The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 27
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 unifiedmeaning. 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 And His Imagination (intrinsic as they are to His Humanity) leads to both an improper view of the value of human emotion and imagination (leading to a deformed representation of men in worship and the arts, and to a mistrust of the arts as legitimate and an inability to correctly understand and execute what Scripture prescribes).
Likewise, such a non-Biblical devaluation of these Aspects of Jesus’ Humanity can extend as well to His Sensual Nature, Which, as a Human, He possessed, as do all humans. The five senses (taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight) are necessarily a part of embodied humanity (since humans dopossess bodies which are one part of who humans are), and the Lord Jesus, Who has redeemed all that He assumed, in order to be a Perfect Sacrifice for the sins of fallen humanity, and Who was an Embodied Human, necessarily possessed these senses.
There has long been a strain of suspicion of the senses in Christianity, which owes its existence to two things. The first is rooted in Neo-Platonic distrust of the physical, material realm as being inherently at odds with the spiritual realm, a distrust transmitted to the Early Church via biases of Neo-Platonically-educated Christians.
The second contributory to suspicion of the senses (especially amongst Evangelicals) is due to a Pietistic overreaction to the very real problem of sensualism, the illicit worship of the senses seen in hedonism, gluttony, and so forth. The Pietist response to these sinful patterns of behavior is to throw the baby out with the bath-water, and seek to suppress the senses as much as possible.
However, Scripture itself tells us that the physical (which necessarily includes the sensual) is the arena of spirituality, as Romans 12:1-2 makes clear when Paul urges Christians to present their bodies (including perforce their senses) as “living sacrifices, holy, acceptable to God, your spiritual service.” We are not called to obliterate our humanity, but to see it oriented to righteousness by the Spirit’s Power, to use our gifts (sensual and otherwise) correctly.
We see this especially illumined in the Sinless Life of Christ, Who exhibited use of His Senses as a Holy and Necessary Part of His Redemptive Human Activity, since All of Who He was and What He did was offered for our sins in His Atonement on the Cross.
The Bible teaches us that Jesus tasted (Matt 27:34), and exercised sight (Mark 3:16; 4:18), the sense of touch (Luke 5:13; 7:14), and of hearing (Matt 4:12; Luke 7:9), all as part of His Sinless Human Existence. His Sinless Exercise of His Sensual Nature shows us that a godly exercise of our own senses is both possible and necessary for our sanctification if we are to imitate our Lord.
A suspicion of the senses inhibits both the creation of Christian art and worship (since both are unavoidably concerned with sensual exercise). To despise the Sensual Nature of Christ’s Incarnation inevitably leads to the paucity of Christian artistic expression such as we sadly experience in our time.
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