Dear Friends,
This is Part Two of an essay on art, Scripture, and imagination. Click here for Part One if you missed it.
Enjoy!
The Legitimacy of Art
Our Christian artist in our story (Mr. Audience-of-One) was actually questioning, and thereby displacing, the legitimacy of art itself. Special grace, our heavenly identity, completely swallows up or pushes out any and all “lesser” and completely natural things like creaturely creativity, entertainment, or enjoyment. And Christians have sometimes questioned the legitimacy of art in other—albeit similar—ways.
When I was 18, I met someone who told me that he thought fiction—things like Lewis’s Narnia or Tolkien’s Middle Earth—was immoral. I thought that very strange, but believe it or not there is a pedigree for this view in Christian history. Fiction, you see, involves lying: pretending a world exists other than the world God made. It dishonors God to imagine a world God hasn’t made. By extension, other kinds of art would be precluded, too: why paint a picture? Who are you, O Man, to think to improve upon God’s works, to presume to present your vain perceptions or imaginings as real?
It seems bizarre, but it actually raises a foundational question about the legitimacy of art. And here I wanted to write something insightful about art, but discovered to my dismay (I’m kidding) that Thaddeus Williams beat me to it in his wonderful book, REFLECT. The lengthy passage I’m about to quote is necessary, so please don’t skip it.
Many of us who have seen “Christian paintings,” watched “Christian movies,” and heard “Christian music” may be skeptical about Christian art. As Gregory Thornbury, quips, “Christianity is the greatest of all nouns, but the lamest of all adjectives.” But is there a way to envision “Christian art” as something more than misty fairytale cottages or contrived plotlines where typecast God-haters join in a tearful Jesus anthem before the credits roll? Allow me to sketch a theology of art
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The first time we meet God in the story of scripture we meet him as an Artist. ‘Created’ is the first verb in the first sentence on the first page of the Bible. Out of the flurry of God’s imagination, the heavens and the earth burst into existence and teem with diversity and beauty. God could have easily spoken a monochrome cosmos into existence. He could have made an all brown universe—brown planets, brown animals, brown-on-brown rainbows in a brown sky. Even oranges would be called “browns.” This Browntopia could have been perfectly efficient and functional from an engineering perspective. Why, then, make our multi-hued universe? Why the color spectrum? Why red strawberries, orange oranges, and yellow lemons? Why mandarinfish, peacocks, and chameleons? Because as Genesis 1 repeats seven times, “God saw that it was good.” God, evidently, cares about more than efficiency and functionality. He also cares about beauty.
James Speigel has made the case that when God said “it was good,” he is not making a moral, legal, political, or prudential claim. He was making an aesthetic claim. It is not like saying that the boy who ate all his vegetables “was good” for obeying mommy, or the Magna Carta “was good” for society, or the Hadron particle accelerator “was good” for quantum research. It is more like beholding a Titian canvas or a sunset over the Pacific and saying, “It was good.” And yet God made this aesthetic declaration even before he made Adam and Eve. It follows that beautiful things can be truly beautiful even if there is no human being around to behold and declare it to be so. Beauty, then, is not merely something we as humans may dream up (thankfully, we can); it is also something we can discover, something beyond and even before us.
This means that when the Hubble Space Satellite left our atmosphere and started relaying space pictures back to us, there is nothing arbitrary or artificial when we exhale together, “Beautiful!” When human beings over the last 30 years first beheld the sprawling fuchsia clouds of the Orion Nebula, the cobalt pupil and auburn iris of the Helix Nebula, or the somber towering gas pillars of the Eagle Nebula, with their speckles of pink fire and wispy sea-green auras—we did not fabricate beauty. We found it. They were beautiful long before Hubble left our atmosphere and would stay beautiful even if we all went blind tomorrow.
Why? In a biblical view of the universe, it is because God cares about beauty and declares things beautiful even when we cannot. Beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholders—us—but in the eye of the Beholder, with a capital B. From this perspective, we enter the world not merely to impose our ever-changing constructs of beauty on some aesthetic void. Beauty is already there, and will impose itself on us and even reconstruct our constructs into something more noble and towering and true, if we dare to let it.
The very first command from God to a human being in the Bible was to do something creative—“Name the animals.” Next come commands to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and steward creation, God’s call to make something of the world. Later we see Bezalel and his sons live out that calling as God’s Spirit gave them the aesthetic skill to make Temple décor. Israel’s God was not worshipped in a drab, hollow cube. Then we find invitations to worship the Creative God creatively: “Sing to him a new song, play skillfully on strings with loud shouts.” “Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody.” “Praise his name with dancing” (Pss. 33:3; 98:5; and 149:3).
God never limited himself to didactic prose when revealing himself to Israel. He tells multisensory truth, truth with fire cooking meat, blood painted on doorposts, talking asses, vomiting fish, hungry bears, wandering goats, crucified snakes, burning plants, thunder, smoke, rocks, bugs, milk, and honey. He tells truth in vivid images—skeletons coming to life, apocalyptic sea monsters, and menstrual rags. Then there is prophetic performance art. Isaiah wanders naked for three years. Hosea marries a well-known harlot.
