Witnessing through the Public Museum
Last year, while visiting some missionaries in Japan, I was struck by the homogeneity of Japanese culture.1 We spent a day at Tokyo Disneyland, and I don’t think I saw more than 25 non-Japanese all day long among the thousands of park visitors. This made for some serious cultural insularity, and I couldn’t help wonder how in the world one would gain a foothold in presenting the gospel there. But then I visited the National Museum of Western Art, a short walk down from the Tokyo National Museum, with its samurai swords, lacquerware, Buddhist statues, and delicate painting superimposed with calligraphy.
Any fair representation of Western art is full of references to the Bible, including, in this instance, Cranach the Elder’s Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26), Brueghel the Elder’s Wooded Landscape with Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22), and separate sculptures of Adam and Eve by Rodin. I could easily imagine bringing a Japanese non-believer to this museum for an orientation to the work of artists from the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern periods, and then explaining the connections to Christian Scripture. It could open doors for witness.
And this is not unique to Japan. In our increasingly post-Christian American culture, biblical literacy is at a low point. And I couldn’t help thinking of similar teaching opportunities in our land. This past week, on an extended road trip, I stopped by a range of museums I’d not yet visited, and in each I found items pointing to God and His Word. Some were taken from Scripture, others from Church history, where doctrinal explanations could naturally arise. Here’s a sampling:
The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts: Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Jesus with Nicodemus (John 3) and Benjamin West’s Death on the Pale Horse (Revelation 6)
Yale University Art Gallery: Several versions of The Peaceable Kingdom (Isaiah 11) by Thomas Hicks.
Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum: John Singleton Copley’s Samuel Relating to Eli the Judgments of God upon Eli’s House (1 Samuel 3) and Benjamin West’s Saul and the Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28)
Utica’s Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute: Puritan Maiden by George H. Boughton and Thomas Cole’s four paintings in The Voyage of Life series, with several depictions of guardian angels (Psalm 91; Matthew 18).
Cornell University’s Johnson Museum of Art: John Constable’s Netley Abbey and Gari Melcher’s The Communion (Luke 22, 1 Corinthians 11).
And the discoveries didn’t end with art. I also managed to visit the three sports halls of fame, where Christian connections were plentiful. At the basketball “museum” in Springfield, Massachusetts, I saw James Naismith’s New Testament; at Cooperstown, New York, I saw the bust of devout Christian pitcher, Christy Mathewson, who was in the hall of fame’s first group of inductees, which included Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb; at Canton, Ohio, I watched the induction video of Seattle Seahawk Steve Largent, who spoke freely of Christ and the grace of God.
So if you think museums are musty or arcane or elitist, you might give them a fresh look, along with a non-believing friend. You might well find the conversation turning to the gospel.