The Table Video

Prof. Natasha Duquette discusses the concept of “heteroglossia” as displayed by Jesus and the disciples in their collaboration with each other and with God as a precursor to the history of collaborative dissent within theology and proposes a model for theological aesthetics for Christians working today in the academy. She discusses a wide range of thinkers including Augustine, Kant, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Edmund Burke.

Transcript:

Christian scholarship has always been a collaborative, pedagogically-focused, outward-reaching, and restorative activity in tension with corrupt social structures. The early disciples went out two-by-two into societies within which they were perceived as dissenters and even jailed. One could argue that Christ himself taught as an individual, but he did so within the system of communal worship and the historic texts of the Judaic culture into which he was born. Those texts themselves present what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as a heteroglossia in an open unity comprised of multiple voices, including those of Moses, Deborah, Jeremiah, David, Habakkuk, and many others.

When Jesus spoke, he was aware that he was speaking into a dynamic, textual conversation. Furthermore, he spoke and acted as part of a community of three within the paradoxical unity of the trinity. Scripture depicts Christ praying from a position of vulnerability, consulting the Father and working in dependent collaboration with Him, not in absolute Kantian autonomy. After Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, the disciples continued to follow His pattern of collaboration. The book of Acts also presents a sublimely on-sparring picture of heterglossia in the many languages of Pentecost.

After Pentecost, working prayerfully in pairs, the early disciples attended to physical and spiritual suffering in the world, juxtaposed with manifestations of God’s imminent beauty. They responded to the contingent details of their particular context with words and actions that triggered sublime regeneration, wonder, and openness to learning. Their teaching challenged the powerful officials of their day who could not ignore the force of their words and the beauty of their loving action.

How can we continue this Biblical pattern of aesthetically delightful and ethically convicting collaborative dissent as we seek to be salt and light in a hurting world? In envisioning a theological aesthetics of collaborative dissent for today, I will begin by outlining Edmund Burke’s division between the sublime and the beautiful and its theological implications, then I will consider a scriptural model of aesthetically delightful collaborative pedagogy.

Next, I will trace a similar pattern running through the dissenting discourses of 18th and early 19th century, my own area of research, and, finally, I will conclude with two examples of theologically charged, aesthetically arresting, and socially conscious collaborative dissent from our own context, 21st century North America. Gesa Thiessen has recently defined theological aesthetics as scholarship that thinks about God, quote, in the light of and perceived though sense knowledge, sensation, feeling, imagination, through beauty and the arts.

Theological aesthetics raises such questions as how do we think about the beauty of God? How do we picture a transcending God as the ultimate source of Earthly beauty? How can we honor God by creating beautiful poetry, works of visual art, or architecture?

How does the incarnation relate to our ideas about concrete manifestations of beauty in this world? And as Reinhold Niebuhr’s work raises, is there a Yeatsian, quote, terrible beauty in the cross itself? Recent work in theological aesthetics has focused on figures such as the African Augustin of Hippo, the American Jonathan Edwards, the German Immanuel Kant, and the Swiss Hans Urs von Balthasar, but my own introduction to this film, or to this field came via the Irish expatriate Edmund Burke.

In 1757, Burke published his “Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas “of the Sublime and the Beautiful”, within which he uses extreme binary divisions to define the sublime in very broad strokes against its foil, the beautiful. And in 1759, prompted by reviewers who asked why he did not mention God in his book, Burke added a section titled Power, within which he quotes from the book of Job and the Psalms in order to inflect his aesthetic system with theological meaning.

In doing so, Burke draws a hard line between the Old Testament and the New, and his system does not allow for any areas of overlap. Burke is able to acknowledge that finer degrees of difference do exist in between his categories, the sublime and the beautiful, but he dismisses such subtleties as illusive and immeasurable.

He writes, in things whose excess is not judged by greater and smaller, as smoothness and roughness, darkness and light, all these are very easily distinguished when the difference is any way considerable, but not when it is minute for want of some very common measures which perhaps may never come to be discovered. According to Burke, the absolute difference between the sublime and the beautiful should be obvious.

However, he acknowledges that men of, quote, cold and phlegmatic tempers and those engaged in the low drudgery of avarice may not properly discern these aesthetic types. To disagree with his strict categories is to risk moral or at least medical judgment. Burke is interested only in perceptions generated by men of plain reason and healthy physique. He holds up his own perceptions as the basis for universal judgments and, as a result, excludes aesthetic observers with infirm, phlegmatic, female, or otherwise different bodies. Essentially, Burke is excluding such individuals from his own definition of the Christian scholar.

Burke’s refusal to allow for multiple perspectives is expressed when he writes, somewhat defensively, quote, to multiply principles for every different appearance is useless and unphilosophical, and so shuts down any possibility of exploring categories that may exist somewhere in between, in the gradations between these aesthetic binaries. This has theological consequences, as Burke draws an absolute divide between the sublime as powerful and terrifying, manifested in Old Testament justice, and the beautiful as weak and comforting, displayed in New Testament love.

So, the New Testament is, ends up being kind of denigrated in this system. He thus creates a seemingly unbridgeable gap between Judaism and Christianity, between justice and love. He writes, quote, before the Christian religion had, as it were, humanized the idea of the divinity and brought it somewhere nearer to us, there was very little said of the love of God. Burke associates the beautiful with the closeness of a loving friendship in contrast to the sublime’s sternness of a distant and punishing father. As cultural historian Jonathan Lamb points out, for Burke, quote, unmodified power is God and God is terrible.

Burke’s biographer, Fred Lock, agrees, claiming that the Philosophical Inquiry is at bottom a theological work where Burke’s God is, quote, the terrible Jehovah of the Old Testament. Due to Burke’s insistence on the wide difference between the sublime and the beautiful, there’s no room for paradox, no room for what Nicholas Wolterstorff has recently termed justice in love. This is largely due to Burke’s scriptural blind spots. He ignores the multiple references to God’s loving kindness, in the Psalms and Jeremiah for example. In attempting to restrict Christianity to the beautiful, he occludes powerful moments of the sublime, sublime power in the New Testament from which he does not quote even once in his inquiry.

British scholar Ben Quash, in a recent address here at Biola, critiqued the sublime but then he presented the transfiguration as one possible example of a Christian sublimity. The crucifixion and the resurrection could also be read as sublime events, both terrifying and awe-inspiring. In Matthew 28, the women run from the empty tomb with, quote, fear and great joy, a paradoxical mixture of emotions that resist Burke’s neat polarities.

In searching for a scriptural starting point from which to address the prospects and perils of of Christian scholarship today, I found myself drawn back to the book of Acts. Attending to the early disciples’ theological aesthetic of collaborative dissent in the wake of the resurrection and ascension further unsettles Burke’s dichotomy.

Certainly, these first believers, aware of what happened to Christ and themselves facing the possibility of imprisonment or execution must have been keenly aware of both the exciting, paradigm-shifting prospects of Christian thought as well as the hostile, life-threatening perils of openly Christian teaching. Acts 3, in particular, presents a striking picture of collaborative Christian pedagogy framed by static beauty and enabled by dynamic sublimity. So, there are Bibles in front of you, so if you wanna grab one and turn to Acts 3, or if you have a Bible or a smartphone with the Bible on it, you could look to Acts 3 and 4.

That’s where I’m gonna be for a little bit. Acts 3, in particular presents us, okay. In his book, “Hearing God”, Dallas Willard celebrates, quote, the possibilities of a life of free-hearted collaboration with Jesus and his friends in the kingdom of the heavens. And we catch a glimpse of such dauntless constructive friendship in the unity between Peter and John in Acts 3 and 4. Acts 3 begins, quote, now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, suggesting that Christian thought, action, and teaching arises from communal entry into prayerful spaces. The two men are stopped in their tracks, however, by an instance of great suffering juxtaposed with the temple’s stately architectural beauty.

A man, quote, above 40-years old and paralyzed from birth lies at the temple gate, which is called beautiful. Most commentators agree that this is the Nicanor Gate. The word beautiful, with a capital B, is not the proper name of the gate. Biblical scholar Ben Witherington points out that Luke uses beautiful here as a descriptive term. The Greek work is horaios, which signifies seasonable, in prime, blooming. It is a feminine adjective, only used four times in the New Testament, twice in Acts 3.

