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The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 26
We’ve been exploring in this series answers as to why millions of Evangelical Americans have produced so few examples of quality art in any artistic category, seeing that this is largely due to limited (and/or distorted) views of Biblical teaching (or a failure to act on the implications of its teachings), despite the fact that Holy Writ instructs Christians in “every good work” (2 Tim 3: 16-17), which works of necessity include the making of art.
We looked at the negative effects of such theologically deficient perspectives on the doctrines of Creation and Eschatology, which result in denigrations of the physical world and time as appropriate theaters of God’s Purposes, encouraging pessimism concerning history, and viewing the world as Satan’s realm which needs only to be escaped from, rather than redeemed and fulfilled.
We saw also that sub-Biblical views on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity led to a destruction of Scriptural justification of symbol as simultaneously showing forth both multiple meanings and unified meaning. Such views lead as well to the reduction of men from the mysterious bearers of God’s Image to simplistic machines amenable to quick-fix formulae.
We then turned to look at the implications of the Incarnation of Christ, in which God, in the Second Person of the Trinity, joined Himself to a fully Human Nature and Body so that He could be the Perfect Sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind by dying in fallen humanity’s place. This Eternal Joining of God to Man in Christ Jesus is summed up by the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) when it wrote that He is “at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood. Truly God and truly Man…”
We’ve seen how this aberrant view of the Incarnation can lead to devaluation of the fact of Christ’s Growth and Human Development, which in turn discounts the valuation of regular human growth in time as unimportant to God’s Purposes, so that men are seen in a deformed fashion.
The devaluation of Christ’s Humanity is artistically destructive in other ways, as well. For instance, an improper view of the Lord Jesus’ Emotions (intrinsic as they are to His Humanity) leads to an improper view of the value of human emotion, and thus to a deformed representation of men in worship and art.
The negative results of this same devaluation extend to the other Aspects of Jesus’ Humanity, such as His Imagination, which, as a Human, He necessarily possessed, as do all human beings. Imagination is the aspect of human consciousness which allows us to envision things which are not physically present to us, to see ourselves in situations we’re not currently in, to think analogically/metaphorically, and to connect disparate abstract elements. Modern Evangelicalism has been generally distrustful of the imagination, associating it with sensuality and an escape from reality, seeing it only as associated with fiction.
Yet the Lord Jesus utilized imagination constantly in Scripture. In John 10:9, Jesus called Himself “the Door,” even though He was not literally a slab of wood, metal, or stone on hinges (but is the only Way for men to access God). In John 15:5, Jesus said that He was “the Vine,” though He was not a plant (though He is the Source of life and growth for those connected to Him by His Spirit). In John 8:2, Jesus called Himself “the Light of the World,” yet He didn’t regularly emit light during His Earthly Mission, (though He does enlighten those in spiritual darkness, and did create the sun, moon, and stars which do shed physical light on the world; cf. John 1:3). He also called men to “count the cost” of following Him (Luke 14: 28-30), to imaginatively envision the future (which hadn’t happened yet) to help decide whether being Jesus’ disciple was worth what it would cost them.
Without the exercise of imagination, Jesus could not have made these statements concerning Himself, nor could He expect men to understand and heed His Word. Any conception of Christ which does not take seriously His Humanity, including His Imagination, inevitably will lead to an expression of the Faith which not only wars against seeing imaginative expressions such as are all the branches of the arts as legitimate, but also results in the inability to even correctly understand (much less execute in our lives) what Scripture says. Imagination, so vital to the making and enjoyment of the arts, is also (as it was for the Lord Jesus) vital to Christianity. Let us not despise the Person and Example of our Lord, holding as worthless what He valued and has redeemed.
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A helpful book on this topic: