Alongside my various musical projects over the years, I have continued to write acoustic-based “solo” material on the side, putting out “lo-fi” four-track recordings on CD-Rs and cassettes. About five years ago I recorded a new collection of these songs but with a full band made up of longtime friends from various bands in which I have played. Inevitably, because I am who I am, my solo material picks through and plays with biblical and theological themes, though I would never call what I do “Christian rock.”

Last week I started recording a new solo record with the same group of people. This one, tentatively titled Christian Burial, is probably my most explicitly (but playfully) theological group of songs yet. While jotting down ideas for arrangements today, I came across a recent post by James K.A. Smith called “Poetry and the End of Theology” and it has been on my mind as I think about what I am doing with this new album. I’m going to quote the entire post, as it is fairly short:

Theology is not usually home to imagination and creativity. Indeed, the sober vocation of the theologian looks on creativity as a temptation, the lure of novelty as a dangerous seduction. The fuel of theology is not the imagination but the intellect. It traffics not in metaphors but propositions, those terse building blocks of arguments and outlines and doctrines. The republic of theology, like Plato’s city, is built on the exile of the poets whose “fictions” are a dangerous distraction.

Let me interrupt for a moment just to say that I think there have been for some time movements in theology — even academic theology — that understand themselves very much as imaginative endeavors and that perhaps these theological expressions have escaped Smith’s view here. But he is certainly right in identifying a dominant trend in academic theology.

But how did a discourse so uncreative become the deputized voice of the Creator? How did a genre so flat and sober and unimaginative become the official mouthpiece of a God who created platypuses and larkspur? Frankly, how did the boring disquisitions of “systematic” theology emerge as the authoritative voice for a people who follow a story-teller like Jesus?

Well, there’s a story to be told here. To make it short: theology picked up some very bad habits in modernity. In particular, and most disastrously, theology somehow became enamored with a rather Cartesian picture of human persons that reduced us to brains-on-a-stick—to cognitive processors temporarily (and regrettably) housed in bodies. On this account, we are essentially “thinking things” — and “systematic” theology bought such thinking-thing-ism hook, line, and thinker. The result was that the story of God’s wonder-working was boiled down and reduced to “beliefs” that could be formulated in propositions, lodged in syllogisms, and linked together in learned treatises. What’s worse, preaching became captive to the same thinking-thing-ism with the sermon reduced to a lecture for cognitive machines.

But what if we are not essentially “thinking things?” What if we are the sorts of animals who love before we think? What if we imagine the world before we perceive it? What if we are not just minds regrettably housed in these meaty frames but rather embodied creatures who make our way in the world through the gift of the senses?

Then wouldn’t images and metaphors be our most natural way of making sense of the world? Wouldn’t story be our first and most natural language — and the language of propositions and syllogisms an acquired, artificial habit? Indeed, wouldn’t fiction and poetry be closer to the truth?

These are the sorts of questions that haunt me as a philosopher and theologian — as someone who makes his living in a world where propositions are the coin of the realm. What if poetry is the end of theology? That is, what if poetry is the telos of theology — its goal and aim? What if the so-called truths of theology are just dimmed-down intimations of the rich truth that can be embodied in the imaginative worlds of poetry and fiction? Then wouldn’t Graham Greene and Franz Wright be more faithful good-news-tellers than most of our theologians? Wouldn’t the short story be our most faithful genre? Wouldn’t the novel be our most powerful explication of the human condition? Wouldn’t poetry be our most intense site of revelation? Could we imagine theology otherwise?

I too have been haunted by such questions for some time, not with regard to novels and poetry but to songwriting, performance, and other music making practices. What Smith says here so clearly applies to the world of rock, and this line of questioning is precisely how I have come to see my own music making as a way of “doing theology.” It’s not that music, rock or otherwise, is just “material for” theology or simply an alternative theological “source” for those following the “cultural turn” of contemporary theology. It certainly is that, but more than that, rock music itself can be theology “imagined otherwise.” Although I am deeply invested in scholarly theological training, I think perhaps my music making is the most theological thing I do, with the academic part coming in second as a more disciplined thinking about the more basic “rich truths” of imaginative, nondiscursive theological activities.

This line of thinking perhaps also suggests why I have never really been drawn to “Christian rock”: there really is so very little theology in it.

Michael Iafrate
Morgantown, West Virginia

3 Comments »

1. 

   Great post Michael. I too am not a fan of “Christian” rock. Anyway, I had to comment on the “Poetry and the End of Theology” post. Smith makes some good points. I think people in systematic theology are particularly guilty of dismissing emotions and the imagination, at least among Catholic circles due to their emphasis on Greek philosophy and reliance natural law theory. That’s certainly one reason I could not study systematic theology and was attracted to ethics. Ethics uses the imagination extensively through its use of ideals. We have to use our imagination and empathy in order to answer ethical questions about how we should live. There is a burgeoning branch of ethics which studies the moral imagination–how we use our imagination in moral reasoning. It’s very interesting and gives creativity its due. When I read your post it brought to mind Karl Marx’s notion that people are fundamentally creative and transformative. I think he was on to something.

   Comment by Mary McDonough — April 29, 2010 @ 10:13 am

2. 

   Excellent post, reminds me of Nietzsche wanting a philosophy that sings and dances. Let’s have a theology that sings and dances!

   Comment by Dan — May 2, 2010 @ 10:00 am

3. 

   Dan – Or, riffing on Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance to it, I want nothing to do with your theology.”

   Comment by Michael Iafrate — May 3, 2010 @ 12:30 pm

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