Many Wednesday nights as the youth group service drew to a close, my palms would begin to sweat. I could sense what was coming. Perhaps I noticed the signs: a particularly rousing message, a lot of new faces in the crowd, or a large metal garbage can waiting in the wings. It wouldn't happen every Wednesday. Sometimes a few months might even go by with nothing. But it always came sooner or later—the announcement that we were to go out to our cars or open our backpacks and deliver up our secular CDs and DVDs to be broken, placed in the garbage can, and burned.
When these instructions came, I was always torn. I was part of the Napster generation, eagerly downloading dozens of songs a day. On movie nights with friends I saw films like Fight Club, Pi, and Life is Beautiful that spoke to me deeply. But I was also devoted to my church and its teachings. Eventually, my cognitive dissonance developed into a guilty truce. I maintained my love of music and films in secret, and when the inevitable Wednesday night bonfire of the vanities came around, I sat quietly, looked innocent, and tried not to squirm in the pew.
I realize that this experience sounds extreme; few churches ask their congregants to destroy all art that doesn't make reference to Christ or the Christian message. But the set of convictions behind my experiences are quite common. Many American churches are mistrustful of art created outside a Christian context. They often assume that it is, at best, a meaningless distraction or, at worst, a seductive vice. When the Pew Research Center released its now-notorious 2012 report called "'Nones' on the Rise," many of these churches felt vindicated. The study revealed that as many as a fifth of all Americans now claim no religious affiliation or identity. Wasn't this just a confirmation of what many churches had long suspected? Wasn't it proof that the seductive influences of secular films and music were drawing more and more people away from authentic religious living?
Robert Johnston's new book, God's Wider Presence: Reconsidering General Revelation, suggests that the answer is no. He sees the increasing importance of the media and the arts in Americans' lives as an opportunity to broaden the conversation about when and where we can experience God.
Johnston, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, has been studying the role of film in his students' spiritual lives for several decades. His research has resulted in books like Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue (2000) and Finding God in the Movies (2004), which have been widely used in courses on theology and film. Personal testimonies provide powerful evidence in Johnston's work. Countless students report having conversion experiences or receiving profound insights and callings while watching films—in other words, the stuff of a real, authentic spiritual life. Such was the case for Johnston himself: when he felt the call to enter Christian ministry at age 19, he was at the movies.
It is easy to see how radically Johnston's views on film differ from those of many churches and Christian leaders. Some churches, of course, might host movie nights or integrate film or other arts into sermons. But they do so mainly to illustrate the ideas already found in Scripture or theology. They treat art as a tool for reaching a "higher" or better truth. But the experiences Johnston is interested don't depend upon a work's ability to illustrate outside ideas. They don't even require any explicitly "religious" content in order for them to occur. They happen during films like Raging Bull, Easy Rider, and even Pulp Fiction, not just during films like The Passion of the Christ.
But the fact that these experiences happen is only part of Johnston's point. Americans' attitudes have also changed. "Occurring simultaneously with the 'fall' of the Christian religion as seen institutionally," Johnston writes, "has been the 'rise' of interest in all things spiritual." Spiritual experience is less centralized than churchgoing, but that doesn't mean it is less common. If anything, our age is more ready than previous ages to encounter the transcendent in new and unexpected ways, in art, nature, and even in seemingly "mundane" moments, not just when we are inside the four walls of a church building. In short, we are living in a neo-Romantic age.
Understandably, many churches hesitate to affirm or validate these spiritual experiences. For one thing, they often make no reference to Christ, Scripture, or the church. But for Johnston, this reflexive suspicion misses the point. He suggests that we are "impoverishing ourselves in our relationship with and knowledge of God to the degree that we are insensitive to that divine Presence in others." Transcendent experiences happen to Christians and non-Christians alike. Thus they provide an opportunity for a broader and richer conversation about the divine that will benefit us whether we operate inside or outside religious institutions.
Johnston's new book is an attempt to zoom out and ask the larger questions raised by God's "wider presence." Ultimately, he hopes to "change the discourse about revelation," showing that these experiences, so often dismissed as second-order "traces" or "echoes," are more important than we ever imagined.
With this purpose in mind, Johnston takes his reader on a long but lucid journey through the biblical text. He repeatedly demonstrates that God's wider presence is itself an essential feature of the "inside," or official, community or text. Think of Melchizedek, for example, or the Athenians that the Apostle Paul commends for their altar dedicated "To an unknown god." For Johnston, the Bible itself bears unmistakable witness to God's revelation to outsiders.
The poet Friedrich Schiller once said, "live with your age, but do not be its creature." Although Johnston takes his initial cue from our neo-Romantic age, attempting to "live with" it with generously, he avoids simply altering theology to suit cultural trends. Johnston quickly dismisses the common assumption that profound experiences with the arts are due to the godlike genius of the artist. Likewise, he rejects the idea that viewers need to develop a special sensitivity to encounter the divine in art.
But Johnston's own claims are even grander and more challenging than these. He asserts that for centuries, theologians have misunderstood general revelation. Romans 1:20, for example, has often served as the locus classicus for theologies of general revelation. (This is the verse where the Apostle Paul declares that "God's invisible qualities" are visible in creation, such that all can recognize them, and those who don't are "without excuse.") But Johnston rejects Romans 1 as a basis for general revelation. The problem with views based on Romans 1 is that they tend to make general revelation a matter of human reason or intellect. They suggest that we can apply our minds to the world around us and work out the truth about God much like we would work out a math problem. But for Johnston, it is always and only God that does the revealing.
Theologians will recognize this as a defense of Karl Barth. Many will take interest—and perhaps umbrage—at Johnston's defense of Karl Barth's famous response ("Nein!") to Emil Brunner on questions of natural theology. For Johnston as for Barth, "it is God's initiative, not ours, that is central to all theology. It is God and God alone who is the actor in revelation; it is God who speaks, not us." But by this statement Johnston doesn't mean to lower the value of the transcendent experiences we have when we encounter works of art. In fact, just the opposite: Johnston aims to raise their value by insisting that they aren't mere "echoes" or "traces"; rather, they are nothing less than authentic experiences of God.
Johnston's focus on direct experience means he takes autobiographical details seriously. This allows him to perform some wonderfully original readings of Barth and C. S. Lewis. Johnston is a cogent explainer, but his readings go well beyond simple explanation. He even at times reads against the grain, showing how primary experiences of the divine shaped a thinker's project in spite of himself. For example, Johnston shows how Barth's experiences with Mozart became central to his religious and intellectual life. In fact, they made him downright uncomfortable because he was unable, at times, to completely reconcile them with his theology. Similarly, Johnston reads Lewis's autobiography, Surprised by Joy, as a story of God's wider presence at work. Although when he begins to speak about them theologically Lewis falls prey to the error of downplaying their importance, these experiences proved to be more important than rational arguments for Lewis's eventual conversion.
Clearly, Johnston's new book presents a remarkable and original way to think about the relationship between faith and the arts. But I don't mean to suggest that his is the first or only way. A book on the topic by a Roman Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox theologian might well ignore figures like Barth and Lewis. It might instead focus on equally astute thinkers like Hans Urs von Balthasar or David Bentley Hart. (Indeed, the role of beauty as a "transcendental," so important to these two theologians, receives only a brief mention in Johnston's book.)
But the fact that the book grounds its argument in the intellectual resources of evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism is, in other ways, a strength. It means that the book fills a greater vacuum in American Christianity. And it means that the book will have, at least potentially, a much greater impact than other works on the topic have had. The book's message to the bulk of American Christians is that they already have rich resources for recognizing God's wider presence, even if, like the church I grew up in, they've tended to be skeptical of it.
But the most innovative part of Johnston's book isn't the tradition it draws upon. Instead, it is the book's inductive method. Johnston isn't out to tell art what it ought to do or ought to be. He doesn't deliver some new standard for judging works of art or a set of guidelines or criteria for works of art to follow. Rather, Johnston succeeds in carefully analyzing our transcendent experiences while preserving their unpredictability. He shows that, while we can usefully talk about God's wider presence—we can muse over it like a scientist might muse over a Lichtenberg Figure created by a bolt of lightning—we can't tame it; where and when it strikes will always surprise us.
Brett Beasley is a doctoral candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago.
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