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Theopoetic
Many today have difficulty in relating to religious language. This can happen when we reduce religious meaning to a specific kind of spiritual experience or give undue importance to one aspect of human life. The reduction of life to human will or intellect is often accompanied by the turn to mystical practices and cults. Amos Wilder calls for a renewal of our deep religious imagination as we reflect on biblical faith and on the basic needs and longings of contemporary persons. This requires a new appreciation for mystery and for deep speaking to deep. Wilder assumes that the depths of biblical truth have scarcely begun to be plumbed and have untapped power to renew life even in our technological Western societies. This requires that we go beyond the objective, surface meaning to the deeper orientation: Before the message, the vision; before the sermon, the hymn; before the prose, the poem. --Amos Wilder Chapter titles: 1.Theology and Theopoetic 2.The Recovery of the Sacred 3.Contemporary Mythologies and Theological Renewal 4.Traditional Pieties and the Religious Imagination 5.Ecstasy, Imagination, and Insight 6.Theopoetic and Mythopoetic Sparks of wit and insight make Theopoetic a notable monument to the ongoing vitality of Wilder's lifelong determination to remain faithful both to the biblical witness and the imperatives of the imagination. -- Journal of the American Academy of Religion This is a wise and unpretentious book. . .it offers no fancy programs or catchy formulas. Its prescription for our spiritual illness, far from being some esoteric pilgrimage, is the long and unspectacular remedy of developing spiritual health. -- The Christian Century For most of his career, Amos Niven Wilder taught at Harvard Divinity School. A former president of the Society of Biblical Literature, his books remain influential in bringing together the disciplines of biblical studies, theology, literature, and mythical imagination.
116 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 10, 2022
Originally published in the seventies by the sadly neglected American theologian (and brother of Thornton Wilder) Amos Wilder, "Theopoetic" is a short, dense, and marvelously rich primer on Wilder's theological sense of the imagination. Wilder was a pioneer in interdisciplinary theology and literature/poetry studies as well as what is commonly referred to as 'theological aesthetics' - that is, valuing the aesthetic nature of theology (visions, poems, dreams, and symbols) and the theological nature of the aesthetic (particularly modern poetry, art, drama, and films that have some sense of the Divine, human sin, etc.), in an attempt to find God from within the beautiful. Despite Wilder's sad neglect, the new editions of Wilder's works put out by Wipf and Stock suggest that he is making a bit of a comeback.
This particular book had a truly significant impact on my imagination, not in the sense that it presented arguments for the importance of the arts within the Christian experience, nor in the sense that it demonstrated the great power the arts might have in the contemporary Christian mission, but rather, in establishing the neglected necessity of foundational symbols, myths, poems, and pre-rational human sensibilities underneath all religion and culture. Then, in several tight and well-reasoned chapters, Wilder presents why Christians today (c. 1970s) must nourish their individual imaginations in order to restore the collective imagination. What he terms 'Theopoetic' is the means to this; it is a state of mind and spirit that is open to experiencing the Creative Word through the means of creative action. It is a merger of Theos (God) and Poesis (making, creating, doing). It's open to the oneiric and ecstatic though as means to an end, recognizing that all revelation must be directed towards the establishing of the Kingdom, which means real people on read land in real life.
It's fascinating to me that, while Wilder's books seem to now be getting the attention they deserve, other thinkers today are doing something similar to Wilder, and the medium is the podcast episode or YouTube interview - the new, creative outlets that Wilder would have been glad to have seen Christians using for Theopoetics (i.e. creatively utilizing those art forms or communication outlets to both critique culture and present the freedom of the Gospel).
I'll conclude with some of my favorite quotes from the book:
- "Religious communication generally must overcome e a long addiction to the discursive, the rationalistic, and the prosaic. And the Christian imagination must go halfway to meet the new dreams, mystiques, and mythologies that are gestating in our time" (1).
- "Imagination is a necessary component of all profound knowing and celebration; all remembering, realizing, and anticipating; all faith, hope, and love. When imagination fails doctrines become ossified, witness and proclamation wooden, doxologies and litanies empty, consolations hollow, and ethics legalistic" (2).
- "Certainly the hymn book, the prayers, and the sermon evoke the dramatic archetypes of the faith just as do the rites and customs associated with Christmas and Easter. But what we have here too often is religious sentiment rather than exorcism, nostalgia rather than actualized revelation. The true mythos of Christianity does not come to life, partly because as stereotype it is not free to generate its own contemporary communication, and partly because it is not brought into costly relation with our current fates and choices" (3).
