Art, Music, Creation, Difference, Violence, Harmony, and the Trinity

"Creation is the work of a dynamic, three-personed God and the members of the Trinity enjoy an eternal giving and receiving among one another. The doctrine of the Trinity informs us of both the personality and the dynamism of God - qualities that are suggested in the ancient term applied to the Trinity - perichoresis. It refers to the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity by extension perichoresis can be used to refer to God's relationship to the world whereby all things exist in him and through him; in him we live and move and have our being... why move?  Are we dancing when we have our being?
All of creation is somehow engaged in the life of the trinity is well.  John 17 in particular comes to mind where we read that in our growth in Christ God indwells us and we indwell Him.  So Father Son and Holy Spirit are dancing around each other and the Christian life is our entry into that dance.
Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart notes that while God was under no necessity to create, the act of creation flows out of the infinite love that's experienced by the members of the Trinity.  Hart writes:
"God's gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love.  Thus creation must be received before all else as a gift and beauty."

What is Worldliness?

“Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, think processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is that system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to their periphery any thought about God.

Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.”

–David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 29.

On "Givenness" ...

"I've tended to use 'givenness' in reflecting upon the given order that God has placed in creation, but creation also has a 'gift-quality' about it.  It's very existence doesn't need to be.
When I was in Sunday School as a kid, the first theological definition I can remember receiving was 'grace is unmerited favor'.  And we usually think of grace as coming after our sin, and yet the existence of all creation is an unmerited favor.  We didn't have to wait to sin to receive God's unmerited favor.
When we receive a great gift, we're delighted in the gift, but we're also delighted in the generosity of the Giver.  And so it is with the reception of a powerful work of art.
When I hear a thoughtful and attentive performance of a carefully crafted piece of music or when I watch a masterfully constructed film, I often have a sense of gratitude, not just to the performers or composer or director - but a gratitude to God as well; gratitude to live in a world where such joys are possible.
The gratitude that is felt by recipients of a gift typically resonates with the delight that is known by the Giver of the gift.  And that is a pattern built into creation."

- Ken Myers

The Perils of Exegetical Preaching

"The challenge for us who want to exegete the hair on a flea; we want to extract and reduce and deconstruct the rose and then tape it back together and pretend that it's a rose ... it's not!  You don't invite people into a morgue.  You invite them into a church to see a resurrection. You don't want to show them an autopsy on the text!"

- Dr Reg Grant, chair of Media Arts and Worship at Dallas Theological Seminary

Merry Christmas

There is one God, Yahweh, who created the world good and rules all things.  Violence and evil are not written into the fabric of creation but are due to sin and His righteous judgment on sin, and therefore there is hope of redemption from evil.  Ultimate reality is not a gaggle of gods, nor an autocrat, nor an impersonal Fate.  Rather, ultimate reality is Three Persons in an eternal communion of love.  Above us is a God who is love, whose love overflows in creating a world He did not need and in redeeming a world that had turned from Him.  Heaven is not a battlefield or a prison; it is a dance hall filled with song.  And, one day, earth will join in.

Peter Leithart
The Heroes of the City of Man

To Consider on the First week of Advent ...

"The two values that are becoming dominant in our culture are: efficiency and control.
I think those are inadequate as virtues.  There's nothing inherently virtuous about them and they tend to move us in non-virtuous directions.  I think we need less efficiency and to give up control over things in order to have more virtuous lives."

- Quentin Shultze, 
author of Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living virtuously in the Information Age

Entertainment and the Church

Entertainment values are very hard to quarantine.  They invade religion.  They are attracting an audience.  They are attracting clients.  How do you attract a client to a church?  You attract people who have been conditioned by decades of entertainment ... by entertaining them.
One of the things that the mega-church movement has been doing to attract its thousands of congregants is to devise the service of worship as entertainment through music, light shows, cappuccino carts and all these things.  The congregants will feel that they are at a rock concert and the religion is thrown in as an extra.
Entertainment is pervasive in every aspect of our lives and it drives our lives.  Entertainment is such a dominant force it tends to marginalize anything that's not entertaining.
The media create expectations for us and how our lives ought to proceed.  We live within those expectations.  And we are the first generation that is able to start to live within its illusions.

- Neal Gabler, author of Life: the Movie.