Author Archives: Philip Tallon

Philip Tallon ~ Make Buildings that Won’t Be Burnt Up

A wise art teacher used to say, “Make art that won’t be burnt up.” He meant, make art that will outlast the last judgment. Make art that will count as one of the “glories of the nations” brought into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:26).

Like most people, I watched in horror as one of the glories of the nation of France was nearly burnt up last week. Someone put it well in Twitter, “Had to turn the tv off. Can’t take it anymore. Like watching someone in real time smashing everything in the Louvre with a sledgehammer.”

The world mourned in real time, only to discover in the following days that much of value survived. An early echo of Easter’s surprising good news, the medieval vaulting protected the sanctuary from much of the fire. If it were not for the much later addition of the spire, the damage to the inside would have been even less. My children will get to see Notre Dame’s sanctuary in much the same state as I have.

The news made much of the response of the French people. The French are marginally church-going and the country ranks as one of the least religious in the world. It is easy to imagine that France will be, in the near future, more meaningfully Muslim than Christian. Yet the world, and the French people, love this cathedral. In many ways it is the heart of Paris.

As the burning was happening I, of course, noticed the occasional dunking on church-obsession by Christians and secularists, for opposite reasons. The Christians looked to score piety points by signaling that “the church is people, not buildings.” The secularists signaled superiority by (often mistakenly) noting that such churches were built on the scaffolding of injustice, superstition, and colonialism. There wasn’t much of this, though. It was mostly a unifying moment.

My thoughts turned to my own town. I wondered what sites here in Houston would warrant such an outcry with their bloodless destruction. The answer was easy: none. Few such places exist in the world. Few buildings are as grand or as famous as Notre Dame. The closest Houston comes to a landmark is its sad, abandoned Astrodome, which the city can’t bring itself to get rid of, but also has no use for. Our dome will never compare to “Our Dame.” We could try awfully hard and still fail to create such a work of beauty. There is, of course, the additional problem that we aren’t trying.

This week it so happened that I had the pleasure to lead a discussion on Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. As anyone familiar with the work will recall, much of what Burke bemoans is the way that the French revolution cut out the heart of civil life: the nobility and the church. Left with denuded rationality, Burke foresaw the likely result. Reason unaided by sentiment will quickly degrade into cruelty. And Burke was right. The reign of terror followed soon after the book’s publication. Despite its coincidental bearing on France, the part of the book that touched most directly on the burning of Notre Dame was a point that Burke made with reference to manners: “There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” The connection here between beauty and loyalty is apparent. Beauty attracts us, even when our reasons are unconvinced. When our nation’s politicians act in ugly ways, it helps that our nation’s capital is still beautiful.

The connection to Notre Dame is obvious. This troubled world still hungers for beauty, even as it has become confused about truth. On cloudy days it seems like the church only cares about truth and goodness (and sometimes not even those), but has left the beautiful to fend for itself. Our love of “Our Lady” reminds us of a truth that the builders knew: to help us love God the church ought to be lovely.

Philip Tallon ~ How Artists Do Theology: The Resurrection

Note from the Editor: we are pleased to reshare this post from Dr. Philip Tallon that originally appeared a few years ago as a resource for Easter.

During this Easter season, I’ve been reflecting on a number of artworks that depict Christ’s victory over death.

One striking painting by Bramantino (1490) features Christ raised from the dead but still bearing the emotional and physical trauma of the cross. Jesus is alive again but seems to carry the knowledge of the torture he underwent into the new creation. It is a powerful painting, as Jesus’ haggard face seems to remind us that his suffering was no illusion and that the way of the cross will be no easier for us.

“The Risen Christ” by Bramantino (ca 1490)

But the most consistently moving painting, the one that I return to again and again, is Piero della Francesca’s “The Resurrection” (ca. 1460).

“Resurrection” by Piero della Francesca (ca 1460)

Here again, Christ carries the sorrow of the cross in his subtle and composed face, which is aimed directly at the viewer, turning the act of spectating into a confrontation. But there is also silent victory in his powerful stance. One hand holds a flag with a cross, while one foot is perched confidently on the sepulcher that recently held his body. The use of a sepulcher, rather than a cave tomb, is a nice homage to the town of Sansepolcro (“holy sepulcher”) where the mural was painted. The tomb is alabaster in color, as even death has been purified by Christ’s presence.

Like all adaptations of a biblical scene, the painter must act as a theologian. Decisions must be made in depicting the moment. And della Francesca, one understands, takes his task of visual exegesis seriously.

Not only does the moment balance gravity and joy in Jesus’ solemn triumph, but it invites us to understand that the work that has been accomplished is not yet understood by a slumbering world. The guards at the tomb bear all the symbols of power and might: one guard’s blood-red shield indicates Roman authority with its alluded SPQR (“The Senate and People of Rome”). Yet they foolishly sleep, utterly unaware that Rome’s power to bring death cannot defeat YHWH’s power to bring life. The same sleeping soldier with the shield sleepily holds on to his spear, as if clutching the last shreds of domination. Jesus’ hand, meanwhile, grips a flag of triumph with the easy authority of the Messiah whose kingdom does not originate in this world (but does extend to it).

But God’s power is seen not just in Christ’s victory, but also in the image of new creation we see in the picture. Jesus’s wounds remain. A trickle of scarlet paints his side. Dots of red stipple his hands. But his body is restored to the full fleshly life we see in della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ” (1450). This is a real body, with weight and heft.

