Church

The following vimeo clip features GRC pastor, David Deutsch, talking about primal themes in Genesis. Darren Doanne, a filmmaker in the congregation, started a series of short clips, signifying the content visually; strikingly appropriate, as David tends to grasp theological meaning, it seems to me, poetically.

Genesis Redux attempts a simple reworking of the visual/poetic/theological word as image. For example, the Apostle Paul instructs Timothy regarding the qualities of a teacher, by using metaphors: soldier, athlete, or farmer. As moderns, we are a long way from poetry - its demise is a long story related to the marginal status of religion and the hegemony of science in secular modernity - so I am curious to see attempts to crawl back, as it were, onto the stage of meaning.

Perhaps the crucial question for me is wading through the specific kind of images that proliferate in contemporary life, usually dismissing rational thought as a form of learning ("book learning") versus artistic or experiential knowledge. It's an unfortunate dichotomy that is really stripping theological meaning from much of contemporary evangelical preaching, even while I am sympathetic to the concerns (ie Emergent Church Movement). I am struck at how many ministers use film clips as illustrations - like parables - rather than exegete.

As for poetry, lets go to the cinematic master, Yasujiro Ozu:

In this scene from Early Summer, these grandparents see a balloon trailing up in the sky, saying, "Somewhere, a boy is crying." The clip returns, allowing us to experience the weightlessness of the balloon against the heaviness of their hearts, as it signifies their eldest son, a missing soldier in WWII, never to return.

I wish I could show you the clip. It's absolutely beautiful and ordinary at once - a "hole in the sky," as one critic wrote.

The visual meaning works a poetic logic; rather than being a subversion or suspension of the rational, it functions on a separate though related register. As such, this is entirely different than today's trend to relativize reason, systematic theology, or even propositional truth; the trick is finding how poetry means, how pictures argue, or deliver truth, which is different than discounting preaching, study, introducing drama or just singing a lot.