I love the Protestant church in America, but I’d never accuse it of having overwhelmingly good architectural style. Our European friends have us beat hands-down in that category, as can be seen in this photo of a breathtaking church in Iceland. More info and photos are available on the church’s Wikipedia page, and presumably on its Icelandic language website.
I’ll confess that viewing the magnificent churches and cathedrals of Europe sometimes make me wonder uncomfortably about the wealth that went into their creation. But there’s something to be said about gathering to worship in a place of such stunning architectural beauty—and I find myself wishing that a stronger aesthetic streak ran in American Protestant circles.
(Photo by Andreas Tille.)
update: I’ve noted this link before, but it seems relevant here: a Slate slideshow of American megachurch architecture. I won’t deny those are impressive structures, but why do they all have to look so much like airport terminals?
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February 15, 2007 at 17:03
I love great architecture. How could you not love great, imaginative architecture? I subscribe to 3 architectural journals and pore over them every month. Jesus is an architect without peer. John tried to describe the city he saw in Revelation but fell short of words human superlatives. The city coming down out of heaven will blow us all away!
However, that said, I get a little conflicted about building grand, exotic churches during this New testament period. As everyone will no doubt note, God does not dwell in buildings made by man, He dwells in the church, His people.
His stunningly beautiful church convenes on street corners, inner city store fronts, Chinese apartments, converted grocery stores and malls, tents, upper rooms, house-to-house, and school gyms. That’s not to say that works of art like this should not be built, it’s just that they should not be mistaken for the church. There is a reason that God abandoned the physical tabernacle at the dawn of the New Covenant.
My daughter spent the summer in France and went to a number of cathedrals on Sunday hoping to worship with others. What she found for the most part was huge, impressive works of art attended by a sprinkling of retired folks and tourists huddled beneath its arches while a religous ritual droned on. The grand architectural church building statement has no relevance to contemporary Europeans.
I paraphrase Charlton Heston at the end of the movie Soylent Green when he yelled for all to hear, “Soylent Green is People!”, The Church is people!.
February 15, 2007 at 17:51
When it comes to amazing church architecture, I’m actually reminded of the stone churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia (search for “Lalibela” on Wikipedia), which are most amazing when you realize the entire buildings were hand-hewn out of a single mass of solid rock some eight or nine centuries ago!
February 15, 2007 at 21:03
I find it hard to make the point more eloquently than Rick D. has already done.
I experience much more than mere inner conflict when I see these lavish giants. It is more like outright revulsion.
How dare we claim to have any moral authority in our society when we so gleefully waste our monetary and human resources on such unabashed and unneeded extravagance at the expense of the poor. It is no wonder the rest of the world views us as hypocrites.
February 16, 2007 at 09:54
Sean, I understand your feelings—I feel nervous about it myself, as I noted in the post above. But consider that the construction of these great churches and cathedrals is done in large part as an act of worship to God. These structures represent the channeling of a community’s artistic skill, money, and physical labor to create a building that, in its way, reflects a bit of the majesty of God. There is also the social function of the church to consider.
In the Old Testament, Solomon built—at God’s direction—a vast and expensive temple for God. Presumably there were plenty of poor people and worthy causes to which that money and effort could have been put instead. I know the comparison isn’t perfect because we’re under the New Covenant now, not the Old—but doesn’t that seem to indicate that church/temple construction is a way to honor God too?
February 16, 2007 at 12:35
This morning I was mulling over these issues and it occurred to me that what is bothersome about extravagant church architecture (and boy do I wish we could drop the term church) is the metaphor it represents. In these cavernous, awe-inspiring structures people seem tiny and insignificant. God seems formal, distant, austere and wholly other. To the medieval person the scale of the building and its special effects would seem magic, not of this world. Perhaps that is also why these people felt the need of multiple intermediaries between them and God. A tiny individual could ask a priest to represent them to Jesus or could ask Mary to ask her Son to grant a petition. One could always turn to a dead saint to ask Jesus to grant a petition.
Even the idea that all the tradesmen and community are building these contemporary temples as an act of worship seems unrealistic. I worked for the tradesmen who built Philip Johnson’s (the great american architect) Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles and I assure you, God was the last thing on their minds. It was strictly business.
