The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 18
We’ve previously explored the question of why millions of American Evangelicals have failed to produce much quality art of any sort, and have seen that this is largely due to limited or distorted views of the Bible’s teachings (or a failure to act on or consider the implications of what they do know from it), despite the fact 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 materiel 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 inevitably to a pessimism concerning history and its value, and seeing time as the domain of Satan, and therefore as only something to be escaped from, rather than something to be fulfilled and redeemed.
Then we turned to a consideration of the artistic deformation 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 in seeing symbols as both carrying meanings simultaneously as well as unifying those multiple meanings. We’ve also seen that the denigration of the Mystery of the Trinity is to minimize the reflected mystery in man who is made in the Image of God, reducing men to simplistic machines subject to quick-fix techniques.
We also saw 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? The answer is 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 Creation.
A failure to see the Diversity which defines the Triune God as much as does His Unity leads to a view of man and the world which flattens both, reducing humanity to a uni-dimensional construct made for one mode of being, rather than inhabiting the nuanced, complex, multi-orbed Reality God prepared for mankind to reflect God in.
In the last post, we saw illustrated the practical results of this theological defect by the story of a Christian record label’s rejection of a song (which both a popular CCM artist and the artist’s producer were pressing the label to allow them to include on a new project) not because the song was considered lacking lyrically or musically (in fact, the label thought the song was very good), but because the song lacked what they called “a happy ending”, by which they meant a conclusion in which the song’s narrator gets what he wants, rather than the thing God deems best for him.
This rejection betrays a belief that humans exist for only one mode of being: happiness (which is not the same thing as joy). This belief is shored up by a uni-dimensional view of mankind as the Image-bearer of the Complex Triune God. Such a perspective forces art by Christians into a singular promotion of a view of God only wanting humans to be happy, rather than for humans to be holy, and of humans only experiencing happiness, instead of, in a fallen world, also experiencing sorrow, repentance, and lamentation at their own sin and the sin around them, as well as sharing in the Suffering of Christ (I Peter 4: 12-19; 2 Cor 7: 8-11).
Scripture, which overwhelmingly concerns itself with the relationship and experience of God with His Covenant People, reflects not only the experience of happiness and joy, but of sorrow, suffering, repentance, duty, malediction, and holy terror, as normative in the fallen world. If Christian art does not accurately reflect the experience of Reality which both believers and non-believers share, the Faith appears as an unrealistic, irrelevant belief fit only to be laughed at or angrily rejected by non-believers, and a source of disappointment and confusion to Christians who have not been taught a fully-orbed Biblical view of the world. A return to what Scripture teaches concerning the Triune God and all that teaching implies is necessary to restore to the Church to a sound view of God, man, and the world, and to equip the Church to begin once again to produce meaningful art.
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Helpful book to understand God’s Purposes in suffering:
