1 Defining performance arts
In order to understand the relationships between Christian theology and the performing arts, it is important to have a sense of the contours and characteristics of the performing arts. This can never be more than a working description, as art itself defies definition. Many definitions have been offered and contested, yet none fully satisfies (Carlson 2004: 1). In part, this is because art points beyond what can be accounted for in precise description. Considered most broadly as an intentional use of human imagination and skill that exhibits beauty, conveys emotion, or inspires ideas, the term art is inclusive and elastic. In the West in the eighteenth century, distinctions were drawn more firmly between the arts and the sciences, even between those – such as music and mathematics – that had previously been understood as closely connected. Further, a fairly small list of ‘fine arts’ was delineated, some lists including painting, architecture, sculpture, music, and poetry, while others include literature and dance (Sokolove 2019: 74–75). Such lists have always been controversial, particularly in driving an exclusionary line between ‘classical arts’ and ‘folk arts’, and they are inadequate in light of the multiplying technologies of the twenty-first century. It is therefore only within a very broad sense of the term ‘art’ that this essay defines the performing arts by addressing four characteristics of performance: embodiment, space, time, and terms of relating.
1.1 Embodied bodies
The primary characteristic of the performing arts is that they are embodied. The artist’s body creates the art. In some performance arts, this is quite direct. For example, a dancer’s body moves, bends, turns, and stretches to create a pattern that is the dance – that is the art. Likewise, a singer creates music using their body – their lungs, vocal chords, and mouth generate the sounds that we recognize as music, as art. In theatre too, the body is very employed in creating art. In theatre, an actor tells a story by becoming (or embodying) the story (Johnson 2014: 155). As Augustine mused, we can only communicate with each other through our bodies. We communicate, since the Fall, through signs, words, sounds, and gestures (Johnson 2010: 13).
Other performing arts involve various forms of mediating instruments. Unlike a vocalist, a musician uses both body and instrument to create sounds. Imagine the cellist wielding their bow, the drummer in a rock band with muscular arms flying, or the pianist whose nimble fingers move rapidly across the keys. The instruments involved – cello, trap set, or piano – do not diminish the embodied nature of these performances. There are some forms of performing arts where the embodied efforts of the artist are less visible to the audience due to the mediating instruments employed. For example, a puppeteer might or might not be seen by the audience, yet their bodily movements animate the characters and narrative of the show.
Every art form involves an artist’s body creating something. Michelangelo used hammer, chisel, and muscle to free David from the stone. Yet his sculpture on display in Florence shows us only the results of Michelangelo’s labours, not the labours themselves. A distinctive feature of performance arts is that those who engage the art – those who see, hear, or otherwise experience it – experience also its making.
1.2 Interaction space
Specifically, this involves bodies inhabiting a shared space. Pushing boundaries of convention and imagination is part of the nature of art, so exactly what bodies inhabiting a shared space looks like will be contested and stretched using various forms of mediation and technology. Yet even such negotiations and approximations, if they are to remain performance arts, aim to involve the bodies of both artist and audience in the same space.
The embodied nature of performance arts acknowledges the wholeness of persons and their existence in community. Humans may be described as complex composites of body and soul, of mind and matter, or even – with a bit more nuance – of intellect, emotion, body, and volition. However, there is a unity to the human person that defies division. Research in neurobiology, embodied cognition, and epigenetics points out the interweaving coherence of the different ‘parts’ of the human person often separated in common parlance (see Strawn and Brown 2020). Our emotions are inseparable from our ideas, our ideas interwoven with our bodily movements, and our decisions incalculably tied up with bodily sensations and emotional states.
The performance arts do not need the latest research to affirm this reality. They rely on, and take advantage of, the messy reality that persons in shared spaces come as whole people. Interacting with art always involves the whole person, but the centrality of bodies is acknowledged and leveraged in performance art. With other forms of art, such as literature, it can be easier to forget that our whole selves are involved. A reader – lost in a good book – can get stiff from unwittingly sitting in the same position for hours. A reader of literature is almost always physically distanced from the author and from the others engaging the art. In contrast, performance art demands physical proximity, in a shared space engaging a mutual experience.
1.3 Event time
Describing performing arts in this way – involving bodies in shared space – points towards another central characteristic: performing arts are events. Performances are time-bound happenings. The script of a Shakespearean tragedy can be held indefinitely in a library; a performance of the play takes place in a specific time, with a beginning and an end. Performance arts do not exist outside of temporal events in which they are realized. Before the play, there is a script, a prompt book, a set design, and so forth. After the show, these things remain, perhaps along with a recording. Yet the play itself – the performance art of theatre – exists only in the particular temporal constraints of the event itself. It is impermanent and fleeting. If someone is late, they might miss it. This temporal ephemerality is characteristic of performing arts. Theorist Peggy Phelan states: ‘Performance’s only life is in the present’ (Phelan 1993: 146).
This does not, however, entirely limit the performing arts to the present tense. Performances always call back to the past and help to form the future. In arts such as theatre and dance, it is clear that a current performance is constructed through repeated rehearsals. Each rehearsal helps to create what the performance will be; each performance is also a rehearsal. Every rehearsal and performance is part of an on-going exploration of the play or dance.
This is true, albeit in a different way, in other performance arts that are not explicitly rehearsed. Performance theorist Richard Schechner identifies performance as ‘restored behavior’ (Schechner 2002: 22). This includes theatre and dance and musical performances that have been rehearsed, but it also includes everyday behaviours. In some cultures, we learn to greet one another with one hand outstretched. That repetition creates expectation. If a handshake is expected, its absence will draw attention. Shaking hands is not a performance art, but it is a performance and, as such, it gains meaning and import from its prior performances. This larger sense of performance clarifies that even unrehearsed performance art relies on the past. It is the narrative logic that allows improvisation as a performing art form to connect with the audience. It is narrative that allows people to connect ideas together in an entertaining way to perform for others, and allows an audience to fill in the gaps of ideas created in the moment (Johnstone 1979: 109–116). Similarly, improvisation in music relies on the repetition and alteration of established musical patterns.
Another way in which performance moves towards the future is by changing the perspectives of those involved, expanding a sense of what is possible, or altering relationships. Any performance of art is also, in some way, a rehearsal for the community that experiences it, a rehearsal of new ways of being together in space and time. The performing arts are time-bound in a way that is both fleeting and formative. It is the performance arts alone that operate within time in this way – past, present, and future – and therefore speak theologically of the human condition as both temporal and eternal. A poem may exist in perpetuity as text, but is vaporous as a speech act. Temporal and eternal, human and divine, are more evident in performance arts than purely literary or plastic arts.
1.4 Terms of relating
Involving bodies together in shared space during a specific time, performance arts rely on explicit or implied rules for relating. Those present together during the performance are interacting with one another in ways that follow or foil conventions of appropriate behaviour at such a performance. At an orchestral performance of classical music, the audience members do not bring their own instruments and join in. Nor do they whoop and holler as the musicians play. However, whooping and hollering is perfectly acceptable at some bluegrass concerts and there are bluegrass picking circles where joining in with one’s own instrument is the norm. There are conventions of behaviour, which sometimes need to be reinforced – e.g. ‘no flash photography’ – that guide interactions between artists, between audience members, and between the artists and the audience. In sum, social arts require social contracts, but this becomes more obvious and sometimes intense in performing arts, as demonstrated by the audience’s harsh reaction (though not quite a riot, as is often claimed) to the premiere performance of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’.
Exactly who or what comprises an audience is a highly-contested question, as is the question of whether or not an audience is necessary for performance art to occur (Carlson 2004: 36). We often think of the audience as passive observers of performing arts, but this is rarely accurate. Even the most staid orchestral performance or conventional ballet relies on the participation of the audience. Audible reactions, such as laughter or an intake of breath, are part of an ongoing communication between artist and audience, through which each specific performance is shaped. A Friday night performance will be different from a Tuesday afternoon matinee, even if the artists attempt to do everything exactly as they have rehearsed it for months before, because the audience will be different. They will bring different expectations, hopes, experiences to the performance, and will respond differently to the work of the artists. Furthermore, performances of the same music will be different in a nursing home in South Dakota, a community centre in London, a school in Nairobi, or a conservatory in Tokyo – even if the musicians are the same. Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, now a classic, did not fare well with audiences in Paris, New York, or London. Many audience members, baffled by the play, simply got up and left. However, when it was performed in San Quentin State Prison, the incarcerated men grasped its meaning and power (Dembin 2019). Each community that engages performing arts brings their own contexts to the work, creating something new.
Many types of art aim to include the audience in the performance as co-creators in some way. The performance artists Blue Man Group ask for volunteers from the audience and require audience members to explicitly make decisions during the performance. Part of the performance – especially for first-time audience members – is an explicit shifting of the terms of relating among those present.
Serbian artist Marina Abramovic’s performance piece, ‘Rhythm 0’, took place at Studio Morra in Naples in 1974. Abramovic stayed in the room with a table upon which various object – ranging from a handkerchief to razor blades to a gun – rested. She explicitly opened the terms of relating with written directions:
Instructions.
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object.
During this period I take full responsibility. (Ward 2012: 119)
At the beginning of the performance, most of the audience members were fairly passive, yet as the performance continued the audience stepped into active roles in violent and demeaning ways, including stripping Abramovic’s clothes and cutting her body. One audience member aimed the gun at Abramovic’s head; another member of the audience pulled it away.
This performance was an exploration of terms of relating in radical ways, creating a situation in which there were no externally-imposed consequences for audience behaviour. The lack of set expectations exposed their very necessity.
Director Augusto Boal changed the terms of relating in theatre performances in hopes of changing them in the broader society. He described theatre as ‘rehearsal for revolution’ and aimed to transform spectators into ‘spect-actors’, people who perceived their situations clearly and acted within them (Boal 1979: 122). To that end, Boal developed games and exercises to draw people into theatrical performances, believing that rehearsing agency onstage could increase social agency offstage.
In the shared space and time of a performance, the terms upon which people relate to one another can be shifted due to explicit instructions, shared experiences, or embodied invitations to see the world in new ways.
1.5 Putting the pieces together
This leads to the question of what the difference is between an action and a performance. If I move my hand as if I am shooing a fly away from me, it means nothing outside of its context. Was there a fly to shoo? Was it merely a spasm of my arm or hand? But if I am on stage and someone has approached me with a request as part of a play, that action could be a non-verbal dismissal of that person’s request. Unlike the first two actions, this action is a performance as it is intentional and has an intended meaning within its context. Performance arts are comprised of intentional actions (i.e. signs, words, sounds, gestures) which convey thoughts, feelings, or concepts to an intended audience in the context of that audience.
Aaron Copeland, in his classic text What to Listen for in Music (2011), highlights the similarity between a play and orchestral concert. Both have a composer or author who had an idea and through any number of potential processes creates a document with their idea for a performance reflecting this idea. This document is then interpreted by artists – a conductor and musicians on one hand, a director and actors on the other (though in reality there are more people involved in this process), who, after rehearsing the piece, perform it for an audience. It is the task of the audience to attend carefully to the performance to be able to receive the layers of creativity and interpretation that are behind this particular performance. They come with history and expectations which guide their reception of each performance (Copeland 2011: 91ff.).
Both the theatre and the concert hall have had to compete with technology as, for the last century or so, one has been able to record a performance of a concert or play and experience it whenever they like, with anyone they like, or alone. Yet only the event being recorded was a performance. Christopher Small makes the distinction between music (a thing) and musicking (the real-time making of music; Small 1998a: 1–18).
This article began with the examples of a play and a concert because they provide the foundation for all the performing arts. Focusing on the narrative quality of theatre, a mime plays with the convention of theatre by making wordless (and often soundless) gestures that create a character or narrative, or both. When a dancer moves to a piece of music, they become an interpreter of music, using their body alone or in tandem with others to embody the music in ways that invite the audience to experience the music differently. Opera often combines all of the above in the context of music: dance, gesture/mime, character, and narrative.
There is something essentially human about interacting in all three of our dimensions. A dancer uses space to perform, transforming that space by their use of all three dimensions, especially when they are dancing with others. All performers act not just in space but in time. Performing in the moment creates an element of risk – at any time something could go wrong. Even if it goes right, it will never be the same twice, so a performance is particular to that specific time with that particular audience.
Theologically, this speaks of the Christian understandings of time inherited from Judaism, with some times being set apart for certain practices, performances, and/or rituals. Certain times were literally more sacred than others, some spaces more sacred than others. Traditions rehearsed over time made this clear in their repeated enactments from generation to generation.
2 Theological hermeneutics of the performing arts
Christian theology sees humanity and creation as both graced and fallen. Where the emphasis is placed – graced or fallen – influences how a particular theologian or Christian community approaches the performing arts. If the created order is primarily fallen, though still graced, then one avoids the created order to seek God – not in the physical, but primarily in the meta-physical, not in the natural, but in the supernatural. On the other hand, if the world we inhabit is first and foremost grace-filled, though still tainted by sin, one is much more likely to see resonance with nature and culture and their divine underpinnings. On the one extreme, one would see God as being extremely transcendent, or ‘wholly other’, present in limited and non-tangible ways. This would be the perspective of Karl Barth and neo-orthodox Protestantism in general. Barth appreciated Mozart and kept a copy of a painting of the crucifixion, by Mattias Grunewald, above his desk, yet he did not look to art for revelation. On the other extreme, one would see God as immanently present, allowing one to ‘find God in all things’ as the Jesuit motto says. This would be the perspective of Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, who represents a ‘Catholic imagination’ which finds the presence of the divine in the ordinary (this reflection, as well as sections concerning theatre in the following pages, borrow from the authors’ forthcoming chapters, ‘Christianity and Theatre’, in the Routledge Handbook of Christianity and Culture and ‘Theatre and Drama’, in the T&T Clark Companion to the Arts). The range of these perspectives play out across the history of the Christian faith and manifest themselves around the contemporary world across traditions and cultures. This range can be seen in how different Christian communities view the performing arts as allies, as suspect, and as tools to be utilized.
2.1 Allies
For many Christian communities, the performing arts have been seen as natural allies to Christian faith and life. There are at least two commonalities that ground this view. Both faith and the performing arts, at their best, lead to mystery – to that which is simultaneously meaningful and beyond human ken. Second, a life of Christian faith is one that has been formed in particular patterns, and the performing arts excel at formation.
2.1.1 Mystery
Art has the power to point beyond itself – to evoke experiences in which the person or persons engaging with the art also engage with broader ideas, emotions, memories, hopes, and possibilities. Superb musicians can inspire a sense of wonder; excellent dancers can invoke awe; compelling paintings can stir new ways of seeing both the world and oneself. For centuries, Christian communities around the world have employed art to glorify God and inspire the faithful. Cathedrals, stained glass, mosaics, organ music, and hymns all evoke wonder and worship.
The capacity of art to point beyond itself towards the ineffable prompts some scholars of both art and religion to see parallels between the two, and other scholars to blur any lines between them. Art critic Clive Bell argued that when artists, or those engaging art, are able to see something as ‘pure form’, as an end in itself that provokes emotion, they ‘become aware of its essential reality, of the God in everything, of the universal in the particular’ (Bell 1916: 69). Protestant theologian Paul Tillich recalled looking at a particular painting, stating that ‘something of the divine source of all things came through to me’, an experience that shaped his view of both art and Christianity (Tillich 1987: 235).
Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner defined the task of the theologian as ‘mystagogy’, that is, to bring people to the mystery of God (Rahner 1982: 111). In some perspectives, the work of the artist and the work of the theologian converge.
2.1.2 Formation
Another way in which the arts – particularly the performing arts – are natural allies to Christian theology is in their capacity to form people holistically, that is, to teach and shape people as whole embodied selves. Many classrooms have students sitting at separate desks, looking straight ahead at a teacher who gives information. Some of this information might be cognitively recalled by students for a test. This is a type of pedagogy that aims to inform minds. Yet the things we know most deeply are learned in much more embodied and communal ways. We learn the alphabet by singing a song as children, the lyrics we sang along to during our teenage years stubbornly persist in memory, and even in our elder years – when dementia causes much to slip away – songs often remain. Performing arts engage not just our minds but our bodies and our emotions, and therefore they can shape use profoundly.
Christian liturgy is a form of pedagogy that addresses the person in their entirety. This is in keeping with a central tenet of Judaism that is repeated often in the New Testament: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord is your God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might’ (Deut 6: 4–5). Theologian Don Saliers writes that, whatever else it might be, Christianity is a distinctive pattern of affections (Saliers 1980: 8). The theological term ‘affections’ refers to deep-seated attitudes to the world that necessarily involve the intellect, emotions, will, and body. While there are certain types of knowledge that might require only the intellect (recognizing that three is the square root of nine, for instance) or only the body (knowing that one is hungry), religious affections are ways of knowing and being in the world that involve the whole person. By participating in liturgy, Christians engage their whole selves (intellect, emotion, will, and body) in particular affections. Congregations practice affections such as gratitude and lament, and do not practice bitterness and resentment. Liturgy does not simply express or reflect the reality of Christian affections, it helps to create that reality.
Precisely because liturgy engages the whole self, there are multiple entry points for members of the congregation. One person longs for God but struggles to believe; they can go through the bodily motions of liturgy. Another person is captivated by ideas about God; they can begin with the sermon. Yet another feels love for God and neighbour deeply; their emotions are affirmed in the music of the service. Each person might first be engaged by one aspect of liturgy that corresponds with some aspect of themselves, but liturgy, over time, draws in the whole person. Liturgy shapes the participant in particularly Christian affections and, quite importantly, in a coherence of the self in which intellect, emotion, will, and body concur. The performing arts are central to this process.
2.2 Suspects
Not all Christian communities embrace the arts as allies. At different times and places, Christian communities have viewed the performing arts with deep suspicion. From this perspective, the performing arts are far too bodily, rely on insincerity, and distract from the one true purpose of glorifying God.
2.2.1 Bodies
The performing arts involve human bodies, and Christian theology has varied perspectives on bodies. On the one hand, Christian scripture is a collection of stories and writings about bodies – from the creation of the earth itself, through the long and ongoing relationship between the Jewish people and God, into narratives of a particular Jew, Jesus, and the community that followed him. The New Testament focuses on a pregnant woman, a vulnerable newborn, hungry crowds, hands-on healings, and the bodily torment of public execution. Numerous events are described in the scriptures in somatic, if not sensual, terms. John 12:1–8 recounts a dinner at the home of Lazarus. Mary takes costly perfume and anoints Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. Judas Iscariot, the disciple who would betray Jesus, chides the woman for her actions, but Jesus defends her, approving her extravagant physical gesture. A central claim of all such texts, and the faith that calls them sacred, is that God became flesh in the incarnation of Jesus Christ: the holy is encountered in and through bodies. This leads Jesus’ followers to create new communities, the formation of which involves tense negotiations about bodily concerns such as eating and circumcision. What’s more, this new community self-consciously understands itself to be a body – the body of Christ.
On the other hand, there are biblical verses that appear to separate earthly life and the spiritual path of Christian faith, such as Col 3:2, which advises: ‘Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth’ (see also 2 Cor 4–5). An extreme example opposing bodily, earthly, and spiritual life is Gnosticism, a view held by sects in the late first century CE, that identified salvation with spiritual knowledge and denigrated materiality as the source of evil. Gnosticism was deemed heretical by the early church.
Christianity emerged from Judaism and in the context of Graeco-Roman life, adding layers of complexity to theological views of the body. In the centuries before the rise of Christian churches, dramatic presentations of the mythological stories of the Greek or Roman pantheon of Gods were made at the temples. As Christian churches were being birthed in the ancient world, theatre was connected to the Graeco-Roman mythologies and the deities they promoted. In the second century, Christians also became the object of satire and ridicule in the theatre.
The Christian faith in its nascent days was very careful to create clear distinctions: Christians were not required to be circumcised (or be Jewish) before being baptized as Christian. At the same time, they could not be soldiers in the Roman empire, as this required having the signa of the emperor tattooed on your body, and you could not be baptized without first renouncing your allegiance to Caesar. Likewise, if someone was a musician or an actor they had to renounce their profession because of its association with the Graeco-Roman deities.
Augustine connected bodily communication and human sinfulness in another way. He theorized that, if humans were without sin, we could communicate directly, soul to soul. Under the influence of sin, communication must be grounded in our bodies. We communicate through signs, words, and gesture. When addressing the subject of music, Augustine understands sounds to be connected to signs, but enacted in movement through time and space. For example, one could see the letter ‘A’ and understand it to be a sign referring to the first letter of the English alphabet. Yet to speak the sound referring to ‘A’ is to enliven the sign and make it move temporally through time and space. Sound becomes the performance of the sign. However, when watching a musical performance, the show of making the music dominates the senses and diminishes the internal aesthetic reality which was the essence of music, ‘its internal intrinsic emotional substance’ (van Deusen 2009: 573) Augustine appreciates music for its communicative and aesthetic values. Yet the bodily characteristics of making music and the sensual process of receiving it – both only present as a result of sin – undercut these values. The performance itself is problematic.
The suspicion of bodies present from the beginning in some strains of Christianity took on a new form, with renewed zeal, in the Western hemisphere in the sixteenth century and following. A convergence of events and developments – including the scientific revolution, the wars of religion, and Western colonialism – contributed to this. The Protestant Reformation, and the various waves of reformation and counter-reformation that followed, informed and energized the modern Western worldview. Rejecting the abuse of religious power being enacted by the Roman Catholic church of the time, John Calvin pushed Christianity away from embodied rituals – controlled by a hierarchy of clergy in particular church buildings with holy objects – towards a kind of spiritual worship that could happen anywhere, without need of special artifacts, relying solely on scripture preached and heard. For some, this led to a view of ‘ritual’ as an inferior form of religiosity that engages bodies instead of worshipping ‘in spirit and truth’ (John 4:24). Calvin’s reforming impulse was taken further by sects such as the Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends, who worship God by sitting in silence, awaiting inspiration.
2.2.2 Insincerity
There is also a long history of Christians suspecting performance artists of insincerity. As Christianity moved into the second century, many Gentile Christians were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, particularly Plato. Plato’s most direct comment on theatre was in his fourth-century BCE work, The Republic. Plato claimed that the mimetic arts are first seen to be inferior to philosophy because they are an inferior reflection of reality and truth, which exist eternally in the heavens. Further, they make a primary appeal to emotions, sensory perceptions, etc. These are assumed to be inferior to the rational intellectual capacity of human beings. Not only are the imitative arts inferior, they are also deceptive: poets and actors do not just pretend, they lie. The Greek word for actor, hupokritḗs (literally ‘mask wearer’ or ‘one who answers’ – as in dialogue), is the etymological base for the English word hypocrite. When Jesus spoke of the Pharisees as hypocrites, the gospel writers used this Greek word.
The theeologian Tertullian, in his treatise De Spectaculus, written from Carthage around 200 CE, describes attending ‘the shows’ (literally ‘the spectacles’) as being a breach of one’s baptismal vow to have ‘renounced the devil, his pomp, and his angels’. This is because the circus, the athletic games, and the theatre were all held in honour of deities and were therefore idolatrous by nature. Further, the themes of theatre play on human lusts and do not give honour to the glory of God through creation. The actors and their dress (and cross-dressing) embody, if not celebrating, a lack of modesty (see De Speactaculus, especially chapters 4, 14, and 17).
2.2.3 Distraction
The third accusation often levied against the performing arts by Christian communities is that they are distracting. This suspicion goes back at least as far as the medieval period. In spite of the protestations of church fathers, in the medieval period a dramatic presentation of the Easter liturgy emerged from a song that echoed the voices of the women before the empty tomb: ‘Whom do you seek in the sepulchre, O followers of Christ? Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, O celestial ones’. Known as the ‘Quem quaeritis’, from the first two Latin words of this piece, it evolved into an enacted dialogue in the early to mid-900s. Many churches at this time had people buried under the main altar, often with stairs leading down from the front of the altar to a crypt below. The clergy simply had to recite the dialogue as the women and angels at the altar for the story to be performed in a cemetery context. Over time the clergy would dress up like the women and the angels, literally becoming a theatrical element in the drama of the Easter liturgy. Churches had no pews and few if any seats at this time, so within this large open space different locations within the nave would be understood as different biblical locations: Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, the Jordan River, etc. The texts of the gospel would often be enacted in these locations to reflect the location of the text being portrayed on holy days.
These theatrical presentations of the scriptures were so popular that the clergy (who were the only actors) began to enhance the performance, often playing to the crowd through comedic exaggeration or inserting references to current events and people in their performances. The church hierarchs grew concerned that these performances were drawing more attention to the clergy than the gospel, and so they ended the practice.
Yet the use of performing arts in Christian services, and the suspicion that these could be distractions, continued. Scholar Deborah Sokolove notes that in medieval Europe attending Masses ‘was something that the leisure classes did to pass the time, to see and be seen’ (Sokolove 2019: 54). Gordon Lathrop observes that the revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century were ‘the best entertainment around, with great preaching and outpourings of the Spirit that were fun to watch’ (Sokolove 2019: 12).
Seen from a certain perspective, the entertainment value of Christian services fulfils sensual, carnal, and worldly desires rather than pointing the congregant beyond their immediate pleasure to God.
2.3 Tools
Perhaps the most common view of the performing arts by present-day Christian communities is that they are tools that can be used effectively in Christian services. There are at least six different general categories of Christian services that each have their own distinct use of performance to create an efficacious ritual.
2.3.1 Word and table
The most traditional form of a Christian service would be Word and Table, referring to the reading and proclamation of scripture and the celebration of the eucharist. This would encompass everything from the Roman Catholic Mass to the Orthodox Divine Liturgy to typical Lutheran and Episcopalian/Anglican services. The intention of this service is for the people to be ‘full, conscious, and active’ participants in the rite (Flannery 2014: 7). People are to be moving, speaking, engaged in mind and body in being part of this offering to God of thanks and praise. The performance is by the people, rather than being for the people by clergy, though those elements also exist. This form of service, while common across the world, looks quite different in a Mass in Africa (see Kane 2004), in a Mass in rural Mexico, and in a wealthy suburban parish in the US.
2.3.2 Fourfold order
A different variation would be a ‘fourfold order’ of Gather, Word, Table, Dismiss that would not have a weekly Table rite. Here there is an expected response to the Word read and preached, but it can vary from church to church, or even time to time. In the Baptist traditions, the response is frequently a commitment or recommitment of one’s life to God. The performance shifts away from being primarily participatory, to being more (if not primarily) receptive. The intended audience is less exclusively God and is more the people who have gathered for this service. Performances here might be more expressive and less formal, more immediate and less objective. Performance of music and speech is often more conversational and persuasive, in particular trying to gain an emotional foothold among those who have gathered for this service.
2.3.3 Seeker service
The Seeker Service was officially birthed at Willow Creek Community Church in the 1980s (Johnson 2002a: 53–62). The Pastor, Bill Hybels, was a youth pastor who created a worship ritual modelled after a Young Life meeting. Young Life’s motto is to ‘earn the right to be heard’. One earns this right through familiarity and relationships. The Talk was an invitation to go deeper in both one’s faith and one’s trust in those leading Young Life. This was similar to Willow Creek’s approach. The Seeker service was a Young Life meeting for adults. The upbeat singing that opened the service was professional and polished, the dramatic vignette that followed was equally well-executed and was directly connected to the Talk that night. After the sketch was performed, the mood mellowed and become more sombre, serious, and explicitly spiritual, and was followed by a sermon-like Talk. It connected the illustration of life in the suburbs that had been performed in the sketch to the promise of the gospel. The invitation at the end was to join a small group Bible study to explore the faith more intimately. The intention was for people to mature from the Seeker Service to small group Bible Study to finally attending Community Life, which were midweek worships services for believers. Both Young Life and Willow Creek saw their ritual as being attractional and relevant. Those who called Seeker Services ‘entertainment’ or ‘infomercials’ were neither wrong nor offending their proponents: that was their purpose. They were a gateway to learn more about God, so performance was intentionally accessible and entertaining, and this fit the piety and intentions of those who promoted such a means of evangelism.
2.3.4 Sunday school
Another service was identified about the turn of the twentieth century, one which was neither new nor traditionally considered worship. Many Protestant churches after the Second World War had two distinct rituals on Sunday morning. One would be a worship service following some form of the Fourfold Order identified above. The other would be Sunday School, which was sometimes after worship, sometimes during worship, but most often before worship. The typical Sunday School ritual had two parts. The first part was ‘opening exercises’ where children of all ages, and sometimes adults as well, gathered together to sings songs which were more up-tempo and recent than hymns that were sung in worship. The purpose of this was to till the soil of the heart to prepare it for the seed of the gospel that would be sown in each Sunday school class. After twenty or so minutes people would be dismissed to their age-appropriate class where they would study the Bible.
This bicameral ritual of preparation and teaching is very common in many contemporary churches where the first part, a long block of music referred to as ‘worship’, would be followed by a long didactic sermon, often thematic and following the Seeker Service model, emphasizing the relevance of the gospel message to everyday life (Johnson 2002b: 19). Just as a young person in the past would bring their friends to Sunday School rather than worship because it was more accessible and geared towards persuasion, so too this worship format has little prior required ritual knowledge, though experience at concerts is an advantage as the format drew upon the sort of power ballads that were popular in the eighties and nineties. It should be no surprise that many contestants on American Idol were ‘praise band’ leaders.
2.3.5 Postmodern
At the turn of the twenty-first century a new model for worship developed, known as ‘emerging worship’, which was a form of multisensory performance art. With roots both in the adaptation of the Church of England’s Eucharistic rite and in rave culture, it was an immersive and interactive experience. As it evolved one would find ‘stations’ within a worship space where responses would be created to the scriptures being read. One could listen to someone offer spoken-word response, or improvised musical or dance pieces, or watch someone paint or sculpt a response (Bolger and Gibbs 2005: 65–88).
A good example of this would be The Church of the Apostles in Seattle during this time period. For a Good Friday service, texts from the common Good Friday service focused on the Seven Last Words of Jesus were used. For each of the ‘words’ the church found an artist, some of faith and some not. Each artist was assigned one of Jesus’ words from the Cross and given a station in the worship space. There they either performed a piece of art or displayed it and then discussed it with those who were present at the time. People would enter this open space and then visit the stations in no particular order, engaging both art and artist. The service concluded with everyone receiving communion.
Both the ritual and the ritual performance are eccentric to what most people would consider a Christian liturgy, let alone a Good Friday service. It was truly a liturgy, the work of the people for the people, yet the execution of this liturgy was particular to its genre (emerging) and community (Church of the Apostles) and the expectations of those in attendance.
2.3.6 Emotional-experiential
The last model of worship identified in Christian churches in the twenty-first century is what might be called experiential-emotional. It has diverse roots that can be traced to the Praise House where enslaved people on American plantation would sing, shout, and dance late into the night as a defiant act against their dehumanizing treatment. It also draws upon the rituals arising out of the camp meetings, Pentecostal and charismatic revivals, and cultures around the world that are not suspicious of bodies.
In structure, this form of service looks very much like the Sunday School model, with a block primarily of music followed by a block primarily of teaching or preaching. Theologically it is understood that the worship (‘music’) is sacramental, as the congregation believes that God will inhabit the praise of God’s people (cf. Ps 22:3; Lim and Ruth 2017: 124–131). These praises are efficacious if one has an experience of God’s presence, which can be emotional, physical, mystical, even ecstatic, but always in some way experiential. Although it has deep resonances with charismatic and Pentecostal tradition, it has extended well beyond those into many expressions of Protestant, particularly Evangelical, worship around the globe and across cultures. It is highly embodied and uninhibited. In some cases, such as the Soaking Rooms at Bethel Church, it is disconnected from any service of the Word. Curiously these soaking experiences have resonances with Augustine’s understanding of music’s effects on the interior life of a person when one has no other or few other sensual distractions.
2.3.7 Conclusion
It is impossible to have a single all-encompassing theology of worship performance, since the broader culture of a people and the subculture they inhabit – especially its understanding of bodies, God, and the appropriate worship of God – are factors determining efficacious performance in worship. Performance in worship, as in every case, is contextual, and any generalizations – even those offered above – serves as pointers, not definitions.
3 Theological approaches to the performing arts
Many theologians draw on analogies with performing arts, either focusing on a particular art or a particular theme upon which both theology and the performing arts have insight.
3.1 Arts
Sometimes theological interest in a particular performing art is rooted in Christian practices, such as singing. At other times, the relationship is more remote or contested.
3.1.1 Song
Don Saliers, mentioned above, reflects theologically on singing. He jointly wrote a book with his daughter, Emily Saliers, a musician. They note scriptural references to making music, such as Ps 150:3–6, which exhorts: ‘Praise! Praise God with trumpet sound, praise God with lute and harp […] Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!’.
Music, they contend, has been present whenever human beings gather for worship, across religions and centuries (Saliers and Saliers 2005: 20). The presence of music is not incidental, but part of the embodied practice and sustained attention by which we become attuned to ourselves and to the sacred, by which we explore who we are and who we want to be: ‘Spirituality is not an idea in the brain but rather a disciplined bodily experience that grows deeper with practice’ (Saliers and Saliers 2005: 21).
Distinctive forms of musicking are ‘hallmark features of pentecostal spirituality’, which grew exponentially in the latter half of the twentieth century (Ingalls 2015: 1). Several scholars, including Miranda Klaver, focus on collective music-making as meaning-making. Klaver asserts that ‘music – as embodied performance – encourages the formation of identities’ and the ‘collective sensual arousal’ that takes place making music together is ‘crucial to social bonding and community building’ (Klaver 2015: 101).
In Christian communities, musicking is a way of doing theology that involves the whole person. Amos Yong reflects, ‘if the Western philosophical tradition since Plato has elevated the domain of abstract thought, the masses have always presumed that the body, the affections, and the emotions are part and parcel of human discursive activity’ (Ingalls 2015: 282). Yong recognizes positive aspects of musicking as a theological process, including drawing people to the church, allowing for diverse theologies to arise, and egalitarian openness to the Holy Spirit. At the same time, he voices concern that ‘the orality of the masses [might create] a feel-good individualism that can derail, rather than foster, substantive theological reflection’ (Ingalls 2015: 282). He also worries that the global reach of Pentecostalism might be vulnerable to mass-market homogenization (Ingalls 2015: 284).
Jeremy Begbie describes music in terms consonant with the definition of performance above. It is embodied, temporal, and arises from ‘an engagement with the distinctive configurations of the physical world we inhabit’ (Begbie 2000: 15, emphasis removed). Music also ‘embodies social and cultural reality’, engaging the terms of relating in its context (Begbie 2000: 13). Music, for Begbie, can be seen as a set of practices that involve the ‘integration of many facets of our make-up’, including intellect, body, and emotions (2000: 5). This makes music, perhaps especially music in worship, ‘a potent instrument through which the Holy Spirit can begin to remake and transform us in the likeness of Christ’ (Begbie 2011: 337). However, Begbie notes that the emotional power of music can also be misused (2011: 337).
For Begbie, the ways in which music engages time provide avenues and insights into multiple Christian doctrines, including salvation, eschatology, and the sacraments. (For more on music and Christian theology, see Music in the Western Theological Tradition and Music and Orthodox Theology.)
3.1.2 Dance
One memorable appearance of dance in scripture occurs when David, then King of the united tribes of Israel, gathered a great company to transport the ark of God to Jerusalem. The ark had to be treated with utmost respect and honour: when Uzzah touched the ark to steady it after it had been jostled by an ox, he was struck down by God. As part of the necessary honour, ‘David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals’ (2 Sam 6:5).
In spite of this biblical description of dancing as a form of reverence for God, dance does not appear universally in Christian worship. Still, there are some communities in which it has been central, including the Shakers.
In the second half of the twentieth century, it became common for theologians to refer to inter-trinitarian relations as a dance. This usage does not appear to have stemmed from Christian practices, but rather from theological imagination. The Greek word perichoreo was used by Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century to discuss the human and divine natures of Christ. Three centuries later, St. John of Damascus used the word to describe inter-trinitarian relations. He writes,
We do not say that there are three gods, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but one God […] They are united but not confused, and they are in one another, and this perichoresis, each in the others, is without fusion or mixture. (quoted in Hikota 2022)
The word perichoreo is inherently reciprocal, as it indicates ‘making space for’ in a way that can indicate both extending or receiving. It can be translated as ‘mutual indwelling’ or ‘interpenetration’. The word is similar to perichoreuo, which means ‘to dance around’, although the two are not etymologically related (Hikota 2022). In the latter half of the twentieth century, perichoreo began to be interpreted as an inter-trinitarian dance. C. S. Lewis invokes two forms of performing arts, referring to God as a drama and a dance. He writes,
The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. (quoted in Hikota 2022)
This image has been taken up by many others, including Hugo Rahner, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, Leonardo Boff, and Paul S. Fiddes. Karen Baker-Fletcher expands upon the dance metaphor to describe both the giving and receiving within the Trinity and the multiple relationships between creation and God. She also incorporates insights from particular dance productions (see Baker-Fletcher 2007).
3.1.3 Theatre
It is not easy to classify theological analogies with theatre as rooted in Christian practices or not, since the relationship between theatre and church is complex. As mentioned above, in the early years of Christianity, theatre was associated with Greek and Roman deities. Various dramatic elements then arose within Christian communities, including the initiation rites of those baptized at Easter and the various enactments of Holy Week that took place in Jerusalem. Those who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem brought many of these practices home to their various churches, including foot-washing, waving Palm leaves, and the Stations of the Cross.
Theatre in Europe dispersed after the fall of the Roman Empire, continued by minstrels and traveling performers. It reconvened, so to speak, in the liturgy of Easter services, with the ‘Quem quaeritis’ mentioned above. When the church hierarchies ended the practices of acting out biblical scenes in church, the show moved into the streets. Each workers’ guild would stage a scene from the scriptures and perform it on a cart which would be part of a biblical narrative procession that was quite popular. These theatrical processions were known as the ‘mystery plays’ and put theatre back in the centre of ordinary life.