- "A creative theopoetic is called for, therefore, not only to vitalize a traditional theology but also to relate our Christian experience to the new sensibility of our time and its images and cults" (7).
- "Early Christianity was more like guerilla theater than social revolution, but it overthrew principalities and powers. When Jesus drove out the money changers they were no doubt back again the next ay or the next week. But the episode was an acted parable and evoked the powerful theocratic vision of the prophets" (28).
- "[The New Testament history] was a guerilla operation which undermined social authority by profound persuasions. What no overt force could do it did by spiritual subversion at the level of the social imagination of the polis and the provinces of the empire. It was a case of liturgy against liturgy, of myth against myth" (28).
- "Our argument has begun with the plea that Christian witness must engage our times at the level of its unconscious axioms and inherited symbolics and not only at that of its ideas. Since such cultural imagery is deep-rooted and powerful it can only be effectively encountered if Christianity draws on its own arsenal of vision. But this eloquence will not be persuasive unless it is lived out and unless its archetypes are quickened and reshaped in the encounter. Such encounter takes place both in depth and at the public level" (29).
- "[I]n the early church there was much of what we would call subversive songs, guerilla theater, underground messages, and political graffiti" (29).
- "Theology as in the time of the New Testament will take form on the basis of prophecies, exclamations, aphorisms, words out of the ordeal, letters from prison, watch-words of the Resistance, beatitudes and woes and parables in the worldly idiom of our own setting and our own involvement" (36).
- "The encounter of the Gospel with the world, whether in evangelism, education, preaching, or theology requires a deep appreciation of and initiation into the varied symbolic expressions of the culture" (44).
- "Artists and mystics have first to practice their scales and learn their a, b, c's and train their reactions. Inebriation is no substitute for paideia" (67).
- "But true myth, involving language as it does, goes beyond any such momentary epiphanies and seizures, and pretends to order both experience and reality. In any case the arts of speech and language - epic, drama, poetry, the novel - raise the question of meaning in a more explicit way than is possible with music, dance, architecture, painting" (81).
- (Paraphrasing Robert Duncan) "...wherever we open ourselves to myth it works to convert us and to enact itself anew in our lives" (91).
- "What ranges of confidence have been forfeited and how widely our assurances have been intimidated! The compass and amplitude of our experience have been widely dwarfed as is evident at the level of basic apperception and matters taken for granted. It is reflected in the impoverishment of our visionary powers. It is a question of retracted horizons and shrunken categories of expectation. We rule out hidden operations of the Spirit and the unpredictable" (105).
- "If our assumptions about the world are dwarfed and routinized then our measure of events either today or in the past are thus blinded. Granted a more sensitive, awesome, and magnanimous vision of mortals and their fates, then such a portrayal as is found in the Gospels would be in order. Miracles and myths would be in the nature of the case, however. trying and particular might be their representation" (106).
This particular book had a truly significant impact on my imagination, not in the sense that it presented arguments for the importance of the arts within the Christian experience, nor in the sense that it demonstrated the great power the arts might have in the contemporary Christian mission, but rather, in establishing the neglected necessity of foundational symbols, myths, poems, and pre-rational human sensibilities underneath all religion and culture. Then, in several tight and well-reasoned chapters, Wilder presents why Christians today (c. 1970s) must nourish their individual imaginations in order to restore the collective imagination. What he terms 'Theopoetic' is the means to this; it is a state of mind and spirit that is open to experiencing the Creative Word through the means of creative action. It is a merger of Theos (God) and Poesis (making, creating, doing). It's open to the oneiric and ecstatic though as means to an end, recognizing that all revelation must be directed towards the establishing of the Kingdom, which means real people on read land in real life.
It's fascinating to me that, while Wilder's books seem to now be getting the attention they deserve, other thinkers today are doing something similar to Wilder, and the medium is the podcast episode or YouTube interview - the new, creative outlets that Wilder would have been glad to have seen Christians using for Theopoetics (i.e. creatively utilizing those art forms or communication outlets to both critique culture and present the freedom of the Gospel).
I'll conclude with some of my favorite quotes from the book:
- "Religious communication generally must overcome e a long addiction to the discursive, the rationalistic, and the prosaic. And the Christian imagination must go halfway to meet the new dreams, mystiques, and mythologies that are gestating in our time" (1).
