still thinking....

i talked about my anti-quality-image rant a couple posts ago to Greg & Lynn at Muggswigz the other night ...

i was saying that middle - low brow evangelicals got money in the last decade and started to get embarrassed about how lo-fi their gospel was -- so they started developing sheen for their gospel. Started to think that gloss would be worth their while. and i was ranting that that seemed so false -- that that image-conciousness seems in direct opposition to Jesus' tendency to minister to Samaritans, Lepers, Cripples & Children.

(Harry points out that in that culture -- children were a pure liability -- the likelihood is that they would die before adulthood but cost you lots in the meanwhile...hard for us to imagine given our child-centric culture.)

So Greg, sent an incisive challenge across the table...yeah, so, but you can't say the opposite is true can you? that the gospel is served by purposely NOT trying to present it with subtlety and clarity, style and beauty?

i'm always wondering whether or not this isn't one of those places where my values clash.

Sometimes Liberals value asceticism because of its connection to social justice -- if i sacrifice and live on less then someone else can live on more.

ascetics are not always the best of bed fellows with aesthetics.

And here's where liberals might frown at artists -- Judas protests to Jesus when the performance artist breaks open some lavish perfume and engages in a sensual inappropriate hair washing.

But its not the sensual norms that Judas protests – “we could feed a lot of poor with the money it cost for this!”

And that scowl has been retained in waves upon particularly the faces of protestant churches.

Lavish design and execution – art as worship has been rigorously lambasted as a violation of the Second Commandment – one of the great heresy of the Roman Catholic Church –

….so here’s how that long debate rubs my question – the defenders of “quality stamped all over it…” might say something like quality construction / aesthetics has eluded Christians for so long – why shouldn’t we adopt the idiom so that we become relevant?

So my argument that there’s a value clash between social justice and presentational beauty puts me in the unfortunate position of Judas’scowl – MUST WE (!) be so lavish !?!? when the poor are going hungry?

A few readers may not be following so let me be more explicit – “quality stamped all over it” was a mantra chanted by leadership at Cedarville College, my alma mater when I was a student there. Anything a Christian does – they suggested – should have quality stamped all over it. This mantra was then used to explain to critics in their constituency the sometimes lavish choices they made in building their buildings, contracting IBM to hardwire their campus at the front end of the tech curve. And while I was there I didn’t object to this ideology.

It’s only in retrospect that it smacks of external obsession, judging our faith based on the perceptions others develop about us (“how’s your ‘testimony’?”).

This burner is definitely still simmering…I’m having a hard time seeing through to the multiple issues at stake…