See, I thought I'd recommend this, which was announced on Facebook yesterday. I was chided for it, and I have to agree, for the most part, with the criticism. I would take the criticism a step further. While I will be honest enough to admit that I have not read the books in question, I will also say (in my own defense) that I have seen most of them (the one on U2 not so much, but it's more recent), and I have pushed them aside as I searched the stacks for something worth reading.
This does not mean the issue is uninteresting or unimportant. On the contrary! It is part of what lies behind this blog! Yet, on the merits, the works offered by the guest speaker sound neither interesting nor of any substantive, intellectual, or theological depth.
Finding a spiritual core in the songs of U2 doesn't take a Ph.D., I know; expounding on them, however, and the opportunities they offer might require a bit more than, "Oh, by! Bono just sang about Jesus!"
For me, I can find hints of the Gospel message in just about anything; after all, God loved the world, you know. This world. The one we live in. This world full of laughter and new babies and genocide and racism and starvation and old couples walking hand-in-hand down the street and young couples snogging in parks and illegal wars and innocent people murdered by governments and first loves and flowers - all of it and more. God loves it as it is. God doesn't love it as it should be. He just loves it. He loves it enough to let everyone know what that love is like. It is a love that is willing to die for all of it rather than let it collapse into nothingness.
God is in every song ever song, every poem ever read, every painting ever put on canvas. God is in the worst moments of our collective lives, and those rare moments when we discover what "eternity" means when we first look in to the eyes of our newborn child. God is there, period. This isn't anything particularly radical, and it shouldn't be surprising. Sitting around and discussing the notion that there are religious themes in the music of U2 is probably enough to make most anyone yawn; sitting around and contemplating the Gospel in Judas Priest, say, or the abstractions of a Pollock or even Mondrian - that might be far more interesting, and it might even be a game changer (although, not necessarily in the case of Pollock; I mean, this is a guy who painted feelings, for crying out loud, and if God isn't in those paintings, then Jesus died for nothing, as far as I'm concerned).
So, yeah, the choice Wesley made in this instance isn't really all that noteworthy, at least as far as speakers go. The theme, though, is not only interesting, it is important. I just wish there were those who could articulate a far deeper vision of the penetration of the Spirit in our collective popular and high culture. Maybe, "The Gospel According the Black Sabbath"?
