Comic Relief to Christian Art

Scripture gives us an amusing description of a lazy man. He turns over in bed the way a door creaks open on its hinges. He lets his hand sink down into a bowl of food but finds it just about exhausts him to bring it back to his mouth. And he cries, “There is a lion in the road! There is a lion in the streets!”

The writer goes on to say (Prov. 26:16) that the sluggard thinks he is wiser than any seven discerning fellows taken together; yet here he is, saying, “I’m not going to go outside, not me! There’s a lion out there!” A lazy man can make fantastic excuses for not going to work, can dream up the most elaborate rationalizations for his inactivity. “There’s a lion outside the door!” So Scripture pokes fun at the fellow.

A quite different situation occasioned the celebrated laughter of Sarah. When Jehovah told Abraham his ninety-year-old wife would still have a baby, he laughed, and later on she laughed, her joy mixed with incredulity, just as Christ’s disciples are reported to have been amazed, not believing because of their joy, when Christ suddenly appeared in the room with them after the resurrection. Sarah, like some Christians today, felt guilty about laughing and lied about it, though after Isaac was born (Isaac means “laughter”) she said believingly, “God made me laugh so that all who hear about it will laugh with me.”

Laughing along with Sarah—that is the direction our thinking and encouraging of Christian art should take.

What makes something funny? The element of incongruity is certainly central; the unexpected juxtaposition or intersection of opposite matters sets up a humorous state of affairs. Once I ate dinner opposite Gerbrandy, the iron-willed wartime prime minister of the Netherlands, who flinched not a bit before the Nazis. I watched him with his huge, white, handlebar mustache sip hot tomato soup and try to keep stray whiskers from getting red. Incongruity! Great courage and dinner-table helplessness.

Exaggeration, too—whether it be that of the Coney Island mirrors that distort the viewer’s anatomy, making him lopsided and pin-headed with monstrous feet, or the lion-in-the-street impossibility—is an element of humor. Whenever exaggeration is patently false or a grand pretense is punctured, there are the makings of comedy. This is why teachers, preachers, and other men of authority are good prospects for the deflation of laughter. The holes in human importance easily show through. The comical has a way of appropriately leveling people.

But there is always a framework of seriousness behind what is funny. Perhaps it is only the plodding determination of a year-old child to walk—step … step … step, till he abruptly stumbles and falls on his face in the grass, a delightfully comical, pleasant failure to a young mother marveling at the fruit of her womb. There must always be some kind of background security, responsible purpose, or norm that gets broken, frustrated, undone, to deliver the element of surprise that is built into something funny. This is why art, if it is indeed intrinsically metaphorical in relating dissimilars, has, because of its serious, constantly surprising character, a subliminal laughter in its products.

Now it is a fact that the same comic discrepancies in reality can be conceived and shared either in Christian charity or in non-Christian disdain. Nietzsche epitomizes the delighting scorn a keen observer of human frailties can voice. Jonathan Swift’s righteous satire, Daumier’s softer yet biting political caricatures, some of Picasso’s violent derangements of figures—all these testify to a severe judgment on the out-of-joint character of society. There is ice in their laughter, a touch of the ridicule that the old revolutionary sophist Gorgias recommended—destroying the seriousness of your enemies with laughter and their laughter with seriousness. But the cold remoteness of such a comic critique of life betrays a restless spirit foreign to the biblical gentleness of rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep (Rom. 12:15). Such critically comic art and literature seems to play the supercilious moralizer it rightly condemns.

I do not mean to suggest that the happily-ever-after endings are a mark of a Christian grasp of reality, or that a tragic, humorless vision like Wagner’s bespeaks God’s world. I just mean that there is a secular, high-handed, polished, black humor that is deep, that bites deep, and that does not heal.

Much modern art, from music to sculpture to poetry, seems to have lost any sense of humor, to have become so professionalistic that it has its head in a bag of double sharps, acetylene torches, and polyglot acrostics. We should not wish to make jokes about abstract, drip-and-drag art, or about difficult atonal music; that would reveal the tasteless pride of a Christian who does not know the deep agony of hopelessness that has gone into some of these contorted creations. But it is worth noticing that, when art has lost the naïve sense of humor, fun, and sheer joy, there is little to protect it from becoming bizarre or barren. And then humorless contemporary art seems to go to one of two ends: either “The Big Mouth” (Rev. 13:5), where it experiments, sexualizes, casts about into dark mythologies with its false prophetic word, becoming something that is absurd for hanging in museums or treating respectfully between hard covers; or a nervous tittering, the unraveled conclusion in pop, op, and bop art to what are indeed the valuable, purging innovations of a Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Stravinsky. One can laugh in art galleries, book stores, and concert halls today; but often this laughter is not so much comic relief as an embarrassed response to the nitrous oxide and frenetic tickling of tricksters making the popularity circuit.

