasses much more than the arts, just as the arts have many more dimensions than the aesthetic dimension. Hence those aestheticians who spend all their time discussing the arts (as was common for the greater part of the twentieth century) miss much of significance in human life, just as those theorists who spend all of their energy sorting out the nature of aesthetic experience overlook much of importance about the arts. The fourth, and perhaps the most difficult claim, is that “allusiveness” or “imaginativity” makes up the central trait of the aesthetic dimension and the defining characteristic of the arts as a unified family of cultural endeavour. By allusiveness or imaginativity, Seerveld means the nuances, indirection, metaphorical suggestion, and playfulness that seem always to accompany aesthetic activities and experience. The main point here is that such features ought neither to be denigrated nor to be blown out of pro­portion, but rather should be recognized and respected as ordinary con­stituents of human life, constituents to which the arts call special attention.



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None of these claims lies beyond dispute. Indeed, several essays in the Pledges of Jubilee volume question or revise one or another of Seerveld’s insights. In their interconnections, however, and in their detailed elaboration, the four claims indicate a substantial and provocative attempt to transform the field of aesthetics, and to do so in a way that makes it serviceable for other disci­plines and for people’s lives.

2 . N e w F ie l d s a n d Old Fri ends Fruits of Seerveld’s transforming aesthetics can be found in the essays that make up Pledges of Jubilee. The essayists include persons who have studied with Seerveld as well as others who have been in dialogue with him about issues in the arts and culture. All of the authors have taken up the challenge of nurturing a Christian approach to contemporary culture. And in doing so, they extend Seerveld’s efforts to new areas, reexamine the tools he has devised for work in the field of aesthetics, and revisit the traditions on which his academic gardening relies for sustenance. The two inner petals of Seerveld’s flower – modal aesthetics and philosophy of the arts – are represented by the four essays in cultural theory that make up Part I in Pledges of Jubilee. Each essay carries a planting from Seerveld’s garden into fields of study that have opened in recent decades: popular culture, perfor­mance art, computer imagery, and the “new art history.” William D. Romanowski, who teaches communications and film stud­ies at Calvin College, explores the relevance of Seerveld’s modal aesthetics for popular culture. Romanowski shows that Seerveld’s philosophy tran­scends the opposition between high culture and low, a polarity that has plagued North American artists and theorists alike and has served as a way to denigrate popular culture in the Reformed community of which Seerveld is a lifelong member. As Romanowski puts it, quoting his subject along the way, Seerveld’s “‘single, unifying vision’ for aesthetic life … provides a useful framework not only for theoreticians and artists but also for viewers and consumers, the ‘so-called pop and hot dog masses.’”13 Whereas Romanowski shows the relevance of Seerveld’s modal aesthet­ics for the study of popular culture, Jim Leach seeks to revise Seerveld’s philosophy of the arts in order to accommodate

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“proto-arts” and “anti-arts.”14 Leach, a playwright who studied with Seerveld at i c s , examines Seerveld’s proposal for an encyclopaedic theory of the arts, made during his “Unionville” lectures to Canadian university students in the early 1960s. Although Leach worries that Seerveld’s emphasis on differences among various art forms might obscure their commonalities, he wants to retain the insight derived from Kuyper and Dooyeweerd that the arts evidence the same coherence-in-diversity characterizing the rest of God’s creation. Art historian Mary Leigh Morbey takes a similar tack in the uncharted channels of electronic imagery. Her exploratory essay examines the ade­quacy of Seerveld’s categories for art history in light of two simultaneous developments: the marriage of art and electronic technologies, and the rise of postmodernist critiques of modernist approaches to art criticism and art history.15 Morbey shows that modernist approaches such as the formalism of Clement Greenberg lead to either neglect or misunderstanding of process-oriented art making such as the computer imagery of Harold Cohen. More appropriate categories are needed for the criticism and history of computer-based visual art. Henry Luttikhuizen, a philosophically trained art historian, continues this exploration of art historiographic categories while introducing several of the themes in the next three essays. Wishing to put into practice the Seerveldian insight that living in a tradition involves “setting the table for the next generation,”16 Luttikhuizen reviews the art historiography of Hans Rookmaaker and Calvin Seerveld, sorts out their contributions and limitations, and proposes a new goblet for drinking their vintage wisdom. Like much of the so-called new art history, Rookmaaker’s and Seer­veld’s art histories reject the positivist notion that art historical interpreta­tions should be valuefree. Unlike most “new art historians,” however, Rook­maaker and Seerveld include religious commitment among the “values” that necessarily and legitimately shape both art and scholarship. Whereas Rookmaaker turns this insight into an emphasis on the worldview signified by the artistic image, Seerveld provides a more complex methodology, one which distinguishes, traces, and interrelates synchronic periods, perchronic styles or traditions, and diachronic ­developments and contributions. Seer­veld also insists on the openended character of historical interpretation as well as the allusive character of the artistic image. Despite his appreciation for Seerveld’s



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approach, Luttikhuizen worries that the proposed methodology can encourage pigeonholing, for it seems to reduce images to words and treats periods and styles as realities rather than as merely heuristic devices. *** The essays in the next section of Pledges of Jubilee, titled “Philosophical Dialogue,” give testimony to the close and engaged reading of major philosophers that has always characterized Seerveld’s teaching and scholarship. The philosophers discussed include the French postmodernist Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the American pragmatist John Dewey (1859–1952), and the German existen­tialist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Merold Westphal, a prominent American philosopher who taught at Fordham University, takes to task those Christian scholars who seek to demonize postmodernism.17 Responding in particular to a book by literary theorist Roger Lundin, Westphal wittily skewers the folly and fallacies in simplistic attacks on the thought of Jacques Derrida. According to Westphal, Derrida does not embrace relativism and nihilism, as too many Christian scholars have claimed. Instead, Derrida points out the finitude and fallibility of all human theories and practices – an inadvertently Augustinian insight that epistemic and moral absolutists would rather not apply to their own positions. Derrida will not let us forget that none of us is God. A similar emphasis on finitude and fallibility occurs in Carroll Guen Hart’s pioneering comparison of Seerveld’s systematic aesthetics with that of John Dewey. Guen Hart, a feminist philosopher and educator, draws upon her extensive knowledge of Dewey’s work to defend him against the charge that his aesthetic theory dissolves art into undifferentiated experi­ence. Her twofold aim is to show that Dewey shares many concerns with Seerveld and to identify the important elements Dewey’s aesthetics may contribute to a contemporary Christian aesthetic theory. Guen Hart shows that, despite Seerveld’s criticisms of Deweyan philosophy, his own emphases are not that far re­moved from Dewey’s. Seerveld, too, rejects elitist understandings of art and regards aesthetic life as intrinsic to ordinary human existence. Moreover, Dewey’s attention to process and context provides an important correction to what Guen Hart regards as Seerveld’s undue stress on meeting God-given norms. Whereas such an emphasis can stifle the experimentation needed for

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aesthetic education and artistic endeavour, Dewey gives us a way to nurture experimentation without becoming indiscriminate in our judg­ments. Both in aesthetic education and in the work of artists, the process of “poeming” is just as important as the “poetry” produced. Dewey can teach a Christian aesthetic theory to recognize “a more generous and flexible normativity.”18 As Guen Hart points out, Seerveld sometimes pits Dewey against Martin Heidegger as two extremes to be rejected in favour of a “third way.” The next essay, by philosopher and community worker Donald Knudsen, addresses the second figure in this polarity. Joining recent battles over Heidegger’s cultural politics, Knudsen demonstrates a mythologizing turn in Heidegger’s thought during the Nazi era. Knudsen’s essay examines the language of “Ereignis” (roughly, “historically freighted event”) in a previously hidden passage from Heidegger’s 1936–37 lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche. After discussing the circumstances under which Heidegger deleted this passage from the published lectures, Knudsen shows that the passage transfigures Heidegger’s own appropriation of Nietzsche’s anti­democratic “nihilism” into an event of worldwide significance. The passage also aligns this event with Heidegger’s earlier (mis)use of Nietzsche to support Nazi cultural policies. Recognition of Heidegger’s mythologizing tendency around 1936–37 lets one “follow clearly the politi­cal component of his turn (Kehre) to poetry, language, and the work of art.”19 *** The outer petal of Seerveld’s flower – hermeneutics, as the study of the principles of art criticism and literary criticism – is represented in Pledges of Jubilee by four essays in cultural critique. Each essay combines reflection on prin­ciples for appreciating cultural practices with commentary on specific cul­tural products: a public monument, a film, a painted collage, and a lyric poem. Common to all four essays is their concern for justice and solidarity amid oppression and conflict. The South African philosopher and social critic Johan Snyman asks how the political system of apartheid could be instituted by people whose ancestors had suffered similar atrocities in the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War. Part of the explanation lies in the kinds of memorials that Afrikaners used to represent and express their suffering.



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Snyman’s eloquent essay begins by distinguishing between memorials, with which we honour the dead, and monuments, with which we honour ourselves: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, dc has a dif­ferent social function from the Washington Monument. Genuine memorial sculpture refuses to serve as an aesthetic theodicy of war and the suffering it causes. This is particularly so of Holocaust art, such as the Dachau Memorial by Glid Nandor, which records and interprets the suffering of Jews and other victims of the Nazi concentration camps. Unlike genuine war memorials, Snyman claims, the Women’s Memorial (1913) in Bloemfontein “is not so much a memorial dedicated to the suffering of the dead, as a monument for the grief of those left behind.”20 His thesis is borne out by a close reading of the written record surrounding the Women’s Memorial sculpture, by careful attention to its placement and structure, and by historical understanding of the culture and ethos of the Afrikaner survivors. Hence it is not surprising that this so-called memorial quickly turned into a nationalist shrine celebrating “love of the fatherland, bravery, and unwavering faith.”21 Against such selective and self-congratulatory memory, Snyman posits a new moral imperative derived from the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno – namely, to prevent repetitions of the deadly domination that genuine memorials protest and of the horrific suffering they express. “Memorials should not … invoke the discourse of greatness by elevating victims to the purported height of their … victimizers and thereby offering false restitution. Memorials vow silently for the sake of future victims.”22 Racial conflict and oppression, which form the social context for Snyman’s essay, provide the main theme of Fran Wong’s essay on The Crying Game, a film by Irish writer and director Neil Jordan. A Canadian film critic, musician, and educator, Wong brings to her analysis the concerns of a Christian feminist and the sensibilities of someone who has lived simul­taneously in both majority and minority cultures. Her essay argues that the film’s depiction of race relations in contemporary Britain encourages filmgoers “to examine their own racial attitudes, their interracial relation­ships … and their society’s racial interactions.”23 Under Wong’s observant eye, the issues raised by Snyman’s essay return with all the expressive power of a definitive film from the early 1990s. Peter Enneson, a graphic designer and art director in Toronto, devotes his attention to the work of Henk Krijger, the accomplished

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painter, sculptor, and book designer whom Seerveld helped bring to the Patmos Workshop and Gallery as its master artist in the early 1970s. Enneson’s innovative piece of “artwriting” provides a suitably multifaceted meditation on Krijger’s painted collage The Survivors of 1972. After describing Krijger’s associative and constructive modus operandi, his history as a survivor from the Dutch resistance movement in the Second World War, and the range of works he completed in 1972, Enneson provides a nuanced account of the structure, significations, and narrative technique of this powerful work. It is at once a product of personal memory, social critique, and communal lament. Like many other of Krijger’s works, writes Enneson, The Survivors transforms “attentiveness to the self and its ravages” into “an act of empathetic human solidarity.”24 The concluding commentary in this part of the collection is by the South African Germanist and literary theorist Gudrun Kuschke. Like the preceding essayists, Kuschke is interested in how Christian intellectuals should conduct themselves in times of social upheaval and political struggle. For clues she turns to the life and writing of the German poet Werner Bergengruen, a member of the “inner resistance” to the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. Kuschke suggests that Christian poetry will be characterized by an ethos that flows into the poetry from the person as a poet. To detect such an ethos requires both “faith-bound sensitivity” and “an integrated structural approach” on the part of the literary critic.25 *** An outstanding feature of Seerveld’s life and work is his passion for the imagery, liturgy, and literature of his own religious tradition. The expression of this passion has been ecumenical in scope and innovative in effect, ranging from illustrated lectures on religious iconography to compositions of new psalm tunes and texts and fresh translations of books and passages from the Hebrew scriptures. The essays in the final section of Pledges of Jubilee exemplify Seer­veld’s concern for renewing and reclaiming the artistic heritage of Chris­ tianity, especially within the Reformed tradition. Bert Polman, a musicologist and one of Cal’s collaborators in revising the Christian Reformed Church’s Psalter Hymnal, provides a fascinating account of the image of Mary as the breastfeeding mother of God. After tracing the earliest sources for this image, Polman explores its shifting connotations of nourishment, humility, power, full



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humanity, spiritual sustenance, and divine grace. Many paintings of  the nursing Madonna, he argues, have erotic overtones that the Catholic Ref­ormation tried to suppress and that Christians in the West continue to find disturbing. Polman, however, thinks the image, including its eroticism, needs to be celebrated: “Patriarchal fears of powerful nursing women notwithstanding, the image of the breastfeeding Virgin Mary continues to inspire human culture as a symbol of maternal nourishment, divine grace, and erotic pleasure, if not also of a humility which is sometimes wrongly focussed only on women.”26 Barbara Jo Douglas, also a musicologist, writes with obvious admiration about the Genevan psalm settings that Seerveld has tried to restore to their rightful place in contemporary Reformed liturgy. Douglas recounts the history of the Genevan Psalter in order to raise issues about church music today. She writes that the Reformers tried to fashion a liturgy that broke with the obscurity and elitism of the aesthetically rich but inaccessible mass in the late medieval church. It was in this context that Jean Calvin and his musical and poetic collaborators introduced congregational psalm singing in sixteenthcentury Geneva. According to Douglas, the Genevan Psalter sprang from a “pastoral theology of music,”27 articulated by Calvin, that considers music a pleasurable gift whose emotional power must be moderated by scriptural texts and placed in the service of fervent prayer. She concludes that the Genevan Psalter provides a solid and rich liturgical legacy whose combination of accessibility and quality is well worth emulating in contemporary church music. Indeed, the postmodern era may be the right time to revitalize the practice of psalm singing and to revive the entire Psalter for contemporary use. Ray Van Leeuwen, an Old Testament scholar, pays homage to Calvin Seerveld’s passion for biblical wisdom literature.28 This passion has led Seerveld to a new translation and many performances of The Greatest Song (otherwise known as the Song of Songs), as well as numerous commentaries and sermons on passages from the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Van Leeuwen first explores the historical reasons why all manner of proverbs have fallen on hard times among modern intellectuals. Then he describes features common to all proverbs and illustrates these with biblical sayings from the book of Proverbs. To do their work, he says, proverbs must fit the situation, and the speaker must have wisdom to use a proverb fittingly. Van Leeuwen suggests that the dominant proverbs in a society, such as “money talks” or “sex sells,” reveal where a culture’s heart

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lies. By contrast, what guides the wise sayings in Proverbs, and what should guide all who wish to follow wisdom’s path, is a verse that could well serve as a motto for Seerveld’s own teaching: “The fear of  the Lord is beginning of knowl­edge; fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov. 1:7, nrsv ). In this proverb of proverbs Van Leeuwen hears a fundamental challenge to the assumptions of modernity and postmodernity alike.

3 . H a rv e s t Home When Calvin Seerveld envisioned three aesthetic “petals” in 1972, he had little assurance that what he planted would not die in the greenhouse. Nor, for that matter, did he need such assurance. Seerveld’s walk with God exudes a Calvinist piety that affirms, with Isaiah: “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isaiah 40:8, n rsv ). Such piety is not an exhausted resignation, but rather the persistent confidence that God will bless what is planted in faithfulness and love. During the intervening years Seerveld has been steadily at work in his garden, training apprentices, inspiring visitors, and turning his sketches into thriving plants and vibrant flowerbeds. At the same time, however, the terrain of intellectual culture has shifted dramatically, and neither Seer­veld nor his students and younger colleagues have ignored changes in the academic landscape. Instead they have refined and reformulated, trying to design appropriate theories and methods for a new environment. The essays in Pledges of Jubilee bear witness not only to the genial expanse of Seerveld’s original ­vision but also to its transformative potential. Indeed, the cross-­ fertilizing of theory, criticism, and history, along with the concern to help transform culture through scholarship, make these essays a fitting tribute to a reformational interdisciplinarian par excellence. What Seerveld has envisioned, and what he has laboured energetically and faithfully to provide, is nothing less than a “doxological aesthetics,” one that, “within … its rich zone of creation, engaged according to its edu­cational formative nature, not abandoning … the tentative caution proper to theoretic work, not short-changing … its conceptual knowledge-getting, yet within all that knowledgegetting, [is] an aesthetics that gets Under­standing.” Such an aesthetics “builds up the praise in the world for the Lord by breaking open a consciousness of the dead ends” in aesthetic life and in the



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artworld. It also “invites the aesthetic lost in to serve with joy on what is fruitful aesthetically, artistically, and can be blessed.”29 This is the challenge he has presented his students. This is the task he himself has taken up. Seerveld’s call to work in anticipation of God’s reign is as urgent now as it was in 1972. In the intervening years he has proved a master gardener, not only as a scholar but also as a teacher and cultural leader. There is now an international community of scholars, artists, and educators who have learned from his work and who pursue a transfor­mational aesthetic in the Kuyperian tradition. Seerveld’s sixty-fifth birthday on 18 August 1995, shortly after his retirement from i c s , offered an appropriate occasion to thank and honour him for his pioneering work by presenting the Pledges of Jubilee Festschrift. With this book, and with a festive banquet at Calvin College on the eve of his birthday, the editors and authors joined hundreds of well-wishers around the world to say thank you to a tireless leader and faithful friend. May he enjoy the fruits of his labours, even as he continues to help us imagine the day when all of culture and society, yes, all of creation, will be made new, when, as in the apostle John’s great vision, God’s dwelling is with humanity and God tenderly wipes each tear from every eye. To that end we offer our own pledges of jubilee.

4 Art Is No Fringe: Introduction to The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy (2000)

Art is no fringe … attached to the garment, and no amusement … added to life, but a most serious power in our present existence, and therefore its principal variations must maintain … a close relation with the principal variations of our entire life. Abraham Kuyper1

In the … academy today, cultural theorizing is largely dissociated from social theorizing, thus mirroring in intellectual life the practical decoupling of the politics of recognition from the politics of redistribution … A critical approach must be “bivalent” … integrating the social and the cultural, the economic and the discursive. Nancy Fraser2

Contemporary intellectuals live in unsettled times. Established boundaries of the artworld and the academy no longer hold, and leading artists and scholars now seek cross-disciplinary ways to address complex cultural issues. Such issues include the erasure of borders between high culture and low, the implications of multicultural politics for intellectual work, and the impact of a media-driven global economy on people’s participation in culture. Issues like these point to dramatic shifts in the structure of society, especially in the state and the economy.



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Scholars and artists need to address such structural changes, and not merely react to disturbances on the surface of culture. The times call for an architectonic critique of society and a fundamental transformation of cultural institutions.3 Too many debates about feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism have failed to ask what sorts of societal structures and cultural institutions would best promote justice, solidarity, and freedom. It is not enough simply to attack or defend the status quo, as happens, for example, when the Hollywood entertainment industry and traditional moral patterns are pitted against each other. Instead, contemporary intellectuals must join their best efforts to sketch new visions of community and democracy. That requires what Nancy Fraser calls a “bivalent” approach.

1 . C u lt u r a l Q ui ltwork The collection of essays titled The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy makes the arts central to such efforts.4 The essayists, who come from several countries and many disciplines, explore the role of the arts in shaping contemporary religion and politics. Sharing Abraham Kuyper’s conviction that “art is no fringe,” they look for clues to the future in artistic practices and institutions, and in their impact on how people create history and interpret texts. They ask about the shape of viable communities and democratic cultures in postmodern times. The essays in Part I (Politics of Culture) describe economic, technological, and political barriers to cultural democracy and suggest how they can be overcome. My own essay, titled “Postmodern Arts and the Birth of a Democratic Culture,” argues that contemporary arts can foster a democratic culture, but only if the political and economic sectors of society become more fully democratic. The essay describes cultural democracy as a historical condition in which the norms of participation, recognition, and freedom usually prevail. Although an increasingly global capitalism might thwart the growth of cultural democracy, contemporary artistic emphases on contingency, context, and construction may nevertheless hold the seeds of a more fully democratic culture. In “The Global and the Local,” Dutch economist Bob Goudzwaard teams up with cultural anthropologist André Droogers to challenge technocratic views of economic development. Citing the examples of

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Church Base Communities in Brazil and the Basque Mondragon Community in Spain, Goudzwaard and Droogers argue that local cultures and communities must be valued and nurtured as prerequisites for human well-being. At the same time, however, a generous conception of justice drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition is needed to evaluate and redirect global economic trends. Sharon Vriend, a historian and specialist in American Studies, uses the case of a cancelled concert to explore tensions between racial identity and cultural democracy in the United States. Vriend demonstrates that newspaper debates in 1939 about discrimination against African-American contralto Marian Anderson provided ways for European Americans to define their racial identities without interrogating their own racial privileges. The same democratic expectations that motivate charges of discrimination tend to be set aside when a dominant community’s power and wealth are at stake. The essays in Part II (Institutions of Art) ask how artists can respond to the impact that structural barriers to cultural democracy have on the arts. Calvin Seerveld cites examples from North America, Europe, and South Africa in order to call for art that has a religious base and engages a broad public. The artist should be considered a demiourgos, he says – a talented artisan called to collect and present nuanced and trustworthy meaning for others. Seerveld explores two ways in which contemporary artists can fulfill this calling. As studio artists they can develop works and events that gain public confidence and cry out obliquely for care, healing, and justice. As cultural workers they can collaborate with other people and organizations to produce neighbourhood murals, people’s theatre, and other forms of community-based and community-building culture. Many artists experience tensions between a modernist aesthetic theory and culturally democratic practices. American musicologist Jennifer DeLapp explores these tensions in the music and writings of composer Aaron Copland. Although famous for populist compositions such as Appalachian Spring, Copland was fundamentally a modernist whose career began and ended with dissonant, intellectually demanding compositions. Copland’s work provides a musical window into struggles over cultural democracy in the second half of the twentieth century. Musicians who embrace the latest technologies can also challenge prevailing relations of power, according to James Leach, an American dramaturge and culture critic. Leach demonstrates this in



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the case of John Oswald’s “plunderphonic” recordings. Oswald’s compact disc of sampled music prompted a copyright dispute that raises provocative questions about legal protections for intellectual property. His noncommercial mode of distributing sampled music suggests a more democratic means of music making – to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, a kind of digital folk music in the age of technological hyper-reproduction. Whereas Part II looks at the arts from the side of production and distribution, the essays in Part III address questions of interpretation that arise for contemporary audiences, viewers, and readers. These essays investigate the role of creative interpretation in forming open communities and in contesting illegitimate authority. Recognizing the hermeneutic jumble of competing traditions and orientations, the Canadian philosophical theologian James Olthuis proposes an alternative theory of interpretation. Liberation theology, feminists, and postmodern thinkers have rightly challenged modernist notions of a fixed text and definitive author, he says. In place of a mastery model of interpretation as penetration, Olthuis proposes a hermeneutics of connection. On his proposal, artworks and literary texts are not objects to be mastered but invitations to conversation and transformation. Interpretation should be a continuous spiral of reception, question, discovery, and reconfiguration that always respects the alterity of the other. The final purpose of interpretation is to promote human flourishing, and today this requires a connective hermeneutics that fosters democratic communities. Dutch philosopher Theo de Boer steps back from the contemporary scene to ask why interpretation became a preoccupation in twentieth-century culture and scholarship. He points to three factors: the discovery that textual meaning is usually ambiguous, the heightened awareness that cultural products are thoroughly historical, and the increasing autonomy of artworks and artistic activity. These factors correlate with a democratization of politics and culture during the past two centuries, de Boer suggests. He argues that the liberation of art, which reached its apex in modern art and modernist aesthetics, should not be considered an elitist obstacle to cultural democracy. For only when artworks become autonomous do they have critical and expressive capacities as art to instruct us and to shape people’s lives. Theories of interpretation can have interesting implications for democratic institutions of law and governance. American political

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scientist Kevin den Dulk examines a growing tendency among legal theorists to speak about legal processes as literary or artistic performances. Because legal processes often provide contexts in which to address communal and democratic aspirations, the law-as-­ performance approach promises new insights into the contours of community and democracy themselves. Den Dulk asks about the moral and political implications of this approach for current debates concerning law and religion. He concludes that the law-as-performance approach lacks the normative resources necessary to support a participatory and egalitarian vision. The essays in Part IV (Creations of History) carry the hermeneutic themes of Part III into the field of art history, exploring how artists and art historians have addressed issues of communal identity and cultural democracy in various settings. Graham Birtwistle, a British art historian who specializes in twentieth-century art and theory, discusses a politicizing of the concept of primitivism, as illustrated by criticisms of a 1984 exhibition on primitivism at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He finds both good news and bad news to report. On the one hand, ideological critiques of primitivism and of Western attitudes to non-Western cultures can help create a more democratic, intercultural artworld. On the other hand, the concept of primitivism has lost the historiographic breadth and complexity it once had, and dismissive judgments about art of the past have sometimes resulted. Birtwistle recommends a more nuanced approach, one that lets us see today’s interculturalism as a partial transformation of yesterday’s primitivism. American art historian Lisa De Boer investigates the power of visual images in mass culture. How does it happen, she asks, that visual creations acquire the authority of journalistic truth or historical fact, as occurred with the file photos used during television coverage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991? A specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture, De Boer explores the relationship between news images and official histories of the Dutch Revolt. She argues that early modern purveyors of news employed specific representational strategies that stamped their accounts as trustworthy and reliable. This effect of authorization, in turn, profoundly shaped Dutch attempts to represent their own history. In a very real way, popular imagery fashioned by skilled artists and publishers helped create a people’s history, both as lived and as narrated.



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Henry Luttikhuizen, an American specialist in early Netherlandish art, connects the theme of communal identity with group portraits. According to Luttikhuizen, Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing shows that group portraits can be both exclusive and empowering. The question for Luttikhuizen, however, is whether group portraiture can become hospitable toward those who are not in the picture. He develops this question by discussing the theme of justice in Dutch and Flemish group portraits from the fifteenth century. In their political and religious contexts, he says, these portraits helped shape a communal identity by juxtaposing the favoured group to others who are dirty, impure, and worthy of punishment. The portraits thereby anoint their subjects and their viewers as “chosen people.” By way of contrast, Luttikhuizen comments on Hunger, a series by contemporary American painter Tim Lowly that presents mentally disabled children as calling viewers to enter their space. Perhaps here one glimpses the hospitality that will thrive in a just society with truly democratic communities. As a collection, then, the essays show that the arts are not peripheral to struggles over the shape of society. Indeed, the arts provide a cultural quiltwork that connects societal structures and cultural controversies. The work of contemporary artists can provide scholars with clues for addressing shifts in societal structures, just as scholars can suggest to artists how they might undertake new forms of cultural engagement. Whereas traditional scholarship privileges written texts over perceptual images, more and more intellectuals now acknowledge the power of aural and visual communication. Hence collaboration between artists and scholars becomes all the more crucial. Together they must seek openings to a different future in the increasingly fragile walls of artworld and academy.

2 . D u t c h Lace The essays in The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy stem from an international conference held in August 1995. Hosted by Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and co-sponsored by Dordt College, the Institute for Christian Studies, and the v u University Amsterdam, the conference attracted 120 participants from six countries, featured presentations by scholars in both the humanities and the social sciences, and included an exhibit presenting recent

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and current work from around the world by visual artists in the ­Reformed tradition.5 The four schools that sponsored the conference have religious and intellectual roots in nineteenth-century Dutch ­Calvinism. Abraham Kuyper remains a common point of reference.6 This intellectual and religious tradition has particular significance for the nexus of art, community, and cultural democracy. Calvinism has long had an ambivalent relation with the arts. Together with its appreciation for the music and poetry of the Hebrew Psalms comes a suspicion of visual imagery that reminds one of iconoclastic strands in Judaism and Islam. In the Lectures on Calvinism delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1898, Kuyper tries to turn such ambivalence into a virtue.7 He argues, in Hegelian fashion, that Calvinism did not need to foster its own “art-style” because it had reached a higher stage of religious development. Being at a more spiritual level, Calvinism did not require the visual symbolism that characterizes earlier stages of religion, Kuyper claims. Yet Calvinism “encouraged the progress of the arts” by freeing them “from ecclesiastical tutelage” and allowing believers to enjoy God’s gifts in the arts wherever those occur, regardless of religious connections.8 Moreover, by rejecting church dominance, Calvinism fostered art that finds significance in the everyday: works by seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Rembrandt were “prophetic of a democratic life of later times” and proclaimed “the people’s maturity,”9 and music by the sixteenth-century French Calvinists Louis Bourgeois and Claude Goudimel created “melodies and songs for the people.”10 Whereas Kuyper’s other Stone Lectures insist on the distinctive expression of a Calvinist worldview in scholarship and politics, he argues here for Calvinism’s liberating influence on the development of the arts, despite the lack of a specifically Calvinist “art-style.” Aware of the inconsistencies and gaps in Kuyper’s argument,11 contemporary Kuyperians are less inclined to turn aesthetic ambivalence into a virtue. In the exhibition catalogue Words & Images, for example, the curators argue that Calvinism is a “logocentric tradition” whose critique of visual idolatry masks a tendency to idolize verbal discourse: “The authority we [Calvinists] grant to our verbal constructs is perhaps more subtly and powerfully distorting, because we do not tend to see the use of words as potentially idolatrous. We have often assumed that words are clear, unambiguous, knowable, and safe as opposed to images which can get out of control, mean different things to different people, and at their worst become idols.



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Yet images are not all idolatrous, nor are words without complications.”12 Moreover, not only are there few historiographic reasons to credit Calvinism for the seventeenth-century “golden age of Dutch painting” but also Calvinism’s emphasis on the everyday need not result in naturalistic depiction.13 In effect, the curators – like the exhibit itself – employ two of Kuyper’s insights to deflate his own claims. Kuyper’s embrace of art’s autonomy from organized religion provides a basis for claiming, in opposition to Calvinist iconoclasm, that images and words have equal but distinct legitimacies. So too Kuyper’s appeal to God’s “common grace” creates room for acknowledging the other historical forces at work in supposedly Calvinist art and for appreciating the “materiality of art” itself, even in art’s most abstract forms. A self-critical Kuyperian will also want to challenge the ways in which artists have been silenced or marginalized by schools, churches, and other institutions in the Reformed tradition.14 This provides a context for asking “Whose Art? Which Community?” – the theme of a conference panel featuring six artists in the Words & Images exhibit. Despite Kuyper’s celebrating Calvinism’s historic contributions to the arts, he gives no account of how contemporary artists contribute to the life of a community. This fact is striking given his insistence that, as a worldview, Calvinism seeks expression in the entire range of human endeavours. It is even more striking given Kuyper’s sustained critique of individualism and his efforts at creating an entire array of organizations to channel the social contributions of a revitalized Calvinism. Nevertheless, two themes in Kuyper provide insight into the nexus of the arts and community: sphere sovereignty and common grace. The theme of sphere sovereignty surfaces in Kuyper’s argument that the arts are a distinct sphere of modern life. They make their own valuable contributions to life and society and must not be subservient to religion, politics, or other domains: “Our intellectual, ethical, religious and aesthetic life each commands a sphere of its own. These spheres run parallel and do not allow the derivation of one from the other … Art also is no side-shoot on a principal branch, but an independent branch that grows from the trunk of our life itself, even though it is far more nearly allied to Religion than to our thinking or to our ethical being.”15 This suggests that artists as artists have legitimate, important, and distinctive contributions to make to their communities. Unfortunately, however, Kuyper repeatedly

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dilutes the potential of his position by giving a semi-mystical account of art’s vocation:16 “It is the vocation of art, not merely to observe everything visible and audible, to apprehend it, and reproduce it artistically, but much more to discover in those natural forms the order of the beautiful, and, enriched by this higher knowledge, to produce a beautiful world that transcends the beautiful of nature … Art has the mystical task of reminding us … of the beautiful that was lost and of anticipating its perfect coming luster.”17 Such an account turns artists into universalizing dispensers of cosmic consolation. It removes them from serious engagement with contemporary issues and communal concerns. One challenge for contemporary Kuyperians, then, is to strip the semi-mystical garb from Kuyper’s insight into structural pluralism and to wrap the latter within more nuanced accounts of cultural and confessional pluralism.18 Another challenge is to reappropriate Kuyper’s emphasis on common grace. As Peter Heslam points out, Kuyper’s lecture on “Calvinism and Art” stresses “common grace” without mentioning “the antithesis.”19 In other words, the lecture emphasizes the goodness to be found in the arts, no matter the religious affiliation, but does not raise questions about distortions, brokenness, alienation, and sheer evil in the arts. Admittedly, Kuyper’s emphasis is helpful for resisting a tendency in historic Calvinism or in contemporary fundamentalism to dismiss “worldly” culture as “of the Devil.” Yet it forgets that modern institutions of art are no paradise, and that artists can be just as complicit as anyone else in racism, sexism, economic injustice, and the rape of nature. At a minimum, contemporary artists have a double task: first, to give imaginative voice to the genuine needs and best aspirations of their own communities (recognizing that each individual artist participates in more than one community), and second, to challenge the reigning ideologies of their society, including distortions and failures in their own communities and in the artworld itself. None of this will occur simply by remembering and anticipating “the beautiful,” although artistic sifting of communal needs and aspirations does require grappling with that hidden normativity toward which Kuyper’s conception of art points.20 An unexplored source of Kuyper’s own aesthetic ambivalence lies in his conflicted attitudes toward democratic tendencies. On the one hand, he applauds the “democratizing” of high art, claiming that an increase in appreciation and production among the middle and



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lower classes elevates taste and counters “the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism.” On the other hand, he worries that popular “homage of art” corrupts art itself and generates “an almost fanatical worship of art” incompatible with “the high seriousness of life, for which Calvinism has pleaded.”21 Similarly, although as a political thinker Kuyper celebrates Calvinism’s contributions to liberation movements in Europe and North America, and although he founded his country’s “first truly modern, massbased political organization,”22 he was an outspoken critic of the French Revolution, classical liberalism, and social democracy. Even “Maranatha,” the important 1891 political address to his AntiRevolutionary Party, gives mostly pragmatic reasons for promoting “a Christian-democratic development of our national government,” despite his advocating a principled approach to politics.23 Kuyper’s conception of democracy emphasizes freedom and solidarity, which he understands in terms of structural pluralism and religious worldviews, at the expense of equality, which he identifies with loss of structural distinctions and of communal identities. He opposes classical liberals because their individualism strips citizens of their communal identities, and he opposes social democrats because their collectivism collapses legitimate structural boundaries among economy, state, and culture. Kuyper’s own political alternative combines a provocative plea for freedom of religion and conscience with a paternalist call for new communal bonds and for compassion toward the poor.24 Lacking a clear vision of equality, and unable to root this core democratic value in a Calvinist worldview, Kuyper cannot avoid sending a mixed message about the democratizing of culture. The mix in the message coincides with his politics. Whereas he has a paternalist reason for supporting greater cultural democracy – it improves people’s aesthetic taste and moral character – he has a pluralist reason for opposing the same – it corrupts art and supplants true religion.25 To unravel this double bind, contemporary Kuyperians will need to abandon paternalism and rethink pluralism. To do this will require an expansive vision of freedom and solidarity, one that takes seriously the core democratic value of equality.26 Only if the fundamental equality of every human being is embraced will compassion turn into genuine solidarity with the poor, and only if equality is promoted will structural pluralism foster freedom from economic

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exploitation. In the end, freedom and solidarity cannot be achieved without a greater degree of economic democracy than that afforded by capitalism either in Kuyper’s day or in our own.27 Such struggles to reappropriate a legacy are crucial to the vitality and relevance of an intellectual and religious tradition.28 In treating the arts as a quiltwork connecting culture and society, the authors in The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy aim to learn from Kuyper’s creative vision without taking up every thread of his thought and practice. We hope that artists, scholars, and community leaders from many other traditions will join us in an ongoing conversation about the shape of viable communities and cultural democracy in postmodern times.

