{"id":1477,"date":"2010-10-16T12:13:36","date_gmt":"2010-10-16T19:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1477"},"modified":"2010-10-16T12:13:36","modified_gmt":"2010-10-16T19:13:36","slug":"the-day-metallica-came-to-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2010\/10\/16\/the-day-metallica-came-to-church\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day Metallica Came to Church"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first part of an interview with John Van Sloten, author of\u00a0The Day Metallica Came to Church<\/a>\"\"<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 In this book, Pastor Van Sloten talks about finding God in culture \u2014 from the \u201chigh\u201d culture of Van Gogh\u2019s paintings to the pop culture of the heavy metal band\u00a0Metallica<\/a>.\u00a0 This is no manual of seeker techniques.\u00a0 Rather, it\u2019s a delightful and enlightening riff on culture and common grace.\u00a0 If you preach or teach or just are interested in the relation between faith and culture, this book is a great resource.<\/p>\n

Dave<\/strong>:\u00a0 You mention in the book\u2019s Preface that you\u2019ve preached sermons on movies such asCrash<\/em>, the paintings of Van Gogh, video games, sports, and other cultural pursuits.\u00a0 It might be tempting to think, \u201cGreat \u2014 more \u2018relevant\u2019 sermons with a hip video clip before the same old three expository points\u2026\u201d<\/em> But you\u2019re up to more than that.\u00a0 Tell us a bit about how you got into this more extensive mode of cultural exegesis.<\/p>\n

John<\/strong>:\u00a0 Yeah, we\u2019re up to way more than\u00a0mere relevance<\/em> here.\u00a0 And looking back, I\u2019d say it happened to us.\u00a0 Eight years ago I was researching a sermon series on The Lord of the Rings with a group of local pastors.\u00a0 At one of our meetings someone said, \u201cTolkien\u2019s story is just so epic, it would be a shame to break it down in order to \u2018hang\u2019 it onto the biblical narrative.\u00a0 What if we did it the other way around and kept Tolkien\u2019s tale intact, let it lead and hung the Bible story onto it instead?\u201d\u00a0 And that\u2019s what we did.\u00a0 We let God\u2019s truth in a fictional myth lead us to God\u2019s truth in the Bible.\u00a0\u00a0 A mere halfling pointed us to God\u2019s humble, servant-like, upside-down plan for salvation.<\/p>\n

Dave<\/strong>:\u00a0 In the book you offer some of your own experiences of what C.S. Lewis called the \u201cnuminous\u201d \u2014 such as entering the \u201choly place\u201d that houses Van Gogh\u2019s painting\u00a0The Church in Auvers<\/em>.\u00a0 Later in the book you mention some similar experiences friends of yours had with architecture.\u00a0 If I had to pick one such experience from my own life, it would be hiking in the Irish hills of Connemara, with no one else in sight, and no sounds but the wind and the sheep.\u00a0 Since we\u2019ve had a chance to talk a bit in person, I know that you weren\u2019t always so sensitive to God\u2019s voice in the everyday.\u00a0 Tell us a bit about how you realized that you were missing it and how things began to change.<\/p>\n

John<\/strong>:\u00a0 I underwent a two part conversion.\u00a0 First, a totally unplanned, spontaneous confession to a pastor\/friend of mine.\u00a0 I had no plans to make it.\u00a0 It just spewed out of me, like it had to come out (a very Reformed conversion experience from my perspective, no free will on my part at all!).\u00a0 Second, my third child Edward was born with Down syndrome.\u00a0 Again a total surprise. My confession experience introduced me to Christ \u2013 the mediator of salvation.\u00a0 Grace discovered me. Edward\u2019s birth introduced me to Christ \u2013 the mediator of creation (John 1:1).\u00a0 Here I met the God who reveals himself through all things; including the circumstances of my life story. Chapter two of the book tells that story, but in short, a few months after Edward\u2019s birth, I had an experience so illumining, so eye-opening in terms of seeing God\u2019s providential hand on the created order, so demonstrative of his sovereignty over all things, that I really had no choice but to spend the rest of my life unpacking what I\u2019d learned. To be honest it took me years to process it all.\u00a0 But now, in retrospect, I can see God\u2019s providential intent in calling me the way he did.\u00a0 He planted the idea of this book (and now my life) into that very painful calling moment.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t fully realize this until just a few years ago.\u00a0 About the same time our church stopped using creational texts for their\u00a0relevance<\/em>and started to read them as\u00a0revelation<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Dave<\/strong>:\u00a0 In your\u00a0Calgary Herald<\/em> article that you reproduce in the book, you note that \u201cMost of the air we breathe is fresh.\u00a0 Most of the streets we walk on are safe.\u00a0 Most of our lives are filled with un-cited goodness and grace.\u201d <\/em>You don\u2019t minimize the reality of suffering, but you\u2019re trying to highlight the common grace that surrounds us.\u00a0 Why do you think we as human beings, and as Christians, so often seem to be more attracted to despair than to hope?\u00a0 Is there an \u201calready-not-yet\u201d tension here?\u00a0 We might need to acknowledge, after all, that the \u201cwe\u201d who might read this blog or your book are mostly relatively wealthy people in the relatively stable global North.<\/p>\n

John<\/strong>:\u00a0 I wrote that Calgary Herald editorial because I was sick of the unyielding, 24\/7 drone of bad news that was inundating our lives in the \u2018relatively stable global north.\u2019\u00a0 I think our media saturated world thrives on fomenting despair. If it bleeds it leads. So part of me just wanted to set the record straight. Most of life is good most of the time.\u00a0 Grace is more common that we think.\u00a0 Another reason I wrote that article is that it helped me process the \u2018rose colored glasses\u2019 concern I was feeling.\u00a0 Early on in this journey of naming God\u2019s goodness, truth and beauty in creation and through cultural texts, I worried that we were just \u2018cherry picking\u2019 the good bits while not paying attention to the very real problem of brokenness and sin. The last thing I wanted to do was go all \u2018power of positive thinking\u2019 on our church.\u00a0 Yet I keep seeing more and more of what was right in life.\u00a0 So this is why I started to measure and count things the way I did in that editorial; 200,000 killed in a tsunami, 3 billion safe on the rest of the world\u2019s shorelines; 32\u00a0killed at Virginia Tech, 19 million post-secondary students safely went to school; 14 plane fatalities in 2006, 99.99999375 percent of air passengers arrived safely to their destinations, etc\u2026\u00a0 I don\u2019t do this math to diminish suffering. It\u2019s real and we ought to suffer with others.\u00a0 But evil is not supreme in our world.\u00a0 This fact makes a lot more room for seeing and experiencing God in all things.\u00a0 As for those in less developed countries, of course, some suffer more than we ever will. But I keep thinking of those global national happiness surveys that come out every couple of years.\u00a0 Aren\u2019t we always surprised when an African nation leads the pack?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first part of an interview with John Van Sloten, author of\u00a0The Day Metallica Came to Church.\u00a0 In this book, Pastor Van Sloten talks about finding God in culture \u2014 from the \u201chigh\u201d culture of Van Gogh\u2019s paintings to the pop culture of the heavy metal band\u00a0Metallica.\u00a0 This is no manual of seeker techniques.\u00a0 Rather, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-nP","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}