A better metaphor for our relationship with God might be the upper room in Acts or the private dining room for the Last Supper. God is not faraway anymore, He dwells with us and is in us, integrated into our homes and jobs, not compartmentalized into a divine structure we drive to once a week. He is approachable, we no longer need earthly priests. Temples also seem part of a Theocracy, an earthly kingdom. Thus the impulse to build the Kingdom of God here, in Rome or Jerusalem or Constantinople.
I suppose we could also honor God by building a giant, multi-million dollar work-of-art automobile that we could even tuck a hundred people into the corner of (so it has a community function). But let’s just call it art. It’s not church and it’s really not all that functional.
February 16, 2007 at 15:14
Rick and Sean—
The problem with your comparison of European churches to modern megachurches is flawed because the cathedrals Andy is referring to really were community-built. They didn’t import contractors from Vienna to build Notre Dame in Paris; it wasn’t their business model. Our cultural business model means that you can bring in secular people to build religious structures, and in such a case, is it not the church spending their money so that the building might reflect and glorify God?
My
churchcommunitygroup-of-believers-attending-a-building-on-Sundays dedicated a new sanctuary in 1997. The old building was amazing in terms of church architecture. It was a classic nave architecture with a vaulted ceiling supported by beam construction (the building was wood—earthquake country up here)with a raised altar and a stained-glass cross dominating the back wall. In the balcony, a pipe organ affected the stalagmites of a cave as it rose over the congregation. On the exterior, the cross was visible to people driving by on the street, and directly to the right of it was a free-standing bell tower. Eventually, we outgrew that building and erected a more utilitarian place of worship.We still have pews, but they’re cushioned. The old style of a raised altar and preaching area has been sacrificed for the modern stadium-style bowl, with four sections of clear sightlines on the altar arranged radially and sloping towards the center. However, I consider the elements of the altar area to be works of art in their own right. One of our congegrants (now deceased, sadly) hand-carved the baptismal font, altar and ambo with biblical symbolic imagery, like the seeds being sewn and if you have a keen eye you can spot the chi-ro on the altar. The baptismal font sits at the foot of a cross framed by stained-glass laced with biblical imagery, the center of which is meant to evoke a waterfall, where it becomes physical in the font, at the foot of the cross, where we meet and come to God.
Are you telling me we built these features off-hand as some business move, or are we not concerned with the beauty and how the church speaks of God?
February 16, 2007 at 17:19
I believe in incorporating art and craft into our church spaces. I was reacting to scale, grandiosity and expense, which is common to Hallgrimskirkja, the Crystal Cathedral or the Chartres cathedral. I would not want my tithe to go the 38 year construction project of Hallgrimskirkja. Would you? It is literally the tallest building in Iceland conceived by a state archictect and built by the state.
I believe we are stuck in an old paradigm of what “Church” is. Most Chinese Churches are apartments and multi purpose rooms, the first century church met house to house. It was only as the church became a political power in the 4th and 5th centuries that a “church” became a single purpose building that rivaled state buildings (probably because it was a state building).
Notre Dame’s foundation stone was laid by an Italian Pope and it was built over 200 years by the best engineers, architects and tradesman of Europe. It was called the “Parish church of the Kings of Europe” because so many European coronations were held there including Henry VII of England, Mary, Queen of Scotts, Napoleon Bonaparte and many French kings. This was not a loving, village project by artsy local christians. During that time the Huguenots, Anabaptists and others were meeting in homes, being ruthlessly hunted, persecuted, burnt at the stake and offending Bibles destroyed.
To some today, its not a church unless it has a pulpit, pews, nave, baptismal font, choir loft, organ, stained glass windows and steeple. Each to his own I suppose.
February 16, 2007 at 23:19
Lets remember that the most beautiful temples were that of Salomon and the rebuilding of the second temple. Both ended up being destroyed because of the spiritual adultery of God’s nation. As noted before, God does not dwell in temples made with hands. I guess the better question would be, “how is our temple holding up”? Spiritual transformation is the greatest testimony of Godly architecture.