5 A Tradition Transfigured: Art and Culture in Reformational Aesthetics (2004)

Three traditions of aesthetic reflection flow through Christian scholarship in North America: the reformational, the evangelical, and the sacramental traditions. Loosely fed by correlative traditions in liturgy, doctrine, and church governance, these aesthetic traditions freely cross contemporary ecclesiastical alignments. Evangelical scholars at evangelical colleges might show a sacramental fondness for symbols; Reformed scholars at Reformed colleges might adopt an evangelical emphasis on worldviews; and Catholic scholars at Catholic universities might share a reformational concern for the transformation of culture. Fusions of this sort are not uncommon in a postdenominational landscape. Yet these three broad streams of intellectual reflection continue. They spread across many academic disciplines, and they spill between the academy and the surrounding culture.1 If one asks about aesthetics in a narrower sense, however, and regards it as a branch of philosophy that acquired its characteristic topics and questions in eighteenth-century Europe, then the contributions of reformational scholars stand out. For reformational aesthetics has been more overtly philosophical and less explicitly theological than the other two traditions. Indeed, philosophers – not theologians – have articulated the most influential ideas in the reformational tradition, and few theologians have had much to add on topics of aesthetic concern. Perhaps this tells us something about the strengths and weaknesses of Reformed theology – I leave that for others to discuss. In any case it provides a reason, given a primarily philosophical context, to limit this essay’s attention to just one tradition and identify new directions in it.

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Let me define a few terms to begin. By “aesthetics” I mean a branch of Western philosophy that has had two main topics since the eighteenth century: the nature and purposes of the arts, and the nature and role of the aesthetic dimension in life, culture, and society. The arts are a broad range of cultural endeavours that include music, film, dance, visual arts, and much more, whether fine art, popular art, or folk art. By “Reformed” I mean a worldwide movement within Protestant Christianity that stems from the Calvinist Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe. The term “reformational” indicates a current from within Reformed Christianity whose main impetus comes from the nineteenth-century Dutch educator, church leader, and politician Abraham Kuyper. Three emphases form the heart of reformational Christian scholarship and shape reformational aesthetics. One is a historical-redemptive narrative that always returns to God’s having created everything good and looks ever forward to God’s culminating renewal of the entire universe. A familiar summary of this narrative is Creation / Fall / Redemption / Fulfillment.2 A second emphasis stems from the first. Reformational scholars hold that Christians and their efforts and organizations are called to be agents of renewal in culture and society, including scholarship and education. Third, although such renewal has a personal side to it, it is not simply about changing persons. It is equally about criticizing and changing cultural practices, social institutions, and the very structure of society, where these dishonour God’s intentions for creation, resist God’s redemptive work in human history, or violate a Biblical vision of a new heaven and new earth. So reformational scholarship tends to be radical, having a social comprehensiveness and a depth of cultural engagement that does not harmonize easily with evangelical personalism or pietist escape. It also has a directness of approach, a freedom from ecclesiastical supervision or mediation, that runs counter to a sacramental vision. Perhaps this directness of approach helps explain why philosophy, not theology, has been the preferred discipline for reformational aestheticians. One notable exception is the theologically inflected work of Hans Rookmaaker, the Dutch art historian whose popular writings influenced Francis Schaeffer and much of the evangelical world.3 Yet even Rookmaaker cut his academic teeth on the challenging and comprehensive reformational philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, which has been sadly neglected by many Christian scholars in North



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America.4 In the generation after Rookmaaker, the two leading figures in reformational aesthetics are philosophers, both of whom graduated from Calvin College in the early 1950s: Calvin Seerveld, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto; and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Professor Emeritus at Yale University. To detect new directions in reformational aesthetics, one does well to recall debates among these three scholars. Rather than recount the debates in detail, I shall highlight issues that occasion new directions among a younger generation. I shall summarize these new directions under three headings: (1) from worldview to interaction; (2) from artworks to cultural institutions; (3) from aesthetics to cultural theory.5

1 . W o r l dv ie w a n d I nteracti on In 1970 Hans Rookmaaker published a book with InterVarsity Press that was widely read in Reformed and evangelical circles. It was titled Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. Taking a cue from Herman Dooyeweerd, but also from the Catholic Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr, Rookmaaker diagnoses modern art as a symptom of Western culture’s spiritual decline.6 “Worldview” is a central category in his diagnosis: he treats artworks as expressions of worldviews. Ten years later Seerveld and Wolterstorff published their own philosophies of art for a Christian audience, under more upbeat titles: Seerveld’s Rainbows for the Fallen World and Wolterstorff’s Art in Action.7 The final essay in Seerveld’s book has the telling title “Modern Art and the Birth of a Christian Culture.”8 There Seerveld objects to doomsayers such as Rookmaaker and Schaeffer who fail to appreciate the positive contributions made by modern art and who underestimate the Christian community’s responsibilities for distortions in Western culture. Seerveld urges his readers to work toward a contemporary Christian culture, one which builds on the positive achievements of modern art but has its own spirit of “compassionate judgment.” Wolterstorff’s Art in Action gives more cautious advice, urging Christians to awaken from the aestheticist spell cast by the institution of high art and to exercise discretion concerning how and why they participate in that institution. Yet both Seerveld and Wolterstorff free reformational aesthetics from Rookmaaker’s obsession with worldviews and their expression: Seerveld, by tracing the dynamic spirits permeating art

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and by embracing the characteristic allusiveness of modern artworks; Wolterstorff, by emphasizing the vast range of uses and purposes that artworks can legitimately serve.9 Both Seerveld and Wolterstorff prepare the way for a new direction in reformational aesthetics. This new path leads away from a fixation on worldviews and their supposed expression in artworks. It leads toward a fresh exploration of complex, dialogical, multicultural, and creative interactions within the more or less public spaces that artistic efforts help generate and frame. Seerveld stresses the importance of communal Christian efforts in the arts. Wolterstorff reminds us that artists accomplish many different actions by making artworks. What the new emphasis on interaction adds here is a recognition that contemporary artistic efforts rarely arise within only one community. Artists themselves are members of many communities – ethnic, political, local, national, religious, educational, artistic, etc. So are the people who support them, challenge them, and receive the benefit of their efforts. Moreover, the emphasis on interaction takes into account significant new forms of artistic activity that are collaborative and sitespecific. These forms are destined not for museum walls or the concert repertoire or mainstream movie theatres but for the groups of participants from which an a i d s quilt or a women’s music festival or a local church video arises, and perhaps also for a larger public. The new interactive path leads away from the old paradigm in which a professional artist makes the artwork, and then paying customers, aesthetic connoisseurs, and professional scholars and critics try to make sense of it. It leads toward a much messier and more exciting model that redefines the roles of artist and audience and gives greater prominence to additional roles such as creative collaborator, dedicated participant, and community activist. Such a model would learn from the experiments that Suzanne Lacy labels “new genre public art.”10 It could also reframe the way in which scholars interpret art from the past and from other cultures.11 It would certainly be less susceptible to the outmoded distinction between high art and low that continues to shape philosophical aesthetics in Western societies. Indications of this new direction occur in the Festschrift published when Seerveld retired in 1995. In “Suffering in High and Low Relief,” for example, Johan Snyman, a philosopher from South Africa, asks how people whose ancestors suffered in English



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concentration camps could themselves create the oppressive apartheid regime. He says part of the explanation lies in the memorials Afrikaners used to come to terms with their own suffering. Through a close reading of written records, sculptural dynamics, and cultural ethos, Snyman shows that the Women’s Memorial (1913) in Bloemfontein was not an eloquent memorial but a propagandistic monument.12 Its actual role in Afrikaner life opposed the “human rights” philosophy of Emily Hobhouse, the English feminist who campaigned for the memorial’s creation and installation. Against this perverting of a generous vision, and as admonition for the future, Snyman concludes that memorials should not elevate past victims but “vow silently for the sake of future victims.”13 Such close, multidimensional, and contextual art criticism presupposes that the primary phenomenon under examination is layered, dialogical, and participatory. The “artwork” – here a public sculpture – does not simply express a worldview, does not have one dominant spirit pervading it, and does not simply function as the object of discrete actions. It participates in a complex process where “artist,” “patron,” and “audience” have contrary interests and visions. It takes on the meaning of a certain culture-political constellation that, presumably, could change after the dismantling of apartheid. No one in the sculpture’s primary (Afrikaner) community can escape responsibility for the role this sculpture has played in South African culture and politics. As this example shows, a new emphasis on interaction brings forth both a new range of phenomena and a new understanding of previously interpreted phenomena.14 A crucial consequence of this new emphasis is that worldview interpretations of artworks seem inadequate, for they presuppose an Enlightenment paradigm that is too thin and rigid to do justice to art as interaction. It’s not only the case, as Seerveld indicates, that the spirits pervading art are rarely so fixed and readily discernible as worldview talk suggests. And it’s not only the case, as Wolterstorff argues, that the expression of worldviews is only one action accomplished via artworks and not always the most important one. In addition, it is misleading to think of art as the production of discrete artworks into which artists pour worldviews that interpreters then distil. This paradigm for art is just as problematic as the banking model of higher education, according to which learned professors stuff valuable information or ideas into the receptive vaults of students’ minds, from which the students regularly withdraw their

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interest (pun intended). Beyond this, however, not even an emphasis on allusive spirits (Seerveld) or on multiple actions (Wolterstorff) frees us from the older paradigm, since the three-part structure of artist, artwork, and audience remains in place. That brings us to the second new direction, from artworks to cultural institutions.

2. A rt wo r k s a n d C u ltural I nsti tuti ons Philosophical aesthetics since Kant has tended to make autonomous artworks central to the field of art. The dominance of this tendency might make it seem self-evident that everything in art revolves around the artwork, and that the roles of artist and audience hinge on their relationships to the artwork. In addition, and for the most part, post-Kantian aesthetics defines artworks as peculiarly aesthetic objects. So philosophers have tended to define artists and audiences as aesthetic role-players whose script comes from the work of art in its aesthetic dimension. In the past, reformational aesthetics has not thoroughly challenged this tendency. Certainly one finds uneasiness along the way, for to call attention to worldviews, spirits, or actions modifies somewhat a post-Kantian emphasis on aesthetic objects. Yet the notion of the aesthetically qualified artwork remains central to Rookmaaker’s worldview interpretations, to Seerveld’s discerning of spirits, and to Wolterstorff’s elucidation of art in action – it is always the work of art by which worldviews get expressed, spirits go to work, or actions are accomplished.15 What would happen to a reformational philosophy of art if we acknowledged that “being a work of art” is itself a historically dated and societally situated phenomenon – that it is tied both to the development of certain economic, political, and social structures and to the emergence of certain cultural institutions that make it possible for works of art to exist as works of art: museums, public concert houses, professional theatres, and the like? Moreover, what would happen if we did not assume that works of art have always been central to those branches of culture Westerners call art, nor that they need to remain as central as they once were? Undoubtedly there have long been products of one sort or another, products that have had many different functions including ones we label “aesthetic.” But the institutional arrangements and the intellectual categories whereby these products come to stand on their own as artworks, independent from the artist’s activity and available for an



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anonymous audience, are themselves historically dated and societally situated phenomena.16 I think the future of reformational aesthetics lies in pursuing this shift in emphasis, from artworks as such to the cultural institutions and broader societal structures that make artworks possible, and could eventually also make them impossible. In fact, a number of reformational scholars are already pursuing this shift, both theoretically and empirically.17 For example, I have investigated the transformation in self-understanding that occurs when artists no longer see themselves as isolated geniuses in pursuit of originality but as gifted participants in an interactive process where non-artists also have a legitimate role. The preferred result, I argue, is a creative and necessary tension between the ideal of artistic authenticity and the ideal of social responsibility. This dialectic can apply to other participants just as much as it holds for professional artists. Hence collaborative public projects such as the ai ds Quilt and The Great Wall of Los Angeles and Womanhouse have special social and philosophical significance. Such art “encourages us to regard artists as community members who make crucial contributions to a cultural environment that is itself essential to the well-being of all communities in contemporary society.” It suggests a relationship of “directed co-responsibility” between artists and their public: “co-­responsibility, because all of us have a stake in the environs we inhabit; directed, because some of us – the artists – have special contributions to make to the care of that environment.”18 This transformation has vast implications for arts education, arts organizations, and programs of public and private arts funding. But it is not simply an intellectual reorientation: it arises in part from political and economic developments. The critical issue is what we should make of these changes. With appropriate and supple categories at hand, reformational scholars can use these changes to point artists, educators, critics, community activists, arts funders, and arts administrators past the Scylla of modernist elitism and the Charybdis of postmodern consumerism. One might however ask what the implications and advantages of this shift are for reformational aesthetics itself. Let me mention two advantages. First, it will help reframe the debate between Wolterstorff and Seerveld over the legitimacy of what Wolterstorff calls “the institution of high art” and what Seerveld calls “art as such.”19 This debate reached a stalemate, it seems to me, because neither scholar

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challenged their shared assumption that works of art lie at the centre of what art is and does. By asking about cultural institutions and societal structures instead, we can pose broader questions about how the Western artworld participates in societal patterns and trends either detrimental or conducive to human flourishing and the renewal of creation. Such questions, which have been the concern of mainstream philosophical aesthetics since Kant, are clearly important to both Wolterstorff and Seerveld. But a work-centred paradigm imported from the mainstream has restricted the ways in which such questions are asked. By excluding them, almost by definition, from the field of philosophical thought about art, mainstream philosophers have contributed to both hyper-inflating and marginalizing the worth of artistic efforts. This has also helped isolate philosophy of the arts from other fields of inquiry and critique, especially in the social sciences. Second, following the path from artworks to institutions will bring into aesthetics the critique of the artwork that artists themselves carried out for most of the past century. It has always felt odd to watch fellow philosophers force their standard aesthetic categories upon the provocations of Dada, Neo-Dada, earth art, and the like, when such art attacks those very categories – not through philosophical argument, but through direct action. Philosophers need to reexamine their categories, and where necessary change them, to make sense of ongoing cultural developments. This does not imply fawning endorsements of whatever artists are up to. But it does imply understanding the reasons and motivations for artists’ dissatisfaction with the cultural, political, and economic settings in which their efforts take place. It also implies that philosophers might learn something significant from practitioners in the field about the perils and promise of artistic efforts in a society such as ours. In short, philosophers would be better equipped to act as the cultural coworkers that reformational aestheticians have tried to be.

3 . A e s t h e t ic s a n d Cultural Theory The phrase “cultural coworkers” introduces the third new direction in reformational aesthetics. This one may sound paradoxical, since it  involves a turn from aesthetics to cultural theory. Another way to formulate the turn would be that the concerns of philosophical ­aesthetics will move closer to cultural studies, social theory, and a



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philosophy of culture. In fact, this redefinition of the field is underway in Europe and on other continents. Eventually it will pervade Anglo-American aesthetics as well, where one already sees attention increasingly paid to popular culture, urban design, environmental aesthetics, and the human body. In Germany the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) are being redesignated as cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften). This implies a shift from studying the human mind (Geist) to studying materially embedded and embodied cultures (Kultur). Moving from aesthetics to cultural theory would require a similar shift within philosophy.20 Reformational aesthetics has never fully embraced the separations between mind and body and between mental and physical labour that sustained traditional aesthetics and its focus on fine art. Rookmaaker found more hope for Western culture in jazz and the “applied arts” than in modern art movements. Seerveld includes play, lifestyle, liturgy, and many other ordinary phenomena within the field of aesthetics. Both he and Wolterstorff tie the fine arts to the so-called cultural mandate. And Wolterstorff has long insisted that art involves the honourable work of one’s hands on materials from God’s good creation. All three scholars share an anti-elitism that ­resists both the deification of artistic genius and the denigration of daily life. Yet their theories are not set up to deal with newer themes in cultural studies and social theory. One such theme is the question of power and oppression and how these play out in contemporary culture. Another is the question of cultural pluralism and how to do justice to it in one’s theory without making the fact of cultural diversity the final word on norms for cultural practices. A third question pertains to the implications of electronic media and information technologies for how cultural products and events are made, disseminated, and experienced. And a fourth question concerns the nature and operations of systemic distortions in contemporary culture, including the arts – distortions that have sources in economic and political structures but do not leave the field of aesthetics unaffected. The need for a new approach becomes clear when one tries to address interdisciplinary questions concerning the role of the arts in contemporary society. Many examples can be found in debates about postmodernism. One cannot adequately grasp the complex issues in such debates, it seems to me, if one thinks that we are simply dealing

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with worldviews or spirits at work in culture. Nor can one develop a sufficiently comprehensive account by employing an action-­ theoretic model. That is why, in an essay whose title alludes to writings by both Rookmaaker and Seerveld, I have posed a different question from the ones that typically arise when Christians enter these debates. “Postmodern Arts and the Birth of a Democratic Culture” asks what contemporary practices, products, and organizations in the arts can contribute to the democratization of culture.21 I raise this question against the backdrop of several hypotheses concerning mutual dependencies among political, economic, and cultural democracy. I pursue it in light of societal trends that seem to block or reverse the development of a democratic culture. And I indicate how, despite the apparent obstacles, artists and arts organizations can work to strengthen rather than undermine cultural democracy. An approach along these lines avoids the habit among some Christian critics to divide cultural endeavours between the redeemed sheep and reprobate goats. It calls attention to deep struggles over power, pluralism, new media, and systemic distortions in which all cultural workers have a stake. And it resists the bleak pessimism and naive optimism toward which various other commentators on “postmodernism” tend. The disciplinary framework of traditional aesthetics, and its modification by earlier reformational scholars, cannot provide the theoretical resources needed to address such issues. Usually the issues come up in footnotes or asides to the discussion of art and aesthetic experience.22 If we moved toward cultural theory, however, and away from aesthetics as traditionally defined, these newer themes would become leading concerns, and traditional aesthetic categories would undergo redescription. We could still talk about the nature and role of the arts and of the aesthetic dimension, but such discussions would become ways to address issues of power, cultural pluralism, technological mediation, and systemic distortion. In effect, reformational philosophers would theoretically recapitulate the creative border crossing that pervades contemporary arts. For scholars who have a calling to be agents of healing and renewal, and who hear the cries of the oppressed, the wounds of God’s world require nothing less than an ongoing transformation of reformational aesthetics.23

6 (Un)Timely Voyage: Calvin Seerveld’s Normative Aesthetics (2014) To develop a systematic normative aesthetics is not fashionable. It resists the mainstreams of contemporary Western thought, where a postmetaphysical turn in both analytic and continental philosophy makes scholars suspicious toward comprehensive claims about societal principles, including what is aesthetically or artistically good. It also runs counter to a consumerist and instrumentalist mentality that permeates Western culture, where people often base their decisions and actions on what they like and what works for them. It even troubles the waters of many religious communities, which tend either to consider aesthetic concerns peripheral to true faith or to regard normative pronouncements as unduly dogmatic. Calvin Seerveld has not worried about being fashionable. He has not sought to swim with the philosophical currents, to give people what they want, or to conform to contemporary religious patterns. Instead he has tried to enrich a reformational tradition of thought that raises critical questions about Western culture and works out a Kuyperian vision of the Christian faith. The result, as his collection of essays titled Normative Aesthetics demonstrates, is a robustly normative conception of the arts and culture and an unapologetically systematic approach to philosophical aesthetics. The scope and ambition of Seerveld’s work in this field show up in the public lecture he gave to begin his years as a faculty member at the Institute for Christian Studies (i cs), the graduate school for ­interdisciplinary philosophy where he taught for more than two decades (1972–95). His inaugural address calls for “a turnabout in aesthetics to understanding.”1 Like many of his public lectures, the address opens and closes with freshly translated readings from the

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Hebrew and Christian scriptures, illustrating in practice what it means to do philosophy that is “scripturally directed.” The “understanding” to which aesthetics should turn is the divine Wisdom that, according to Seerveld’s translation of Proverbs 8, has played throughout God’s creation from the very beginning. It is to this Wisdom – manifesting itself in creation, scripture, and Jesus Christ – that Seerveld wants his aesthetics to respond. For the normative task of aesthetics is to give “a winsome account of the aesthetic hold the Lord God has for creaturely existence” so that people can “order their everyday lives more obediently.”2 Such an aesthetics can be a blessing, he says, not only to Christian believers but also to artists, scholars, social institutions, and society as such. The stakes for Seerveld’s normative aesthetics are high. Historically, he notes, the study of aesthetics has not had a proper home in the Western academy, and the arts and aesthetic life have not found a legitimate place in Western society. Nor have Christians done much to change this historical predicament. Yet they must, he insists, because the arts and aesthetic life are good gifts from God that should contribute to human flourishing. Seerveld’s response is to claim that normative aesthetics has a “rightful task,” in three respects:3 1 To map out the structure of aesthetic life, its relationships with other aspects of life and society, and the normative principles that hold for aesthetic life (Seerveld calls this mapping exercise “modal aesthetics”). 2 To develop a general theory and historiography of the arts, both in their differences and in their common features, and to indicate their proper tasks and roles in human life. 3 To study the principles that should guide arts criticism and literary criticism and thereby to indicate the proper tasks of professional critics, journalists, and educators in these areas (a study Seerveld calls “hermeneutics”). To those who think that the arts defy theoretical analysis or that such study is an elitist enterprise, Seerveld has a twofold reply: first, “art is no more recalcitrant to analysis than a salmon’s nervous system,”4 and, second, the right kind of “committed aesthetics,” in pursuing Wisdom, will be humble enough to serve artists, critics, and their publics. The many articles in the Normative Aesthetics volume



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that started out as public lectures for non-academic audiences show his own commitment to providing a serviceable aesthetics. Seerveld has not shied away from the hard work of systematic philosophical reflection, however, nor has he shirked the responsibility to address fellow scholars. Two essays stand out in this regard.5 “Dooyeweerd’s Legacy for Aesthetics,”6 first published in 1985, builds a systematic framework for Seerveld’s aesthetics from the reformational ontology developed at the vu University Amsterdam by Dirk Vollenhoven and, especially, Herman Dooyeweerd. Seerveld derives several key insights from Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd: that “the aesthetic” is one of the (fifteen) interrelated dimensions (“modal law-spheres”) of creation; that the discipline of aesthetics should study this dimension in all its manifestations; and that the arts constitute a distinct multidimensional realm of cultural products, practices, and relations that are “qualified” (i.e., definitively characterized) by aesthetic concerns. Seerveld differs from the founders of reformational philosophy in two respects, for reasons he explains. First, he characterizes the aesthetic dimension in terms of “allusivity” or “imaginativity” rather than harmony or beauty. Second, he considers the aesthetic dimension more fundamental to human experience (i.e., earlier in the order of modal law-spheres) than Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd do. Yet Seerveld retains, indeed strengthens, the conviction that Christian scholars should contribute to an “inner reformation” of academic disciplines, including philosophy.7 Two years later Seerveld published an article on “Imaginativity”8 in Faith and Philosophy, the leading journal for Christian philosophers in North America. There he lays out the central claims of his systematic normative aesthetics and indicates how they provide a redemptive response to the “pivotal errors” in Western thought about art and the aesthetic dimension. Briefly, the pivotal errors are to disparage (Plato), to misconceive (Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant), or to  exaggerate (Coleridge, Schelling, anti-rationalist theologians) the nature and role of imagination. Seerveld counters this entire tradition by identifying “imagining” as an irreducible mode of ordinary human functions – the aesthetic mode. It is distinct from, albeit ­related to, “sense perceiving or image constructing or conceptual functioning.”9 Aesthetic functioning is characterized by the activity of “making-believe.” All creatures are open to our acts of imagining or making-believe: all creatures have aesthetic object-functions, and all humans (and perhaps some other creatures) have aesthetic

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subject-functions. Even God’s unchanging ordinances for all creatures and their relationships can be imagined. Moreover, all that is “imaginativable” (whether objects, subjects, or laws) and all acts of imagining are themselves governed by God’s aesthetic law or creational ordinance, whose meaning human beings need to disclose as an “aesthetic imperative.” Seerveld articulates this aesthetic imperative as follows: “note or present or perform the nuances there be playfully; present what a given state of affairs is like; transform dissimilars into a similative surprise; and do this as praise of God, with care for things, in winsome service to all and sundry.”10 That is how to love God and one’s neighbour in aesthetic life, he says, and it can be a blessing. All of us do well to accept and nurture God’s gift of imaginativity “as an avenue for joy,”11 for “humans are created to be imaginative before God’s face.”12 The challenge for Seerveld’s normative aesthetics is to spell out what this aesthetic imperative means for human imaginative acts, for the arts, and for the other acts and institutions where aesthetic functions play a role. Beginning with the first article, titled “The Halo of Human Imagination,” several essays in the Normative Aesthetics volume give passionate and thickly textured articulations of the aesthetic imperative in ordinary life – in style of life, including clothes and games, for example (see “Joy, Style, and Aesthetic Imperatives”), or in leisure, humour, and aesthetic taste (see “Ordinary Aesthetic Life”).13 Other essays explore what the aesthetic imperative implies for artists, who are to give leadership in aesthetic life as “professional imaginators … making nuanced human knowledge serviceable to the neighbors in God’s world.”14 After explaining why “allusivity” is better than “beauty” as a norm for good art, the essay “Christian Aesthetic Bread for the World” catalogues several ways in which art can and does violate this norm – namely, through subaesthetic, paraaesthetic, anaesthetic, and anti-aesthetic approaches. Similarly, “The Place for Imaginative Grit and Everlasting Art” pinpoints the traditional worldviews and contemporary spirits that confront those who wish to follow the aesthetic norm, including the spirits of pragmatism, agnosticism, utopianism, and anarchistic nihilism.15 “The Relation of the Arts to the Presentation of Truth,” chronologically the earliest essay in this volume (1971), offers a reformational conception of truth and shows how the imaginative knowledge provided by art can present and embody the Truth. Throughout these



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essays Seerveld gives many examples of artists and artworks that, in his judgment, do indeed offer aesthetic bread, not stones. Seerveld, too, wishes to offer bread, not stones – philosophical bread for a needy world. That is how he formulates his vision of scholarship in “Philosophical Aesthetics at Home with the Lord,” the valedictory address he gave in 1995 to conclude his years as a faculty member at i c s. The aim of “obedient Christian scholarship,” he writes, is “to give the next generation food for thought as they covenant with the l o r d in our dürftige Zeit [impoverished time].”16 Blending cultural sensitivity with passionate commitment, Seerveld calls for scholarship that meets three requirements. First, it must be “scripturally directed,” guided by a vision of God, creation, and human life provided by “the Holy Spirited Bible.”17 Second, it should be historically informed, well versed in foreign languages, comprehensive in scope, culturally critical, and relevant. Third, it needs to be an interdisciplinary and communal endeavour. Scholars who meet these requirements will “give away wise untimely counsel to those caught in our cultural times of disarray”18 – wise counsel, ­because such scholars will pursue Wisdom; untimely, because, as Seerveld says about his own valedictory remarks, such teaching and research “are not fashionable, do not fit in with the times, and might be considered out-of-step with the current drummers drumming.”19 Then, in appreciative response to Pledges of Jubilee, the volume published to honour him upon his retirement, Seerveld formulates five issues that need attention from the next generation of reformational scholars in aesthetics and the arts:20 1 To explain the unique character of aesthetic knowledge and truth. 2 To provide a general ontology of the arts. 3 To sort out proper relationships between the arts and public culture. 4 To fashion historiographies that point out the “horizons of spirited vision” that enfold artistic developments. 5 To give a genuinely philosophical account of culture that does not rest content with a mere “theology of the arts.” In retrospect, we can see that Seerveld’s instructions for the next generation encapsulate the unfashionable concerns of his normative aesthetics. Moving against contemporary philosophical currents, he

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points his scholarship toward a God-given aesthetic ordinance that shines from the very structure of creation, culture, and human life. Unbowed by the onrushing winds of consumerism and instrumentalism, he calls attention to the imperative to be imaginative in the arts and daily life. Appealing to the scriptures that should guide his own community of faith, he urges Christians to abandon both their theologically insular yachts and their aesthetically impoverished rowboats. This collection of essays, like all of Seerveld’s scholarship, charts an unfashionable direction for exploration, construction, and critique, a direction not only for scholarship but also for the arts and aesthetic life. If Seerveld’s hopes are fulfilled, his readers will find blessings by joining him on this untimely yet oh-so-timely voyage.

7 Imagination, Art, and Civil Society (2015)

Art is not a fringe on the garment of life. It plays important roles in contemporary society. The same can be said about the aesthetic dimension. These insights, spelled out in Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism,1 are central to my own work and to the tradition of reformational aesthetics. But what is art? What social roles does it play? And how should we characterize the aesthetic dimension and its place in human life? I plan to address these questions as follows. First I give a general description of art, the aesthetic dimension, and their relationship. Then I present my conceptions of artistic truth and art in public. I conclude with some reflections on the reformational tradition in aesthetics.

1 . A rt a n d t h e A e s theti c Di mens i on Immediately we face a problem. Philosophers disagree not only about how to define art but also about whether art can be defined. Nor are they alone in such debates. Artists also disagree about how to define art or say it cannot be defined. Moreover, many ordinary folks think art is whatever you call “art.” Although I do not intend to discuss these disagreements, it is important to acknowledge them up front and ask what they might tell us about art. One thing they tell us is that art is puzzling. What’s puzzling is that people in Western society experience art every day, yet many think it is not an ordinary part of their lives. This puzzle stems from the kind of society we inhabit and how art has developed within Western society. Until the sixteenth century or thereabouts, art was not a

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special and distinct branch of culture. Gradually, however, certain forms of practice and experience came together under the heading “fine art” (schöne Kunst in German, beaux arts in French) and became distinct from craft, manufacturing, and entertainment. Then in the twentieth century the separation of fine art from other branches of culture came under attack from within fine art itself – notably in the anti-art movement of Dada and its spin-offs – to the point that today conflicts about what art is and why it matters are central to art itself. 1.1 Social Institution This history, so briefly sketched, leads me to say art is primarily a social and historical institution. What art is and what roles it plays in society are wedded to patterns and trends that shape society as a whole. For example, both as a concept and as a complex arrangement of practices and experiences, fine art emerged in conjunction with the development of a capitalist economy, the rise of a middle class, and the formation of a more democratic public sphere. This does not mean that art is not a distinct social institution, different from other social institutions and having its own roles to play in society. Yet it does mean that the most prominent features of art change as society changes, making it very difficult to say which features (if any) are essential to all art at all times and in every society. Hence I prefer to talk about art as a changing constellation of prominent features. Some features are more prominent than others in certain societies and at certain times: different stars in the constellation shine more brightly or they fade, depending on the sociohistorical context. The development of fine art in Western society made two features especially prominent. One is the artifactual character of art: art involves the making, distribution, and interpretation of individual products or events. Artists paint paintings or write poems or compose and perform pieces of music; these artifacts are shared with other people; and those who view, read, or listen to the artifacts interpret their meaning. Obviously this artifactual character is not peculiar to art. All practices that involve making and distributing things have an artifactual side: craft, manufacturing, and entertainment, for example, but also education, communication, and science. Nevertheless, the rise of fine art brought art’s artifactual character to



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the fore, as artists became more and more intent on making individual products and events that could stand on their own as artworks to be interpreted by others. The other prominent feature highlighted by the rise of fine art is the aesthetic character of art. Artists, art critics, art publics, and philosophers gradually came to agree that fine art primarily serves ­aesthetic purposes rather than, say, economic, political, moral, or religious purposes. They did not agree about how to describe fine art’s aesthetic character. The important point, however, is not the disagreements but how leading cultural figures after Kant largely agreed that fine art primarily serves aesthetic purposes. Indeed, some have said cultural practices and products that do not primarily serve aesthetic purposes – advertising, for example, or political posters or liturgical banners – either are not really art or they are bad art. Not surprisingly, anti-art movements tended to be anti-aesthetic, challenging the emphasis on art’s aesthetic purposes in much of Western philosophy and culture since the eighteenth century. Although important as a challenge to destructive social forces, anti-aesthetic movements seem to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In my view, the fact that aesthetic purposes became a prominent star in the constellation of art is an important historical achievement, and it can contribute to human flourishing. It not only calls attention to the importance of aesthetic features in all art, including commercial, political, and liturgical art, but also makes us more acutely aware of the aesthetic dimension in all of life, all of culture, and all of society. Our philosophical challenge is to understand both how art and the aesthetic dimension are related and how the aesthetic features of art relate to its other features. For there is more to art than its aesthetic character, and there is more to life than its aesthetic dimension. Before taking up this double challenge, let me pause to consolidate what I have said thus far. I have described art as a distinct social institution whose most prominent features shift as society changes. The development of fine art in Western society has highlighted two prominent features: the artifactual and the aesthetic character of art. Based on that development, we can say, at a minimum, that art is a social institution within which people create, share, and interpret products and events for aesthetic purposes. People also pursue nonaesthetic purposes within this institution. If they refuse to pursue aesthetic purposes, however, or if social patterns make it impossible

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for them to pursue aesthetic purposes, then either they are not participating in the social institution of art or art is changing into a different kind of institution. 1.2 Imagination Elsewhere I have described the aesthetic dimension of life, culture, and society as imagination.2 By “imagination” I do not mean a mental faculty or an individual trait. Instead, I mean something that is intersubjective, something that involves interaction among people. Imagination is a complex process in which people interact with each other and with their environment. Three practices make up this intersubjective process – namely, exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation. These practices are part of everyday life. We regularly engage in exploration: we seek to make discoveries when we are not sure what we hope to learn. We also regularly make presentations: we fashion objects or products or events that capture nuances of the meaning we wish to discover. And we regularly practise creative interpretation: we try to make sense of objects or products or events that hold more meaning than ordinary language can convey. In other words, we regularly engage in the practices of imagination: exploring, presenting, and interpreting aesthetic signs. Aesthetic signs, in this context, are simply the ways in which objects, products, and events function within our practices of exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation. They function as aesthetic signs in their capacities to sustain discovery, to acquire nuances of meaning, and to call forth creative interpretation. For example, a public ceremony such as the inauguration of a President or a wedding celebration can function as an aesthetic sign. The lighting, the sound system, the tone of the speeches, the sequence of ceremonial actions, the pacing of the event – all contribute to our exploration, presentation, and interpretation of the event’s meaning. Obviously such events are more than aesthetic signs: the inauguration is primarily a political event, cementing a transfer or continuation of administrative power; and the wedding ceremony might be primarily a familial event, officially sealing an intimate partnership that interweaves distinct families and personal histories. Yet public ceremonies are events where we carry out the intersubjective process of imagination, where together we engage in exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation. To that extent, they are aesthetic



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events. Or, to say it more carefully, they are events that have an important aesthetic dimension. They also are events where we engage in aesthetic evaluation, where we consider the aesthetic merits of what we experience. Why do people dress up when they go to a wedding? Why do they sit or stand where they do and when they do? At more traditional weddings in North America, why do vows get said and rings get exchanged? There are many ways to address such questions. One way is in terms of aesthetic considerations: people dress and gesture and act as they do because they are contributing to the imaginative character of this event. Moreover, people know when a wedding ceremony is aesthetically flawed – when it takes too long, for example, or the costumes, flowers, and ambience do not hang together, or the tone of the spoken remarks is inapt, or the whole event is pretentious or trivial or downright boring. Although we often voice such concerns as praise or criticism of the person in charge, they really are aesthetic evaluations of the event itself – an event in which all who attend are participants. Philosophers have debated for a long time what the marks of aesthetic merit are and whether these are “objective” or “merely subjective.” Is beauty, for example, merely in the eye of the beholder? My emphasis on imagination as an intersubjective process suggests a different approach. On the one hand, we can identify standards that people commonly employ, whether they realize it or not, when they evaluate the aesthetic merits of objects, products, and events, standards such as the intensity of a ceremony or the complexity of a design or the depth of a story. On the other hand, we can acknowledge that none of these standards in and of itself captures the full extent of our aesthetic expectations, the full range of what we need and desire when we engage in imaginative practices. Rather, we must point to an open horizon where something like a shared principle holds for us and draws us onward. I call this open horizon “imaginative cogency.” Imaginative cogency is the shared expectation that our practices of exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation should be neither rigid nor arbitrary, that, instead, they should be valid. Imaginative cogency is a societal principle of aesthetic validity. It is the ever-alluring horizon within which we identify and follow aesthetic standards. Nothing I have said about imagination up to now is peculiar to the arts. Imagination and imaginative cogency are features of everyday

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life: they occur in all the institutions that make up contemporary society. They also are crucial features of everyday life and society: a failure of imagination has serious consequences in education, politics, ethics, and religion. That’s why imagination should be a central concern of schooling. Science, technology, engineering, and math – the so-called st e m subjects – are not enough. In fact, these themselves are undermined if schools do not foster or pursue imagination. If, in addition, the arts are crucial for fostering and pursuing imagination, then one can see why the arts are not optional in good schooling. At a minimum, st e m should become s t e am . Are the arts crucial for fostering and pursuing imagination? I think they are. For art is the one institution in contemporary Western society where aesthetic considerations are decisive. In the language of traditional reformational philosophy, imagination is – or rather, it has become – the qualifying function of art, and artifactuality is – has become – art’s founding function. No matter what other features art has, and no matter what other practices are involved in making, sharing, and experiencing art products and events, exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation must accompany and frame them in order for such features and practices to belong to art as art. Even the artifactual character of art is guided by imagination: making, sharing, and experiencing art products and events necessarily proceeds through media of imagination such as sculptural techniques or musical performance practices or poetic diction. Although the development of site-specific and performance art, along with the rapid acceleration of digital techniques, has vastly expanded the range of media in the visual arts, artists and their publics must still approach these as media of imagination if they intend to be making and experiencing art. Correlatively, the practices of imagination in art are necessarily tied to art’s artifactual character. This places constraints on what can count as art. Your animated conversation with a friend is not art, no matter how inspired and creative it might be, unless you have somehow staged it to be shared with others as a product or event. Although conceptual artists push against such constraints, and although the new social media might seem to turn every user into a proto-artist, the artifactual character of art provides a backdrop against which to judge the purportedly artistic character of such efforts.



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1.3 Multidimensional Art At the same time, art has many other features beside the artifactual and the aesthetic. Art involves perception and feelings; it both relies on and contributes to education and scholarship; it inevitably involves language and communication; it has economic, political, moral, and religious dimensions. Moreover, the prominence of these other features, and their relation to artifactual and aesthetic characteristics, can change over time and in different contexts. Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1727 Saint Matthew Passion was first composed, performed, and experienced as liturgical music in a church setting, such that its moral and religious dimensions stood out. Since Felix Mendelssohn revived it in 1829 it has been primarily concert music, presented on stage in music halls, with its moral and religious dimensions subsumed for aesthetic purposes. Performers and audiences still experience the music’s moral and religious qualities, but they do so non-liturgically, and in a concert setting. This does not mean, however, that somehow Bach’s oratorio first became art in the nineteenth century. It was art all along, a complex imaginative product of music, originally liturgical in orientation and now staged primarily for aesthetic purposes. Further, whatever liturgical use it originally fulfilled, it was primed for this use by musical media – instruments, voices, compositional techniques, etc. – that served imaginative purposes. So-called religious art is still art, as are political art and commercial art. It can be better or worse both liturgically and aesthetically. After the development of fine art, however, religious art cannot be art unless it is artifactual and imaginative. It is precisely because art is multidimensional that art is crucial for fostering and pursuing imagination in society. If art were only an isolated hothouse for imaginative experiments, as some artists and philosophers think it is, we might wonder about its importance in society. But if, as I have suggested, art is in fact connected with the rest of society by way of its various dimensions, and if imagination is an indispensable dimension in all of life, culture, and society, then art, as a societally connected institution devoted to the practices of imagination, can nurture these practices in education, politics, and, indeed, all of life. Conversely, art itself benefits when imaginative practices in other institutions feed back into art. Isolating art from society would be bad for art. It also would be bad for society.3

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Unfortunately, elements in both the fine art and the anti-art movements have encouraged the isolation of art, as have technological, economic, and political developments in Western society. To challenge such isolation, and to point toward alternatives, I have developed two notions that highlight art’s interconnection with the rest of life. One is the concept of artistic truth. The other is the idea of art in public.

2 . A rt is t ic Truth 2.1 Controversy In 2013 controversy broke out in the United States about the truthfulness of the film Zero Dark Thirty. Critics of Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the search for Osama bin Laden accused it of twisting the truth. The critics were especially upset about the film’s disturbing depictions of c i a torture. Some charged that these scenes demean America’s battle with the terrorists behind 9/11. Others, such as Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain, claimed the film grossly exaggerates the role torture played in tracking bin Laden to his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed on 2 May 2011. Roger Cohen, in an op-ed published by The New York Times, says such criticisms miss the point. The movie presents a wide audience with “images of a traumatized America’s dark side,” he writes, and this is important. The movie’s “portrayal of torture is truthful,” and it builds a case that “whatever torture’s marginal usefulness, it is morally indefensible.” So charging the movie with inaccuracy “is a poor thing measured against the potency of truth.” Cohen concludes: “Truth is art’s highest calling. For it the facts must sometimes be adjusted. ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ meets the demands of truth.”4 I do not plan to take sides in this debate. What intrigues me is how Cohen makes his case. He appeals to “truth” as art’s highest calling, such that it either trumps factual accuracy or justifies inaccuracy. He never says exactly what he means by truth. Yet he employs the term to strong rhetorical effect, so much so that Columbia Pictures incorporated his op-ed into a full-page ad for the movie. What sustains Cohen’s rhetoric, I want to suggest, is an idea of artistic truth. He appeals to an idea that refuses to equate truth with propositional correctness (true propositions) or factual accuracy



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(established or objective facts). Even though this idea of artistic truth lives mostly underground in contemporary culture, it nevertheless plays a crucial role in our experiences and justifications of the arts. Yet it has fallen out of favour among both analytic and continental philosophers. Among the many reasons for this, two stand out. On the one hand, the mainstream of analytic philosophy has remained attached to what I call a propositionally inflected correspondence theory of truth. According to this theory, truth amounts to the correspondence between propositions and facts, with propositions or their equivalents being the primary or sole bearers of truth. After Monroe Beardsley convincingly argued in 1958 that artworks typically do not convey propositions and do not correspond to facts, many analytic philosophers gave up on the idea that art can be true. Moreover, when prominent analytic philosophers such as Nelson Goodman and Richard Rorty subsequently challenged the dominant correspondence theory, their approaches made artistic truth even harder to conceptualize. On the other hand, many philosophers in the continental tradition have given up the kinds of sweeping claims about art and truth made in the writings of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Theodor W. Adorno. Either, like Jürgen Habermas, they have returned to a more modest and primarily propositional view of truth – without necessarily embracing a correspondence theory – or, like Jacques Derrida, they have deconstructed the metaphysical pretensions that seem to inhabit such sweeping claims. Either way, little room remains for a comprehensive conception of truth that gives substantial weight to the role of truth in art. 2.2 Cogent Imaginative Disclosure Nevertheless, I am convinced that artists and philosophers alike need a robust conception of artistic truth, and I am just foolhardy enough to propose one.5 I want to capture the widespread intuition that truth is at stake when we make and interpret art. This intuition pertains to all forms of art in contemporary culture – not simply fine art or high art but also mass-mediated art, popular art, and folk art. On my view, art’s capacity for truth is crucial to both its aesthetic worth and its societal importance. I conceive of artistic truth as a dynamic correlation between imaginative disclosure and aesthetic validity. As already indicated, my

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technical term for aesthetic validity is “imaginative cogency.” So we can also say that artistic truth is a dynamic correlation between imaginative disclosure and imaginative cogency. Let me unpack this idea of artistic truth by saying first how I understand imaginative disclosure. Then I will discuss the three relations that make up artistic truth. Imaginative disclosure has to do with acquiring and sharing insights. I regard the arts as ways in which we discover, disseminate, and test insights into ourselves, others, and the society and universe we inhabit. These insights need not be articulated in language, although they often can be articulated, nor do they usually need to take propositional form, although we sometimes can translate them into propositions. At the same time, however, these insights are not simply feelings or emotions, even though our feelings and emotions help give us access to them. We have access to these insights via the media employed in the various arts – musical, literary, visual, etc. – and via trained sensory capacities. In fact, one could revitalize the static and visual metaphor of “insight” by coining more dynamic terms such as inhearing, inreading, and intouching. Instead, I replace the term “insight” with the term “disclosure,” which suggests both discovering and uncovering via various media and sensory capacities. In the arts we employ imaginative media to imaginatively disclose ourselves, others, and the society and universe we inhabit.6 Indeed, I see the practices of imagination and the pursuit of imaginative cogency as one important way in which we can contribute to the interconnected flourishing of human beings and other creatures. Of course, as we have seen, there is much more to art than imagination. The arts are multi-dimensional. Yet the practices of imagination – exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation – are decisive in the arts, such that whatever the arts contribute to politics, economics, and civil society must flow through imaginative channels. That is why artistic truth is crucial for the roles art plays in society. The arts are a dedicated site in society for imaginatively cogent disclosure in which human beings and other creatures can come to flourish. 2.3 Authenticity, Significance, Integrity We can specify what artistic truth amounts to by distinguishing three relationships in which cogent imaginative disclosure occurs. One is



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the relationship between the artist or art producer and the art product or art event. The second relationship lies between the audience or art public and the art product / event. The third relationship is internal to the art product itself when it is institutionally constituted as a work of art.7 Moreover, the first two relationships are not simply between artists or audiences and art products / events. They are simultaneously interrelations between artists and their audiences: artists and audiences interact with each other by way of the art products and events they make and interpret. Artistic truth in the first relationship – that between the artist and the art product / event – amounts to the expectation of authenticity. Artists bring their personal histories, traditions, training, concerns, and community involvements to the process of making art. It is common for them to try to be authentic in this process. It is also common for audiences to expect authenticity in the making of art. What does this expectation of authenticity come to? I do not think it is simply a matter of each individual artist being true to the artist’s own self – whatever that might mean. Rather the expectation is that the artist’s practices and the resulting art product or event will be true with respect to what drives the artist to engage in art making. I summarize this driving force as the experience or vision from which competent art making allows an art product to arise. We expect art products to disclose in an imaginative fashion the experience or vision that gives rise to their production. We tend to prize more highly art products that are cogent in this regard – ones that are “original,” that give surprising and compelling expression to the originating experience or vision. We also turn to art products for insight into and from the personal worlds of those who make art, seeking to learn something important for our own lives. This is so regardless of whether the artist is an individual or whether the art product results from a collaborative effort. In short, artists and audiences alike expect art products to be true in the sense of being authentic. They expect art products and events to be cogently and imaginatively disclosive of the experience or vision from which these arise. Artistic truth in the second relationship – that between the audience or art public and the art product – amounts to the expectation of significance. Audiences and art publics bring their histories, traditions, preparation, interests, and community involvements to the process of interpreting art. It is common for them to find art

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products and events more or less significant. And it is common for artists and art producers to try to make art that can be significant. What is this expectation of significance? It is not the same as relevance. An art product or event can be relevant by addressing an urgent issue or by connecting with an audience’s interests, yet not be very significant. The movie Zero Dark Thirty is certainly relevant in that sense. But is it significant and, if so, how significant is it? The expectation of significance pertains to the degree to which the art product presents something that is worth an audience’s engaging with it. It concerns whether and to what extent an art product is worth our while, the degree to which it deserves our attention. Behind this expectation lies a need for cultural presentations that help us make imaginative sense of our lives within the society and universe we inhabit. Art products that fail to do this can seem like a waste of time. Art products that do this with a high degree of cogency come across as provocative or even profound. They can uncover our interpretive needs and help us discover or rediscover ourselves and the social world within which our interpretive needs arise. Significance is the shared expectation that art products should be true with respect to an audience or public’s need for cultural presentations that are worth its while. We expect art products and art events to be cogently and imaginatively disclosive of our own need for worthwhile cultural presentations. As this formulation suggests, when we creatively interpret a product or event of art, we simultaneously come to terms with our own need for what this art does or does not present. In that sense, the cogent imaginative disclosure accomplished in art is also a disclosure of those who interpret art. The third relationship in which artistic truth occurs is internal to artworks as such. Here I refer to the integrity of the artwork. Integrity has to do with the meaning or import that is intrinsic to a work of art. Like all other aesthetic signs, artworks present nuances of meaning about something other than themselves. Zero Dark Thirty, for example, is about the political, legal, strategic, and moral struggles Americans and others have faced after 9/11. Unlike other aesthetic signs, however, artworks simultaneously are very much about themselves. Whether explicitly or implicitly, an artwork calls attention to its own status and role as a nuanced presenter of meaning. In Zero Dark Thirty, the camera angles, crosscutting of scenes, and highpowered sound track remind one repeatedly that this is a filmic



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dramatization of recent history, not a documentary film, and certainly not a presentation of evidence in a court of law. Like other artworks, Kathryn Bigelow’s movie presents its import by presenting itself, and it presents itself in presenting its import. An artwork with integrity will do both of these successfully and at the same time. Integrity is the expectation that the import of an artwork should be true. To be true, this import must occur in an artwork that lives up to its own internal demands, one of which is to live up to more than its own internal demands. That is simply another way to say that the artwork whose import is true will succeed at simultaneously presenting itself when it presents import about something other than itself. When an artwork is cogent in such (self-)disclosure, we find it “unique” or “challenging,” and we prize it for this. We also discover that it points us to its own world, one that can illuminate or disturb or reorient our personal and social worlds. The imaginatively cogent artwork asks us to interpret its configured import and, in doing this, to interpret its world – a world that exceeds the artist’s world or the world of the interpreter. Artistic truth, then, has to do with three expectations and how they are satisfied. We expect art products and events to be authentic with respect to their production, significant with respect to their use, and, when they are artworks, integral with respect to their internal demands. An artwork that meets all three expectations in a cogent way will imaginatively disclose the experience or vision that sustained its production, an audience’s need for worthwhile cultural presentations, and the artwork’s internal – but not simply internal – demands. Artistic truth is a matter of cogent imaginative disclosure in all three respects. As I said before, art’s capacity for artistic truth helps make it important in society. Truthful art can introduce us to an artistic vision that disturbs our sense of justice and injustice, our understanding of who is oppressed and why. It can call attention to unmet needs that we would otherwise ignore or shrug off as someone else’s problem. And it can usher us into an imaginative world where the struggle for justice and solidarity is complex and compelling, a world where we can find both inspiration and critique. The question of artistic truth does not remove art from the hubbub of daily life. Rather, it points to the important roles art plays in contemporary society. To highlight these roles, I have proposed a theory of art as “art in public.” Let me explain.

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3 . A rt a n d S oci ety Heated debates in North America in the early 1990s about government funding for the arts prompted my first thoughts about art in public. It struck me that the advocates and the critics of government funding actually shared several problematic assumptions about the arts, government, and the nature of a democratic society. For the next two decades I tried to expose these assumptions and replace them with a better understanding. The result was a book titled Art in Public.8 3.1 Art in Public I use the term “art in public” to indicate two features of much contemporary art, features that debates about government arts funding often overlook. First, the state is heavily involved in the production and use of the arts, regardless of whether it provides direct subsidies. Not only does the state provide indirect subsidies via tax concessions and tax exemptions but also it maintains the regulatory framework within which artists and arts organizations operate, most notably in the areas of copyright, international trade, and freedom of expression.9 Second, the term “art in public” points to the fact that much of contemporary art has a public orientation. That is to say, the meaning of such art is available to a broader public – broader than the original audience for which it is intended or to which it speaks. Given how extensively the state is involved in culture and how rapidly computer-based technologies for creating and experiencing art have proliferated, much of contemporary art has become art in public, regardless of how direct or indirect are its links to the state. Very little art that is intended for some audience is “private” in the strict sense. In fact, the traditional distinction between “public” and “private,” which is problematic in any case, seems ever less applicable to the arts.10 The concept of art in public immediately affects how one justifies government funding. The standard arguments, whether economic or political, presuppose a static and fixed boundary between artistic creation and experience, on the one hand, and matters of state, on the other. They also assume that unattached individuals privately create or experience discrete works of art either to satisfy their



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aesthetic needs or to achieve some other end. The standard framework is individualist with respect to who participates in art, privatist with respect to where their participation occurs, and instrumentalist with respect to how. The concept of art in public challenges these mainstream assumptions. On the one hand, it suggests that the state is unavoidably present in the societal framework of contemporary art and that very little artistic creation and experience would occur without the state’s fiscal and regulatory involvement. On the other hand, because much of contemporary art is public in orientation, we can no longer regard art as a field in which unattached individuals carry out private transactions with discrete objects that either have intrinsic value or give rise to external benefits. Rather we need to devise a new model, a postindividualist, nonprivatist, and communicative model, for understanding both the recipients and the rationale of government arts funding. Specifically, we must identify the roles of art in civil society and determine whether government funding can and should strengthen these roles. That is what my book tries to do, thereby recasting the hackneyed debate between advocates and opponents of government arts funding and showing why the arts are important in a democratic society. 3.2 Civil Society To show this, I need to say something about civil society. I regard civil society as one of three macrostructures in contemporary Western societies. The other two macrostructures are the for-profit or proprietary economy and the administrative state. Whereas the economy and the state are highly integrated systems that operate ­according to their own logics, civil society is a more diffuse array of organizations, institutions, and social movements. It is the space of social interaction and interpersonal communication where economic alternatives can thrive and where informal political publics can take root. The intersections between civil society and the proprietary economy, on the one hand, and between civil society and the administrative state, on the other, have special significance for the role of the arts in a democratic society. I call the first of these intersections “the civic sector.” The civic sector is the economic zone of nonprofit,

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cooperative, and mutual benefit organizations within national and international economies. It is the zone in society that is most conducive to a “social economy” – an economy in which considerations of solidarity take precedence over “efficiency, productivity, and maximal consumption for their own sakes.”11 I call the second intersection – that between civil society and the state – “the public sphere.” The public sphere is a continually shifting network of discourses and media of communication that supports ongoing discussions about social justice and the common good. The public sphere is essential to any modern democratic society. It sustains widespread participation in the shaping of societal structures that affect everyone. It facilitates challenges to the economic system and the administrative state that open these to nonmonetary and non-administrative considerations. And it promotes democratic communication about matters of general concern. 3.3 What Good Is Art? Using these concepts of art in public and civil society, let me now briefly address the debate about government funding. A satisfactory case for government arts funding should address at least five philosophical questions: What good is art? What should the arts contribute to a democratic society? What is the best form of economic organization for art in a democratic society? What right do people have to participate in the arts? And what if anything justifies government funding for the arts? First, what good is art? Is it a private good? A public good? A merit good? Or are such economic concepts insufficient in order to understand art in public? I argue that art is primarily a sociocultural good. More specifically, art in public is a societal site for imaginative disclosure. That is why people today turn to the arts in order to find cultural orientation. “Cultural orientation” has to do both with discovering purpose and meaning and with learning why purpose and meaning are absent. People look to the arts for this because the arts have developed in the West as organized settings for exploring, presenting, and creatively interpreting multiple nuances of meaning in our lives, in society, and in the world we inhabit. Accordingly, my own justification for government arts funding argues that, by virtue of being positioned in civil society via a civic sector and a public sphere, the imaginatively disclosive character of art in public fulfills



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important political and economic roles that it is in the public interest to protect, support, and promote. That introduces the second question: What should the arts contribute to a democratic society? Many things, to be sure, but one contribution stands out when one considers relations between civil society and the state. Art in public helps shape and renew a vital public sphere. A vital public sphere requires cultural organizations and practices in which matters of general concern can be explored, presented, and interpreted. These organizations and practices include the ones that make up art in public. The special contribution of art in public is to help people take up matters of general concern in an imaginative fashion. It helps us disclose in fresh and insightful ways the felt quality and lived experience of concerns that merit public attention. Art products and events that accomplish such imaginative disclosure foster critical and creative dialogue, both within various publics and among them.12 What about the economic underpinnings of art in public? What is the best form of economic organization for art in a democratic society? Should art be a commercial enterprise? Should it be owned and operated by the state? Or is there another option? Clearly there is another option. The best way, if art is to help shape and renew a vital public sphere, is that of the civic sector organization. The reasons for this are complex, but they have to do with how solidarity has priority in the social economy of the civic sector. By “solidarity” I mean the democratic expectation that no individual, group, or community should be excluded from the recognition we owe each other as fellow human beings. It is the expectation that everyone, regardless of their wealth, power, and cultural orientation, should be able to participate in public life and have their worth respected. Whereas the proprietary economic system allows resources to flow constantly toward the private profit of those who control the market, the civic sector brings a different principle to bear on the use of resources. This principle is the imperative to share resources without assurance of private gain. Arts organizations that follow this principle are in a better position than either commercial enterprises or state agencies to foster critical and creative dialogue about concerns that merit public attention. Yet the civic sector form of economic organization creates a tension between art in public and the proprietary economy, just as art’s participation in the public sphere creates a tension between art in

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public and the administrative state. In fact, we cannot re-frame the debate about government arts funding unless we recognize both an economic and a political tension or dialectic. Economically, civic sector arts organizations foster a sociocultural good that society needs but neither the capitalist marketplace nor the administrative state can adequately provide. Civic sector arts organizations offer real resources in an imaginative fashion, and relatively free from the systemic constraints of marketplace and state. They do this within a social economy where solidarity among participants outweighs considerations of efficiency and control. At the same time, however, the most dramatic threats to civil society, and to art as a sociocultural good, come from the financial imperatives of a global capitalist economy dominated by transnational corporations. Global capitalism threatens to wipe out any form of economic organization that does not make monetary objectives primary and does not fully embrace commercial strategies. This economic pressure threatens art in public. It threatens community-based health care. It threatens genuine education, academic research, and non-commercial broadcasting. It even threatens religious communities and organizations. That is why, in the interest of preserving creative economic alternatives to a dominating economic system, governments do well to protect and subsidize arts organizations in the civic sector. Such arts organizations strengthen the social-economic fabric of society, without which the capitalist market itself would implode.13 That is one reason why they warrant government support. The other side to this dialectic is political. It occurs between the communicative role of the arts and the imperatives of state power. On the one hand, art in public has a central role to play in helping people articulate issues and interests that require government attention. Because this articulation occurs as imaginative disclosure, it affords access to public issues and interests in ways that open rather than close conversation and debate. On the other hand, the administrative state is a relatively self-sustaining system that tends to be culturally tone-deaf. Following its own bureaucratic logic, it puts enormous pressures on the public sphere in which such art participates. These pressures undermine the imaginatively disclosive public communication that democratically elected governments nevertheless require. In the interest of preserving avenues for critique and redirection of the state’s own power-driven operations,



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then, governments do well to protect and subsidize civic sector organizations that sponsor art in public.14 To say that governments should subsidize art in public assumes that people have a right to participate in the arts. What right is that? I do not think it is the economic right to pursue one’s own self-interests, as political liberals suggest. Rather, it is a cultural right, and it pertains not simply to individuals but also to the social institutions and cultural communities in which they participate. The problem with the standard liberal notion of rights is twofold. First, it construes the bearers of rights as unattached individuals pursuing their own self-interests. Second, it portrays the state as a neutral agency for sorting out these competing individual rights. By contrast, I think that all individual members of society are participants in institutions and communities, and that not only individuals but also institutions and communities are bearers of cultural rights. I also think that the primary normative task of the state is to achieve and maintain public justice for all the individuals, communities, and institutions within its jurisdiction.15 So the right to participate in the arts is a cultural right held by individuals, communities, and institutions, and the debate about government arts funding forces us to ask how we envision public justice in the first place. Is public justice simply the state’s duty to uphold the rights of discrete individuals and to mitigate economic disparities among them? Or does public justice include the state’s obligations toward various social institutions and cultural communities? If it includes these obligations, then the political justification for government arts funding must take them into account. Government funding must help ensure that the social institution of art has room to flourish in a structurally complex society. Art subsidies must also help uphold the cultural rights of diverse communities in a multicultural setting. That brings us to our final question: What justifies government funding for the arts? I have indicated already that I consider the reasons given in standard economic and political arguments to be insufficient. That’s why the following three claims are crucial. First, art is a social institution that has its own legitimacy and makes an important contribution to society. This contribution is primarily one of imaginative disclosure. Second, society needs what the arts offer. Third, the normative task of public justice obliges the state to support the arts in a wide variety of ways, including the provision of

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direct subsidies. More specifically, the basis for justifying government arts funding has to do with what art in public offers within the context of civil society and with a view to economic and political systems. It offers an imaginative disclosure of meaning that can foster solidarity within a social economy and democratic communication within a public sphere.16

4. Re e n v is io n in g R e f o r mati onal Aestheti cs The account I have given concerning art, the aesthetic dimension, and their roles in society arises from the reformational tradition in aesthetics. This tradition has guided my work for more than forty years: Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture influenced my early attempts, as an undergraduate at Dordt College, to understand the challenges facing Christians in the arts today; ­Calvin Seerveld was my mentor during graduate studies at the Institute for Christian Studies (ics) and the vu University Amsterdam (vu); Nicholas Wolterstorff was my faculty colleague in the Department of Philosophy at Calvin College; Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin completed her doctoral dissertation under my supervision at the vu. Later I became her faculty colleague at ics and subsequently became a colleague of Rebekah Smick, Adrienne’s successor at ics. The roots of my aesthetics in the reformational tradition might not be obvious, however, because I have reworked reformational insights and emphases to address the issues I consider most important. So let me undertake some excavation.17 4.1 Seerveld and Wolterstorff To begin, I should say that I have a Seerveldian understanding of the discipline of aesthetics. In the first instance I consider it a branch of Western philosophy that took shape in the eighteenth-century Europe around two main topics: the nature and purposes of the arts, and the nature and role of the aesthetic dimension in life, culture, and society. Like Seerveld, I believe that studying the principles of interpretation and criticism in the various arts also is intrinsic to philosophical aesthetics.18 Also like Seerveld, I think aesthetics could and perhaps should become a specialized area of research in its own right and not simply a subdiscipline of philosophy, although I would see it as an interdisciplinary field rather than a single discipline.



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This understanding of aesthetics is itself indebted to the reformational philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven. Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven turned Kuyper’s social teaching of sphere sovereignty and Jean Calvin’s theology of creation and redemption into an expansive and complex ontology, epistemology, and social philosophy. They translated the teaching of sphere sovereignty into a philosophical theory concerning the distinct character of different social institutions and of creation’s modal dimensions. Moreover, Calvin’s theology inspired them to call for an inner reformation of the academic disciplines and a transformation of social life. My accounts of art as a multidimensional social institution and of the aesthetic as a ubiquitous dimension of life presuppose their philosophy, just as the socially engaged character of my thoughts about art in public continues the project of inner reformation and social transformation. There are more specific links to the work of Seerveld and Wolterstorff, however. Seerveld describes the aesthetic dimension in terms of “allusiveness” and “imaginativity.” My account of “imagination” is very similar to this description, even though I emphasize processes and practices more than subjects and objects. Also similar is the fact that I think aesthetic matters necessarily involve normative considerations, which Seerveld discusses in terms of an aesthetic law or aesthetic imperative, and which I formulate as a horizon of aesthetic validity (i.e., the societal principle of imaginative cogency). Moreover, both of us follow Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven in thinking that art is aesthetically qualified and technically founded,19 although my account of art as a changing constellation regards its internal organization as a historical achievement and not a permanent and transhistorical structure. Wolterstorff’s book Art in Action, which appeared just as I was completing my doctoral dissertation on Adorno’s aesthetics, helped move my account of art in this more social and historical direction.20 I found Wolterstorff’s characterization of the West’s “institution of high art” very insightful. I also appreciated his attention to the great diversity of roles that art can play in human life and his refusal to privilege aesthetic purposes in an elitist fashion. His emphasis on human actions, and not simply artworks, pointed me toward the importance of human practices and interrelationships within the arts and led me to an account of art products and events that does not remain stuck in a modernist fixation on the work of art.

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None of this is to suggest, however, I have simply picked random elements from reformational aesthetics and used them in my own fashion. Rather, my entire approach is informed by debates within reformational aesthetics and by my questions about shared assumptions underlying those debates. One issue in particular is relevant for the topics of this essay, dating back to the years when I received my graduate training in reformational philosophy (1972–81). It has to do with Christian faith and contemporary art. 4.2 Contemporary Art and Christian Faith As is indicated in my essay “A Tradition Transfigured,” three Kuyperian emphases are at the heart of reformational aesthetics. One is the theological story of a good creation disrupted by sin and evil, renewed in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, and moving toward fulfillment in a new heaven and a new earth. A second is the calling of Christians to be agents of renewal in culture and society. And the third is the notion that such renewal involves not only persons but also cultural practices, social institutions, and the structure of society as a whole. Because of these emphases, reformational thinkers have asked repeatedly what stance Christians should take toward contemporary art and culture, and they have made their own proposals. Rookmaaker saw the modern art movement as the expression of a dying culture. He encouraged Christians to neither denigrate art nor put it on a pedestal, but to instead approach it in a spirit of “love and freedom” and accept it “as a great gift of God.”21 Seerveld, in an essay whose title implicitly takes issue with Rookmaaker’s book, says that modern art has made important contributions to the unfolding of art as such. He calls upon Christians both to repent of their own “guilt in the plight of those caught in cultural dead ends” and to develop a contemporary Christian culture that builds on what modern art has achieved and displays its own spirit of “compassionate judgment.”22 Wolterstorff, by contrast, says that the institution of high art, which overlaps significantly with modern art in Rookmaaker and Seerveld’s descriptions, has blinded us to the many legitimate nonaesthetic purposes of art and to our aesthetic responsibilities in everyday life. He urges Christians to address the aesthetic squalor in everyday life and to be discerning when they decide whether and how to participate in  the institution of high art.23 So we see that the key figures in



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reformational aesthetics have different views about how Christians should engage with modern art and, presumably, with postmodern art as well.24 To simplify, whereas Rookmaaker recommends personal piety and Wolterstorff calls for critical discernment, Seerveld urges a communal alternative. Although I find something right about each of these stances, none seems sufficiently nuanced and comprehensive, for several reasons. First, the challenges facing all participants in the arts today, regardless of their religious orientation, are largely generated by economic, political, and technological systems that neither individuals nor religious communities can address on their own. Second, those who participate in the arts are members of many communities, not simply religious communities, and their membership in ethnic, national, and other communities is no less decisive than their religious adherence or nonadherence. Third, and perhaps most important, the art projects and arts organizations that have the greatest potential to contribute to cultural renewal and social transformation today are neither established museums, galleries, and the like, nor faith-­oriented endeavours, but rather collaborative and participatory ventures that have a public orientation and help build a social economy. I believe the entire discussion about faith and art needs to catch up with such factors. That is why my accounts of artistic truth and art in public emphasize not only how people interact in the arts but also how societal macrostructures frame their participation. I have no doubt that, as an important contemporary social institution, art needs to be redeemed. Yet I am convinced that such redemption must go hand in glove with the transformation of society as a whole. As agents of renewal, Christians need to work alongside others for the sake of such transformation.25

Part Two

Education, Scholarship, and the Common Good

8 Salt for Humankind: Challenges of Christian Scholarship (1982/2002) 1 . S a lt o f the Earth The ordinary can be extraordinary. Salt is like that. We use it every day, but can we fully explain why we use it and what it does? According to Jesus, people who follow him are like salt. They are extraordinary in an ordinary way. When they choose to follow Jesus in higher education, perhaps their ordinariness becomes even more extraordinary. 1.1 Synoptic Sayings Jesus compares his disciples to salt in all three synoptic gospels. In each gospel, however, a different context gives the comparison a unique flavour. Mark’s gospel places the comparison right after a dispute among the disciples about who was the greatest (Mark 9:33–50). We should note the irony and Jesus’ anger. Jesus has been transfigured, the disciples have failed to exorcise an evil spirit, and now they squabble about their own status. Jesus tells them “Whoever wants to be first must be last and the servant of all.” Then, lest they miss his point, he embraces a child and says, whoever welcomes a child welcomes not only me but also my God. Now, like women, children had little status in Israel during Jesus’ day. Just imagine it. Impotent followers of a transfigured Jesus are arguing about their rank, and he tells them to be servile enough to welcome insignificant children. This is the context for Jesus’ angry warning about turning away from following him: “Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness how can you make it salty again?

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Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with each other” (Mark 9:49–50, NIV ). Matthew locates the saying about salt in the famous Sermon on the Mount, right after the opening Beatitudes. Whereas in Luke Jesus’ pronouncement of blessings leads to a pronouncement of woe to the rich, well-fed, and well-respected, in Matthew the Beatitudes are followed by words of pious admonition:1 “You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus says. “But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled … You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden … Let your light shine before [others], that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:13–16, NI V ). Here Jesus compares the disciples to all-­ purpose salt – they are the salt of the earth. But they must be careful to stay salty so that others notice and give God praise. In Luke’s gospel Jesus’ saying about salt is more compassionate than ironical or admonishing. Out for Saturday dinner with a prominent Pharisee, Jesus heals a man with swollen legs and arms. The legal experts and devout Pharisees have nothing to say. Then Jesus instructs his fellow diners to seek the seat of least honour and to invite the least respectable people to their special meals. One pious guest says, “Blessed is the one who will feast in God’s kingdom.” Jesus replies with a parable in which the invited guests (such as the legal experts and Pharisees) boycott a great feast. The poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame fill their places. Then comes Jesus’ address concerning the costs of being his disciple. He concludes: “Any of you who does not give up everything [you have] cannot be my disciple. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out. [Those who have ears to hear, let them hear]” (Luke 14:33–5, niv ). In other words, you don’t need to be respectable to follow Jesus, but he expects complete devotion. 1.2 Purifying, Preserving, Transforming What should we make of the various flavours to what Jesus says in these different contexts? Let me suggest a synoptic reading and highlight three functions that salt performs – namely, purifying, preserving, and transforming. Mark’s Jesus says everyone, including the status-conscious disciples, will be salted with fire: better to drown



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than to lead trusting children astray, better to remove a hand, a foot, or an eye than to lose your whole life in a salting fire more terrible than the burning sulphur rained on the inhospitable Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:24). Here salt symbolizes a purifying destruction. When Jesus says “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another,” he warns his followers to purify themselves of anything that hinders radical discipleship, especially their concern for rank and status. Salt is an agent of purification. It hurts to rub it into a wound, but sometimes that’s just the remedy needed.2 Matthew’s gospel emphasizes preserving rather than purifying. Salt was indispensable for preserving food in Palestine’s climate, as the commercial fishers among Christ’s disciples understood. It was so valuable that the Romans taxed it heavily. Matthew, the former tax collector, knew that some merchants would hide their salt to avoid taxation or would mix in sand to reap a higher profit. Either way the salt would become useless. Matthew’s account suggests that humankind will spoil if Christ’s disciples become diluted. Although a mere pinch of salt in Jesus’ day, they must stay salty to be salt for humankind. Rather than purifying or preserving, Luke stresses the transforming power of salt. Salt that loses its saltiness is good neither for seasoning nor for manure. As an addition to manure, salt improved the smell and increased its effectiveness as a fertilizer. As a seasoning, salt could thoroughly change the flavour of food. Luke’s gospel tells us that salt must be genuine to carry out complete transformation. The disciples must give up everything that would block their entering fully the world Jesus came to transform into God’s great banquet hall. Synoptically, then, salt purifies, preserves, and transforms. In all three respects those who follow Jesus are like salt for humankind. They are not simply preservatives that, by remaining undiluted, keep humankind from spoiling. They also are cathartic agents who, by being purified, contribute to the sometimes painful purifying of humankind. And they are metamorphic agents who, through continual sanctification, serve the radical transformation of humankind. Moreover, the disciples must undergo the same processes that Jesus calls them to activate in the world. Why does the world need such salt? What does being like salt have to do with higher education? What’s so extraordinary about following Jesus in such ordinary projects as teaching, learning, research,

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and writing? I wish to consider these questions by developing an idea of academic discipleship for humankind. I shall propose that higher education can become extraordinary when we pursue it in social solidarity, cultural partnership, and historical communion. In making this proposal, I seek new language for the theme of creation, fall, and redemption that permeates the reformational tradition.3

2. A c a d e m ic D is c ip l e s hi p for Humanki nd What can we say in general about the human beings for whom Christian academics are called to be salt? Three things come to mind. First, that human beings are alienated from God, ourselves, and other creatures, and we suffer greatly in this condition. Second, that we are created in God’s image. Third, that in principle we are liberated from our alienated condition to bask in God’s presence. Let me e­ xplore the implications of these descriptions for Christian scholarship. 2.1 Alienation and Social Solidarity During the past two centuries, alienation has become impossible to ignore in Western societies. The theme of alienation sounded powerfully in Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel saw human culture and society as an “inverted world” fraught with tensions, struggles, and contradictions. But he suggested that reconciliation had arrived in his own philosophy. Marx found Hegel to be standing on his head and tried to invert Hegel’s philosophy. Alienation is all too real, said Marx. Philosophy must help prepare for a political-economic revolution that would bring an end to alienation. By alienation Marx meant the estrangement of human beings from their labour, from the product of their labour, and from other human beings. When persons are forced to earn money at brutalizing jobs in dreary factories just so some capitalist can realize a profit, such exploitation cuts them off from their work and the meaning of human life. The condition of alienation doesn’t stop there, however. Subsequent philosophers have argued that modern individuals usually engage in self-­deception; theologians have commented on how we Westerners softly kill God; and social scientists have noted the rapid fragmenting of social classes, ethnic communities, marriages, families, and other social relationships. So alienation seems to be an established feature of human life in Western societies.



