This book has been many years in the making. It expresses my thinking not just about art and the church but about the very nature of our lives. There are so many people who helped to make this book possible that I am bound to leave someone out. First, I would like to acknowledge my debt to Hans-Georg Gadamer. As I have come to the conclusion of this project, I realize (once again) how indebted I am to him. His thought influences every page, and I am ever grateful not only for his friendship and mentoring but also for his encouragement when I was first formulating my ideas regarding improvisation. Let me next thank the hundreds of students who have been part of my Philosophy of the Arts course over the past twenty years. They have asked probing questions and forced me to think through these issues. My thanks also go to my colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Wheaton, who read portions of the manuscript and gave (as always) very constructive feedback. I have greatly benefited from numerous conversations with colleagues in the Art Department, the Conservatory, and the Theatre/Communications Department. The Wheaton College Alumni Association provided travel funds for this book, and I received release time that made the writing of this book possible. My thanks to my dean, Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, for her support. I wish to thank Jamie Smith, who invited me to write this book for his series and has provided excellent advice along the way. Thanks to Bob Hosack, who patiently awaited the completion of the manuscript. For continued dialogue on the arts and theology—not to mention much encouragement—many thanks go to Jeremy Begbie. For dialogue on the arts and philosophy, I am pleased to thank Nicholas Wolterstorff. Artists who have read and commented on my work include Bruce Herman and Ted Prescott. My conversation with Enrique Martínez Celaya has been enlightening, and I am delighted to be involved in his art foundation, Whale & Star. The art historian and erstwhile museum curator Dan Siedell has provided invaluable and generous feedback, not to mention inspiration, at various points along the way. My thanks go to Jeremy Heuslein, who kindly read an earlier version of the manuscript and provided helpful comments, and to Peter Christensen for helping with the proofs. Peter Goodwin Heltzel has provided many constructive suggestions. Thanks to John Walton for his comments on creation and Genesis. Many thanks also to Scott and Elizabeth Benson. I am grateful for conversations with such artists and/or worship leaders as John Bayless, Daniel Bayless, David Davis, Sanford Dole, Makoto Fujimura, Tom Jennings, Dan Kimball, Brandon Muchow, Buddy Owens, Jimmy Owens, and Jeff Warren. My visits to such churches as All Saint’s Episcopal Church (Beverly Hills), Redeemer Presbyterian Church (New York City), Rock Harbor Church (Costa Mesa), Saddleback Church and its conference for worship leaders (Lake Forest, California), Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church (San Francisco), Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church (New York City), Saint Sabina Roman Catholic Church (Chicago), and Vintage Faith Church (Santa Cruz) have been enormously helpful.
Just seeing that list will tip some readers off to the fact that the folks and institutions I will be discussing as examples of artists, worship leaders, and churches vary. What I have discovered in working on this book is that there are many churches that have markedly differing worship styles and, as a result, are ministering to markedly different people. Thanks be to God! As it turns out, my own preference in worship is rather high-church Anglican/Episcopalian. Yet I hardly think that such worship is necessarily better than all others, nor would I for a moment suggest that everyone adopt it. Indeed, often when I attend other churches I think “this is wonderful!”—even though I am delighted to return to my own church the following Sunday. As becomes clear the more one attends various churches, they have different qualities and worship styles worth commending. Who one is and where one is on one’s spiritual journey have a great deal to do with which church one ultimately finds an appropriate fit. For myself, I can say that I learned far more than I could have ever expected from visiting a wide variety of churches and gained a deep appreciation for the Holy Spirit at work in many different settings.
Of course, having said all that, I must add the following regarding a fairly standard convention in writing a book. Although authors in “acknowledgment” sections often thank various people who helped them with the book, such thanks almost always conclude with something like “any mistakes, of course, remain my own.” But why is it that we would only get good ideas from others and the bad ones always happen to be our own? It’s like a reverse practice of insurance companies that call disasters “acts of God,” as if God only gets credit for really bad things. Naturally, we don’t actually believe in this standard author’s reuse. It’s really, as I’ve said, more of a convention. After all, you can’t really say, “For all the stupid things I’ve said, so-and-so is equally to blame.”
