Kemper Crabb

Worship. Art. World.

The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 17

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In previous posts, we’ve explored the question of why a millions-strong Evangelical Church has failed so signally to produce much quality art of any sort, and have seen that this is largely due to a limited or distorted view of the Bible (or of a simple failure to act or consider the implications of what is known from it), despite the fact that Scripture instructs believers in “every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17), which includes the making of art.

We’ve seen some of the destructive implications of shallow or distorted views of the Doctrines of Creation and Eschatology. To misunderstand the implications of God’s Creation of the world is to ultimately devalue the material world as the arena (and plastic material) of spirituality in history. To misunderstand Biblical Eschatology (the Doctrine of what God is shaping history toward, and of what His Purposes are to accomplish within [and at the end of] time) leads inexorably to a pessimism concerning history and its value, and to seeing time as the captive of Satan, and thus as only something to be escaped from, rather than as something to be fulfilled and redeemed.

We turned then to a consideration of the artistic deformations wrought by a sub-Biblical perspective on the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, seeing that a rejection or misunderstanding of the Three Persons of the One God destroys the possibility of any theological justification of seeing symbols as both carrying multiple meanings simultaneously and unifying those meanings.

We also saw that the denigration of the Mystery of the Trinity results in a minimization of the reflected mystery in man who is made in the Image of God, reducing men to simplistic machines subject to quick-fix techniques.

We saw as well that the Balance of Unity and Diversity, the One-and-Many Aspect of the Triune God, is the answer to the question every artist faces: which is more important, the artist’s interior vision or the perception of the audience? We saw the answer in the balance of the unity of  the artist’s vision with the diversity of the sundry perceptions of the audience, just as God’s Unity and Diversity in Balance is intended to be reflected in all of Creation.

A failure to see the Diversity Which defines the Triune God as much as His Unity leads to a view of man and the world which flattens both, reducing humanity to a uni-dimensional construct made for only one mode of being, rather than the nuanced, complex, multi-orbed Reality God has prepared for mankind to reflect God within.

Some years ago, I wrote a song for a popular Christian artist depicting the experience of a Christian witnessing a Move of God on the people surrounding him, and who cried out to God to include him in that Move. The song never disclosed whether or not God included the song’s narrator in His Move among the people being observed. Though the artist and his producer loved the song, and wanted to use it for the artist’s new recording, I received a call from the artist’s label’s A&R department, asking me to give the song a “happy ending,” by which they meant a resolution wherein the song’s protagonist shared in the Move of God.

Though they recognized that virtually every Christian has a similar experience, and that sometimes God includes individuals in particular Moves He’s doing and sometimes He doesn’t, and though I argued that the open-endedness of the song matched the nuanced experience of most Christians, they preferred to promote an unrealistic picture of life (Christian radio wouldn’t support such an open-ended song, they told me). I refused to change my song to a unitarian, over-simplified, feel-good farce, and it was dropped from the project at the label’s insistence.

Scripture is replete with various literary expressions revealing the vast range of God’s Attributes and mankind’s varied experience of those Attributes. The Bible contains history, parable, lamentation, encomium, symbolic apocalyptica, proverbs, psalms of victory, repentance, malediction, and mourning. These varied forms with their variegated and multi-hued expressions of God’s Revelation and man’s experience of that Revelation are apropos to the Complex Triunity of the Living God and His Created Image-bearer, mankind. 

Let us not seek to artificially restrict our artistic representations of that experience in such a way that we misrepresent the fact that fallen man experiences life with struggle and the taint of the Curse, lest we end up communicating a half-truth to those who encounter our art, and subsequently see God and man as something other than what they truly are. Any view of God which dumbs down His Complexity of Persons results in a view of God, mankind, and the rest of the world, which is overly simplistic and an assault on God’s Revelation in Reality.

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A helpful book on Art: