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Art is art. Everything else is everything else.

—Ad Reinhardt2

Works of art are instruments by which we perform such diverse actions as praising our great men and expressing our grief, evoking emotion and communicating knowledge.

—Nicholas Wolterstorff3

The world is full of problems: war, homelessness, global warming, domestic violence, AIDS, hunger, drug abuse. The list goes on and on. In a world that seems to be always on the brink of disaster, there is an endless amount of work to do to help the earth heal from pollution of every kind; to insure adequate nutrition, housing, education, and health care to every person; to bring peace among the nations and in every city and village and home. And yet, if all of this is done, and there is no art, then the world will still be a sad, sorry, joyless place.

Still, in most of the developed world, and especially in those parts of the world most influenced by the Protestant churches, art is often treated as suspect, as Jeremy Begbie puts it “a luxurious ornament,”4 a frivolous frill that is easily discarded whenever resources are stretched and other needs seem more pressing. In the face of diminishing budgets and continual insistence on raising test scores, public schools in the United States are consistently pressured to reduce or eliminate time spent on music, dance, and drawing; the National Endowment for the Arts is repeatedly threatened with losing its funding; and local arts organizations constantly operate on the edge of budget disaster.

Some of the sources for this attitude may be found in the complex relationship that Christianity has had with the arts at least from Augustine onward, describing them at once as a good gift from God and as a distraction from true worship. Other sources are deeper, dating back to early Greek philosophers who posited a dualistic universe in which the physical, material world apprehended through the senses was understood as an unreal shadow of true reality, which could only be apprehended through reason.

The church, broadly speaking, both influences and is influenced by the attitudes of the society around it. Because of our collective discomfort with the arts, both the church and the world tend to think about them in ways that are problematic for artists as well as, ultimately, for society at large and the church in particular. Sometimes, we instrumentalize art, turning it into a means to achieve didactic, propagandistic, or other pragmatic ends. At other times, we commercialize art, turning it into a commodity to be bought and sold, with little or no regard to its intrinsic worth. In other circumstances, we demonize art, seeing only its potential as the object of idolatrous worship, on the one hand, or as the tempting purveyor of other illicit thrills, on the other. Too often, we trivialize art, seeing it as the province of children or as a recreational activity for adults with both time and money to spare from what are regarded as more important pursuits. Finally, we may spiritualize art, ignoring its sources in the concrete materiality of life while believing that art will somehow save us from ourselves, or that artists have a better pathway to God than everyone else.

Too rarely, we see art as an answer to a real—though hard to define—human need, as a legitimate response to God’s call on all our lives to love and serve the world. Many of the ways in which art has been characterized are misunderstandings about the nature and function of art, or address some kinds of art while ignoring others. These mischaracterizations divert us from recognizing how the arts actually help us to understand, interpret, and communicate our experience of the world around us. Instead, they either strip the arts of their genuine power or elevate them to a status that they do not deserve. Such ideas also tend to alienate artists, who think about an artwork in terms of how it operates on the senses; how it fits into its historical, physical, and spiritual context; or how subtle changes to visual, auditory, or physical configurations can shape our experience and touch us at the deepest places of our being. In this chapter, we will consider the ways that churches and artists tend to talk past one another when they think about and use art, and begin to sketch the outlines of a deeper conversation.

Instrumentalizing Art: Reducing Art to a Single Meaning

Art speaks to the senses in ways that are too complex and subtle to be able to fully define in words. We respond physically and emotionally to the colors, shapes, textures, rhythms, timbres, pitch, or other aspects of a painting, a song, a poem, a film in ways that are difficult to describe, but still very real. These responses contribute to our sense of the meaning of the piece, frequently below our conscious awareness, even more than any overt subject matter that might be implied or overtly stated.

Too often, however, art is reduced to its supposed message, as though an artwork were simply a kind of shorthand or diagram for an intellectual idea. While it could be argued that even diagrams are a type of artwork, these tend to be dry, simplistic, and as unambiguous as possible. When a multivalent, well-wrought artwork is treated as a diagram, the very sensory qualities that the artist labored to create are ignored. This happens, for instance, when the words to a hymn are changed for didactic reasons and without equal regard to how they sound or the ease with which they can be pronounced near one another. Too often, such changes alter the aesthetic integrity of the hymn to the extent that people find it impossible to sing.

Too often, artists and theologians seem to talk past one another. My theologian friend who had wondered why anyone should care about art continued to think about the question, responding to my reply with another idea:

I asked myself, What is art? I answered myself, Art is a human construction. What kind of human construction? Communication. What kind of communication? Communication about what matters in itself and thus distinct from illustration, which points to something else that matters. So what matters in and of itself?

On one level, my friend was trying to make an important distinction that artists, themselves, are often at pains to figure out how to explain. Why is illustration often considered to be something less than real art? What is the difference between the kind of art that is seen in museums and the kind of art that is seen in most churches? Why does the art world often disdain Christian art, dismissing it as mere illustration?

One answer to these questions has to do with the observation that illustration relies on its connection to a verbal description or story outside itself, while contemporary museum art is expected to say something profound without an external narrative. This distinction is, in part, what my church friend meant when speaking of “what matters in and of itself.”

However, while what art has to say may correctly be understood as communication, it can be misleading to define art in that way. The problem is that when art is defined solely as communication, it is too easy to reduce any given artwork to its supposed message. This kind of oversimplification is rampant in the church, which too often rejects complex, multivalent artworks in favor of tendentious, single-message lessons. As soon as we say that art is communication, and leave it there, we omit all the other things that art also is and that other forms of communication are not.

Many of the roots of equating art with communication may be found in the Reformation. Although there is a popular conception that the Reformation was an iconoclastic movement, that is only partially true. Many Reformers did reject the use of religious images, especially those that they understood to be used in idolatrous ways, but others accepted or even encouraged their use. Both visual art and hymnody, for example, were permitted in many places. However, these arts were accepted primarily as didactic tools rather than for their emotive or symbolic qualities. This bent towards didacticism tended to strip art of all of its affective qualities, reducing it to a visual analogue, a one-for-one translation of discursive language. This is exactly what my friend describes as “illustration.”

