By Micah Hogan

If you want to, you can justify anything theologically. That’s the terrible lesson we learn from the serpent’s appeal to theosis in the garden and from Satan’s use of Scripture during Jesus’s wilderness temptation. This thought should chasten all theologians but, especially, I think, those theologians whose work engages most clearly with human culture; in other words, those most likely to encounter a thing which they may wish to justify. And, for better or for worse, Anglican priests and theologians, through the vocation of our particular historical and sociopolitical situatedness, cannot avoid being cultural theologians. We are, as one priest told me, “chaplains to the culture” It is therefore incumbent upon us, the historical heirs of Anglicanism, to learn the rules of the grammar of our shared vocation.

It is my experience that most modern theological engagements with the arts follow a tried and true pattern of liberated theological acceptance. Reacting against fundamentalist critiques of culture, many modern theologies seem to provide unabashed justification for any given cultural artifact, usually following one or more of four central strategies: 

1. teasing out the ways in which nature anticipates grace in the artifact (as influenced by the nouvelle theologie)

2. teasing out the ways in which the artifact provides a prophetic critique of late modernity

3. teasing out the artifact’s witness to God’s transcendent “otherness” from creation and/or 

4. teasing out how the artifact communicates a general feature of humanity (usually inspired by the psalms of imprecation and lamentation). 

There are of course other strategies out there, but these seem most prevalent to me. I have nothing against these strategies, and they have proven beneficial in providing positive apologetic to the culture in ways reminiscent of Paul in his speech to the Areopagus of Acts 17.  It's on the basis of these strategies that I can say with no shame (or at least modified shame) that I find Taylor Swift’s albums rich with Christian metaphysical speculation, or that I have learned important lessons about Christian integrity from Andy Warhol. 

Reflecting on strategy 1, and regarding Taylor Swift, I find most of her songs incredibly theologically provocative, but none more so than “False God” from her new album “Lover” (2019). Swift here compares the anatomy of her lover to the liturgical elements of a Christian worship service. I think it’s a fascinating reflection on the sacramentality of the body as it converges with idolatry.

Reflecting on strategy 2, Warhol was a devout Byzantine Catholic and had a lot of pieces interacting with religion. His Last Supper (1986), for example, overlays the supper with capitalist logos. The underlying image is a cheap, mass market reproduction overlaid with a price tag and company logos. Here, the corporate Dove replaces the Holy Spirit, and General Electric (GE) takes the place of the light of the world. Against the black and white of religion, these symbols of consumerism pop out in full colour, grabbing our attention.

But let the reader be warned: these tools are subject to abuse. Woe the day humans realized that hammers could hit heads as well as nails. Affirmation of the arts, like all tools, can be quickly abused. And, like all rhetorical tools, an abused tool quickly loses its meaning. 

Let me provide a case study. Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” (2004) is a wicked poem. If you haven’t read it, I invite you to do so now (it's quite short). From the theological perspective, this poem is evil. Not only does it explicitly negate the moral (“you do not have to be good”) but it also trivializes asceticism and praises the loves of the “soft animal of your body” as finding one’s place in the “family of things”, which are, by the way, wholly at the whim of the imagination. This is, I take it, the exact opposite of St. Paul’s argument in Romans 6-8. It sounds innocent enough to indulge the flesh in what most immediately comes to mind, chocolate or a romantic tryst, but what about those things that the soft animal of our body wants that it should not, those dark urges Freud probes so well? Theology tells us, and every responsible person knows, that the soft animal of the body is really a ravenous wolf that must be denied and restrained. 

In my judgement, there is no appropriate theological justification for this poem. But this is not to say that there is no possible theological justification for it, just that here lies our difficulty. If one were to try to justify Oliver’s poem, one’s best recourse would be to appeal to some form of strategies 1 and 4 mentioned above, namely that the artifact shows nature in some way anticipating grace and that the artifact tells us something meaningful about the human experience. Far from contradicting the Christian message, we might say this poem actually reveals the inherent structure of its grammar. Oliver, it can be argued, boldly fights against Pelagian tendencies to find our salvation in works of the law and instead gestures toward a saving humility through fellowship with the neighbor in our embodiedness, the very embodiedness through which Christ redeems us by himself taking a body. 

As you can see, this is a weak argument--sophistry masked in theological language and subtlety. This poem advocates antinomianism, pure and simple. Nature anticipates grace, but is not identical to grace. Jesus commands us to love God and neighbor with self-sacrificial love and the unredeemed body cannot faithfully teach us this love. There is a reason that St. Paul juxtaposes flesh and spirit; there is such a thing as a “body of death.” The poem moreover does not helpfully expose the amorality of a purely sensual existence, but actually advocates for it without mitigation. Further, there are no deep insights that redeem or expose the moral ambiguity. Quite simply, the poem is lying to us. What truth there is is so partial as to render the poem fundamentally unhelpful. It is simply untrue. 

The fact of the matter is this: while art is prophetic and has many things to teach theology (which the Eastern tradition knows so well), it arises from the human consciousness and, like theology, is subject to error and is in need of correction. Theology most readily provides this correction since it treats all things “under the aspect of God” (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I. q.1, a.7). Therefore, if theology wants to receive the benefit of artistic insight, it must be prepared to enter into a real friendship with art, replete with wounds: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Prov. 27:6). Merely to kiss the kiss of constant veneration is for theology to make herself an enemy to culture and the arts. The theologian then must be prepared to give faithful wounds with the sword of the Spirit. 

As we seek to grow into Christian maturity, let us seek to mature into faithful friends, friends committed to courageous rebuke of the world they love. 

Micah Hogan is a residential Middler and sacristan at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, pursuing his MDiv as a postulant for holy orders in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Micah fell in love with the “elvishness” of the Anglican tradition during his first Mass his freshman year of college and has never looked back. He was confirmed a year later and began to discern a call to Holy Orders. He is a perpetual member of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University (Class of 2019), where he studied Theology and Great Books, in addition to spending a semester abroad studying philosophical theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Micah is primarily interested in the doctrines of creation and sexuality, the practices of hospitality, and the writing of poetry. His accomplishments include serving as theology editor for The PQ Review and co-hosting the infamous Polycarp Pajama Party of 2016.