The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 14
In earlier posts we explored why it is that millions of American Evangelicals have produced such poor quality art, and discovered that this is largely due to a limited or distorted view of the Bible, or, even worse, to an unwillingness to live out and apply what isknown from Scripture.
This deficiency in understanding plays out in the application of shallow versions of the Biblical Doctrines of Creation and of Eschatology. A poor grasp of the Doctrine of Creation leads to a devaluation of the material world, which, since artistic expressions are constructed from material things, devalues art itself. If a Doctrine of Eschatology (the doctrine of history and its purposes) is held incorrectly, it leads to a belief that history is Satan’s captive, denigrating its worth as the arena in which art achieves God’s Intended Purposes for it. Doctrine is obviously important to the doing of art.
We’ve seen that a faulty view of the Holy Trinity, Who created all things to reveal knowledge of Himself (Rom 1:18-21; Ps 19:1-4), leads to symbols (the primary form of artistic expression) being reduced to a single meaning, rather than also expressing a nuanced nexus of interlocking, mutually-reinforcing meanings. This does violence to symbols, which were created to function in such a way as to reflect the Triune God’s Nature as both One and Many, as both a Unity (or Unified Meaning) and a Diversity (or Collection of Meanings) simultaneously: One Being, Three Persons, neither of which is more primary.
Such a devaluation of Trinity-reflecting symbols leads to a severe compromising of the ability of an artist to create in complex and nuanced ways, and inevitably flattens and distorts the artistic view of the world. The resultant flat simplicity reduces the world from artistic complexity toward a single meaning, a “bottom line” which truly isn’t a bottom line, because, in order to arrive at any sort of basic meaning, it is required that all the levels of the interlocking meanings of a thing be considered together, and, since such a flattening of symbols yields only one meaning, a true “bottom line” cannot be arrived at.
This deficient view of symbols, which denies the possibility (or importance) of multiple simultaneous symbolic meanings, leads to the erroneous view that only a single meaning, a bottom line, is important, that there is only one important mode of being to reality.
The flat uni-dimensional view of the Creator leads to a uni-dimensional view of Creation, which leads to a uni-dimensional view of the Image of God in mankind, rather than the more-sophisticated, complex, highly-nuanced view of the multi-dimensional Image of God which reflects in humankind the God Who is not only Simple, but is also Highly Complex. This is a reduction of man, who is a little mystery made in the Image of God, Who is the Greatest Mystery, to the level of a lesser simplicity made in the image of a greater simplicity. Amongst Evangelicals, this has reinforced a view which assumes that man has only one desirable mode of being—one of happiness or ecstasy, which, in a fallen world during the process of sanctification prior to death, reflects neither reality nor God’s Purposes.
Much of Evangelicalism is taken up with a quest for constant happiness, consequentially downplaying in that illegitimate quest the Biblical privilege and necessity of sharing Christ’s Sufferings (1 Peter 4:12-13; 5:10; Phil 1:29; Rom 8:17; etc.). Not only does this outlook do severe damage to Biblical notions of sanctification and discipleship, and trivialize the experience of happiness and ecstasy which are a normal part of Christian life, but it also subverts Christian art by limiting its expression to only those aspects which seek or glorify happiness or ecstasy, restricting artistic manifestations which address the other legitimate dimensions of life which Christians experience in the world: sorrow, anger, resolution, resignation, etc. This massively hampers the intended range of artistic address and expression, cheapening our art.
This viewpoint also assaults (with the pernicious help of dispensationalism’s view of the Old Testament’s irrelevance for Christians) the value of all the various moods and modes of the different literary expressions of Scripture, such as the laments in the Prophets and the Psalms, the apocalyptic elements in the Gospels and the Prophets, the maledictions in the Psalms, the validity of the ethical stipulations in the Law and the Gospels, and so forth.
Besides the catastrophic implications of this assault for the fullness of the Faith, it also limits both content and artistic example in terms of addressing the complete range of experience and theology for Christian artists. This is a great tragedy, which partially flows from, and is reinforced by a deficient Doctrine of the Triune God of Scripture. Ideas have consequences.
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Helpful book to see multi-layers of meaning in the Cosmos:
