Aristotle and the Art of Shalom

I have been reading a book called Farming as a Spiritual Discipline by Ragan Sutterfield the past few weeks. In it, I encountered an idea that offers a serious insight across most of life. 

Sutterfield explains the Aristotelian concept of Stochastic art. This is any practice where the artist works within a predetermined system or organism with the goal of bringing that system to a place of health. For example, a doctor’s task is not to create something new but to work within the canvas of a human body to assist the person toward optimum flourishing. This is true of the farmer, as he works to make his property abundant within the land’s contours and the local ecology. 

It is also true of community development. The developer approaches his community with a sensitivity for the place’s unique characteristics--studying the culture, values and assets within the system--and cultivates them towards shalom. 

Greek thought has its pitfalls, but if handled well I think this idea reveals something of the nature of sanctification, the process toward discipleship and the messy nature of participating with God’s work to let it be on earth as it is in heaven. As Sutterfield says, these “are arts that can never be mastered.” There is a constant progression of discovery, of cresting one rise only to discover still higher peaks in the distance. In the effort to become like Jesus and to bring forth the New Creation, we discover the paradox that we can never be closer to our journey’s end when that end is infinite. It still lies just as far away as when we began. Though our quest is interminable, it does not cause us despair but amazingly becomes a wellspring of hope, for around each bend life is bursting onto the scene with new colors and fruits to be tasted. In this way, we learn just how graciously generous God truly is.

The Wanderer

I loved the painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog since the first time I saw it in an undergrad English Lit book. 

Some might see him as a triumphalist, Master and Commander of all that lies before him, embodiment of the "white man's burden," the consummate colonialist ever claiming ownership of that which was never his. 

Perhaps.

That's just not how I see it.

From my point of view, that is me standing there on that rock. It is any one of us, and, in a way, it is all of us. 

In my mind, the Wanderer is a pilgrim. An explorer aimed at discovery whose motivation is the journey and the experience and the encounter with things unseen, not the conquering of those things. 

The next set of destinations are clear. They rise up out of the mist beckoning him onward. But though the goal may appear obvious, the way there is shrouded in mystery and uncertainty. Risk and danger are inevitable. 

Because the Wanderer is foregrounded in the painting, he seems to loom large over the valley. But any hiker knows that is never one's own experience in such landscapes. When vast trackless expanses envelop you on all sides, your smallness is never more poignant. It is deeply humbling. However, once your desire to control your surroundings is overcome, a sense of self rightly conceived, of finding one's proper place within the world, can settle in.

This, to me, is what life is like. It is a journey full of missions that seem impossible and unplannable. Every next step is fraught with uncertainty, but that upon arrival shape us and draw us into discoveries that open our heart afresh to God and our fellow humans. 

One of those gracious discoveries is that there are others journeying through the fog. We are not alone on this path. Friends and family wait to embrace us and walk by our side if we will but begin. 

When I look at this painting I am reminded of the Israelites when it finally came time for them to enter the Promised Land. 

They stood on the banks of the Jordan and gazed across at that far shore, but in between the river raged at full flood tide. 

The way across was unclear. They could not even see where to place their first step.

But they were told to go.

And so they stepped out in faith, and it was not until they stepped into the roaring waters that the waves parted and a path was made.

Reading and Responding to Contexts

Wassily Kandinsky, "Concentric Circles" 1913.

In the last post I expressed my conviction that the world is now a "glocal" place requiring multivalent contextual awareness for effective leadership. But how exactly do we tap into the culture's worldview? More difficult still, how do we connect with those people who are at culture's leading edge? The Church has had a bad habit of responding to the questions people were asking 20 years ago with the kind of answers that made sense to people 50 years ago. How do we attune our minds to those shaping our culture's future so that we can have answers for our neighbors' questions before they even start asking them? (recapturing and reimagining the role of culture creating in post-Christendom America is a can of worms for another day!)