Christian art does not and will not succumb to the secular sickness and the positivistic inheritance of the Renaissance-schooled intelligence with its ideal of harmony, nor to the Romantic revolutionary and his affinity for anarchy and meaninglessness. Christian art is born out of a perspective revealed in the eighth chapter of Proverbs, where Wisdom says: “And there I was, all playfulness, laughing daily, continually, before God’s face; playing with the inhabited portion of his earth, I enjoyed myself with the sons of men.”

That is, the biblical Christian is not bluffed by the fashion of Big Mouths or the whine of chitter-chatter, because he knows that from the beginning God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and that therefore our created situation is not hopeless—it is an arena in which God’s trustworthy grace covers men of faith till Christ comes back to earth and finishes righting the broken world that we inhabit, or wear like a cloak.

The human condition, to the eye of biblical faith, is funny! Not that sin is a humorous matter, nor God’s covenanting, jealous anger not a terrifying reality, nor the evils of war and rumors of war not enough to freeze the smiles on little girls’ faces. But this: revelation shows unmistakably the childish folly of us two-legged men trying so hard to walk by ourselves and falling flat on our faces with our lion-tired rationalizations and our exaggerated estimate of our strivings. Revelation makes clear the joke God has played on mankind, how in a little Jewish baby he answered the questions that for centuries have taxed the brains of the greatest philosophers. And to top off the incongruity, for the ultimate rule of his world God chooses, not the especially intelligent, gifted, or good-looking people, but the apparently foolish, the weak, the meek.

Furthermore, these followers of faith are, it seems, misfits, people who are able to rejoice at death, suffering, and daily persecution when they could be carefree, who thrive on marriage but act as if they were not married, who intensely enjoy the world but can let it go (1 Cor. 7:29 f.). This sainthood business is a joke. Disciples of Christ cut the figure of a clown in the world; they are buffoons, going the extra mile, turning the other cheek.

Yet it is this comical reality—funny because God’s hand cradles the whole inexplicable, laughing, homely matter in certain hope—this delightful surprise of mercies each new morning despite our sin, that deserves creative artistic form. This kind of buoyancy should typify Christian art.

By comic relief to Christian art, I do not mean an anecdotal temper, a reformed take-off on Salvador Dali’s mystifying practical jokes in art, or even Ionesco’s visionary dramatic enigmas. Rather, I mean that Christian art—one must be careful not to dictate its forms a priori—in the spirit of Schütz, Bach, Melville, Alan Paton, Rouault, will disclose a spirit of holy contentment not gone to comfortable seed, an apocalyptic prophecy that still encourages reconciliation. It has in it the joyful victory laughter of Psalm 126 sung before the final battle, though perhaps mute in time of deep trouble; the relief in toil of Romans 8 (“nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”); the incredulous, quiet, humanly sinful but forgiven joy of Sarah. This sin-sensitive, Father-in-heaven-comforted comic relief will come through subtly in Christian art.

Too often artistically talented young Christians hover on the edges of the Church. There seems to be little room for them within a given evangelical communion; they are asked to squeeze their lump of art somehow into a liturgical shape—if they cannot, then what is it good for? This unhappy situation, which is generally foreign to Roman and Anglo-Catholic communions, comes from the inability of most evangelical churches to know how to laugh Christianly or to recognize that there is more to our Father’s world than piously delimited space.

There are lions in the city streets and country roads of America today. But our task as Christians is to go outside.—our Lord is at hand!—to judge what we see in the name of Jesus Christ, to trample lions under foot, and thus to be built up in the faith. Otherwise, what we are inescapably exposed to culturally will judge us on the Last Day. This means that those interested in art must find out what the color signature of Matisse, or an Emil Nolde, is saying, that they must study the verse form of Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Alan Ginsberg, and T. S. Eliot, to discern what is excellent and what is not. We may neither flirt indiscriminately with our cultural surroundings (cf. Matt. 6:13) nor try to escape earth for an ivory palace (1 Cor. 5:10). Here and now we must let the compassionate, purifying love of Christ in us spill over into our daily experience and into every sensation we feel (Phil. 1:9), including our appreciation of art. Here too Christ must rule.

Yet for the Christian community, critique is not enough. Especially those believers who are true to the fundamentals of the faith once delivered to the saints must busy themselves with the positive, full-orbed witness of praise. And if art is anything, according to the Old Testament psalms, it is a vehicle of praise.

But art will not grow Christianly strong within evangelical circles unless (1) men see that the proper ministry of art is first of all not evangelizing but a praising edification (the root meaning is rough-hewn, earthy building up, not cloying, heavenly platitudes), and (2) the Church does not expect full-blown Christian masterpieces from its young artists in the first generation but has the wisdom to be happy with little artistic comic reliefs.

Evangelical Christians should not take themselves too seriously just because they take Christ’s mission in the world very seriously. The legitimate “burden for souls” needs the relaxing biblical perspective that all things present as well as future belong to us, and we “are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3:21–23). Therefore, let us work out our everlasting salvation with fear and trembling—and with Sarah’s holy laughter.

