A Labour of Love: Creativity, Work and Art
Monday, 2 November 2015
| Sean McDonough and Gordon Preece
A Labour of Love: Creativity, Work and Art: An
Interview with Sean McDonough
Gordon
Preece: Sean, you are part
of the Theology of Work Project. Tell us about it.
Sean McDonough: Many concerned people globally
wanted to think through how we relate work and faith more positively. We first
examined the entire Bible on work with different biblical scholars focussing on
what their part contributes to the theology of work. We wanted a holistic
reading to sense the broader thrust of a given text, but then to tease out
specifically what it says about human labour. Then it would go to our Committee
of theologians, biblical scholars, and marketplace practitioners. Through a vigorous
process of vetting, discussion and reorganisation, it would, though a final
editor, become a coherent, succinct commentary on each book of the Bible on
work.
At the
Faith and Work Award, you talked about labour and love; two things people often
think of in separate boxes. How are they connected?
That
is a problem. Both in popular culture and Church, there’s often a radical
distinction between faith and work, with work typically seen as bad. That’s an
analogous distinction to the being and doing of humanity. But in Scripture, particularly
John’s Gospel, Jesus’ experience of God’s love is interwoven with his labour in
God’s love. In the whole Gospel, Jesus is bringing about a new creation; so in
the end, he says, “It is finished”.
The next verse notes that it was the Sabbath. So Jesus’ creation week begins
with a positive work of renewal, water into wine, then continues with healing
the sick, raising the dead, and paradoxically concluding with the finished work
of the Cross. Yet it is his love for God and humanity which leads him to labour
for God and then he, in turn, commissions his friends not only to soak in his
love, but to labour for him. There is no problem juxtaposing those two.
So
how has that link between love and labour been largely lost today?
In Church history there seems to be a stress on a particular
class of holy people devoted to God in prayer, preaching or evangelizing that
we deem to be non-labour. And ordinary people will just do ordinary labour and
buy-off some spirituality by supporting those doing “God’s Work”. The medieval caricature
of this sees ordinary people doing their business and hopefully learning the
Lord’s Prayer and going to Mass once a year. And those with a religious vocation
(priests, monks, nuns, etc.) pray for the rest of society. But many monks were
hard-working; and they still make the best beer!
And Dom Perignon champagne! Also the Benedictine
rule exhorts monks “to work is to pray”. So what modern forces have torn love
and labour apart?
The
biggest culprit is equating “love” with romantic
love. When we think of love we often think of a romantic comedy and then
transfer that to our relationship with God. So even in fine contemporary
worship, love songs for God are often indistinguishable from love songs for
your girlfriend or boyfriend. That’s not to be completely scoffed at because in
Song of Songs pure erotic love models Christ’s love for the Church. But work is
easily seen as the antithesis of romantic experience of God. Whereas biblical
love skews toward practical concern for neighbour which invariably involves
work.
One
of the benefits of the Theology of Work Project was to remind us that the Bible
is written into the real world. Again, one of the persistent perversions in Church
history is reading scripture as only
spiritual lessons for one’s interior life. But it’s equally true that the
concrete realities of life—love, sex, work, and death—are caught up in the grand
narrative of God’s purposes. So the Bible is a really grounded text. One of the
best illustrations is reading Luke where Jesus encountered people regularly in
their workplaces, e.g. Matthew in his little tax-collecting booth or office.
Jesus intrudes right into his work. If he can do it then, why not now?
One
of your books is on Christ and Creation. How does that link relate to the link
between love and labour?
In every
way. At a basic level, Christians love to sing that Jesus paid it all and
they’re grateful for the work of the cross. But, if you celebrate Jesus as
Redeemer, you’ve equally got to celebrate Jesus as Creator and therefore the
work that is a necessary part of the Creation project. In
John 5, Jesus says, “My Father is still working, and I also am working”. There’s a divine union in labour as their
love becomes real in the labour. It’s the living expression of God’s triune love.
And James 2 shows that body and soul and their mutual inter-penetration and
absolute union is how faith and work relate; it’s inextricable.
In another
book you talk about creation and new creation; but people often think
eschatology (last things) is ‘escape-ology’, escaping earthly labour. How do
you relate creation, new creation and work?
There’s
at least two aspects: the here and now, which is also eschatological, and the
ultimate end of all things. So Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, there is new
creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ mighty works or signs are
acts of new creation, the ultimate fulfilment of God’s creation purposes,
foretastes of the coming Kingdom. It’s like getting a party invitation with a
piece of the cake within it; it’s a sign, but also the beginning, the
down-payment on the reality. So, we likewise are, through the Spirit, giving
people a foretaste of God’s kingdom. And as that involved labour on Jesus’
part, it equally involves labour on our part; a labour of love. While
Jesus does what I can’t do, Jesus also
does what I must do—he is our model—and
if Paul can use the cross as a model for his own ministry, what couldn’t Jesus
serve as a model for? The rest of his life is surely a model as well. And Jesus’s
labour on God’s behalf, his compassion, his powers (admittedly supreme and
miraculous), and so on, enable what is in our power (skills, gifts, influence,
resources, creativity) to be deployed as signs of new creation. In this regard,
my favourite quote is from Jürgen Moltmann, who says Jesus’ healings are not
supernatural miracles in a natural world, they are the only truly natural thing
in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounding. I can’t say it any better
than that. That’s a labour of love.
