Change 1 comments

By Michael Capps

“All is flux; nothing stays still” —Heraclitus

I’ve been thinking about the topic of ‘change’. Certainly one of the reasons this is on my mind is because the arts conference which I co-direct is coming up this week and that is our theme. My friend and co-director Kim Alexander and I have often pondered this topic as we have observed over the years in our conference participants a tension between those who privilege the traditions and heroes of the past, and those who privilege the new and the modern, advancing a cause somewhat akin to progress.

Certainly, many of the questions and experiences faced by humankind are perennial, and the art of the past continues to speak to us deeply. Art reaches across time telling us of both then and now. For example, if I want a glimpse of what it felt like to live in New York in the 1920s, I can listen to George Gershwin. If want a hint of what it was like to be alive in fourteenth century France, I can listen to Guillaume de Machaut. Yet the direct meaning and force of such music is strangely undiminished despite the time and distance.

Even so, the artistic challenge that our traditions present can be intimidating, forcing us to take a new path, to break new ground. Moreover, as Walter Brueggemann observed in his Image interview, “truthful statements must continually be restated in order to remain truthful.” Consequently, we need to restate eternal truths in imaginative and vibrant ways, and transformations in art over the centuries can be seen as symptomatic of our humanity and our changing understanding of our physical and spiritual world.

For both art and faith, we can be tempted to receive a glimpse of a truth and then attempt to freeze it in an absolute. In doing so, we deny the generative force of both art and faith. Brueggemann goes on to say that the imagination offers a challenge to this temptation. As the purpose and impact of art adapts within our culture, so does our response, shifting the standards for a flourishing artistic culture. Moreover, the media and tools available to the artist constantly change, altering our engagement with the past, and with those alongside whom we work.

As art engages with faith, the artistic imagination can state eternal truths anew, and safeguard the strangeness of the gospel, preserving it from domestication by our ideologies and culture.

Yet we can tip the scales too far. We’ve had rough time of late with summary fiats and what not, declaring all traditions and prior artistic expressions as rubbish and no longer relevant. In this environment, art can become captive to trendy fads or totalizing views concerning what ought, and ought not, be made. Such a constrained vision can also more easily refuse to acknowledge good art that is outside contemporary categories.

Alfred North Whitehead once said that the art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. When neither gets the upper hand, the resulting tension becomes a good thing for the artist. We engage with one another in the here and now, just as we engage with our past and our traditions. We do this as we constantly shift our own faulty footing, seeking the one true foundation. Perhaps we will find along the way God’s endlessly changing expressions through unique people and times.