In 1997 musician Nick Cave released Into My Arms. The song, which Cave considered one of his finest, begins with theology: “I don’t believe in an interventionist God.”

Is this a disbelief in God? Or is this disbelief in a particular understanding of how God interacts with this world? The rest of Into My Arms gives little away. In verse one, if an interventionist God existed, Nick would pray to this God. In verse two, the prayer is that the person Cave loves might “walk like Christ in grace and love.” In verse three, this love will last “always and evermore.” Love and theology in light of eternity haunt Nick Cave’s lyrics.

In 2021, Cave released Carnage, a collaboration with fellow Australian musician Warren Ellis. Released amid the carnage that is Covid-19, Rolling Stone called the album “hopeful.” The recently released movie, This Much I know to be True, documents the first-ever performance of songs from the Carnage album.

Filmed amid masks and lockdown restrictions in 2021, there are interviews with Ellis and Cave, rehearsals and live studio performances. Director Andrew Dominik described the film as caretaking. Cave and Ellis had “such a clear idea in their minds .. we created a vision for something that we were not driving”(Leonard, Design Week).

Hand of God, the first song of the Carnage album, continues to wrestle with an interventionist God. The repeated line, “I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high”, signals a plunge into life’s realities. In the middle of life, God remains, “hand of God coming from the sky.” God neither disappears nor intervenes. Yet God remains simply present.

Such theology is what philosopher Charles Taylor would call an immanent theology. In his monumental The Secular Age, Taylor explores the place of faith in our world today. He ponders why it seems harder today to disbelieve than to believe and he also asks why theologies in light of eternity refuse to die.

Taylor calls this the “nova effect,” the explosion of ways that contemporary society seeks significance. Taylor outlines an “immanent theology,” in which God neither disappears nor intervenes. Yet humans continue to find words to describe the hand of God in ways that give meaning to life in this world.

Following the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, in 2015, Nick started The Red Hand Files, a website through which people ask questions. Cave commits to read each question carefully, attentive to what each person is trying to say.

Nick calls this a spiritual practice. “This practice of reading the questions is, in its way, a form of prayer, because prayer is primarily about listening. It allows the necessary space to experience the subtle intimations of the divine.” Such is Cave’s theology in light of eternity. What Cave knows to be true is the need to seek God’s grace and love, not as escapist intervention, but in “the middle where the water is real high.”

References

Nick Cave www.theredhandfiles.com/happy-anniversary-three-years/

Nils Leonard, “How Uncommon produced Nick Cave’s This Much I Know to Be True” Design Week, May 13, 2022, www.designweek.co.uk/issues/9-15-may-2022/uncommon-nick-cave/

Rev Dr Steve Taylor is the author of "First Expressions" (2019) and writes widely in theology and popular culture, including regularly at www.emergentkiwi.org.nz.