When Jewish historian Josephus describes a 75-foot gate whose beauty, quote, greatly excelled that of the others, he’s most likely referring to this beautiful gate. Made of Corinthian brass, its surface brightly reflected the rays of the sun, and it is here beside the gate’s brilliant splendor that Peter and John encounter the paralytic. He asks them for money but instead Peter heals him in the name of Jesus, and he leaps and praises God, astonishing a transfixed crowd.

The sublime creates opportunities for effective Christian pedagogy because it generates a state of humility, fear, and wonder, an awareness of humanity’s finitude in contrast to divine omnipotence. God’s power to restoratively heal causes the crowd in Acts 3:10 to be, quote, filled with wonder and amazement. Or, in Greek, thaumazo and ekstasis, words that denote sublimity. Thaumazo means amazed, in wonder, astonished, surprised, to marvel. The sublime is something that catches us off guard. It is unexpected and takes our breath away, whereas the beautiful is static and expected, like the beautiful gate of the temple.

Burke recognizes astonishment as key to sublimity as well, arguing, quote, several languages frequently use the same word to signify indifferently the modes of astonishment and those of terror. Thambos is, in Greek, either fear or wonder. The fearful wonder of the crowd at the the temple arises as they realize the limitations of their own preconceptions, thus becoming more open and teachable. Into the crowd’s silent awe, Peter and John speak the truth of the Gospel, and as a result, 5,000 people come to believe in Jesus as Messiah.

Ekstasis, the second Biblical term for the crowd’s response to the healing, has historically been associated with sublime transport by writers from first century rhetorical philosopher Pseudo-Longinus to 17th century metaphysical poet John Dunn. Strong’s Concordance defines ekstasis as bewilderment, amazement, and Thayer’s Concordance adds it is an alienation of mind, which such as makes a lunatic, or that of the man who by some sudden emotion is transported, as it were, out of himself so that in this rapt condition, although he is awake, his mind is so drawn off from all surrounding objects and wholly fixed on things divine.

This is the state of the crowd in Acts 3, gathered at the temple, after they observe a previously paralyzed man leaping and praising God. The observers are not merely pleased but terrified, astonished, on the edge of madness, and in this moment of ekstasis, movement out of stasis, Peter and John teach them about, quote, the Prince of Life whom God hath raised from the dead whereof we are witnesses.

After this instance of dynamic Christian pedagogy, the position of Peter and John as collaborative dissenters emerges. The Sadducees swoop down on the two men, quote, grieved that they taught the people without official sanction lay hands on them and placed them in hold until the next day, literally imprisoning them for their Christian thought and teaching. Similar patterns of dissent and imprisonment are embedded in the history of the denominations out of which Biola University emerged.

At the beginning of the 18th century, John Chamberlain divided religious dissenters into, quote, four classes, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers. Biola’s founders included Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congregationalists, whose culture can be traced back to what Mark Noll has now recognized as a uniquely dissenting theological aesthetic. In the scandal of the evangelical mind, Noll writes, quote, over its first centuries, Protestantism provided an ethos in which artistic expression of unusual high quality flourished.

It gave one musical genius, Johann Sebastian Bach, many of the themes for his noblest work. Noll moves on to note that dissenting Protestant culture also, quote, developed to poetics and argues that in such writers as John Milton and John Bunyan, we can observe an identifiably Puritan aesthetic. Like Peter and John in Acts 3 and 4, the writers of “Paradise Lost” and “Pilgrim’s Progress” were themselves imprisoned for their Christian thought, John Milton for publishing “A Treatise for Civil Power” and John Bunyan for preaching and evangelizing outside of the structures of the state church.

My own research studies the women scholars of 18th and early 19th century Protestant dissent who, largely inspired by John Milton, generated poetry and aesthetic theory from within their Presbyterian, Quaker, and Moravian networks. Though it was rare for dissenters to be imprisoned in the 18th century, they could still not sit in Parliament or matriculate from Oxford because they were outside of the Church of England, so the British dissenters set up their own colleges in order to equip Presbyterian, Moravian, or Quaker men to serve, not unlike the move to set up the Bible Institute of Los Angeles in 1908 in order to train young men and women to reach the world for Christ.

Biola was not established as an alternative to universities affiliated with the state church. So, America has never had a state church, and institutions such as Yale and Princeton were themselves set up by Congregationalists and Presbyterians. However, Biola was created to impart sound doctrine and so were the small dissenting academies in 18th century Britain. Unlike Biola, which included female students as well as students of diverse racial backgrounds from its very first years, 18th century British institutions such as the Presbyterian Warrington Academy did not enroll women officially.

Dissenting British women were thus doubly marginalized both by their commitments to non-conformist church communities and by the limits at times imposed on them by those very communities. In my forthcoming monograph, “Veiled Intent”, I examine the tactics that women deployed in order to ensure their Biblical hermeneutics and theological views were preserved for posterity, and I argue that dissenting female poets and theorists veiled provocative hermeneutical claims and calls for social action in aesthetics forms of discourse viewed as more acceptably feminine modes of expression.

The marginalized possess unique viewpoints that can generate subtle, effective tactics appropriate and helpful to Christian scholarship in the 21st century. I wonder if such tactics could be compared to Peter and John veiling their Christian thought, action, and teaching in the aesthetic forms and historic practices of Judaic worship or Christian scholars today choosing to be, quote, shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves by couching critical thought in aesthetically delightful, even sublime forms of discourse, disarming to a potentially resistant audience. In adopting previous aesthetic forms and modes of discourse to express theological or cultural dissent, one inevitably shapes, alters, or even extends older conceptual structures, making them more flexible in order to express new or fresh perspectives.

Peter and John do this when they adopt the structures and spaces of Judaic worship to express their dynamic teaching about Jesus as Messiah. Christian scholars today face questions regarding the balance of honoring cultural traditions while at the same time remaining winsome and adaptable to the cross-cultural needs of the present. For the dissenting women theorists and poets who were engaged with earlier definitions of beauty and sublimity, it was key both to acknowledge the influence of Anglicans such as Edmund Burke and their fellow dissenters such as John Milton as well as to adjust and modify earlier aesthetic forms to new ends such as voicing a female perspective and the attainment of social reforms, including the abolition of slavery.

How can Christian scholars today honor their own cultural foundations and deploy a theological aesthetics of collaborative dissent that encourages more inclusive, socially conscious practices? Perhaps, listening to the voices of dissenting Protestant women from the past can help us. One of the perils inherent to academic pursuits, from which Christian scholars are not exempt, is the danger of solipsistic isolation, and dissenting women writers were keenly aware of this problem.

This is also one of the dangers of the sublime as defined by Burke, who associated, quote, entire solitude with sublimity and, quote, lively conversation and the endearments of friendship with beauty. Burke’s connection between solitude and the sublime led to cultural idealizations of the solitary figure, visible in paintings such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea. It’s hard to even see the human figure, but he’s right there.

However, warnings regarding the dangers of excessive solitude were voiced almost immediately upon the publication of Burke’s inquiry. Edmund Burke’s friend, Samuel Johnson, wrote a cautionary parable about a brilliant astronomer who studies the vast heavens without any significant human contact for 40 years until he comes to believe that he can control the weather with his mind. I’m just gonna read you a quick quote from Johnson. The astronomer explains, “This contemplation fastened on my mind, “and I sat days and nights in imaginary dominion, “pouring upon this country and that the showers of fertility “and seconding every fall of rain “with due proportion of sunshine.” He’s essentially playing God, and it’s arising out of his isolation.

In Rasselas, it is the discussion of astronomical concepts with two intelligent and educated women that gradually draws this scientist out of his delusion. Johnson’s parable of the mad astronomer suggests that his own intellectual friendships with women, which were well-documented, were reciprocal, edifying, and mutually beneficial, perhaps even necessary to his mental health. Christian scholarship in the 21st century likewise needs to include both male and female perspectives.

My own research on dissenting women writers asks whether there is a difference between male and female perspectives on the sublime, and thus my work intersects with the field of standpoint epistemology. What if, instead of a brooding German monk, we think about a contemplative Canadian woman by the sea? For Burke, a position on a cliff overlooking the sea is sublime because it is perilous. The depths of the sea connote the threat of drowning and the sharp edge of a cliff suggests the danger of falling but the open horizon also provides a sense of freedom and possibility. Joseph Addison argued, quote, a spacious horizon is an image of liberty where the eye has room to range abroad, and Immanuel Kant would later connect sublimity to freedom in his “Critique of Judgment”.

Throughout the 18th century, the sweeping perspective from a geographical height was referred to as a, quote, prospect view. With its combined precariousness and freedom, it symbolized both the perils and prospects of intellectual or artistic activity. Romanticist Jacqueline Labbe suggests that, quote, the prospect view, allied as it was with cultural power and breadth of vision, was appealing to individual women who desired to, quote, claim the prospect for themselves. Simply replacing a solitary male figure with a solitary female one, however, does not solve the problem of isolation and solipsism which haunts the 18th century discourse of the sublime and the 21st century pursuit of Christian scholarship.

The Biblical picture of Christian scholarship is neither a man nor a woman standing alone, but rather a dissenting community of brothers and sisters collaborating together. Theologian Kristina LaCelle-Peterson notes that in Genesis 1:28 the woman along with the man is commissioned jointly with him to carry out God’s work in this world. Here we see God’s original intention, a collaborative model of mutual dominion or care-taking. If such collaboration were attempted today from a prayerful space of shared vulnerability, this is my church, it could result in intellectually engaging and aesthetically delightful Christian outreach towards a world in need.

In her sublime poem, simply entitled, “A Hymn for the Scotch Kirk”, Presbyterian poet Joanna Baillie paints portrait of a diverse community brought together through obedient worship of God. She declares, O God who made Earth, sea, and air and living creatures free and fair, thy hallowed praise is everywhere, hallelujah. All blended in the swelling song are wise and simple, weak and strong, sweet woman’s voice and infant’s tongue, hallelujah.

Yeah, woods and winds and waves convey to the rapt ear a hymn and say He who hath made us we obey, hallelujah. Okay, so I’m gonna show you her. I’ll look a little bit more closely at her hymn. Through her image of a rapt ear listening to the sounds of creation, Baillie suggests that close attention to the collaborative pedagogy of nature can trigger a state of ekstasis, of sublime fear and wonder akin to that of the crowds in Acts 3. In her alliterative grouping of woods and winds and waves, Baillie creates a gradually amplifying phonetic parallelism that echos the rhythmic sounds of nature.

By depicting diverse natural elements joining their voices with human beings, wise and simple, weak and strong, women and infants, Baillie clearly alludes to Psalm 148, where ocean depths, stormy winds, and cedars unite their voices in praise with young men and women, old men and children to together exclaim hallelujah. The 18th and early 19th century dissenting women writers who both influenced and were influenced by Joanna Baillie also actively situate their discussion of theological aesthetics within the context of communal worship.

In doing so, they move against an increasingly hyper-rationalist grain within the intellectual groups and institutions established by their dissenting communities. In Anna Barbauld’s essay “Thoughts on Devotional Taste”, she reflects on the Presbyterian Warrington Academy where her father taught theology. She acknowledges that, quote, free inquiry is undoubtedly necessary to establish a rational belief, but she also worries that a, quote, disputatious spirit could divide her community.

Lest she be viewed as anti-intellectual, she adds, shall we mention philosophy as an enemy to religion? God forbid. Philosophy, daughter of heaven, that slow ascending, still investigating sure the form of things with radiant finger points to heaven again. Yet there is a view in which she, philosophy, exerts an influence perhaps rather unfavorable to the fervor of simple piety. Philosophy does, indeed, enlarge our conceptions of the deity and gives us the sublimest ideas of His power and extent of dominion, but it raises Him too high for our imaginations to take hold of and in a great measure destroys the affectionate regard which is felt by the common class of pious Christians.

Barbauld’s careful quotation from James Thomson’s poem, “The Seasons”, which is a long work of natural landscape description, suggests that philosophy is a gift from heaven that allows us to study concrete, sure realities of creation in order to discern evidence of a creator. Barbauld ends her essay with hope that the Psalms will be re-embraced by, quote, the living voice of the people in worship where, quote, the spirit of philosophy and the spirit of devotion shall join. The voices of Joanna Baillie, Anna Barbauld, and a third woman, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck emphasized the importance of shared devotional practices to dissenting theological aesthetics.

Like the women who converse with the astronomer in Samuel Johnson’s parable, Baillie, Barbauld, and Schimmelpenninck seek to ground speculative thought in collaborative activities and shared experiences. Unlike Burke, they do not divorce the beautiful from the sublime but strongly desire to bring these two aesthetic categories into reciprocal, mutually supportive relationship.

Barbauld does so by noting how Hebraic scripture mixes abstract sublime ideas about God with concrete poetic metaphors that reflect what she calls all that is delightful in the beauty of holiness. Schimmelpenninck does so by creating a system within which the Burkean sublime of terror, which she calls the terrible sublime, is only one of four species of beauty, which is her overarching category. Schimmelpenninck’s other three species are the contemplative sublime, the sentimental, and the sprightly.

She uses music to explain her scale of aesthetic types, arguing that, quote, the deep tones such as produced by a bass drum are sublime, medium-pitched sounds such as produced by a flute are sentimental, and high-pitched tones such as those produced by pan pipes are sprightly. She further differentiates between the terrible and the contemplative sublime by arguing that in the terrible, abrupt, irregular pauses fix the attention, so abrupt pauses in music, whereas in the contemplative sublime, quote, one regular, grand, sonorous swell strengthens and stabilizes the listener. Examples from poetry further elucidate her categories.

According to Schimmelpenninck, Homer’s epic typifies the terrible sublime, Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, the contemplative sublime, William Cooper’s hymns, the sentimental, and Alexander Pope’s satire, the sprightly. As well as expanding Burke’s aesthetic dichotomy into four species, Schimmelpenninck challenges him directly regarding the necessity of solitude to the sublime. So, she writes solitude is generally considered an integral part of the sublime.

That it is not essentially connected with it will appear from the following reason. It has not always produced that effect but only under certain circumstances. Were we transported to Cheddar Cliffs or any other sublime prospect with all the company of a race ball, for example, the sublime would be destroyed, but were a first-rate man of war which was sinking and the whole crew prostrate in prayer while destruction was engulfing them or had we seen the venerable assembly of Conscript fathers awaiting their death by Gaal, the very circumstance of the multitude would have added to the sublime.

Schimmelpenninck’s examples of communal prayer at sea and calm acceptance of mortality may be loosely based on John Wesley’s observation of Moravian Brethren while traveling aboard a ship bound for Georgia in 1735. By the time she wrote this book, she had become a Methodist at this point. Historian J.E. Hutton notes that when the ship carrying John Wesley to America was swamped by a tempest, quote, the English passengers screamed with terror.

The Brethren calmly sang a hymn. This event triggered Wesley’s conversion. Schimmelpenninck’s own move from Quaker beliefs of her family to Methodism and finally Moravianism suggests a similarly dynamic spiritual journey. Just as Wesley’s conversion out of a more cultural Christianity into a saving faith in Christ spurred him to write tracts against the British slave trade, Schimmelpenninck found herself actively involved in abolitionism after her Methodist baptism in 1808. Schimmelpenninck’s theological aesthetics were directly tied to her involvement in the collaborative dissent of anti-slavery, an involvement that grew as she turned more intensely to the field of Biblical studies, which ultimately caused her to conclude that there’s, quote, no beauty but in Christ, close quote, who unites love and justice within himself.

In the early 19th century, ideas about theology, aesthetics, and justice were thoroughly integrated, as evidenced by J.M.W. Turner’s painting, The Slave Ship. After the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies and amidst debates about slavery in America, Turner engaged the sublime image of a ship engulfed at sea to remind the British of their own past. So, approximately 60 years before he created this painting, a British slave trader named Captain Collingwood cast 132 men, women, and children into the sea in order to claim insurance money for this lost cargo.

If you look carefully at the bottom of the frame, you’ll see the arms and legs reaching up out of the churning waters. It is a horrific image. However, cultural historian Simon Schama also reads it redemptively by emphasizing the light at the top of the painting and, quote, the deep trough Turner has cut in the ocean, which at the center of the painting makes the blackly heaving swell stand still as though the wrathful hand of Jehovah has suddenly passed over the boiling waters, for this is a day of martyrdom but also a scene, Turner must have optimistically thought, of vindication.

It would be a sin redeemed. Slavery would be defeated. So, he painted this seven years after the absolute abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1833. The cultural aftermath of slavery still reverberates here, however, through American culture today, and it is edifying for us to be honest about this truth within any discussion of 21st century Christian thought. In his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree”, James Cone critiques what he terms, quote, the bankruptcy of any theology in America that does not engage the religious meaning of the African American struggle for justice.

Reinhold Niebuhr reminded 20th century readers of the connection between justice and the sublime, writing, quote, much of our contemporary moral idealism lacks the sublime faith of Jesus and later asserting, quote, justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and spiritual wickedness in high places.

This is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms and must, therefore, be brought under the control of reason. Only, or sorry, one can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done. Let’s close quote. Through his research into the African American struggle for justice and its intersection with the Christian Gospel, James Cone discerns expressions of a, quote, sublime faith in African American poetry and music.

He concludes that, quote, an imminent presence of a transcendent revelation, confirming for Blacks that they were more than what whites said about them, gave them the inner spiritual strength to cope with anything that came their way. This inner spiritual strength is evident in Countee Cullen’s long narrative poem, “The Black Christ”, within which the speaker, a young boy, describes his brother’s sublime dignity and calm in the face of death at the hands of an angry mob. He seemed one I had never known.

Never such tragic beauty shone as this on any face before. It pared the heart straight to the core. It is the luster dying lends, I thought, to make some brief amends to life to wantonly cut down. Like Turner’s painting, this poem combines aesthetics, theology, and social ethics. Literary critic Scott Slovic has recently referred to the, quote, urgent aesthetic of environmentally conscious writers today, and perhaps this phrase urgent aesthetic could be applied to any socially conscious writer or artist seeking justice in love. Once such artist is Lorna Simpson, an African American photographer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn whose early work mourns the history of lynching but whose more recent work engages the empowering effect of music within the African American community.

So, she really intersects with what James Cone is saying in theology. They’re humming a John Coltrane cover of an old show tune called “It’s Easy to Remember”, which was first created in 1930 and then John Coltrane did a jazz improvisational resetting of it in 1963. Simpson chose this tune for its melodic and romantic qualities. Those are her words. But her friends in New York City who first saw her piece exhibited just four days after 911, after September 11th, found it tragic. So, she made it before September 11th and then exhibited it right after. Regardless of the viewer’s interpretation of tone, this piece definitely conveys the open unity of Bakhtinian heteroglossia.

Simpson gave her hummers freedom to express their individuality as each chose his or her own octave from Coltrane’s multi-layered jazz improvisation. The result is, in Simpson’s own words, beautiful because of the huge range of octaves, baritone, soprano, alto, expressed in male and female voices. The piece is also witty, sprightly, to borrow Schimmelpenninck’s word. Every time I show it to somebody, a group, somebody laughs. There’s something witty, clever in it. And there’s even one mouth that occasionally smiles.

In fact, 15 Mouths contains all four categories of Schimmelpenninckian beauty, the terrible sublime, some people have been frightened by the piece, the contemplative sublime, the sentimental because it’s a John Coltrane piece from the ’60s based on a piece from the ’30s, there’s a nostalgia, as well as the sprightly. Nigerian-American art critic Okwui Enwezor argues for a reading of Simpson’s early photography in terms of a, quote, American sublime of violence. Perhaps we could read her 21st century work in light of what Nicholas Wolterstorff and Harriet Guest have called the religious sublime with its life-affirming dynamic movement.

A theological aesthetics of collaborative dissent, whether modeled on the diverse unity of Peter and John, Joanna Baillie and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, or Lorna Simpson and her cast of musicians both past and present could serve as a response to terrible suffering that could move communities forward towards the wonder of contemplative sublimity, the affection of the sentimental, and perhaps even the uplifting wit of the sprightly.

As Christian scholars in the 21st century, we are called to attend to a hurting world and respond with collaborative writing, acting, and teaching that both acknowledges the horrors of the past and provides hope for life-affirming restorative movement into the future.

