Creating Art by Polling

Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar
at the SAATCHI Gallery in London 

Every once in awhile, a story on PRI's This American Life just sticks in my head. It may even weave itself into the very fabric of our family language. Every Labor Day, such a story reemerges in our goofy humor. We find ourselves walking around the house singing, in our loudest "children's" voices, "Labor Day! Labor Day!" It all started when two artists, Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar, decided to create art by polling people in different countries about what they like most and least in paintings. They seem to have a good sense of humor about people and pop culture even as they critique it.

Melamid & Komar's painting for the US

The most memorable part of the story is when they talk about writing two songs. The first incorporates all the favorite elements from their polling data - love, low female voice, ballad, etc. Your basic pop song... The second incorporates all the least favorite elements - bagpipes, an opera singer rapping, children voices, tuba, singing about holidays, etc. I love the second song. It is so goofy, and it always cracks me up when the children's choir shouts out, "Labor Day! Labor Day!" and then, later in the song, "Yom Kippur! Yom Kippur!" (Well, it is fast approaching!)

Hilarious and silly! So, on this Labor Day weekend, may you find many ways to observe your celebration of work in your leisure and sing a jovial (if silly) song in your heart. "Labor Day!"

"88: Numbers - Paint by Numbers" on This American Life, Chicago Public Media: PRI, January 2, 1998:

Thinking about what to read: What are the options?

Classes start in just under a month and my mind has turned to the various reading lists and options for my theology class. Every Fall students in my class have to choose between various options for small reading groups (or reading pods). I decided that I would put up some resources to help with that decision.

Here are the reading options for the reading pods:

• Black Liberation Theology:
• Selections from Carter, Cone, Hopkins, and Baker-Fletcher
• Anabaptist:
• Selections from McClendon, Yoder, Finger, and Weaver
• Baptist: Stan Grenz
• Theology for the Community of God, Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994.
• Church Fathers:
• Christopher A. Hall, Learning Theology with the Church Fathers, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002.
• Eastern Orthodox:
• Selections from Stavropoulos, Lossky, Zizioulas, and Ware.
• Feminist Theology:
• Selections from Johnson, Soskice, McFague, Gonzalez, Storkey, and Gilliss.
• Womanist/Mujerista/Post-Colonialist Theology:
• Selections from Baker-Fletcher, Joh, Oduyoye, Grant, Isasi-Díaz, Kwok, etc.
• South and Central American Liberation Theology:
• Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuria, eds., Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, Orbis Books, 1996.
• Reform (German): Jürgen Moltmann.
• Selections from Trinity and the Kingdom, God in Creation, and The Crucified God.
• Reform (British): Colin Gunton
• The Christian Faith, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
• Reform (American): Kathryn Tanner
• Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 2001.

Thinking about what to read: Why all of these choices?

You may be wondering why there are so many choices for the Reading Pods. I know that it feels complicated or unnecessary, but there is a method to my madness. 

A few years ago, Dr. Hollins and I attended an Association of Theological Schools (ATS) conference on Race and Ethnicity in Theological Education. ATS is looking ahead to 2040 when it is projected that white Americans will become a minority in the US. They are concerned that Seminaries are not prepared for this major change in American culture. Are the pastors of the future prepared for such diversity in churches, or will Sunday morning continue to be the most segregated morning of the week? Their assertion is that we won't know until we experience this reality, but for now, we can practice what it means to listen more broadly in our theological explorations. 

After I came back from this conference, I decided to change up my reading lists for The Theological Mosaic class. I wanted students to read more broadly, yet find one space where they read more deeply. My hope is that this diversity with spill into discussions and dialogue both in and outside of class. Theology is a mixture of seeking out the least inadequate language through which to talk about God (Colin Gunton) and how that reality intersects and forms our views of culture, humanity, and the sacred in every day life. 

The complication is that we live constantly with great mystery - e.g., God, trees, cabbages, the person sitting next to you on the bus, etc. Mystery is sometimes thought to be those things that you cannot know. I disagree. Mystery is not an unknowing or an ignorance. Instead, mystery is a pressing into what we can only know in part. British theologian, Sarah Coakley, encourages us to press into the task of doing theology, to learn the discipline, read, think, and discern. It is only at this point, when we push the boundaries of our knowing, that we can understand the boundlessness of the mystery of God and of one another.  