Perhaps even more notable, however, is the landscape behind Jesus. A testament to the artist’s thoughtfulness, the trees and hills to the left of the Messiah are barren, but to the right new life has begun. Leaves and shrubs testify to the new work of creation inaugurated by Christ. In this way, Piero della Francesca gets thunderingly right what so many Christians get so stunning wrong. Raised on the first day of the week – a day any faithful Jew would understand as the first day of creation – God in Christ has begun the re-creation of this world. This work of making all things new is not complete, but it has begun.

N. T. Wright’s address, “The Road to New Creation,” could almost be taken as commentary on della Francesca’s painting:

God is not going to abolish the universe of space, time and matter; he is going to renew it, to restore it, to fill it with new joy and purpose and delight, to take from it all that has corrupted it. ‘The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom, and rejoice with joy and singing; the desert shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.’ The last book of the Bible ends, not with the company of the saved being taken up into heaven, but with the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, resulting in God’s new creation, new heavens and new earth, in which everything that has been true, lovely, and of good report will be vindicated, enhanced, set free from all pain and sorrow…God will make new heavens and new earth, and give us new bodies to live and work and take delight in his new creation. And the ‘good news’ of the Christian gospel is that this new world, this new creation, has already begun: it began when Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead on Easter morning, having faced and beaten the double enemy, sin and death, that has corrupted and defaced God’s lovely creation.

Wright has been making the rounds with this point for over a decade now, and has helpfully reminded us of this key piece of biblical theology. Salvation is about restoring this world, not escaping from it. But it’s worth pointing out that paintings like “The Resurrection” have been reminding us of this for centuries.

Philip Tallon ~ Two (More) Ways to Integrate the Arts into the Church’s Mission

A friend kindly directed my attention to a recent blog post over at Christianity Today, “Seven Evangelism Environments Artists Create: How the church can leverage the arts for evangelism,” by Dr. Byron Spradlin. I give a hearty ‘amen’ to what I take is Spradlin’s main thrust, which we find in the final line: “If you are a church or mission leader, invite the artists you know to help you take a fresh look at the way you think about, plan for, and implement evangelism.”

The bulk of the post is aimed at offering some frameworks for how artists can aid the mission of evangelism by designing environments, creating community through shared artistic endeavor, helping to express the gospel, and so forth. All of this is offered with the modest disclaimer that these are just preliminary suggestions for getting started:

These seven environments mentioned above are simply a start in stating how artistic expression specialists (artists) bring powerful and beautiful resource to the Lord’s assignment of evangelism. In fact, when it comes to evangelism, the Church cannot do without them in the mix.

This is good. The church can’t do without artists.

However, I do have some quibbles, though I’m reluctant to pillory a post whose main point I affirm. (Lord knows, I’m not eager for some smart aleck to nitpick all my blog posts.) In lieu of a very direct response, I want to offer two things to keep in mind as we try to thoughtfully integrate the arts into the church’s mission.

1. The arts are already and always involved in the church’s mission.

Throughout the post, Spradlin relies on a common distinction between the message of the gospel and the mode of its expression. He rightly points out that without being able to “feel” and “imagine” the truth of the message, the news will not seem good. This is right, but could still mislead the reader into seeing the truth of the gospel as something distinct from its mode of expression.

What the study of theology and the arts reveals, however, is that our understanding of the truth is always mediated through aesthetic categories. Metaphor, the interconnection of two networks of meaning, fundamentally shapes all thinking. Encountering and explaining are inextricable. Imaginative intuition and artistic sensibility are necessary for accessing the objective truths of the gospel. Divine communication is already artistically shaped, because God himself uses artistic expression. Through parables, metaphorical language, and the medium of story, the Bible assumes that the arts matter. It is impossible to access the propositional truths of theology without relying on creative expression. Punching it a bit: God has already bound up the task of theology with the power of poetry.

With this in mind, we should approach the arts not first as powerful vehicles that amplify our expression and encounter with the truth, but as a necessary element in all theological knowing. A ministry that sees the arts as intrinsic, rather than instrumental, will already be two steps ahead in fruitfully integrating the arts in ministry.

Perhaps this all still seems nitpicky, but many Christians hold to a reductively sharp distinction between content and expression. I once heard a famous mega-pastor exclaim that the “only thing that makes music Christian is the lyrics.” By this I assumed he meant that worship could work in all manner of musical modes, so long as it kept the same message. But this overlooks, of course, that the mode of expression mediates our understanding of the message. Transpose almost any song from a major to minor key (or vice versa) and the meaning shifts dramatically. (YouTube offers many, many examples.)

2. Artists are not special (or, at least, not in the sense we sometimes think).

Even among those who value the arts, there can be a temptation to put them in a “gilded ghetto”: a separate space of distanced admiration. The same happens with artists. They can be construed as specially gifted, yet also alien. More than one working artist I know has felt this simultaneous admiration-with-distance. Theseus’s lines in Midsummer Night’s Dream comes to mind:

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold—

That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven. (5.1)

For Theseus (though probably not Shakespeare) the poet, like the lover and the madman, is a frenzied genius who mysteriously sees more than reason can comprehend. Many people in the pews will likely hold a similar view.

Much of this is come by honestly. Plato seemed to distrust the artist as an irrational-yet-inspired creator, (cf. Ion). Likewise, Kant separated aesthetic judgment from the rationality. These ideas still haunt the Western mind, even among those who have never cracked the pages of Kant or Plato.

An important step for integrating Christian artists more fully into the life of the church is to honor their talents as meaningfully connected to the larger concerns of the church. Artistic making is often closely bound up with careful reflection on big ideas and cultural context. Spradlin goes a long way to suggesting how artists can be integrated. His generalizations are broadly true, but might also be misread to propagate the idea of artists as a special class of people touched by the muses with a mysterious gift:

Artists are hardwired to be curious about culture expressions and intrigued by and interested in culture’s ways. Through their curiosity—and a wonderful product of it: looking at familiar realities in fresh ways—they always create situations and places where relationships are formed.

