Serious Questions Deserve Serious Answers
Remnant Review
Serious questions are often asked by extremely naïve people. They really don’t know what they’re asking.
On the other hand, serious questions are occasionally asked by dedicated people who are willing to pay the personal price of getting their questions answered.
Which one are you?
As an example, I offer this question that was posted on this site recently.
Can you suggest any books or other sources that would discuss aesthetics in the Protestant Church or perhaps since the Reformation? I am pondering what is the definition of beauty to the reformed (especially vs the Catholic as they seem to tie it to the sacred liturgy) believer? And can 'aesthetics' refer to how we live our lives/glorify God, not just art? Once defined in some way, (knowing that God is ultimately the definition of beauty), how then does the Christian reflect, appreciate, and further the beauty of God in his thoughts, actions, and plans?
He wants one book on this.
WHAT SUCH A BOOK ENTAILS
Let me break down this question into some of its complement parts. These are a few that I can come up with off the top of my head. They are merely scratching the surface. Aesthetics includes these aspects of culture:
painting
photography sculpture
music
literature
theater
humor
architecture
fashion
What the person is really after is this: the relationship between aesthetics and worldview. Worldview is ultimately what individuals and groups believe about the following:
God
man
law/ethics
sanctions/causation
time/continuity
He wants to know the relationship that systematically and somewhat predictably connects Protestantism with the principles of aesthetic understanding and the techniques of physical execution of all of the items in the first list.
This requires an author. Consider his task.
Before anyone investigates this, he must first deal with the issues in the second list. He needs reasonable examples of how the issues in the first list would be handled by the following:
Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and bits of Protestantism) Judaism
Islam
Humanism (samples: classical Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Revolutionary France, modernism, the USSR in the 1930's, and post-War America) and
Note: I am ignoring Asian worldviews and their aesthetics.
Without a background in these, there is no way to distinguish Protestantism from Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, not to mention Islam and humanism. In other words, if worldview really does affect aesthetics, there has to be some kind of correlation and differentiation. Furthermore, I have not raised the issue of historical developments which would connect the changes in aesthetics within each of these religious categories. How do things change, yet also remain recognizably the same?
He should be able to discuss these matters cogently. If he cannot discuss them with another informed person on these matters, he is not ready to distinguish Protestantism from Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, not to mention Islam and humanism. In other words, if worldview really does affect aesthetics, there has to be some correlation within each competing worldview. What is it?
I have not raised the issue of historical development which would connect the changes in aesthetics within each of these religious categories. What is constant, and what changes?
Yes, this really is a serious question.
I am not aware of anybody who has begun to assess these questions with respect to even one category of aesthetics.
THE MAGNITUDE OF THE QUESTION
The magnitude of what is involved in answering this question is mind-boggling.
We need at least one reliable, conscientious, and dedicated young Ph.D. in some underfunded Christian college or well-funded Catholic University who will devote his career to this project.
He had better not do this alone. He must seek disciples online -- they will not be in his classrooms -- who are more than competent, plus sufficiently dedicated, and willing to self-fund the rest of their lives in a steady studying of a few aspects of this question.
At the end of three decades, the initial scholar may be in a position to offer a few tentative answers.
I think this would take at least a dozen detailed volumes plus support materials. There must be online specialized articles (monographs) going into arcane details. These must contain URLs to examples that support the thesis connecting his dozen volumes. He would have to hope and pray that 90% of the URL links are not broken within 20 years by energetic programmers who want to make the sites more efficient, thereby breaking all of the older URL links. This is what programmers do because programmers do not care about Google links to old articles, documents, and images. They do not care about enabling people to visit specific pages over a period of 10 years, let alone 100. The programmers just want to make their sites "neat." Result: 404.
It takes serious work by serious, intelligent people who are willing to do their work over a period of three or four decades to frame the question, provide a few preliminary suggestions as to how the question should be answered, and then get the funding to publish and promote these preliminary answers.
Such a person must do all this with the understanding that not one American Protestant in 50,000 is going to read two or more of his books. Furthermore, most of the people who read one book are doing it out of brief curiosity. They will go on to something else a week after they finish the book. They will forget 98% of the book within two months. They will never look at the book again. The book will sit on a shelf.
Where is this scholar?
Are you getting my drift?
NARROWING DOWN THE QUESTION
There is a way to narrow down the question. The person who asked the question could study the architecture of Christian churches. He would have to study the history of churches in Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism in the millennium before Protestantism. Then he would have to study the architecture of maybe a dozen Protestant groups in at least three countries per group over a period of 500 years.
As he does this, he must search for aesthetic principles undergirding each architectural tradition. Why are they all Christian? Why are they different?
No such book exists. This would be self-study on the Web. But at least this is possible. In 1995, it wasn't.
At the end of his studies, which would probably take 10 hours a day, 50 weeks a year for 40 years, he could begin to answer the question that he really wants to get answered.
As with any sales project, it must answer in advance the skeptical questions that kill all projects that do not answer them plausibly.
So what?
Who says?
NO ONE ELSE CARES YET
The scholar must start the project with this in mind: pastors don’t care, congregations don’t care, and his wife doesn’t care.
If he ever comes up with an answer, nobody with enough authority to implement his discovery is going to pay any attention unless he can make a cogent case that aesthetics matters for church architecture, and aesthetically faithful architecture will help evangelism, which will be needed to help pay off the new building's mortgage.
The pastor must also find an architect who will actually do what the pastor tells him to do aesthetically. That will take the providence of God.
Meanwhile, tastes will change, funding will change, and people will move on to the world beyond the Internet.
He has an outside possibility of influencing Protestant architecture in Asia, especially China and India, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. There, there is no aesthetic tradition. Well, there is a little in sub-Saharan Africa. It was developed mainly by Anglicans and South African Afrikaaners – Dutch farmers on the outskirts of Dutch culture.
CONCLUSION
This is a serious question. It deserves a serious answer. The answer will not come in a used book search on Amazon. It will only after the scholar writes it, finds a publisher, and sells (say) 100 copies. There will soon be 50 copies for sale . . . cheap.