Monthly column on the arts: setting a course

And a Happy New Millennium to you all! Hopefully the Year 2000 bug didn't cause too much havoc, the city centres are by now unblocked, you can once again book a place to eat lunch in central London and that huge rotary wheel thing has not slid expensively back into the Thames.

I am writing this at the end of a bleak, damp November, with January still a long way away and the millennial buzz still going strong. There's a fair bit of future-gazing going on and some of the tabloids are filling space the easy way, speculating what the millennial world will look like. I shall be very surprised if G.K. Chesterton is proved wrong: he predicted that the future will look very similar to the present. It would be nice if it did not. The 20th century is sliding to a bloody end, with a disturbing similarity in the headlines of today and those of the first decade of the century. But the odds are that three noughts at the end of the calendar will not make us happier people.

Network

Looking back, at times like these, is often more encouraging than looking forward. In a recent bout of nostalgia, I was struck by how little is really new. Take the Internet: back in the Middle Ages there was a global network in place, where every village was linked to every town by an invisible network, where news and entertainment were disseminated by the same all-pervasive organisation that exercised a profound influence on society and individuals. That global network was the Christian church, and the comparison is by no means frivolous.

Or take the great literatures of Europe that have flowered throughout this millennium and still today produce works that will live well into the next one. How was it that literature got a foothold in the lives of ordinary people, so that it was no longer the province of the intellectuals and the wealthy? Well, there was Luther and his printing press, Calvin whose contribution to the French language is still acknowledged to be seminal, Wesley whose Evangelical revival included a massive literacy programme, a certain Bible translator who vowed that every ploughboy should have the Scriptures to read . . . for several centuries, the mark of a family that could read was that it possessed at least three books - The Bible, Pilgrim's Progress and The Whole Duty of Man. All Christian classics.

For the long centuries of this millennium in which literacy was scarce, it was the church again that led the way. Go to the walls and stained-glass of Chartres Cathedral, where the gospel is spelled out in emblems and symbols, the biblia pauperum, the Bible of the Poor, for all to plainly read. Look at John Bunyan and Isaac Watts, who, long before Narnia, launched children's literature with books of sacred emblems and moral verses (many of Watts's were to end up cruelly parodied in another, later clerical masterpiece: Alice in Wonderland). Think of the ordinary Londoner crammed into the Globe Theatre to listen to the words of a 46 year-old playwright poet, so revered by King James's Bible translators that his name can be found woven into their rendering of Psalm 46 (count 46 words from the beginning, then 46 from the end, if you think I'm bluffing).

Pandora's box

It was more than evangelism. Of course these creative flowerings grounded thousands in the gospel, and the church, having opened people's eyes to the power of words and imagination, made good use of its opportunities. Wesley, having helped many to learn to read, didn't write novels for them but edited the story of his own spiritual history for their edification. The Puritans before him seem to have regarded their explorations of the imagination as opening a Pandora's box, which they promptly slammed shut with doctrine. But it was more than utilitarianism. The church recognised that human beings exist on levels beside the propositional and the didactic, and in making use of that realisation they launched many of the artistic movements of the millennium.

Rebirth

The past 50 years have seen a rebirth of evangelical involvement in the arts, and we enter the new millennium with a lot to be grateful for and some exciting projects still to be embarked upon. And how wonderful it would be if these early years of the 21st century saw the rekindling of that 1,000-year-long involvement of the church in the artistic and cultural life of the people that gave us so much truth and wisdom in theatre, in poetry, in architecture and much more.

Practically, that means equipping both artists and audiences, perhaps financially but certainly in prayer. Today's arts environments are not always easy places in which to be a Christian, both in their lifestyle and in what is admired and disparaged there. And the church may not always find it easy to understand, let alone support, the work that young and adventurous artists, writers and others are doing as they look to express their faith in a vital and integrated way in their art.

But it's an enterprise well worth launching a new millennium with. I estimate we have just over 999 years before we report back on how we did. I'll see you then - I'll try to persuade John Bunyan and John Wesley to sit in on the discussion.

Monthly column on the arts: setting a course

Looking back on evangelical involvement in the arts over the last millennium and into the next

Network

Pandora's box

Rebirth

David Porter

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