Art and the Bible

I have always been very sceptical of what is often referred to as ‘modern art’. How can Cy Twombly’s “Untitled” be compared to the “Mona Lisa” or “The Hay Wain”? Being artistically challenged doesn’t, I hope, stop me from being able to appreciate true talent. Twombly’s painting honestly looks like something I could achieve myself, despite my artistic limits not extending much further than stick figures. However, I doubt I could demand the 46 million USD it sold for. It does seem that some of what parades itself as art is pretentious and over-priced rubbish. And yet at the same time, decent young artists can find it difficult to break into the art world and be noticed.

To stimulate my thinking on the subject of art I read Art and the Bible by Francis Schaeffer. The first essay deals with Art in the Bible. Schaeffer begins by arguing that evangelicals can be so concerned with seeing souls saved that they can forget that Christ is Lord of the whole man, body and soul. God made the whole man, and in Christ, the whole man is redeemed. For Schaeffer, the Lordship of Christ involves everything – total culture, and that includes the area of creativity. Indeed, one of the ways we image God is in the area of creativity. So he spends quite a bit of time detailing God’s interest in beauty, and the variety of art that is mentioned in Scripture.

In the second half of the book, Schaeffer gives 11 perspectives which he thinks are helpful in evaluating art. There is plenty here that is food for thought. Of note is his fifth perspective, the four standards of judgment: technical excellence, validity, intellectual content and the world view that is expressed, and the integration of content and vehicle. So, for example, we might be able to praise a work for its technical excellence, but critique the worldview that it espouses. Christians can often be tripped up on this point!

Another extremely interesting point is perspective 2: art forms add strength to the world view. Schaeffer argues that art can heighten the impact and effect of an idea even if it is false. Thus, “if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art it can be far more destructive and devastating than if it is expressed in poor art or prosaic statement. I think this explains that feeling a Christian might sometimes have in a movie, where one wants a character to leave their spouse, or otherwise commit or get away with what is forbidden in God’s Word. Art is powerful.

Another interesting perspective from which to evaluate art is ‘normal definitions, normal syntax’. What Schaeffer means here is that an element of art is communication. Some art (poetry, painting plays) can bend the rules of language and grammar or symbolism so much that communication is lost. He writes, “Totally abstract art stands in an undefined relationship with the viewer, for the viewer is completely alienated from the painter.”

I was also interested by the point he made regarding non-Christian artists who are able to produce art according to a Christian worldview. His explanation for this was that when a large number of people in society are Christians, they can bring a kind of Christian consensus, and non-Christians can write or paint within and out of this contextual framework. This was clearly the case in Christendom, where although individual artists might not necessarily have been Christians, they lived and breathed a Christian context in a way which we no longer do.

For Schaeffer, we never look at just one piece of art, we look at it in the context of the body of an artist’s work. He encourages Christian artists to produce art within the context of their time, place and culture, and reminds us that Christian art should have two themes. One, which he calls the minor theme is associated with the fall. We are in a sinful world, and outside of God there is a lack of meaning and purpose, and even within God’s family, there is suffering and sin to deal with. But the major theme of Christian work, which we could call redemption, is meaning and purpose in both metaphysics and morality.