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Christians would be practising self-deception if we did not recognize that alienated human beings are the ones who alienate, or if we believed ourselves neither responsible for alienation nor subject to it. Professors and administrators at Christian colleges are just as estranged as anyone else through the process of wage labour, and they are just as responsible for this estrangement. Christians can be just as self-deceptive, God killing, and socially fragmented as non-Christians. Yet, amazingly, Jesus calls them to be agents of healing. He calls them, in the midst of their alienation, to be purified and to be purifying, to be preserved and preserving, to be transformed and transforming. I hear this call as an appeal to practise social solidarity. By “social solidarity” I mean both recognizing human needs and cooperatively attempting to alleviate human suffering. I am not simply talking about having compassionate feelings nor repeating the pious mantra that we must be right with God to be right with one another and ourselves. The persons commended in Matthew 25:31–46 are not those who had compassionate feelings but those who actually fed the hungry and thirsty, welcomed strangers, clothed the naked, took care of the sick, and visited prisoners. Jesus did not try to make people disciples before healing them and showing them respect. Compassion and piety can be forms of self-deception if we ignore human needs or fail to alleviate suffering. To practise solidarity in the academy is to respect students as human beings, and to have students and teachers serve one another regardless of rank. How many times do our methods of teaching and the concern for measurable achievement get in the way of such respect and mutual service? Practising solidarity in the academy also means more than this. It means that our schools will be open to the outcasts with whom we may be most uncomfortable. It means that we do not turn the cause of Christ into an excuse for rejecting ideas or practices simply because Christians did not come up with them first. It means that exposure to suffering and exposure of alienation are guiding concerns in the educational program. And, so long as our society has a capitalist economy, practising social solidarity will mean that our colleges regularly reassess and restructure pay scales, tuition fees, and financial priorities, to counter the injustices this economy generates. 2.2 Creativity and Cultural Partnership Jews and Christians throughout the ages have placed human alienation in the context of God’s creative work. They have affirmed the

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story of Genesis, in which God fashions the entire world and creates humankind in God’s own image. But there our common affirmation has ended. The significance of God’s creative work and the meaning of the divine image have been topics for prolonged debate. Without rehearsing this debate, I simply wish to assert that human creativity seems central to our being created in God’s image. I do not want to ignore the elements of mastery, productivity, and propagation in the divine image, very significant elements when the book of Genesis was written. Now, however, I think the feature of creativity needs to be singled out. Human beings have mastered, produced, and propagated to such an extent and in such a way that they risk losing their creativity. Among all the creatures of God, human beings stand out for their ability to create. When the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the deep, God’s Spirit hovered over the water, according to Genesis. How many possibilities there must have been for forming the void, generating light from darkness, and dividing the restless waters. God grasped these possibilities and acted on them. By the time God was ready to rest, God had human partners to help continue the creative work. Humankind was created in the image of a creative God. Creativity is central to humanity. By “creativity” I mean an ability to envision possibilities, to decide upon them, and to enact them. When creativity is more experimental, enacting tends to precede envisioning and deciding. One discovers the possibilities and chooses among them by trying something out. When creativity is more inventive, decision tends to guide the envisioning and enacting of possibilities. One has a definite purpose in mind, and one discovers possibilities and tries them out in order to make something with a specific use. When creativity is more speculative, envisioning tends to outweigh deciding and enacting. One considers various possibilities without worrying too much about deciding or about enacting one or another possibility. Experimentation, invention, and speculation make up the creativity for which human beings have been created. If creativity is central to being human, then Christian academics need to practise cultural partnership. The challenge is to place our teaching and learning, our research and writing, in the context of a huge cultural project shared with fellow human beings throughout the ages and with the God who created humankind to be creative. We are challenged to cultural partnership not because we are



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unusually creative. Too often, in fact, Christians have lacked imagination. Rather, we are challenged to cultural partnership because Christ calls us to become new human creatures in a new creation. We are called to the passionate purification, preservation, and transformation needed for a cultural project surpassing our grandest visions. To practise cultural partnership in the academy is to affirm the creating of culture as a good gift entrusted to all human beings and renewed by Christ. It means keeping the excitement of exploring new ideas, inventing new tools and products, and experimenting with various social practices and cultural methods. It also means that our schools will not stymie people through inordinate worries about the correctness or rightness of everything they do. Nor will they narrow the vision of humanity’s cultural project by suggesting that only Christians can make worthwhile contributions. Just as we share in the alienation under which all human beings suffer, so all human beings receive through God’s creative and recreative work the gift to envision, choose, and enact possibilities – possibilities for shaping their world, for building a culture, and for generating social institutions. In the midst of this ongoing human project, Christians are to be salt. We are called to criticize, affirm, and transform culture, including ourselves. Christian academics will criticize in view of God’s own salting fire; they will affirm out of God’s concern for the creative work of God’s human partners; and they will transform in expectation of the great day when God will once more be at home with humankind, wiping away every tear (Revelation 21:1–4). 2.3 Liberation and Historical Communion That day will be one of complete liberation: liberation of human beings and the whole creation from all forms of suffering and evil. Like the theme of alienation, “liberation” has been central to modern discussions about humanity. Indeed, liberation movements have profoundly shaped Western societies, from the American and French Revolutions and various wars for national independence to workers’ revolutions and movements for the liberation of women, racial or ethnic minorities, and members of the l g bt q community. It would be hard to imagine these liberation movements apart from a Jewish and Christian narrative stretching from Genesis 3:15

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through the Exodus to the Messianic prophecies and Jesus’ message of God’s approaching kingdom or reign. Through this historical narrative runs the theme of God’s liberating the alienated from their suffering and oppression. This history reads as the story of God’s freeing people from sin, evil, and their effects. But it also reads as the story of God’s concretely liberating specific people from slavery, poverty, hunger, illness, and injustice. Though Jesus’ gospel of God’s reign conflicted with prevailing expectations of Israel’s liberation from Roman rule, it did not exclude a gospel of social liberation. Instead Jesus extended the theme of God’s liberation to the outcasts of society, to all people, and to the entire world. God’s reign becomes the complete liberation that God will bring, a liberation already beginning with Jesus, and continuing whenever human beings let God’s will be done. God wills nothing less than the reconciliation of humankind, the well-being of all people, and the fulfillment of all creation – at all levels and in every respect.4 In the light of Jesus Christ’s person, life, message, and deeds, human beings appear to be liberated, though not yet completely; they appear to be liberating, though without being able on their own to overcome their alienation. So liberation is hardly a minor concern to the followers of Jesus. For Christian academics, this concern translates into the practice of historical communion. To practise historical communion is to set our solidarity and our cultural partnership in the direction of future liberation. This future liberation is promised by God’s care and indicated by Jesus Christ’s mission. It is the direction into which God’s Spirit moves human history, that same Spirit who hovered over the water at creation, who inspired Jesus in his mission, and who struggles to have human beings let God’s will be done. To practise historical communion is to work in the direction of total liberation on the basis of the liberation God has already accomplished, also through human endeavours. Practising historical communion will prevent Christian academics from identifying our schools and their communities with God’s future kingdom. We have not arrived. In fact, we are not the ones who have to arrive. We are to expect God’s arrival, simply living and working in this expectation. And we are to ask God’s Spirit to move us and our projects, along with other human beings and their projects, toward complete liberation. Our students and supporters need to sense among us the humility, openness, and expectation that characterize historical communion in the light of liberation.



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3 . S a lt in g t h e Old Salts Practising historical communion requires more hope than many people can muster today. Creative cultural partnership and solidarity amid alienation also are difficult. We cannot ignore Jesus’ words about the cost of discipleship. Yet we may remember that the call to be disciples is an invitation to the feast of grace. There is no need to heap heavy burdens when Jesus has already offered a light load. Perhaps that’s the most extraordinary thing about Christian discipleship: this challenging way of living is an open invitation to God’s great banquet. But how do Christian academics experience grace in the demanding occupations of teaching, research, and administration? Are there ways in which academics called to be salt can themselves be salted? What will keep their academic discipleship pure and fresh? Let me conclude with three suggestions about the salting of old salts. I will not give specific tips for dealing with fatigue and burnout. But perhaps my suggestions will help refer the stress of our profession to the blessings one can find in academic discipleship. My first suggestion concerns the practice of social solidarity amid alienation. It is crucial for our well-being to recognize our own alienation, our own brokenness, our own suffering. Yet it also is crucial to place these in larger contexts. Simply examining our own faults can be just as damaging as seeing only the needs of others. To practise social solidarity amid alienation we should reflect on ourselves in larger contexts, neither berating ourselves nor denying our own needs. In other words, we should engage in expansive self-reflection rather than narrow self-deflection. My second suggestion refers to the creative practising of cultural partnership. I think artists know why God is said to have rested after the initial work of creation. One of the most blessed times in an artist’s life occurs when she or he has finished a major project. All the canvases are painted, the paintings framed and hung, the lighting arranged. Now, for the first time, before any other viewers arrive, maybe with just a few close friends, you embrace the entire project – the progressions over the months, the subtle connections hidden even to the artist at work, the sheer satisfaction of work done well. But when do such times occur for others? Are weekends and vacations anything like the day when God rested? When do professors get a chance to survey their work, share it with others, and bask in

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their accomplishments? Are the usual workloads too heavy and hectic to allow for speculating, inventing, and experimenting? Can we maintain the principle of creative rest within a college’s daily operations? To be creative cultural partners we will need to observe the Sabbath, not only during sabbaticals, which every profession should have, but also in the normal rhythms of the academic year. My third suggestion deals with practising historical communion in the light of liberation. I can put this suggestion in two words: avoid enclosure. Avoid enclosure?! What does that mean? By enclosure I mean a whole set of circumstances that help make us nearsighted, comfortably discouraged, and hopeless. Teaching in small privately funded institutions can keep academics out of touch with the mainstreams of education and society. Living too much of our lives within solid academic walls can deafen us to the melody of God’s Spirit playing in the world. Merely watching the news without actively shaping the events reported can turn the most optimistic person into a fatalist. I could go on, but the point has been made. Avoid enclosure if you want to live in the light of liberation. Jesus and God’s Spirit are this light. They ratify the promise, confirm the partnership, and seal the communion between God and God’s creatures. Those who decide to live in this light, those who decide to be salt for humankind, will be extraordinary in their ordinariness. The purifying, preserving, and transforming they undergo will also be done for others. As salt for humankind, they will be free to celebrate God’s truly amazing grace.

9 Studying the Arts for Serviceable Insight (1983)

In response to a question posed for Dordt College’s Arts Seminar in 1982, I should like to argue that, with respect to arts education, the stated philosophy of my alma mater rests on a mistake. This mistake lies in how “The Educational Task of Dordt College” defines the notion of serviceable insight.1 My initial answer, then, to the question “What kind of serviceable insight does a study of the arts provide?” is “perhaps no kind at all.” While developing this answer, however, I shall head toward a different notion of serviceable insight and a different answer to the question posed. This different notion will lead me to argue that studying the arts can provide insight that is not only serviceable but also crucial at a college such as Dordt.

1 . “ S e rv ic e a b le I ns i ght” Although I share many of the concerns expressed in Dordt’s statement of purpose, I think its notion of serviceable insight is inadequate, to say the least. It is too broad to be serviceable. It is too non-historical to be insightful. And it conceals an intellectualism that can only misread the contemporary importance of studying the arts. Let me develop each of these polemical points. In ordinary usage and in some of its primary lexical meanings, “insight” indicates the power or act of seeing far into a situation. “The Educational Task of Dordt College,” however, takes “insight” primarily to mean understanding “the fundamental character”2 of the creation and of adult tasks within it. The statement considers such understanding a prerequisite to cultivating creation and to effective social activity3 as well as the core to education both inside

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and outside schools.4 Now, apart from the question whether trying to understand the “fundamental character” of the creation is a meaningful endeavour, I sometimes wonder whether any persons besides philosophers have ever tried to do this. In any case it strikes me that such global understanding has much more to do with comprehensive theories than with perceiving situations in depth. Can anything but confusion result from the attempt to make “insight,” as global understanding, the core to all education as well as to link it  with the Holy Spirit’s disclosure of Jesus Christ?5 What does “­insight” really mean? Unusual perceptiveness? Basic awareness? Philosophical understanding? Spiritual wisdom? As it stands, the term seems too broad to be serviceable for spelling out Dordt’s educational task. Whether institutional or not, and whether educational or not, tasks arise in definite situations at specific times under certain conditions. Saying this would be unnecessary were it not for the tendency in Dordt’s statement to enunciate principles as if they were inscribed in ahistorical stone. This tendency takes its toll on the notion of serviceable insight, making it less than insightful. To be insightful the notion would have to carry within it a penetration of the social and historical circumstances in which Dordt College finds itself. Given the definite ethnic and confessional context of the college, and given the disparateness within Christianity today, isn’t it the height of abstraction to connect the serviceability of insight with helping ­ “Christians,” “the Christian community,” or “the community of believers”?6 Of which Christians are we speaking, and what sorts of effective activities are we seeking to promote? Given current options for understanding the love of God and neighbour, what exactly do we take such love to imply? Given the college’s small size and limited financial base, isn’t it presumptuous to say that “wherever insight is required, there Dordt College is called to supply it”?7 Shouldn’t we say instead that the college is called to provide the educational leadership it deems most strategic and feasible in its current context? Despite my criticisms of the ahistorical character of “serviceable insight,” I recognize some of the origins of this idea. They are most noticeable in the chapter on implementation. Philosophically, at least, those origins are the intellectualism mentioned earlier. I have no quarrel with the concern to integrate “theory and practice.”8 But the working assumption behind this concern seems to be that theoretical understanding of “God’s created order” should be the



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foundation of practice and the core of the educational activity at Dordt College.9 Even extra-curricular activities are said to aim at developing insight and the desire for insight.10 Surely one would have thought, for example, that intramural basketball had as its goal nothing more sophisticated than good competitive fun. Must everything be aimed at insight to be a legitimate part of campus life? Might not the desire for “integration” and consistency be forcing into theoretical service what is not properly eligible for conscription? Is a theoretical understanding into the fields of academic disciplines demanded in order for students and graduates to act insightfully in “all kinds of practical situations” with “all kinds of problems”? Surely the case for serviceable insight has been overstated; apart from certain “skills,” insight seems to be the only service the college and its graduates have to offer. Such an exaggerated case means, I think, that the present statement of purpose cannot be “implemented” in arts courses and programs unless the statement itself is modified. The requisite modifications pertain to both terms of the phrase in question. To indicate these modifications, I shall now reverse my tack and argue that the study of art can indeed provide insight that is highly serviceable. But by “insight” I mean “unusually penetrating perception of things, events, or situations.” By “serviceable” I mean “helpful in the long run for carrying out the ministries begun by Jesus Christ and summarized in Matthew 25:31–46.” From this reversal will emerge the beginnings of a rationale for the study of arts at a college such as Dordt.

2 . A rt a n d I ns i ght Saying the study of art can provide insight quickly leads one into a thicket of controversy about the cognitive status of art. Though I am aware of the controversy, for now I wish to bypass it – after making just a few comments. Some philosophers wish to reintroduce into the concept of knowledge the broad connotations it had earlier.11 This move would make it easy to talk about the arts as forms of knowledge.12 But North American philosophers tend to restrict the concept of knowledge to knowledge about something and to knowledge that something is the case. Given this tendency and its force in ordinary language, our

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purposes in this article might be better served by distinguishing acquaintance with something from knowledge about it.13 When I say the study of art can provide insight, I am not saying that the study of art can provide knowledge about and knowledge that, even though this knowledge might also occur in the study of art. Instead I am saying the study of art can provide acquaintance of a sort that is penetrating, important, and indeed crucial. Two prevalent weaknesses of arts education in schools today are that either students acquire little more than knowledge about an art itself or they achieve little more than a nodding acquaintance with various arts. In either case students tend to miss out on insight. Either they become Fachidioten, socially and historically uninformed specialists in doing or appreciating a certain art form, or they become amateurish generalists who dabble in whatever art forms catch their fancy. But the insight art can provide remains hidden to Fachidioten and generalists alike. If this is so, and if the insight in question is crucial, then, as a liberal arts college, Dordt should be ensuring that no student here remains a mere amateur in the arts, and that the arts courses offered do not allow students majoring in the arts to become socially uninformed specialists. By now, of course, you are wondering what sort of insight is available to arts students and why it is so crucial. I shall address each of these matters in turn. First I’ll distinguish two phases to insight in art, only to claim that neither phase can unfold without the other. Then I’ll give reasons why insight in the arts can be highly serviceable. My conclusion will be as follows: to the extent that the study of art provides highly serviceable insight, arts education is crucial at a college such as Dordt. 2.1 Insight into Art When I speak of insight in art, you will recall, I mean “unusually penetrating perception of things, events, or situations.” Let me now discuss two phases to insight in art. One phase can be described as insight into art. The other phase can be described as insight beyond art by way of art. Insight into art is not the same matter as knowledge about art. That statement helps me explain why I judge the notion of “serviceable insight” in Dordt’s statement of purpose to be mistaken so far as arts education is concerned. To the extent that this notion



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emphasizes global understanding of the “created order,” any consistent “implementation” of the notion would lead to programs in which knowledge about the arts surpasses or eliminates insight into the arts. Either that, or the arts would be approached as mere skills, which is not all there is to art. Whereas knowledge about art can be acquired theoretically, insight into art cannot be so acquired. Insight into music, for example, comes only by way of composing, performing, and listening to music. Only by actually doing music can one become unusually perceptive of what is happening in a piece, where a piece is headed, and how the musical events are put together. A similar point could be made about painting, sculpture, drama, or literature. Certainly knowledge about the history and structure of music can enrich one’s musical perception. But such knowledge can never replace insight into music. In addition, I would argue that listening to music can seldom achieve the depth of insight attainable through composing and performing music, even though composing and performing can only become insightful in conjunction with disciplined listening. To emphasize insight into an art is to emphasize the activities of the artist rather than the activities of the spectator or of the scholar. Stressing the artist’s activities has been one of the potential strengths of arts education at post-secondary institutions in North America. Unfortunately, technical specialization has undermined this strength. Instead of gaining insight into an art, arts students are introduced to the repertoire, “savvy,” and “contacts” that may ensure a “successful” career. This tendency in arts education is understandable. For artists, the market system is one of ruthless competition. The winners take all. With the emphasis on technical specialization for successful careers, however, comes a loss of insight into art, and with the loss of insight into art comes a failure to gain insight beyond art by way of art. 2.2 Insight beyond Art by Way of Art A good way to grasp what is at stake here is to see My Dinner with André, a film directed by Louis Malle. The film features a conversation between Wally, a mediocre playwright plugging away at his career, and André, a brilliant director and drama coach who has given up his career. Central to their conversation is the question whether

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contemporary theatre can break through the sophisticated surface of modern life, or whether the most it can do is simply confirm the public’s prefabricated illusions. Wally, who is more at home in contemporary “reality,” thinks his career is still worth pursuing. André, who obviously has deeper insight into drama, thinks contemporary “reality” makes it impossible to gain insight beyond drama by way of drama. Can we gain insight beyond art by way of art, and if so, what does this mean? When insight beyond art is gained by way of art, human experience is disclosed in ways that are hard to describe. Brokenness is exposed; suffering is presented; possible events and actions become highly imaginable; actual situations become very memorable; inarticulate desires become expressible; the usual is estranged; the unusual is brought home. Of course there are also countless works of art through which little insight is gained and much human experience is occluded. They are, we could say, of less import, and thus in some respects they are less important. We would be mistaken to think that the insight gained beyond art by way of art is a knowledge of specific matters or of things in general. If this were so, art would be dispensable. But in our society art is indispensable precisely because all our means of gaining knowledge often seem to afford little insight. As with insight into art, insight beyond art by way of art is best achieved through artistic activities and trained listening or viewing. Unless the artist or trained participant is well-informed about social, historical, and cultural matters outside art, however, whatever insight is gained probably will become “interesting” rather than effective in art and beyond. With respect to studying the arts for insight, then, I would propose the following. Students should become competent artists and trained participants who connect artistic engagements with well-informed experience of the world in which those engagements take place. In this way they will achieve insight beyond art by way of art, and their insight into art will have extra-artistic implications.

3. T h e S ig n if ic a n c e of Arts Educati on Insight in art can be highly serviceable at the present time. That is to say, unusually penetrating perception into an art and by way of an



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art can be helpful for carrying out the ministries of Jesus Christ. Those ministries are ones in which human needs and human interests are fulfilled.14 I have several reasons for claiming that insight in art can be highly serviceable today. Despite an increasing public concern about the dead ends into which the development of Western society has taken us, it has become obvious that any significant turnaround will be extremely difficult. In this context it becomes just as difficult to carry out the ministries of Jesus Christ, despite some glib Christian talk to the contrary. Prevailing criteria such as convenience, success, or efficiency are pounded into us daily, often without our noticing. What could be done or should be done is fully prescribed, and what really needs to be done hardly comes up for discussion. In this situation artistic insight can be highly serviceable. This is especially so of insight into and from the more important art of our day. Such art requires and provides keen sensitivity to real needs. It takes and gives imaginative envisaging of past and future possibilities. And it includes provocative protests against the prevailing criteria in our lives and society. Keen sensitivity, imagination, and resistance are required if the ministries of Jesus Christ are to be carried out today. Thus artistic insight embodying those prerequisites can be highly serviceable. By the same token, to the extent that these prerequisites are absent outside contemporary art, Christians lacking artistic insight might contribute little to the liberation and reconciliation for which Jesus Christ came. To say that insight in art can be highly serviceable is not to say that the acquiring of such serviceable insight is the full extent of arts education. Nor is it to say that arts education is the full extent of the aesthetic education important to the lives of mature Christians today. Yet perhaps the significance of arts education at a Christian college today hinges on the insight such education can provide and on the special serviceableness of such insight. The serviceable insight provided will not be a global understanding of God’s creation. Instead it will be an unusually penetrating perception, without which human needs will be ignored, theoretical understanding will become irrelevant, and the cause of Christ will be poorly served.

10 Teaching for Transformation: Philosophy in the Undergraduate Curriculum (1989) Theodore Plantinga concludes his wide-ranging reflections on the role of philosophy in the undergraduate curriculum on a sombre note. “When it comes to providing Christian orientation,” he says, philosophy professors at Reformed liberal arts colleges “are not having as much impact as we should.”1 I take it he intends this as a provocative statement. Let me rise to the bait. Three questions immediately come to mind. First, should we be having an impact in this regard? Second, if we should, then what kind of impact should we be having? Third, how could the desired impact be achieved? An answer to the first question would tell us something about the nature of our task as teachers of philosophy. An answer to the second question would indicate something about the purposes of our task. An answer to the third question would suggest how such purposes could be better achieved. Before I address these questions, however, let me comment on the unity and diversity that philosophers at Reformed colleges bring to such a discussion. Although Plantinga’s paper declares non-partisanship, I think he would agree with me that doing philosophy requires one to take positions and that, when philosophers talk about the place of their discipline in the undergraduate curriculum, they invariably take positions about the doing of philosophy. Furthermore, I think he would agree that many considerations inform the positions we take, including ones that are political, economic, and religious in character. If we agree on this, then perhaps we would also agree that declaring non-partisanship is a way of taking a position, with all that this implies.



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1 . V is io n a n d Strategi es Most philosophers who teach at Reformed colleges in North America share something in common. At the risk of simplification, let me suggest that this unity comes from a common intellectual and religious tradition that is a North American version of Kuyperian Calvinism. At the core of this tradition lies a view of scholarship and society that one can call a “transforming vision.” This vision takes two directions, one toward scholarship itself, and the other toward the society in which scholarship plays a role. Nicholas Wolterstorff gives a helpful summary of the first direction at the end of his talks for new faculty at Calvin College: “What characterizes this college, at its best, is a passionate concern that the gospel of Jesus Christ shall guide and shape our learning at whatever points such guidance and shaping is relevant … What is good in the scholarship of humanity in general we shall receive thankfully, as God’s good gift. What is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ we shall reject. And we shall then do our best to go beyond rejecting to reconstruction, to renewal, to reformation, to rethinking, to healing. A critical and creative engagement with the world of scholarship, both the critique and the creativity being guided by the Word of God spoken to us in the Scriptures and in our Lord Jesus Christ: That is the vision which lures us on.”2 The second direction encompasses the first and gives it a context. An earlier talk in the same series portrays the transforming vision as one of “holy worldliness”: “Thus not only do we discern the goodness in creation’s potentials and the ways in which those potentials have been fulfilled, and the fallenness in what has been done with creation’s potentials; we also see ourselves as called to struggle for renewal. Called to struggle toward making the world holy, always acknowledging, however, that it is God who will have to bring about [God’s] Reign in its fullness.”3 To summarize, we can say that the Kuyperian tradition envisions a critical, creative, and faithful engagement with the world, including the world of scholarship. Within the unity of this tradition and vision, however, many factors make for diversity among us. Let me mention four. First, there are differences in the student populations at our various colleges, so that the teaching of philosophy takes on a different focus in each place. At Calvin College, for example, around 35 per cent of the student body in 1988–89 came from denominations other than the Christian Reformed Church, and only 30 per cent of the student

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body came from the network of Calvinist day schools. I suspect that comparable statistics at other Reformed colleges are significantly different. Second, each philosophy department operates within the requirements and opportunities of its own institution. What is expected of introductory philosophy courses, for example, varies accordingly, as does the role of such courses in the curriculum and life of the college. Third, the approaches we take to our teaching arise in part from the schooling we have received and the continuing involvements we have with our profession. At Calvin, for example, most of the philosophy professors are schooled primarily in analytic philosophy, and their professional involvements revolve around the Society of Christian Philosophers and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the American Philosophical Association. Such factors as student population, institutional setting, and professional training make for the distinct profiles of each department. They also help shape how various departments and individuals understand the Kuyperian tradition and its transforming vision. A fourth factor is equally important and perhaps more obvious – namely, what Plantinga calls cultural strategies. Plantinga identifies three such strategies and labels them “participationist,“ “isolationist,” and “positional.”4 If I understand him correctly, the participationist sees positive value in the Western philosophical tradition and encourages Christian students to join in. The isolationist has reservations about philosophy as such and warns Christian students to be wary of it. The positional approach wishes to build a Christian philosophy and encourages Christian students to join this constructive project. Plantinga does not seem to think these strategies are mutually exclusive, although he does on occasion recommend one or another strategy as being preferable. The point I wish to make is that each of these strategies is a way in which scholars have made the Kuyperian tradition relevant to the North American world, and each one has adherents in the philosophy departments of Reformed Colleges. Which strategy we prefer will help shape the life of our departments and our teaching. Nor do I think these strategies are mutually exclusive. Rather, each one highlights one side of our transforming vision, with the participationist emphasizing what is good in humanity’s scholarship, the isolationist emphasizing what is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the positional approach emphasizing the reconstruction and renewal to which we are called.



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Further, in the absence of one emphasis, the others become ineffective. Participation without isolation undermines our efforts at renewal. Isolation without construction leads to haphazard participation. Construction without participation results in uninformed isolation. Hence it is crucial to keep all three strategies vital, if in our teaching as in our lives we would be in the world, not of the world, but for the world. Or, to translate this into familiar reformational language, all three strategies must be kept alive if we would have our work embody the scriptural themes of creation, fall, and redemption. In still other words, we with our diverse strategies need each other, for without each other the unity of our tradition would become hollow. To paraphrase Kant, vision without diverse strategies is empty, strategies without a unifying vision are blind.

2 . C r it ic a l R e sponsi bi li ty By now we seem to be a long way from our original questions. You will recall that I asked (1) whether philosophers at Reformed colleges should be having an impact by providing Christian orientation, (2) what kind of impact we should be having, and (3) how the desired impact could be achieved. Let me submit that to think in terms of “having an impact” is to misconceive the nature of our task as teachers of philosophy. Hence I need to reformulate all three questions. In reformulating the questions, I shall follow Plantinga’s lead and restrict my comments to introductory philosophy courses. There are two reasons to question the notion of “having an impact.” The first reason has to do with how we understand the transforming vision. It seems to me that this vision, like most visions of life and society, is not so much taught as it is caught. The notion of having an impact by providing Christian orientation seems to assume that the vision can be packaged and delivered in a way that effectively changes students’ lives. Part of having this vision, however, is to trust that the gospel of Jesus and the working of the Holy Spirit will bring about such change, sometimes despite our own best efforts. The transforming vision cautions us against taking ourselves so seriously that we think our efforts must have the effect that seems desirable. The second reason has to do with how we understand the task of teaching at the college level. It seems to me that teaching undergraduates is not so much a matter of providing an orientation as it

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is of encouraging them to take self-critical responsibility for their own orientation. Teaching college students is not so much a matter of having an impact on them as enabling them to become mature participants in various cultural and social endeavours. Teaching them is not so much a matter of giving them a vision for life but of challenging them to live what they envision and to envision what they live. For both of these reasons, let me propose that we ask not about having an impact by providing Christian orientation but about ­encouraging, enabling, and challenging students who already have a  Christian orientation. (Obviously a different question would be more appropriate if we were teaching at a different kind of college.) If we consider our task to be one of encouraging, enabling, and challenging, then we can rephrase our second and third questions as follows: How should introductory philosophy courses encourage, enable, and challenge students who already have a Christian orientation, and how could the performance of this task be improved? In response, let me briefly indicate what a one-semester introduction to philosophy might look like if encouraging, enabling, and challenging students were primary objectives. My comments focus on topics, approaches, skills, and texts. I also say something about the possibilities and constraints of a one-semester introduction.

3 . In t ro du c t io n to Phi los ophy Topics: Three types of topics seem equally important for an introductory undergraduate course in philosophy. These are (1) the roles of philosophy in society and culture, (2) the central concerns of philosophy, and (3) selected details of the discipline. The first topic is important because we need to locate philosophical questions in larger contexts, in the contexts of the arts and sciences, of education and schooling, of social issues and religious questions. The second topic is important because we need to help students see the concerns that philosophers bring to such questions, especially concerns about reality, knowledge, and the meaning of human life. The third topic is important because students need to know what distinguishes philosophical approaches to these questions and concerns from approaches in other disciplines and in other areas of human endeavour.



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Approaches: Both our view of philosophy and our view of college education will shape how we approach such topics. On both scores I think a problem-posing pedagogy has much to recommend it. The danger of such an approach is that students can gain the impression that philosophy is no more than the messy art of asking questions without finding answers. The excitement of such an approach is that it draws students into the doing of philosophy, and it lets them begin to take responsibility for finding and articulating their own answers. In these ways philosophy can become a living tradition rather than a dead weight. Students in an Introduction to Philosophy course need to grapple with questions about constancy and change or about good and evil as live issues, for example, coming to understand both why these are problems in philosophy and why they are important. Skills: The term “skills” is not quite right for what we hope students will acquire during the introductory course. What we are ­after is to develop certain activities, several of which the typical introductory student has not attempted before, and to nurture ­certain abilities by means of these activities. In my view, the most important activities in which introductory undergraduates should become somewhat proficient include the reading of philosophical texts, the discussing of philosophical issues, the writing of philosophical essays, and thinking philosophically about contemporary concerns. As to abilities, I would identify six as the most important: • • • • • •

to discover the structure of a text, discussion, or argument to identify basic issues to clarify meanings to uncover assumptions to recognize and evaluate arguments to take, develop, and defend one’s own position

What we regard as important abilities and activities will say something about the types of assignments we give and how we organize our class time. Texts: Topics, approaches, and skills provide the context in which one selects texts for the introductory course. Together with our views on philosophy and undergraduate education, these considerations give rise to certain standards in our practice of selecting texts. When reflected upon, such standards can be formulated as criteria. I find

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the following five criteria especially important for text selection in an introductory course: • • • •

•

Primary texts are preferable to secondary sources. The texts should be relatively accessible and engaging. The texts should raise central issues in philosophy. The texts should have been influential both within philosophy and beyond. Each text should be representative of its age and its author, and there should be at least one such representative text for each of the main historical eras of Western philosophy (ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary).

Such criteria have led me to select the following four texts for my one-semester Introduction to Philosophy at Calvin College: Plato’s Republic; Books One and Two of Saint Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will; Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy; and John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy. In addition, I have assigned sections of Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton’s The Transforming Vision at various stages of the course, treating it not as a text in philosophy but as a book in which central concerns about life and faith are made available for philosophical discussion. Notably absent from this list is any text by women or by persons of ethnic minority as well as any text in non-Western philosophy – omissions I wish to correct but find difficult to correct, given the constraints of a onesemester course.5

4 . P o s s ib il it ie s a n d Constrai nts Now permit me some concluding remarks on the possibilities and constraints of a one-semester introduction. When I taught at The King’s University College in Edmonton during the early 1980s, the college required all students to take both a two-course introduction to philosophy and a two-course sequence in interdisciplinary studies. The two philosophy courses gave students a leisurely introduction to representative texts and relevant issues in the history of Western philosophy. The two interdisciplinary courses focused on contemporary issues of life and scholarship, with the first course examining “Perspectives on Life and Society” and the second course discussing “Central Issues in Academic Disciplines.” Although these



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interdisciplinary courses happened to be coordinated by a philosopher, they did not need to be, and they always involved readings and faculty lectures from across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. For various reasons, King’s subsequently replaced the two-course sequence in philosophy with a one-semester introductory course, followed by one other philosophy course of the student’s own choosing. Likewise, an annual all-college conference and interdisciplinary components in the senior seminars of all disciplines replaced the two-course sequence in interdisciplinary studies. The limitation of the one-semester introductory course in philosophy is that it cannot treat in detail what used to require four semester-long courses at King’s. At the same time, Reformed colleges seem not to have built into their curricula enough other ways to ensure that every student is encouraged, enabled, and challenged to grapple with such matters. Hence our introductory courses in philosophy are forced to become somewhat superficial both as introductions to philosophy and as ways to help students explore and articulate a transforming vision for life and society. Yet the one-semester introduction, like the sword of Damocles, can do wonderful things to concentrate our pedagogical attention. It also can give students an exceptional opportunity to explore the forest of philosophy without getting lost in its underbrush. What our colleges need to discover, however, is how the students’ later explorations of the underbrush can be less haphazard, and how we can help them locate the forest of philosophy in the larger landscape of life and society as they make their way through the college curriculum. Such discoveries are crucial, I think, if we wish to encourage, enable, and challenge our students to lead a life of holy worldliness.

