Kenneth Heffner believes that the City of God will be a city filled with the arts.
“What we’re longing for as the people of God is the reunification of heaven and earth,” said Calvin College’s director of student activities during an Oct. 28 forum presentation at Bluffton University. “We’re looking forward to the new city that is coming to the earth that is not made by human hands.”
For him, this reunification will not come about through the church’s condemnation of the arts and popular culture. While churches may recognize that not all pop culture is bad, Heffner said, they often ban all forms of a medium to protect their members from engaging with art they deem as sinful. But this causes us to miss how God is also at work in that medium, he maintained.
Heffner believes that pop culture is organic to humanity and is not condemned by God, because culture is what happens when the image of God (humans) shapes and forms creation. “I want to suggest that any message that you’ve been given that tells you that you have to choose between whether or not you will love Christ and whether or not you will love the world is a false choice,” he said. “Culture, therefore, is not the enemy, but the enemy is in culture.”
Hip-hop has particularly been dismissed by the church in recent years due to its frequent use of harsh themes and language. “There is a lot of wickedness and a lot of lying and deceiving in hip-hop,” Heffner told the audience. But hip-hop is also sometimes trying to get us to see suffering and injustice, particularly among minorities, and “there is no music that has been untouched by sin,” including Mozart and church hymns, he noted. “There is also no kind of music that is not being fought for by Christ to make it good,” he added.
Heffner, who has organized both Christian and secular concerts at Calvin—including by popular bands such as Fun. and Death Cab for Cutie—believes that pop culture doesn’t need to be explicitly Christian to contain biblical themes or to glorify God.
You can even find God’s presence in music that contains profane and violent lyrics, he said, but you must look for it with the aid of the Holy Spirit. For Heffner, cultivating appreciation of music is the key to viewing pop culture through the lens of God. “You will then find things about which the artists themselves have no idea,” he suggested.
To cultivate appreciation of music, Heffner urged the audience to break a few habits he believes hinder understanding of the art. First, listening to music primarily through earbuds or headphones dulls the sound quality and isolates the listener from others, who could instead be included to enjoy the music as well. “Personal music listening is OK, but it is even better to listen in community,” he said.
He also believes that listening to music mainly as background noise causes us to lose the messages of the music, particularly God’s messages. In order to fully understand a song, we must notice it and pay attention to it, which he refers to as “playful work.”
“You should be listening to it and noticing it,” Heffner told the audience. “Music is worth the attention.” And much like our human relationships, the more we cultivate and take care of our relationship to pop culture, the closer we come to glorifying God through our natural and inevitable creation of culture, he said.
Heffner also directs Calvin’s biennial Festival of Faith and Music, an “extended conversation” on the Grand Rapids, Mich., campus of how grace, love, compassion and Christian faith are expressed in popular music.
