It Shows Us the Darkness
Chris Green’s newest book draws on many artists and thinkers to elucidate his description of Jesus Christ as the Word of God.
Review by Michael Austin Kamenicky
If I were to sum up Chris Green’s eclectic theological career, I might say that one of its unifying themes is inseparably holding together ideas that others have understood as opposing: Pentecostalism and liturgy; holiness and worldliness; and in his new book, All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology, the intelligibility and mystery of Christ.
Like one of his chief influences, the late Robert Jenson, Green believes that Jesus Christ specifically is the Word of God, and wherever God speaks he does so as Jesus. But unlike Jenson, who believed that the intelligibility of the Word as Christ foreclosed the possibility of knowing God through apophatic negation, Green argues that the Word we hear in Christ echoes with the expanse of mystery. Jesus is a Word whose very intelligibility draws his hearers into silence and mystery, precisely because of his visibility.
And Green’s Christ is visible. As the Word, he enlivens all discourse: “God’s very life is gift… so, our words are never simply what they are in themselves: they are what they are in his creativity.” The Word speaks through the films of Terrance Malick, the pages of Dostoyevsky, and the verses of dozens of poets. The Word is so loud that he can be heard even in his absence. The book examines these sources in a furtive and episodic manner. The chapters are themed by the major movements of the liturgical year, and each one is centered on the art that Green engages rather than any systematic agenda. In its episodic format and searing-hot spiritual sensibility it feels more like Green’s sermon collection Surprised by God than his more thesis-driven works. Green has clearly been influenced by the work of Jeremy Begbie and Natalie Carnes, and they are cited approvingly, but this book seems most methodologically similar to Sarah Coakley’s chapter on art and the Trinity from the first volume of her systematics, God, Sexuality, and the Self. Coakley’s work focuses on the twofold task of demonstrating how art reveals subliminal theological assumptions and unearthing the potential for art to spark new theological trajectories. Over the course of these chapters, Green engages in these two tasks, with a spiritual candor and rhetorical flourish that calls to mind Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss.
As Green acknowledges in the introduction, readers of theological aesthetics will find some of the usual suspects. The aforementioned Malick, Flannery O’Connor, and T. S. Elliot all make requisite appearances, but this familiar territory is re-explored with a thoroughness that yields all kinds of small unorthodoxies. He critiques Malick’s lauded A Hidden Life as inciting admiration of its central Christ figure rather than true participation. He critiques one of the central assertions from the wildly popular Jesus and John Wayne, that American evangelicalism has merely replaced the peaceable Jesus with a warlike Christ, arguing that Americans are aware of Jesus’ character but fear that he cannot do what is necessary to ensure our safety. He critiques theologies that regard the resurrection as a narrative resolution in favor of a poetic alternative.
The beauty of Christ is a suffered beauty, a beauty that survives the accusation that “all is vanity.”
An audacious chapter entitled “Beauty Will Not Save the World” reads like Lauren Winner’s The Dangers of Christian Practice transposed into an aesthetic key, arguing that beauty itself stands in need of redemption, and without passing through death and resurrection, will only serve to further propagate brokenness. Green’s Christ is presented as self-effacing, constantly redirecting our gaze to others. He is a Christ whose humble passion repudiates our fanaticism. And whose resurrection is not a relieving narrative resolution but a poetic rupture, the beginning of a strange new world. Green’s vision of Christ is well summarized when, elaborating on Jean-Louis Chrétien, he says of our attempts to speak of Christ’s beauty: “We must feel the risk: praise can so quickly turn to blasphemy, just as blasphemy can so quickly turn to praise.” Indeed, the Word is so all encompassing that even our blasphemies are pregnant with praise and even our idols cannot help but speak the Word: “If our mind is habituated to God’s, we know that idols are nothing but as-yet-unrecognized icons.”
The volume is not without issues. On a theological level, I wonder if the challenging and disruptive picture of Jesus that Green figures is not occasionally overdrawn. Certainly Jesus’s resurrection upends the comfort of the powerful and disturbs the death-dealing norms of the world. But this same Jesus reclines with the beloved disciple, bids welcome to children, and sends the Comforter in his absence. Structurally, the chapter that covers The Odyssey, the binding of Isaac, and America’s history of racism feels cluttered. And I imagine readers looking for a single coherent Christological presentation might be disappointed. Like every Green project, one senses the substance of several books compressed into one short volume. While this density is occasionally overwhelming, it seems intentional as it keeps the God of the book always on the move. It is a fitting form to speak of a God whose revelation often leaves witnesses more bewildered. .
When I first received the book, I mistakenly assumed that the title was a reference to the Anglican Hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” with its soaring choral tones and resplendent verses about the beauty of creation. But the title of the second chapter, “All Things Beautiful in His Time,” revealed my error, redirecting me to Ecclesiastes 3:11. This correction of my silly misreading actually serves as a good illustration of work that Green seeks to do in this volume. The beauty he writes about is not merely the splendor of the field, or the swell of a chorus. The beauty of Christ is a suffered beauty, a beauty that survives the accusation that “all is vanity.” It is beauty so vast that even its absence cannot help but speak its name. It is a beauty demanding as the grave. It is the beauty of a consuming fire—at once illuminating and blinding.
Michael Austin Kamenicky holds an MA in theological studies from Lee University. His current research examines the intersections of Pentecostalism, aesthetics, and constructive theology.
All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology was published on September 15, 2021 by Baylor University Press. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