Again, my goal is not to correct Spradlin’s notions, but to nuance their reception. Artists come in all shapes and sizes. Artists are people, no more trustworthy or untrustworthy in their powers than any other group. (Even here, there’s a danger in grouping artists together. A broad view of the arts accounts for the ad-man and the ballerina; the game designer and the book binder.) Those who wish to shepherd artists should plan to pastor the whole person, including the expression of their craft.

If this seems intimidating, it is worth noting that pastors are artists too. They shape sermons, and they also shape souls. As Hans Urs von Balthasar points out, the most beautiful work of art is the life of the saint.

***

Philip Tallon (PhD, St. Andrews) is an Assistant Professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University. He is the author of The Poetics of Evil (Oxford, 2012), and The Absolute Basics of the Christian Faith (Seedbed, 2016).

Philip Tallon ~ How Artists Do Theology: The Resurrection

Note from the Editor: we are pleased to reshare this post from Dr. Philip Tallon that originally appeared a few years ago as a resource for Easter.

During this Easter season, I’ve been reflecting on a number of artworks that depict Christ’s victory over death.

One striking painting by Bramantino (1490) features Christ raised from the dead but still bearing the emotional and physical trauma of the cross. Jesus is alive again but seems to carry the knowledge of the torture he underwent into the new creation. It is a powerful painting, as Jesus’ haggard face seems to remind us that his suffering was no illusion, and that the way of the cross will be no easier for us.

But the most consistently moving painting, the one that I return to again and again, is Piero della Francesca’s “The Resurrection” (ca. 1460).

Here again Christ carries the sorrow of the cross in his subtle and composed face, which is aimed directly at the viewer, turning the act of spectating into a confrontation. But there is also silent victory in his powerful stance. One hand holds a flag with a cross, while one foot is perched confidently on the sepulcher that recently held his body. The use of a sepulcher, rather than a cave tomb, is a nice homage to the town of Sansepolcro (“holy sepulcher”) where the mural was painted. The tomb is alabaster in color, as even death has been purified by Christ’s presence.

Not only does the moment balance gravity and joy in Jesus’ solemn triumph, but it invites us to understand that the work that has been accomplished is not yet understood by a slumbering world. The guards at the tomb, bear all the symbols of power and might: one guard’s blood red shield indicates Roman authority with its alluded SPQR (“The Senate and People of Rome”). Yet they foolishly sleep, utterly unaware that Rome’s power to bring death cannot defeat YHWH’s power to bring life. The same sleeping soldier with the shield sleepily holds on his spear, as if clutching the last shreds of domination. Jesus’ hand, meanwhile, grips a flag of triumph with the easy authority of the Messiah whose kingdom does not originate in this world (but does extend to it).

But God’s power is seen not just in Christ’s victory, but also in the image of new creation we see in the picture. Jesus’s wounds remain. A trickle of scarlet paints his side. Dots of red stipple his hands. But his body is restored to the full fleshly life we see in della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ” (1450). This is a real body, with weight and heft.

Perhaps even more notable, however, is the landscape behind Jesus. A testament to the artist’s thoughtfulness, the trees and hills to the left of the Messiah are barren, but to the right new life has begun. Leaves and shrubs testify to the new work of creation inaugurated by Christ. In this way Piero della Francesca gets thunderingly right what so many Christians get so stunning wrong. Raised on the first day of the week – a day any faithful Jew would understand as the first day of creation – God in Christ has begun the re-creation of this world. This work of making all things new is not complete, but it has begun.

N. T. Wright’s address, “The Road to New Creation,” could almost be taken as commentary on della Francesca’s painting:

God is not going to abolish the universe of space, time and matter; he is going to renew it, to restore it, to fill it with new joy and purpose and delight, to take from it all that has corrupted it. ‘The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom, and rejoice with joy and singing; the desert shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.’ The last book of the Bible ends, not with the company of the saved being taken up into heaven, but with the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, resulting in God’s new creation, new heavens and new earth, in which everything that has been true, lovely, and of good report will be vindicated, enhanced, set free from all pain and sorrow…God will make new heavens and new earth, and give us new bodies to live and work and take delight in his new creation. And the ‘good news’ of the Christian gospel is that this new world, this new creation, has already begun: it began when Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead on Easter morning, having faced and beaten the double enemy, sin and death, that has corrupted and defaced God’s lovely creation.

Wright has been making the rounds with this point for over a decade now, and has helpfully reminded us of this key piece of biblical theology. Salvation is about restoring this world, not escaping from it. But it’s worth pointing out that paintings like “The Resurrection” have been reminding us of this for centuries.

Philip Tallon ~ The Gospel According to Some Really Good Artists: Seeing the Unseen God

No one has seen more clearly than G. K. Chesterton that Christian theology is defined by a certain kind of benelovent paradox. The stretched arms of the cross extend infinitely in either direction, holding all goods together, even virtues that might seem to be opposed. Chesterton writes:

This was the achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions…St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle. But he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds. But he must not call the fight hopeless. So it was with all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion. By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness. Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange coup de théatre of morality–things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice (“The Paradoxes of Christianity,” Orthodoxy).

