The online arts and culture blog The Rabbit Room has a great interview up with Steve Turner, author of The Gospel According to the Beatles and Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts.
This part sounded familiar:
We have just developed a very narrow idea of what “Christian” is. I saw an entry in a directory for Christian artists where someone had advertised themselves as writing “poetry both Christian and non Christian.” I think he meant poetry that was specifically religious and poetry that was about everday life but he had unconsciously betrayed the fact that, when he wrote asbout ordinary events in his life, he thought of these things as somehow outside his experience as a Christian. As though God is not interested in us walking, eating, fishing, playing ball, shopping, etc.
Where have we heard that? To quote Leithart again:
Theology keeps Christian teaching at the margins and ensures that other voices, other languages, other words shape the world of temporalities. Politics is left to politicians, economics to economists, sociology to sociologists, history to historians, and philosophy to madmen.
Theology ensures that Christians have nothing to say about nearly everything.
-Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, Ch.2 Sec. 4
Turner goes on, raggin’ on the monks and the fundamentalists for being like the monks. Actually I think he’s right on in this case:
Hank Rookmaaker the Dutch art historian used to say, “Christ didn’t die in order that we could go to more prayer meetings.” People would gasp at this. Then he would add, “Christ died to make us fully human.” That’s right. He didn’t die to make us religious, but to make us human. In our fallen state, we lack the completeness of our humanity. The monastic tradition makes the mistake of thinking that God is best pleased with us when we cut ourselves off from the world, deny ourselves pleasure, refrain from marriage and devote ourselves totally to religious activities. This almost assumes that God made a mistake in putting us in a world of pleasure, culture, art, nature, work, companionship, etc. Fundamentalists would hate to be compared with medieval monks but, in many ways, they suffer from the same split.