Offering a “Sacrifice of Praise”: Human Vocation, Culture-Making, and Cultivating a Sabbath Imagination

This dissertation consists of an examination of the human cultural vocation in relation to the created order at large, with particular reference to the writings of theologian Colin Gunton, and writer, poet, and cultural critic Wendell Berry.

Gunton presents a vision of the human vocation within the created world as offering a “sacrifice of praise,” a vision with a distinctive stress on the agency of the Holy Spirit, in which the concepts of perfection, particularity, relationality, and mediation play determinative roles. Humans are enabled to participate in the Holy Spirit’s perfecting of creation through cultural practices that support personal particularity and mediate interpersonal relations between God, humans, and non-human creatures. This vision seeks to both integrate and uphold the integrity of all dimensions of cultural life – the Good, True, and Beautiful or ethics, knowledge, and art – in contrast to what Gunton sees as the fragmented yet homogenizing ethos of postmodern culture.

However, despite his stated concern for particularity, Gunton offers little in the way of particular concrete exemplification of what a “sacrifice of praise” or its related “ethic of createdness” looks like in practice except for the celebration of the Eucharist. The vision of “sacrifice of praise” as presented by Gunton is not sufficiently generative of specific cultural, artistic, or ecological practices that will enable persons to participate in the Holy Spirit’s perfecting of creation.

It is argued that the integrative imagination of Wendell Berry, as embodied by his Sabbath poetry and poetic practice, can be employed to meet the deficiencies of Gunton’s vision, providing powerful, concrete exemplifications of Gunton’s major concerns and developing his concepts of perfection, particularity, relationality, and mediation further. Berry argues that locally adapted poetry is a practice that enables the formation of a sympathetic and placed imagination, such that humans can perceive ways to work in harmony with the material creation. Crucial to this practice and formative process is a rich vision and goal of Sabbath and, consequently, Sabbath-worthy work. His account of poetry and his own poetic output, together with analogous (agri)cultural practices, constitute a fully integrated vision of human culture – imagination, work, economy, and the arts – that advances the main trajectories offered by Gunton.

These two accounts of the human vocation resonate generatively because Gunton and Berry both operate from perspectives that keenly recognize the God-giftedness of creation. Berry’s perspective is from the “ground up” as it were, in part utilizing the practice of poetry to attend to particularities in light of a holy vision of Sabbath rest. Gunton’s perspective is more overtly and rigorously theological, governed above all by a theology of the triune economy and the outworking of the economy within the created order, particularly the perfection of creation by the Spirit. Berry’s Sabbath vision, as embodied in his poetic practice, brings two key resources to Gunton’s pneumatological vision of the human vocation as offering a “sacrifice of praise”: i) a concrete and particular example of human engagement with place and culture-making that exemplifies Gunton’s desire for fully integrated cultural engagement of the True, Good, and Beautiful, and ii) an expansion of Gunton’s vision of the human vocation vis-à-vis creation, that is, a “sacrifice of praise,” by including the cultural category of work and economy.