A comparison of the spare woodcuts that accompany many Reformation texts with the lush, heavily emotive contemporaneous art of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation will reveal not merely stylistic difference, but distinctive theological difference as well. The Reformation images are often black-and-white woodcuts accompanying texts. Made with the explicit intention of minimizing their ability to evoke emotion, they simply underline the point already made in words. As William Dyrness points out, for instance, regarding Zwingli’s vernacular work on the Lord’s Supper,

which would have been read in many homes, the title page is adorned with simple images . . . These images portray and elaborate this special meal in a clear and simple way that would have been accessible to all who participated in the worship experience. It was teaching by pictures the narrative connections between these miracles and the communion meal . . . . Clearly the images here play the role of helping people envision the theological meaning proclaimed in the preached word and in the sacrament.5

For the Reformers, images were not expected to point to any reality beyond the narrative that was depicted, much less participate in such a reality sacramentally. Instead, they were meant to be memory aids for the marginally literate, somewhat like the schematic a-is-for-apple images in picture books for young children.

Hymnody, too, was enlisted in a program of inculcating specific creedal and historical understandings. As theologian, musicologist, and liturgical scholar Robin Leaver notes, Martin Luther insisted that “unison congregational song was a powerful demonstration of the doctrine of universal priesthood, since every member of the congregation was involved in the activity.”6 Leaver quotes from a 1523 letter from Luther to fellow reformer George Spalatin in which Luther praises Spalatin for his skillful and eloquent use of the German language, and asks him to turn psalms into songs suitable for congregational singing. However, Luther cautions,

I would like you to avoid new-fangled, fancied words and to use expressions simple and common enough for the people to understand yet pure and fitting. The meaning should also be clear and as close as possible to the psalm. Irrespective of the exact wording, one must freely render the sense by suitable words.7

Such singable psalm texts, or metrical psalms, quickly became the primary musical form used in worship throughout the churches of the Reformation. While both the poetic quality and the musical settings of such metrical psalms could be of high artistic quality, this was not always the case, and even when it was, such excellence was not always appreciated. Indeed, the primary value for the Reformers was that such songs allowed congregations to more easily memorize and internalize the psalms. This insistence on simplicity and accessibility continues to be an important criterion by which all the arts are evaluated in the church, often to the exclusion of any other value. Too often, the sensory elements through which meaning is also conveyed are completely ignored, as when exultant words are set to somber melodies.

A strict adherence to the psalms, however, was not the only didactic use of hymnody. Luther, in “Ein feste Burg,” and later Isaac Watts, in his volume The Psalms of David Imitated, interpreted the psalms through a New Testament lens. As Leaver points out, “The revolution that Watts brought about was his insistence that Christian congregational song cannot be confined to the Old Testament psalms, but must embrace the totality of Scripture.”8

Beyond Scripture, hymn texts were used to teach both doctrine and history. The martyr hymns of the various Anabaptist groups, such as the Mennonites, Hutterites, and Swiss Brethren, exemplify another didactic use of music. Persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants, the sufferings and faith of many executed Anabaptists were recounted in narrative songs intended to inspire their co-religionists to similar levels of commitment.9

This emphasis on using art to instruct does not mean that all Reformation hymns and images were artistically worthless. Indeed, many hymn texts from the Reformation onward were poetically well-crafted and much of the music similarly excellent. When Martin Luther published his German translation of Scripture, he enlisted the eminent artist Lucas Cranach the Elder—best known for his Isenheim altarpiece—to provide the illustrations. However, this tendency to instrumentalize art, to see it as simply illustrative or a way to make a didactic point rather than to lead to new understandings through metaphoric and sensory qualities, has permeated the Protestant churches.

By the late nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church had fallen into similar habits. As Colleen McDannel has shown, both Protestant and Catholic visual materials became increasingly bland and instructional in this period. As may be seen throughout McDannel’s lavishly illustrated volume, Material Christianity, the visual materials used by American Protestants and Catholics were virtually indistinguishable, and, indeed, often shared. In her discussion of the institutional and cultural structures surrounding the distribution of water from Lourdes following the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary to the young peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, McDannel notes

Marian piety with the Lourdes water and replica grottoes flourished in the United States because its themes resonated not only with Catholic traditions but also with Victorian culture. Protestants and Catholics both acknowledged the healing capacities of water and sought to articulate religious and aesthetic values by creating Christian landscapes . . . . Although Catholics understood their Marian piety to be truly “Catholic,” the expressions of that piety drew from the culture of the time.10

An examination of some visual materials from the late nineteenth century that McDannel shows will demonstrate the point. For example, an illustration of the church and shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes from the Catholic Herald, April 24, 1880, which McDannel reproduces as illustration 88 on page 134, and the print of visitors at the grave of David W. Gihon at the Laurel Hill Cemetery, printed in 1852 and reproduced as illustration 70 on page 112 in the same volume, exhibit similar visual devices, such as exaggerated poses, unequivocal directional cues, and sentimental references.