Chesterton’s point here is that, in Christ, the extremes of virtue are made possible as the angled mirrors of the lives of the saints blindingly reflect different aspects of the spectrum of the divine light. A terrifying fierceness is made possible in Christian soldiers, capable of overthowing armies far more powerful (e.g. St. George and the dragon, or St. Germanus facing the Saxons). And an even more terrifying compassion is made possible in Christian martyrs, meeting death as a welcome friend (e.g. Ignatius or Polycarp).

The same may be said of Christian art, which is at once angrily iconoclastic about false images of God, but also adoring of images that help us to see God’s nature.

The focal point of Christian thinking about the image is in the second council of Nicea, which faithfully follows the logic of the first council of Nicea by recognizing that if God has united Himself to humanity in Jesus Christ, there is no longer any reason why the human artist cannot picture God through Jesus Christ, and use the image to honor God.

St. John of Damascus, in his first treatise of On the Divine Images, says this well:

In former times God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take His abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation! I honor it, but not as God. How could God be born out of things which have no existence in themselves? God’s body is God because it is joined to His person by a union which shall never pass away. The divine nature remains the same; the flesh created in time is quickened by a reason endowed soul. Because of this I salute all remaining matter with reverence, because God has filled it with His grace and power. Through it my salvation has come to me. Was not the thrice-happy and thrice blessed wood of the Cross matter? What of the life bearing rock, the holy and life-giving tomb, the fountain of our resurrection, was it not matter? Is not the ink in the most holy Gospel-book matter? Is not the life-giving altar made of matter? From it we receive the bread of life! Are not gold and silver matter? From them we make crosses, patens, chalices! And over and above all these things, is not the Body and Blood of our Lord matter? Either do away with the honor and veneration these things deserve, or accept the tradition of the Church and the veneration of images.

John of Damascus grounds the making of image in the incarnation (the “taking on flesh”) of Jesus Christ, who “married” heaven and earth through the union of God and man. If the God-Man Jesus is the “express image” of God, as Hebrews 1:3 says, then the artist is free to express himself creatively, using the material of the world to faithfully image God in Christ.

Because of the expression of God’s image in Jesus, Christians are not bound to be simply “people of the book” (like Jews and Muslims) but can as truly be said to be “people of the image” (unlike Jews and Muslims).

For this reason, Nicea 2 not only allows image making, but forbids speaking against divine images which the invisible God has made visible.

Christian theology and practice are therefore boldly positive (or we might say, “courageously cataphatic”) about our ability to speak of and image God. Representative images of Jesus, Mary, angels, the saints, and the cross fill our churches, and we do not blush.

But the church’s artistic life has been traditionally wary of picturing what cannot be seen. Nicea 2 allows for a set of images that does not include the picturing of the Father, who is seen “through Jesus” (Jn. 14:9). In the early church, the practice of not picturing the Father was followed, and continues to be emphasized in the Eastern church. The Synod of Moscow in 1667 explicitly prohibits picturing the Father.

This negative prohibition (we might say, this “appropriate apophaticism”) is an attempt to maintain the paradox of Christian theology, that God is both immanent and transcendent: with us and also infinitely beyond us (Jn 1:18; Jn. 6:46; Ex. 33:20).

Christian artistic practice in the West has drifted from this apophatic dimension of theology. After the split between East and West, the Roman church began to picture the Father more and more. The most profound expression of this is seen on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel, where the Father, resplendent in a white beard, creates the sun and moon and touches life into Adam.

Even this image, which many would say upsets the balance of Christian artistic worship, is not without grounding in the witness of scripture, which describes God as the “Ancient of Days” with clothing and hair “white as wool” (Dan. 7:9). But a more serious-minded artistic practice is governed by clearer scriptures, which teach us that the Father cannot be seen by us here and now (1 Tim. 6:15-16).

As is often the case, we cannot simply banish the bad without replacing it with the good. The best corrective for improper images is not no images, but rather faithful images.

One faithful artistic image comes from an unlikely source, a Jewish artist named Marc Chagall, who was fascinated by biblical imagery from the Old Testement and the New Testament. Some of Chagall’s most famous paintings picture Christ crucified, often juxtaposed with the suffering of the Jews in the 20th century. Jesus, the most famous suffering Jew, crucified at the hands of the Roman empire, represented the plight of Jews suffering during the Russian pogroms and German final solution. To emphasize his Jewishness, Jesus was often pictured wearing the prayer shawl of his beleagered kinsmen.

Chagall’s Jewish heritage helps to recover something that has been, at times, lost in Western religious art. In his paintings of Moses, he brings us back to a key theological moment in God’s self-revelation, which at once evokes the paradox of God’s radical transcendence and His desire to be known by us.

Chagall’s simple-but-beautiful images of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush interpret the apophaticism of God’s nature by showing God’s appearance, which is still shrouded in mystery.

In his numerous paintings of the encounter of the burning bush, God is only seen through the burning bush, or through an angel of the Lord. In a few versions of the painting, however, though the angel is present, God is seen through the burning bush and through the divine name, which emanates in the form of the Hebrew tetragrammaton (YHWH).

It is here that Chagall captures the paradox of the God’s self-revelation, which is at once personal (God’s name is revealed), but also veiled in mystery (he is only seen through the burning of the bush). Divine glory shines forth from the name, and extends to Moses, whose face shines, and is crowned with horns of light. (The horns are from the Latin Vulgate mistranslation of “shining.”)

Even God’s self-revelation of his name here is marked by the paradox of revelation. God’s name is “I AM,” a concrete set of syllables by which God can be specified. As Tom Oden writes, “Calling Yahweh by name is something quite different from speaking abstractly of an ‘unmoved mover’” (Classic Christianity, 57). Speaking of himself as “I” requires a conscious self. God is personal. Yet God’s name is mysterious, a self-description that defies easy understanding. God speaks of himself as “I am that I am” without a predicate attached. This self-referential way of speaking suggests a being that is being itself, as if his very existence is not defined by anything in this world at all.

To return to Chesterton, we may say that the virtues of God’s revelation stretch to both extremes:

God is both personal and beyond any categories we have for understanding personhood.

God is both present to us and utterly beyond us.

God is both known by us and unknowable in his innermost being.

God is both visible through Jesus and unseen as the Father.

This is the paradox Christian art has tried to maintain, often imperfectly: to proclaim God’s self-revelation in Christ and the hiddenness of God in his very being.

Philip Tallon ~ Martyred Velociraptors and Vegetarian Vampires: The Christian Roots of Redemption in Hollywood

I went with my wife to see Jurassic World the other night. It’s a movie about an ineffective park executive with poor control over the attraction’s carnivorous inclinations. Fittingly, it’s directed in an ineffective style, with poor control over dialogue, editing, and characterization. The one exception is the dinosaurs, who are perfect, and whose Cretaceous carnivorous instincts get to explode pleasurably onto the reopened park’s Disnified main street. Pleasurably, I should say, for the dinosaurs and the audience, not the rich tourists attacked by pterodactyls while drinking at Jurassic World’s Margaritaville.

In most ways, Jurassic World is just Jurassic Park, but with more at stake. The story of human hubris punished by nature is the same. Most of the dinosaurs have appeared in previous films. But there’s one big difference, and I think it’s worth a note. As seen in the trailer, Chris Pratt’s character, a dinosaur trainer named Owen, has tamed the first film’s villainous velociraptors. Early in the film, a hapless Jurassic World employee falls into the raptor pit. Everyone writes him off for dead, but Owen rushes in, asserting his alpha role over the raptors and saving the goofball’s life. Later in the movie, the raptors become the heroes, riding alongside Owen as they go on the hunt.

At this point in the movie, and again later when yet another dangerous dinosaur from the first film returns as a semi-hero, I was struck that Batman was wrong. He says in The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

But in Hollywood, the opposite is true, “You either die a monster or live long enough to see yourself become the hero.” Which is to say, there’s an operative logic of redemption running so deep in Western storytelling that, given enough time, we should expect that all villains will eventually become heroes. Origen may have been wrong to state that even the devil will eventually be saved, but a certain kind of “narrative universalism” is true in Hollywood.

More evidence for my thesis about this deep, redemptive theme in Hollywood films was in the trailers. Terminator Genisys features lovable old Arnold, a terminator-turned-good, fighting his evil old self (a brilliantly created CG representation of young Arnold from the first movie). The Terminator series has carried on this redemptive theme for so long that younger viewers may be unaware that the Schwarzenegger-shaped terminator model was ever evil.

Even further evidence is easily found in your Netflix list or on any Redbox, with a host of monster-types-turned film heroes. E.g. I, Frankenstein, Godzilla, Despicable Me 2, Fido, and Maleficent. Respectively, these show: Frankenstein’s-monster-turned-hero, destructive-lizard-turned-hero, super-villain-turned-hero, zombie-turned-hero, and Disney-villain-turned-hero.I could go on all day with more examples. These are just some recent ones.

Perhaps the best recent example is Twilight, where one of the most sexually-predatory, satanic monsters in the popular imagination becomes, not just a hero, but a monogamy-seeking vegetarian of sorts, forsaking his natural prey for humanely sourced animal blood.

This theme of forsaking violence is also found in a number of other kids’ movies, where beasts of prey attempt to overcome their carnivorous appetites. You can see this in the terrible movie Shark Tale, or in the infinitely better Finding Nemo–whose repentant sharks, with their mantra, “Fish are friends, not food”–make explicit the groaning Paul talks about in Romans 8. They’re seeking a deliverance and restoration of harmony.

It is hard not to see this perennial theme of monster redemption as anything but theological. if John Wesley could have used film clips in his sermon, preaching, perhaps in a movie theater rather than in a field, he might have played Finding Nemo at a key point in “The General Deliverance,” when he talked about the restoration of all creation from any bloodlust:

The whole brute creation will then, undoubtedly, be restored, not only to the vigour, strength, and swiftness which they had at their creation, but to a far higher degree of each than they ever enjoyed…They will be delivered from all irregular appetites, from all unruly passions, from every disposition that is either evil in itself, or has any tendency to evil. No rage will be found in any creature, no fierceness, no cruelty, or thirst for blood. So far from it that “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.” (Isaiah 11:6, etc.)

This theme of monsters-turned-heroes is right there in scripture, with Paul’s story in Acts, when murderer-turns-martyr for the gospel. It is also seen in the incorporation of monsters like gargoyles into medieval church art, where even grotesque creatures find a purpose and place in the redeemed life.

But it is also even more explicitly seen in some of the stories of the saints of the early church, especially in the apocryphal-but-interesting story of St. Christopher. In one variant of the story of St. Christopher, he was a dog-headed monster, a cynocephaly, who on meeting Christ and carrying him across a river, repents and is turned into a human.

These conversion stories, even of monsters, is made possible by the Christian theology of creation, which holds that everything God created is good, and the most sin can do is distort that goodness. Moral evil cannot completely eradicate goodness in anything. Redemption means restoring the good originally intended, untwisting and untangling the distortions of God’s primeval intention. Monsters are save-able (in theory) because there can be no purely evil thing. If a thing exists, it isn’t beyond the possibility of redemption.

It has long clear to me that, though popular culture forsakes any explicit theological grounding, the narrative “operating system” of Western storytelling still runs on the “kernel” of Christian theology. Self-sacrifice and resurrection is central in Hollywood blockbusters (The Matrix, Tangled, Big Hero 6, Frozen, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, etc.). The hope of the gospel lives on even after the truth of the gospel is forgotten.

This is akin to the way that church architecture often proclaims bigger theological truths than the preacher. In old churches, which faced east in expectation of Christ’s return, the hope of the second coming may be denied from the pulpit. Tombstones in old church graveyards faced east for the same reason, preaching a “sermon in stone” about the hope of the resurrection to future, less faithful, generations.

The theme of monsters being redeemed is, of course, partly a result of the need for Hollywood to milk any old iconography with some juice left in it for new products. But the ease with which we accept these stories of redemption, and our desire to see monsters turned into heroes, speaks to a deeper need to know that nothing with a shred of goodness in it is beyond the scope of salvation. Deep down, we are all velociraptors in search of an alpha.

Philip Tallon ~ Could Jesus Save Aliens? Why Answering Silly Questions is Serious Business in Youth Ministry

If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it 1000 times: “They won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Very true.

But it’s also true that once they know how much you care they’ll care how much you know.

So study hard, future youth pastors, because your students are going to have some interesting questions. And these questions will require you to draw on stuff you studied in seminary you never thought would matter.

They’ll ask you somewhat predictable questions about science & faith, and the problem of evil.

They’ll ask you less predictable questions about how the canon of scripture was formed, or about the book of Revelation.

But sometimes they’ll ask you something totally unpredictable.

For example, I was leading an apologetics seminar at winter retreat, and a student from a different church asked this question, “If we discovered aliens on other planets, could Jesus save them too?”

Total curveball.

At this point I had three options.

a. Dismiss the question.

b. Delay the question for later.

c. Answer it as best I could.

There are some times when ‘a’ is okay. There are, of course, silly or inappropriate questions. But this wasn’t a question asked lightly. It was an honest query and I wanted to answer it as best I could. In youth ministry we want students to ask questions. We want students to come to us with their doubts and struggles. And so if we blow off their questions with a joke (as I easily could have with this one), they’ll stop bringing their questions. Every question matters.

I also could have delayed answering, but this was a formal question-and-answer time and part of the point of the exercise was for students to have their questions answered right then. It’s a little bit like doing street magic. Answering questions off-the-cuff has more charge than building content into your lessons.

So I delved into an answer, beginning with an admission we can’t really know the answer with certainty. Scripture teaches us all things necessary for salvation, but not about things like quantum physics or the nature of the circulatory system. Scripture isn’t written to satisfy all our curiosity about the entire universe, it’s written for us to understand how God redeemed the human race. And it does that perfectly.

However, we can build off what we know to speculate a bit. So I gave the students some possibilities to think through.

The problem with the idea of Jesus saving aliens is just that the church has always affirmed that the eternal Son had to assume a fully human nature in order to save us (cf. Chalcedonian definition and Hebrews 2:14). But aliens, it’s reasonable to think, might not have a “human nature” in any meaningful sense, and so the incarnation & death of Jesus would not benefit them. There’s the challenge that aliens pose in a nutshell.

Then I offered three hypothetical solutions to the theological problem:

A. One solution, which I cribbed from C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, could be that these aliens might not be fallen aliens. Perhaps it’s only in our little corner of the universe where disobedience to God runs buck wild. If aliens were unfallen, they wouldn’t be in need of the kind of reconciliation Jesus makes available for us.

B. Another solution, offered even more tentatively, is that perhaps the Son (or one of the other members of the Trinity) could become incarnate on another planet without undoing the hypostatic union between the Son’s divine and human nature. In this way, God could become incarnate in a range of worlds. Some people really hate even offering this as a possibility, but Thomas Aquinas, at least, seemed to believe this was compatible with Christian theology (ST III, Q3, Art. 7).*

C. Finally, it may well be that in bridging the divide between creation and creator the incarnate Son already offers redemption for all fallen created beings. Aliens from Kepler-22 (or wherever) – even if their flesh was silicone-based and their blood was liquid nitrogen – could perhaps still possess a shared nature with us, such that Christ’s assumption of “flesh and blood” would be equally effective for saving them.

All this is might seem to be a long and unnecessary reflection on a completely hypothetical question (and many will surely say that it is), but I don’t think so.

Talking about aliens was a great opportunity to teach students about the Wesleyan understanding of scripture, to delve into the logic of the two natures in Christology, and to unpack how Christians connect incarnation to salvation. I got to show the student I cared about his question, and maybe helped him learn a bit more about Christian theology.

Taking questions seriously helps to grow a culture of inquiry, which is just what we want. As Fuller Youth Institute has observed, students who regularly ask tough questions are more likely to hold on to their faith, and many college-age atheists cite the church’s inability to respond to their questions as a main reason for leaving the church.

So take questions seriously – even the silly ones. It matters. It really does.

*FOOTNOTE: I posed this question again on Facebook before writing the article, and got a wide range of responses. Some people thought it was completely possible. One person quoted Larry Norman, saying Jesus was a UFO. And one person objected to the line of questioning altogether as silly and slightly dangerous. I was concerned with the responses on both ends of the spectrum: those who too quickly accepted the possibility without thinking through the theological implications, and those who dismissed the question asking itself. The point of opening up these issues in a Christian way is precisely to seriously explore the question.

Philip Tallon ~ Seven Tips For Effectively Using Ministry Interns

Most churches have interns at one time or another. This can either be a great experience, or a terrible one (though it will probably be somewhere in between).

