Art & the Bible by Francis A. SchaefferMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The arts are powerful. They draw our hearts and minds more effectively than dry intellectual content alone, and they make us experience truth in ways that nothing else can. So all of us are drawn to the arts. The music, books, poems, stories, films, and other forms of art that we engage with shape our thinking, our affections, and the direction of our lives, for good and for evil.
This is true of all people, the old and the young. But unfortunately, sometimes Christian young people have been given no direction in thinking about the arts because their parents, teachers, and church leaders have felt threatened by the arts, didn’t understand them, or didn’t think about them at all. At times, this has caused young people to fail to receive guidance that they desperately need.
In light of this problem, Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible is a good place to get help in thinking biblically about the arts. In Art and the Bible, Schaeffer shows that Christians should have a high place for creating and enjoying art because God Himself is an Artist who calls us to appreciate His artworks, and because He has made every one of us to image Him forth.
Unfortunately, we modern Christians tend to over-value the functional/intellectual side of life at the expense of the aesthetic, when the aesthetic is far more critical in drawing the affections and capturing the imagination.
The truth is that human beings are not merely functional. We are embodied creatures with not only a mind, but a body, an imagination, and a sense of beauty. We have the ability to express emotion and to reflect on truth. In short, by God’s design, we are created to contemplate the mysteries of our experiences and of this world through the arts.
So instead of ignoring the arts, we need to think biblically about them. Schaeffer gives us some solid direction for doing so in this book. Here are some notable areas of Art and the Bible:
1. First, it is absolutely amazing that human beings have a capacity to create art. If you think about it, this is an astonishing feature of who we are, one that shows that we are not highly developed biological contraptions, but creatures made in the very image of the Creator God. Nothing else in the universe does what we do in creating art, and no evolutionary theory can account for this uniquely human capacity. So when Christians fail to appreciate art, they fail to recognize the divine image in man—the element of our being that makes us human.
So I love when Schaeffer says things like this: "An art work has value as a creation because man is made in the image of God, and therefore man not only can love and think and feel emotion, but also has the capacity to create. Being in the image of the Creator, we are called upon to have creativity. In fact, it is part of the image of God to be creative, or to have creativity. We never find an animal, non-man, making a work of art. On the other hand, we never find men anywhere in the world or in any culture in the world who do not produce art. Creativity is a part of the distinction between man and non-man. All people are creative to some degree. Creativity is intrinsic to our mannishness."
2. Art has a place in the Christian life and in worship. Schaeffer refutes the notion that the second commandment forbids the use of art in worship. Instead, the second commandment forbids the wrong uses of art in worship. To support his point, Schaeffer points to Scripture throughout the Bible, including God’s directions for building the tabernacle and the temple, the Psalms, and the worship in Revelation. These passages show that the worship of God incorporates many forms of art.
As Schaeffer says, the Second Commandment “is not against making art. God simultaneously gave the Ten Commandments and commanded Moses to fashion a tabernacle in a way which would involve almost every form of representational art that men have ever known." Later, Schaeffer says that God's instructions for the tabernacle included “cherubim of gold . . . representations of nature, flowers, blossoms, things of natural beauty. And these are to be in the tabernacle at the command of God in the midst of the place of worship.... Later in Exodus we find this description of the priests' garments: "And upon the skirts of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet ..." (Ex. 28:33). Thus, when the priest went into the Holy of Holies, he was to take with him on his garments a representation of nature, carrying that representation into the presence of God. Surely this is the very antithesis of a command against works of art.”
3. Schaeffer also shows that secular art has a place in God’s world and in the Christian life. Art does not to be explicitly religious, and in fact the Bible includes a lot of secular art. For example, the Song of Solomon is a beautiful secular love poem. Although some theologians claim that the poem is a picture of Christ and the church, the poem is only a picture of Christ and the church in the way that every good marriage pictures Christ and the church. Song of Solomon is primarily an artistic expression of the love between a man and a woman. But by being such, it displays God-redeemed humanity in a way that points to the glory of God in his design for human love.