Yet that convention is upstaged by an even more interesting one—that I am the author of this book. Yes, my name’s on the cover and the copyright is in my name, but that’s also more convention than reality. Here I am not arguing for the classic “death of the author” idea propagated by Roland Barthes, who is perhaps best remembered for his famous statement that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”[2] Thankfully, no one needs to die, in my view. Instead, as should become readily apparent to anyone who reads this book, I’m only the author of it to a certain degree. Lots of the ideas I work with are really “someone else’s.” To be sure, I do cite various people and even quote from them at points. But I’m really much more indebted to them than any citation, quotation, or acknowledgment section could ever make clear.
In an important sense, that’s what this book is all about—that living (and not simply “making art”) is a process of improvisation, in which one starts with things gifted to us by other people and works from there. Ultimately, I argue that this improvisational practice is best thought of as a kind of liturgy.
I first began thinking about improvisation when I encountered the work of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, who wrote on (among other things) musical creation and performance. Although Ingarden provides a highly nuanced view, I began to realize that the model with which he was working simply failed to acknowledge how much improvisation is part of art.[3] Not long after my article on Ingarden was published, an Old Testament scholar friend of mine (Frans den Exter Blokland) who had read the article astutely responded by saying, “But isn’t what you say about improvisation in music really what I am also doing in interpreting the Bible?” I told him that I thought he was quite right.[4] And I soon came to see that life is improvisational. Although I have worked out this improvisational aspect in regard to music,[5] here I want to expand on that work to speak not merely about art in general but life itself. As should become clear, we are all improvisers in all that we do.
Yet, if our very existence is improvisational, then this changes the way we think about what we do artistically and otherwise. In other words, it’s not as if I’m the one lifting ideas from others and they all got theirs by way of the mystery of genius. T. S. Eliot—certainly one of the more innovative of poets—puts it rather bluntly: “One of the surest of tests [of quality] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”[6] The context for that quote is an essay on the playwright Philip Massinger, and it is quite clear that Eliot thinks that Massinger is an immature writer who merely imitates Shakespeare. Speaking of stealing, a quote often attributed to Pablo Picasso (also known for innovation) is, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.”[7] Whether Picasso knew he was stealing from Eliot is hard to say. After all, a common anonymous saying is, “He who is most creative conceals his sources the best.” And, even before Eliot and Picasso, supposedly Benjamin Franklin said that “originality is the art of concealing your sources.”[8] But Picasso clearly does admit to stealing: “When there’s anything to steal, I steal.”[9] What else would one expect from a great artist?
Not surprisingly, the view I take of my own authorship is one that I see as indicative of the creative process in general. I suggest that we think of ourselves as artistically improvising rather than creating. As we shall see, there is a very good theological basis for this way of thinking. On this point, though, I am not alone: others I cite throughout the book come very close to saying exactly that. Of course, I admit that this suggestion goes fundamentally against the grain of what most of us have been taught to think about artists and artistic creation, which we’ll consider in the second chapter. That’s also partly what this book is about—challenging what we think about art: what art is and exactly who makes art and how art is made. In short, I contend that we are all artists, that our very lives should be seen as art, and that we should live liturgically in service to God and neighbor.
Ultimately, my goal here is to explore the deep and interpenetrating relationship of life, art, and worship, though not with the intent of merely sketching some theory about their relationship. Instead, it is about working out a way of life that can properly be termed “liturgical.”
For a book in which improvisation is central, it should be expected that some of the material appeared in earlier forms. A version of chapter 1 appeared as “Call Forwarding: Improvising the Response to the Call of Beauty,” in The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts, edited by Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands, and Roger Lundin (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007). Other parts of chapter 1 come from “The Fundamental Heteronomy of Jazz,” Revue internationale de philosophie 60 (2006): 453–67. Much of chapters 2 and 3 is taken from “In the Beginning, There Was Improvisation: Responding to the Call,” Verge: A Journal of Arts and Christian Faith 1 (2011): 6–22. Portions of chapters 3 and 5 are from “Chrétien on the Call That Wounds,” in Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology, edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).