What We Believe
What We Believe
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We believe:
God’s world is good & He is King over it
So we respond to even the most ordinary glories with thanksgiving and delight.
He has filled it with the echoes of heaven
So we want to delve fearlessly into the truths and wonders of His creativity.
He will come to
live with us
So what we join with Him to build matters for eternity.
Beauty
Beauty
We believe God’s world is good and filled with grace, and He is King over it.
We respond with hope, delight, and thanksgiving.
“Festivity is our ‘amen’ to God’s ‘it is good.’”
In The Lord of the Rings, one of the first things the hobbits notice about Rivendell, besides its visual beauty, is the merry laughter and singing of the elves. It’s a place filled with purposeful delight; with festivity.
We emphasize feasting (not just food and drink, but enjoyment, celebration, and with God and His sacrifice as a centerpiece) because, as Malcolm Guite has pointed out, grace and gratitude have the same root word.
The proper response to a gift worth enjoying is enjoyment, and the beautiful things of this world, things that point us to heaven, are worth enjoying!
Truth
Truth
God’s world is filled with the echoes of heaven.
We respond with wonder, and a fearless quest to go further up and further in.
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!”
Rivendell is a place filled with ancient wisdom. Not just a library of facts, but a place where people go to find revealed secrets, and the incarnated marvel of a people shaped by them.
The more you learn about something wonderful, the greater your capacity for wonder.
In medieval Christian virtue ethics, the virtue of “studiositas” is the virtue of loving the known (i.e. Christ and His nature) and wanting to know it better. We strive to create a place that is safe to ask hard questions, learn challenging truths, and rediscover things that should not have been forgotten. Because just as so many of you suspect, Christianity is bigger on the inside!
Goodness
Goodness
We believe God has come to earth, and will come again, to make us one with Him.
We respond by participating in His life, story, and work…from a posture of Sabbath rest.
“We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.”
The people of Rivendell were shaped by the old stories and songs and images–and out of that identity, in a place of rest, they reflexively added new creations. Indeed, in The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo and Aragorn (who are not even elves!) are found putting the finishing touches on a new song about ancient things.
Goodness and morality aren’t a matter of avoiding bad behavior; they are a matter of conforming our lives to the good—in other words, they are generative in nature rather than restrictive; ultimately about addition more than subtraction. And that addition comes through the transformational work of Christ (so the pressure’s not on us to be superheroes!).
So we seek to surround each other with the kinds of art—stories, songs, images, etc.—that form and strengthen a shared Christian identity and history, so that we can step outside our own egos and into that larger world and story.
What do you mean by Christian imagination?
What do you mean by Christian imagination?
“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes.”
A Christian imagination is a sacramental way of seeing and living in the world. In other words, it sees earth as participating in the life of heaven; and time as participating in the story of eternity. God didn’t put us in a material world to keep us from Him; He did so to draw us to Him.
Seeing the world this way changes our view of everything—because suddenly we’re not here to wait around, but to be united to Christ in His work of making all things new. Nothing is ordinary!
A Christian imagination:
Responds to beauty with hope, delight, and thanksgiving;
Responds to truth with wonder, and a courageous quest to go further up and in; and
Responds to goodness by participating in the life of Christ.
Want to dive deeper into this? Read (or listen to) executive director Brian Brown’s talk, “How to live like a Narnian.”
Statement of Faith
Statement of Faith
As the Anselm Society, we firmly believe that goodness, truth, and beauty (the “transcendentals”) are facets of one thing, and that we have the responsibility to pursue God's vision for all of them together.
To that end, we unequivocally adhere to the historic Christian faith handed down through Scripture and tradition, including but not limited to the unifying creeds used by all orthodox denominations throughout the history of the church (the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed of 381 A.D.). We acknowledge our responsibilities in God’s narrative for this world—Creation, Fall, Redemption, and now, Restoration—including to uphold mankind’s identity as the imago Dei and model the goodness, truth, and beauty of God’s design to a watching world.
Statement of Ecumenical Policy
As we are not a church, but an ecumenical organization whose members are Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, we do not generally take institutional positions on issues on which the historic denominations have disagreed in good faith. Where these differences have affected their approach to the imagination or the arts, we may of course draw attention to them for educational and relational purposes. We encourage a culture of lively and formative discussion and we understand that leaders and members will in good faith express their personal views.
But because we believe in the transcendentals, we believe that we cannot fully serve God in the area of beauty while denying His truth. Where the church has consistently held a position on an issue, we will not take a contrary position, nor to the best of our abilities will we implicitly endorse such a position by institutionally elevating those who do as officers, lecturers, etc., but will uphold historic orthodoxy and Christian tradition.
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Board and officers of the organization are required to affirm the Statement of Faith, and commit to upholding the organization in its Statement of Ecumenical Policy.
“Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”