The Audioguide is Doing our Preaching for Us

Bear with me, even if you’re not the ‘culture’ type.  

I recently had a fun couple of hours with a friend, going round the Siena exhibition at the National Gallery.  Siena is a city in Italy, which is world-famous for its art and architecture, most of which can never go on tour.  Buildings and frescoes stay put. So when some of their paintings are crated up and flown around the world, it makes for an unusual moment.

It’s all gold and glamour, with beautiful angels, harrowing crucifixions, and some other rather gory bits. 

I said, bear with me – I’m not going to make you go to it, or look at anything medieval. You may have a very different idea of ‘fun.’ You may question mine.

The point is this: that this spectacular artwork presumes, and expresses, the biblical narrative.  Meaning, that you can’t understand it without the biblical narrative. So the audioguide has to keep explaining the Bible story, and its impact on people.

The Audioguide is preaching.

Now, think this through.  At the back of your mind you’ve probably been told that medieval peasants were all as thick as cow dung and couldn’t read, which is why they had to make do with the paintings on the wall.  Which, if true, is a bit wasteful on the part of the artists and their patrons.  It would be a bit like hiring David Hockney to draw the visual aids for your kids’ group.

I reckon they were a bit savvier than that, and they knew these magnificent works were a celebration and delight in the good news.

But… our contemporaries are that biblically illiterate. We know that and assume it whenever we reach evangelistically.  

And here’s that amazing thought.  While (quiet revivals notwithstanding) people are not queueing up to come to church, they are queuing up to look at the art – to do that they have someone explain the Bible to them.

The great Western tradition cannot be understood or appropriated without it. Even when the Renaissance took a deliberate turn to the secular, the Christian context could not be obliterated.  It may have run in parallel, but it did not overwrite it.

The same goes for music and architecture and printing and poetry. Theatre and then fiction came later and have less obvious Christian riches baked in (yes, I know about Passion Plays, but they are scant compared to what was going on in paintings, architecture or music).  Even so, the Christian worldview is consistently assumed throughout and sets the moral frame.  Why else do Don Giovanni and Faust deserve to go to hell?

So here’s why Christians – pastors, preachers, evangelists and apologists especially – need to take the deep culture of the West seriously: it’s a profound ally. 

A complete atheist needs to understand the Bible in order to sing, or even enjoy, Messiah.  They don’t need to believe it, any more than you need to believe in elves to enjoy Tolkien, but you have to know the story.  

As long as people listen to, look at, read, any intelligent creative endeavour from before, what, 1850, there’s a better than even chance that it’s the Christian viewpoint which is its working assumption, even if it’s heading in the opposite direction. As Tom Holland and Glen Scrivener point out in their different ways, the atheism and secularity even in a place like France is a very Christian atheism and secularity.

Which means that one of our roles is to be a cultural investigator and curator.  We know that any artefact expresses a world view, and careful interrogation will expose it.  That’s true of anything from any culture anywhere, because of the universality of God’s truths. A thousand-year-old Chinese poem may not express the gospel, but it cannot help but express a worldview which is consistent with biblical truth in some aspect.

But for us in the West, that task is comparatively so easy. The treasure lies on the surface.

And if our non-Christian friends are enjoying finding it, we have an easy bridge. ‘Do you understand what you’re reading?’, asked Philip of the Ethiopian.  We can ask that, and other similar questions. Do you understand what you’re listening to? Do you understand what you’re looking at?

If Im feeling a bit sharp, I might say that our culture is biblically illiterate but deep-culturally savvy; the average pastor I meet is biblically savvy but deep-culturally … you get my drift

That might be out of your comfort zone, but aren’t missionaries like us supposed to learn the culture we are trying to reach?

Oh, and by the way – you’re allowed to enjoy this great art for yourself, as well.  It’s not just for unbelievers, you know!