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By ChrisW, 20 November 2009 7:02 pm

It would be very tempting to pursue the theme announced in the comments to last week’s blog that I am not simply banned in Tibet but actually threatened by Tibetans. The idea of mysterious Tibetan assassins lying in wait for me (what with? yak prods? yurt stakes?) is so wonderful that I refuse to countenance the possibility that the death threat merely comes from one of my mildly deranged students who probably thinks that Tibet is some sort of London fashion emporium.

Actually, the week actually brought fairly serious news for those of us engaged in Christian writing: namely the fact that the curious tripartite organisation that is Wesley Owen (bookshops), Authentic (books) and the United Bible Society are effectively bankrupt and are in the hands of something close to a receiver. This is sad and difficult news not simply because they owe me several hundred pounds in royalties. Nearly 500 jobs are at stake and I have a suspicion that with the state of retail and publishing in this country many of those who lose their job will not easily find other ones. Incidentally, this is part of something of a general malaise in this sector of publishing: I gather that Borders is also in a perilous state at the moment.

I have some specific comments on these matters but they are not really suitable for blogging. Let me instead say that I’m praying for some sort of solution to this problem but I feel that whoever takes over has at least three deep obstacles to deal with

Obstacle 1) Book readership has declined catastrophically in society in general and only slightly less amongst Christians. I commented to someone earlier this week that if I walked past five hundred of our students in the corridors and common rooms I would barely see one reading a book (and, in all probability, that would be a vampire book). They text, they wriggle and tap at computer games, they play cards, they access the Internet, but they very rarely read. (The fact that some of our students are of the highest calibre makes it all rather more worrying.) As so often with social trends I suspect the church is merely a few years behind. Our own church, which includes a very high number of doctorates, is not marked by high levels of reading. It would be a fascinating exercise to ask from the pulpit, how many people had bought or read a Christian book in the previous month. I’m not sure I have the courage to raise the question. Exactly why there has been this decline ought to be discussed some other day. Is the key factor the rise of experiential-based worship? Or the growth of the Internet? Or is it just the busyness of modern society? Anyone attempting to market Christian books these days has to grapple with this waning literacy. And trust me, when you get out of the habit of reading books then soon the very idea of reading a book becomes a hurdle that has to be overcome rather than a delight to wallow in. Incidentally, I should say that not all young people in churches do not read: both our sons are very literate members of theologically conservative churches that regularly proclaim the importance of reading.

Obstacle 2) Purchasing on the Internet has now become the exception rather than the norm. To be honest it is so easy buying books on the Internet that I find myself doing it more and more frequently. Let’s say I realise that I need a book. What are the alternatives? I could get out the car, drive down to town, try and park, find a bookshop, locate the book section and then probably find that the book wasn’t there but they could get it for me in a week or so at full price. I then have to return back home. Goodbye the best part of two hours. Or I could call up Amazon, browse around, check the reviews, order online and have it delivered within little more than 48 hours at a discount price. All without leaving my seat and probably within ten minutes. It’s not a hard decision is it? I wish it was otherwise: I love bookshops but the equations don’t stack up

Obstacle 3) Digital downloads are finally beginning to make inroads against paper books. Around ten years ago someone got in touch with me trying to get digital publication rights for the two books I wrote as John Howarth, Heart of Stone and Rock of Refuge. I was assured that digital book readers were going to take off. They weren’t then but it looks like they will soon will with Kindle and its kin. In fact my most recent purchases of theological literature have been in digital format. I have recently moved to the new Logos Bible Software 4 (very nice) which seems to be the winner in the battle for Bible study and research software, and bought some books for that. No, I don’t like reading on screen but I do like to be able to painlessly reference and search books like this. But I can’t help but feel that, as digital downloads have largely squeezed record shops out of existence, so downloads may do just the same for bookshops.

So with these three big obstacles you would probably assume that I am pessimistic. Curiously enough, I am not entirely so. I feel convinced there must be a way forward for Christian publishing. However I have a strong feeling that it will be based, not around the model of the Christian bookshop as a major profit-making enterprise, but as the Christian bookshop as an expression of church service to the community. But I’m open to bright ideas. And I’m pretty sure our publishing companies are too.

