The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 21
In this series we’ve been exploring answers as to why millions of American Evangelicals have produced so few examples of quality art in any artistic category, seeing first that in large part this is because of limited (or distorted) views of Biblical teaching (or a failure to act on the implications of its teachings), despite the fact that Scripture instructs Christians in “every good work” (2 Tim 3: 16-17), which necessarily includes the making of art.
We’ve also looked at the negative effects of shallow or distorted views of the doctrines of Creation and Eschatology, which lead to denigrations of the physical world and time as proper theaters of God’s Purposes, encouraging a pessimism about history, seeing it as Satan’s realm which must be escaped from instead of redeemed and fulfilled.
We looked as well at the results of sub-Scriptural perspectives on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, seeing that misunderstandings or rejections of the Three Persons of the One God destroy the possibility of any Scriptural justification of symbols being revelatory of both multiple meanings and unified meaning at the same time.
Trinitarian confusion leads to muddled ideas as well of the reflected Mystery of the Image of God in men, to views of men as simplistic machines subject to quick-fix techniques, and to man as being incapable of reflecting God in multi-faceted ways, resulting in overly-simplistic representations in art-forms.
Last issue, we began a consideration of the implications of the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ, which teaches us that Jesus was both fully God and fully Man simultaneously, with no confusion between His Natures, both of which co-inhered to form One Person in a great Mystery. We saw that this Truth, that God has eternally joined Himself to a human body, soul, and spirit means that God not only is not opposed to matter, but that matter was made for, and inescapably involves, spiritual expression.
We also saw that this concept of Incarnation, that matter and spirit were made for each other, as evidenced in the Divine/Human Christ Jesus, was scandalous in Christ’s Time on earth, as it violated the dualistic belief of neo-Platonism (the dominant world-view of the Classical era) that matter and spirit were opposed to each other, and were incompatible with each other.
Unfortunately, this basic idea of dualism, that spirit is superior to and incompatible with the material world, was imported into the Church by educated converts who misread both Scripture and the world in neo-Platonic terms, even though they believed in the Biblical Revelation of Jesus’ Divine/Human Incarnation. Not considering the implications of the Incarnation, their dualism resulted in a withdrawal from the “sin-infected” physical world as much as possible, which was the mainspring of the growth of ascetic monasticism.
Throughout the Church’s history, dualism and Incarnationalism have struggled for dominance among believers, and in the aftermath of the Reformation, Pietism arose and adopted dualism as its view of the world, injecting it into the Evangelical Church, where it has become the primary perspective of American Evangelicals.
This has lead Evangelicals in their theology, experience, and art, to emphasize only “spiritual” aspects of life, things like prayer, worship, evangelism, etc., and to de-emphasize as unspiritual or unimportant the regular, quotidian things of life, things like work, politics, economics and so forth, seeing them as areas which were only important if explicitly “spiritual” themes could be foisted upon them.
The arts, seen as being too sensual and worldly, were reduced to the status of propaganda, their only real justification being to function as glorified gospel tracts, with music being privileged, since worship services require songs. But dance, architecture, acting, all the more visceral and physical arts, came to be largely viewed with suspicion, relegated to the realm of the “secular,” as being so worldly that they were only possibly“spiritual,” and likely not “spiritual,” so were ignored and distrusted.
Are these sub-spiritual arenas? Are they less spiritual than prayer? Are there more and less spiritual aspects of life? How does the Incarnation answer these questions? Lord willing, we’ll examine these questions next week…
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