Art and Biblical Worldview—Developing Christian Discernment
By Jay Wegter
- Our aesthetics are keyed to God’s own expression of truth and beauty. Man as the image of God is ‘creatively receptive’ of God’s truth and beauty. We ‘create’ works of art which draw from the categories and relationships which God has created.
- God the Master Designer has joined form and function in His creation. The artist who studies God’s creation is forced to reckon with the union of form and function. Man as a creature made in the image of God imitates God in his pursuit of form and function. Carl Zimmerman
- The Christian understanding of aesthetics directly opposes the world’s
conventional wisdom
concerning beauty. Since the beginning Satan has sought to tempt by means of a false understanding of beauty. Beauty that glorifies God is always joined to what is true, good, morally right, and real. Albert Mohler
- In the culture war and the battle for the soul of man, beauty is the battlefield and the
human body is the epicenter
of that battlefield. Fyodor Doestoyevsky
- Art that is beautiful communicates truth. Beautiful art communicates truth because without words it depicts the relationships ordained and established by God. The arts constitute a kind of language which reaches to touch, as well as create, legitimate longings in the human heart which prose cannot do. Ravi Zacharias
- Culture which honors God is regarded by Scripture as an extension of creation. In the original plan there was no shadow between culture and devotion to God. Culture only enriches our lives when it conforms itself to the way things truly are—when it takes shape in the world as it truly is. Ken Myers
- Culture that is uplifting cultivates man’s deepest yearnings. The transcendentals which are communicated in ‘good’ cultural expressions (truth; beauty; justice; morality; love; order; goodness; rationality; etc.) are glory pointers—they point to God’s goodness, holy character and majesty. Whether in the visual arts, drama, or literature; the creative process utilizes the ‘symbolic vocabulary’ of God’s world.
- Your identity as the image of God is inseparable from the fact that God has placed
eternity in your heart
(Eccl 3:11). Because we are the image of God we yearn for excellence, virtue and beauty (transcendentals). God Himself is the only infinite integration point that can satisfy our longing for the infinite and the eternal (all other proposed ultimates and integration points are but idols).
- We need a Christian view of the arts. Popular culture has conducted a form of
cultural captivity
that has replaced God with the self—this is reflected in the arts today. Nancy Pearcey
- The presuppositions behind ‘evil art’ deny that human experience must be interpreted by means of the four great themes of redemptive history: creation; fall; redemption; and restoration. These four are inseparable from truthfulness in the arts. The misuse of the sexual body is the greatest separation from the transcendentals (universals)— for it lowers man as God’s moral image so that he operates by animal passions. C. S. Lewis
- In denying redemptive history, modern sinners prefer the ‘absurdity
perspective’
of life in order to free up their lusts and justify their apostasy from God. Artists who ‘normalize’ immorality in their art are responsible for their willful rejection of divine revelation.
- Art is not created in a ‘worldview vacuum.’ The artist will view life and depict life
through his or her worldview.
The church can play a key role in affirming the
‘sacred canopy’
of biblical worldview which is suspended over all men.
- The church needs discernment so as not to embrace cultural trends blindly. We are to call people to an entire renewed life across their cultural experience—in a way that honors creation, human nature in God’s image, and the commands of God.
- Solid Bible believing Christians tend to be intimidated by the cultural arts because of today’s ‘cultural captivity’—in other words the secularists have ‘captured’ the arts so that they no longer communicate the great truths of God. Culture is seen as dangerous. BUT, if armed with Christian worldview as our means of discernment; then our study of culture is both enriching and actually strengthening to our biblical worldview.
- Our goal in studying culture is the glory of God and the achievement of a unified
worldview
under the lordship of Christ. Our confidence when approaching the study of culture is that all categories and relations within human experience are created and established by God. This puts sin under the spotlight as a radical deviation from God’s creation structures and sin as rebellion against our bounded-ness as the creatures made in His moral image.
- God made the perception of beauty pleasurable (it ultimately points to His beauty). Beauty has no existence separate from God. Art produces a pleasurable response —for it communicates our values and our engagement with the world. The renaissance credo was: artists derive their creative power from God; therefore creativity is a divine duty.
- The subject of a piece of art needs a theoretical base which will enrich our understanding. We study the past to understand the uses of the visual arts which were put to use in a society. In renaissance Europe art was often a commodity to communicate status.
- Christianity is total truth. A constant theme in art is man’s place in the cosmos. Today’s cultural animism (the worship of created things) is filled with unhealthy cultural forms which deny God’s universal moral order in the cosmos. The cultural arts today are
laden with lying cultural forms about the nature of human freedom.
Teleology is freedom by living out our design (we find our freedom in being the image of God). Lying ‘forms’ suggest freedom from design—thus, sinners finding their ‘freedom’ in denying the image of God—they want Eros not Logos. Peter Jones
- Freedom is found only in God’s creational moral order as it is restored in Christ. Secular-humanist utopian ideas about human flourishing are at the heart of the culture war. The fixity of God’s order (both moral and physical order) is depicted in uplifting
cultural forms that point us to God.
He is outside of us—infinitely greater than us. He is the only abiding source of all love; life; light; truth; and blessedness.
- Good art strengthens our worldview because it communicates the truth about the sacred canopy of God-honoring transcendentals. ‘Evil art’ is at war with the
sacred canopy of God’s transcendentals—
(truth, beauty, love, justice, the image of God, rationality, order, meaning, etc.) —evil art depicts self as the architect and definer of man’s existence. ‘Cultural relativism’ is stipulated upon this net loss of divine creation structures. Without the cultural richness of God’s creation structures, life is reductionistic. Francis Schaeffer
- God is the standard in the arts; not subjectivity. That which is good, true, beautiful, good, and real points to God as the ultimate Giver. Beauty is joined to these
transcendentals.
Fallen society severs beauty from the universals (transcendentals). It rips beauty from its moral context. True beauty points to the Creator. Confusion over beauty goes back to the Lie in Eden. Satan’s prevarication was, “Reject God’s Word and you will have the right to define human existence.” Albert Mohler
- Shame, nakedness, rebellion, animal passions, degradation—all separate beauty from the transcendentals of truth, goodness (morality), glory, and the image of God. The
cross of Christ reunites
the transcendentals of glory, heaven, and earth. In the cross, Christ takes on the disconnection of our ‘dis-relatedness’. Paul F. M. Zahl
- How will those who reject biblical theism and redemption in Christ remove evil? History has shown that apart from theism mankind engages in oppression—historically we see a stream of tyrants, dictators, and butchers, who carried out their reigns of terror.
Christian freedom is far different from ‘humanistic freedom’. In
Christian freedom, man is free only when restored to God (who is the source of all authority and freedom). Man restored to creation structures by God’s grace is able to live wisely by God’s good, merciful, wise, loving and just laws. By contrast, in humanistic freedom man is his own standard and autonomous reason his absolute.