by Matthew Raley

Daumier was a prolific illustrator, so one of his fortes was vigorous characterization. I stumbled across this oil painting today and was struck by the commentary on its subject. Amid the gloom the collector, who gives an impression of age, seems to rest his desultory gaze on a gleaming woman. Has he turned away and then looked back over his shoulder?

The atmosphere is not one of pleasure, but of boredom. The aesthete's desiccated sensibilities reach for something beyond art for art's sake.

... is with the least apparent effort to make you wonder what was just said.

Matisse created this work when he was too weak to use a brush or a pencil. He made it by cutting pieces of colored paper. That's a persistence in vitality that I hope to have if the Lord should allow me to live long.

by Matthew Raley

This painting is about where the faces are pointed, and about evoking the key elements of a story to make a spiritual impact.

The fire is ready to receive the boy Isaac's body. His father Abraham has take the swing back with his arm that will end his son's life. But someone outside our frame of vision catches his sword, and Abraham's face jerks back and up to see.

Isaac's face, while he waits for the final blow to fall, is set on a ram caught in a bush immediately below him. He seems to be contemplating this ram in serenity, as if he understands the animal's significance for him as a substitute sacrifice.

The painting is a dramatic evocation of the words Abraham told Isaac: "The Lord will provide." And it demonstrates how biblical art can be edifying without the deadness of sentimentality.

by Matthew Raley

The drama of painting seems to begin with the brevity of drawing, in which every monochromatic gesture implies not only shape, but color, light, and texture. I just happened across this marvel in red chalk today.

Here is one of my favorites from the American master who died last week. The New York Times obituary could scarcely manage a compliment to Wyeth without copious references to how polarizing he was in the art world. For some reason, art that is unselfconsciously American has no legitimacy in those circles.

This picture is famous, and I think justly. Begin with the impact, lost on us now but still striking in 1877, of showing that an urban street's story is worth telling on canvas. Then observe the fine draftsmanship and the skillful effects like the water on stone, qualities that never lose impact.

I am also struck that the most dramatic effect of perspective, the vanishing-point building, is tempered not just by being in the background but by the faded colors of distance. Caillebotte is not striving to impress, but is creating a balanced design.

The story itself, for me, focuses on two pairs of eyes. The eyes of the top-hatted man look across the street at something, or someone. Hers, it seems, look at him.

By Matthew Raley

What Alfred Hitchcock might have staged, Friedlander caught.

by Matthew Raley

What attracts me to Matisse is the way he accentuates patterns by eliminating depth.

In this painting, as in so many of his works, he gives us a flat surface with a multitude of  designs vying for attention: one pattern on the floor, another on the red curtain, still another on the yellow wallpaper, more yet on the crown molding.

I don't think it's going too far to say that, without the illusion of depth, the two chairs, the railing on the balcony, and the violin case become abstracted design elements rather than representations.

They're just more patterns.

If we want models for Christian art that speaks truly and deeply, giving no concession to sentimentality, I nominate Dürer.

He not only gives us a stable, but a total wreck. I love the timbers balanced precariously above the courtyard, and the window swinging on its hinges in the room above baby Jesus. How many pigeons live in there? The plaster crumbling off the exterior and the trees growing out of the ruins in the background are also marvelous atmospheric touches.

But the thing that grabs me in this engraving is the fact that I have to hunt for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The figure in plain view is that of an old man preoccupied with pouring water into a too-narrow jar. In the stress of his task, he seems unaware that God is just up those neglected steps.

I have always been partial to intimate media -- such gems as art songs, strings quartets, and drawings. I am quickly absorbed.

In part, my love of drawings comes from childhood. My dad's charcoal drawings always hung in our home when I was small, and for me his draftsmanship had a definite voice. There is also the pleasure of good paper, the tactile interest of which I began to enjoy early. Though it might seem strange, I was also taken with the colors of drawings as boy. The browns, occasional reds, and blacks I found to be not austere but warm.

Now, most of all, I enjoy the power of simple and spare compositions.

This drawing is a favorite. The design books tell me that the horizontal lines create a calm atmosphere. I sense a gentle flow toward the right of this picture. And I especially like the ease with which Rembrandt moves my eye from the darker foreground to the actual focal point of the composition, the lighter and more distant boat.

My sermon on Sunday explored the connection between ignorance of God and unbelief. When God's people don't know his history, his promises, and the worldview he instantiates in the Bible, they cannot have confidence in him. In their worship, God becomes a mystery guest. The broad ignorance of American evangelicals about the faith they claim is well-documented. But I have many questions. Specifically, what kind of ignorance are we facing? In order to have abiding faith in God, what should evangelicals learn? And how?

Many have decried evangelicals' biblical illiteracy, which I have seen all too often. Once, at a banquet where I'd been invited to speak, I was seated next to a woman who'd been highly involved at the host church. She told me about a T.V. movie she had seen: a young man in olden times was sold into slavery by his own brothers, was taken to a foreign country, even wound up in prison, but eventually became the nation's ruler. The movie was really exciting, she said, adding brightly, "And it was based on a true story!"

There is, beyond this, a lack of doctrinal knowledge. People no longer learn a system of teaching about the faith, a biblically derived intellectual framework. Some even attack doctrine as a hindrance to faith.

Further, people lack a knowledge of devotional disciplines, which the spiritual formation movement now aims to teach. Further yet, there is a broad decline in practical family skills like parenting, budgeting, and communication -- skills that used to be inherited but now have to be taught.

All these species of ignorance populate evangelical pews. Churches are filled with men and women who are confident socially -- who smile and laugh with their friends, and who are eager to be involved in activities. Many of the people have confident political views as well. But let God become the sole focus of conversation, and their eyes show a certain retreat, a vulnerability and wariness.

So, what are we dealing with?

First, we are oppressed not such much by individual ignorance as by cultural ignorance. Regardless of what individuals may or may not know, communities don't know enough. People do not have a large enough fund of shared knowledge.

Cultural knowledge is, as the rhyming preachers say, caught not taught. It is gained in the rhythms of a way of life. A person learns the story of Joseph deeply -- learns Joseph's traumas, learns his importance, learns the Lord's providence in his life -- not because she hears about him in a class, but because in her church Joseph is still alive. He is a constant reference point, an icon of God's faithfulness in human suffering. Joseph is shared.

Cultural knowledge is not fully conscious. The bulk of it is prejudicial. It is not theoretical or abstract, but instantiated. It is not even coherent, in the sense that the community has fully untangled all its paradoxes. Cultural knowledge is gut-level.

Which leads to a second point: evangelical ignorance is not merely a dearth of facts but of emotion. Evangelicals do not recognize the significance of the Bible, of doctrine, of devotional and practical godliness -- recognize the significance at gut-level. Spiritual realities leave them unmoved.

When people do not have shared knowledge, they do not feel deeply enough.

A Christian way of life in America has been lost. Its rhythms of community are loose, and its shared symbols are neglected or sentimentalized. For a long time now, evangelicalism has been a parasite on consumerism, having little vitality or nourishment on its own. This is why evangelicals become wary when they're confronted with God himself. They do not share him; they share worldliness.

Pastors have been frantically trying to replace cultural knowledge with mere training. Give the people more facts, more tools, more tips.

In particular, pastors have been trying to make applications of biblical knowledge using generalizations. Joseph's story isn't "practical enough" as Genesis narrates it. In order to become "practical," the man Joseph has to be atomized into a series of "principles" that can be "applied" to "real situations in your life." So, keep a good attitude in hardship. Always do your best, whether you're in prison or in power. Just like Joseph in olden times. See ya next week.

This training approach is not necessarily wrong. But it won't educate the kind of ignorance we face: it won't build up a community's shared knowledge. It won't train people's guts.

If evangelicals are going to believe God deeply again, the preacher will need to address his own ignorance. He will need to explore how the Bible instantiates truth artistically -- through poems, narratives, and, yes, sermons. He will need to find how he can instantiate the same truth, bringing the Bible's instances to life with such specificity and detail that no one can ignore the implications. He will need to recover a sense of drama with God as the central character, not human beings.

In other words, evangelical ignorance results from the emotional detachment of evangelical preachers.

The plain fact in John 2.10 is that Jesus makes the best wine. The contrast with Coke is instructive. No one makes the best Coke: what you're drinking is either Coke or it isn't. Coke is mass-produced according to a famously secret recipe, and the production is quality-controlled to ensure the brand keeps its identity. Indeed, the whole point of Coke is that the dose you drink now is indistinguishable from what you drank fifteen years ago.

Here's a ruthless reality: mass society has no interest in beauty. Mass society is fanatical about sameness because, in order to make money, a product has to appeal to the largest number of people. Any unusual characteristic that might irritate customers must be eliminated.

Maintain the ruthlessness just a moment longer. Churches that serve mass society have no interest in beauty. The ethic of sameness dictates that a church fit the prevailing tastes. If it does not, it will lose people. Such churches emphasize conformity rather than depth.

There are other reasons why the churches of mass society don't care about beauty.

For one thing, beauty costs too much. European churches of the 1700s had maintained music directors, composers, instrumental ensembles, and choirs for hundreds of years - a cultural investment that eventually matured into the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The fact that his music is one of the few remaining gospel witnesses on that continent doesn't ease the jaw-dropping impact of the price tag.

Beyond that, people who make beautiful things are weirdos. Bach was notoriously hard to get along with. He played the organ too loud. His music was too complicated.

Further, they're pretentious weirdos. Bach couldn't just play the violin. He had to write three and four parts for one violin to play at the same time.

Contemporary church people weigh these exalted considerations and agree that getting the masses to pray the prayer is more important than art.

This puts mass society churches in direct conflict with Jesus.

Two women anointed him with costly perfume (Luke 7.37-38; John 12.3). This means a craftsman fussed over the ointment, mixing it according to a refined recipe and throwing out the batches that weren't up to standard. His weird fixation with getting the stuff to smell exactly right was what made it so pricey. Jesus accepted the women's offering of scent.

According to John (19.23-24), Jesus wore a seamless tunic valuable enough that the Roman soldiers gambled for it rather than tear it into four parts. This means a weaver put extra labor and skill into the garment, creating a unique cloth that would be valuable not for its utility but for its beauty. Why was Jesus wearing such expensive threads?

Because he cared about physical expressions of beauty. He knew that beauty ministers to the human soul. So when he made wine - just as when he made the souls that would consume it - he made it surpassingly well.

The question today is not how we will win souls to Christ if we invest in beauty, but how we will win them if we don't. Our Coke society - with its killing conformity - is creating an audience thirsty for wine.

Populism, the ethos among evangelicals, works most powerfully with negative emotions like resentment and suspicion. The populist appeal is for The People to rally because The Elites are out to get them. It's an appeal to wounded pride. But, to evoke positive emotions, populism leaves evangelicals with only one tool. Feelings such as gratitude, joy, and love aren't compatible with wounded pride, but can only grow in the soil of humility. Which is why the populist tool for evoking positive emotions is sentimentality.

Novelist John Gardner defined sentimentality as "the attempt to get some effect without providing due cause." Arousing sentiment is essential, he said of fiction. But when an emotion is "achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration" -- sentimentality -- it "rings false." (The Art of Fiction, New York: Vintage Books, 1991, p 115.)

I'll put the point bluntly. Evangelicals can't seem to arouse good feelings among themselves without artistic cheating.

We have, for instance, this:

Your daughter has gone beddy-bye, and she's snuggled head-to-head with Raggedy Ann. Hovering over her, almost patting her silken hair, is Jesus, looking like a kindly woodsman who happens to blow-dry his hair. And what is Jesus saying to your daughter? "I know the plans I have for you, etc., etc."

You, the viewer, are Daddy or Mommy peeking in to check on your precious baby girl, only to realize that Jesus is already there.

This picture is all "message," like any other piece of commercialized art. The emotion it seeks to arouse is good -- relief and joy at God's providential care for your children. But the picture does not provide "due cause" to achieve this emotion. It cheats. It goes for "Oh, how cute!" bypassing the more volatile "Oh, how defenseless!" Because the girl is safely upper-middle-class, nothing truly horrible hangs over her. And Jesus is reassuringly within the Anglo-Saxon gene pool.

There's no desperation in that picture.