Another example of so-called secular art is the selah—a musical interlude without words. In a selah, the music itself, significantly, is offered as a work of art in praise of God. There are other examples as well, such as David’s anthem in praise of Israel’s heroes. Schaeffer’s best example is God himself, whose creation of the universe is what we would call secular art. Schaeffer says, “Consider God the Creator. Is God's creation totally involved with religious subjects? What about the universe? the birds? the trees? the mountains? What about the bird's song? and the sound of the wind in the trees? When God created out of nothing by his spoken word, he did not just create ‘religious’ objects. And in the Bible, as we have seen, God commanded the artist, working within God's own creation, to fashion statues of oxen and lions and carvings of almond blossoms for the tabernacle and the temple.” Such is Schaeffer’s powerful argument for secular art, which is, incidentally, a good apologetic for writers of secular literature that nonetheless demonstrates a Christian worldview (writers such as Flannery O’Connor, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others).
4. Schaeffer also shows that good art does not need to be “photographic” or realistic. In fact, the Bible shows that abstract art and fantasy are legitimate genres for the Christian artist. He says, "Christians ... ought not to be threatened by fantasy and the imagination. ... The Old Testament art commanded by God was not always 'photographic.' There were blue pomegranates on the robes of the priest when he went into the Holy of Holies. In nature there are no blue pomegranates. . . . [Such non-realistic art in the Bible shows that] the Christian is the really free man--he is free to have imagination.… The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars." (That last sentence is my favorite quotation in the whole book!)
5. Schaeffer also critiques Christian art of the past and today, which sometimes portrays a romanticized, “everything-is-always-wonderful” view of the world and the Christian life. (How Schaeffer would have despised the false view of reality expressed in the paintings of Thomas Kinkade!) Christians, of all people, know that the world is ugly—it is fallen and evil. And this fallenness is a valid topic for Chrsitian artists.
Schaeffer uses an analogy from music to demonstrate the balance that a Christian artist should have between positive and negative themes in art: "The Christian world view can be divided into what I call a major and a minor theme…. The minor theme is the abnormality of the revolting world…. The major theme is the opposite of the minor; it is the meaningfulness and purposefulness of life.... The Christian and his art have a place for the minor theme because man is lost and abnormal and the Christian has his own defeatedness. There is not only victory and song in my life. But the Christian and his art don't end there. He goes on to the major theme because there is an optimistic answer.… If our Christian art only emphasizes the major theme, then it is not fully Christian but simply romantic art.... Older Christians may wonder what is wrong with this art and wonder why their kids are turned off by it, but the answer is simple. It's romantic. It's based on the notion that Christianity has only an optimistic note."
6. Schaeffer also points out that to communicate, Christians today should use living art forms and not dead ones. He says (writing in 1973), “Christian art today should be twentieth-century art. Art changes. Language changes. The preacher's preaching today must be twentieth-century language communication, or there will be an obstacle to being understood. And if a Christian's art is not twentieth-century art, it is an obstacle to his being heard. It makes him different in a way in which there is no necessity for difference.” Schaeffer also says, “"Change is not only true of art forms, it is true of whole word systems.... There is no living language which does not undergo constant change. The languages which do not change, Latin, for example, are dead. As long as one has a living art, its forms will change. The past art forms, therefore, are not necessarily the right ones for today or tomorrow. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois failure."
At the same time, Schaeffer rightly points out that “we must not be misled or naive in thinking that various styles have no relation whatsoever to the content or message of the work of art. Styles themselves are developed as symbol systems or vehicles for certain world views or messages." Unfortunately, Schaeffer is inconsistent on this position in the book. Even so, he gives good advice for Christian artists to avoid styles that implicitly contradict the messages they are conveying.
7. Schaeffer points out that we need to judge art not only by its content, but by its technical excellence. For example, art created by Christians is not necessarily good art. (Christian bookstores tend to sell films and novels that may have good messages, but are weak as works of art.) At the same time, Christians often completely reject works of art by non-Christians completely because they disagree with the artist’s worldview. Schaeffer says, "We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors, and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn and ridicule. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view. Man must be treated fairly as man.”
8. Schaeffer points out that Christians need to value art as art, and not merely as a vehicle for an intellectual message. A work of art should be free to be what it is—a work of art. In Schaeffer’s words, some people think “that art is only an embodiment of a message, a vehicle for the propagation of a particular message about the world or the artist or man or whatever. This view has been held by Christians as well as non-Christians.... But, as I have said, this view reduces art to an intellectual statement and the work of art as a work of art disappears."
As Schaeffer shows, Christians can both produce and appreciate art because the Creator made us in His own image—and we are to image Him forth. This book can be a helpful guide as we think through how to do this in each of our own lives.
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