The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do - Part 9

Last post, as we continued our study of the example of the sons of Issachar (1 Chr 12:32) for Christian artists today (e.g., understanding the times, and knowing what New Israel, the Church, should do), we began to consider the question of how much artistic freedom Christian artists and audiences have artistically.  The question was asked: what things cannot be seen, heard, or considered artistically, either by the artists or the audience, without incurring sin?

To answer this, we looked at the Bible to see how depictions of the categories of human experience most frequently considered suspect by Christians today were handled by the inspired writers (2 Peter 1:20-21) of Holy Writ.  The categories we considered were depictions of nudity, sex, and graphic violence.  We discovered that all of these were addressed in Scripture in ways that would be thought wicked by a large part of today’s Evangelical Church.  (The passages discussed were: for nudity, Proverbs 5:18-19; for the sexual acts of the wicked, Ezekiel 23:19-21; and for graphic violence, Judges 3:21-22 and 1 Samuel 15:32-33.)  We concluded that all of life’s categories are to be addressed legitimately, as long as it is remembered that no category of life, artistically rendered or not, should ever promote sin.  They should, rather, promote righteousness and help inhibit sin.

The final arbiter of how that is to be done is, of course, God, and He has given us His infallible Word (2 Tim 3:16-20) to tell us how to do just that.  We clearly see from the Scriptural passages just listed that His idea of how to depict human actions like sex and violence in order to promote righteousness (the promotion of which is one of Scripture’s primary purposes) differs substantially from the ideas of most modern Evangelical Christians.  The question posed in the last post was: why is there a difference in God’s idea and we modern Christians’ ideas on this subject, especially when we claim to be ruled by Scripture?  Why do American Christians have so much difficulty accepting that these and all categories of life in godly contexts are legitimate?

At the core of the problem is confusion about what biblically constitutes holiness (e.g., how should a Christian believe and act in order to honor Christ?).  This confusion is a result of two pagan systems of thought which have crept into the Church’s views early on (and have been competing with fully Biblical doctrine ever since): Platonism and its evil child, Gnosticism.

In the world of the Early Church, educated men were trained in Platonic thought just as modern men are taught naturalism (which is the underpinning of evolutionary scientism, modern psychology and sociology, etc.).  When these educated men converted to Christ, they carried with them inadvertently a thought grid, or way of looking at the world, that was formed by Platonic thought, and this affected the way they looked at parts of the Bible.

Plato taught that the physical body should be rejected as “mortal trash,” and denounced works of art as inferior copies of the eternal Forms or Essences, useful only as a religious way to escape from the visible and the physical.  From the loins of Platonism sprang a system of thought called Gnosticism, which held that all matter and our bodies, the entire physical world, are innately evil, and that only non-physical things (like the human spirit) are good.

Splitting the created world into bad parts and good parts in this fashion is called dualism.  Dualism is in direct conflict with the Bible, which explicitly says that everything God created is good (1 Tim 4:4; Gen 1:9, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).  (I am not, of course denying the Fall and its radical and monstrous consequences, as we will see in the next post.  Remember, though that both St. Paul and Moses were very aware of the Fall, and still wrote in 1 Timothy and Genesis, respectively, about the goodness of Creation under the Holy Spirit’s direction [2 Peter 20-21]).

Generally, the Early Church Fathers renounced Gnosticism’s hard-core denunciation of the physical, but they unfortunately frequently retained the matter/spirit dualism in its milder Platonic form, which, remember, was the received educational wisdom of the day.  This led many in the Church to devalue art, sex, the body, and the physical world generally.  This viewpoint has been passed down through the centuries in various forms to today’s Church, and has been (and still is) at war with Biblical, Creation-affirming, Incarnational Christianity, watering the Faith down and radically and negatively affecting the Arts amongst Christians.

Why did the exemplary and godly Fathers of the Church continue to identify with this pagan view of reality?  Why do Christians still today continue to (though it is called by a different name now)?  The answer lies in a sad confusion of terms.  What terms?  The world and the flesh, which terms we will (God willing) consider closely next week.

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