![]() Now, before we Christians start patting ourselves on the back for being on the right side of these issues, since we believe in God and submit to his lordship, we need to ask ourselves whether we too have bought into many of the beliefs and assumptions of our contemporary culture. To borrow the words of a famous political speech from a few years back, “We are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.” All this I think illustrates the basic outlook of our contemporary secular culture. ![]() But Andrew Lloyd Webber has found a way to keep us interested, since in his version of this classic tale, we are at the center. History is always difficult to wade through, because there are so many foreign names, places, and concepts to wrestle with. At the end of the day, the story is not actually about Joseph at all, but what we can accomplish if we think it, want it, or dream it. Rather, it’s actually just another glossy panel for us to look through, so that we can gaze on our own reflections. You’ll notice that in this version of the Joseph story we’re not confronted at all with a historical or theological drama that points to God’s providential care and oversight of his people. As the musical begins, the narrator sings: “Because these panels are glossy and reflective,” my character suggested-complete with a pretentious English accent, mind you- “you, the viewer, can see your own reflection within the gray, and thus ‘you’ become the art!” But to our surprise, what I said in jest actually ended up being the gist of the explanation written on the wall next to these panels.Īndrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat provides a similar example. It was at this point that I began to impersonate a pretentious art critic who was trying to explain the significance of these amazing works of art. Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the Saint Louis Art Museum with two of my college-aged kids, and at one point on our tour we found ourselves in the modern art section, staring at extremely large, glossy gray panels. In such a world, there can be no ultimate standard for truth, goodness, or beauty, but only subjective preferences, which is why many have come to believe in our day that there is no such thing as objective morality, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that truth is relative. Of course, these things are proportionally related, for as people increasingly adopt the dogma that above us is only sky, they begin to see themselves (either individually or collectively) as the ultimate source of authority. According to recent stats, religious affiliation is on the wane and autonomy is on the rise.
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