Art Theology, Seeing what we Overlooked and Making New Knowledge

Within the western academy today there is a lot of conversation about decolonizing the academy and decolonizing knowledge.  While well meaning, the language itself still centers the  colonizers.  Indigenous ways of knowing have been making art to know and understand the world, ideas, one another, etc for thousands of years before the western academy even formed.  As a white woman I want to center indigenous knowledge without falling into appropriation or asking indigenous peoples to do the work for me.  In studying the published works of the Maori, the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, I have learned from the dynamic way of knowing called matauranga Maori.  Matauranga Maori is constantly evolving, holding the past, present, and future simultaneously with love and care.  When the Pakeha colonizers came to Aotearoa the Maori took what was helpful in their discursive methods of knowing and incorporated it into, what Sir Hirini Moko Mead calls, the larger pool of knowing that is matauranga Maori.  

Learning from the Maori how to hold a broader pool of knowledge making, while simultaneously not wanting to fall into appropriation or cause any harm, I sought to create a method that would emphasize making art in theology.  

Art Theology is a way of making theology.  We are not making art to become “great artists,” the terms art and great art are also language of the colonizers and it is important to reflect upon and examine who have been the gate keepers of so called great art. 

Theologian David Brown’s article, Supplying Theology’s Missing Link, discusses how theology has discussed the importance of art, especially in its aesthetics branch, yet it has treated art as merely illustrative.  Brown makes the case for seeing art as a primary source of knowledge.  The problem with Brown’s article is that he is talking about seeing what has been judged as great art from the west.  While Brown is correct, that we do need to stop seeing art just passively as illustrative, but intentionally as sources of knowledge, we have to be careful to expand this seeing beyond what the academy has labeled great art.  

Have we even seen the visual thinking of theologians from the past?  Art historians Susanna Berger, Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Ayelet Evens-Ezra have uncovered the visual thinking of philosophers and theologians from the western academy before the 18th century that many theologians have overlooked, or not even known existed.  They have concluded that we have not fully understood these thinkers of the past because we did not translate or even print their visual thinking.  We only translated and printed their words.  Berger and Evens-Ezra demonstrate that to fully understand these past thinkers we need to see their visual thinking that was made with their discursive words because the visual thinking produced entirely different knowledge and conclusions than the words of discursive reasoning alone.  

In order to understand the impact of the conclusions these art historians have come to, we need to understand the emerging science of the Extended Mind Theory of Andy Clark at the University of Edinburgh.  Clark’s theory demonstrates that when we draw for example, the pencil and paper become a part of our thinking and this extension of thinking that results in making diagrams also results in different knowledge making, as well as different outcomes.  

If Berger, Evens-Ezra, and Clark are correct we missed so much! We have not only missed fully understanding thinkers of the past because we did not understand how they were thinking through making diagrams all along, we have also missed out on fully understanding ourselves by not including making in the discipline of theology.  

It is time to incorporate Arts Based Research in Theology.  In the UK artists can pursue a PhD in arts based research.  They engage in making art to think through their research ideas.  We do not have to be labeled artists to do this kind of research.  By creating color, line, sound, texture, movement, and taste lexicons we can create what Paolo Friere called, collaborative classrooms that begin by calling forth the wisdom, knowledge, and experience of everyone in the classroom.  Then we move together through thinking about theological questions with these lexicons.  At this point the presenter would like to engage the audience in a brief activity as well as discuss what occurred or will occur in the AAR workshop: Art Theology, Non-Violence, and Wisdom from the Margins.  What is truly astounding about this method is that it not only creates new knowledge it also creates a different kind of conversation; one that revolves around connection rather than argument. 

Arnheim, Rudolph.  Visual Thinking.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.  

Berger, Susanna.  The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.  

Brown, David.  “Supplying Theology’s Missing Link.” New Blackfriars vol. 101, issue 1092 (2020): 153-163.  

Even-Ezra, Ayelet. Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021.  

Hart, Trevor.  Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry. Texas: Baylor University Press, 2014.

Kaa, Hirini.  Te Haha Mihinare: The Maori Anglican Church.  New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 2020.  

Kramer, Sybille. “Is there a diagrammatic impulse in Plato?  Quasi-diagrammatic-scenes in Plato’s philosophy.” In Thinking with Diagrams: The Semiotic Basis of Human Cognition, edited by Sybille Kramer and Christina Ljunberg, 161-178.  Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 2016.  

Mead, Sir Hirini Moko Mead.  “Understanding Matauranga Maori.” In Conversations on Matauranga Maori, edited by Daryn Bean, 9-14. New Zealand: NZQA, 2011.