11 Adult Children of the Enlightenment (1992)

In a provocative paper on the project of the Enlightenment, Bruce Benson argues against accepting the blackmail of either the Enlightenment or one version of postmodernism.1 Christian scholars should resist the blackmail of either completely accepting or completely rejecting the claims of reason, he says. Benson derives the claim that the Enlightenment engages in blackmail from his reading of an essay by Michel Foucault. Whereas Kant stands in for a blackmailing ­Enlightenment, Benson does not name anyone in particular as the representative of a blackmailing postmodernism. Let me call it the no-name brand of postmodernism.

1 . M o d e r n it y a n d Pos tmoderni sm I find Benson’s paper particularly valuable and instructive in two respects. First, it refuses to shield Christian scholars from the welter of voices in debates about postmodernism, and instead develops a position in interaction with several prominent figures. Second, the paper both assumes and illustrates the extent to which the contemporary project of Christian scholarship is itself indebted to the Enlightenment. In these two ways, Benson counters those Christians who would reject both postmodernism and modernity without considering the historical constraints and the implications of such rejection. My comments aim to support his intentions, although I differ on several key points. I want to show that Benson’s portrait of Kant is a caricature. If this can be shown, and if we may assume that no-name postmodernism is also a caricature, then perhaps neither Kant nor Professor No-Name is an extortionist. If neither one is an extortionist, then we



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might not be forced to choose between either blackmail (whether modern or postmodern) or the Gadamerian escape that Benson recommends. To be brief, I shall concentrate on Kant, leaving no-name postmodernism on the shelf until someone wants to buy it. I proceed on three assumptions. First, I assume that the Enlightenment, as discussed by Kant and Foucault, is not the sort of thing that can engage in blackmail. As I read Foucault, he does not suggest that either Kant or the Enlightenment – as a complex “set of political, economic, social, institutional, and cultural events”2 – forces us into a simplistic choice. Rather, Foucault rejects certain recent stances toward the Enlightenment that say one must be either for or against the Enlightenment, indeed, either for or against modernity. My second assumption is that Foucault’s refusal of this simplistic choice is faithful to the spirit and ethos of Kant’s reflections on the Enlightenment. My third assumption is that Benson’s own recommendations are closer to Kant’s position than a first reading of his paper might indicate. I’ll return to this last assumption later. Those then are my three assumptions, which others may want to challenge: the Enlightenment cannot engage in blackmail; Foucault’s refusal honours the Kantian ethos; and Benson’s recommendations are closer to Kant’s position than they might seem. I want to aim my remarks at the social and political dimensions of the Enlightenment. Although Benson focuses on the question of personal maturity, the essays on Enlightenment by Kant and Foucault primarily concern the shape of a free society. More specifically, both Kant and Foucault are asking what societal changes would be required in order for public maturity to flourish. A crucial notion in this connection is that of “the public sphere.”

2 . O f f ic ia l a n d Publi c Reas on Let me now turn to Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” and recall its context. Kant wrote his essay in  1784, roughly midway between the American and French Revolutions, in response to questions about the public rights and responsibilities of clergy, professors, and other civil servants in Prussia. He wants to distinguish between what he calls the “private use of reason” in one’s official post and the “public use of reason” in one’s capacity as an educated member of civil society.3 To avoid possible confusion, I label these the official and the public uses,

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respectively. For example, whereas, according to Kant, members of the clergy are properly obliged to uphold church doctrines when they preach – an official use of reason – they also are properly free and obliged to criticize mistaken aspects of those doctrines when they write in public journals and newspapers – a public use of reason.4 Accordingly, Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” aims in the first instance at the public use of reason by government and church employees. His point is that members of the learned professions should not unthinkingly toe a party line when they engage in public discussions. Rather, they should think for themselves, they should be encouraged to think for themselves, and they should not be punished or sanctioned for such independence, so long as it does not infringe on the performance of their official responsibilities. Moreover, for all this to occur, society must be structured in a way that guarantees freedom of inquiry and speech in the public sphere. On my reading of Kant’s essay, it is a caricature to construe his notion of maturity as “coming out from under the yoke of everything except reason.”5 Kant explicitly states that in matters of official capacity one is duty-bound to uphold the policies or doctrines of the government or church one serves – using one’s reason, to be sure, but not setting it above the constituted authority. He greatly admires the “enlightened” approach of Frederick the Great with regard to civil servants such as Kant himself: “Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!”6 This hardly sounds like outright rejection of authority. Similarly, it is a caricature to suggest that Kant defines Enlightenment as “escape … from the yoke of the past.”7 Although this may describe a dominant post-Kantian attitude, I fail to find it in Kant. Kant thinks that all human beings are innately endowed with the “inclination and vocation to think freely.”8 This inclination will grow and prosper in a society that does not erect artificial barriers against freedom of inquiry and speech in the public sphere. The focal point for Kant’s critique of an unenlightened society or institution is not its ties to the past but rather its refusal to remain open to the future. He gives the example of a church assembly that tries to “commit itself to a certain unalterable set of doctrines” in order to guarantee the continuing orthodoxy of its members. “A contract of this kind,” he writes, “is absolutely null and void” because any attempt



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to prevent the next generation from extending and correcting its knowledge “would be a crime against human nature.”9 In other words, for a church body to enter such a contract would be to accept and promote self-incurred immaturity. If Kant does present us with a clear choice, it is not one between maturity and immaturity or between rationality and irrationality. The choice is rather between publicly accepting and publicly resisting the self-incurrence of immaturity. No doubt each of us can think of church assemblies and governments, or colleges, for that matter, that have declared certain teachings or laws or policies sacred, in the sense that these may not be questioned or perhaps not even discussed in a public forum. Such declarations, in Kant’s view, are morally repugnant, not because they seek to uphold an inheritance from the past but because they try to foreclose on the possibility of enlightenment in the future. It is not morally offensive to try to uphold the truth of a tradition or of a canonical text, but it is morally offensive to try to prevent others from testing the truth claims of this tradition or text in a public forum.

3 . F o u c au lt a n d Gadamer Perhaps Benson’s paper does not mean to suggest that Kant is a blackmailer, but rather that there is a set of attitudes and practices stemming from Kant and the Enlightenment that amounts to a kind of blackmail: Be mature or else … ! Be rational or else … ! Accept the Enlightenment or else … ! Perhaps, too, it is this mentality or sensibility that Foucault means to resist. The Foucauldian response, as Benson summarizes it,10 is to reject the apparent choice between accepting or rejecting the Enlightenment, and further to demonstrate the social and historical impurity and contingency of Enlightenment rationality. Apart from the question of whether or not Kant imposes this choice, I find the Foucauldian response troubling in at least one respect. What I find troubling is that, in resisting the apparent choice between accepting or rejecting the Enlightenment, Foucault seems to slide into a type of avoidance. What Foucault seems to avoid is the question of the truth or validity of purported insights. Moreover, I am worried that some such avoidance also creeps into Benson’s critique of Kant. Consider in this connection his suggestion that Kant’s re-reading of Christianity in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone blackmails us into either accepting Kant’s “rational

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version of Christianity” or being “irrational.”11 What one wants to know, I should have thought, is whether the truth in this situation lies on the side of Kant’s re-reading or on the side of those parts of the Christian tradition challenged by his re-reading. Although traditions can have authority, and although they can contain truth, neither capacity renders them immune to critical scrutiny. To be sustained, the hyper-Foucauldian gesture of finding unacknowledged power plays behind every truth claim, of finding blackmail in every choice, needs an assumption like Kant’s that an emergence from self-incurred immaturity is at least worthwhile and preferable, if not morally obligatory. Not surprisingly, as Benson later indicates, Foucault actually is closer to Kant than it might at first seem.12 So too, an attempt to criticize Kant for misreading the Christian tradition (and not simply re-reading it) cannot help but appeal to the quasi-Kantian notion that some interpretations are more truthful and hence better than others. Benson finds in Hans-Georg Gadamer a way to escape the apparent blackmail of both the Enlightenment and no-name postmodernism. I am no more confident about the reliability of this escape route than I am convinced that Kant is an extortionist. Let me give two reasons for hesitating about Benson’s Gadamerian rescue operation. First, Gadamer has difficulty explaining why his prejudice in favour of prejudice is preferable to the Enlightenment’s purported prejudice against prejudice. Second, Gadamer’s attempt “to acknowledge the validity of both reason and tradition”13 does not address the question of which of the two has priority in the public sphere, nor does it indicate whether the validity of each is of the same kind.14

4 . T r a d it io n a nd Cri ti que Rather than launch a full-blown critique of Gadamer, however, let me conclude by indicating how my worries pertain to Benson’s claims. As I understand his paper, he recommends a “critical” or “knowing” acceptance of authority and tradition. Such acceptance is, he suggests, the mature alternative to the childlike acceptance of authority prior to modernity, to the adolescent rejection of authority in Kantian modernism, and to the equally adolescent rejection of rationality in no-name postmodernism. It seems to me that Benson’s recommendation confronts us with exactly the sort of choice between reason and authority that he and Gadamer wish to avoid.



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What can “critical” or “knowing” acceptance mean, if not this: that, in the end, the authorities and traditions we embrace are accepted not simply on the basis of their authoritative or traditional character but rather for other good reasons. Moreover, how can such good reasons be found and established, apart from rational discourse in a public forum? And is this not precisely what Kant urged upon us – namely, not to let our adherence to a religion, civic code, or the like prevent us from testing the claims of that tradition or authority in a rational and public way? Perhaps Benson has all of this in mind when he speaks of “knowingly accepting authority.” But then he is closer to Kant than it first appears, and he gives greater priority to reason than Gadamer seems ready to grant. My point is this: some traditions are better than others, and some parts of traditions are more worthy of acceptance than others, and we need more than tradition itself to make such distinctions and choices. Indeed, if, as Habermas argues in his critique of Gadamer, traditions and authorities can undergo systemic distortion, then the gift of public rationality is a crucial one indeed. I would submit that the real choice posed by the Enlightenment, one that still confronts us, is whether traditions and their institutional embodiments are to be accepted without question, or whether there exists something like a moral obligation in the modern (and postmodern) world to make even the most basic of our beliefs and the most cherished of our customs available for critical scrutiny in a public forum. I also would submit that Kant’s position on this choice is roughly right.15 Indeed, I would go so far as to say Kant’s emphasis on civic freedom as a condition for public enlightenment is a valuable continuation of genuine insights and worthwhile impulses from the Christian tradition, such as the Reformation’s emphasis on the priesthood of all believers and the perspicuity of scripture. As children of the Enlightenment who criticize it, Christians need to remember that the Enlightenment itself is – rebelliously perhaps, but nevertheless powerfully – a child of Christianity.

12 Living Water: The Future of Higher Education in the Reformed Tradition (1998/2002) 1 . A T r a n s f o r mi ng Vi s i on Reformed institutions of higher education in North America have inherited a grand vision of the church and the world. Stemming from Jean Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, and Kuyper’s successors, this vision emphasizes the transformation of society and culture. According to the Kuyperian vision, Jesus completely transforms human life and calls for committed partners in this transforming work. Not one institution in society, not one area of culture, not one square inch in the entire universe lies beyond the scope of Jesus’ ministry. This vision makes the details of life very important. If nothing lies outside Jesus’ transforming work, then all our decisions and actions are significant, and conflicts about education or politics or medical ethics cannot be avoided. Such conflicts occur in two directions. The first conflict is with dominant forces in the world today. Though Christians are in the world for the sake of the world, they cannot simply be “of the world.” We must resist forces that destroy the world God loves. The second conflict is with fellow believers. If we are partners in Jesus’ transforming work, then there is little room for simply “doing one’s own thing.” There is just as little room for simply letting the other side have its way. We are obliged to work together as Jesus’ partners, even when we disagree about how to do this. By emphasizing the details of life, a transforming vision often intensifies conflicts among Christians. How much easier it would be



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simply to think that God only saves individual souls, to nurture one’s own soul, and to win other souls for Christ. There would be fewer causes for concern and much less to fight about. Then we would not have to bother ourselves about poverty and racism and sexism. We would not need to debate the pros and cons of Christian schooling. We would not feel compelled to ask whether our parenting or consuming pleases God and serves our neighbour. But what does this have to with the future of higher education in the Reformed tradition? In a sense, everything! Unless each generation embraces anew a transforming vision, our colleges will lose sight of their missions, and their very reason for existence will gradually disappear. Let me be more specific. After a lifetime in schools affiliated with the Kuyperian strand within Reformed Christianity – not only as a student in grade school, high school, college, and graduate school but also as a faculty member at two Christian high schools and at two Reformed colleges – I have strong senses of both promise and peril for the entire enterprise of higher education in the Reformed tradition.

2 . P ro mi se The sense of promise comes from the fact that Reformed institutions such as The King’s University College in Canada and Calvin College in the United States have much to offer their own students, their supporters, and the larger world of higher education, and that there is a felt need for what we can offer. Let me mention three opportunities. First, higher education is unsettled right now. Many institutions are looking for new models of curriculum, pedagogy, and scholarship, models that get beyond narrow specializations and isolated expertise. Consequently, this is a good time for our own institutions to reexamine their missions and strategies, and to share our findings and experiments with others. We could discover that some things we have done well in the past, such as placing academic work in larger social, cultural, and religious contexts, will prove even more valuable in the future. Second, significant segments of the North American population no longer embrace the myths of economic progress and geopolitical domination that sustained much of higher education after the Second World War. The dark side of capitalism and the failures of the nation

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state have begun to emerge, now that the irresistible push to commodify everything has become obvious and national fears cannot be projected so easily onto what Ronald Reagan called “the evil empire.” Although such fears can easily be redirected toward gays and welfare recipients at home or toward Al Qaeda and Iraq abroad, this demythologizing has allowed alternative visions of life to flourish. Many of these alternative visions recognize the limits to human achievement and the interconnectedness of all creatures. A new thirst for spirituality has emerged, to which Reformed institutions can respond. Third, leading Christian and Jewish intellectuals in North America now acknowledge that traditions whose substance has shrivelled will not survive in the twenty-first century. I think here of studies by Mark Noll and George Marsden, which sound sobering notes about the weakness of intellectual pursuits among conservative Christians and the loss of faith traditions among liberal Christians. But I also refer to work by African-American voices of social conscience such as Cornel West and to the provocative politics of meaning forged by Michael Lerner and Tikkun magazine. This is not a time of complacency for leading members of the religious intelligentsia, and it should not be for our own institutions either. So my sense of promise has to do with the ferment in higher education, a new thirst for spirituality in North American culture, and the search for substance among intellectual leaders within traditional religions.

3. Peril But I also have a sense of peril. Near every open door I see forces that threaten to slam it shut and to lock our own institutions into spaces where we are sure to lose our creativity, relevance, and substance. First, much of the search for new educational models is driven by economic and technological imperatives that threaten the very identity of colleges and universities as independent centres for research, critique, and cultural creation. Feeling the crunch of decreased government funding, shifting job markets, and economic globalization, many institutions turn to the latest fundraising strategies, information technologies, and marketing plans without thoroughly examining their appropriateness for higher education. I speak in sound bites here, but I’m sure my readers know what I am talking about: wealthy



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donors setting college policy; full-time tenured faculty positions being replaced by part-timers; recruiters selling college education simply as a path to successful careers or to personal gratification. Many of our students enter college with careerist and narcissistic views of the value of higher education. So it is not hard for colleges and universities to get caught up in a cycle where short-term fixes spell longterm disaster. If, in the end, all we can offer society is job training and intellectual entertainment, we will be replaced by other organizations that are much more efficient and effective at providing these services. Small religiously based colleges will be the first to go. Second, the new thirst for spirituality does not seem much in evidence within the academy as such. Nor, for that matter, do many churches of North America seem ready to offer living waters. Instead, both the academy and the church have been caught up in culture wars that put a premium on party lines and diminish dialogue. I do not wish to belittle the issues at stake in these skirmishes: abortion, civil rights, ecology, the entertainment industry, and identity politics all deserve serious public debate. Unfortunately, neither the academy nor the church has provided adequate forums in which genuine dialogue can take place, relatively free from the pressures of power and money. Moreover, Reformed denominations such as the Christian Reformed Church (c rc ) and their affiliated educational institutions seem as much at fault here as anyone else. To persons thirsting for a vision to replace arid materialism and overheated nationalism, the church and the academy do not seem so much like oases as sand in the desert storm. Third, the historians and prophets who seek substance often find ordinary religionists enamoured with consumerist gimmicks. As the religious intelligentsia call for a renewing return to our sources, ordinary Christians happily march on to the latest hit tunes. Among institutions in the Kuyperian wing of the Reformed tradition, this march has taken a consumer-populist twist. While the official theology remains Calvinist, the lived theology – the type of personal piety, music and liturgy, cultural and political affiliations, media of communication, support for parachurch organizations, etc. – is hardly steeped in the ecumenical Reformed tradition. Increasingly it resembles a bland brew of feel-good religion mixed with reactionary social stances. A clear indication of where the crc’s comfort zone lies ­occurred when its Synod endorsed affiliation with the National Evangelical Association and rejected membership in the World

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Alliance of Reformed Churches. Around the same time Calvin College revised its policy on church membership to allow faculty members to belong to an assortment of small evangelical or fundamentalist Presbyterian churches, who now want little to do with the crc , but did not permit membership in the mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), despite strong faculty support for the latter. When the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (5.2 million members) agreed in August 1997 to enter into “full communion” with both the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Reformed Church in America (rc a ), this notable step toward unity among churches of the historic reformation barely registered at Calvin College, even though the rca is also one of the churches to which Calvin faculty may belong.1 The college, like its c rc mother church, seemed sadly out of step with the larger world of Reformed Christianity, quite unlike our patron saint Abraham Kuyper, who painted such a broad canvas in his Stone Lectures in 1898.2 My worry is that, cut off from larger expressions of the Reformed tradition around the world, the Kuyperian tradition in North America will wither into empty phrases mouthed on ceremonial occasions but having little to do with the lives of our students and supporters. So concerns about economic and technological pressures, about the effect of culture-political skirmishes, and about a consumerist mentality in North American religion temper my sense of promise, stemming from higher education’s ferment, a new thirst for spirituality, and the search for substance. Yet even these concerns make me think that Reformed institutions of higher education have something crucial to offer today.

4 . E du c at io nal Shape How should Reformed colleges respond to this mixed environment? Let me make three suggestions. The first has to do with the shape of our educational endeavours. The history of curriculum and scholarship at Reformed colleges after the Second World War spans three stages. Until the mid-60s, these colleges embraced a classical liberal arts approach, with a strong emphasis on history, literature, philosophy, and foreign languages, and with the scholar teacher as campus authority. A professor felt little pressure to publish in academic journals. His or her scholarship (mostly his, at the time) served the classroom, campus, and church. In the eyes of the larger academy, many of these scholar teachers might have looked like dilettantes. But in



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the eyes of their students and the church, they were respected masters of the liberal arts tradition. H. Evan Runner and William Harry Jellema, whose teaching shaped several generations of Reformed scholars and church leaders in North America, were two of those masters at Calvin College. In the mid-60s, the liberal arts approach gave way to a new disciplinary model. (Trinity Christian College in Illinois came on the scene at this time.) The new model emphasized broad exposure to the entire range of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, combined with specialized study in one discipline. At Calvin College this model received eloquent articulation in Christian Liberal Arts Education.3 Although classically trained masters still had some sway on campus, the locus of authority shifted to those professors who had won their spurs in the larger academic world, but who could also rearticulate the liberal arts and a religious tradition for college supporters and church laity. My former colleague Nicholas Wolterstorff is a good example of such a professor. Sometime in the early 1980s another stage emerged, one harder to characterize because it has nowhere received a definitive elaboration. (The King’s University College and Redeemer University College came on the scene at this time.) Let me describe this as the stage of activist professionalism. In curriculum, this has involved adapting a liberal arts core to meet requirements of professional and pre-professional programs, as well as encouraging internships, service opportunities, and off-campus experiences. In pedagogy, this has meant relying less on lecturing about prescribed content and turning to more collaborative and dialogical approaches. In scholarship, an increasing amount of research and writing has aimed at current issues in society and culture rather than at either the classics or contemporary theories. I think our colleges have nearly exhausted the potential of this third stage. Now we confront some weighty decisions about the ­future shape of higher education in the Reformed tradition. What I  recommend is critical contextualism. By critical contextualism I mean an approach to curriculum and pedagogy and scholarship that uncovers the historical, social, and cultural subtexts of the professions and disciplines in order better to understand, evaluate, and transform those professions and disciplines. Let me briefly describe what I have in mind. I think all of us can recognize both the strengths and the weaknesses of the first two stages – the classical and the disciplinary approaches. We are much

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less clear about the strengths and weaknesses of activist professionalism. I would suggest that this third stage gains relevance at the expense of creativity and substance. It encourages us to be engaged, but it discourages us from taking the time to understand the larger forces at stake in contemporary issues. It also does not inspire us to explore thoroughly the resources of our own tradition, much less those of other traditions. Without such in-depth study of underlying patterns and traditional resources, our teaching and scholarship have less opportunity to become creative and substantial. A change in this regard is not something that individual educators can bring about on their own – our institutions and the academic profession cast long shadows over our work. It is really a matter for institution-wide discussion and reform. In a sense, we have to go back to square one, and ask again: Why should students study some of the classics of Western Civilization? Why do we encourage students to pursue off-campus opportunities? What is the point of contributing or not contributing to the glut of professional and academic publications on any particular topic? Where in all of this lies the challenge to help transform society and culture? It is through such serious self-examination and critique that our colleges can transform our earlier stages of development into a new model of higher education, one that is not simply driven by economic and technological imperatives.

5 . C u lt u r a l S i gni fi cance My second suggestion pertains to the cultural significance of our educational efforts. I mentioned earlier a new thirst for spirituality, which the church and academy fail to address. I don’t know what the climate at other campuses is like. At Calvin College, where I taught for seventeen years, a few explosive situations punctuated long stretches of tense silence, with minor skirmishes rumbling continuously in the background. We failed, as a college community, to have serious and sustained discussion of hot-button issues. This failure has kept us from giving significant leadership to our own church communities, and decreased the opportunities for a Kuyperian intellectual voice to be heard in North America. Needless to say, an atmosphere of tense silence hardly fosters the development of a new and winsome Reformed spirituality. I would like to single out one tension in the Kuyperian tradition that deserves special attention. Scholars or artists who have grown



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up in the Christian Reformed Church and its affiliated schools cannot help but feel this tension deep in their bones. People from other traditions also experience this tension on our college campuses. I mean the tension between personal piety and social action. My historian colleague James Bratt has detailed the complicated history behind it.4 The struggle between pietism and social activism is constitutive of the Kuyperian tradition in North America. There are two ways in which a constitutive tension becomes debilitating rather than creative in the life of a community. One way occurs when the two sides lock into a battle without resolutions. Then the community’s energy gets channelled into rigid defensive formations until communal paralysis sets in. The other occurs when the two sides go their separate ways and have little interaction. Then the community’s energy drains away into projects that no longer represent the best potentials of its tradition. I am not a historian. But my sense, as an insider on the margins, is that a little of each way has occurred during the past few decades among Kuyperians in North America. More precisely, the pietist and social activist sides have set up defensive formations around controversial social issues such as women’s rights, abortion, and same-sex marriage, and the two sides have gone their separate ways in matters of worship, evangelism, and congregational life. Such a combination of embattlement and isolation does not bode well for the future. It leaves each side free to turn away from the other toward hospitable allies on the larger North American scene – roughly liberalism and postmodernism on the one side, and fundamentalism and the Religious Right on the other side. It would be a tragedy if the Kuyperian tradition in North America dispersed itself into the older forces of liberalism and fundamentalism or their more recent successors. For the genius of Kuyper and his followers has been to couple a critique of the modern world with active contributions to transforming this world, always out of a deep sense of personal gratitude and calling. One challenge facing King’s, Calvin, and their sister institutions is to embody anew that genial spirit of holy worldliness. The best aspects of our tradition’s pietism and social activism need to be renewed, not left in rigid battle or nonchalant isolation, but carried forward by a revitalized and more encompassing vision of transformation. One need look no further than Abraham Kuyper’s meditation on Psalm 42 for a glimpse of what this might mean. I quote from the adaptation by James Schaap titled Near unto God:

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How often have we truly desired, for God’s sake, to be near to [God]? … How often do we authentically thirst for God? … No creed will satisfy, no nicely formulated idea about God, no relic or symbol. What we need is the living water – and not brakish [sic], swampy stuff either. We need water that tumbles and leaps and rushes, water that is alive …. Our being near unto God isn’t limited by time and space. It’s not something that happens only inside stained-glass windows. Zion is a sidewalk, an office, a kitchen, a classroom, a factory, a library carrel. Zion is where we come to God through Christ. That’s where we find our thirst finally relieved by living water. Zion is Christ really, our Mediator and our King, who is … God, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen!5

6 . D ig g in g D eeper Wells That brings me to my final suggestion. I have mentioned the search among religious intellectuals for the substance of their traditions, even as many believers buy into consumerist approaches to religion. It may seem that I wish somehow to recapture some earlier expression of the Kuyperian tradition that was more pure and less diluted. This is not at all my intention. In fact I think such a backwardlooking approach, whether nostalgic or dogmatic, kills a tradition more quickly than does outright rejection. What Habermas has said about ethnic cultures also applies to religious traditions in the modern world: “When a culture has become reflexive, the only … forms of life that can sustain themselves are those that bind their members while at the same time subjecting themselves to critical examination and leaving later generations the option of learning from other traditions or converting and setting out for other shores … Cultures survive only if they draw the strength to transform themselves from criticism and secession.”6 Hence to maintain a tradition is not to isolate or protect it, but to renew it through self-criticism and through dialogue with other traditions. Every tradition worth its salt needs to form its own loyal opposition. This cannot occur, however, if members of a religious tradition do not care enough about their own sources to pay them close scrutiny. Nor will it happen if no one in the tradition makes the effort to translate its sources into a language that makes those sources accessible to participants of other traditions. This is an urgent task facing



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Reformed institutions of higher education. Who among us is testing the insights and blind spots of Calvin and Kuyper and Dooyeweerd? Who is exploring and recontextualizing the imagery, music, and stories of the Kuyperian tradition? Who is translating the central texts and debates of the tradition into a language for the twenty-first century? If we college educators fail to do this, and if our administrations and boards do not give us the incentives and support we need, then we cannot expect our supporters and church communities to embrace a transforming vision. I grew up on a small farm in north-central California. The soil was sandy, the climate hot and dry. Were it not for an extensive public irrigation system, the area would have been like a desert. Because water flowed freely through the canals and ditches (just right for swimming in the summer!), lush pastures and thriving orchards covered the landscape. Even so, we needed our own well for household and garden use. When the water table dropped, or when too much sand sifted into the well, we would have to drill the well deeper.7 Perhaps there’s an image here for how Reformed colleges in North America need to relate to the Kuyperian tradition. In each generation we need to dig deep wells in order to release once again the nourishing currents of our intellectual and religious tradition, not simply for ourselves but for all the students, supporters, and future generations for whom we work. But we also need to find channels that allow these currents to flow toward neighbouring communities, and to let the best elements of their traditions flow toward us. Through all of this, perhaps, we also will receive and send onward the water of life, in Kuyper’s words, “water that tumbles and leaps and rushes, water that is alive.”

13 Living at the Crossroads: Ethical Scholarship and the Common Good cprs e Inaugural Address, 24 October 2011

When Joyce and I moved to Grand Rapids in 1985, we bought a house in an area called Eastown. We lived just a block and a half from the six-way intersection that forms the heart of Eastown. But because two main roads cross there at an unusual angle, many visitors missed our little street, called Norwood Avenue, and had to detour to get to our house. Five years later we adopted our first dog, a Golden Retriever / Labrador mix we named Rosa. Every afternoon Rosa and I walked up Norwood Avenue, across the six-way intersection, to a neighbourhood park where she loved to romp with other dogs. One day after playtime Rosa and I were walking back to the house. We had just navigated the crossroads and were on the home stretch, or so we thought. I was lost in some deep philosophical puzzle, and Rosa was absorbed in the scents and sounds of the neighbourhood, trotting happily along, her big tail waving. Both of us forgot that the pathway here was narrow because parking metres had been planted right in the middle of the sidewalk. Looking sideways at something else, Rosa walked full tilt and head first into a parking metre. Clunk! From my perspective, this looked like a rare case of doggy absentmindedness. But that’s not how Rosa saw it. No, the parking metre had viciously attacked her, without either provocation or warning. Following the ancient canine wisdom of “once bitten, twice shy,” she considered it an enemy for life. From then on, whenever she and I walked down that side of Norwood Avenue, she would veer as far away as possible from the hostile parking metre. Much later, after



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we had lived on a different street for eight years, I walked Rosa back along Norwood to visit our former neighbour Frances Wiley. Sure enough, Rosa still steered well clear of her adversary – the only metre in Grand Rapids that had ever attacked her. I learned from this that living at the crossroads can be a challenge. To live at the crossroads we need to look ahead, trying to detect where our paths lie blocked. We must recognize dead ends. We need to say, without hesitation, “We cannot go on like this.”

1 . S o c ie t y at t he Cros sroads This is true of society as well. Many of us see that the worldwide financial collapse in 2008, in whose aftermath we now live, was not an accident. It resulted from our going in unsustainable directions, hitching our personal and collective futures to a potential landslide of bad debts. We know we cannot go on like this. Economically we need to find a better way. Many of us also have heard the alarm bells of an immense environmental crisis. They have been ringing constantly for fifty years, ever since Rachel Carson published her eloquent book Silent Spring (1962). We cannot continue to charge deafly down the fossil-fuelled road, destroying the earth and its most vulnerable inhabitants for short-term gain. Some of us have tried to head in another direction. Collectively, however, we have not mustered the resolve – either nationally or globally – to find a different path. That failure reflects poorly on our elected governments. Despite widespread recognition of economic and ecological dead ends, our governments seem unable to help us go in a different direction. They seem more concerned to cut taxes than to protect the environment, more committed to backstopping large banks and corporations than to pursuing public justice for the poor and oppressed. The voices of ordinary citizens are largely ignored, and the changes needed in culture, education, and health care are mostly deferred. We appear to be headed toward a political dead end. Meanwhile, civil society, where most of us lead our daily lives, threatens to become less civil. This tendency is obvious in the United States, where public debates have become ideologically turbocharged, and in Europe, where economic anxieties have fostered anti-immigrant attitudes. Yet in Canada, too, the multicultural mosaic seems to be shattering under the competing blasts of ­

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individualism and intolerance. We have not found a viable path toward intercultural inclusion.

2 . U n s e t t l e d U ni vers i ti es Where at these societal crossroads do our universities stand? Their location is unsettled, I would say, for at least three interlinked reasons: muddled missions, external pressures, and entrenched patterns. First, the missions of our universities have become muddled. One would think that universities should be centres within civil society for dialogical learning, critical inquiry, and creative exploration, and that these activities should make a significant contribution to human flourishing. Yet several factors have made this less obvious: consumerist attitudes have taken hold among students and their parents; institutional costs have soared; and governments have cut back funding. In response, universities have refocused their activities toward vocational training, fundable research, and corporate appeal. External pressures have increased the sense of dislocation. Politically, governments, which still hold significant purse strings, increasingly demand measurable outcomes, thereby constraining the type of learning permitted or encouraged. Economically, as universities become more dependent on corporations, they steer research toward commercial applications. Technologically, universities are under pressure to stay ahead of the digital curve, channelling creative exploration into innovation for its own sake. A third reason for the unsettled location of universities is entrenched patterns of specialization and certification. Many universities today give lip service to the value of interdisciplinary research and teaching.1 But their structure and how they promote and reward the work of their faculties put a premium on specialization within established disciplines. They expect faculty members to burnish their credentials within disciplinary professions more than they encourage faculty members to engage in interdisciplinary projects or to be public intellectuals.2 Hence our universities have an unsettled location at the crossroads of society. Indeed they are themselves at a crossroad, pulled in different directions and unsure where to go: for example, toward dialogical learning or toward vocational training? Critical inquiry or commercialized research? Technological innovation for its own sake or genuinely creative exploration? Disciplinary expertise or



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interdisciplinary and public scholarship? Such uncertainty clouds the contributions universities can make to human flourishing.

3 . A D if f e rent Path Given this brief diagnosis, I think it is time to take a different path. It is time to pursue ethical scholarship for the common good. By “ethical scholarship” I mean teaching and research that consciously pursue social responsibility and continually orient themselves to the common good.3 I have stuffed a lot into this definition, more than I can unpack here. But let me briefly itemize some contents in my academic travel bag. 3.1 Social Responsibility First, with the term “social responsibility” I want to indicate that university-based scholars have something important to offer in society, and that they can offer this because of the gifts, training, and professional standing they have received. Because of what they have received, scholars have an obligation to be trustworthy, accountable, and responsive in their work: trustworthy with respect to the tasks of learning, inquiry, and exploration, accountable for the significance and worth of their contributions, and responsive to the opportunities, issues, and contexts that deserve their attention. Although nonacademic institutions cannot prescribe what this means for any individual or group, socially responsible scholars will acknowledge the obligation to be trustworthy, accountable, and responsive, and they will constantly ask whether they are meeting it in their work. 3.2 The Common Good Second, I have said that ethical scholarship continually orients itself to the common good. What do I mean by “the common good”? That’s not an easy question to answer. The topic is complex, and talk of the common good meets with suspicion and resistance in the academic world. Such talk seems to ignore postmodern critiques of Western metanarratives. It seems to overlook feminist and postcolonial exposures of institutionalized violence. It seems to skate too quickly past the real differences that distinguish various communities and traditions as well as the unique stories of individual lives.

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Although these are legitimate concerns, it would be hard to address them adequately in a short programmatic essay. Let me simply say that I have detected a deep desire in contemporary culture, maybe a spiritual hunger, for connection and community. This desire has surfaced within responses to sociological studies of isolation and alienation such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. In 2001 many Americans experienced it in the unprecedented outpouring of sympathy and good will from around the world in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I recognized it again in 2011 during public commemorations of Jack Layton, the former leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party. I hear talk of “the common good” as a response to this shared desire for connection and community, rather than as merely an ideological ploy to ignore differences or to cover up violence. By “the common good” I mean the interconnected flourishing of all earth’s inhabitants, despite and amid the many ways in which we destroy the earth and oppress other people.4 I also mean societies whose organization and ongoing development promote rather than hinder this interconnected flourishing. The common good is a condition where, for example, people enjoy substantial solidarity with one another across their differences; where the earth’s resources are tended carefully and everyone’s basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing are met; where the demands of justice are fulfilled, especially for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed. To say even this much, one must appeal to thickly textured notions of what is good, notions that we can best explore together rather than announce by fiat. Perhaps, however, I have said enough to indicate what I mean by “the common good.” My underlying point is this: Universities at the crossroads should foster dialogue and debate about what is good. They should not avoid it. They should encourage their students and faculty members to give these topics priority and to see this as a matter of social responsibility. We need ethical scholarship for the common good. 3.3 Pioneering Efforts The need for ethical scholarship has not gone unnoticed. The Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto (U of T), for example, chose “Food” as its main topic for collaborative



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research in 2012–13. The University’s Centre for Ethics, Joint Centre for Bioethics, and Centre for Environment all encourage scholars to address issues of the common good. The Toronto School of Theology (tst) supports programs in Islamic and Jewish studies that can enrich the dialogue among Catholics and Protestants on issues of social ethics. Liberal arts schools such as The King’s University College and Redeemer University College in Canada and Calvin College, Dordt College, and Trinity Christian College in the United States emphasize questions of purpose and value throughout their curriculums. I could multiply such examples many times over. The standard understandings and practices of university-based scholarship need to catch up with these pioneering efforts.

4. P h il o s o p h y, R e l ig ion, and Soci al Ethi cs Building on what others have done, the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics (c p rse) at i cs aims to articulate and demonstrate a vision of ethical scholarship for the common good. Because we are specifically a research centre at an independent graduate school, let me say what this vision means for the research we sponsor. As our name suggests, the Centre aims to foster scholarship that is philosophically informed, religiously attuned, and oriented to questions of social ethics. 4.1 Interdisciplinary Philosophy The philosophy pursued at the Centre, like the graduate programs at ics, is deliberately interdisciplinary. We do not ignore the specialized work done by philosophers with a more disciplinary focus. But we are especially keen to shed light on central questions in other disciplines as well as on pivotal issues in contemporary culture and society. A good example of this emphasis is the April 2010 conference and concert called “Songs of Love and Sorrow,” organized by my colleague Rebekah Smick and co-sponsored by ics, tst, the Royal Conservatory, and several units at U of T. The conference panel of composers and philosophers on the social ethics of music, subsequently published in the Toronto Journal of Theology5 and excerpted in an online ­video,6 conveys the excitement and significance of crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries in pursuit of topics that affect all of us.

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4.2 Religious Attunement The scholarship supported by the Centre is also religiously attuned. This means several things. First, as the founders of ics and its faithful supporters have always insisted, religion in the sense of spiritual orientation does not lie at the outer edges of academic work but at its very core. In the words of the Hebrew scriptures, out of the heart flow the issues of life (Proverbs 4:23), including, we may add, the issues of teaching and research. Or, as Jesus said, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21, nrsv). Researchers who are religiously attuned keep both ears open for questions of spiritual orientation, for questions of what matters most. In the second place, religiously attuned research does not buy the story of secularization that has prevailed at Western universities in the past 100 years. Although we live in a society where organized religion does not have the dominant role it once had, this does not mean the practices and institutions of faith and worship are marginal or irrelevant to the concerns of politics, economics, and civil society. Rather, organized religions have important contributions to make in these public arenas. Most fundamentally, they can help us test and rearticulate visions of the common good.7 Religiously attuned research remains sensitive to such contributions, always aware that organized religion can be a force for evil as well as for good. This implies, in the third place, that religiously attuned research studies and fosters interreligious dialogue. In today’s world organized religions are central to many global and domestic conflicts. They are also central to resolving such conflicts. Religiously attuned scholarship asks what the various religions can learn from each other. It asks as well how each religion can maintain its integrity and contribute to public discourse without feeding conflicts that destroy human life and undermine religion itself. In April 2012 the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics, joined by Emmanuel College and other co-sponsors, hosted a conference at the University of Toronto on Social Justice and Human Rights. This conference illustrates what I mean by religiously attuned research. It brought together scholars, lawyers, politicians, ­human rights advocates, and religious leaders to ask why human rights are important and why religious communities are internally divided on this question. The conference featured keynote lectures by Nicholas Wolterstorff, who argued that the concept of human



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rights has crucial roots in the Jewish and Christian religions, and by Melissa Williams, who explored the meaning of global justice in connection with democracy and cultural differences. The conference also spotlighted a panel discussion among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scholars on debates within their own communities about human rights. And it connected the topic of human rights with the theme of social justice, an aspect of the common good over which many of the world’s religions struggle.8 4.3 Social Ethics That brings us to the third emphasis in the Centre’s work, namely, an orientation to questions of social ethics. ics stems from a tradition of philosophically informed and religiously attuned scholarship inspired by the social vision of Abraham Kuyper, the nineteenth-century Dutch Calvinist who founded the vu University Amsterdam. We call this the reformational tradition. Kuyper claimed that Calvinism is not simply a theology or an organized religion. It is, he insisted, a way of life – a “world- and life-view” – that makes a difference in all areas of society – the arts, education, mass media, labour, business, politics, and so forth. Following Kuyper, reformational scholars believe their research and teaching should help transform university-level scholarship. They also think pivotal issues in public life deserve scholarly attention. To do this, they try to explore and articulate the normative principles or ethical path marks that should guide public life. Inspired by Kuyper’s social vision, as elaborated by Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, and others, our new research centre focuses on questions of social ethics. We ask what makes for better or worse organizations, communities, practices, and policies in all areas of public life. We reflect on how contemporary institutions such as government, business, and schooling, each in its own way, either enhance or undermine the common good. We wonder whether the current social order promotes the interconnected flourishing of all earth’s inhabitants. Inherent to such questions are both a wide-ranging social critique and an open-ended call for social transformation. This orientation to social ethics turns us toward others. It invites contributions from many different academic disciplines and professional fields. It also welcomes voices from diverse religious communities. Hence we want to partner with other research centres, schools,

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and organizations. In 2011, for example, cp rs e launched the Toronto Interfaculty Colloquium. The colloquium brings together faculty members from i c s, t st, U of T, and other schools to discuss research that falls within the scope of the Centre’s mission. Similar projects might be a public, partnered lecture series on religion and scholarship as well as collaborative research projects on topics such as social justice, care for the earth, and intercultural solidarity.9

5 . R e s e a rc h at t h e Crossroads To do research at the crossroads is a challenge. The Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics wishes to embrace this challenge. We do not want to stroll absent-mindedly into misplaced parking metres. Nor are we comfortable with a sense of academic dislocation at the crossroads of society. Instead we aim to shed light on societal dead ends and point in new directions. We intend to pursue ethical scholarship for the common good. In 2006 ic s awarded its first honorary doctorate. We paid tribute to someone who fully embodied a reformational passion for the common good: Gerald Vandezande. When Gerald was inducted into the Order of Canada, he was called a “powerful and respected voice for social justice.” Gerald died in July 2011. But the words he spoke on 20 October 2006 live on. Our society is at “a critical crossroads,” he said, confronting deadly economic, environmental, political, and cultural crises. These “demand radical changes in our hearts,” he continued, for “only a fundamental change of heart and life can reverse today’s worsening ways of death.” Gerald asked all of us to be forthright about our “heart-felt faith(s) and fundamental values.” And he called us to “non-partisan yet passionate political engagement” that “advocates and practices life-embracing compassion, … justice, peace, and solidarity” in order to build “a mutually caring and sharing society … We all must act,” he declared, “in selfless service of the common good.”10 What better way to carry out the vision of i c s ’s first honorary doctor than to pursue ethical scholarship for the common good! Such scholarship has a strong sense of social responsibility, and it promotes the interconnected flourishing of all earth’s inhabitants. Inspired by the leadership Gerald Vandezande showed in the public arena, may our new research centre place the reformational tradition in lively conversation with other voices in the academy and



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beyond. May we offer what the apostle Paul calls “a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1, n rsv ), ever open to the renewal of our own hearts and minds, as we seek with others to discern the paths of justice and peace. May our research help build a mutually caring and sharing society. In Gerald’s words, may all of us act in service of the common good.

14 Spirituality, Religion, and the Call to Love: On Being a Christian Philosopher (2014)

Our spiritual quests need not be religious. Bruce Cockburn

Scholars and schools of Reformed and evangelical persuasions say they wish to integrate faith and learning. They have many different ways to understand what this means and many different strategies to pursue such integration.1 For example, at the Institute for Christian Studies (ic s), the graduate school for interdisciplinary philosophy where I have taught since 2002, all graduate students take a core course in “Biblical Foundations,” and all PhD candidates attend an annual seminar on “Scripture, Faith, and Scholarship.” Unlike any other graduate programs in philosophy that I know of, i cs ’s master’s and doctoral programs uniquely emphasize “the relation of the Bible to learning,” to borrow a phrase from i cs ’s patron saint.2 This is part of what it means at i c s to pursue the integration of faith and learning. Yet one might wonder what such integration comes to. How exactly should the scriptures inform scholarship? What bearing does Christian faith have on the details of an academic discipline and on the practices of the academic profession? How should scholars and schools that have a religious tradition give appropriate credence to their tradition in curriculum and pedagogy, in research and publication, in administration and governance?



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In response to such questions, this essay reflects on the life of faith and asks how my work as a philosopher fits in.3 I wish first to consider the relation between spirituality and religion. Then I shall discuss scripture, faith, and worship, before I say how I understand the task of Christian scholarship and describe my own calling as a reformational philosopher. I conclude with very brief remarks about what it means to follow Jesus in the profession of philosophy.

1 . S p ir it ua l it y and Reli gi on Often I hear people say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” I haven’t heard anyone say, “I’m religious, but not spiritual.” In contemporary Western society, spirituality strikes many people as a good thing; religion, not so much. Unless they are hard-bitten secularists, people do not mind saying that they yearn for connection with something greater than themselves; that they feel reverence for nature; or that a loved one who has died lives on in their hearts. Yet they are reluctant to embalm such spirituality within the trappings of organized religion, within liturgical practices or scriptural teachings or theological doctrines. Organized religion seems to squelch rather than foster their spirituality. A recent spiritual autobiography by the Canadian guitarist and singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn, whose music has provided a soundtrack to my life, puts this very forcefully: Our spiritual quests need not be religious. In fact, the two are sometimes antithetical. Doctrine can be a great thing to hide behind when faced with the unanswerable questions of which life is full. Politically, dogma is often a pretext for the imposition of authoritarian measures … Strict religious doctrine works for some, but it can also be an obstacle to developing a relationship with the Divine … Freedom to study, freedom to pray, and freedom to weigh what comes in are essential if we are to maintain the necessary state of openness to the promptings of the Divine … There are many good reasons to attend churches, synagogues, mosques, viharas, temples, and shrines … But the … grandeur of institutionalized religion also appeals to the ­insecure assumption that a relationship with God must be

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hierarchical. The opposite is true. A relationship with God starts with the one, with the individual, and flows outward from there.4 For Cockburn, organized religion, with its dogmas and authority structures, too often blocks genuine spirituality, which requires the openness and freedom of a personal quest. I strongly empathize with Cockburn and with people who share his concerns – among them, my closest friends. I, too, often find organized religion less than spirit affirming and spirit filled. In fact, my life of faith has been a continual search for authentically spiritual religious communities. Fortunately I have found these from time to time, and I currently participate in just such a community. Although I am sufficiently a “traditionalist” to think spirituality without religion is hard to sustain, I also am sufficiently a non-traditionalist to say religion without spirituality is not worth sustaining. The difficulty of sustaining spirituality without religion has three sides. First, no matter how pure we want our spiritual orientation to be, we usually need a religiously committed community to keep us on track. There are so many strong and competing spiritual forces in contemporary society – consumerism and individualism, for example – that one easily succumbs to them in the absence of religious partners. Second, the practices of religion have developed over the generations to help bring spiritual orientations to public expression. If we do not engage in religious practices, we lose many of the ­resources to manifest and share our spiritual orientation. Spiritual orientation then readily becomes a merely private matter. Third, spirituality without religion often becomes haphazard because it lacks the guidance provided by the teachings of an organized religion. The non-religious person easily becomes a spiritual bricoleur, tinkering with whatever practices or ideas or leaders come one’s way. Such haphazard spirituality is unlikely to provide reliable orientation for life. Of course, a deeply spiritual person can make up for these three disadvantages. But to do so requires devotion and dedication that most people cannot muster on their own, even when supported by spiritual companions. Conversely, however, I also doubt that religion without spirituality is worth sustaining. Again, I have three reasons for saying this. In the first place, religious practices quickly become empty formularies if they are not in tune with a person’s or a community’s spiritual quest.



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We might still go through the motions of worship, but these no longer move us toward what we seek to worship. Second, in the absence of genuine spirituality, the teachings and doctrines of a religion become either rigid dogmas or flaccid opinions. We might either “defend” or “entertain” them, but they lose their significance within the life of faith. Third, religion without a motivating spirituality quickly loses its openness to what religion at its best seeks to disclose, namely, what ultimately matters most. We might act as if we seek the divine, but in fact we simply shore up the comfort zones of our own religious beliefs. So, although I believe most people, in order to lead genuinely spiritual lives, need a religious community with its practices and teachings, I also think religious practices and teachings do not deserve to be fostered and pursued if genuine spirituality does not infuse them. What Jesus says about God, according to John’s gospel, has implications for all religions: “God is spirit, and those who worship [God] must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24, n rsv ). Bruce Cockburn grasps this, and so do many other spiritual seekers who reject the formalism, dogmatism, and hypocrisy of far too many religious adherents.5 To this point I have used the terms “spiritual” and “religious” without defining them. I use “spiritual” in roughly the same sense as Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven use the term “religious,” and I use “religion” and its cognates in roughly the same sense as they use “faith.”6 “Spiritual” pertains to the passionate and connected quest of the entire human being or an entire community or an entire society or culture for what matters most. This quest is an allencompassing direction in how one connects with others, and it can show up in many different and non-religious ways. Nationalism and consumerism are forms of spirituality where what appears to matter most is either political or economic. Nature mysticism and the quest for individual authenticity are forms of spirituality where what seems to matter most is either impersonal or deeply personal. Apart from nature mysticism, none of these specific forms of contemporary spirituality receives encouragement or endorsement from the core practices and teachings of traditional religions, even though some contemporary expressions of religion do embrace nationalism or consumerism or self-fulfillment. That’s one reason why, as I suggested before, the pursuit of spirituality without religion can leave us vulnerable to spiritual forces that channel our devotion and

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dedication into directions that, in the long run, prove unworthy of a heartfelt quest. “Religion,” by contrast, refers to organized worship and faith. It involves a distinctive array of practices and organizations that have their own legitimacy and worth in relationship to other institutions. Worship services, for example, are different from political ceremonies or artistic performances. So too, as religious communities (not simply as buildings), churches or synagogues or mosques are distinct from businesses, families, and social clubs. Of course, there is a political dimension to worship services, and the arts play an important role in many liturgical events. Further, there are “business” and “social” sides to religious communities, and the ethical bonds among religious believers can be nearly as strong and as fraught as family ties. Yet, as a distinctive array of practices and organizations, religion has its own legitimacy and worth in a differentiated society such as our own. What is that legitimacy and worth? What is the normative task of religion in a differentiated society? In my view, religion’s purpose is to help people worshipfully disclose the ultimate meaning of their lives – to find what ultimately sustains them in the face of both good and evil – and to do this while placing their hope and trust – their faith – in this source of ultimate sustenance. Insofar as people name their source of ultimate sustenance “God,” I can say this more simply: religion should help people worshipfully find and have faith in “God.”7 Typically, religionists have decisive touchstones for their quest and their confidence, namely, the stories of faith in which “God” speaks to them. In scriptural religions, such touchstones are encapsulated in certain sacred writings, around which the activities and symbols of worship revolve. Religions also have meaning-ful rituals in which “God” shows up, rituals that help their adherents to reenact the disclosure of religious meaning, to remember and celebrate their “God,” and to participate in “God’s” appearance. Both the teachings and the doctrines of a religion, insofar as it has them, arise from these stories and rituals and must in the end be true to them. The same applies to theology, insofar as a religion has a theology: its source and its test lie in the stories and rituals of this religion.8

2 . S c r ip t u r e , F a it h, and Wors hi p Given these preliminary remarks about spirituality and religion, let me turn now to the relation between faith and scripture. From here



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on, when I write about faith and scripture, I do so in the context of the Christian religion. I do not assume that all the claims to follow apply equally to Judaism or Islam or any other religion, although some might. I am not sufficiently well versed in the world’s religions to make generic claims about all of them beyond the few I have made already. As a lifelong adherent of the Christian religion, however, I have more confidence making specific claims about it. To begin, I would note that “faith and scripture” is a truncated theme. On my view of religion’s normative task, one should also speak about stories and rituals and about worship and meaning. Perhaps to focus on faith and scripture is a peculiarly Protestant thing to do – specifically, a remarkably Reformed thing to do. This focus is inadequate. Even in the context of Reformed Christianity, the stories of faith, the rituals of worship, and the search for meaningful disclosure are part and parcel of true religion. If we do not include the full scope of what religion comes to, we will be inclined to reduce faith to propositional beliefs and to treat scripture as little more than a source of such beliefs. This is a constant temptation, especially for philosophers and theologians, and it’s one I aim to resist. At a minimum, then, we need to discuss both faith and worship, and we need to consider both of them in relation to scripture and scholarship. Let me tell a personal story to illustrate why we should expand our theme to include worship. I grew up in a rural community in  north-central California. At the Escalon Christian Reformed Church where my family worshipped, the sacrament of the Eucharist was a sombre affair. The service of communion, as we called it, took place only once every three months. On the Sunday before communion, the pastor read aloud a denominational document that admonished each of us to examine ourselves, to confess our sins, and to consider whether we were worthy to sup at the Lord’s Table. From what I could tell as a child, the adults took this admonition seriously. Certainly my parents, especially my mom, seemed to undergo intense introspection as they prepared for communion. Indeed, some church members would decide, upon reflection, not to take communion. On communion Sunday the sacrament began with the pastor reading aloud an even longer document. This document laid out the denomination’s understanding of “the Lord’s Supper” and invited us to remember Christ’s death until he returns. Then the elders, all of them men, solemnly came to the communion table, picked up trays

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of cubed Wonder Bread and tiny wine glasses, and passed them along the rows of pews. We children sat silently as church mice while each adult picked out an individual bread cube and an individual wine glass and, looking straight ahead, held them quietly until, on cue, everyone “partook” of communion. The ceremony ended with the rapid-fire rattle of shot glasses landing in hard-rubber cup holders on the back of each pew. As the church custodians, my dad and I arranged the communion furniture beforehand; my mother always washed the communion elements afterward; and my weekly chore was to dust all the pews. So I fully understood the mechanics of this ceremony. But its meaning escaped me. It was not so much a mystery as a puzzle. So far as I could tell, communion was a rite to be observed, not a sacrament to be celebrated; only worthy adults, not children and unrepentant sinners, could participate; and the point of the observance was to help individuals achieve or maintain a higher degree of moral purity. Only later did I realize how this mode of observance both reinforced and issued from the pietistic ethos and theological dogmatism that characterized the church of my youth. I began to break out of such pietism and dogmatism when I studied at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, and made my first ­acquaintance with reformational philosophy and theology. Only when I took up graduate studies at i c s in 1972, however, did a new way for participating in the sacrament emerge. Thanks especially to the liturgical leadership of the late Bert Polman and the wise pastoring of Morris Greidanus, Hart House Fellowship, the campus ministry of the Christian Reformed Church (crc) at the University of Toronto, began to incorporate the Eucharist into every Sunday morning service, with children included as a welcome presence. The ceremony became a joyous feast where we stood in circles to serve each other from delicious home-baked loaves of bread and handcrafted goblets of wine. Now I experienced the sacrament as a genuine communion of the saints celebrating the joy of renewal in God’s world. In those days, influenced by the New Jerusalem version of the Bible, we at ic s and Hart House Fellowship often referred to God as “Yahweh.” I remember as if it were yesterday one autumn when Calvin Seerveld and his graduate students in aesthetics travelled together to New York City in his old beat-up Rambler – we called it Cal’s kingdom car. We went there to attend the annual meeting of



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the American Society for Aesthetics, to visit art galleries and museums, and to take in a theatre performance (Peter Shaffer’s Equus, as I recall). On Sunday morning Cal and I went to worship at a Christian Reformed Church in New Jersey. It was a communion Sunday. The ceremony proceeded just as it had at Escalon c rc where I grew up. When the wine came to us in our pew, Cal and I picked out our tiny individual glasses. Just before taking our commemorative sips, however, we spontaneously turned to each other, made direct eye contact, and whispered, “Cheers to Yahweh!” It was a quietly graceful moment of liturgical liberation. Ever since, communion has been a joyous celebration, not a solemn observance, and this sacrament both enriches and sustains my life of faith. If you ask me why, contra Bertrand Russell, I am not a non-Christian, this is one reason I can give. I experience God’s loving presence and the communion of saints in the Eucharistic feast, and that renews my trust and uplifts my hope in the One who ultimately sustains me as well as the world in which I live. Christian faith needs to be wrapped in the practices of worship, as in a warm blanket; stripped of those practices, it becomes a cold and paltry thing. This says something important about the role of scripture in the life of faith and in the practices of faithful scholarship. Members of an authentically spiritual Christian community will not come to their scriptures as blank slates, waiting for the words and their message to imprint themselves on their passive minds. Nor will they come armed to the teeth with theological weapons, ready to beat the scriptural text into doctrinal submission. Rather, they will come like children, eager for a good story, ready to be surprised yet again, or maybe for the first time, by the storied good news. And, like a really good children’s story read or told aloud, the scriptures will come alive for these people of faith within the practices of worship, as they hear God speaking to them through the scriptures. How do we need to hear the inscripturated stories of faith and listen for God’s voice? Certainly, we can sit down by ourselves or in a circle of family or friends, read the text, meditate on it, talk about it, consult commentaries on it, and the like. All of this is important to do, even though the academically inclined might do some of it more than others do. Yet the primary site for listening and learning should be within the worshipping community of faith. If this community is genuinely spiritual, then it is worshipfully attentive to the scriptures: within worship we hear the storied good news in the

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music, we see it in the liturgical art, we sing it together in the selected hymns, we receive it from the reading of scripture passages, we reflect on it through the homily or sermon, and we respond to it in prayers and offerings and other liturgical actions. In all of this we expect God to address us, to call us via the stories of faith to hope and trust in God, even as we await God’s appearance within the rituals of our worship. When a sensitive or dramatic reading of scripture passages or the pastoral or prophetic delivery of a sermon speak to your heart, you hear the voice of God. When the choir’s accomplished singing moves you to tears of joy or sorrow, or when a benediction delivered with compassion and conviction assures you of amazing grace, you witness the presence of God in our midst. I cannot explain scientifically how this happens, but I know it does. It takes place in my own life, and in the lives of those I worship with. Earlier I described sacred writings as encapsulated stories of faith that serve as a scriptural religion’s decisive touchstone. That is how I see the Christian Bible. But what do “decisive” and “touchstone” mean? Without wading into centuries of debate about divine inspiration, canonicity, and the like – about which I am no expert! – let me simply explain how I understand these terms. First, “touchstone.” Historically a touchstone was a black stone used to test the relative purity of gold and silver. If you rubbed a pure piece of gold on the stone, rubbed another gold piece of unknown quality next to it, and then treated the rubbings with nitric acid, you could see the difference in the markings left by each piece. That’s how you could tell how pure the new piece was. So a touchstone was a way to test for quality in metals. By metaphorical extension “touchstone” has primarily come to mean a way to test for quality or genuineness. Secondarily it has also come to mean a quintessential feature or a peak achievement. The Bible is a touchstone in both of these ways. It serves to test the quality of our faith, and it is the very heart and summation of what our hope and trust come to. The Bible is not the only test, and there is much more to our hope and trust than what the Bible contains. Yet, when push comes to shove, any other test (such as the testimony of fellow believers) and any other content (such as the historic creeds) receive their credibility in light of scripture. Scripture, you could say, is the touchstone of all touchstones in the life of faith. That’s why the scripturally encapsulated stories of the Christian faith are so decisive. Think about it. How exactly do the scriptures



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serve as the chief touchstone for faith? It’s not as if they just sit there like black rocks, waiting for us to dump faith samples on them. Yet the scriptures, in their complex historical origins, their diverse literary forms, and their multi-layered hermeneutical transmission, are decisive for those who would trust in the God they reveal. To understand this, we need to recognize who the scriptures say God is. According to the scriptures, God, as creator and sustainer of all, continually calls us to love God and all creation, offers trustworthy guidance as we respond to this call, and inspires us to continue day by day to walk in these ways. The scriptures are decisive because they are completely reliable in revealing who God is and how we should respond. We find God’s call to love resounding in the scriptures. We learn to follow the guidance God gives there. We inhale the inspiration the scriptures offer for a faithful walk with God. So the scriptures are decisive – not as an inert authority, but as a vibrant medium for God’s call and guidance and inspiration. Someone who wishes to follow Jesus will heed the call to love resounding in the scriptures, relying on them to point one’s responses in fruitful directions, and receiving strength from the inspiration they offer.9 This is not to deny that the scriptures as we have received them are the collected and literarily disparate writings of many human beings from diverse historical and societal settings, available to us only because of translators, archaeologists, biblical scholars, and the like, and always already caught up in traditions of interpretation that every believer inhabits, whether one recognizes this or not. Rather it is to affirm why the highly mediated character of the Bible is important to recognize. The reason this is important is not in order to deny the Bible’s decisive role within the life of faith but rather both to appreciate and to relativize all the human effort that enters its creation, transmission, and reception. In the end, the point of all this effort is so that people can worshipfully listen for God’s voice and faithfully respond – so they can live the life of faith. The life of faith, however, is not simply that part of our lives where we engage in overt worship, gathering with fellow Christians to listen and look for God. To lead the life of Christian faith is to live all of one’s life in response to God’s call and guidance and inspiration. It is to respond in one’s buying and selling, in one’s voting and debating, in one’s parenting or friendships – to follow Jesus in all that one is, in every relationship one has, in everything one does. Or rather we try to do all of this, since so much of who we are and what we do

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is caught up in practices, institutions, and societal patterns over which we have little direct control. To lead the life of Christian faith is to have one’s spiritual orientation set by the Christian community’s inscripturated stories of faith and shared rituals of worship insofar as these disclose the God who calls and guides and inspires us, and to let this orientation permeate everything one is and does.

3 . C h r is t ia n S cholarshi p That, in essence, is also what it means to be a Christian scholar. A Christian scholar is someone who seeks to have the spiritual orientation of one’s scholarly work set by the scriptures and worship of the Christian community, insofar as these disclose the God of love. Hidden within this simple summary, however, lie countless complications. For one thing, scholarship involves many different practices as well as many different results, practices such as teaching, research, writing, and administration, and results such as curriculum and courses, research findings and published writings, and the collective decisions and policies reached in university governance. Moreover, these practices and results are caught up in institutional, sectoral, and societal patterns over which an individual scholar has little say, such as the systems for evaluating students’ work, the standards and operations of the academic profession, and the frameworks that govern the publication and dissemination of academic research and writing. Complications also arise from the side of Christianity. There are so many different traditions of scriptural interpretation and liturgical practice and so many different ways in which Christians have expected these either to inform or not inform the practices and results of scholarship. Facing such complications, how should one actually pursue Christian scholarship? Unless one is a complete individualist and thinks one can carve out an authentically Christian path in scholarship all on one’s own, one needs to either embed one’s work within a religiously inflected tradition of some sort or recognize the tradition within which one’s work already is embedded. In the discipline of philosophy, where I do most of my scholarly work, someone in North America does not have unlimited options. You could embrace Thomism of some sort, for example, or Radical Orthodoxy, or the Reformed Kuyperian tradition in one of its two offshoots – Reformed epistemology and reformational philosophy – or a looser array of evangelical approaches.10



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Not surprisingly, given my biography, I locate my own scholarship in the reformational tradition. Moreover, specific crystallizations of scripture and worship in this tradition serve as Leitmotiven, as guiding themes, in my work as a philosopher. Three of these stem from the Kuyperian movement in general: an emphasis on the original goodness of creation and on its culminating renewal; a conviction that religious communities and organizations are called to be agents of renewal in culture and society, including scholarship and education; and an understanding that such renewal goes beyond personal conversion to include criticizing and changing cultural practices, social institutions, and the very structure of society where these ­impede the interconnected flourishing of all earth’s inhabitants. In other words, my scholarship orients itself to the goodness and redeemability of creation and the call to renew and transform culture and society. Christian scholars from other traditions might not ­emphasize these themes, or they might have significantly different understandings of them. Even within the Kuyperian tradition, there are those who would beg to differ. For me, however, these themes are deeply consonant with the inscripturated stories of faith and the shared practices of Christian liturgy, as I have experienced them in the worshipping community. Closely related to these Kuyperian Leitmotiven, three other faithoriented themes guide my work, all three received and reworked from the reformational tradition in philosophy, namely, that an unfolding structural diversity is intrinsic to the goodness of creation, that human beings are responsible for the direction in which such diversity unfolds, and that the evil we are called to resist often is entrenched in how society has come to be structured. In more abstractly philosophical terms, one needs to distinguish and interrelate structure, process, and direction, and this in turn must guide one’s thoughts about structural diversity (“sphere sovereignty,” in an older vocabulary), normativity (“societal principles,” in my own vocabulary), and societal goodness (“interconnected flourishing,” in my own terms).11 All of these considerations surface in my ongoing work on the general idea of truth, which I describe as a dynamic correlation between (1) human fidelity to societal principles and (2) a life-giving disclosure of society. I hope this work will contribute in some small way to a renewal of philosophy itself as well as a longer-term reorientation of both religious communities and society in general.12

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Whether or not this happens is not for me to say – it depends on so many factors beyond any individual’s contribution or influence and, in that sense, it is in God’s hands. Yet I experience such work as a deeply spiritual exercise, one that rings true to the Good News as I have received and pursued it within a worshipping community and in a specific intellectual tradition.

4 . R e f o r m at io n a l Phi losophy At this point one might ask to what extent this self-description of my work aligns with how other scholars in the Kuyperian tradition have characterized the contours of Christian philosophy. Dirk Vollenhoven, for example, says that Christian philosophy should be “in line with” scripture. Specifically, it should acknowledge the authority of the Bible as God’s Word and do justice to the biblical themes of God’s sovereignty as creator, religion as God’s covenant with humankind, and the interplay between humanity’s radical fallenness and God’s grace in Jesus Christ.13 Herman Dooyeweerd claims that Christian philosophy should express the “biblical ground motive” of creation, fall, and redemption via the content it gives to the central philosophical ideas of origin, unity, and coherent diversity.14 Hendrik Hart, my predecessor in systematic philosophy at ics, suggests that Christian philosophy should spell out an ontology whose ultimate categories give consistent articulation to ultimate assumptions of one’s ultimate commitment.15 Nicholas Wolterstorff, my former colleague at Calvin College, says Christian scholars (including philosophers) ought to let the “belief-content” of their “authentic Christian commitment” function “as control” within their “devising and weighing of theories” – authentic Christian commitment being “the complex of action and belief” in which one’s following of Jesus Christ “ought to be realized.”16 Jacob Klapwijk, professor emeritus at the vu University Amsterdam, calls for a “transformational philosophy” that critically assesses, selects, and appropriates “existing intellectual goods” in order to restructure and redirect their content and thereby incorporate them “into a Christian worldview.”17 Each of these descriptions is partially correct, it seems to me. ­Insofar as the scriptures are the decisive touchstone for the Christian religion, Christian philosophers should seek always to align the practices and results of their scholarship with the Bible, as Vollenhoven says. The question is, how? Is it sufficient to pick out a few



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key themes crystallized in one’s own theological tradition and use these as the central content of a philosophical touchstone? So too, the dynamic revelation (“ground motive”) of creation, fall, and redemption – expanded eschatologically to include fulfillment – certainly should find expression in how one conceptualizes ideas of unity, diversity, and the origin of everything, as Dooyeweerd claims. Yet I wonder whether these ideas are the crucial ones for a Christian philosophy today and whether other ideas might be more important for expressing that dynamic revelation. Again, articulating one’s ultimate Christian commitment in an integral ontology à la Hart certainly has its strengths. But it runs the double risk of overly systematizing the life of faith and overly theologizing the categories of philosophy. Avoiding this double risk, Wolterstorff gives a very precise account of how scholarship and Christian commitment should intersect. Yet he equates the project of Christian scholarship with using certain beliefs to test theories, thereby reducing the scope of both scholarship, which involves an array of different practices and results, and the life of faith, where beliefs themselves derive from other religious practices.18 Klapwijk, by contrast, rightly emphasizes the need to discover and learn from insights outside one’s own religious and intellectual tradition, but he treats a Christian worldview as a static litmus test, almost as if it, and not the scriptures-within-worship, were the decisive touchstone of Christian philosophy. Beyond these specific questions and concerns, however, I have two broader reservations about Kuyperian characterizations of Christian philosophy. As you might expect, one reservation has to do with their neglecting the importance of worship in religion as such and in the Christian life of faith, as well as the relevance of worship for philosophy.19 My other reservation has to do with how religion and spirituality intersect. Whatever we take to be the decisive touchstone for our life of faith, and for philosophy insofar as it belongs to our life of faith, this touchstone itself must disclose the God who calls, guides, and inspires us. In a Christian context, this means the scriptures-within-worship are the decisive touchstone insofar as they disclose the God of love.20 It also suggests that those who live according to this touchstone must remain spiritually open within their scriptural interpretation, within their worship practices, and, if they are scholars, within their scholarly pursuits. They need to remain open to being spiritually reoriented by God’s self-disclosure.21

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Such openness to reorientation is crucial for both faith and philosophy. Without it, the life of faith can become self-enclosed and no longer attentive to new ways in which God calls us to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. So too, without openness to spiritual reorientation, the project of Christian philosophy easily becomes self-satisfied rather than self-critical concerning its own deepest assumptions. Self-criticism, however, is required in any good philosophy. It is doubly required in any good philosophy that aims to be faithful to scriptures-within-worship. That is why, like Wolterstorff, I do not think Christian philosophy should aim first of all to be distinctive. Rather, it should strive to be faithful. Faithfulness, both in life and in philosophy, requires one to remain open to being spiritually reoriented by God’s self-disclosure. This notion of reorientation via divine self-disclosure adds important texture to my previous descriptions of faith and worship and of scripture and scholarship. For the Reformed tradition does not restrict divine revelation to the vibrant medium of scriptureswithin-worship. Indeed, the scriptures themselves testify to the broad scope of divine revelation: “The heavens are telling the glory of God,” sings the psalmist (Psalm 19:1, n rsv ), and Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, the Word of God made flesh, the Gospels proclaim. Accordingly, reformational philosophy has insisted all along on at least three ways in which the self-disclosure of God ­occurs: in creation, in scripture, and in Jesus Christ, all via the inspiration of God’s Spirit. Moreover, if one understands creation broadly enough to include human history, culture, and society, then God’s self-disclosure can occur in other religions as well as in scholarship that either ignores or actively rejects an alignment with scriptures-within-worship. Such a capacious notion of how divine revelation occurs complicates the project of Christian philosophy. For in seeking to align one’s work with scriptures-within-worship, one also needs to pay attention to how God calls and guides and inspires in the very stuff of creation and human life, including the contributions of other philosophers. This provides a better basis for “transformational philosophy,” as Klapwijk calls it, than an appeal to one’s Christian worldview, it seems to me. Let me share a personal example. Only because of an intense engagement with Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, with its anguished reflections on ethics and metaphysics after Auschwitz, did I



Spirituality, Religion, and the Call to Love 195

come to see suffering and societal evil as central topics for contemporary philosophy. I made this discovery because my initial engagement with Adorno took place during my sojourn in the geopolitically divided city of Berlin in the late 1970s and during my exposure there to ecumenical liberation theology at HendrikKraemer-Haus and to the teaching of German Lutheran theologian Helmut Gollwitzer. Suffering and societal evil are not central themes in the writings of Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd. Yet, after grappling with Adorno’s writings, in a city that still bore the marks of immense societally inflicted suffering, I could not in good conscience ignore or gloss over these themes. Nor could I ignore the importance of eschatological hope when we confront societal evil. Thanks in part to Adorno, both my life of faith and my work in philosophy underwent a profound spiritual reorientation, as God’s call to love came through to me in new and challenging ways.22

5 . O n B e in g a C h r is t i an Phi los opher Perhaps my experience in Berlin helped create a lingering dissatisfaction with many attempts to circumscribe what counts as Christian philosophy. In any case, faith and philosophy are so richly variegated, and openness to spiritual reorientation is so vital to them, that the practices and results of Christian philosophy resist circumscription. Nevertheless, here is how I see the contours of the Christian philosopher’s task: a Christian philosopher continually seeks to align the spiritual orientation of his or her philosophical practices and their results with the scriptures-within-worship of the Christian community, insofar as this decisive touchstone discloses the God of love. One does this best within a religiously inflected tradition of scholarship that takes this touchstone seriously. Moreover, given the dynamic and historically embedded character of both philosophy and scriptures-within-worship, the Christian philosopher needs to remain vigilant and open – persistently vigilant in pursuing the project of alignment, and ever open to having one’s philosophy spiritually reoriented by God’s self-disclosure. That, in my view, is what it means to be a follower of Jesus in philosophy. Christian philosophy is a spiritually oriented response, both in practices and in results, to the God of love, faithful to the scriptures-within-worship, and ever open to the surprising ways in which God calls and guides and inspires us to follow Jesus along the

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pathways of love. And even though my own response occurs in public settings – in the classroom, in the profession, and in the worshipping community of faith – it arises from a very personal calling. For, as I wrote in my memoir Dog-Kissed Tears, “Love is the thread that stitches together my dreams. It is the refusal amid suffering to let go: to let go of life, to let go of hope, to let go of the ones I love most.”23 To do philosophy in response to such love: that is why I am a Christian philosopher in the reformational tradition.