Prayer cards and other devotional materials featured rotogravure prints of images inspired by late Renaissance and Baroque prototypes. Such derivative images continually recycled visual ideas from the past rather than risking new interpretations that took into account current realities. When contemporary situations were included, they were usually sentimentalized or sensationalized, depending, again, on the didactic point that was intended. By the 1950s, this often took the form of clean-cut young people dressed in contemporary clothing in the presence of rather innocuous Jesus. Although Jesus was depicted dressed in robes, rather than the T-shirts and jeans of the young people, he somehow managed to look like a modern white American.11

Such images often moved easily and without comment between Protestants and Catholics. As just one example, a 1946 advertisement for a children’s coloring book from a Catholic goods house, reproduced by McDannel,12 juxtaposes simplified outlines of the popular Roman Catholic devotional figures, the Infant of Prague and Saint Anthony, with nineteenth-century Protestant artworks such as Holman Hunt’s Christ Knocking at Heart’s Door and Heinrich Hoffmann’s Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Similarly, images of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus often found their way into Protestant households.13 In an article about domestic shrines maintained by Protestant women in Pennsylvania, folklorist Yvonne Milspaw describes her Methodist grandmother’s shrine, which

held a variety of religious objects . . . [including] a glossy framed print of Christ crowned with thorns. Next to that were a votive candle in a broad green glass container, a small, golden glass brick with an intaglio of the crucifixion, and a small aluminum bottle (which had once contained Holy Water) decorated with a lithograph of Our Lady of Lourdes.14

This denominational eclecticism continues into the present day. Having spoken about art in a wide variety of church-related venues and conversed with priests and pastors from all over the country, I have observed that today there is an even greater openness to a wider selection of visual materials in many Christian churches, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. However, all too often even excellent, evocative, multivalent artistic materials are subverted into didactic readings as congregations are encouraged to look for the one, true meaning of an artwork. This is parallel to a method of biblical interpretation that insists on a single, correct meaning for each chapter and verse, rather than a hermeneutic of questioning the text. Rather than allowing the arts to open conversations that lead to exploration of multiple ideas, artworks are overexplained, reduced to sermon illustrations rather than allowed to stand on their own as biblical interpretations or analogues of spiritual experience.

Such single-message interpretations lead, too often, to a preacher or Sunday School teacher showing a Renaissance painting that depicts some scriptural narrative with no regard to the intrinsic meanings of the painting itself. Instead of attending to the specific ways that this painting tells the story in color, spatial emphasis, the visual relationships among the various characters, and any other telling details, the preacher will simply say, in effect, “I’m preaching on the Prodigal, so here’s a picture of that story,” while completely disregarding any potential conflict between the preacher’s interpretation and that of the artist. Equally disregarded is the potential for the image to illuminate the understanding of the text by either the preacher or the congregation through attention to the exegesis offered by the artist.

This attitude devalues good art by refusing to recognize that anything other than its subject matter might contribute to its meaning. It also leads to joyless felt banners with the word “Joy” stitched across them; moralistic children’s stories that are so predictable that even the children are bored by them; and hymns of praise that are sung like dirges, more out of duty than any sense of delight in the presence of the living God.

Commercializing Art: Making Art a Commodity

There is a certain kind of art that is created solely for the purpose of aesthetic contemplation. Such works have no other purpose than to delight, to elicit the particular thrill that is felt by many in their presence. This is often termed high art, and is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the artistic enterprise. In music, this is sometimes referred to as concert music, and generally takes the form of symphonies, concertos, chamber music, opera, and the like. In the world of literature, a distinction is often made between the literary novel and all other forms of fiction. Serious poetry, drama, and certain films also fall into this category.

In the world of visual art, it is the kind of work that Daniel A. Siedell calls museum art, in his book, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art.15 As Siedell points out, the high arts are both a cultural and an institutional practice, a living tradition that exists

not only invisibly in the hearts and minds of its practitioners and participants but also embodied, mediated in and through its visible public institutions. And it is in fact this public or outward manifestation that produces the private and inward experience of art. What art is, then, is defined through a public network and not merely by private assertion or opinion.16

In general, Siedell is speaking about modern or contemporary visual art and the structures, critical language, and traditions that surround and support it. According to Siedell, such art operates for the serious viewer in many ways like icons do for the Orthodox Christian. Like an icon, he suggests, a work of art is a kind of hypostatic union “between sensuous material and rational ideas.”17 This union of form and content, he argues, is the source of high art’s power. Similar arguments can be made about the effects of serious music, drama, poetry, and other artistic disciplines, as found in such visible public institutions as concert halls, theaters, and literary publishing houses.

Not all art has such lofty goals, however. As Nicholas Wolterstorf helpfully notes, there are many purposes for art.

Works of art are instruments by which we perform such diverse actions as praising our great men and expressing our grief, evoking emotion and communicating knowledge. Works of art are objects of such actions as contemplation for the sake of delight. Works of art are accompaniments for such actions as hoeing cotton and rocking infants. Works of art are background for such actions as eating meals and walking though airports.18

Some art is actually intended for commercial purposes, to participate intentionally in the world of commerce. Art in this category is not just the overt advertising that is ubiquitous in our culture, but also includes such things as mass-market music and movies; most (but not all) architecture; and fashion design, industrial design, and all the other fields that include the word design in their titles. Sometimes, the line between commercial art and high art is hard to discern, as when a dancehall poster by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec becomes more prized than paintings by many less well-known artists, or Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is used as the soundtrack for an animated film, or the work of popular musicians like Bob Dylan or the Beatles become the subject of scholarly dissertations.

Generally, however, the commodification of art becomes problematic when works that are created for the purpose of contemplation are treated as simply as objects to be bought and sold in the marketplace. In this situation, discomfort arises in those who value art for reasons that are unconnected with money. Artists whose works sell well, or who allow their works to be used to sell other products, are sometimes accused of selling out, of compromising their principles for monetary gain.

Religious institutions rarely are involved in this kind of overt commodification, but they nonetheless often confuse the true value of the arts with their monetary price. Alternatively, they abuse the notion that art is priceless, expecting artists to donate their time and talents even when that would create an undue hardship. While there are, of course, successful artists who command many thousands of dollars for each of the many works they might sell in a year, most professional artists struggle to get by, taking any commission that comes their way, even if the effective hourly rate is below minimum wage. Asking such artists to donate their time and work can severely compromise their ability to pay their bills. Even Michelangelo was nearly bankrupted when Pope Julius II refused to pay him what he had promised for the Sistine Chapel.

Money, in itself, however, is only a marker for an attitude that sees no intrinsic value in artistic activities or objects. The problem of turning art into a commodity arises in churches when how much it costs, how much revenue it can raise, or how it can serve as a symbol of a congregation’s social status, outweighs the emotional, spiritual, and communal values that the arts can bring to a congregation and to the individuals that comprise it. In the church, art becomes a commodity when it is seen as a hook that will bring in new members, as a decorative addition to a worship service, or as a way to communicate the cultural sophistication of a congregation.

Art becomes a commodity when stained glass windows are ordered from a catalog with no sensitivity to the particular building and the congregation that worships there; when a church hires professional singers for the entertainment of the congregation rather than teaching its own members to sing as an offering to God; or when an exhibition series is started with the hopes that commissions on the sale of paintings will generate income for the church rather than for its promise as a ministry to artists. When the value of the arts is connected too closely to their monetary potential or liability, the loss is often the ability to experience an artwork directly. What is lost in the transaction is the experience of allowing an artwork to enter through the senses and illuminate the lives of those who come into contact with it.

Demonizing Art: Art as Idolatry

There has always been an iconoclastic tendency within Christianity, a fear that any image might be or become an idol. Often, the source of this diffidence towards images has been cited as the second commandment, as found in Exodus 20:4–5 and repeated in Deuteronomy 5:8–9, in which the Israelites are told not to make pselet for themselves, “whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” The meaning of pselet has been variously rendered as idol, carved or graven image, or simply image. In modern Hebrew, the word means statue. But however we understand pselet, the context seems to make it clear that representational images are forbidden.

I say seems because—as is true of many things in the biblical record—this ban is not as clear as it may appear on the surface. As the beginning of verse 5, which reads “You shall not bow down to them or worship them,” points out, the real issue is not representation in itself, but rather idolatry. At the time that the commandments were recorded, the primary function of statues was to depict the gods and goddesses of the state religion. From the point of view of the Israelites, there may have been no other reason to make a representational object except for purposes of worship.

Further evidence that all representation was not forbidden in the Mosaic code comes in at least two places. The first is the mysterious incident in Numbers 21:4–9, in which God sends poisonous serpents to punish the people for complaining. Moses is then instructed to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole, so “everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” Whatever other notions may be implicit in this story, it is clear that God explicitly commands the making of something that looks as much like a snake as possible. If we could see it today, we would certainly call it art, just as we do other representational images from that period. And it is clear that the biblical witness does not understand this artful representation of a snake as an idol.

The second piece of evidence against a total ban on visual representation is in God’s instructions on the design and construction of the Tent of Meeting in Exodus 25–27. These instructions include sculptural renditions of cherubim on the cover of the Ark of the Covenant; almond flowers of pure gold on the branches of the lamp stands; and images of cherubim worked into the fabric of the curtains. A few chapters later, these descriptions are repeated in a report of what was actually done under the direction of Bezalel and Oholiab, God’s chosen leaders of the work.

The issue in the second commandment, then, is not art, as we understand art today, or even representational images, but rather idolatry. It is not the making of images, as such, that is forbidden, but making them for the purpose of bowing down and worshipping them. In the early days of Christianity, as in Moses’ day and for the centuries in between, idolatry continued to be a present danger. As the followers of Jesus spread beyond Palestine into the wider Roman empire, many converts came from religious traditions that worshiped a variety of deities. These were understood to be present in their statues. Thus, some writers in the early church period were understandably skittish about representational imagery.

This was not universally true, however. Since the discovery of the early third-century frescoes at Dura Europos, assumptions about a uniform, or even widespread, anti-image bias of the early church have been challenged. Some have pointed out that the lack of images in the first two centuries of Christianity may have had more to do with its status as a persecuted religious body with little money to spend on decoration and few buildings to decorate than with any ideological position. It is certainly true that as soon as Christianity became a state religion, its royal patrons arranged for elaborately embellished buildings, filled with portraits of themselves as well as various biblical and extrabiblical personages and objects.

Nonetheless, the writings of early Christian theologians and preachers repeatedly circle around the issue of images and idolatry. This concern is not restricted to the visual arts, nor even to representation as such. As early as the late fourth century, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) wrote about his own struggles to keep his appreciation of music within proper bounds. Berating himself for loving the sound of the music more than the edifying words, and perhaps even more than God, he wrote,

at one time I seem to myself to give them more honour than is seemly, feeling our minds to be more holily and fervently raised unto a flame of devotion, by the holy words themselves when thus sung, than when not; and that the several affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence wherewith they are stirred up. But this contentment of the flesh, to which the soul must not be given over to be enervated, doth oft beguile me, the sense not so waiting upon reason as patiently to follow her; but having been admitted merely for her sake, it strives even to run before her, and lead her. Thus in these things I unawares sin, but afterwards am aware of it.19

Augustine’s concerns were repeatedly echoed by other ancient writers. Suspicion of the arts, especially of visual art, came to a climax in the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries. The matter of icons was settled in the Christian East at what is today celebrated as the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843. The Western church continued to vacillate between an austere asceticism, as exemplified by the writings of the Cistercian monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, and a sumptuous exuberance reflecting the glory of God, as exemplified by the church built at St. Denis under the direction of Bernard’s contemporary, Abbot Suger. In his Apologia, written in 1125, Bernard writes disparagingly of the “enormous height, extravagant length and unnecessary width of the churches, of their costly polishings and curious paintings which catch the worshipper’s eye and dry up his devotion.”20

Abbot Suger extolled precisely the kind of elaboration that Bernard of Clairvaux deplored. His church at St. Denis is one of the earliest examples of what came to known as Gothic architecture. Such buildings featured pointed-arch windows filled with stained glass, ornate embellishments at every turn, and a lapis sky filled with golden stars on the ceiling over the altar. In his account of the building process, Suger argued that only the finest materials and workmanship were worthy for the service of God. As he wrote in his treatise, “De Administratione,”

If golden pouring vessels, golden vials, golden little mortars used to serve, by the word of God or the command of the Prophet, to collect the blood of goats or calves or the red heifer: how much more must golden vessels, precious stones, and whatever is most valued among all created things, be laid out, with continual reverence and full devotion, for the reception of the blood of Christ! . . . The detractors also object that a saintly mind, a pure heart, a faithful intention ought to suffice for this sacred function; and we, too, explicitly and especially affirm that it is these that principally matter. [But] we profess that we must do homage also through the outward ornaments of sacred vessels. . . . with all inner purity and with all outward splendor.21

In response, Bernard somewhat grudgingly accepts that it may be all right for parish churches and cathedrals to revel in outward splendor. It does no harm, he admits, to the simple and devout, whatever problems it may pose for the vain and greedy. However, he points out, for poor, spiritual, cloistered monks such things are at best distractions and at worst invitations to sin. He goes on,

But in cloisters, where the brothers are reading, what is the point of this ridiculous monstrosity, this shapely misshapenness, this misshapen shapeliness? What is the point of those unclean apes, fierce lions, monstrous centaurs, half-men, striped tigers, fighting soldiers and hunters blowing their horns? . . . In short, so many and so marvelous are the various shapes surrounding us that it is more pleasant to read the marble than the books, and to spend the whole day marveling over these things rather than meditating on the law of God. Good Lord! If we aren’t embarrassed by the silliness of it all, shouldn’t we at least be disgusted by the expense?22

In this short passage, Bernard summarizes an attitude that continues to resound in the church as well as the wider society. For Bernard and his spiritual descendants, art is too frivolous for serious people to fool around with, and much too expensive in both time and money when there are more important needs crying out for our attention. For Suger, however, through art and the light that art could reflect and reveal, God could be apprehended directly.

Three hundred years later, the unresolved tensions over the appropriateness of the arts in Christian worship became evident again in the iconoclastic excesses of certain portions of the Reformation. While stories of whitewashed churches and disfigured statues are familiar, it is important to remember that there were significant differences among the various reformers with respect to the arts. Luther, for example, advocated leaving the churches as they were, converting the use of whatever religious art existed to didactic rather than devotional means. He was horrified to discover that Andreas Karlstadt had encouraged the wholesale destruction of religious statuary during his absence from Wittenburg in 1522. Zwingli, on the other hand, was, like Augustine, all too aware of his own tendency to get so carried away by music that he forgot about God and banned even hymns from the worship of his church.

Despite these differences among the reformers and among the ecclesial traditions that derive from each, effective patronage of the arts was no longer seen as a legitimate role for the Protestant churches. The Roman Catholic Church did continue to commission important artworks for a long time. However, the widespread secularization of society in the ensuing centuries led to developments in serious visual art, music, and drama that made the practitioners of each of these art forms less and less interested in providing works that were appropriate for Christian worship and edification.

One strand of development that was particularly important in the divorce of the arts from the church can be traced to the eighteenth century, often referred to as the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment. In his 1974 Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Jacques Barzun notes that the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau “pointed to the spectacle of nature. Its beauty and harmony gave warrant for the feeling of awe which he then said that men experience natively like the promptings of conscience.”23 As Enlightenment rationality removed more and more of the mystery from the Protestant churches, in particular, the Romantics continued the elevation of the artist from humble craftsperson to prophetic visionary and priest that had begun with the Renaissance invention of the idea of artistic genius. Eventually, art—especially music, poetry, and painting, but encompassing other arts, as well—became for many a substitute for religion. Barzun continues,

Like other religions the religion of art promised the individual not only the peace of harmonized feeling and understanding but also the bliss of spiritual ecstasies. For Wordsworth and Goethe, Beethoven and Berlioz, Turner and Delacroix, great art—including their own work—produced all the effects of religious fervor—enthusiasm, awe-struck admiration, raptures and devoutness. Great artists constituted the Communion of Saints. Walter Scott, hardly an extravagant mind, writes in his Journal that love of the great masters is “a religion or it is nothing.”24

Over the course of the next two centuries, a rebellious persona became associated with artists, as they became increasingly involved with those who believed that organized religion was primarily a tool with which the powerful coerced the powerless to submit in mindless obedience. Barzun goes on to suggest that the French Revolution added to the artists’ sense of themselves as the true priests and prophets. He notes, “Artists could no longer think of themselves as entertainers or craftsmen serving the leisured. They were now the interpreters of life.”25 Art and religion, once inextricably bound to one another, had become mutually antagonistic. Art itself, rather than any particular art work, became—depending on one’s perspective—either the very embodiment of spiritual sensibility or an idol.

By the latter part of the twentieth century, the notion of art as idol seemed so self-evident to many Protestants in the United States that making church buildings harmonious and gracious was frequently considered completely unimportant. Any old cinder-block building was good enough, the simpler the better, as long as it could hold all the worshippers. And among certain segments of Christian society, some kinds of art—especially rock-and-roll music, dancing, and movies—were seen as agents of the Devil.

This demonization of the arts continues. In recent years, it is often couched as controversy over works that seem, at least to some, to be sacrilegious, obscene, or anti-American. Such controversies often also involve concern that the works, or the institutions that exhibit them, are supported through public funds. Examples include the 1989 exhibition of Mapple-thorpe’s photographs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which was partially funded through the National Endowment for the Arts; the NEA grant given to Andres Serrano in 1988, the year that he created his notorious photograph, Piss Christ; Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary, exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999; and, more recently, David Wojnarowicz’s video, A Fire in My Belly, which was removed from an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in February, 2011.

Often, the people who object to these artworks identify themselves as Christian, and the nature of their objection is the perception that the works are, in one way or another, offensive to Christian sensibilities. While each of these works is admittedly disturbing, all of them have artistic merit, and all are more complex than the simplistic interpretation offered by their critics. Indeed, at least some of the works condemned as sacrilegious grow out of the sincere, if questioning, faith of the artists who make them. Following such events, the non-Christian art world remains confirmed in its dismissal of Christianity as antithetical to the arts. When Christians demonize the arts by refusing to engage difficult works in a spirit of inquiry, they tell artists that they, along with their efforts, are not welcome in the church.