We Bible believers do not need an up-to-date dialectical theology that is really old as the hills, nor do we need to learn to speak with a secular voice to a dechristianized world. What we really need to know is how to laugh for God’s sake. Then Christian art, because of its intrinsic comic relief, will be both evidence of the evangelical community’s robust faith and a pointer toward the way God’s people should go.

Thee, Thou, And All That

The nominating committee asked Bill Sykes to be president of our men’s group and he refused; so I went around to talk with him. After giving all the bad reasons he gave the real one: he didn’t want to lead in public prayer.

“Do you pray in private?” I asked.

He said, “Of course I do.” (I guess Bill doesn’t know how many Christians have difficulty in this department.)

“Well, public prayer is the same except you do it out loud,” I said.

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” he replied. “In private I just talk with my Father, but in public I have to say thee, thou, and all that, and I can’t get the hang of the lingo.”

A good many conversations with men like Bill have begun to convince me that the twentieth century is here and that perhaps we should recognize the fact in public prayer. The traditional language of devotion is stately and beautiful, when used correctly. But there is much to be said in favor of talking with our Father in the same language we use the rest of the time.

Traditional prayer language is based upon the justly beloved Authorized Version, which was published in 1611. The most noticeable difference between the language of that day and ours is in the pronoun “you.” In 1611 “one of you” was “thee” or “thou”; “two or more of you” was “you” or “ye.” Today, unfortunately, “you” serves both purposes.

By 1611 a change dictated by politeness was already far advanced. Medieval rulers called themselves “we the king,” the plural of majesty. Those who addressed the king naturally said “you” (plural) instead of “thee.” Bit by bit the plural “you” spread from royalty to any superior, and thence to almost anyone. The old terms “thee” and “thou” were reserved more and more for the family; words that once were just convenient ways of speaking to other people became suffused with intimate, beautiful, family associations.

Our fathers prayed to God as “thee,” first because it was the only possible word, and later, as the language changed, because it was the close, endearing term. Today the obsolete term may increase the distance to God, instead of drawing his children close to him.

Post-Elizabethan English is stately, dignified, and beautiful. But is it the only proper way to address the Deity? A man might say to his boss, “How do you want me to handle this correspondence, Mr. Smith?” A few minutes later he might pray about the same matter, “Holy Father, infinite in mercy, do thou guide me through the perplexities that beset me.” He is probably unconscious of shifting centuries; archaic English is his natural prayer language. But how about his neighbor who is just learning to pray? Must he learn a new language before he can begin?

A seminary classmate, leading in chapel prayer, spoke to our heavenly Father as “you.” Afterward a professor commented, “That was a thoughtful prayer. I would suggest, however, that in the future you speak to God as ‘thee.’ It’s more respectful.” By that time I had already discovered that seminary professors are not always right. And here was one of them telling us to use yesterday’s language for the exact opposite of the reason that led our fathers to use it.

“Hallowed be thy name.” Sometimes I think “thy” is the most important word in the prayer. Here children speak to their Father in an intimate, family manner. We address the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, whom we call “Abba” (“Daddy”). I join my professor in believing that all prayer should be respectful; but there is distant respect and affectionate respect, and Christians are called to the latter.

Two reasons for using modern English in prayer seem forceful. First, and less important, the old-fashioned English sounds ghastly unless used correctly. It isn’t just the pronouns. The verbs are inflected along with them, and wrong inflection produces such oddities as “O thou that arteth” and “we cometh to thee.” Prepositions are different, too. And word order is different.

The second reason for using modern English is far more important. Many believe that in order to pray they must use the kind of language they hear in church. And since they can’t twist their tongues around all these unfamiliar forms, they don’t pray. Doesn’t the use of antiquated language bind unnecessary burdens upon God’s people?

If modern language in prayer is good, it does not follow that traditional language is always bad. Hallowed liturgical prayers are seldom improved by the use of contemporary forms. Consider one that is beloved throughout the English-speaking world:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love Thee and worthily magnify Thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord, Amen.

If you tamper with that prayer you make a complete botch. Shift “thy” to “your” and “thee” to “you.” Nobody says “unto” any more, so change it. “Hidden” is more natural today, and we would probably say “so that.” Make all the other shifts that occur to you, and what do you have? A botch. And you haven’t made the prayer one bit more understandable. If you are going to use a classical prayer, use it correctly. But when you compose your own prayer, speak good contemporary English.

It’s hard to mix the old and the new successfully. I’m sure the Lord understands when a prayer alternates between “you” and “thee,” but a human listener may decide the one praying doesn’t think prayer important enough to get it right. (Men who pray this way usually do it with their hands in their pants pockets.)

If my arguments have left you unmoved and you still think you should pray in King James’s English, then do so—correctly. But always remember why you are leading in prayer. You are not praying to display your command of historical grammar. You are praying to praise God (which you can do in any language) and to help people. What language is most likely to help the people you are leading in prayer? Jesus, the Apostles, the Reformers, and the translators of the Authorized Version all thought that the language of their own day was the best.—The Rev. ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD, JR., Covenant Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia.

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