Publication Information

Note: This list provides information about the sources for all chapters within this volume, in their order of appearance. 1 “Toward a Shared Understanding of the Arts,” Pro Rege 11, no. 1 (December 1982): 18–25. Originally presented as one of four lectures to the Arts Seminar sponsored by the Fine Arts Division at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa, in May 1982. 2 “Francis Schaeffer’s Worldview and Modern Arts.” Presented at a conference on the arts at King’s Fold, Cochrane, Alberta, on 29–31 July 1983, and as one of the 1984 Arts Lectures sponsored by the Obadiah Arts Group, Berkeley, California, on 25–26 March 1984. Partially revised and previously unpublished. 3 “Transforming Aesthetics: Reflections on the Work of Calvin G. Seerveld.” Introduction to Pledges of Jubilee: Essays on the Arts and Culture, in Honor of Calvin G. Seerveld, edited by Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1995), 1–22. 4 “Art Is No Fringe: An Introduction,” in The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy, edited by Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 1–12. 5 “A Tradition Transfigured: Art and Culture in Reformational Aesthetics,” Faith and Philosophy 21 (July 2004): 381–92. 6 “(Un)Timely Voyage: Calvin Seerveld’s Normative Aesthetics,” in Calvin G. Seerveld, Normative Aesthetics, edited by John H. Kok (Sioux Center, i a: Dordt College Press, 2014), xiii–xviii.

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Publication Information

  7 “Imagination, Art, and Civil Society.” Invited essay for a book on reformational approaches to the visual arts, in the Verantwoording series (Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn, forthcoming).   8 “Salt for Humankind: Challenges of Christian Scholarship.” One of four talks in a series titled Bread for the Journey and presented at the Faculty Re/Sourcing Conference, The King’s University College, Edmonton, Alberta, on 7–8 May 2002. This talk was a revised version of “Salt for Humankind: Blessings in Educational Discipleship,” a keynote address given at the Annual Convention of the Christian Educators Association of Alberta in Calgary on 21 October 1982. Stylistically revised and previously unpublished.   9 “Studying the Arts for Serviceable Insight.” Originally presented as one of four lectures to the Arts Seminar sponsored by the Fine Arts Division at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa, in May 1982, and published as “The Study of Arts for Serviceable Insight,” Pro Rege 11, no. 3 (March 1983): 20–4. Partially revised. 10 “Teaching for Transformation: Philosophy in the Undergraduate Curriculum.” Presented at the Vrieze Philosophy Conference, Trinity Christian College, Palos Heights, Illinois, on 16–18 March 1989, and in the Philosophy Colloquium at Calvin College on 21 March 1989. Stylistically revised and previously unpublished. 11 “Adult Children of the Enlightenment.” Presented at the Wheaton College Philosophy Conference on 23 October 1992, in response to a paper by Bruce Benson. Previously unpublished. 12 “Living Water: The Future of Higher Education in the Reformed Tradition.” Adapted from a speech given on 21 August 1997 to the Faculty of Trinity Christian College and subsequently revised and published as “Deep Water from the Kuyperian Well: The Future of Higher Education,” Perspectives 13, no. 3 (March 1998): 7–11, and reprinted as an insert to Contact, the newsletter of ia pc he (Fall 1998). The current text is based on a revised version presented as “Living Water: Reformed Colleges Today” in a series of four talks titled Bread for the Journey at the Faculty Re/Sourcing Conference, The King’s University College, Edmonton, Alberta, on 7–8 May 2002. 13 “Living at the Crossroads: Ethical Scholarship and the Common Good.” Inaugural Address given as the founding Director of the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics, at the Faculty Club, University of Toronto, on 24 October 2011, and posted online at the i c s Institutional Repository: http://hdl.handle.net/10756/305125. Previously unpublished.



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14 “Spirituality, Religion, and the Call to Love: On Being a Christian Philosopher.” Revised text of a lecture titled “On Being a Reformational Philosopher: Spirituality, Religion, and the Call to Love,” presented to the Scripture, Faith, and Scholarship seminar at the Institute for Christian Studies on 14 November 2014 and posted online at the i c s Institutional Repository: http://hdl.handle.net/10756/337419. A video of the lecture, with excerpts from the discussion, was posted at http://research-portal.icscanada.edu/2014/11/on-being-reformationalphilosopher.html.

Notes

I nt roduct i on   1 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 173.  2 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 21.   3 “Introduction: Transforming Philosophy,” in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 3–22.   4 Ibid., 20.   5 For a succinct summary and evaluation of Runner’s work and influence, see Zylstra, “H. Evan Runner.”  6 Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, and Zuidervaart, Art in Public.   7 Here, and throughout this book, I use “art” and “the arts” to refer to the full range of artistic practices, products, and events: not only the visual arts but also dance, film, literature, music, theatre, and the like.   8 The webs of relationships between reformational philosophy and Schaefferian apologetics are thicker than a casual reading of Schaeffer’s books might indicate. His historical narrative seems to draw on Herman Dooyeweerd’s understanding of the four main “ground motives” of Western civilization, especially the nature/freedom motive of modernity, and Schaeffer’s account of the links between modern art and the “death” of Western culture relies heavily on Hans Rookmaaker’s work as a professional art historian; the two were personal friends. Both Schaeffer and H. Evan Runner studied with Cornelius Van Til at Westminster Theological Seminary in the mid-1930s, and both belonged at the time to small conservative Presbyterian denominations that had split off from the mainline Presbyterian Church – now the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Also, although Schaeffer never endorsed the theocratic side to Rousas John Rushdoony’s reconstructionist

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theology, the two had very similar criticisms of “secular humanist” dominance in American public life. Even though I think reformational philosophy is incompatible with Rushdoony’s theology, which has been highly influential within the New Christian Right, nevertheless he was sufficiently attracted to reformational philosophy to provide an introduction to Dooyeweerd’s English-language lectures from the late 1950s. See Rushdoony’s “Introduction,” in Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought, vii–xvi.   9 See Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth. 10 The titles of Seerveld’s six volumes, in alphabetical order, are Art History Revisited, Biblical Studies and Wisdom for Living, Cultural Problems in Western Society, Cultural Education and History Writing, Normative Aesthetics, and Redemptive Art in Society. Every volume carries the ­subtitle “Sundry Writings and Occasional Lectures,” and all were edited by John H. Kok and published by Dordt College Press in 2014. 11 Some years after writing “Teaching for Transformation” I discovered that Doug Blomberg, now my i cs colleague in the philosophy of ­education, also advocates a problem-posing pedagogy. For Blomberg, “problem-posing” is an intermediate stage between “play” and “purposeful response.” See Blomberg, Wisdom and Curriculum, 179–208. A shared source for our emphasis on problem-posing is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I read as a young college professor in the early 1980s. 12 Although the essay does not note this, the idea of critical contextualism emerged in part from work I had done on the interdisciplinary committee that formulated a new philosophy of education and scholarship at Calvin College, published in 1992 as An Expanded Statement of the Mission of Calvin College: Vision, Purpose, Commitment. 13 See in particular Robert Sweetman, Tracing the Lines. Sweetman relates the reformational tradition to sister traditions within higher education and to the sources it shares with them. Many of Calvin Seerveld’s writings on higher education are collected in part 3 of In the Fields of the Lord, 117–234, and in part 1 of Cultural Education and History Writing, 1–198; many of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s are in Educating for Shalom. 14 For a comprehensive collection that includes contributions not only on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam but also on Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shint , see Brown, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts.



Notes to pages 17–18

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15 See in this connection Thiessen, ed., Theological Aesthetics. Thiessen’s collection spans the Christian theological tradition from Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) in the early church through Joan Chittester (b. 1936) at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For a useful and succinct survey of religious and theological aesthetics, see Viladesau, “Aesthetics and Religion,” in Brown, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts, 25–43. 16 See Dyrness, Visual Faith (2001), Reformed Theology and Visual Culture (2004), and Poetic Theology (2011); and de Gruchy, Christianity, Art and Transformation (2001). A former student of Hans Rookmaaker, Dyrness is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in California. De Gruchy is an ordained minister in the United Congregational Church and former Robert Selby Taylor Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Cape Town. He was a leader in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. 17 Thiessen, ed., Theological Aesthetics, singles out “the theology of the image, in particular, ideology and iconoclasm” as the central issue in theological aesthetics during the Protestant Reformation (124–9). In her general introduction, however, Thiessen observes: “While Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans have been foremost in the dialogue between theology and the arts, now scholars of the Reformed tradition increasingly engage with questions including the role of the visual image in places of worship, distancing themselves from some of the Calvinist iconoclast polemics of the past” (3). 18 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 7 vols. See also the following three books by Aidan Nichols, a leading interpreter of Balthasar’s aesthetics: The Word Has Been Abroad; Scattering the Seed; and A Key to Balthasar. 19 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 189–98, and Viladesau, “The Beauty of the Cross.” Although Viladesau acknowledges his indebtedness to Balthasar, his methodology is closer to the “transcendental Thomism” of Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and David Tracy. See the illuminating first chapter (“Theology and Aesthetics”) in Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 3–38, where the author situates his own approach and provides a particularly illuminating discussion of Balthasar’s indebtedness to Karl Barth. For an attempt to sort out the contributions of both Barth and Balthasar to a transformative Reformed theological aesthetics, see ch. 3 (“The Redemptive Power of Beauty”) in de Gruchy, Christianity, Art and Transformation, 97–135.

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Notes to pages 18–19

De Gruchy ultimately turns to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer for a better understanding of how “recovering aesthetic existence in the life of the church” relates to “the struggle for justice” (135). 20 Goizueta, Christ Our Companion. 21 The most influential of Tillich’s many writings on art and religion is “Art and Ultimate Reality” (1960) – excerpted in Thiessen, ed., Theological Aesthetics, 209–17. Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise (1991) surveys and evaluates all of Tillich’s contributions to what Begbie calls a “theology of art,” and he contrasts them with the contributions of the “Dutch neo-Calvinists” – Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, Dooyeweerd, Rookmaaker, and Seerveld. Begbie finds both Tillich and the neo-Calvinists insufficiently “Christological” in their theology. His own emphasis on Christology and the Trinity sets the direction for Begbie’s subsequent theology of music in such words as Theology, Music, and Time (2000), Resounding Truth (2007), and Music, Modernity, and God (2013). 22 Brown, Religious Aesthetics, 77–111. 23 Stoker, “Culture and Transcendence,” and Stoker, Where Heaven and Earth Meet. 24 Seerveld identifies “the curse of beauty” in his 1962–63 Unionville lectures, published as A Christian Critique of Art and Literature, 25–35; returns to it in his 1972 i cs inaugural lecture “A Turnabout in Aesthetics to Understanding,” in Normative Aesthetics, 237–41; deepens his critique in the seminal 1980 essay “Modal Aesthetic Theory,” in Rainbows for the Fallen World, 116–25; and touches on it once more in his 1995 valedictory address “Philosophical Aesthetics at Home with the Lord.” There he suggests that “theological aesthetics” and “theology of the arts” do not do justice to either aesthetic life or the arts because they are overly indebted to the Greco-Roman tradition of beauty: “many Christian thought traditions have only domesticated the Greco-Roman inheritance and then hewn out a transcendent ‘theological’ realm for theory and the arts that would go an additional, special extra mile of ‘grace,’ rather than … instigate an in-­ principle conversion by the Hebraic-Christian revelation of the Greco-Roman impulse we Western Christians have inherited” (Normative Aesthetics, 277–8). 25 Wolterstorff, “Beyond Beauty and the Aesthetic in the Engagement of Religion and Art,” 119 and passim. See also “Art and the Aesthetic,” Wolterstorff’s contribution to The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, where he compares theologians Gerardus van der Leeuw and Paul



Notes to pages 19–23

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Tillich with the formalist art critic Clive Bell as all three having little interest in the non-contemplative ways in which religious people actually engage the arts – due to all three accepting the grand modern narrative of art’s autonomy. Parts One and Two in Wolterstorff’s recent Art Rethought, 5–82, give a full-blown articulation of his case against the “grand narrative.” 26 On “beauty,” see Dengerink Chaplin, “Art and Embodiment.” On art and religion, see Dengerink Chaplin, “Transcendence Re-mixed.” Two of the graduate seminars Rebekah Smick teaches at ic s have the telling titles “Beauty: Theology, Ethics, or Aesthetics?” and “Art, Religion, and Theology: ‘Theologies’ of Art in the Christian Tradition.” Evangelical scholars seem even more prepared to incorporate beauty speculation into their theological aesthetics. See, for example, Treier et al., eds, The Beauty of God. For a detailed and insightful commentary on what the Reformed tradition can offer Protestants who are increasingly attracted to themes of beauty, sacrament, and linguistic ineffability, see Begbie, “The Future of Theology amid the Arts.” 27 On the nature and social roles of the arts, see Zuidervaart, “Creating a Disturbance.” On religion, see Zuidervaart, “Religion in Public” – now ch. 12 in Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 237–51. On relations between art and religion, see Zuidervaart, “Art, Religion, and the Sublime” and “Hegel, Malick, and the Postsecular Sublime.” For two contrasting philosophical views, see also Adorno, “Theses upon Art and Religion Today,” and Graham, The Re-Enchantment of the World. 28 See especially Zuidervaart, “Critical Transformations.” 29 The classic statements of this approach are Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) and Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997). 30 Smith and Smith, ed., Teaching and Christian Practices, especially the “Introduction: Practices, Faith, and Pedagogy,” 1–23. 31 The seminal sources for this new liturgical emphasis are James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (2009) and Imagining the Kingdom (2013). For an instructive use of “hospitality to strangers” as a model for teaching and learning foreign languages, see Smith and Carvill, The Gift of the Stranger (2000). 32 Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 3. 33 I have discussed the problem of structural sacralization in conjunction with the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank. See “Good Cities or Cities of the Good?” – ch. 11 in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, especially 230–2.

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34 Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 217. The passage quoted comes from the 1988 essay “Defining Humankind: Scheler, Cassirer, and Hart” (ch. 10), in which I discuss the key philosophical insights of a reformational anthropology.

c h a p t e r on e   1 See in this connection Toulmin, Knowing and Acting, 143–206. Addendum: For an illuminating recent discussion of relativism by a philosopher whose work has roots in the reformational tradition, see Smith, Who’s Afraid of Relativism? James K.A. Smith studied with James Olthuis and others at the Institute for Christian Studies, where he received a master’s degree in 1995.  2 Dickie, Aesthetics, 1.   3 Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts” (1951–52).  4 Saisselin, Taste in Eighteenth Century France, 117.   5 Galbraith, “The Market System and the Arts.”   6 For a characterization of conversionist Christianity, see Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 190–229.   7 Seerveld, “Modal Aesthetic Theory,” in Rainbows for the Fallen World, 104–37.  8 Addendum: I discuss the theoretical issues surrounding this question of an irreducible aesthetic aspect or mode in “Dooyeweerd’s Modal Theory: Questions in the Ontology of Science,” ch. 4 in Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 77–109.   9 Ibid., 105–9. Seerveld illustrates the problem by describing a debate between “neo-idealists” and “operationalists.” In my discussion I ­substitute “essentialist” for the term “neo-idealist.” 10 See in this connection Dickie, Aesthetics, 41–3, 69–108. 11 Ibid., 70–8. 12 Cf. Hoekema, “Elusive about Allusive.” 13 Cf. Wolterstorff’s comments in Wolterstorff and Seerveld, “Two Writers Engage in Rainbow Action.” 14 Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 3. 15 Ibid., 4. 16 Ibid., 37. An important question, however, is whether the Greek notion of techne actually resembles later concepts of craft and technique. Martin Heidegger has argued that “techne signifies neither craft nor art, and not at all the technical in our present-day sense; it never



Notes to pages 31–9

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means a kind of practical performance … Techne, as knowledge experienced in the Greek manner, is a bringing forth of beings … out of concealedness and … into the unconcealedness of their appearance.” Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 59. 17 Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 6, 7. 18 Ibid., 37. 19 Ibid., 17, 18. 20 Saisselin, Taste in Eighteenth Century France, 117–34. 21 Seerveld, Rainbows for the Fallen World, 112–13. 22 Osborne, Aesthetics and Art Theory, 17–24 and passim. 23 Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 122–55. 24 Seerveld, Rainbows for the Fallen World, 112–13. 25 Ibid., 110. 26 Ibid., 25. 27 Ibid., 28–31. 28 Ibid., 39. 29 Participants in the Arts Seminar pointed out the sketchiness of my comments on the cultural mandate and the antithesis. Acknowledging their point, I expressed my intention to develop these comments at some later date. Addendum: See in this connection chs 13 and 14 below as well as the introduction, epilogue, and chs 12, 13, and 14 in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation. 30 Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 177. 31 Ibid., 22. 32 Ibid., 24–63. 33 Ibid., 175–99. 34 See Zuidervaart, “Refractions,” especially 18–23, 37–62, 199–205. Addendum: This doctoral dissertation was subsequently revised and incorporated into Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. I examine the economic underpinnings of art in Art in Public.

c h a p t e r t wo   1 Woodward, “Guru of Fundamentalism,” 88.   2 I use the spelling “worldview” throughout this essay, also in passages quoted directly from Schaeffer’s writings, even though he often uses the spelling “world view.” I have not corrected language in direct quotations that is not gender inclusive, and I apologize in advance for the offense such usages give.

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Notes to pages 39–46

  3 Woodward, “Guru of Fundamentalism,” 88.   4 Concerning this line (actually two lines) of theology, see VanderStelt, Philosophy and Scripture. On the presuppositional apologetics of Van Til, Clark, and Schaeffer, see Knudsen, “Progressive and Regressive Tendencies in Christian Apologetics.”   5 This description of “evangelical Protestants” comes from Marty, The Public Church, 13.  6 Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, 7.  7 Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 117–62.   8 Woodward, “Guru of Fundamentalism,” 88.  9 Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 227. 10 Ibid., 20. 11 Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, passim. 12 Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 22. 13 Ibid., 30, 56. 14 Ibid., 55, 56. Cf. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, 9–13. Much of this booklet is reproduced and elaborated in How Should We Then Live? 15 Ibid., 57. 16 Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, 13–18. 17 Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 68. 18 Ibid., 79–88. 19 Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, 21. 20 Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 88–119. 21 Ibid., 121. 22 Ibid., 152. 23 Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, 35, 40–2. 24 Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 164. 25 Ibid., 176–8. 26 Ibid., 60. 27 Ibid., 182. 28 Ibid., 184. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 183–4. 31 Ibid., 184–7. 32 Ibid., 188, 190. 33 Ibid., 158. 34 Ibid., 193. 35 Ibid., 194. 36 Ibid., 190, 194. 37 Ibid., 190.



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38 Ibid., 197. 39 Ibid., 197–8. 40 Ibid., 201. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 202. 43 Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto. 44 Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 204. 45 Ibid., 205. 46 Ibid., 193. 47 Ibid., 196. 48 Ibid., 20. 49 Ibid., 21. 50 Ibid., 254. 51 Addendum: In 1985, not long after I gave the lecture from which this chapter derives, Calvin College, ics, and the vu University Amsterdam sponsored a conference at Calvin College that thoroughly explored and problematized the concept of worldview. See the conference collection Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science edited by Paul Marshall et al. A similar conference took place at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids in 2004 and resulted in a collection with the telling title After Worldview: Christian Higher Education in Postmodern Worlds, edited by J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens. The essays in these two collections provide all sorts of reasons for Reformed and evangelical scholars to think twice about the historical background and systematic limitations of a worldview philosophy such as Schaeffer’s. 52 Acton, “Idealism,” 110. 53 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 33–5. 54 Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 34–6; How Should We Then Live?, 187–90. 55 Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 221. 56 Ibid. 57 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 41. 58 Ibid., 42, 47. 59 Ibid., 46. 60 Ibid., 51–3. 61 Ibid., 54. 62 Ibid., 44. 63 Ibid., 43, 45. 64 Ibid., 56–9.

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Notes to pages 57–64

65 Ibid., 56–7. 66 Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 15. 67 Ibid., 131. 68 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 39–40. 69 Ibid., 54.

c ha p t e r t hre e   1 Of the twenty or so master’s theses and doctoral dissertations directed by Seerveld, about half examine important figures in the arts and cultural criticism, while the others discuss the contributions of philosophers and other cultural theorists. For a list of these theses and dissertations, see Zuidervaart and Luttikhuizen, eds, Pledges of Jubilee, 2n1.   2 For a historical account of the religious and ethnic subculture in which Seerveld grew up, see Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modem America. Bratt pays special attention to the struggles over Christian involvement in culture to which the Reformational Movement has made a unique contribution.   3 For a discussion of Seerveld’s aesthetics that places it in the context of Dutch neo-Calvinism, see Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise.   4 Published as Seerveld, Benedetto Croce’s Earlier Aesthetic Theories and Literary Criticism.   5 A Fulbright Travel Award allowed Seerveld to spend his sabbatical in 1966–67 doing research in biblical wisdom literature with Gerhard von Rad. He spent subsequent sabbaticals and leaves in Munich and London (1980), Paris and London (1986–87), and Germany (1993– 94), this last by virtue of a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (s s hrc ). He also presented papers and organized sessions at the International Congresses of Aesthetics held in Darmstadt, Germany (1976), Dubrovnik, the former Yugoslavia (1980), Montreal (1984), and Nottingham, England (1988). For details, and for information about presentations at other international conferences and symposia, see the bibliography prepared by Perry Recker in Zuidervaart and Luttikhuizen, eds, Pledges of Jubilee, 328–49.   6 Published as Seerveld, A Turnabout in Aesthetics to Understanding (Toronto: Institute for Christian Studies, 1974), from which the citations derive; republished in Seerveld, Normative Aesthetics, 233–58.   7 Ibid., 6–12.



Notes to pages 64–76

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  8 Ibid., 11.   9 In the essay “Biblical Wisdom underneath Vollenhoven’s Categories for Philo­sophical Historiography,” Seerveld argues that Vollenhoven’s problem-historical method provides the historian of philosophy with “technically precise categories which make possible a truly transcendental christian critique of other philosophies.” Such transcendental critique “asks christian questions within the other thinker’s assumed framework” in order to listen “intently to the (checkmated) contribution of non-christian philosophies to our (faulty) christian understanding of reality” (135–6). See also the companion piece “The Pedagogical Strength of a Christian Methodology in Philosophical Historiography.” Addendum: I discuss the historiographic methods of both Vollenhoven and Seerveld in “Metacritique: Adorno, Vollenhoven, and the ProblemHistorical Method,” in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 183–204. 10 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. 11 Seerveld, A Turnabout in Aesthetics, 12–20. 12 Ibid., 18. 13 Romanowski, “The Joys Are Simply Told,” 31. 14 Leach, “Playful Constellations.” 15 Morbey, “Sorties into Cyberspace.” 16 Luttikhuizen, “Serving Vintage Wisdom,” 78. 17 Westphal, “Deconstruction and Christian Cultural Theory.” 18 Guen Hart, “Poetry and Poeming,” 152. 19 Knudsen, “Thinking in the Image of Need,” 174. 20 Snyman, “Suffering in High and Low Relief,” 192. 21 Ibid., 204. 22 Ibid., 209. 23 Wong, “You Wouldn’t Shoot a Brother in the Back,” 211. 24 Enneson, “Senggih’s The Survivors,” 248. 25 Kuschke, “Creation and Wholeness,” 251. 26 Polman, “The Maternal Mary,” 284. 27 Douglas, “Prayers Made with Song,” 289. 28 Van Leeuwen, “In Praise of Proverbs.” 29 Seerveld, A Turnabout in Aesthetics, 20.

c ha p t e r f ou r  1 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 151.  2 Fraser, Justice Interruptus, 5.

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Notes to pages 77–84

 3 Addendum: I discuss Kuyper’s notion of an architectonic critique of society and propose a contemporary version of this in “Macrostructures and Societal Principles: An Architectonic Critique,” ch. 13 in Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 252–76.   4 Zuidervaart and Luttikhuizen, eds, The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy.   5 The catalog accompanying the 16 August–23 September 1995 exhibit, curated by Lisa De Boer and Henry Luttikhuizen, is titled Words & Images. Another highlight of the conference was the presentation of a Festschrift to Calvin G. Seerveld at a banquet honoring him and his wife Inés on the occasion of his retirement from the chair of philosophical aesthetics at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. See Zuidervaart and Luttikhuizen, eds, Pledges of Jubilee.  6 The v u University Amsterdam was founded by Kuyper in 1880; Calvin College, Dordt College, and the Institute for Christian Studies (i c s) were established in North America by twentieth-century Kuyperians. Of course, people who did not consider themselves Kuyperians were also involved in establishing these schools – I have drastically simplified the historical narrative. See the following histories and commemorative volumes for these schools: van Deursen, The Distinctive Character of The Free University in Amsterdam, 1880– 2005; Timmerman, Promises to Keep; Kok, ed., Celebrating the Vision; and VanderVennen, A University for the People. For further reading on Kuyper, see Bratt, Abraham Kuyper; Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper; and Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview.   7 “Fifth Lecture,” in Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 142–70.   8 Ibid., 157–60.   9 Ibid., 165. 10 Ibid., 169. 11 For a discussion of such inconsistencies, and an attempt to understand their historical setting, see Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 196–223. 12 De Boer and Luttikhuizen, “Words & Images,” in Words & Images, 4–9; the passage quoted is from page 6. 13 Ibid., 6–8. Addendum: For an instructive and fascinating study of the “visual culture” of Calvinism in the sixteenth through eighteenth ­centuries, see Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture. 14 I hint at this in my foreword to the Words & Images catalogue, 3. 15 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 150. 16 For an analysis of the philosophical framework of this account, see VanderStelt, “Abraham Kuyper’s Semi-Mystical Conception.”



Notes to pages 84–7

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17 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 154–5. 18 For a discussion of these three types of pluralism, see Mouw and Griffioen, Pluralisms and Horizons. What I have labeled structural, cultural, and confessional pluralism correspond, respectively, to what Mouw and Griffioen identify as associational, contextual, and directional pluralism. Mouw and Griffioen also distinguish between descriptive and normative accounts of each type of pluralism. 19 Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 215–17. 20 Kuyper credits art with an ability to reveal normativity in ways that scholarship and religion cannot: “Art reveals ordinances of creation which neither science, nor politics, nor religious life, nor even revelation can bring to light.” Lectures on Calvinism, 163. 21 Ibid., 142–3. 22 Bratt, “Abraham Kuyper,” 12. 23 Abraham Kuyper, “Maranatha,” 222, emphasis removed. 24 The lecture “Maranatha” sets out the following guidelines for the “Christian-democratic development” Kuyper envisions: “(1) religion held in honor; (2) freedom of conscience restored; (3) our people set again in their organic relations; and (4) the spirit of compassion poured out over our entire governmental apparatus.” Ibid., 223. 25 It is symptomatic of Kuyper’s cultural stance that, to argue Calvinism’s merit in bringing art closer to the people, he singles out such artistic heroes as Rembrandt and Bourgeois but says next to nothing about art created by common folk. 26 I indicate how this might go in the essay “Postmodern Arts and the Birth of a Democratic Culture.” 27 The contemporary Kuyperian can go to various sources to find historical support for embracing equality: church teachings concerning the imago Dei, the economic practices of Jesus’ early followers, and Calvin’s emphasis on the “priesthood of all believers” readily come to mind. 28 I apply this theme to higher education in “Deep Water from the Kuyperian Well: The Future of Higher Education,” Perspectives 13, no. 3 (March 1998): 7–11 – now ch. 12 in this volume.

c ha p t e r f i ve   1 Examples of the evangelical tradition of aesthetic reflection include Ryken, The Liberated Imagination; Veith, State of the Arts; and Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation. Expressions of the sacramental tradition include James Alfred Martin, Beauty and Holiness;

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Notes to pages 88–90

Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics; and Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste. The current chapter discusses several texts in the reformational tradition, so these are not listed here. For a successful fusion of evangelical language and reformational concepts, see Brand and Chaplin, Art and Soul.   2 For helpful explications of this narrative that address a general ­audience, see Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, and Walsh and Middleton, The Transforming Vision. The most important philosophical source for these explications is Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought; see especially vol. 1. Since Dooyeweerd does not emphasize the fourth theme of “­fulfillment” or “renewal” or “consummation,” the narrative is often summarized as having three themes (Creation / Fall / Redemption) – inappropriately, it seems to me, given the importance of eschatology in Reformed theology. See, for example, Spykman, Reformational ­Theology, especially Part Five, “The Consummation,” 513–60. The eschatological theme receives its due in an updating of this reformational narrative by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr, who emphasizes “longing and hope” in Engaging God’s World.   3 His writings are collected in Hengelaar-Rookmaaker, ed., The Complete Works of H.R. Rookmaaker. Laurel Gasque’s biography in Part 4, vol. 6 of this collection is also published as Art and the Christian Mind: The Life and Work of H.R. Rookmaaker.  4 Addendum: I devote most of Part One in Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 23–127, to a “critical retrieval” of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy.   5 A complementary account of these developments is provided by the art historian Graham Birtwistle, a younger colleague of the late Hans Rookmaaker at the vu University Amsterdam, in “Filosofie van de kunst en de esthetica” [“Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics”].   6 A decade earlier Dooyeweerd had published a series of lectures titled In the Twilight of Western Thought (1960). Hans Sedlmayr’s approach to the visual arts is best exemplified by Verlust der Mitte (1948) and by Kunst und Wahrheit (1958).   7 Jeremy Begbie’s Voicing Creation’s Praise has made Seerveld and Wolterstorff’s aesthetic theories more widely known among Englishspeaking Christians. See also Begbie’s Theology, Music, and Time and Beholding the Glory.   8 In Seerveld, Rainbows for the Fallen World, 156–201.   9 Although one such function is the fictive projection of a world, Wolterstorff insists that we not confuse world projection with the



Notes to pages 90–2

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expression of a worldview. He gives a detailed and rigorous account of world projection in Works and Worlds of Art, a technical companion volume to Art in Action. Addendum: I examine Wolterstorff’s account of fictive world projection in ch. 9 (“Wolterstorff’s Realism”) of Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 182–202. 10 Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. 11 Examples and articulations of this model that arise from the reformational tradition can be found in Zuidervaart and Luttikhuizen, eds, The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy. On the diverse social roles of visual artists and their audiences, see Van Laar and Diepeveen, Active Sights. 12 Snyman, “Suffering in High and Low Relief,” 192. 13 Ibid., 209. 14 For another example of close, multidimensional, and contextual art criticism that emphasizes interactivity, see Enneson, “Senggih’s The Survivors,” in Pledges of Jubilee, 227–48. In the same volume, 78–104, Luttikhuizen’s “Serving Vintage Wisdom” provides illuminating comparisons and criticisms of Rookmaaker and Seerveld’s approaches to art history. 15 In correspondence about this essay, Nick Wolterstorff has suggested that Art in Action makes actions rather than works of art central, but it treats actions “too atomistically.” Subsequently he has developed a more holistic idea of “social practices” and has argued that we should think of the arts in terms of ongoing composition, reception, and performance practices. See, for example, his seminal essay “Philosophy of Art after Analysis and Romanticism.” I am not convinced that his older account of “art in action” can avoid making works of art central, since the actions in question are all ones that have works of art as their objects or instruments. The notion of social practices is more promising in this regard, although I wonder how easily it can be applied to conceptual art, new genre public art, mass-mediated art, and the new information technologies. Addendum: Wolterstorff’s recent Art Rethought works out the notion of social practices in great detail and shows its relevance both for rejecting what he calls “the grand narrative of art in the modern world” and for understanding memorials, objects of veneration, social protest art, and work songs. He also reflects in the preface about lacunae and problematic formulations in Art in Action, including his failure to note how the actions within which art is embedded are performed in the context of social practices of creation, performance and display, and public engagement – see Art Rethought, vii–ix.

