Creative Theology?
So, what’s more fraught with cognitive dissonance than being a feminist, slightly left-leaning Mormon in Sacrament Meeting?
Being a FSL-LM who is also an effete snob in an “open and affirming” Congregational worship service!
Usually, my preference for inclusive language is overridden by my even stronger aesthetic preferences when I’m confronted with hymns that have been denuded of gendered God-language in favor of clunky repetitions and jarringly unmetrical, if ever so politically inoffensive, formulations like “What God’s almighty power hath made, God’s gracious mercy keepeth;/By morning glow or evening shade God’s watchful eye ne’er sleepeth” or “How firm a foundation, ye Saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in God’s excellent word! What more can be said than to you God has said…”
Ugh.
So I was working myself into a nice little holier-than-thou-and-with-better-taste-and-more-refined-appreciation-for-vestigial-Germanic-verb-endings snit, when I was stopped by the last line of the Doxology. The traditional text is “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him, all creatures here below/Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host/Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” In the Congregational version, presumably to avoid the heavily gendered Trinity, the last line was rendered “Creator, Christ, and Comforter.”
Leaving aside the tiny little theological squabbles we might have with God the Father as ‘Creator,’ I really liked this formulation. It’s still clunky, and “Comforter” comes out with the wrong word stress in the melody, but it’s not absolutely awful, and I do think it yields a richer picture of the God we are praising, if only (or mostly) by jolting us out of the utterly familiar phrase we’re used to.
So, what that made me think about was the interrelation between revelation and creative work. Do artists/poets/novelists/composers improve their access to revelation by doing such work? How does this sort of revelation differ from the kind one gets during prayer or meditation or in yoga class or while chasing toddlers? And, more broadly, do artistic reworkings of theological ideas end up actually changing theology?
I would be inclined to think that claiming influence on a church’s theology would be a grandiose posture for an artist, except that I once spent a long time examining Primary songbooks for an article in Dialogue (which you can read, if you’re exceptionally patient, here). In a church like ours where, particularly since the ascendance of Correlation at mid-century, theology tends to be promulgated from the top down, you’d expect such officially-sanctioned compositions to merely reflect the teachings by authority figures. In fact, though, to take the most dramatic example, the increased emphasis on Christ and the neo-orthodox Christology which became widespread in the church after President Benson’s 1987 talk, “Come Unto Christ,” is actually prefigured by Primary songs composed as much as 20 years before that talk.
Our church is probably a special case, since we have relatively little official theology and also tend to borrow art and music from other traditions, but that shouldn’t stop us from wildly speculative musings about the interrelationship of art and doctrinal teaching–so have at it!
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February 9th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Nice alliteration: Creator, Christ, and Comforter. I like it.
So, after the primary program last year, I came home feeling a bit stifled because of the heavy male language in all of the songs and memorized sentences that comprised the program. I got out a new journal and started composing what I call “Hyrs” (as opposed to “Hymns”). I worked on creating lyrics to the familiar primary children’s song book tunes that told the women’s stories and viewpoints. (After all, how did the Mother show the world . . . she sent us Eve, right?)
I always like to remember that Eliza R. Snow’s lyrics to “Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother” (now called “Oh, My Father”), is the most cited piece of writing about the doctrine of Mother in Heaven.
February 18th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
I really appreciate your post because the question of whether artists of all stripes can/should influence theology is something I consider a good deal; it might be the source of a large amount of my artistic anxiety. Can I speak authoritatively (scripturally? yikes!) and from within the Mormon tradition as a woman?
I think it is up to artists to master their respective theologies so when inspiration comes they can be ready to receive it on behalf of their communities. It’s up to those communities to determine what is doctrinally true and what isn’t, even if the artwork is true in other senses besides doctrine. I don’t mean to say that artists should solely be in the service of their tradition. Artists should be in a position to critique and question. They should be in the service of their God and their art (and that God will look differently for women than it will look for men). The primary problem for Mormon artists today is fear of using their theological understandings for new creative purposes. These artists are stifled by mimicry and assume that revelation only comes through the mouths of the men in ties. I am absolutely convinced that artists have prophetic roles to fulfill.
So, yes, by practicing their crafts, artists improve their instrumentality in the hands of God. Studying the Hebrew Bible this year has made me convinced of its unavoidable artistic inspiration and creation. I think the doctrinal imperfections of the Bible are there to instruct us, to create dialogue, to create knots that we must try to untie. We are meant to seek truth by study and by faith. Even the Book of Mormon isn’t perfect, despite its truth. What if artists and theologians were to take seriously the idea that the Book of Mormon has a more pure theology than any other book on earth, despite its human imperfections? What does the book say that other theological texts don’t and do we agree? Nephi was writing in his context and Mormon was redacting in his. The important thing is the inspired attitude in which they did it.
Thus, it is both puzzling and entirely clear to me why we haven’t had more Eliza R. Snows. Puzzling because Mormons believe in a tradition that is open to new revelation that all members have access to and clear because theology has over time become the sole domain of men. This is wrong. Women have an equal responsibility to interpret scripture and have authority that only the Spirit can give. Sure, there is a specific set of revelatory gifts that goes along with certain priesthood offices. But as I understand it, women can be prophets, seers, and revelators, too, even if they are not allowed to speak for the whole church. But who knows when that will change? I have faith that it will.
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