First of all, we will benefit from seeing that this task moves beyond awareness of current events. Knowing what is going on is important, and there's a slew of things in the news right now that the church needs to have Jesus shaped responses to. However, if our awareness of the culture is only as deep as the constant stream of news and people's reactive commentary on it we will remain stuck within the culture. By doing so we forfeit our right/ability to see its presuppositions, offer prophetic critiques, appropriate Good News and deeply relevant pastoral care.

Francis Schaeffer was a master cultural interpreter and apologist, and my first introduction to this task. In The God Who is There he explains how existentialist philosophy (specifically its dismissal of absolutes and sense of despair) progressed through Western culture. From his perspective, they cascaded in the following order:

Philosophy
---------------
                  |  Art
                   -------
                            |  Music
                             -----------
                                          |  General Culture
                                           ------------------------
                                                                        |  Theology
                                                                         -----------------


I think he needs to pay more attention to the historic events (usually driven by technology, economics and contact with some new "other") and shifts in the actual contextual forms and functions themselves that move philosophers to articulate new thoughts. But I agree that this is a fairly apt (though perhaps overly linear) portrait of how a cultural worldview shift takes place.

As Schaffer describes it, the church's problem was that it was too absent from spaces where people were asking the questions and experimenting with the ideas that eventually eroded modernism. We weren't hanging out at the exhibits where Dada artists acted out their beliefs on life's absurdity. We weren't listening to the music they listened to or reading the books they read. Far from shaping the conversation, we were not even at the table.

So we became irrelevant. And it's a practice we are still repeating.

Most Christians still struggle to understand what it means to be postmodern or "late Modern" (myself included!) even though the key bards of postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc) are all dead, and the ideas they offered have mostly had their way at the general culture level by this point. A new wave of thinkers is already writing and painting and filming and singing away while we continue to be mired in the questions of the previous generation.

My point in saying these things is not that every leader needs to be reading the latest philosophy books. We don't. Most contemporary philosophy books coming out will never take hold and it is impossible to know what will except in retrospect twenty years from now.

Rather, I am trying to affirm and intensify Karl Barth's charge that as pastors, theologians, community developers, and Christian leaders of all stripes we must hold the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. We need to see the big picture, the megatrends, the worldview/philosophical perspective that the majority share, tapping into the ideas innovators are pushing at culture's leading edge when and where we can.

My seminary professor Dr. Brian Ross offers three suggestions for understanding what he calls "the secular mindset":

1) Be friends with secular people and listen to them. Not in a creepy, you are only friends with them because you have an agenda kind of way. Just a normal friendship where you have fun together and share about the stuff that matters to each of you. But pay attention and note those ideas that seem to emerge from a different source than your beliefs.

2) Look into the founding "myths" of the culture. Whether it is a macro-culture like America (City on a Hill, a Christian nation, the American Dream, the land of opportunity, the Founding Father stories, the King Arthur tales, etc) or a micro-culture like the local craft brewery scene (Hipster ideals, local economy, environmental concerns, etc), every niche has narratives--some we are only subconsciously aware of--that provide the backdrop for our concepts of the the world, how to act in it and what the good life is. Researching these backgrounds helps us identify the presuppositions people in the culture are walking around with, even if they can't identify what they are for themselves.

3) Read what people are reading in the philosophy/english/sociology classes at the local universities, watch popular movies, definitely watch indie movies, listen to secular music, play secular video games, etc. As you watch/read/listen/interact with these media, consider the two basic questions that Howard Thurman claims all humans ask: "Who am I?" and "What am I here for?" At some level, we are all trying to figure out what it mean to be human and what our purpose in life is. What answers are the films and books and songs offering to these questions? To what fundamental longings or problems do the answers relate? Get together with some thoughtful friends and have fun with this one.


Once some categories begin to emerge, it is time to consider...

A) How Jesus' Kingdom culture might speak prophetically to the context

and

B) What the gospel (good news) might be for this context (Note: it may be different than what has always been good news for us; that's ok, God is more than big enough).


There's several gospel and culture related posts in the pipeline, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, I'd love to hear what you think.