With this in mind, I'll leave you with a quote from the Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Every time I read this quote, I realize that this articulation of mystery and prayer are foundational for how I do theology. So, I invite you to come and dive into the abyss with me...

“Contemplation starts at the point where the believing mind begins to perceive a dawning light in the abyss of the mystery, where the mystery begins to reveal itself in all its vast proportions. Not in the sense of doubt, of loosening the tautness of the dogmatic affirmation, but in an astonishment which reaches to the very roots of our being (Balthasar, Hans Urs von,  Prayer,  Tr. By Graham Harrison, San Francisco: Igantius Press, 1986, 158.).”

Thinking about what to read: Colin Gunton

Colin Gunton with his teacher Robert Jenson

Colin Gunton's book, The One, The Three, and The Many, is probably the most influential theological work that I have ever read. Partly this is because I read it early in my theological training but more likely it is how he masterfully brings together trinitarian theology, the arts, philosophy, and a theology of culture. His theology helped to shape my theological imagination in significant ways, and for that I will always be grateful. 

At the center of Gunton's theological project, is a robust and vibrant trinitarian theology. For Gunton, the Trinity is not some nice abstract idea about absolutes or perfections, nor is it a cypher by which and through which to understand the mysteries of the world (an entry into some kind of mystery religion). Instead, this doctrine brings us to the very heart of the God who is distinct, particular, and unity-in-community. As he argues:

“God is not God apart from the way in which Father, Son, and Spirit in eternity give to and receive from each other what they essentially are. The three do not merely coinhere, but dynamically constitute one another’s being” (Gunton, The One, The Three, and The Many, 164).

Thus, unity and diversity (particularity) are mutually constitutive - they do not exist separately or outside of one another. Unity in God requires the distinct persons and diversity requires the unique manner of God's being one. 

This kind of trinitarian theology leads to a core concept that I have taken from Gunton (and he took from Barth, and so on, and so on...): because God has space to be the one triune God as Father, Son, and Spirit, then all of the created order has space to be itself. This is the very heart of his dynamic theology of freedom. Freedom is mediated by relationships. It is his argument that the very being of God leads us to this conclusion. Freedom and relationship are intertwinned. 

Even though Colin Gunton was not my classroom teacher (though I did hear him lecture a number of times, and I almost spilled tea on him during a private conversation), I feel that he is one of my best teachers. His commitment to disciplined and critical theological thinking, his pastoral heart for the church, and his desire to raise up a new generation of theologians and pastors inspire me in my writing and teaching life. 

Gunton died too early. At the time of his death, he was in the midst of writing his systematic theology. The world of Christian theology will always be impoverished because his final theological project was never finished... 

Prof. Gunton, thank you for your passion and leadership. You are sorely missed.

Obituary for The Rev. Prof. Colin Gunton by Stephen R. Holmes

Thinking about what to read: Jürgen Moltmann

I used to joke that Jürgen Moltmann was in every one of my classes, which was strange because he wasn't registered for any of them. OK, not a very funny joke, but it articulates something of the impact that he has had on my students. As a teacher, I have to pay attention to any thinker that is enthusiastically received by my students.

Moltmann, who is German, became a Christian in the aftermath of World War II. At the end of the war he was in a series of prisoner of war camps. It was in these camps that he was given a Bible and experienced the love and care of the local Christians. He eventually went back to Germany and studied theology. 

Thus, Moltmann's theology was nurtured in the ashen soil of the Holocaust. Because of this, his theology takes suffering very seriously. Love and suffering are intertwined in Moltmann's thinking about humanity and God. A central tenet in his theology is that God meets us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is Jesus' solidarity with human suffering that shows forth and reveals the ever pursuing love of the triune God who created all things and persons.

I think that one of the reasons that students respond so passionately to his theology is that he connects theory to the realities of life. There is an honest wrestling in his work that responds compassionately and critically to a Christianity steeped in a century of war and political upheaval. At the beginning of the 21st century, his theology feels relevant and deeply hopeful. Moltmann's theology is never naive but is, instead, infused with the faith that God will always meet us in our most broken places and experiences.

The following is a lecture that Moltmann delivered at Yale Divinity School in 2004: "Control is Good, but Trust is Better." The video has the added benefit of an introduction by Serene Jones, another intriguing theologian that you should read. (See her book, Trauma & Grace):