The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 29
We’ve been exploring in these articles the question of why it is that millions of Evangelicals in America have produced so little quality art of any sort, and have seen that this is largely due to limited (and/or distorted) views of Biblical teaching (or a failure to act on the implications of these teachings), despite the fact that Scripture equips Christians for “every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17), one of which is creating art.
We examined the damaging effects of deficient theology on the doctrines of Creation and Eschatology, effects which produce devaluations of matter and time as apropos theaters of God’s Glory, resulting in pessimism about history, and in viewing the world as effectively belonging to Satan, as only something to be escaped from.
Non-Biblical ideas concerning the Holy Trinity lead to a picture of mankind as simplistic machines rather than the bearers of God’s Image, as well as to the destruction of symbol as showing both multiple and unified at the same time.
We turned then to an examination of the Incarnation of Christ, in Which God joined Himself to Humanity in the God-Man Jesus, “at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood; truly God and truly Man” (Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451), and saw that many Evangelicals hold a view of the Incarnation which sees Jesus’ Humanity as only peripheral to His Divinity, and ignore His Humanity, denigrating the human as a legitimate sphere of spirituality.
In the last article, we saw 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 Lord Jesus, fully God and fully Man, has risen from the dead still Incarnate (Eph 2:20-21), still Enfleshed, as He will be forever. The Body He assumed along with the Rest of His Humanity is like our own, except for His UnFallen Absence of sin. Yet, as we've seen in previous articles, Jesus ate and drank, slept, sang, suffered, and so forth, as an Embodied Human.
His Humanity required Spirit, Soul, and Body, which only together make a Complete Humanity (Heb 4:12). Genesis 2:7 tells us that God first formed Adam's body, and then breathed the spirit of life into him, and only then did man become a "living being." Man's spirit was created afterhis body, perhaps to complete it. Nonetheless, only these elements together comprise humanity as God intends.
Our bodies, though subject now to death because of sin, are intended to last forever as our habitations. The sundering of body and spirit at death is a monstrous perversion, one to be remedied by the Resurrection of the Dead on Doomsday.
As 1 Corinthians 15:42-58 tells us, our salvation is not complete until our bodies are raised and transfigured to be like Christ's (1 John 3:2). Our bodies are meant to last forever. This means that the body and the spirit are not opposed; it was sin which affected both body and spirit at the Fall of Man, bringing death to both, not the physicality of the body alienating it from the spirit.
The physical body is rather the arena of spirituality, the offering of which is a spiritual offering, as Paul tells us in Romans 12:1-3.
The body is not worth less than the spirit; it takes both to be human (and achieve individual destiny before God...). There is no hard hierarchy betwixt spirit and body: both are necessary to God's Purposes for humanity and to properly reflect the Image of God.
It does, after all, take the body to do most of the good works prepared from before the foundation of the world for us to perform (Eph 2: 8-10). What is the implication of these facts for the making of art?
Simply that limiting the subject or content of our art to "spiritual" matters while ignoring those of "physical" (or what is sometimes erroneously called "secular" matters) is actually an implicit denial of true Biblical spirituality, which necessarily involves and includes the physical world and all of Reality as the arena of God's Presence, Activity, and Revelation.
All art, if it is to be Incarnational and Biblical, must neither implicitly or explicitly deny the value of the body in God's Plans, or it will end up as an expression of a sub-Biblical view of the world, and thus fail to serve God.
For additional teaching on the relationship of the physical to spiritual, visit Patreon for the “Windows to Glory” series.
A helpful book on this topic:
