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5 min read

Bear Grylls: Why I'm retelling the greatest story ever told

Why the tougher path often ends up being the most fulfilling

Bear is an adventurer, writer, and broadcaster.

A wet-looking Bear Grylls looks at the camera.
Bear Grylls.

As a young teenager, whenever I came across stories about Jesus, he seemed to be about peace, kindness, sacrifice, freedom and affirmation. Everybody he encountered – rich, poor, sick, healthy – seemed to walk away with their life changed. It made me want to learn more about him.  

It wasn’t religion I was after – as a teenager I wasn’t exactly hungry for more rules and restrictions – but I did like the sound of the freedom and empowerment that seemed to come from being around this guy. What I didn’t know was how it would truly change me from the inside out. 

Having a Christian faith can be difficult to articulate, but I know I have the light of the Almighty within me. At times I have ignored it and tried to live without it. But my heart is restless when I try to live on my strength alone. I am not too proud to admit that I need my Saviour within me. 

And it’s easy to be cynical about faith, but I have realised that doubts are ok. That’s part of it all. To seek truth and choose faith is courageous. Life and the wild have taught me that the tougher path often ends up being the most fulfilling one. 

I’ve witnessed the gift God gives us change so many lives over the years. None of us deserves it. I certainly don’t. If anything, I am more aware than ever how often I have failed, yet still I am forgiven. That’s why Christ turned everything on its head. His forgiveness is free because he has paid the price. He took our place on the cross. He died to set us free. No wonder they call it the greatest story ever told. 

The story I have written in my new book is His story, Jesus’ own story, told from the perspective of the first eyewit­nesses. I deliberately stuck closely to the accounts recorded in the four gospels, though some dialogue and other details have been added for context and flow. But not a single word of Jesus has been changed from the original accounts in the New Testament. I have used different English translations to capture his words depending on the context. 

In writing a book like this, I also wanted to be authentic to the original setting and to avoid anglicised names that are over-familiar to many of us. The region in which Yeshua (Jesus) lived was complicated and remains contested to this day. Greek and Latin were the dominant languages throughout the Roman Empire at that time. Yeshua himself was Jewish and would have read the Scriptures in Hebrew. However, as a Galilean, Yeshua’s everyday language would have been Aramaic. The Gospels beautifully preserve some of Jesus’ most intimate words in Aramaic.  

So I’ve used a mixture of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic names for people and places to reflect the social context of Yeshua’s time.  

As we have just passed Easter, here is a small section from the book when a small selection of Yeshua’s followers saw him ascend into heaven, ahead of that great Pentecost Sunday.  

WHEN forty days had passed since he first appeared in the garden, Yeshua made his final appearance to us. One moment we were alone, then there he was among us, again. He said nothing about this being the last physical visitation that he would make. With hindsight, I should have known. 

He led us out of the house, down through the city gates and along the valley, up beyond Gad Smane and into the hills towards Beth ’Anya. The journey we had done so many times together. 

When we reached the top of this small hill, called Tura Zita, the Mount of Olives, Yeshua turned and stopped. He reached out his hands to us and held on tight to each of us in turn. Andreas asked him, ‘Master, are you going to restore your kingdom now? Is this the time?’ 

Yeshua told them that God’s own Spirit would come to them. ‘Dates and times. They are not for you to know. But the Holy Spirit will come upon you and give you power. You will be my witnesses. You will tell people everywhere about me – in Yerushalayim, in the rest of Yehuda, in Samaria, and in every part of the world.’ 

His arms were now raised above him, and his eyes closed. His head lifted up to the heavens. Suddenly, the light around him started to change. And a brightness began to shine out from him. A brightness that was almost impossible to look at. Then a cloud began to form around him. A cloud that circled him and slowly began to lift Yeshua off the ground. 

We all stood there, holding each other, and we watched our friend – the Master, the Lord, the Messiah – slowly disappear among the cloud until he was gone. There was no fanfare. No grand goodbye. Just that swirling cloud around him as he was raised higher and higher. 

And then, just like that, Yeshua was gone.  

We were left staring up into the clouds above. 

As we stood there, suddenly two angels appeared beside us.  

‘You Galileans! Why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky?’ 

We all looked at each other in awed surprise. But with no paralysing fear anymore. 

How strange, I thought, that this is no longer strange. 

Then one of the angels spoke: ‘This very Yeshua who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly – and mysteriously – as he left.’ 

 

Join Bear for an exclusive event in London on the evening of 18 June where he’ll share more about his faith and The Greatest Story Ever Told.

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Art
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5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.
Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating. 

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art. 

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it? 

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.  

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics. 

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books? 

 JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration. 

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others. 

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?       

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.  

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns. 

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period? 

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well. 

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such. 

 

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)