Woman: Thank you so much. Natasha, all the way through this, I kept feeling at the basis of it was this, something that Liz spoke to, this character infusing our Christians, our scholarship. And then the very last question for Liz’s presentation, which is how does scholarship affect our character, I think this presentation kind of explicitly shows how, but do you have any further thoughts on how…

I’ve thought about that a lot, especially because I’m

Woman: How that happens.

writing about these women and how they’re, they’re not isolated intellectuals but they’re in community and then they’re serving in outreach outside of their community. So, that’s one reason I showed my church. My church in the PowerPoint. I don’t know if I can get it to go back. I go to a really unique church that does not have a church building, and the reason is because they saved money for a church building and then somebody in the church became very concerned about human trafficking in the Philippines and then they took money that they could use for a church building and they built a home for young girls rescued out of human trafficking. And so, for me, it’s important to go to a church that is reaching outside of itself like that. I don’t know if that answers.=

Man: Thank you very much, Natasha, for your presentation. I was particularly struck, and I don’t know if this is gonna come out as a question or as a comment, particularly struck by how you went to Acts and the way that you looked at, particularly, Peter and John in there in Acts 3. I wonder if you see how exploring that further through a look at the Holy Spirit’s ministry, particularly into Acts 4 and the kind of dissenting collaboration of the sharing of the disciples would be fruitful precisely for this kind of collaborative aesthetic?

Yeah, sure. I did wanna go right through the book of Acts, it’s true. And then I’m limited in time. So, the Holy Spirit is a collaborator along with them. Yeah, I’d love to bring that in. Because, originally, I was thinking in the trinity we have collaboration already, that model, but then the Holy Spirit is this active, imminent collaboration after Jesus. And how is that different from before the crucifixion and resurrection and ascension?

I wish I could answer that more thoroughly right now, but I have been thinking about that. The reason, the story behind the fact that I want to the book of Acts is I was talking to Fred Duquette, my husband, and he said, “If you’re thinking about Christian scholarship “why are you not looking to the Bible, to the scripture?”

And then I went on a retreat at the Hilltop Retreat Center, and I just started reading Acts and that’s where that reference point came out of. But I can’t… I’ve had a desire to do that, but I have felt like within the constraints of the paper I couldn’t go through the whole book of Acts. So, I need to think more about that and do some more re-reading of the book of Acts. And I’d be, I guess I’m curious if this theme of beauty, and certainly wonder and amazement, is just constant through the book of Acts. And I had noticed that with the sublime, but I’d never noticed this capital B beautiful gate before.

It even has a little bit of a platonic resonance that it’s a capital B beautiful gate. It’s, yeah… So, I’d like to look more for how beauty plays through. What struck me was going back to the New Testament through the lens of beauty and looking for the aesthetics gave me a totally different reading, a less maybe guilt-ridden or dutiful experience of scripture and the beauty was just jumping out at me. So, it actually made for a more joyous reading of the book of Acts for me, rather than looking for rules or more [mumbles]. It was just delightful, yeah. It came alive and it made the book of Acts come alive when I was looking for beauty in it, yeah.

Woman: Wow, thank you so much for this marvelous paper because, as you know, your work has been so inspiring to me this past year. And as a historian whose been working on this project in the back of my work on beauty for ashes, I find your resonance with history and what has happened in history to real people, real places, has just been very inspiring. So, I just wondered if you would talk to us a little bit about that journey that you’ve been on, too.

Sure, the type of literary theory that I dwell in is called new historicism, and it’s a strong commitment to reading literary texts in their historical and cultural context. And I think that was behind what I was saying about seeing Jesus in his Judaic and historical context. So, I’ve always been committed to that with literary texts, but what the Center for Christian Thought work encouraged me to do was to bring that to scripture just like I was bringing aesthetics to scripture. I guess that Center for Christian Thought has freed me to bring my whole mind to scripture, not as if I do my scholarship and then when I’m reading the Bible it’s a devotional practice somehow separate. So, that’s been very effective outcome of this semester.

So, I guess I’m doing a bit of a new historicist reading of scripture now. But that, yeah… I’m deeply committed to the new historicist practice of reading texts. It seems like it is even dishonoring of the text to take it out of its historical context. [upbeat music]

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