Done well, an internship program can give you greater levels of effectiveness, train up next-gen leaders, and expand the possibilities for great future ministry in the church. Done poorly, it can eat up a ton of your time and waste a lot of theirs.

At our church, we get a fresh crop of 10 or more interns every summer. They serve in all different areas. About six serve with us in student ministries. We want to make it a) a great use of their time and a growing experience for them, and b) a blessing to the staff and not a burden.

Here are a few tips to make sure that its great for everyone:

1. Get to know them. Duh. This is connected to the second point.

2. Spend a lot of time doing an orientation process. Plan to spend about a week. It’s a lot, but it pays off: a day for walking through all the necessary rules and regulations; a day to give them a tour of the place; a few big lunches out to get them rolling; etc. Give them a detailed packet with a job description. Make sure you include clear expectations and guiding principles. (If you’re really curious what this looks like, email me and I’ll send you our intern packet as an example.)

3. Make sure that the interns get to help with the best parts of ministry around the church (not just the worst). The reason interns are there is to learn how to do the most life giving aspects of your job. Nobody gets into ministry to organize data or do mundane paperwork. This means handing over some big pieces of what you do. If you are in teaching ministry, find a way for them to teach. If its pastoral care, empower them to make contact with people. Interns should eventually be able to do significant work without constant supervision. If they can’t, it’s not worth having an intern. One of the worst things to hear from an intern is that there isn’t enough for them to do. If you can set them loose on some things they are passionate about, you won’t hear this complaint.

4. Include them in your regular ministry meetings. Interns should get to see how the sausage gets made. During the summer we have an abbreviated weekly strategic meeting they sit in on. It keeps everyone on the same page and hopefully gives them a deeper sense of the way ministry works without boring them to tears.

5. Have short review sessions regularly. (Perhaps right after your weekly meeting.)

6. Build time into your schedule for development. This could look like anything. Meet once a week and discuss a few chapters from Mere Christianity. Walk them through the top 10 things you’ve learned about your ministry. Last summer, we worked our way through the Apostle’s Creed using Tim Tennent’s book, This We Believe! This summer, it’s Sandra Richter’s Epic of Eden. This time is incredibly valuable for joining theological development with practical experience. Students need and want to grow intellectually as well as personally. It’s one of the things that make the internship truly special. If you don’t have time to dedicate to this, you probably shouldn’t have interns.

7. Plan a big celebration at the end of their stay. Do something they would want to do. With our summer interns, we get away to the lake or go white water rafting. It’s a reward for a lot of hard work with little pay, and it adds a strong positive feeling to the end of the experience.

All of this, of course, looks like a lot of work. And it is. Nothing hard is ever easy.

Philip Tallon ~ Taking the Trinity to Youth Ministry*

In my grandmother’s house there were collector’s plates with Norman Rockwell scenes on them hanging on the living room wall. As children, we were never ever allowed to touch the collectors plates, let alone eat off them. They were purely for admiring. When my grandmother died, nobody really wanted her collectors plates. I think my father has them in a box somewhere. We didn’t care about them that much, and I don’t particularly miss them. But I do miss my grandmother’s kitchen: the smell of food and the regular old plates on which she used to serve up home-cooked meals and Swedish cookies.

In the Christian church we have dinner plate doctrines and collector’s plate doctrines. Dinner plate doctrines include Jesus’s death and resurrection, God’s loving character, God’s providential plan for us, and God’s guidelines for living. We get these doctrines out weekly, plop them down, and eat off them.

But some doctrines stay in the china cabinet or worse, up on the wall, where they gather dust: occasionally admired, rarely used.

The Trinity is, in my experience, the ultimate collector’s plate. A gilded, limited edition Charles and Diana Wedding commemorative. Purely for admiring. Never for serious use. In my experience, Christians never talk about the Trinity unless compelled for some reason, and then the discussion is preceded with a lot of hemming and hawing and insecurity posing as ‘mystery.’ And as soon as the occasion for discussing the Trinity is done with, we drop it and get back to topics that don’t cause theological panic attacks.

This is a problem.

Because we love what we use.

Can we really love the beauty of the Trinity if we never talk about it?

Jeremy Begbie, the theologian and musician, has always been fond of saying that if we want to talk about the Trinity more skilfully we need to talk about the Trinity more.** Which is to say, to take the Trinity down off the shelf and start eating pot luck lasagna off it.

With this in mind, I have three tips for turning the Trinity from a collector’s plate into a dinner plate.

1) Uncover some fresh new ways of understanding the Trinity. As this Lutheran Satire video recently pointed out, a lot of the analogies that we use for the Trinity have theological problems bound up in them. On top of that, lots of them have been trotted out endlessly. New and joyful imaginative analogies refresh our appreciation and keep the Trinity from being a drag. Jeremy Begbie again, in a Veritas lecture, jokes that on Trinity Sunday we discover “the glorious good news, that God is a problem, a mathematical problem, to be solved.” Instead of laboring over tense formulations of God’s threeness-in-oneness, Begbie offers a simple and lovely analogy: the three-part harmony, such as we can easily play on the piano. The three in one perfectly combine to make a single note, while retaining the distinctness of the three parts.

2) Use Trinitarian language when speaking about the story of scripture. What I think is the best way to keep the Trinity off the shelf and on the table is just to speak Trinitarian-ly when discussing the story of scripture. It’s not just that “God created:” rather “the Father created through the Son in the power of the Spirit” (Gen. 1:1-2; Gen. 2:7; Col. 1:16) It’s not just that “Jesus came to earth:” rather “the Father sent the Son in the power of the Spirit” (Lk. 1:35). It’s not just that “as a Church we gather to worship God:” rather we are unified together by “the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Spirit” (2 Cor. 13:14). Gregory of Nyssa saw this a long time ago, when he wrote that we understand the unity of the Trinity by virtue of the fact that whatever God does, He does as a Trinity. Gregory of Nyssa was a smart guy (smart enough to be the most famous Gregory from the town of Nyssa, at the very least), so maybe we should listen to him.