Have a good week,

Chris

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By ChrisW, 13 November 2009 6:32 pm

If you remember my Lamb among the Stars books you will remember something called the Technology Protocols where the Assembly critically and carefully evaluated any technology before adopting it. This, of course, is in total contrast to our own dear world where we blunder in first and only worry later. Anyway this week I have been thinking about the Internet. My meditations were triggered by references to comments by Eugene Kaspersky, the eponymous Russian CEO of Kaspersky Labs, who wants the abolition of net anonymity and for us all to access a newer faster and cleaner web through a digital passport.

My ponderings were heightened when, having received an e-mail from the DXO Labs saying that version six of their excellent (if slightly expensive) photo processing software was now available I checked on the Internet for reviews on it. To my astonishment, I found that within two days of the software being launched six or seven sites were already claiming to offer cracked downloads. (Incidentally, don’t even think about it; there is an awful lot of evidence that most – if not all – of such sites are teaming with viruses.) So what are we to do with the Internet?

There’s certainly a lot morally wrong with the web. There is cracked software with viruses, porn, Facebook bullying, slander, an awful lot of lunacy as well as an almost infinite number of ways to separate you from your money. (We had a missionary friend staying with us last week who, while checking his e-mail, found that he had an apparently authentic message from an old friend saying that he was in Nigeria and had been robbed and urgently needed some money to get his passport replaced. It was merely the latest twist on an old, old scam.) I suppose too, if you want to look for them, there are also terrorists and paedophiles.

And yet…. I was talking at length recently with someone who has worked an awful lot with the cults and he said how difficult they are finding the Internet. In the ‘good old days’ the cults specialised in restricting information to members. Knowledge was trickled down on a need-to-know basis and very heavily censored. If a Jehovah’s Witness, say, wanted to find out any alternative view on their religion he or she had to find a Christian or secular bookshop and openly purchase a book. Now though, a few keystrokes will reveal websites of ex-members, lurid details of scandals and very good arguments against what is being taught. In short, in the age of Google it’s hard to hide dirty washing, whether it be intellectual or moral. And the best argument against Kaspersky’s dream of the new, passport-only Internet is that it would be a bad day for truth if it ever came to be. I have no doubt that there are those in Beijing, Saudi Arabia and say it not too loudly, the Kremlin, who would love to see such a tamed, controlled and neutered Internet.

So what do we do about the Internet? Quite simply I don’t know. The problem in evaluating the problem from a Christian point of view is that here several competing concerns come together. A first is the Christian commitment to the publishing the truth: for nearly three hundred years Christianity grew as an underground organisation. And I am old enough to have helped smuggle Bibles across the Iron Curtain. A second concern is that we wish to protect the weak; I may have seen through that Nigerian scam but would everybody? A third concern is that we know that there is a spirit of corruption in the world which ruins even good things so that, in hindsight, the corruption of the Internet was almost inevitable. ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is a profoundly Christian saying. That applies very well to the awesome transnational potential of the Internet.

Yet even if I have no specific remedy I have no doubt that we need to do some thinking about what is happening. The temptation is that because of the very complexity of the problem we simply shrug our shoulders in despair. I think Eugene Kaspersky is wrong but he is right to open the debate.

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By ChrisW, 6 November 2009 6:39 pm

Thank you all for considering my mystery word last week. I think in the end I probably decided that it needs a combination of words: ‘unsensational-but-satisfying’, ‘delivers-the-goods’, ‘excellent-and-unflashy.’ I suspect that this sort of thing works much better in German than English.

I have just about recovered from my cold/flu. I have no idea whether it was the swine flu but I can’t remember ever having been knocked out so long. It’s a useful reminder not to take good health for granted!

I have started to run a series of lunchtime classes on what is called Critical Thinking. Critical thinking is the semi-formal process of analysing arguments to identify reasons and conclusions and whether the evidence fully justifies the claims. It’s an odd sort of subject; I suspect in the old days you probably did it as part of English GCSE. Nowadays it seems to have gone missing but our higher-level universities, notably Oxford and Cambridge, are increasingly setting test papers which require a fairly sophisticated analysis of arguments using this sort of approach. Anyway it was rather gratifying that my geology room was crammed full with 30+ students today, many of whom have a reasonable chance of being interviewed at least for Oxford and Cambridge. It is actually good because it encourages me to think logically.

I spoke at Swansea University Christian Union this week (it’s been a busy week) on God’s Omniscience, Omnipresence and Omnipotence. Phew! There were a hundred or so students and a good atmosphere. The one thing that somewhat perturbed me was that although I touched on all sorts of important and useful things the only questions I got afterwards were all to do with the creation and evolution debate; something that I had alluded to in the briefest possible manner. I find it somewhat disturbing that what is, by any account, a rather peripheral debate (we are all creationists in some sense  has taken centre stage.

What else? Without saying too much I have had a rather intriguing series of e-mails from someone (let’s just call him M.) from the Middle East who knows me as a professional geologist and who has been asking some interesting and penetrating questions about my Christian faith in a very friendly and open way. He has just asked me to explain the doctrine of the Trinity and how Christians can pray to Jesus without committing the sin of polytheism. Well that’s going to be an easy one isn’t it? (Is there an emoticon for irony?). That’s my next task this evening and I would value prayer.

Finally, for those of you who are fans of technology, Mr. Google has given us a nice new present which so far has not been widely publicised. If you use Google Earth (and I use it at least once or twice a day in teaching) turn on 3-D Buildings and Photorealistic on the side panel and take a look at New York, Birmingham, Cardiff or Dublin. All being well if you have a reasonably fast modem connection and a tolerable graphics card you should see the landscape slowly spring alive with wonderful 3-D buildings which really look realistic. (Two tricks for Google Earth that not everybody knows: 1. set vertical exaggeration to around 1.7 in order to make landscape look realistic and 2. use a mouse with a scroll wheel in the middle and press down on it. ) To say it’s awesome is an understatement: I showed it to our head of IT who one presumes has seen everything and twenty minutes later he was still playing with it  like a happy child. On a slightly reflective note, I’m actually wondering whether one of the side-effects of being made in the image of God is that we like to see things as he sees them. But that apart, it’s pretty awesome to swoop and wheel around the skyscrapers. I’m wondering if I do it enough whether it will cure my vertigo.

3D google

top-down skyscrapers

Have a good week!

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By ChrisW, 30 October 2009 6:30 pm

Well my flu is more or less over but I don’t feel inclined to tackle the heights of theological debate just at the moment, although thank you all for your contributions. Today I want to try something else and it’s still a slightly difficult topic. You see I was sitting in traffic the other day, listening to yet another volume in Suzuki’s excellent Bach series, and I tried – and failed – to come up with a word to describe the qualities of the performance. In the end I felt I that there probably wasn’t an English word to describe the sentiment I want to express. Not only that but I realised that if such an adjective existed I would be able to use it for an awful lot of things that I value. ‘Go on!’ I hear you say ‘what was it?’ Well here the problem begins because, of course, there isn’t a single word to describe it. If there was I wouldn’t be writing this blog would I?

Let’s start by saying that the missing adjective is an admirable quality that brings together virtues from three separate areas. First, it is close to such ideas as ‘reliable’, ‘trustworthy’ and ‘will never you down’. Yet it is more than merely reliable because it is also the quality of being consistently good and even excellent. Second, there is also something about it that is, well, understated: it doesn’t draw attention to itself, it isn’t flamboyant or garish but it just does what has to be done and does it well. In fact, it can be so understated that you even forget it’s there. A final aspect is that it is profoundly ‘comfortable’ and never awkward, unpleasant or challenging. The nearest word I can come to is the word ‘homely’ but that isn’t quite right. (If memory serves me correctly, in the old days if you couldn’t call a girl ‘pretty’ you called her ‘homely’ which was very definitely damning with faint praise.)

Do you sense what I’m trying to express? Perhaps you are fluent in a language in which such a word exists. If such a word was available in English then I would use it not just for this series, but for many other things. I might start with the trainers I am wearing at the moment (reliable, comfortable and very unflamboyant). I would use it (99% of the time) for the now ageing turbodiesel VW Golf that I go to work in. I have colleagues for whom I could probably use this word; dependable, easy to overlook but always pleasant and always comfortable to be with. I live in a house for which I could use the word. I have at least one anorak which would be accurately described this way. Many of us are fortunate enough to have marriage partners who we would happily describe with such an adjective. I’ve no doubt that C S Lewis had pubs (especially on wet winter nights) for which he would have used such a word gladly. In fact, I’m fairly certain that no single word exists in English. If it did I have no doubt it would be used frequently by poets and writers for the English rural landscape itself, for it applies to that: consistently good, quietly understated and easy to be at home with.

By now you are probably thinking well this will be one of those rare blogs where Chris doesn’t bring in Christianity. Well I’m sorry to disappoint you; isn’t it precisely this sort of quality (unfailing, unobtrusive, and never irritating) than actually conveys the sort of consistent Christian life that we really ought to live? Yet the interesting thing is that these qualities are rarely trumpeted as being desirable values today. It seems to me that we are in danger of being taught to applaud only the dramatic and even the shocking rather than those things that are ‘merely’ good, decent and workmanlike. Passion and even infatuation are elevated over affection and compassion. We are asked to applaud celebrities and megastars with their towering and brittle egos rather than men and women who do ordinary jobs effectively modestly and with grace. No, whatever we decide we could call my mystery virtue, I think I’ll happily stick with that.

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By ChrisW, 23 October 2009 7:34 pm

There were a number of possible topics to write on this week but I am disinclined to touch them. In part it is that I am a bit drained because I have just had flu and also because I have just upgraded my computer to Windows 7. (Very nice, thank you, but it’s really just Vista working as it ought to have done.) Instead I think I will look at one or two of the issues raised in the blog two weeks ago on ‘K’s Argument’. K, very kindly, has come out fighting in defence of fundamentalism as being at least logically consistent. This of course raises the interesting question ‘What is fundamentalism?’ I remember a member of our church coming to me at the end of one service with a worried look and asking me in that quiet ‘I-do-not-wish-to-be-overheard’ tone of voice, ‘Chris, am I a fundamentalist?’

You could of course try and define fundamentalism in terms of specific creedal beliefs; such as believing in a creation in a literal six days, holding to the authorship of Isaiah by a single person, not doubting a single miracle in Scripture, belief in an imminent Rapture, etc. I think however this is very difficult on all sorts of grounds. Let’s say you came up with ten criteria, what you do? Give a ‘Fundamentalism Index? ‘He’s a 10 out of 10 fundamentalist.’ It all seems rather mechanical. Besides how do we know which fundamentals are truly fundamental?

It also seems to overlook the fact that we vaguely know that there is more to fundamentalism than simply holding to a tight creedal confession.  Now please don’t get me wrong, creeds are vitally important but I would hazard a guess that there is something else going on here. In fact I think that Catherine (who I don’t always agree with!) is close to the mark when she describes fundamentalism as easy. There is indeed a simplicity to fundamentalism; it is a religion that shuns questioning. And when you get rid of questions life becomes really quite simple. You are all singing from the same hymn sheet because there is no other hymn sheet (and if there is, those who sing from it are going to hell). Yet I think behind that is something else and I think it is fear.

A nice image I came across a number of years ago and I wish I could remember who coined it said that the difference between fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism is something like the difference in mediaeval times between a walled city and a market town. Fundamentalism is a religion of barriers, battlements and, just occasionally, burning oil. It is haunted by the fear of the enemy (and isn’t there always an enemy?). The enemy may be Catholics, New-Agers or – most dangerous of all because they are wolves in sheep’s clothing – Liberals. There is no engagement with the enemy, no dialogue. All there is survival and conflict. As the Rev Ian Paisley used to shout with his all too imitable Ulster accent: ‘No Surrender!’

Here Conservative Evangelicalism is very different. (I’m sorry about the clunky term but I think it’s best used here because it’s the faith that on the surface can appear to be most similar to fundamentalism.) At the heart of Conservative Evangelicalism is the relationship with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit. That affects everything, not least how we view others. With them there is (or ought to be) a courteous engagement, an open debating, a confident discussion. But to go back to the imagery; the gates are flung open. Yes it’s risky, but that’s the way it ought to be. You can’t do evangelism from behind the ramparts.

Anyway that’s my take on it. But I’m open for further discussions. Now if you excuse me I’ll go and  take my cough medicine…

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By ChrisW, 16 October 2009 6:00 pm

I see that they have just awarded the Nobel prizes. I have no particular comment to make on the most widely noted one (Barrack Obama’s award for peace) except that given that he has at least three years left in the White House, it is perhaps well, a little premature.

What did cross my mind was that if there were a Christian version of the Nobel prizes I’d certainly award one for the man or woman who could come up the right thing to say to those who you meet who have close relatives facing death. I have two colleagues/friends at the moment in this sort of situation, one where the affected relative is in their 20s; the other late 50s. It’s not easy to know what to say. At an earlier stage of their cancer, one could offer to pray for healing and I did, but now with both having developed secondaries and been pronounced incurable I’m less inclined that way. The problem is that however we phrase it, (and boy, do people avoid spelling it out) they face death.

Interestingly enough I actually hesitated writing that last little word, death and instead wrote ‘the big D’. And that of course is part of the issue. It’s not a case of applying the Christian solution to a problem, it’s that we are now so far back that we barely recognise there is a problem until it is staring us in the face. Today, death is the great unmentionable; the thing above all that that we must not talk about. An alien living amongst us might assume that modern humans believe that our life is endless because we so rarely talk of its ending. The result is we now live in what is effectively the worst of all possible worlds in this respect. Our culture has lost the Christian hope of resurrection beyond the grave but not regained the social and intellectual defences that most pagan societies have to enable them to handle the monstrosity of death. We don’t really know what death is except that it is an abomination and that it tears at the very fabric of our lives.

As with so many trends in the secular world there is a parallel (if slightly muted version) in the church. Within Christianity we pray for healing, rejoice that aches and pains have gone away in the name of Jesus, talk in distant and abstract terms about heaven and glory but rarely, if ever, dwell on the inevitable termination of bodily existence. It may be that it is a little bit of the trend I talked about last week, that we have decided to become so seeker-friendly in our churches that we don’t want to put people off by mentioning the great unmentionable. Even if it is an unavoidable unmentionable.

Let me make two cautious and related observations. The first is that these times of bereavement or impending bereavement are probably the worst time to share the Christian view of death, suffering and resurrection through Christ. There is too much aching and hurting for lectures. Such vital beliefs probably need to be taught (and rehearsed) in times when the sun shines, not when the clouds are gathering. You practice fire drills well before fires, not during them.

The second is that we probably ought to declare our belief in eternal life through Christ more readily and more frequently than we do. Again, difficult times are the worst times for us to come up with our own personal views on death. As I have mentioned recently I am currently listening through a lot of Bach’s cantatas. One of the plus points of doing this is that (particularly when I read the words in translation) I am exposed to a lot of nearly 400-year-old Lutheran theology from a very different church world. They did things differently there and it helps me put my own 21st-century faith in perspective. One of them, No. 161 has a title whose very words make you blink: Komm, du süße Todesstunde which is perhaps best translated ‘Come, O sweet hour of death’. A few lines give you its flavour:

“Pale death is my rosy dawn,
with this rises for me the sun
of glory and heavenly delight.

Therefore I sigh truly from the depths of my heart
for the last hour of death alone.
I desire to pasture soon with Christ.
I desire to depart from this world.”

Universally, modern commentators, even Christian ones, struggle with such sentiments. Yet we cannot accuse Bach, of all people, of being naïve about death; I forget how many of his children died in infancy, and on one appalling occasion he returned from a relatively short trip to find his wife dead and buried. It may be that he, and what theologians call the German Pietist school, went too far in looking on the bright side of death. But surely it seems undeniable that we have gone too far in the other direction.

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By ChrisW, 9 October 2009 6:00 pm

Let’s call him K. He is an American ex-Christian of some sort who follows these blogs and has written to me courteously at some length about my books. I have replied back, answering his questions as best I can and challenging him on his current agnosticism and the debate sporadically continues. K has an interesting take on Christianity which I think is worth sharing even if I think it is flawed.

Most of us are familiar with the standard kind of anti-Christian argument which begins “I can’t believe in Christianity because…” and then goes on to talk about our alleged views on women, science, homosexuality and so on. A major problem with this sort of argument is that it is extraordinarily naive. K’s argument is – at least on the surface – somewhat more sophisticated. To simplify his position somewhat, he claims that there are two major groups within Christianity: the hard-edged fundamentalists with their strident and uncompromising gospel and the fluffy seeker-centred ‘mainstream evangelicals’ (my term not his) with their gentle, winsome and somewhat soft-edged preaching. What K says is that he actually admires the fundamentalists more than the ‘mainstream evangelicals’. According to him they at least have intellectual consistency and some measure of honesty in their understanding of Scripture: they also are prepared to confront the world not to conform to it. For him although they adopt an unbelievable creed, the fundamentalists score in the area of integrity and ethics. In contrast, in a search for bridge building and populism the soft evangelicals have actually become so close to the world that they have lost any real integrity. Compromise has undone them.

First, I want to say that I think that there is something in his critique of seeker-sensitive Christianity that is worth considering. Let me give you one example: an old friend of mine does quite a bit of speaking on the troubled matter of ‘origins’ from a contemporary evangelical perspective that is rather sympathetic to evolution. I recently read a review of a debate he was in and the non-Christian commentator was actually quite dismissive; he detected nothing in any way distinctive in what my friend said and found it almost impossible to separate his position from that of his atheist opponent. Examples can be multiplied; for instance, it is hard for instance to separate the modern evangelical’s view of Sunday from that of anyone else. I think there is a real danger that in the interests of evangelism (or is it cowardice?) evangelicals try to blend into the world in such a way that we lose the radical difference that is perhaps Christianity’s most appealing feature. There is a tragic irony here: in an effort to preach the gospel effectively we somehow lose the gospel.

However I also want to point out that K has engaged in a clever sleight of hand. By splitting Christianity into two poles he has created two artificial positions. On the one hand are the manic fundamentalists who hold to an unbelievable creed but who are at least intellectually consistent. On the other are the jelly-like mainstream evangelicals who hold to a more believable creed but who suffer from the fatal intellectual flaw of compromise. He can’t follow the first party because they believe in manifest nonsense: he can’t follow the second because of their intellectual inconsistencies. His head prevents him from joining the fundamentalists, his conscience from joining the evangelicals. Thus doubly protected, K’s agnosticism is safe.

K’s perspective is no doubt shared widely. It is not enough to simply critique it. We have to admit that the churches are flawed; after all, they are made up of flawed people like me. Yet it is not the church that draws men and women to God, it is Christ. It sometimes seems to me that the greatest proof of the gospel is that, despite the church, men and women continue to come to God through Jesus Christ.

Have a good week.

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By ChrisW, 2 October 2009 7:24 pm

First of all, welcome to the new blog site which you’ll see is attached to my own website. There are lots of reasons for this but it ought to make things a lot easier. I presume you’ve got here from the old site, so please adjust your favourites accordingly.

This is one of those catching-up type of blogs. It’s been good, if busy, week here. After the ceaseless grey skies and endless rains of July and August, September has been almost totally dry here. Even if I haven’t been able to enjoy it most of the time, it’s still been pleasant. This week I had a really great field trip with 35 students to the south coast of Wales where we looked at the Carboniferous, Triassic and Jurassic rocks. The sun shone, the rocks were revealing and I was reduced to wearing a T-shirt on the last day of September. This is the Jurassic.

I’m afraid I don’t possibly engage with the responses that I get to my blog in the way I ought to. Writing the blog has become a regular Friday evening task which I (largely) enjoy and I don’t try and do too much during the week to it. We all know stories of writers whose writing suffered because they spent too much time dealing with the fan mail. Well I’m afraid I don’t have that much fan mail but this blog could preoccupy me. However that is not to neglect your contributions: I am not deliberately flattering you in saying that you almost all raise stimulating and challenging points.

Last week was no exception: I was fascinated by the feedback on Thomas Kinkade. Kirsty said effectively that she didn’t mind his paintings but they were ‘twee’. That raises an absolutely fascinating question as to whether in a world of suffering, woe and potential redemption we actually ought to do ‘twee.’ Mind you, I’ll take tweeness over in-your-face brutality and gratuitous ugliness any day. Boaz said some nice things and wondered quite provokingly about the nature of heaven and set me thinking about whether there will be any shadows there. Surely light needs some measure of darkness to emphasise it? Could you ever create a picture without some darkness? Taking the subject less metaphorically, could goodness be seen as goodness in the absence of evil? Well I’m reluctant to meditate on the nature of heaven (I have already done more than any man ought to do on that subject) but I wonder if it is worth considering that, although evil will be gone, the memory of it will be allowed to linger? There are at least hints in the book of Revelation that the redeemed will praise God because of what they were rescued from. In heaven, evil will be without power and threat but I’m pretty certain that we will not all be amnesiacs in that area. I wonder if in some way evil be will be preserved; like some sort of stuffed animal in a museum or as tales in books to remind us what the world once suffered. As others have said, perhaps what are wounds now will be merely scars there.

Zoomie added the revelation (or should I say ‘allegation’?) that the paintings were in fact mass produced by a team of copyists. While I cannot say that this is true or false, the sheer number of different paintings using common elements but done in an identical style is rather striking. Frankly, the thought had crossed my mind but I didn’t dare utter it. Of course, many great artists working to deadlines got their pupils to do various elements such as the sky and background and then filled in the foreground themselves. I read somewhere that Arthur Sullivan (the composer half of Gilbert and Sullivan) got his students to write many of his overtures using themes from the operettas. Nevertheless the suggestion here is of something on a much larger and more outrageous scale. When I mentioned the possibility to someone he said ‘I’m not surprised given the sort of painting he produces’. I think what he meant was poor art goes together with poor ethics. I think there is some truth in this but I’m still thinking it through. (Some great artists were utter rats). My take on this would be something along the following: If an artist is determined to create original and valued works of art, he or she is unlikely to get someone else to do that for them. Conversely, if they produce works of art that are neither original nor which they value, then it is hardly surprising that they might get others to do it for them. So its a broad, but not perfect, correlation. Anonymous (I think) defended poor old Kinkade but referred to a website presumably of their own work. The interesting thing was that I felt that the images on that site had precisely the freshness, newness and excitement that the tired old Kinkade images didn’t have.

Aranel made an interesting comment about an ailing friend who took comfort from the paintings. Now here, friends, is the problem with being a Christian critic. Faced with a brother or sister being comforted by some work of art that we dislike intensely, what can we do? I would say that if we are certain that it is actually doing no theological harm surely all we can do is mutter ‘bless you’ and tiptoe away as quietly as possible.

Have a really good week.

Every blessing

Chris

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By ChrisW, 25 September 2009 6:43 pm

I fear I’m going to make enemies with this blog but something has to be said. Last weekend we were on the edge of the Cotswolds for a family reunion and on the Sunday spent a couple of hours in the once picturesque but now rather tourist beset village of Broadway. There we found a shop devoted entirely to the works of the American artist Thomas Kinkade and we wandered around looking at the numerous prints and keeping our comments to ourselves. If by some fortune you do not know the work of this gentleman then here is a specimen.

And if you insist here’s another.

Now that’s probably all you need to know; his work is pretty much variations on a theme and instantly recognisable from ten paces. ‘Thomas who?’ I hear some of you say but what is interesting is this man is probably the world’s bestselling living artist.  You may consult his website (I have no intention of giving you the URL) and you will find that he declares himself ‘Thomas Kinkade: The Painter of Light’. (The last bit by the way he has rather modestly trademarked; although as some wit has remarked, ‘The Painter of Lite’ is a better title.) Now normally I would pass over such things but Kinkade makes claims to be a Christian and certainly a little fish logo rests over his signature. Not only that but the Wikipedia article on him (which I have no reason to disbelieve) tells us that his paintings are much loved amongst American Evangelicals. I have a nasty feeling that they are probably popular amongst British Evangelicals too. 

Now here I want to be careful. After all, we all disagree on aesthetic matters: and it could be -I suppose – that my intense dislike of these works is due to a sort of cultural snobbery or a personal dislike of American popular art. Well I’ve searched hard and I don’t think I’m guilty of either sin. Indeed, with respect to the latter I have to say that I have rather a soft spot for Norman Rockwell. I suppose too I want to be wary of what is no more than envy: Kinkade has certainly made a massive fortune through shrewd marketing: another wit calls him ‘the artist formally known as prints’. (By the way Kinkade attracts some extraordinary attacks: there are some spectacular and often hilarious parodies of his work on something awful.com). I also recognise that the man clearly has (or had) talent; there are well, portions of his paintings that are done well.  And let’s face it, in a world where dead sharks and unmade beds can be considered art it’s surely no bad thing to see landscapes and homely scenes. Yet when every excuse is made I have to say that I find these paintings bad art generally and, in particular, bad Christian Art.

I have spent some time considering why I dislike these paintings. There are several reasons. I loathe the formulaic and lazy repetition of elements (the glowing skies, the sombre trees, the absence of people, the snow draped rocks and above all, those wretched houses with golden light blazing through the windows as if every stove had suddenly gone supernova). I am sickened by the nauseous distorted colours which seem to me to be the visual equivalent of chocolate sauce and syrup on ice cream. Yet I think my biggest dislike of these paintings is simply that they are not true to the world. It’s not just that the water wheels he paints couldn’t turn, that no house ever glows like that, or that it’s sometimes impossible to know whether it is dawn or midday. It’s something more profound: these paintings are escapist in the worst sense of the word. In Kinkade’s world, no shadow falls. And because no shadow falls there can be neither redemption nor authenticity. His paintings, as Christian Art at the very least, are lies both about us and about the world.

By way of contrast (and I hope I don’t come over as an intellectual snob), I have been listening to Bach cantatas on the way to and from college. (The first 40 discs by the Japanese Christian Masaaki Suzuki have come out in a series of cheap box sets.) Anyway in Cantata 12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Klagen  (‘Weeping, lamenting, worrying, fearing’) there is a wonderful aria with the following haunting couplet probably based on Revelation 2.10 and 1 Corinthians 9:24.

‘Kreuz und Krone sind verbunden,
Kampf und Kleinod sind vereint.’

Which being translated is “Cross and crown are joined together, struggle and treasure are united”. The great authority on Bach, Durr, suggests that Kleinod should really be translated as ‘prize medal’: so maybe that last line ought to read “contest and prize are united.” Well maybe the alliteration is a little bit cheesy but frankly, it all seems so much truer to life and ultimately, infinitely more encouraging than all of Kinkade’s paintings.

Comments (3)

By ChrisW, 18 September 2009 6:00 pm

I don’t understand this blogging business; post something innocuous and you get lots of responses, say something outrageous and there is only silence. I thought for instance last week I would have lots of responses; instead Catherine took another position in her post (she made some fair points even if I don’t agree with them all) and we got not a single response. Oh well.

Anyway, some people might lament the fact that I am not hard-hitting enough, that I do not thrash about and lash the targets of the age with barbed witticisms and withering critiques. (Memo to self: must read Richard Dawkins’s new book – that should give me something to be venomous about.) There are several reasons why this is not a more acid blog and my belief in grace and forgiveness is only one of them.

One reason is something that has always lurked at the back of my mind but which has surfaced rather spectacularly in the UK; namely our extraordinary libel laws. I picked up a fascinating and disturbing case in a recent perusal of the New York Times website. The background is that a British science journalist of some repute, Simon Singh, wrote an article in The Guardian in which he said there was no evidence for some of the claims that the British Chiropractic Association makes about the health benefits of visiting a chiropractor. He specifically wrote, “The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.” That penultimate and incautious word bogus damned him and he is now being sued for libel by the BCA. He is in a desperate no-win situation. In order to successfully defend himself, he will have to come up with at least £25,000 and spend a couple of years battling the BCA; if he loses he will be hammered for the best part of quarter of a million.

The problem is that British libel laws are very biased. It is apparently very easy to bring a libel case against someone and astonishingly hard and costly to defend having made an allegedly libellous statement. The New York Times says that the average cost of defending a libel case in England and Wales is 140 times greater than it is in most of the rest of Europe. Not only that but English law favours the person who believes he or she says she has been defamed.

Now I know almost nothing about chiropractors. Until I did a bit of reading up on the subject I was not aware that there was something of a philosophy behind it and I am not qualified to say whether Singh is right or wrong. (Mind you, I have my suspicions.) The New York Times’s point of view was that the UK was definitely not a place for discussion of difficult scientific issues and I have to concur. What is surely legitimate discussion is being suppressed by the fear of punitive litigation.

If pushed to give a Christian take on this, I think I would want to say three things. The first is that, as those who are dedicated to the truth, we must have some sort of commitment to supporting open discussion even if the outcome can sometimes be abusive and hateful. ‘You will know the truth and the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32). Surely, one of the differences between Christian orthodoxy and fundamentalism is that orthodoxy is prepared to risk being criticised. That somewhat aberrant Puritan, Milton wrote in protest against censorship. (Mind you I wonder whether he would have persisted in his views had he seen what’s on the Internet.) If this sort of legal situation persists we will have a culture of nothing but blandness and empty words. Perhaps this is the root of the legendary English politeness: not goodness of heart but the fear of being sued!

The second is that in the sovereignty of God (and the stupidity of men) such actions can actually be astonishingly self-defeating. Courtesy of this action I, and I’m sure many others, have gone from being neutrally ignorant on chiropractors to being better informed and distinctly more negative.

The third is the comforting thought that we know that the truth will ultimately triumph. Perhaps in this life but certainly in the next, the lie will perish. A verdict will be given that is more definitive (and certainly more unarguable) than given by any judge and jury. And if necessary we can wait until then.

So if you do turn to this blog and find a fiery condemnation of some movement or individual, can probably guess that I have left the UK’s shores and am living abroad. In the meantime I will watch out for words like ‘bogus’.

Have a good week.