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Notes to pages 93–5

16 I explore the philosophical implications of historicizing “the artwork” in an essay on Dooyeweerd’s cultural theory titled “Fantastic Things: Critical Notes toward a Social Ontology of the Arts” – republished as ch. 5 in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 110–27. 17 This is particularly so in studies of the electronic media and popular culture, which do not have the same indebtedness to modern aesthetics as do studies of the so-called fine arts. An especially instructive interdisciplinary attempt to understand and evaluate youth culture can be found in Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and the Electronic Media. One of that book’s six co-authors, William D. Romanowski, has since published other studies that wed Seerveldian aesthetics to a sociohistorical critique: Pop Culture Wars and Eyes Wide Open. 18 Zuidervaart, “Creative Border Crossing in New Public Culture,” 222. Addendum: A revised version of this essay appears within ch. 8 (“Authenticity and Responsibility”) in Zuidervaart, Art in Public, 241–66. 19 For a fascinating exchange between these two philosophers, in the form of side-by-side reviews of each other’s books, see Wolterstorff and Seerveld, “Two Writers Engage in Rainbow Action,” in Vanguard, a Toronto-based magazine. Seerveld’s review has been reprinted as “Cal Looks at Nick: A Response to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Art in Action,” in Seerveld, In the Fields of the Lord, 360–4. 20 Nick Wolterstorff has suggested in correspondence that my emphases on “cultural institutions” and “cultural theory” remain too close to the old way of thinking that he and I wish to reform. He would rather emphasize social practices, which account for the cultural institutions, and have social theory rather than cultural theory be the embracing theoretical framework. His worry could simply reflect a semantic difference tied to the disparate intellectual sources from which our vocabularies derive – roughly, Alasdair MacIntyre in Wolterstorff’s case, and Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas in my own. As I explain in greater detail elsewhere, I use “culture” to refer to “the entire network of practices, products and institutions through which traditions are shaped and transmitted, social solidarities are generated and contested, and personal identities are molded and embraced.” On this understanding, a proper cultural theory will necessarily also be a social theory, but not every social theory will be a cultural theory. Nor can the work of the cultural sciences (“humanities,” in an older



Notes to pages 96–9

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vocabulary) simply be absorbed into the social sciences, even though the traditional isolation of the former from the latter can no longer withstand critical scrutiny. See Zuidervaart, “Postmodern Arts and the Birth of a Democratic Culture,” 22. Addendum: A revised and expanded version of this essay appears as ch. 9 (“Democratic Culture”) in Zuidervaart, Art in Public, 267–92. This book, like Wolterstorff’s Art in Action, characterizes art as a “social institution.” 21 My essay “Art Is No Fringe” (ch. 4 in the current volume) indicates that cultural theory and social theory need to join hands if scholars and artists are to address dramatic shifts in the structure of society and not merely react to disturbances on the surface of culture. The essay also indicates the continuity and discontinuity between the approach I recommend and that taken by Abraham Kuyper in his writings on Calvinism and the arts. 22 This is not to deny that the social and political underpinnings of the arts show up more clearly in Seerveld’s recent writings, however, nor to ignore Wolterstorff’s important writings on political and economic topics. See, for example, Seerveld, Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves and Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace. Addendum: See also Seerveld, Cultural Problems in Western Society and Redemptive Art in Society, as well as Wolterstorff, Justice and Art Rethought. 23 An earlier version of this essay was presented in September 2001 at the conference “Christian Scholarship … for What?,” in a session on “New Directions in Christian Philosophy” organized by the Calvin College Philosophy Department. I wish to thank my fellow panelists and audience members for their helpful comments and questions.

c h a p t er si x   1 See Seerveld, “A Turnabout in Aesthetics to Understanding,” in Normative Aesthetics, 233–58. Seerveld delivered his inaugural address on 14 October 1972. i cs published it in 1974 as Institute for Christian Studies Publication No. 1.   2 Ibid., 242.   3 Ibid., 243–52.   4 Ibid., 246.   5 In addition to the two essays discussed, which were addressed primarily to other Christian scholars, one should turn to “Both More and Less Than a Matter of Taste” (Normative Aesthetics, 135–44) and the two book reviews at the end of Normative Aesthetics (285–95) to see

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Notes to pages 99–101

how Seerveld raises his normative aesthetic concerns in the pluralistic contexts of philosophy as a profession.   6 In Seerveld, Normative Aesthetics, 45–80.   7 “Dooyeweerd’s Legacy for Aesthetics” may be read as a companion piece to “Modal Aesthetic Theory,” in Seerveld’s Rainbows for the Fallen World, 104–37, an essay originally written for Kraay and Tol, eds, Hearing and Doing, 263–94. “Modal Aesthetic Theory” gives a more substantial argument for replacing “beauty” with “allusiveness” as the “qualifying function of art.”   8 In Seerveld, Normative Aesthetics, 27–44.   9 Ibid., 31. 10 Ibid., 39. 11 Ibid., 44. 12 Seerveld, “The Halo of Human Imagination,” in Normative Aesthetics, 1. 13 For a schematic presentation of Seerveld’s multi-layered conception of the aesthetic imperative, see Diagram 4 in the essay “Christian Aesthetic Bread for the World,” in Normative Aesthetics, 152. It is interesting to compare this diagram with an earlier schema of “functions of aesthetic-life subjectivity” on the right-hand side of the diagram “A Christian Tin-Can Model of the Human Creature,” in the essay “The Fundamental Importance of Imaginativity within Schooling,” Rainbows for the Fallen World, 143. 14 Seerveld, “The Halo of Human Imagination,” in Normative Aesthetics, 10. 15 Seerveld’s term for utopianism is “fundamentalistic neo-idealism” – Normative Aesthetics, 179. 16 Seerveld, “Philosophical Aesthetics at Home with the Lord,” in Normative Aesthetics, 260. The phrase “dürftige Zeit,” which comes from Martin Heidegger, is translated as “time of need” in Barrett, Time of Need. Perhaps more than any other book, Barrett’s Irrational Man introduced Heidegger and existential philosophy to an entire generation of North American students in the 1960s and 1970s. 17 Seerveld, “Philosophical Aesthetics at Home with the Lord,” 261. 18 Ibid., 271. 19 Ibid., 260. 20 Ibid., 272–7. For attempts to take up several of these issues, see the two companion volumes by Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth and Art in Public.



Notes to pages 103–16

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c h a p t e r se ve n  1 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 151.   2 See ch. 3 (“Kant Revisited”) in Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 55–73. What follows is a very brief summary of this chapter.   3 For an elaboration of these points, see Zuidervaart, “Creating a Disturbance.”   4 Roger Cohen, “Why ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Works,” posted online on 11 February 2013 at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/opinion/ global/roger-cohen-why-zero-dark-thirty-works.html; accessed 18 February 2013. Also published as part of a full-page advertisement in the print edition of The New York Times, 15 February 2013, C9.   5 What follows is a very brief summary of ch. 6 in Artistic Truth, 118–39.   6 Disclosure, however, includes more than imaginative disclosure, and truth, in its most comprehensive sense, is more than disclosure. I explore these broader notions of disclosure and truth in the book Artistic Truth when I discuss Martin Heidegger’s conception of truth in Being and Time and in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” – see chs 4 and 5. See also the essay “Unfinished Business: Toward a Reformational Conception of Truth” – republished as ch. 14 in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 275–97. I will work out the details in a book I am currently writing on the ­general idea of truth.   7 Throughout this essay I assume a distinction between art products and art events. Whereas a piece of music is a product, for example, a music recital is an event. Everything I say about artistic truth is meant to apply to both products and events, even though sometimes I mention only products. I also consider artworks to be only one type of art product. Artworks are art products that are fashioned to stand on their own, thanks to an elaborate nexus of institutional supports – in music, for example, published music scores, professional musicians, concert and recital halls, specialized performance groups, electronic modes of music dissemination, educated listeners, and a philosophical idea of the autonomy of art. For more on these distinctions, see Artistic Truth, 7–8, and Zuidervaart, “Fantastic Things” – republished as ch. 5 in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 110–27.   8 What follows is a brief summary of some themes in Art in Public.

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Notes to pages 116–24

  9 On the topics of regulation and taxation, see O’Hagan, The State and the Arts, 73–130. 10 Hein, Public Art notes this tendency yet continues to use a distinction between “private art” and “nonprivate art” (which includes what she labels “public art”). 11 Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno, 129. 12 Understood along these lines, art in public can have political relevance without needing to be overtly political. See, for example, the discussion in Art in Public, 126–7, of the a ids Memorial Quilt as a project that offered “profoundly moving and politically relevant imaginative disclosure.” 13 On the importance of civil society to a market economy, see John Keane, Global Civil Society?, 75–88. 14 Art in Public, 77–83 discusses these systemic economic and political pressures in more detail under the heading “Hypercommercialization and Performance Fetishism.” 15 This understanding of the state’s primary normative task, discussed at greater length in Art in Public, primarily derives from the political and legal philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd. See in this connection Chaplin, Herman Dooyeweerd. 16 This gives only the gist of my justification for government arts funding. The last chapter in Art in Public lays out a detailed argument that has five primary premises and nearly twenty secondary premises – see 304–11. 17 See also Zuidervaart, “A Tradition Transfigured: Art and Culture in Reformational Aesthetics” – ch. 5 in this volume. 18 See Seerveld, “A Turnabout in Aesthetics to Understanding,” in Normative Aesthetics, 243–52. 19 Seerveld speaks of the “techno-formative” foundation of art; Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven speak of its “historical” foundation, but by “historical” they mean roughly what Seerveld means by “technoformative.” For more detailed discussions of Dooyeweerd’s modal ontology and his philosophy of art, see chs 4 (“Dooyeweerd’s Modal Theory”) and 5 (“Fantastic Things”) in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 77–109 and 110–27, respectively. 20 See my review of this book in Philosophia Reformata 48, no. 1 (1983): 87–90. 21 Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, 231. 22 Seerveld, “Modern Art and the Birth of a Christian Culture,” 177, 182.



Notes to pages 124–39

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23 Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 175–99. Wolterstorff specifically addresses the city, the church, and the reappropriation of a Calvinist aesthetic tradition as sites where blindness to aesthetic responsibility needs to be overcome. 24 This is more than a presumption. Seerveld, Wolterstorff, and I all gave keynote lectures at the 1995 conference at Calvin College on “The Arts, Community, and Cultural Democracy” and aired our differences about postmodern art in the concluding panel discussion. The title of my lecture indicates my misgivings with both Rookmaaker and Seerveld’s approaches to faith and art. See “Postmodern Arts and the Birth of a Democratic Culture.” 25 For more detailed accounts of the normative and structural transformation I envision, see Art in Public and my essay “Macrostructures and Societal Principles: An Architectonic Critique” – ch. 13 in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 252–76.

c h a p t e r e i g ht   1 See in this connection Küng, On Being a Christian, 244–8, 267–77.   2 Cf. Ezekiel 16:4, which refers to the practice of rubbing newborn children with salt.  3 Addendum: In retrospect I can see that this essay, first written in 1982, touches on many of the issues addressed at great length by Gustavo Gutierrez in A Theology of Liberation – a book I first read in 1986 and then used as a primary text for several years in an interdisciplinary graduate course at Calvin College titled “Christianity, Learning, and Culture.”   4 See Küng, On Being a Christian, 177–277.

chapter nine   1 I cite this document from its first version in 1979. It was subsequently revised between 1979 and 1996 and now serves as the formally adopted “confessional foundation for the entire academic enterprise at Dordt College,” according to the latest version available from the Dordt College website at www.dordt.edu/publications/faculty_­ handbook/task.pdf.   2 “The Educational Task of Dordt College,” 7.   3 Ibid., 6, 9.

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  4 Ibid., 6–7.   5 Ibid., 16. Cf. 1 Cor. 1–3.   6 Ibid., 9–10.   7 Ibid., 11.  8 Ibid.   9 Ibid., 11, 13. 10 Ibid., 16. 11 Among these philosophers are Martin Heidegger, who has tried to recapture dimensions of human experience underlying classical Greek theories of knowledge, and Hendrik Hart, who has tried to bring into epistemology concepts of knowledge found in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. 12 Cf. my article on “Music” in Shaping School Curriculum, 94–104. 13 This distinction has been suggested by John Hospers, following Moritz Schlick, in Meaning and Truth in the Arts, 232–8. That the distinction need not entail an underrating of art is shown by Hospers’ concluding paragraph: “What art gives us … is something which is not knowledge but perhaps more valuable than knowledge – the enrichment of experience itself … And who is to say, in an age when the consequences of Erkenntnis have brought our civilization almost to the brink of disaster, that a larger share of Erlebnis, as art gives it, might not help to give humanity the largeness of spirit and breadth of vision which alone can enable us to survive?” 14 On the connection between Jesus Christ’s ministries and the fulfilling of human interests see Küng, On Being a Christian, 214–77, 530–602.

c ha p t e r t e n   1 Plantinga, “Philosophy’s Place in the Reformed Undergraduate Curriculum,” 49.   2 Wolterstorff, “Keeping Faith,” 42.   3 Ibid., 13–14.   4 Plantinga, “Philosophy’s Place,” 32–3.  5 Addendum: In subsequent years at Calvin College I replaced Dewey’s work with a book of feminist political philosophy by Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, and made it the focus of group research and presentations. I also began to use a classic statement of the Reformed transforming vision instead of the book by Walsh and Middleton, namely, Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism.



Notes to pages 154–64

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c h a p t e r e l e ve n   1 Benson, “Escaping the Blackmail of the Enlightenment.” Benson’s paper and my response were presented at the Wheaton College Philosophy Conference in October 1992. My colleagues in the Calvin College Philosophy Department graciously provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this response.   2 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 42.   3 Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’” 55.   4 Ibid., 56–7.   5 Benson, “Escaping the Blackmail,” 3.   6 Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’” 59.   7 Benson, “Escaping the Blackmail,” 3.   8 Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’” 59.   9 Ibid., 57. 10 Benson, “Escaping the Blackmail,” 4–7. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 10. 13 Ibid., 13. 14 See in this connection Warnke, Gadamer. 15 I return to these issues in the 2010 essay “Religion in Public,” republished as ch. 12 in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 237–51. See also ch. 8 (“The Inner Reformation of Reason”) in the same volume, 176–82.

c h a p t e r twe lve  1 Addendum: In the years since I wrote this essay the Christian Reformed Church in North America has joined the newly formed World Communion of Reformed Churches, into which the larger and more social justice-oriented World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the smaller and more evangelically oriented Reformed Ecumenical Synod amalgamated in 2010. Both the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Reformed Church in America also belong to the World Communion of Reformed Churches, as do the Presbyterian Church in Canada and the United Church of Canada.  2 Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism. The lectures were first delivered at Princeton University under the auspices of the L.P. Stone Foundation. After teaching this text in honours sections of Introduction to Philosophy several times, I am inclined to say that Kuyper’s vision

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Notes to pages 165–74

of Calvinism as a comprehensive worldview is not just grand but grandiose – thereby implying criticisms that need to be developed on a different occasion.   3 The curriculum study known around Calvin College as c la e or the little black book.  4 Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America.  5 Kuyper, Near unto God, 235.   6 Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” 130–2.  7 Addendum: Obviously this system creates many ecological problems and might not be sustainable in the long run. But this is not the place to discuss such issues – hopefully they do not undermine the metaphor suggested in the last paragraph!

c ha p t e r t h i rt e e n   1 York University even advertises its “interdisciplinary approach”: “Some see a university. We see a world of possibilities. At York University, our interdisciplinary approach engages diverse viewpoints and crosses traditional barriers to create new ways of learning. Explore how at www.yorku.ca.” Taken from the back cover of University Affairs, August 2011.   2 This despite the fact that funding agencies such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc ) have developed significant programs to support interdisciplinary research and public scholarship.   3 Often people use the term “ethical scholarship” to refer to scholarship that shows academic integrity – it avoids cheating, treats its sources fairly, and shows respect for the rules of research and teaching. I, too, think academic integrity is important. But by “ethical scholarship” I mean something broader than this.  4 Addendum: This notion of the common good has deep resonances with the idea of “shalom” developed by Nicholas Wolterstorff in his collection of essays titled Educating for Shalom. It also has strong affinities with Catholic social teachings about the common good, with their emphasis on solidarity, human dignity, and authentic development. For a brief summary, see Randall Jay Woodward’s entry “Common Good” in Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy. For a recent papal rearticulation, in the context of “new evangelization,” see the Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Francis titled The Joy of the Gospel.



Notes to pages 175–81

225

  5 Smick and Zuidervaart, eds, “A Different Tenor: Songs of Love and Sorrow – Re-engaging the Social Ethics of Music.”   6 “Songs of Love and Sorrow: Re-examining the Social Ethics of Music,” a s s hrc-funded video directed and edited by Rebekah Smick and produced by Kevin White that documents a half-day conference and music performance in April of 2010 on the relation of music and social ethics. The video highlights the work of three contemporary composers – Jonathan Berger, John Rea, and James Rolfe – who have responded in their music to some of the most pressing social issues of our era. The video can be viewed on YouTube, http://youtu.be/ p10V5yRcw3k.   7 I develop this conception of religion in the essay “Religion in Public.” A revised version of this essay appears as ch. 12 in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 237–51. See also “Spirituality, Religion, and the Call to Love” – ch. 14 below.   8 Videos, session descriptions, and summaries of the various sessions are posted at the cprs e website: http://research-portal.icscanada. edu/2013/06/social-justice-and-human-rights.html.  9 Addendum: In 2013 cprs e began a multi-year research project on justice and faith, in partnership with the Office of Social Justice of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (c rc na ) and the Centre for Community Based Research, with funding provided by s s h rc . The project uses informant interviews, literature reviews, and congregational surveys to identify and mobilize perspectives on social justice in the faith lives of crcn a congregants in Canada. Complete information, including a video of the one-act play commissioned and performed as part of this project, is posted at the c prse website: http://www.icscanada.edu/cprse/justice-and-faith. 10 Vandezande, “Hope-Filled Advocacy for Public Justice” – notes for remarks given by Gerald Vandezande on the occasion of his receiving an i c s honorary doctorate on 20 October 2006.

c h a p t e r f ou rt e e n   1 For a brief introduction that compares Protestant and Catholic understandings of this phrase, see the entry by Louis B. Gallien Jr on “Integration of Faith and Learning” in Encyclopedia of Christian Education, 241–2.  2 Runner, The Relation of the Bible to Learning.   3 This is the revised text of an invited lecture given to the Scripture, Faith, and Scholarship seminar at the Institute for Christian Studies

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Notes to pages 182–92

on 14 November 2014. I wish to thank all of the seminar participants for the generative discussion that followed my talk. I also want to acknowledge the probing and helpful comments I subsequently received on the lecture text from Hendrik Hart, Calvin Seerveld, and Chandler Stokes. A video of the lecture, with excerpts from the discussion, has been posted at http://research-portal.icscanada.edu/2014/11/ on-being-reformational-philosopher.html.   4 Cockburn and King, Rumours of Glory, 518–20.   5 I find a similar recognition in the work of theologian Ben Quash, who describes history as “the gift and medium of the Holy Spirit” and develops this understanding through interdisciplinary discussions of theology and the arts. See Quash, Found Theology, xvi.   6 See, for example, Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture, 91–4, and Vollenhoven, Introduction to Philosophy, 75–93.   7 By putting “God” in quotation marks, I indicate that this characterization is functional rather than prescriptive. I am not saying that, to count as a religion, an array of practices and organizations must be monotheistic or must be directed toward the God of the Hebrew, Christian, or Islamic scriptures.   8 I understand theology to be disciplined, critical, and constructive reflection on the stories, rituals, and meaning of a religion and on the religious community and organizations within which these take shape.   9 Debates about “the inspiration of scripture” will always come up short, it seems to me, if they never turn from asking how God inspires the scriptures to describing how God through the scriptures inspires us. 10 There might be other options stemming from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, say, or liberation theology. I’m not sure whether they actually are or have become traditions in philosophy. But see, for example, such contributions to a philosophy of liberation as Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation and Ethics of Liberation and Cornel West’s Race Matters and Keeping Faith. 11 I understand philosophy to be disciplined, critical, and constructive reflection on the structures, processes, and direction of the entire creation and on creation’s origin and destiny. 12 I give a brief reflection on why the topic of truth is important for both Christianity and philosophy in “Truth and Goodness Intersect.” 13 Vollenhoven, Calvinism and the Reformation of Philosophy (1933), especially 27–9. 14 Dooyeweerd, “Christian Philosophy: An Exploration.” 15 Hart, Understanding Our World, 325–59. The ultimate assumptions Hart articulates pertain specifically to God as sovereign, God’s Word



Notes to pages 192–6

227

and Spirit, the covenant between God and creation, creation’s dependence on God, the Bible, knowledge and truth, and humanity’s special calling. 16 Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 76, 72. Wolterstorff, 72–3, succinctly summarizes what he takes authentic Christian commitment to be. 17 Klapwijk, “Reformational Philosophy on the Boundary between the Past and the Future.” See also Klapwijk, “Antithesis, Synthesis, and the Idea of Transformational Philosophy.” 18 Addendum: See, however, the essays in Educating for Shalom, where Wolterstorff develops an understanding of learning as a “social practice,” similar to his approaching art in terms of social practices in Art Rethought, and proposes an “interactional model” for the relation between Christian faith and the theoretical disciplines. 19 Addendum: Here Jamie Smith and I are on the same page, despite the reservations expressed in the Introduction to the current volume. See Smith, Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom. 20 Obviously this formulation deserves more elaboration than I can give here. In the church where I worship and where I sing in the choir, scripture readings begin with the invitation to “listen for the Word of God.” That seems right to me. We can and do listen for what God says in all of scripture, but that does not mean all of scripture is the Word of God. 21 Perhaps this is my version of the “Kierkegaardian footnote” that Gerrit Glas urges for a Dooyeweerdian approach to Christian philosophy, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Christian Philosophy (Dooyeweerd Chair) at the vu University Amsterdam. See Glas, “What Is Christian Philosophy?” 22 That helps explain the themes and subtitle of my inaugural address when I took up the position in systematic philosophy at ic s. See Zuidervaart, “Earth’s Lament: Suffering, Hope, and Wisdom.” A slightly revised version appears as the epilogue in Zuidervaart, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 317–24. 23 Zuidervaart, Dog-Kissed Tears, 43.

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Index

administrative state, the, 117–18, 120–1 Adorno, Theodor W., 7, 36, 71, 111, 123, 194–5, 216n20 aesthetics, 105–10, 216n17; and Christianity, 29–32, 33–7, 64–7, 87; and cultural theory, 94–6; doxological, 74–5; eighteenth century, 28, 32, 87–8, 122; evangelical, 9, 87; Kantian, 92, 94, 105; Kuyperian, 9, 82–6; normative, 11–12, 97–102, 204n24; religious, 17–19, 21–2; sacramental, 9, 87; theological, 17–22, 203n17, 203– 4n19, 204n21, 204n24, 205n26. See also modal aesthetic theory; reformational aesthetics aesthetic imperative, 100, 218n13 aesthetic signs, 106–7 aesthetic validity, 5–6, 11, 107, 111–12 alienation, 132–3, 135–7 allusiveness, 30, 33, 66, 99–100, 123, 218n7 antithesis, 34, 42, 84, 207n29 apologetics, 39–40, 57 Aquinas, Thomas, 41 architectonic critique, 77, 212n3 art, 27–8, 76, 201n7; aesthetic character of, 11, 105; artefactual

character of, 11, 104–5, 108; and Calvinism, 82–6; and capitalism, 36; and Christianity, 33–5, 39–40, 53–4, 65–6, 124–5; and community, 93; definition of, 7, 21, 28–32, 36–7, 103–5; and democracy, 77–81, 119; government funding for, 6, 116–22, 220n16; liturgical, 31–2, 109; multidimensional, 109–10; products and events, 219n7; in public, 6, 116– 20, 220n12; and religion, 21–2; renewal of, 6–7; as social institution, 6, 10–11, 35–6, 93, 104–6; social role of, 5–6, 109–10, 117– 22; sociohistorical character of, 7–8, 11, 32, 36–7, 92–3, 104–5; in Western society, 11, 33, 35–6; value of, 51–2. See also fine art; high art; modern art art-as-such, 33–4, 93 art history, 80 artistic truth, 5–6, 100, 110–15, 219n7, 222n13; as authenticity/ integrity/significance, 6, 113–15; Schaeffer’s view of, 53–5 artworld and academy, 76–7, 81 artworks, 92–4, 104–5, 215n15, 215n16 authority, 156–9

246 Index

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 46–7, 109 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 18, 203n19 Barth, Karl, 18, 43, 203n19 Beardsley, Monroe, 111 beauty, 19, 28, 84, 204n24, 205n26, 218n7 Begbie, Jeremy, 204n21, 205n26, 214n7 Bell, Clive, 30, 204–5n25 Benjamin, Walter, 65, 79 Benson, Bruce, 14, 154–5, 157–9 Bergengruen, Werner, 72 Bergman, Ingmar, 46–7 Bible, the, 180; Schaeffer’s interpretation of, 42–4, 56–8; as touchstone for faith, 188–9. See also scriptures-within-worship Birtwistle, Graham, 80, 214n5 Blomberg, Doug, 202n11 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 204n19 Bowling Alone, 174 Bratt, James, 167, 210n2 Brown, Frank Burch, 18–19 Cage, John, 46–7, 55 Calvin College, 9, 14, 61, 67, 75, 147–8, 152, 161, 164–7, 202n12, 209n51, 217n23 Calvin, Jean, 18, 73, 123 Calvinism, 39, 82–5, 163–4, 177, 223–4n2. See also Reformed tradition capitalism, 77–8, 120, 161–2. See also proprietary economy Carson, Rachel, 171 Cézanne, Paul, 30, 45, 47 Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics (cp rse ), 15–16, 175–9, 225n9 Chaplin, Adrienne Dengerink, 19, 122, 205n26 Christianity: in the academy, 132–8; evangelical, 39; and higher

education, 12–16; Reformed, 3–4, 39, 88, 163–4, 185–7; Schaeffer’s interpretation of, 40–4, 56–8 Christian orientation, 16–17, 129–38, 146, 149–50, 184–96. See also faith: life of Christian practices, 22–3 Christian Reformed Church (crc), 163–4, 167, 223n1 Christian scholarship. See scholarship: Christian church music, 73 civic sector, the, 117–21 civil society, 6, 10, 117–20, 171–2 Cockburn, Bruce, 180–3 Cohen, Roger, 110, 219n4 common good, the, 15–16, 173–9, 224n4. See also interconnected flourishing common grace, 83–4 Copland, Aaron, 78 creational ordinances, 10, 102 creativity, 51, 133–5 critical contextualism, 15, 165, 202n12 Crying Game, The, 71 cultural despair, 40–4 cultural mandate, the, 33–5, 95, 207n29 cultural orientation, 118 cultural partnership, 134–5, 137–8 cultural renewal, 5, 12–18, 23–4, 88, 124–5. See also social transformation cultural strategies, 148–9 cultural theory, 10, 94–6, 216–17n20, 217n21 Dadaism, 52, 94, 104 De Boer, Lisa, 80, 212n5 de Boer, Theo, 79 de Gruchy, John W., 18, 203n16, 203–4n19 DeLapp, Jennifer, 78

Index 247

democracy, 9, 84–6, 96, 213n24; and the arts, 77–81, 119 den Dulk, Kevin, 80 Derrida, Jacques, 69, 111 Dewey, John, 69–70 Dickie, George, 28 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 48–9 dogmatism, 8, 53–6, 59 Dooyeweerd, Herman, 4, 62, 88–9, 99, 123, 177, 183, 192–3, 195, 201–2n8, 214n2, 220n19 Dordt College, 6–7, 12–13, 27, 62; educational task of, 139–41, 221n1 Douglas, Barbara Jo, 73 Droogers, André, 77 Duchamp, Marcel, 45, 52 Dyrness, William, 18, 203n16 education: activist professionalist model of, 165–6; in art, 108, 139, 141–5; Christian, 13, 15, 22–3, 139–41, 145–53, 160–9, 202n13; disciplinary model of, 165; liberal arts, 164–5; in philosophy, 13–14, 146–53; Reformed, 161, 163–9 Enlightenment, the, 14, 42–4, 154–9 Enneson, Peter, 71–2 equality, 85, 213n27 faith: and the arts, 6–7, 221n24; life of, 22–3, 189–90; and philosophy, 16, 194–5; and scholarship, 20, 180–1, 187–8; and scripture, 184– 5, 187–90 fine art, 11, 28, 31, 104–5, 109 Foucault, Michel, 14, 154–5, 157–8 fragmentation, 44–7, 54–5 Fraser, Nancy, 76–7 fundamentalism, 7, 14, 38–40 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 14, 111, 155, 158–9

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 29 Genevan Psalter, 73 God, 16–17, 23, 74–5, 100, 134–8, 168, 183–4, 188–90, 195–6, 226n7, 226n9, 227n20 Gollwitzer, Helmut, 195 Goizueta, Roberto S., 18 Goudzwaard, Bob, 77–8 grace, 41–2, 137–8 Gutierrez, Gustavo, 221n3 Habermas, Jürgen, 15, 111, 159, 168, 216n20 Hart, Carroll Guen, 69–70 Hart, Hendrik, 62, 192–3, 222n11, 226–7n15 Hegel, G.W.F., 3, 32, 43–4, 47–8, 50, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 70, 111, 206– 7n16, 218n16, 219n6, 222n11 hermeneutics, 70, 79–80 Heslam, Peter, 84 high art, 35–6, 89–90, 93, 123–4 historical communion, 135–6, 138 holy worldliness, 147, 153 Hospers, John, 222n13 humanism, 41–4, 47 Hunger, 81 iconoclasm, 18, 82–3, 203n17 idealism, 49–52, 59 imagination, 6, 11, 106–9, 111, 123 imaginative cogency, 11, 107–8, 111–12 imaginative disclosure, 5–6, 111–12, 115, 219n6. See also artistic truth imaginativity, 10, 66, 99–100, 123 insight: by way of art, 13, 143–4; into art, 13, 141–3; serviceable, 13, 139–42, 145 Institute for Christian Studies (ics ), 15–16, 60–1, 63, 97, 101, 175–6, 178–80, 186, 212n6

248 Index

interconnected flourishing, 174, 177, 191. See also common good Jellema, William Harry, 61, 165 Jesus, 129–33, 136–7, 183; and the academy, 12, 147; ministries of, 144–5, 222n14 justice, 78, 81, 121; and artistic truth, 6, 115; social, 13, 178, 225n9 Kant, Immanuel, 14, 43–4, 47–8, 50, 92, 94, 105, 149, 154–9 Kierkegaard, Søren, 43–4, 47 King’s University College, 6, 12, 15, 152–3, 161, 165 Klapwijk, Jacob, 192–4 knowledge, 141–3, 222n13 Knudsen, Donald, 70 Krijger, Henk, 71–2 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 28 Küng, Hans, 222n14 Kuschke, Gudrun, 72 Kuyper, Abraham, 62, 88, 167–8, 177, 223–4n2; on art, 9, 76–7, 82–4, 103, 213n20, 213n25; on democracy, 84–6 Kuyperian tradition, 3–5, 124–5, 191–5, 213n27; in higher education, 15–17, 147–9, 160–9 Lacy, Suzanne, 90 Leach, James, 67–8, 78–9 Leeuwen, Ray Van, 73–4 Lerner, Michael, 162 liberation, 13–8; and art, 34–5 liturgical turn, 17, 22–3, 205n31 love, 57, 195–6; call to, 4–5, 16–17, 24, 193–4 Lowly, Tim, 81 Luttikhuizen, Henry, 68–9, 81, 212n5, 215n14 Madonna, the, 72–3 Malle, Louis, 143

Marsden, George, 22, 162 Marx, Karl, 3, 132 memorials, 70–1, 91 modal aesthetic theory, 11, 29–30, 67–9, 98–100, 123, 220n19 modern art: Schaeffer’s interpretation of, 44–7, 49–59, 89; Seerveld’s interpretation of, 89–90 modernity, 154–5, 158–9 Morbey, Mary Leigh, 68 My Dinner with André, 143–4 Nandor, Glid, 71 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 70 Noll, Mark, 22, 162 O’Connor, Flannery, 57 Olthuis, James H., 62, 79, 206n1 Osborne, Harold, 33 Oswald, John, 79 pessimism, 43–7, 55 philosophy, 40, 50, 226n11; analytic and continental, 97, 111; Christian, 9–10, 16–17, 192–6; and faith, 16, 194–5, 227n21; interdisciplinary, 175, 224n1–2; redemptive 3–5; religiously attuned, 176–7; teaching of, 13–14, 149–53, 222n5. See also reformational philosophy; worldview philosophy pietism, 186; and social activism, 167–8 Plantinga, Theodore, 13, 146, 148–9 pluralism, 85–6, 213n18 Polman, Bert, 72–3, 186 postmodernity, 69, 77, 95–6, 154–5, 158 presuppositionalism, 48–9, 57–9 problem-posing pedagogy, 14, 151, 202n11 proprietary economy, 117–20. See also capitalism

Index 249

proverbs, 73–4 public sphere, the, 118, 155–7 Putnam, Robert, 174 Quash, Ben, 226n5 reason, 43–4; official and public uses of, 155–9 Redeemer University College, 165 Reformation, the, 41–2, 44 reformational aesthetics, 5–12, 17–21, 87–96, 101–3, 122–5, 203–4n19 Reformational Movement, the, 61–2, 88 reformational philosophy, 3–5, 10–13, 61–2, 88–96, 122–4, 146– 50, 177, 191–5, 201–2n8 Reformed colleges, 15, 146–8, 153, 160–1, 164–9 Reformed tradition, the, 17–18, 82–6, 88, 160–1, 163–9. See also Calvinism; Christianity: Reformed; Kuyperian tradition relativism, 27, 57, 206n1 religion, 21–2, 226n7; normative task of, 184–5; and spirituality, 22–3, 181–4 religious studies, 19–22 Renaissance, the 41–2, 44 rights, 121, 176–7 Romanowski, William D., 67 Rookmaaker, Hans, 9, 68, 88–9, 92, 95–6, 122, 124–5, 201–2n8, 214n5, 221n24 Rouault, Georges, 57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 43–4, 47 Runner, H. Evan, 5, 61–2, 165, 201–2n8 Saisselin, Rémy, 28, 32 “salt of the earth,” 129–32, 137–8 Schaeffer, Francis, 7–8, 11, 38–59, 88–9; and reformational philosophy, 39, 201–2n8

Schoenberg, Arnold, 45, 47 scholarship: Christian, 12, 16–17, 64–5, 87–9, 101, 132–8, 147, 154, 180–1, 190–6; ethical, 15–16, 173–5, 178–9, 224n3; reformational, 9–10, 88–96 scriptures-within-worship, 16–17, 187–8, 193–5 Sedlmayr, Hans, 89, 214n6 Seerveld, Calvin, 7, 21, 28–30, 78, 89–96, 186–7, 210n1, 211n9, 212n5, 216n19, 217n22, 221n24; aesthetics of, 8–12, 18–19, 33–4, 64–9, 74–5, 97–102, 122–5, 204n24, 214n7, 218n13; biography of, 60–3, 210n2, 210n5; Normative Aesthetics, 97–102, 217–18n5; Rainbows for a Fallen World, 89; scholarship of, 63–7 self-deception, 132–3 Silent Spring, 171 Smick, Rebekah, 19, 122, 175, 205n26, 225n6 Smith, James K.A., 22–3, 205n31, 206n1, 227n19 Snyman, Johan, 70–1, 90–1 social ethics, 177–8 social responsibility, 173–4 social transformation, 3–6, 12, 15, 18, 23–4, 61–2, 77, 123–5, 130–3, 135, 160–1, 165–7, 177–8, 191–2. See also cultural renewal; transforming vision societal crossroads, 171–3 societal evil, 191, 195 societal macrostructures, 6, 117–18, 125 societal principles, 191 solidarity, 12, 85–6, 119–20, 133, 137 sphere sovereignty, 9, 83–4, 123 spirituality: and religion, 16, 22–3, 181–4; thirst for, 161–3, 166 spiritual openness, 193–5

250 Index

spiritual (re)orientation, 5, 16, 23, 176, 182, 194–5 Stoker, Wessel, 19 suffering, 34, 70–1, 133, 195 Survivors, The, 72 Sweetman, Robert, 202n13 theology, 17–22, 123, 193, 203– 4n19, 204n21, 226n8, 226n10 Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth, 203n15, 203n17 Tillich, Paul, 18, 204n21, 204–5n25 tradition, 14, 158–9, 162, 168–9, 190–1 transforming vision, 4–5, 13, 16, 18, 147–9, 153, 160–1, 167–9. See also social transformation Trinity Christian College, 13, 15, 62–3, 165 truth, 59, 191–2, 219n6, 226n12; and the Bible, 57–8; correspondence theory of, 111; propositional, 58; perspectival, 53–5. See also artistic truth university, the, 15, 161–6, 172–5 Vandezande, Gerald, 178–9 Viladesau, Richard, 18, 203n19 Vollenhoven, Dirk, 4, 62, 99, 123, 177, 183, 192–3, 195, 211n9 Vriend, Sharon, 78 vu University Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit; Free University), 177, 212n6 “Waste Land, The,” 54 West, Cornel, 162 Westphal, Merold, 69 Williams, Melissa, 177 Wisdom, 98, 101

Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 7, 9–10, 18–19, 21, 28–9, 52, 147, 165, 176–7, 192– 4, 216n20, 217n22, 221n24, 224n4, 227n18; Art in Action, 30–2, 35–6, 89, 123, 215n15, 221n23; Art Rethought, 205n25, 215n15, 227n18; Educating for Shalom, 202n13, 224n4, 227n18; philosophy of art, 30–3, 35–6, 89–95, 122– 5, 204–5n25; Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 27; Works and Worlds of Art, 214–15n9 Women’s Memorial in Bloemfontein, 71, 91 Wong, Fran, 71 Words & Images exhibit, 82–3 worldview philosophy, 10–11, 89–92, 209n51, 214–15n9; and art, 49–52; of Schaeffer, 8, 39–40, 45–57, 207n2 worship, 16–17, 21, 23, 183, 185–8, 193–5 Zero Dark Thirty, 110, 114–15 Zuidervaart, Lambert: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 207n34; Art in Public, 116–22, 207n34, 216n18, 217n20, 218n20, 220n12, 220n15, 220n16, 221n25; Artistic Truth, 111–15, 215n9, 218n20, 219n6; The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy, 9, 77, 31, 215n11; autobiography of, 60–1, 169, 170– 1, 185–7, 194–5; Dog-Kissed Tears, 196; Pledges of Jubilee, 8–10, 63, 65, 67–75, 90–1, 101; Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 4–5, 205n33, 206n34, 206n8, 207n29, 211n9, 212n3, 214n4, 216n16, 221n25, 223n15, 227n22