The most influential scholar who draws significantly on theatre is Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Catholic theologian in the twentieth century who was born in Switzerland. Balthasar envisioned God’s act of self-giving in Jesus and humanity’s act of lived response as elements of a traditional five-act play: The climax of the story is past and we know Christ is victorious; the Christian task is to decide to be part of that victory and live our acceptance of God’s gift in Christ. For Balthasar, the theatrical metaphor illuminates the linear unfolding of Christianity, the connections between God’s actions and human actions, and the necessarily communal, multivocal performance of Christian ecclesial life.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer draws extensively on Balthasar to argue for a particular approach to the Bible. In Vanhoozer’s use of the theatrical metaphor, scripture is script, church is the acting company, theologians are dramaturgs who help the company interpret the script, the pastor is director, and theological understanding as lived out in worship and life is the performance. If the Bible is the script for the church then, Vanhoozer argues, Christians must interpret the Bible – including all its many books, genres, and perspectives – as a whole. The process of canonization resulted in the script, which should be interpreted in its unity and entirety. Furthermore, doctrines are the stage directions that should be used to guide Christian interpretation and performance. Both a canonical view of the Bible and a high valuation of doctrine, according to Vanhoozer, will help Christians understand the Bible as it is used by God rather than as it is used by human communities and continue God’s communication through the Bible into new contexts (Vanhoozer 2005: 19).
Vanhoozer also draws on the work of Nicholas Lash, even as he departs from it. Lash’s influential essay, ‘Performing the Scriptures’ (1986), argues that Christian communities interpret scripture much the way actors perform a script. Lash writes, ‘the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of scripture is the life, activity, and organization of the Christian community, construed as performance of the biblical text’ (1986: 45). Such performance of scripture bears witness to Jesus, who, through his own life, death, and resurrection bore witness to ‘the truth of God in human history’ (Lash 1986: 42). Lash draws on Rahner to affirm that God and grace are both found and known in the world and in material history, and not apart from it.
Ethicist Samuel Wells rejects the idea that scripture is the script of Christian performance. Christian life is extemporaneous and not comprehensively contained in scripture. Christian communities have been performing their faith for roughly two millennia since the New Testament was written and are faced daily with quandaries unmentioned in its pages. Understanding scripture as script would force Christians into a backwards-looking posture, hearkening to a ‘golden era’ in the past rather than fully engaging the world in the present (Wells 2004: 63). Going unscripted, Wells moves from drama to improvisation, which he refers to as ‘improvisation in the theatre’ or ‘theatrical improvisation’, which he depicts as a set of practices within theatre more generally. He then describes Christian ethics as analogous to improvising, although he locates such Christian improvisation within a larger narrative, a five-act play, three acts of which are scripted. Wells writes: ‘Training in improvisation is an analogy for worship and discipleship – an analogy at times so close it becomes the real thing’ (2004: 85).
3.2 Themes
In addition to the many theologians who draw upon analogies with specific performance arts, there are others who focus on themes that connect the theology and the performing arts more generally. There are at least three themes that call for such comparisons and conversations.
3.2.1 Incarnation
The performing arts are profoundly incarnational. Ideas, visions, hopes, and possibilities become enfleshed. Max Harris, in his work, Theatre and Incarnation (2005), dives into the similarities between divine revelation in Christ and what happens in the theatre. He affirms the power of theatre precisely because it engages the whole person – and all senses – in the process of words becoming flesh. Harris uses these similarities to emphasize the bodily elements of Christianity, and writes that theatre ‘may well bear a likeness to that sensory mode of divine self-revelation’ (2005: 128). Harris, influenced by Barth, stops there, wary of imagining that the human art of theatre could rival or supplant divine revelation, which happens only as God wills.
Dale Savidge and Todd Johnson, in their book Performing the Sacred (2009), are less protective of divine initiative. The triune God creates humanity in God’s image, redeems us by becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ, and is present within and among us in the Holy Spirit. This trinitarian emphasis allows Savidge and Johnson to see theatre as a ‘graced opportunity’ for us to encounter our true selves – made in the divine image as communal, interdependent, and integrated with one another – and to be aware of the presence of God (2009: 74–75). The distinction between God and humanity is honoured, but so is the reality that God chooses – again and again – to be in intimate relationship with humanity. There is an analogous perichoretic nature between the triune God and the creation of performance art.
Eboni Marshall Turman, herself a dancer and a theologian, uses dance as both metaphor and conversation partner in her constructive work on Womanist ethics and incarnation. Here dance is used in the christological arena in which Gregory of Nazianzus employed perichoreo, as Turman focuses on the coexistence of human and divine natures in Jesus. Chalcedon becomes her model for theological discourse that both creates and refutes boundaries (see Turman 2018).
3.2.2 Inspiration
Another deep resonance between Christianity and the performing arts is inspiration. Artists use the term inspiration to indicate an energy, impulse, or idea that is not generated through the normal processes of human striving. This inspiration takes the hours of training and rehearsal to a new level. It can be prepared for and invited, but cannot be forced. Inspiration is received as a gift, even if its source remains unspecified.
After the resurrection, Jesus spent forty days with his followers and then ascended into heaven (Acts 1:3–9). His followers gathered in Jerusalem to observe the Feast of Harvest.
And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:4)
Those who spoke were from Galilee. Those in the crowd came from many places, ‘devout Jews from every nation under heaven’ (Acts 2:5). Yet when the Galileans spoke, every person in the crowd heard the words in their own native language. In Christian tradition, this event is marked as Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit to Christ’s followers. The Spirit gives those who receive it new powers, including to speak and to hear, to prophesy, and to do signs and wonders.
As more people heard what happened at Pentecost and were convinced by the message of Jesus’ resurrection, they asked the apostles what to do. The answer was to be baptized, as the disciples and even Jesus had been baptized. Following this person, Christians are baptized, a symbolic death and resurrection, to become part of Christ’s body. The sending of the Spirit does not negate the bodily nature of Christianity, but emphasizes it in new ways.
When inspiration happens, it can change the terms of relating. Sometimes we can feel it happening. Perhaps not so noticeable as a rush of wind and tongues of flame, but still perceptible. Sitting in the audience of a concert, inspiration happens, and suddenly we all hold our breath for a moment as an artist captures our full attention. We have experienced something beyond the fruits of technical excellence. Then, the audience member sitting next to me is no longer a stranger, but someone with whom I shared this gifted moment. We no longer politely pretend that we are not knee to knee and elbow to elbow. Instead, we look at each other, eager to share that something extraordinary has taken place.
After Pentecost, the terms of relating between the followers of Jesus changed drastically. ‘All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need’ (Acts 2:44–45). The new community of the Body of Christ behaved differently after it was inspired. In the twenty-first century, it is not always obvious that the terms of relating within Christian communities differ from the terms of the broader culture in which the community is housed. Yet, Christian theology still hopes for and affirms the life-changing power of inspiration.
3.2.3 Eschatology
For Christians in some sacramental traditions, the Body of Christ is sustained by the Eucharist, in which Christians eat bread that is Christ’s body and drink wine that is his blood. This sacred meal is scripted and rehearsed. While it is a brief event, it hearkens back to the Last Supper and forward to the heavenly banquet. Many Eucharistic liturgies capture the temporal reverberations of the event with a brief recitation: ‘Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again’. Each sacrament is such an event – scripted and rehearsed, drawing on the past, refiguring the social contract in the present, and hoping for the future God intends.
