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Beauty is there to remind us of
its ultimate source: God. — Ed Farley

Farley’s Latest Book Examines Faith and Beauty

by Ray Waddle

One of the world’s most distinguished theologians can be found at the keyboards in a jazz band on Monday nights at the Bellevue mall food court. Edward Farley— author, educator, interpreter of Christian philosophical tradition, ordained Presbyterian — also plays a lively jazz piano. He sings in Nashville’s Second Presbyterian choir, where he attends with Doris, his wife of more than 50 years. He writes poetry and stories for his six grandchildren. He keeps up with trends in contemporary science too. It’s all of a piece to Ed Farley — meditating on theology, playing music, canoeing in the Adirondacks, enjoying the world’s beauty. They’re all part of the adventure of faith, the life of mind and heart.

Now 73, Farley is officially retired from the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty, where he was an honored professor of theology for 30 years. In that time he produced a magisterial four-volume work of contemporary theology and many other writings on culture and theological education.

He stepped down in 1998. But he has hardly slowed down. He’ll have a new book out next year called Practicing Gospel: Unconventional Essays in the Church’s Ministries (Westminster John Knox). He has written a provocative manuscript called Prayers of an Atheist, which is a fictional account of a middle-aged man’s unfolding confrontation with his own shaky, faulty unbelief.

“He doesn’t really have a conversion experience in the end, but his certainty in his own atheism is robbed from him,” Farley says. His latest book, published earlier this year in England, involves a subject he postponed for decades — the embattled role of beauty in Christian life and practice. The book is called Faith and Beauty: A Theological Aesthetic.

He admits it's a subject absent from his previous theological investigations, even though music and litera- ture have always been deeply important to him personally. (Growing up in Louisville, he was playing trumpet in professional bands as a teen, and won an award for a symphonic composition at age 17. In Nashville, he played trumpet in the big band The Establishment from 1975-95.)

The book Faith and Beauty tackles a nagging question: Why doesn't beauty play a bigger role in our culture and our churches?

Beauty still exists, of course — it’s found every day in nature, music, poetry. Religious belief itself has a beauty to it. But as a subject worthy of discussion and affirmation, beauty and art have retreated to the specialized safekeeping of professionals (composers, writers in residence, visual artists). It’s a no-show in daily routine. Yet surely people need beauty in their lives. It’s part of being human. So why isn’t it preached from the pulpits? Why is faith separated from beauty?

“Faith, it would seem, is about ‘something else’: church doctrines, the afterlife, Jesus, the Bible, liberation,” Farley writes in Faith and Beauty. “This odd lack of relation between faith and the aesthetic dimension of human life is not, I realize, peculiar to my project, a rare autobiographical idiosyncrasy. It haunts the work of most theologians I know.”

There are reasons, he says, for a prejudice against beauty in both secular culture and religious life. The whole postmodern drift of contemporary life — our isolation from nature, our technocratic institutions and vocabularies, the revving engines of consumerism — devalues experiences of beauty.

Religious history is full of alienation from beauty too. In ancient days, art was sacramental, a signal of divine presence. But since biblical times, aesthetics and art were often suppressed or marginalized, denounced as pagan, self-indulgent, idolatrous.

Even though the poetry of Scripture and the rhythms of liturgy and the splendor of church architecture embody beauty, our instinct is to separate religion from art — and ethics from aesthetics, Farley says. But it won’t do.

“When you try to cast out beauty it creates an inherent suspicion of life itself,” Farley says. Indifference to beauty in religion robs us of a divine gift, he argues. Beauty has a sacred mission: The arts point to something sacramental about the world itself. Artistic creation — music, art, poetry — seems to partake of the divine creative impulse that mysteriously infuses all life. This welling-up impulse of grace gives the world meaning and holiness, and people were made to experience it, this aesthetic wonder and astonishment, with all their senses.

And when they do, a moment of redemption is at hand. Sacramental beauty has the power to lift us out of self-absorption and stir compassion for the larger world, Farley believes. Beauty is there to remind us of its ultimate source, God. It draws us beyond ourselves. It’s the opposite of evil, which closes the heart in on itself and shrivels empathy and compassion. “. . . It seems to be the case that people in and outside religious communities still sense something divine at work in the dark mysteries of world process, something that impels creatures beyond mere predatory behavior toward interdependence, cooperation and creativity,” Farley said in a recent lecture called “Being Human and the Arts: A Sacramental Reflection.”

So tune your heart to the overlooked religious dimension of beauty in our fast and furious 24/7 world. It might happen the next time you’re strolling through Bellevue Center on a Monday night (6-8 p.m.) as the sounds of jazz standards float out from the food court. Keep your eye on the piano player.

Story by Ray Waddle, a writer based in Nashville.