Trivializing Art: Art as Play

It is both curious and telling that, by and large, when people in the church talk about making art, they tend to use words like play, self-expression, creativity, fun, or release. All of these are, of course, important factors in healthy development and living a rich, full life. In suggesting that seeing art as play trivializes art, I do not want in turn to trivialize the importance of play as a restorative, healing, explorative, expansive, imaginative activity. However, professional artists tend to feel discounted when church members make no distinction between art as recreation and art as vocation.

Michael Sullivan’s Windows into the Soul: Art as Spiritual Expression, carefully makes this distinction, unlike many other similar books. Even so, this volume is representative of a popular genre which invites Christians to explore various art media as a way to reconnect with the childhood creativity they let go of in the process of growing up. Sullivan, a pastor, recounts his own discovery that working with clay helps him deal with the unexpected death of a young parishioner:

I knew that signs, symbols, and metaphors of art could free the soul. Art helped me to explore places within that I had never imagined or acknowledged—creative places where the person in me burst out in new songs with words and phrases only I knew but with melodies that others seemed to understand. Being creative with art allowed me to let go of inhibitions and embrace a radical love of God’s creation and my place in it as a beloved creature.26

Sullivan goes on to say that his intention is not to teach people to become world-class artists, but rather to connect more deeply with God.

Elsewhere, however, such distinctions are often blurred or, more commonly, simply ignored, implying that the kind of insights gained from long hours of practice in the studio are equally available to everyone in brief, free-form sessions. For instance, a practice called InterPlay was developed in 1989 by Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter. Incorporating elements of dance, drama, storytelling, and music, InterPlay is a way for people to use non-discursive means for communication and self-expression. The InterPlay web site proclaims,

InterPlay is a global social movement dedicated to ease, connection, human sustainability and play. Unlock the wisdom of your body!

InterPlay integrates body, mind, heart and spirit. . . . InterPlay is devoted to fun. It teaches the language and ethic of play in a deep and powerful way. If you are convinced that seriousness is the path to inner wisdom, then you might want to look elsewhere. If you would like to become a “recovering serious person,” then InterPlay might be for you.27

InterPlay is intended for secular as well as religious groups, but it has a great appeal among many people who are affiliated with churches or other religious bodies. Under a heading noting “InterPlay with people where they worship helps spirituality become a whole body experience,” their website lists hospice and chaplaincy organizations as well as several churches as places to connect with the wider movement.

The leaders of InterPlay make no claim that what they do is art, and those who participate in its events and ongoing activities report the deep healing and spiritual growth that such participation promotes. However, by combining the experience and practices of various artistic disciplines with the notion of fun and play that is embedded in their very name, the notion that art and fun are somehow synonymous moves even more deeply into the collective understanding, both within and outside the church.

While understanding art as play, as self-expression, as community building, or even as therapy is not incorrect, such notions address only part of what art is for those whose primary vocational identity is artist. When artists talk about making art, they tend to call it work. Of course, artists do sometimes say that they are going to “go play in the studio,” but often when they say that, they mean that they are going to experiment with something new, do something light or inconsequential, or make something outside of their normal production. Attention to an ongoing project, however, is almost invariably considered work.

It is not accidental that a painting or sculpture is called a work of art; or that a musical composition is often given a number preceded by the word opus, the Latin word for work. For the serious practitioner, for the person whose primary vocational identity is that of artist, time spent in the studio is unequivocally work.

While such linguistic distinction may seem to be, itself, trivial, it leads churches (as well as society at large) to devalue what artists do and know. Unlike most other vocations, the arts can be practiced as a hobby, a spare-time activity done for relaxation and pleasure. Lawyers, doctors, or truck-drivers might pick up a guitar and strum for an hour or two in the evening as a way to unwind; a social worker, file clerk, or auto mechanic might throw paint onto canvas as a way to process a particularly stressful afternoon; a nurse, plumber, or CEO might join a local theater club as a way to make friends. For people who derive their primary vocational identity in non-art ways, their engagement with the arts, even as practitioners, often is not essentially different in character from slowpitch softball or fishing. It may be very important to them, and they may even become quite good at it, but it is understood as a delightful extra to the daily work which pays the bills and often brings a great deal of professional satisfaction of its own.

Artists, on the other hand, see their art-making activities as primary, as central to their understanding of who they are. This is not necessarily a matter of economics or even how many hours each day are spent in making art. Many artists are gainfully employed in some other occupation. But, among artists, this is known as one’s day job, done in order to pay the bills. For them, the real work of painting or sculpting or writing or composing is done as a second shift, often late into the night, and to the exclusion of adequate sleep, attention to relationships, or anything that might be a recreational activity. For serious artists, to make art—whether as an economic activity or as largely unpaid second shift—is a vocation in the true sense, a calling from God to work that, like ministry or medicine, is both burden and gift. When others assume that it is simply creative release, rather than real, serious work, artists tend to bristle.

Some artists do use the word play to describe what they do. Musicians play instruments; actors may refer to themselves as players; and, of course, what they are acting in is called “a play.” However, this understanding of play is not intended to imply some innocent, childish, useless occupation. Rather, it derives from an older sense of the word, which implied not so much frivolity as exercise. This sort of play, like professional sports, is seriously intentional, taking years of daily practice to do even marginally well.

The problem, then, is in equating what artists do with what is done merely for fun, as though they were weekend bowlers, or four-year-olds pretending to be superheroes. While a case can be (and sometimes is) made for the serious nature of this kind of play, as well, especially in connection with the socialization of children or the mental and spiritual health of adults, that is a discussion for another time and place. The point I am making here is that when the disciplined practice of art is trivialized as a childish pursuit, recreational hobby, or therapeutic technique, artists feel marginalized and misunderstood, left out of a conversation in which their own hard-won skill and knowledge is devalued by a culture where how hard one works is the marker of seriousness and commitment.