It was noted above that Christian liturgy involves formation in Christian affections. The distinctive affections of Christianity go against the norms and expectations of many cultural settings, even those in which Christianity is the dominant religious tradition. Gratitude, lament, resurrection hope – these are not always easy ways to know and be in the world. Their viability rests not only on the history of the Jewish people in relationship with God and the narratives of Jesus and his early followers in scripture, but also on the biblical promises of the future God intends. For this reason, theologian Letty Russell claims it is important to start from the end. The future God intends should shape Christian life now. The primary way that Christians know what that future looks like is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Russell states, ‘Jesus is a memory of the future’ (Russell 1979: 157). Christians remember Jesus to know what God’s future looks like and act accordingly now. On occasion, Christians are present for what Russell calls ‘proleptic mistakes’ (Russell 1974: 46), moments when the future is fleetingly present. In this way, the events of the sacraments anticipate the eschaton, the future God intends. In the midst of congregational song, or the passing of the peace, or the Eucharist, Christians occasionally experience a proleptic mistake, a moment of inspiration that approximates the beatific vision.
3.3 Christian practices as performance art
It is possible to consider Christian practices as a form of performance art. First, the sacraments. They are profoundly embodied; they imply that embodied practices are of utmost importance. They take place when people are together in the same space. They are fleeting events that take place in the present, rely on the past, and shape the future. They remake the social contract of those who participate. It is not difficult to think of these as performance events. Second, a Christian worship service. It, too, is embodied, involving shared space, event time, and the possibility of altering the social contract of its participants.
Christian sacraments and services are not only performance arts. The sacraments make God’s grace present in unique ways; services are events of worship.
In many forms of entertainment, the audience ‘is relatively passive, yielding itself to the power of the performer’ (Sokolove 2019: 12). They show up to be entertained. Yet in Christian services, no one should be purely an observer. While entertainment can have an audience, services have a congregation. The gathered community is involved in the work of the people (litourgia). Indeed, part of the work of the people is to gather the community. Musician and scholar Mark Miller describes true worship as
rituals that gather us together in a time and a place, to take us out of ourselves, to put us in contact with a Higher Power, and put us in touch with the gathered body, the cloud of witnesses, all of those people gathered past and present, in this world to try to pull together community and care for one another. (Sokolove 2019: 30–31)
Unlike an audience, a congregation ‘comes to participate and to be transformed through the ritual that is Christian worship’ (Sokolove 2019: 12). Theologian Don Saliers asks of both liturgy and entertainment, ‘what does it arouse? What does it sustain? What does it lead to?’. Liturgy leads to ‘taking delight in the things of God’ (Sokolove 2019: 22). While it is appropriate for an entertainer in a non-liturgical setting to place themselves in the spotlight as the centre of attention, in a church service the gathered community gives its attention to God.
Christian sacraments and services would have to been seen as a very particular type of performance art: one that is oriented towards God, normed by the community’s interpretation of scripture, intended to be in continuity with Jesus, and inspired by the Spirit of the resurrected Christ.
Shannon Craigo-Snell describes ‘church as a disciplined performance of relationship with Jesus Christ, mediated by Scripture, in hope of the Holy Spirit’ (Craigo-Snell 2014: 145). From this viewpoint, church is a performance art that rehearses Christians for a life of faith outside the events of sacraments and services. While some Christians might find it off-putting to subsume Christian sacraments and services under the larger umbrella of performance arts, it might prove illuminating.
4 Future considerations
The sudden shift to online worship services when the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020 caused enormous consternation and theological questioning. Virtual church services involved real losses. Congregational singing, which has been a part of Christian worship from its earliest days, could only be approximated, as the most common digital platforms allowed only one voice to be heard live at the same time. The holy kiss or passing of the peace, another ancient part of Christian liturgy, was reduced to typed messages or digital waves.
Yet there were also incredible gains in virtual services. People who were sick or had mobility issues that might prevent them from attending church in person could attend online. Accessibility for disabled members of the congregation skyrocketed. Others who found getting to church difficult for reasons of limited time and resources could easily attend. Many Christians found they preferred to have church services in their pyjamas on the couch, and were therefore more likely to attend.
As Pastor Jason Byassee notes, the body of Christ has always been virtual (Byassee 2011). Through baptism, Christians become part of the ‘body of Christ’, understood as a corporate body of Christians in all times and places. While Jesus of Nazareth was a scandalously particular embodied human, post-resurrection, all Christians are joined together by the Holy Spirit into the body of Christ in a way that is not constrained by space and time. For two millennia, Christians have understood that the body of Christ includes and unites bodies who do not share the same physical space or time. Christian communities have always used available technologies to support the body of Christ, including letters, books, radio, and television. Digital and virtual realities are simply the latest technologies Christians will employ.
Yet it is worth noting that, in moving entirely online, Christian services stopped employing performance art as defined above; they stopped being events of performance art. Christians were still embodied participants in services, but their bodies were no longer in shared physical space, and often no longer in the same event time, observing a particular social contract. There was still music and dance and dramatic performance, but for most Christians it was recorded or observed through the mediation of a screen.
Very similar patterns emerged in the responses of performance arts organizations. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, live performances had all but ceased. Those that continued mostly continued on-line as broadcasts of those performances. ZOOM choirs performed choral pieces, broadcasts of virtual plays, standup comedy, and dance, and virtually any form of performance art found a way to survive by adapting to an electronic medium.
Many churches sought to return to in-person worship as soon as possible, ceasing digital services. Others adopted a both/and strategy, either having worship in-person and online at the same time or alternating between the two. Other churches have communities that meet entirely online or on virtual reality platforms. In contrast, nearly every performing arts organization saw returning to in-person performances as vital. These organizations continue to employ digital media, yet the realities of bodies sharing space and time, navigating how to be together in familiar or new social contracts, are understood to be core to the identity of the performing arts and therefore non-optional.
Christian theology is traditionally rooted in Christian practices, particularly those of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist as well as the practices of Christian liturgies. This relationship between practice and theology is reflected in the maxim ‘lex orandi, lex credenda’ (the law of what is prayed is the law of what is believed). This idea derives from Prosper of Aquitaine, a fifth-century disciple of Augustine, who identifies the roots of Christian doctrines in liturgical practices, primarily prayer. It remains to be seen how digitally-mediated liturgical practices will alter Christian theology – and its relationship with the performing arts – in the long term.