3) Start ‘em early. The way to get good at talking about the Trinity is the same way you get to Radio City Music Hall: practice. Pastors need to practice speaking about the Trinity, and parishioners need to practice hearing about it. So I suggest starting with the kids. Get them eating off the Trinitarian plate. The Trinity is a big idea, but it’s not any more conceptually difficult than pre-algebra. It’s easier, really. You only have to count to three. So start talking about the Trinity in youth ministry. Bring it up in confirmation. We did at Christ Church, we started with the Trinity and built on the doctrine as we explored each key area of Christian theology. By the end of eight weeks, all our kids could give a solid definition of the Trinity, not just of the essence of the doctrine, but of the shape of the Trinitarian life as it plays out across scripture. They could faithfully recite, “three persons in one God” and talk about the Father as the source, the Son as the way, and the Spirit as the power of God. If they can do it, then so can you.

Dig in.

*Thanks to Andrew Root’s book Taking Theology to Youth Ministry for inspiring the title, and the topic.

**In the short run, this sometimes means talking about the Trinity poorly. When we charge into doing theology, we sometimes run roughshod over details that are truly important. In our confirmation lessons, for instance, I was writing about God’s nature, I screwed up at one point and included some accidental properties in my discussion of essential properties. It wasn’t a colossal mistake, but it was a flub nonetheless that I have to revise in the second version. A helpful phrase to learn in doing theology is, “I was wrong.”

Philip Tallon ~ Emerge from the Waters of Your Baptism: Investing in Confirmation

There aren’t many times in the life of the church where people sit down and say, “Please teach me doctrine.” As a theology nerd, I wish it would happen more. But it just doesn’t happen that much.

Now, this isn’t to say it never happens. In my ministry as a youth pastor I have students who are full of questions and are hungry for deeper answers. We’ll go out for chicken wings and spend hours talking about weighty matters. But these discussions over chicken wings don’t happen that often. Most of the time, our learning is set on cruise control. And the default speed isn’t that fast.

However, there is one time in the life of a family where almost everyone leans in and asks for some doctrinal training. There’s a time when they put the pedal down. And that’s confirmation.

Now, I don’t know about your confirmation, or what you do at your church, but growing up, confirmation felt like an afterthought. We met in the pastor’s office for a few weeks and he led us through some teachings. Then he took us in a van down to a district conference meeting where we sat through a few youth talks before he drove us back. It was cool for us to get face time with the pastor, but it didn’t feel cool to him. An unkind but not inaccurate word for the process would be “perfunctory.”

This is a problem. Because kids can sense when you aren’t that invested. They know you’re going through the motions. And I find that passion gets watered down in the transmission. If you want kids to care, you need to care twice or three times as much they do. You need to deliver passion concentrate.

So if you care at all about instilling some solid theology in your future church leaders, you should care about confirmation.

Now, I didn’t write this post to brag, but I’m pretty proud of what we do in student ministries at my church. Here’s what it looks like for us.

We do eight, hour-and-a-half sessions at the same time as our middle-school large-group meeting. The eight classes end with a fun weekend trip to a local camp.
The classes are a relaxed and rowdy atmosphere. We do games and have the groups compete against each other for points.
We partner our 10th-graders in the student ministry up with our 6th-graders. 10th graders act as big-brothers and sisters, bringing candy to confirmation class and going on the retreat as cabin leaders.
We’re very intentional about teaching through the basics systematically, biblically, and visually. Students are learning the full scope of the Apostle’s creed, how each article is rooted in scripture, and are given memorable visual hooks to help aid their comprehension.
We ask parents to help their students memorize scripture and study up for the following week. (This means confirmation is a ‘toofer,’ we get parents learning and engaging as well.)

That’s the how. Here’s the why.

INGRAINING: Confirmation is about catechesis, which means that students are called to ingrain Christian truth on their hearts and minds. This means that we’re making the students actually learn some stuff. They memorize scripture and learn the answers to specific catechetical questions. This is real Deuteronomy 6 kind of stuff. We’re doing what God commands us, to pass on this teaching about who He is to the next generation. And since we’ve found that our students are reluctant to bind Tefillin around their arms and foreheads, scripture memorization is necessary to get the content inside their heads.

EMERGING: Confirmation is also about initiation. It’s the final step in the baptismal process bringing them into full membership in the life of the church. The phrase we use for this at Christ Church is that confirmation is about “emerging from the the waters of your baptism.” This is helpful theologically because it grounds us in the infant baptismal tradition and makes good on the promise that the community made to nurture the child as part of Christ’s holy church. The metaphor is powerful in that it conveys the grace that our children have been swimming in this whole time, extending, in a sense, the baptismal moment until the present. But it also conveys upon our sixth-graders the notion that they have to emerge, dry off, and join in – or else they’ll simply drown. Now is the time to begin to take responsibility. By pushing parents and students to seriously study during confirmation, dedicating time and brain bytes to memorizing scripture, we’re not only talking about the importance of responsibility, but also giving them a chance to embody it.

I would encourage all pastors and youth leaders to dig into confirmation. Make it fun. And make it serious.

It’s worth it.

Also, of course, it’s commanded (Mt. 28:20).