- "Imagination is a necessary component of all profound knowing and celebration; all remembering, realizing, and anticipating; all faith, hope, and love. When imagination fails doctrines become ossified, witness and proclamation wooden, doxologies and litanies empty, consolations hollow, and ethics legalistic" (2).
- "Certainly the hymn book, the prayers, and the sermon evoke the dramatic archetypes of the faith just as do the rites and customs associated with Christmas and Easter. But what we have here too often is religious sentiment rather than exorcism, nostalgia rather than actualized revelation. The true mythos of Christianity does not come to life, partly because as stereotype it is not free to generate its own contemporary communication, and partly because it is not brought into costly relation with our current fates and choices" (3).
- "A creative theopoetic is called for, therefore, not only to vitalize a traditional theology but also to relate our Christian experience to the new sensibility of our time and its images and cults" (7).
- "Early Christianity was more like guerilla theater than social revolution, but it overthrew principalities and powers. When Jesus drove out the money changers they were no doubt back again the next ay or the next week. But the episode was an acted parable and evoked the powerful theocratic vision of the prophets" (28).
- "[The New Testament history] was a guerilla operation which undermined social authority by profound persuasions. What no overt force could do it did by spiritual subversion at the level of the social imagination of the polis and the provinces of the empire. It was a case of liturgy against liturgy, of myth against myth" (28).
- "Our argument has begun with the plea that Christian witness must engage our times at the level of its unconscious axioms and inherited symbolics and not only at that of its ideas. Since such cultural imagery is deep-rooted and powerful it can only be effectively encountered if Christianity draws on its own arsenal of vision. But this eloquence will not be persuasive unless it is lived out and unless its archetypes are quickened and reshaped in the encounter. Such encounter takes place both in depth and at the public level" (29).
- "[I]n the early church there was much of what we would call subversive songs, guerilla theater, underground messages, and political graffiti" (29).
- "Theology as in the time of the New Testament will take form on the basis of prophecies, exclamations, aphorisms, words out of the ordeal, letters from prison, watch-words of the Resistance, beatitudes and woes and parables in the worldly idiom of our own setting and our own involvement" (36).
- "The encounter of the Gospel with the world, whether in evangelism, education, preaching, or theology requires a deep appreciation of and initiation into the varied symbolic expressions of the culture" (44).
- "Artists and mystics have first to practice their scales and learn their a, b, c's and train their reactions. Inebriation is no substitute for paideia" (67).
- "But true myth, involving language as it does, goes beyond any such momentary epiphanies and seizures, and pretends to order both experience and reality. In any case the arts of speech and language - epic, drama, poetry, the novel - raise the question of meaning in a more explicit way than is possible with music, dance, architecture, painting" (81).
- (Paraphrasing Robert Duncan) "...wherever we open ourselves to myth it works to convert us and to enact itself anew in our lives" (91).
- "What ranges of confidence have been forfeited and how widely our assurances have been intimidated! The compass and amplitude of our experience have been widely dwarfed as is evident at the level of basic apperception and matters taken for granted. It is reflected in the impoverishment of our visionary powers. It is a question of retracted horizons and shrunken categories of expectation. We rule out hidden operations of the Spirit and the unpredictable" (105).
- "If our assumptions about the world are dwarfed and routinized then our measure of events either today or in the past are thus blinded. Granted a more sensitive, awesome, and magnanimous vision of mortals and their fates, then such a portrayal as is found in the Gospels would be in order. Miracles and myths would be in the nature of the case, however. trying and particular might be their representation" (106).
September 7, 2021
Ideas that are essential and easily overlooked.
March 23, 2022
not a fan of the writing style. wonderful + interesting ideas, but not enough substantive examples of applications, or even examples of poems/songs that illustrated his points.
April 6, 2015
This book is one of the most eye-opening and enlightening books I've picked up in sometime. Written in 1976, it is a push back against the constrained sense of reality that presents itself purely through empirical observation and also against the constrained sense of reality that comes through pure transcendence. Wilder calls for a return to the mythical imagination where there is more behind the five senses. However, he sees the five sense as being the first step to this transcendental meaning (as oppose to drugs or physiological stimuli alone). His lexicon can become murky, but he drives several good points home. Finishing with a quote, he calls for a "heightened sensitivity for which the ordinary transactions of life are shot through with meaning, with moving charities, and with providence." Highly recommended--beware of academic language.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews