Well, we got here a little early for the final day, so I’m sitting here finally typing up my notes from the first plenary session on day one with Andy Crouch. So, once again, here they are… unedited.

Gen 2:4-15

The best definition of culture: what we make of the word, in both senses

  • raw material fashioned
  • perception of the world

Culture is “meaning making” but always includes material - it is not immaterial. It is audible, tactile, tasty, and made of the “stuff” of creation.

Lord God Himself is a culture maker in Genesis 2. In Genesis 1, He created ex nihilo (from nothing), but in Genesis 2, He creatio ex creatis - created from creation.

  • The garden is a creating of culture before He gives it to Adam - God is the first gardener
  • The garden is the original gift of culture “pleasant to the sight and good for food”

In this passage, Moses mentions that “the gold of that land is good” - what’s the point?

  • The only real value of these materials is their beauty and then only after cultivation and craft
  • This invites the creation of beauty
  • These substances are also hidden and must be found through exploration and excavation and, again, only fully experienced after they have been crafted

Wisdom is not simply the knowledge of good and evil, it is being able to choose good and resist evil. Adam and Eve had chose creation over Creator. They took the gift and transferred it to a right. Their first act after rebellion is to sew fig leaves - they start making their own culture:

  • It is now no longer a good and gracious world
  • They sew fig leaves to protect themselves… from each other
  • They now ward off the threat of exposure not beauty to the eyes
  • They are also creating rudimentary protection from the Creator… a protection from dependence.

Instead of fashioning the beautiful that is hidden, we take the earth to create brick and build our own edifices and towers that are self-made… creating culture.

God doesn’t wash His hands of this - He stays in the story and eventually enters the story. While here, He gives bread and wine but not simply wheat and grapes… bread and wine. These are cultural goods. Bread is wheat plus culture, wine is grapes plus culture. Not simply the raw materials.

Do we believe that culture is a gift and a calling. Can it be taken, blessed, broken, and given.

Art focuses these questions. How we respond, discuss, and make art is the truest diagnostic test because its the one thing that cannot be reduced to utility. Artful goods are stubbornly themselves. You can’t translate art - poetry resists paraphrase.

  • We’ve made our piece with useful culture
  • What is Christian faith if not the rejection of religious utility
  • What if the world from beginning to end is a gift?
  • Not useful, but better than useful
  • Does prayer work? No - it does something better than work
  • Be unuseful - we don’t require God to be useful and He doesn’t require us to be useful to Him

Art & Worship both stand together on common ground. Is worship a free response to grace or a means to divine persuasion?

2 things artists dare to do

  1. They play (it’s not fully adult to play) - you can only do this in a world of grac
  2. They bring us into contact with pain

The cost of grace is often missed - this is escapism.

Pain without grace creates darkness without hope. Both play and pain are held together.

The champions of the unuseful.

[Additional (missed this): If we aren't the champions of the unuseful, who will champion the people who are unuseful... stubbornly themselves.]