The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 16
We’ve been endeavoring, in past posts, to consider answers as to why, in an America wherein statistically one-fourth to one-fifth of the population claim to be Evangelical Christians, the Church produces such shoddy art. We’ve seen that Evangelicals, despite a reputation for Biblical literacy, actually have a tenuous grasp of Scripture’s content, and an even more tenuous desire to act upon the things they do know from God’s Word.
Such a paucity of Biblical wisdom inevitably shapes a Christian artist’s view of the world, delivering the artist into unbiblical ideas uncritically culled from the world-system to fill the roaring vacuum left by the absence of a well-rounded Biblical worldview grid by which to measure what is and what is not of value in the culture round about. Mistaken or facile (or nonexistent) doctrinal ideas inevitably distort the art produced by an artist, as these ideas perniciously affect the artist’s goals, content, and even methodology.
We have to date examined a number of the negative consequences of incorrect theology for the making of art, tracing the implications of a shallow or distorted view of the Doctrines of Creation and Eschatology.
In the last several posts, we have begun to consider the artistic deformation wrought by a jake-legged perspective on the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, seeing that a misunderstanding or rejection of the Triune Persons of the One God destroys the possibility of any grounding of viewing symbols as simultaneously carrying more than one meaning, while also having the potential to unify those multiple meanings. The world (and man) are thus reduced to a flat, univocal picture.
We also saw that minimizing the Mystery of the Trinity also minimizes the reflected mystery in mankind, who is created in the Image of the Mysterious Trinity, reducing our concept of mankind to a uni-dimensional machine subject to quick-fix techniques rather than the rich mysteries of God’s Reality. This encourages the production of art which denigrates the Mystery of God, man, and the world, which fails utterly to reflect Reality as it truly is, rendering art which justly reaps the approbrium of the culture at large.
We saw in past issues that the fact that the Trinity is equally both One or Unified (since God is One Essence) and Many or Diversified (since God is Eternally Three Persons) answers the perennial question of the one and the many, the question of which is more important: The one or the many? The state or the individual? Unity or diversity?
The existence of God as Triune, as Eternal Balance of One and Many, Who has created all things to reveal Himself (Gen 1; Ps 19; Rom 1:18ff.; etc.) teaches us that both the many and the one are equally important and primary.
This means that the rights of the individual and of the state (the collective people) are both to be protected and guarded governmentally. This principle should also be reflected in a very foundational way concerning the relationship of the artist to his audience. One of the questions that has bedeviled artists (especially arts theorists) is: which is more important, the artist’s interior vision or the perceptions of his audience?
Every artist imposes his vision upon the medium through which he expresses himself (whether music, dance, literature, painting, film, etc.), and one of the criteria by which an artist legitimately criticizes his work is by how closely he is able to replicate that vision through his chosen medium. For many artists in the modern era, what matters primarily to them is whether they achieve their inner vision, and, if their audience doesn’t understand that vision, so be it: the artist matters, not the audience. The artist in this scenario is concerned with the one (the artist), not the many (the audience). Such a scenario sacrifices accessibility and connection with the audience for the ego-driven vision of the artist (one before many).
In the more commercial sphere of the artistic realm, frequently the artistic vision is ruthlessly sacrificed to whatever is the perceived taste of the audience (the many), reducing the artistic vision (the one) to the lowest-common-denominator deemed to appeal to the most people. This, of course, values the many over the one.
A Trinitarian Balance of the One and the Many should be sought here: neither an artistic vision so rareified and demanding that it spurns accessibility and understandability to its audience, nor such a dumbed-down work of art that it does not capture the vision of the artist, challenging and changing the perspectives of the audience: a balance of the one and the many. A robust Doctrine of the Trinity, grasped and applied, will guarantee that such a balance remains a standard and a goal to the Christian artist, remedying to that extent the imbalances evident in Evangelical art today.
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A helpful book on artist perspective:
