Explainer
Art
Culture
Identity
5 min read

Controversial art: can the critic love their neighbour?

What to do when confronted with contentious culture.

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

Two people run though a darkened art gallery towards a body lying amongst photography paraphanalia
Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code.
Sony Pictures.

In the wake of the controversy over the Olympic opening ceremony, based as it was on a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Christians as to what was being portrayed, you may be perplexed or confused by the different ways Christians respond to controversial art or media portrayals that are perceived to be an attack on core Christian beliefs. If that is you, here are some thoughts as to why it is that Christians react in a range of different ways.  

Our responses are always underpinned by depth of relationship with and commitment to Jesus, the one who has turned our lives upside down and filled us with his Spirit. Our sense of what it is that Jesus has done for us and what it is that relationship with Jesus means to us is the determinative factor affecting our response when we perceive the One we love and who loves us to have been maligned or mocked. 

For some, we feel a need to stand with or defend Jesus whenever we perceive that he is under attack, and we have seen that instinctive response apparent in reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony. However, instinctive emotive responses run the risk of pre-empting more reasoned or reflective responses. That has certainly been the case here, as what many Christians perceived to have been a parody of the Last Supper was not actually that at all. Instead, the sequence was a portrayal of the feast of Dionysius, so had nothing to do with the Last Supper at all.  

Christians, as here, are often too quick to make allegations of blasphemy without actually understanding what is being portrayed. I have, unfortunately, seen many similar examples within my lifetime. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinemas, while Christian organisations, like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse, lobbied for those films to be banned.  

God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery. 

However, interestingly, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets, churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church. 

The protests against such films often did not tally with the content of the films themselves and displayed a lack of understanding of them, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, a former Dean of King’s College London, has said of Life of Brian, “those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were ‘embarrassingly’ ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message”. Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced that stereotype.  

As a result, the Church had to learn again that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites and the like that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised, making use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims. These created a conversation with the wider community that was far more constructive than the kind of knee-jerk reactions we have seen to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. 

Some of these knee-jerk reactions derive from a sense, in the West, that the dominant place Christianity used to have in society has been eroded leading some to think that our values and beliefs are under threat. This reveals an underlying insecurity which it is surprising to find in those who believe that God is all-powerful and in control of human history. God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.  

Indeed, the reverse is the case, as, in Jesus, God deliberately entered human history to experience human life in all its facets, including real mockery and suffering, to show that such experiences are not defining and can be transcended through love and sacrifice. Such a God does not require those who follow to become defensive themselves when the path of mockery is actually the path to resurrection and renewal.    

Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. 

So, what might a more constructive and productive response to controversies entail? Taking time to reflect and to understand what it is we are experiencing would be a much better place to start. The Olympic opening ceremony was a celebration of French culture, which highlighted images from the Louvre in particular. Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is in Italy and does not include a blue Dionysius. With some reflection and investigation, that would quickly have become apparent. Similarly, the scene to which Christians objected in The Last Temptation of Christ was just what it said on the tin, the last temptation Jesus faced. It was a temptation that he rejected, and the film was all the more powerful as a depiction of the incarnation as a result. 

Then, we can see that what the Christ who embraced human life through the incarnation calls us to is a charitable hermeneutic (how we interpret), when it comes to receiving, understanding and commenting on the culture around us. Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.  

With the beautiful secret of a charitable hermeneutic, we might, perhaps, look again at the Olympic opening ceremony and appreciate the intent of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the ceremony, when he said that religious subversion had never been his intention: “We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.” 

 

Article
Art
Creed
Space
5 min read

How black holes illuminate love’s greatest story

The universe’s darkest mysteries hold strange parallels with Christ’s Passion

Jake is a former BBC journalist turned writer and speaker about art and faith.

A spital galaxy coloured red, white and black.
A composite image of Andromeda galaxy.
NASA/JPL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to the BBC radio show In Our Time, I’ve found a new pleasure in life. It is this: to learn about the enormity of outer space, and the absurdity of what goes on there, and to share what I find with anyone who’s interested. By ‘anyone’, I mean my wife. But now that Seen & Unseen have published this, I mean you too. 

Or that mysterious cosmic rays from deep space regularly sail straight through the bodies of each of us, and scientists are baffled as to what might have created them? Did you know that a tiny, pale area of the night sky once named the ‘little smudge’, is now known to be the biggest thing anyone will ever see with the naked eye: the Andromeda galaxy? And did you know that the strength of gravity on Venus would crush you instantly? I could go on indefinitely. 

The centrepiece of all this galactic trivia, however, is reserved for black holes. Almost everything about them fascinates, baffles and scares me.  

Black holes are the remnants of dead stars that have collapsed in on themselves, creating a gravitational field so powerful that nothing – not even light – can escape. If you were to pass over its threshold, you’d be obliterated as you get pulled towards the black hole’s infinitely dense centre.  

They get even stranger though. Inside them, astrophysicists say, the laws of physics break down completely. Time and space somehow swap places, they say. And even though anything pulled in by a black hole's gravity is crushed by unimaginable force, in some sense it may be preserved and – in theory – might end up elsewhere, in a new form. It is a death that might not in fact be the end of us. 

There are many black holes – there’s one at the centre of our galaxy. But even though we can study them and develop scientific theories about them, we have not come close to grasping them in all their terrifying and monumental glory. What goes on inside them is, and perhaps always will be, an unfathomable mystery. 

This is why I’d love to see them refracted through the eyes and hearts of poets and artists, philosophers and theologians. What might their strangeness tell us about their creation, their creator? What might they tell us about how to live our lives? And if gravity at its most intense can upturn the laws of science, bamboozle great minds, and maybe even turn death into new life, then might other forces of attraction that do not adhere to known laws of physics, like love, do the same?  

Scenes from the Passion of Christ by Hans Memling.

A painting of a medieval cityscape.
Hans Memling, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In dwelling on questions like these, I have found this painting to be strangely helpful. It tells a love story that – in terms of its sheer intensity, its pull upon us, its utter strangeness, its death-defying endpoint – is not a bad match for a black hole. It’s called Scenes From The Passion Of Christ, it’s by the northern European painter Hans Memling, and when I first saw it I thought it looked silly.  

Why cram onto one small canvas over twenty scenes from the final eight days of Jesus’s life on Earth? It’s like a cartoon strip without the white lines to divide up each scene. We see Jesus welcomed by a crowd, betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, sentenced by Pilate, stripped by henchmen, humiliated by another crowd, crucified by soldiers, and buried by loved ones. We see him upending a table, praying for an escape route, sharing bread and wine, carrying a cross, emerging from the grave, and appearing to his followers.  

It reduces the crucifixion to a few square millimetres at the top. It sidelines the heart of Jesus’ story – the resurrection – to the far right edge. It shrinks Jerusalem to a tiny labyrinth resembling an MC Escher painting. It is daytime and nighttime. It is disorientating. And it is claustrophobic. But I think it is also brilliant, and it’s made me look in a new way at the strangest of weeks in the story of the world.  

By showing us so much convening at this moment in space and time, we sense how impossible it would have been for Jesus’s followers to compute anything that went on during that week. As each event unfolded, they would have had to rethink what might come next, whilst dealing with some pretty overwhelming emotions. They would have had no time or space to process any of it. It seems perfect, therefore, that in this painting, we don’t either.  

But as I look at it now, I wonder: have we actually processed these events, two thousand years later? Do Christianity’s attempts to explain everything that went on here really do justice to a story in which divine love does some of the unfathomably strange things that a black hole does? Or do these explanations tell us more about our own way of thinking than they do God’s?  

I think there is a tendency – which I see in myself and in most churches I have attended – to resist the weird, mysterious and inexplicable nature of this story. We draw heavily on logic and evidence to try and explain a story that defies both. But just as it is within the boundaries of a black hole, so it is within the frame of this painting: the old rules no longer apply. Divine love manifests itself in ways we cannot yet fathom. Pretending otherwise saps power from the story.   

At the top right corner of the painting, there is a tiny dot on the seashore. It’s the last image of Jesus in this painting. And next to it, a church. Here, the baton is being handed over from Jesus to those who follow him. The church is now the ‘body of Christ’, tasked with embodying infinite love in a world that badly needs it.  

What a daunting task. Frankly, it can be easier to believe in a bizarre series of events from two millennia ago, than in a church here and now, comprised of people as flawed as I am, that is meant to be capable of embodying a world-changing love.  

And that is why I am so drawn to black holes, and to this painting. In them, I see that impossible things can and do happen; that unfathomable mysteries are littered throughout reality; that these mysteries are not so much problems to solve as they are wonders to revel in; that the narrow, rational mindset in which I too often dwell is small and limiting; and that an overwhelming force of attraction can and will overpower anything in its way. 

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