When we turn to the New Testament we learn that the masterful Creator we met in Genesis 1 is actually Christ (Jn. 1:3; Col. 1:15-17; and Heb. 1:8-13). Glowing space nebulae, rainbows, the flavor of watermelon and coffee beans were his idea (in creative collaboration with the Father and the Spirit). The Son took on created flesh. He spent most of his career as a tekton, a craftsman who could make both small and large-scale projects with stone, wood, and metal. Then when his public ministry started Jesus taught mostly in parables, painting mental pictures that have lived in our imagination for over two millennia. His greatest commandment to love God with all of ourselves includes the imaginative and creative parts too, as it most certainly did for him.
Creativity and Christlikeness go hand in hand.
Scripture provides this foundational legitimacy: God has created us and restored us in his image and likeness, and that involves emulating him with our creativity, to cultivate and beautify his creation.
The Context of Art
But that tells us who were are (God’s image) and where we are (God’s world), but we need to go further and ask the question: when? What time is it? That is, when are we situated in God’s great redemptive story? When it comes to art, we need to be aware of both space and time. And the timeline of the Bible provides a crucial orientation for our artistic endeavors.
Creation: The world God made “very good.”
Fall: The world that humanity made “very bad.”
Redemption: The restoration of the world as it was intended to be. This is the implication of all the “re” words in the Bible: Restoration, Reconciliation, Regeneration, and so forth.
Consummation: The hope of the world to come, when sin is vanquished and all things are made new and brought to their perfected destiny.
Redemptive-history should provide a context and even a blueprint for our art and imagination. The context is cosmic and all-encompassing, from the creation of all things to the consummation of all things. Many Christian artists artificially limit their scope to only one of these facets. There is nothing wrong, of course, with having a passion for a particular subject matter. But there can be a distorting effect if one entirely neglects the bigger picture. There was a famous Christian painter who only painted Edenic scenes of absolute perfection—not a grain of dirt, hint of scars or ugliness, nothing out of place; indeed, he even left out people! There is no consciousness of a fall in his work, a sense of “having-been-saved,” and it leaves the vague impression of a kind of gnostic and sentimental otherworldliness.
Even a singular focus on redemption can have a distorting effect. I’ve already mentioned Mr. Audience-of-One, who’s only interlocutor in every song (the “you” to whom he sings) is God, because he is the only worthy subject matter. A couple of years ago I attended a concert with a lineup of four different contemporary Christian musical artists, but it, likewise, turned out not to be a concert at all. It was an intense spiritual worship service, with passionate exhortations and—I would say—emotional manipulations. I was struck thinking how spiritually exhausting it must be for those singers to gin up that kind of emotion night after night after night. That, too, can tend toward the gnostic because it effaces from our view the mundane. The ordinary. You know, the people, places, and things where God is actually at work all of the time. This kind of art, too, tends toward the otherworldly. You know that each of those artists at some point wishes they could sing a sweet song about, say, parenthood or a gritty song about a relational conflict or a song like Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “This Shirt” (a rather lovely ode to, yes, a shirt), but sadly they’ve convinced themselves that that is not the proper subject matter for “Christian” art.
Many other artists know only of a fall and human dysfunction, and never redemption or eschatological hope. There is no shortage of this, because it tends to be the default setting of hopeless artists in meaningless belief systems. The distortion here is that sin and grit without any redemption or hope is just nihilism, “sound and fury signifying nothing.” And this happens with Christians, too: those who insist on only asking the big questions but never even hinting at answers, or those elevate doubt to a cardinal virtue and portray the certainty of faith as a vice to be avoided.
But then, as if in response, the opposite happens: think of Christian movies that are long on redemption themes but very short on actual sin; long on certainty, and short on doubt: the result is sentimentality—the equivalent of those Amish romance novels so popular at Christian bookstores. A redemption story is only as powerful as the portrayal of that from which one is being redeemed. And so the worst depictions we get are a guy who scandalously smokes or drinks—but, strangely, never uses profanity. Again, this can be sort of gnostic dimming of the real world, the real time in which God has placed us.
I am suggesting that these kinds of one-sidedness can be corrected by giving each moment in the great redemptive story its due in Christian art. No, not each and every individual work of art can convey everything a Christian believes about life, the universe, and everything. That is almost the besetting sin of Christian art—using it as a utilitarian vehicle to communicate an entire systematic theology! It is a paradox that less is more, but it is often so true in art. In truth, a singular piece of art focused on just one facet of the grand story is perfectly legitimate; Psalm 88, for example, is a song entirely about death, with no redemption and no hope whatsoever! But, like the Author of the whole canon of Scripture himself (God!), a Christian artist should strive for a diverse and “thick” portfolio, striving to bear witness to the great works of God beginning in creation and ending in consummation.
And that brings me to my final question: what is the mission of art?
Stay tuned for Part Three