Spiritualizing Art: Art as Savior

Artists hold a special status in Western culture. Simultaneously revered and dismissed, they are presumed to possess a unique insight into the way the universe works even while they are ignored as irrelevant to the important work of the world. The starving artist is a common cultural trope, as is the artist as revolutionary, outsider, flaky, or weird. These stereotypes are largely the invention of the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, and were intensified by the writers, painters, and composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Lurid stories of Van Gogh going mad and cutting off his ear, of Cocteau and Baudelaire using cocaine and opium, of the enthusiasm for séances and automatic writing among the adherents of art movements such as Dada, of the general aura of licentiousness and debauchery surrounding the avant-garde, are circulated as evidence that artists are somehow different from ordinary people. Not only do they, themselves, live dangerously; their very existence is often seen as dangerous, as a threat to the morals and mores of the rest of society. Today, many artists continue to cultivate this aura of edginess, having internalized the role that society has given them.

In this discussion, I am speaking of artists quite broadly, to include not only practitioners of what might be called high art—concert music, opera, ballet, theater, painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, and the like—but also movie stars, pop singers, designers and others whose work falls under the general label of creative. Society tolerates—and sometimes even celebrates—the flamboyant clothing, the excessive use of alcohol and drugs, the flaunting of sexually charged extravagance, in part because the presumed reward to society is that the artists will return from their perilous journeys outside the ordinary with something precious to share with everyone else.

The reality may be quite different. Many (or perhaps most, it’s hard to know) artists live much more sedate lives. They get married, they worry about their kids’ schools, they pay their taxes, they go to church. If you met them on the street, you would not assume that they are any different from accountants, teachers, salesclerks, or waiters. For the most part, at least once they are out of art school, artists live like everybody else.

But the stereotypes persist, perhaps because there is a way in which artists are, in fact, different, and because this difference does sometimes lead to odd behaviors. Having trained their eyes, their ears, their minds to notice things that most other people do not, and to produce things that point to that noticing, they do something that people who are not artists perceive as outside the normal range of abilities. To paint a picture, to compose a tune, to choreograph a dance—these things seem marvelous, magical, the result not of work as it ordinarily understood but rather the product of a divine gift or genius.

I do not deny that some people do seem to have more innate talent than others. However, it is important to recall that even those who are more gifted than most still must work hard to develop that raw talent into something that others will recognize as great. In his memoir, The Street Where I Live, Alan Jay Lerner noted that every great star he had ever worked with never rested on talent alone, but worked harder, cared more, and had a greater sense of perfection than anyone else. He wrote,

I remember when I was doing a film with Fred Astaire, it was nothing for him to work three or four days on two bars of music. One evening in the dark grey hours of dusk, I was walking across the deserted MGM lot when a small, weary figure with a towel around his neck suddenly appeared out of one of the giant cube sound stages. It was Fred. He came over to me, threw a heavy arm around my shoulder and said, “Oh Alan, why doesn’t someone tell me I cannot dance?” The tormented illogic of this question made any answer sound insipid, and all I could do was walk with him in silence. Why doesn’t someone tell Fred Astaire he cannot dance? Because no one would ever ask that question but Fred Astaire. Which is why he is Fred Astaire.28

Such a story might be told of any talented, disciplined artist who strives continually to move towards a vision of perfection. The gift of talent is only a beginning, perhaps a necessary—but never a sufficient—condition of greatness. As someone said in another context, genius is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

Regardless of the presence or absence of innate talent, in many cultures, everyone is expected to sing, dance, tell stories, and/or make images with some degree of facility. Even in our own culture, until relatively recently every educated person was given some instruction in playing a musical instrument, making watercolor sketches, and singing sufficiently well to carry a tune. It is only in our own time and place that teaching these skills is so neglected that only certain specialists are expected to do them at all, with everyone else serving as passive, adoring audience.

However, even when the practice of art is widespread in a society, rather than the domain of a specialized few, certain pictures, tunes, dances, poems, plays, and other artworks seem—at least some of the time—to convey something that feels like revelation, like an encounter with the holy. It is this experience, even more than the presumed differentness of artists, that suggests that those who make such works have a special access to God. There is something about that access that we perceive as simultaneously dangerous and valuable. The artist is given license to be flamboyant in return for going into the dangerous domain of the hidden and bringing back visible (or audible, or tangible) evidence of what is found there. In the popular imagination, the artist is often understood as a kind of shaman, and flamboyant behavior is seen as evidence of that special status.

While artists may be given license to be unconventional and simultaneously castigated for doing so, it is the artwork itself that is often seen as salvific. The conflation of aesthetic experience with religious ecstasy is the source of a worshipful attitude towards art that is widespread, especially among the highly educated professionals who make up the bulk of the audience for (and patronage of) opera, ballet, concert music, and art museums. A worshipful attitude towards art as a whole, not simply this or that artwork, is particularly problematic because it denies both the particularity of individual artworks and the particularity of individual responses to them. As Barzun puts it,

. . . it is fraudulent to pass from a great artistic moment felt by one or more persons at a certain time and place to Art in general. Art does not consist only of masterpieces. Not all masterpieces overwhelm everybody equally, nor do they hold their magic invariably, eternally, and universally as the litany of religious adverbs pretends.29

As problematic as this attitude might be for those who profess no other religion, such sanctification of art presents even greater challenges when it is imported unreflectively into the church. Barzun is not addressing the church, but rather society at large. Nevertheless, his admonition regarding how to speak (or, more properly, not speak) about art applies to those within the church who want to advocate for the arts. He continues,

Because Art is not a singleminded power, it cannot fulfill the requirements of a religion. The priest speaks with authority to all believers, no matter what his personal failings; the artist speaks with authority only to some and only when his happy condition or theirs will permit. I know that each of us, from proprietary feelings, would like to say that my chosen artist, this divine work moves all mankind. It is simply not so. All the epithets of immortal, timeless, self-sustaining, and autonomous applied to any work are but brave lies, when they are not merely partisan publicity.30

John Witvliet notes in his preface to Frank Burch Brown’s Inclusive Yet Discerning that the values and assumptions about good and bad art, the function that art plays in human life, and how such art may affect our own lives, are formed outside of an institutional Christian context. Witvliet notes that when these assumptions are brought into our worship, they

. . . may help God’s people worship faithfully and vibrantly. They might, for example, help us to appreciate an artwork from a culture other than our own, or to discern the pathos or energy of a given work and its significance for Christian prayer and proclamation. At other times, however, these assumptions can erect barriers to faithful and vital worship. They might tempt us to worship artists or artworks instead of God, for example, or to fall into the kind of elitism or pragmatism that erodes our experience of grateful awe that is inherent in the act of worship. They might even prevent us from discerning how emerging forms of cultural expression might genuinely revitalize and deepen worship practices.31

Such assumptions lead to what is often termed the worship wars, in which different groups within a congregation argue over what kind of music is best for worship. Often, such differences of taste and opinion lead to separate services for those who prefer to sing the hymns they have known since childhood and those who find joy and comfort in praise choruses that sound more or less like the popular songs heard on the radio every day.

Elitist notions of what constitutes good music (or good art of any kind) can be especially pernicious, as when an organist or choir director’s taste is in conflict with that of the majority of the congregation. In an earlier book, Frank Burch Brown describes Methodist theologian Tex Sample’s report on the struggling, hard-living, working-class people, noting that they

relate to songs that other classes tend to scorn . . . . They don’t respond favorably to imported organists and choir directors insistent on using Bach and Brahms to “lift” the musical tastes of the congregation. They don’t much like musicians who feel compromised by the so-called musical debauchery of contemporary, gospel, and country music.32

Such assumptions also carry over into a more generalized notion that art is good for people, without much attention to what is meant by art, or what that good might consist in. Thus, the very real benefits that might accrue to people who practice an instrument, for example, are conflated with the quite different experiences of individuals who attend chamber music concerts, listen to rock-and-roll or rap, go to galleries that exhibit interactive digital art, or participate in a weekend retreat that encourages participants to make collages to explore their understanding of a biblical passage. While any of these activities may, in fact, be of benefit to participants, and all of them do fit loosely into the category of art (or the arts), it is not at all clear what either the activities or their benefits have in common.

Such assumptions also lead to the growing practice of designating the church organist or choir director as the Minister of the Arts. While in principle I am glad that such a ministry is recognized at all, it is unlikely that a person who is a proficient musician will also know how to address the issues involved in fostering an art gallery or studio, dance and drama ministries, or poetry workshops, just to name a few possibilities. In Voicing Creation’s Praise, Jeremy Begbie rightly cautions against allowing the visual to become the paradigm of an understanding of the arts. However, it is equally problematic for the specific concerns of music production and performance to dominate our understanding of the arts generally. Not all arts are equal in congregational life. While the type of music that is appropriate for worship is often a matter of contention, very few contemporary Christians would argue that there ought not to be any music at all. The other arts have varying levels of acceptance, and pose their own, particular production and performance problems.

I am not arguing here that a wide range of art activities have no place in Christian life. Rather, I am asking that those who advocate that the arts are integral to Christian life be more clear about how the various arts and differing levels of participation may lead to a fuller, richer, more authentic life in Christ. Rather than simply lumping all the arts, and all arts activities, together under one banner, I believe that it is important, at some level, at least, to make distinctions.

A Sanctified Art

In this chapter, I have looked at five general ways that the church, and society at large, misunderstands and misuses the arts. Whether we instrumentalize art, reducing it to a single meaning; commercialize it, turning it into a commodity rather than an experience; demonize it, seeing only its potential for idolatry or as an invitation to sin; trivialize it as child’s play or something to while away a free hour; or spiritualize it as a pathway to the Divine regardless of the specific theology or worldview embedded in a particular work, we lose track of the genuine, concrete benefits and dangers inherent in bringing art into our lives.

In the chapters to follow, I will explore the complex relationship between art, beauty, and truth as these terms are understood colloquially, theologically, and in the world of art criticism and theory; propose some ways that the church might speak more constructively about art, inviting both Christian and non-Christian artists into a dialogue that can enrich both our theology and our aesthetic experience; and consider how the arts might genuinely address our aching need for meaning, for communication, and for genuine worship of the One who calls us into relationship with one another and with God.

Finally, I will move towards a theology of art that is both sanctified and sanctifying. John Wesley taught that, while each Christian is justified by faith, we spend our entire lifetime moving towards Christian perfection, which he called sanctification. Art, like any human activity, is not perfect, nor does it have the ability to make us perfect. What it can do is carry the tune when we are off-key and keep the beat when we are out of step. A sanctified art is like a mirror that always tells the truth, even when we would rather it lie. A sanctified art can show us both who we are and who we are meant to be as we journey together towards perfection.

2. Reinhardt, “25 Lines,” 90.

3. Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 5.

4. Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise, xvi.

5. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, 59.

6. Leaver, “Liturgical Music,” 283.

7. Ibid., 284.

8. Ibid., 295.

9. Ibid., 292.

10. McDannell, Material Christianity, 133.

11. Ibid., 52, illustration 33.

12. Ibid., 56, illustration 40.

13. Ibid., 17–66 passim.

14. Milspaw, “Protestant Home Shrines,” 119.

15. Siedell, God in the Gallery, 22.

16. Ibid., 24; emphasis original.

17. Ibid., 28.

18. Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 4.

19. Augustine, Confessions, book 10, chapter 33.

20. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Bernard of Clairvaux: Apology.”

21. Suger, “De Administratione,” 65–67.

22. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Bernard of Clairvaux: Apology.”

23. Barzun, Use and Abuse of Art, 26.

24. Ibid., 27.

25. Ibid.

26. Sullivan, Windows into the Soul, sec. 53.

27. Winton-Henry and Porter, “InterPlay.”

28. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 89.

29. Barzun, Use and Abuse of Art, 87–88.

30. Ibid., 88.

31. Witvliet, “Series Preface,” viii.

32. Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, 8.