In
the Middle Ages, the Church was strong in its patronage of the Arts and
produced wonderful architecture. How does today compare as it seems that the
Church is relatively weak in relationship to the Arts?
That is a real concern. Now the forbidding of
images in the Old Testament is an important practical theological directive for
the Church. Nonetheless, even in the Old Testament, even in the construction of
the tabernacle, there is gifting and equipping for those with creative arts. Outside
the Church, Islam is even more notorious for forbidding any images and yet you
go into the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and it’s absolutely stunning in its
wonderful artistry. So even when the culture may seem to be against the arts,
there’s this natural human propensity to engage in artistic endeavour.
I think we’ve lost, particularly in Protestantism,
that apocalyptic sense of staggering imaginative discourse that speaks to a
different part of our brains. ‘Revelation’, which technically means the
apocalypse’s unveiling, is simultaneously an unveiling and a veiling, partly
because God is so immense and awesome that to reveal himself to finite
creatures inevitably involves some diminution in his presentation to people. So
an apocalyptic, creative mode of presentation actually suits that aspect of the
Gospel wonderfully well: there are lots of things that we know clearly and
discursively and that we assent to and believe, but there are other things that
are just too much to capture.
Job is rich with imagery drawn from creation with
a wonderfully, imaginatively rich tapestry of stars and seas and monsters and
crocodiles and whatever else is going on. And it’s no coincidence that Job has,
particularly in the last couple of decades, been a huge resource for
film-makers; usually not of a confessional Christian nature, but they’re nonetheless
drawn to Job. Isn’t it a shame and embarrassment that the creative resources of
scripture itself have to be developed by those outside the church?
Who
are some of those film-makers who have used Job as a source for various movies?
So we’ve got the Coen Brothers and their
darkly humorous film A Serious Man. We
have Terrence Malick, probably the most overtly spiritual or religious of the
lot, in The Tree of Life. This
features the stunning scene of the cosmos and creation with verses thrown in
from Job and, of course, the narrative of that film is also about the loss of a
child and the parents’ and siblings’ struggle to reckon with that: very much a
Job-like theme.
You’ve also got the Russian film Leviathan which concerns a land grab by
a local bureaucrat accompanied, sadly, by a powerful Orthodox Church figure. This
involves a wonderful image of a whale skeleton washed up on the coast,
presumably alluding both to the sea monster Leviathan of Job, but also to
Hobbes’s view of Leviathan as the all-consuming state. And there may be many
more.
Let’s
return to when you were talking about the sense of romance and (particularly
sexual) intimacy, that has commandeered the idea of love today. Have you
thought about how that plays out gender-wise? It seems to be that in most
Western Churches, with approximately 60% female/40% male on average, that it’s
harder for many men to identify with the romantic view of love that they see
often in churches which doesn’t seem to connect with their work. And also,
increasingly, as women are more and more involved in the paid workforce, some
of them seem to be getting alienated as well, or torn between those different
worlds.
That could be reinforced by worship styles
which have a preponderance of romantic themes which might, in theory, appeal
more to certain types of women—I’m not sure how far to pursue that. The image I
have in mind, though, is from a song by Rich Mullins’s ‘The Love of God’ where he talks about the reckless,
raging fury that they call the love of God. That description of love has been exponentially
more helpful to me than the admittedly, sometimes useful, soft, romantic
strains of divine affection. This is partly because it just makes better sense
of life in general, including work.
Take an example from sport. A coach could
appear to be not acting out of affection for his players. Think of the film Chariots of Fire where the old Italian
coach is drilling the Jewish Ben Cross character Abrahams into sprinting
excellence—there’s a good deal of harassment and antagonism and challenge. Yet
in the very touching scene where the coach is not allowed into the stadium but
hears that his charge has won, he cries out, ‘My son, my son’. So they’ve
developed this affection that they’re both aware of, but it’s hardly
romanticised, yet it is genuine love and involves, of course, work—the work of
sprinting. But if we don’t include those sorts of images of divine love, then,
we will lose a substantial amount of people and the remainder will have trouble
making sense of why they face difficulties if God’s love for them is reduced to
romantic love.
Sean McDonough is Professor of New Testament
at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, near Boston. Interviewer Gordon Preece is Director
of Ethos and a board member of the TOW Project (www.theologyofwork.org). Thanks to Ethos intern Rich Phan for editing assistance. This
is an expanded version of an article first appearing in TMA.