Category: Articles

This article explores interactive theatre as a model for reimagining Christian mission as interactive performances among an unbelieving audience. After an introductory section on the role of metaphors and models in theology and ethics, the article explains how interactive theatre mediates between traditional and experimental forms of theatre, thus providing a model for interactive church as a mediating position between traditional and experimental forms of church. Next, the article demonstrates the mission, means, method, mise en scène, and meaning of interactive ecclesial performances. Finally, the article concludes by observing that improvising hospitality is one primary way to enact the mission of inviting strangers to participate as guests in the theodrama.

Life is inherently dramatic, and because of this, this essay argues it is through the dramatizing of theology that theology is best equipped to illumine God’s desire for humanity’s participation in His reconciliatory performance in Christ through the Spirit. God does not want to be just “contemplated” and “perceived” by us; as from the beginning, He has provided for a play in which we must all share. The dramatizing of theology is a natural response to God’s Being-in-act. It is the natural movement of theology’s response to God’s action which calls for an active response on our part. As we re-enact the biblical story, we shall realize increasingly that we are participants performing in Christ’s drama of faith and life. The essay reflects on how dramatizing theology offers solutions to the conflicts of life by calling for the theological performance of faith, and attending to its import for theological-cultural engagement in theoretical as well as concrete terms.

Much ink has been spilt over William P. Young’s The Shack but little has been said about his use of kitsch. While it might be easy for cultured despisers to bash kitsch, object-relations theory derived from Melanie Klein suggests that the propensity of kitsch to split good from bad has its roots in (undeveloped) infancy. Further commentary on both kitsch in Kinkade’s work and the grotesque in the Chapman Brothers’ then reveals similar (undeveloped) common ground. Therefore, given the locus of object-relations theory within counseling, a more constructive response to kitsch is sought than its bashing. (It is taken as self-evident that bashing traces of infancy is not conducive to this locus.) But what is also required is an approach to the arts that integrates both good and bad, kitsch and grotesque. This, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find serves to illustrate. Whereas O’Connor attempts to “repeat” the incarnation, Young is in danger of supplanting the incarnation with a shack. Young’s (good) God of the transfigured shack is split off from the (bad) “un-real” wilderness outside, whereas O’Connor employs indirect communication to pressure the reader towards encountering God in that wilderness. In contrast, The Shack lends itself more readily to direct communication, which might explain why so much debate has concerned its message rather than its style. So perhaps The Shack should be filed under “Christian Living”, and subsequently read as part of a wider literary diet. How might this form part of a more constructive approach to kitsch?