As opposed to this:

The Miraculous Draught of Fishesby Jacopo Bassano (1545) arouses many emotions, but they need sorting. (The National Gallery displays the work here.) One fisherman kneels in a posture that mixes helplessness, gratitude, and loyalty. Another, his features contorted in amazement, has just hopped onto Jesus' boat. He has abandoned the three remaining fishermen, who have to struggle with the catch and their boat by themselves.

My feelings about Bassano's Jesus are complicated. He does not appear to my eye first because his robe is a cool blue, and he is not at the center of the action. Even when I notice him, I don't feel that he is open to me. His back is turned, and I only see his face in a severe profile. Emotionally, he is remote from the frenzy of activity among the fishermen, with his posture erect, his face serene, and his hand raised in blessing.

This painting doesn't tell me what to feel. But it provokes many sentiments, and the more I reflect on them, the more force they have. I find myself responding to a King.

This is not a populist painting: Jesus is not "one of The People." But he is in the ordinary. The painting's complexities give it power.

The populist cannot trade in complexity. He controls his audience's emotions with a false simplicity -- us against them. He can arouse the uglier sentiments easily with slogans. But how can he arouse redeeming sentiments like gratitude when he has driven out the humility that gratitude requires?

It's no wonder evangelical church life is so emotionally unsatisfying. With harangues against the godless, we sing our own virtues, and then with sentimentality we invite each other to rest in coffins of self-regard.

Populists are the virtuosi of ugly emotions. They always hit the right notes. So, in examining the evangelical version of the populist aesthetic, I started with resentment, the pedal tone that rumbles underneath us-and-them rhetoric. Now we examine the populist use of a related chord, suspicion.

The formula is well-known: the elite few have not only amassed money and power for themselves (which we resent), they're conspiring (we suspect) to use their unfair advantages to destroy our way of life.

Consider two quite different incidents of evangelical suspicion in response to films.

In 1989, evangelicals got wind of a Martin Scorsese film not yet finished, The Last Temptation of Christ. Lines from the screenplay and descriptions of scenes had leaked, and the way Christ was portrayed was shocking. So the grass-roots operations that had helped elect Ronald Reagan twice, and the elder George Bush once, swung into motion to protest the film.

The line I remember was, "Those people in Hollywood have gone too far this time!" The film confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Hollywood elites were out to discredit the faith. The massive protests marked a new phase of push-back in the culture wars. We were mad as heck, and we weren't going to take it anymore.

But it was the evangelicals who went too far. Their protests ensured blanket free-media publicity for the film's opening -- and accomplished little else.

Moral: Negative emotions get the masses moving, but not always in the right direction. In the case of Last Temptation, using people's suspicions to rally them for battle plugged the film, rather than sink it.

In 2004, Mel Gibson used evangelical church networks in an under-the-radar marketing campaign for his film, The Passion of the Christ. He gained the endorsements of prominent evangelical pastors, and held rough-cut screenings in large churches to invitation-only audiences. The campaign was a huge success.

I recall that the push to get on board with The Passion unleashed many evangelical sentiments. Some of the feelings were understandable -- a sense that the film was a significant evangelistic opportunity, for instance. But others led to profound misjudgments. Just to take one example, there was a sense that this was "our film," when it was really more from Roman Catholic traditions. Such distinctions seemed not to matter.

There was also a sense that Gibson had put himself at risk to produce "our film," both in terms of his finances and his career. I remember people talking about what "Hollywood" could "do to Mel" because he had made this film. "So we'd better get out there and support him, make the film a success." I heard this kind of thing from lay people as well as pastors. The Passion became a way "we" could hit back at "them."

Evangelicals heavily invested their credibility in Gibson. They defended him, in particular, against charges that the film was anti-Semitic. So when Gibson made anti-Semitic remarks during his DUI arrest on July 28, 2006, there was nowhere for evangelicals to run. How were we going to defend "our guy?"

Moral: Suspicion drives groups to choose their friends based on their enemies. Gibson's testimony of life-change sounded a lot better when he was overturning the chessboard in Hollywood than it did when he was railing against the Jews.

I'm not saying that Last Temptation was really a good film, while The Passion was really a bad one. I'm not saying that Scorsese was really sincere and well-motivated, while Gibson was really just a slick manipulator. I've never seen either film, nor have I looked into the hearts of the two men, who have both been held to account for their public words and deeds.

I am saying that evangelicals got very public black eyes in both cases because of their addiction to us-and-them populism. They picked both fights and friends on the basis of point-scoring opportunism.

I am also saying that evangelicals learned populism from politics, not from the Bible. The uses of suspicion for organizing the grass-roots, for fund-raising, and for Sunday morning fulminations, are many. If the goal is to keep people's view of their own team inflated, then populism works.

But if the goal is to soften souls -- which the Bible says our goal ought to be -- then the uses of suspicion are few.

The faces I see each Sunday morning are often rigid from the week's tension, frozen against our society's assaults -- inhuman rudeness, aggression, and indifference. In their tension, these people yearn for a renewed emotional life. Their yearning is broadly shared. Quadrivium offers excellent comments (here) on the self-destructive behavior of celebrities. All the pampering money can buy does nothing to renew them. At the other end of the spectrum, Quadrivium notes that in one region of south Wales, thirteen young people have committed suicide over the past year.

When we see this kind of despair, we're tempted to extol the joys of life in Christ, the pure pleasures of the Spirit. But such generalizations won't help me minister to Sunday's faces.

Christian joy is not otherworldly. It is practical, a matter of investing time and focus.

Tim Challies gives a glimpse of one kind of investment here. He interviews Makoto Fujimura, a New York-based artist, about how his artwork is an extension of his faith in Christ. At one point, Fujimura refers to an international group he has formed and says, "We believe that God desires to re-humanize the world via the arts and creative expression, and we want to create a home for folks wrestling with deep issues of art, faith and humanity."

That got some comments.

One participant questioned the idea "that God desires to re-humanize the world via the arts." Is it biblical? We evangelicals are suspicious of creativity. So when we hear the phrase "re-humanize the world via the arts" we tend to smell liberalism. I wonder why. No one cares more about re-humanizing the world than the God of the Bible. He provided creativity as a tool for our emotional refreshment.

If evangelicals pushed the drab and stale things out of this world through the arts, they would be more potent evangelists. Fujimura's paintings took my breath away.

God has given us another tool for refreshment -- the Bible itself. His word was not inspired only to instruct our minds, or to command our wills. It was also inspired to change the way we feel. I say this because God chose to reveal his truth through high literary art. Take the Psalms.

Dale Fincher brings us a quote from Kathleen Norris here. She writes,

The value of this great songbook of the Bible lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them, praise is meaningless.

Norris is right. We cannot express the greatness of God without reflecting on the depth of our sins, needs, and losses. That is why the most troubling moments in the Psalms can be the most edifying.

The emotional impact of the Psalms comes from several artistic devices.

The Psalms use structure to satisfy our emotions with balance and completion. On a broad scale, for instance, Psalm 103 both begins and ends with the words, "Bless the Lord, O my soul!" The words are bookends for the poem. On a small scale, Psalm 103 exhibits the classic parallel lines of Hebrew poetry: "He will not always strive with us, nor will he keep his anger forever." The second line is a reflective pool under the first.

The Psalms also use imagery to lift truth into liveliness. Psalm 103 says that in the Lord "your youth is renewed like the eagle." It pictures the greatness of God's love: "as high as the heavens are above the earth." It gives the power of God's forgiveness a spatial measurement: "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us."

And much of the Psalms' imagery expresses pain. Psalm 103 says that God "is mindful that we are but dust."

Still another way the Psalms affect our emotions is through allusions -- references to other parts of scripture. For example, Psalm 103.8 is a partial quotation of Exodus 34.6. "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness." The psalm summons the scene of God forgiving Israel for its idolatry with the golden calf.

We can gain this emotional power if we invest time and focus in God's word. The Bible is not only a source of truth, but a source of beauty. If we really believe the doctrine of inspiration, then we realize that God inspired the Bible's genres, forms, and images to impress his character on our feelings.

What people need on Sundays is to have their rigid emotional lives softened by the beauty -- the sometimes dark beauty -- of God's word.