Christianity and Art

Art for God's Sake: A Call to Recover the Arts
By Philip Graham Ryken
P & R Publishing, 2006
(64 pages, $5.99, paperback)

Art & the Bible
By Francis A. Schaeffer
InterVarsity Press, 1973
(64 pages, $7.00, paperback)

reviewed by Elizabeth Hopkins Mickle

Philip Graham Ryken’s Art for God’s Sake: A Call to Recover the Arts is just that: a rallying cry, a plea for the church to embrace the arts as gifts of God, ordained and blessed in his word; to recognize the vocation of artists as a true calling, of equal importance as (and in fact similar in purpose to) the vocations of preachers and prophets; to support Christian artists rather than “surround[ing] them with a climate of suspicion,” making their already difficult work even harder. Ryken writes, “The dual purpose of this booklet is to encourage Christian artists in the pursuit of their calling and to give artists and nonartists alike a short introduction to thinking Christianly about the arts,” and he accomplishes both of these goals quite well. Drawing textual evidence from Exodus 31, in which God calls Bezalel and Oholiab to build his tabernacle, Ryken argues that God himself calls individuals to be artists, to create, that this (as Dorothy L. Sayers argued) is in large part what it means to be made in the image of God. And not only does God call artists, but he will bless them in all forms of art, so long as the art work meets his standards of goodness, truth, and beauty.

Francis A. Schaeffer, in his classic pamphlet Art & the Bible, published thirty-three years earlier, makes similar assertions. While Ryken’s argument rests almost exclusively on Exodus 31, with a few references to the Psalms, Schaeffer builds his argument from the whole Bible: the construction of the tabernacle in Exodus and of the temple in Chronicles and Kings; the poetry in Samuel, the Psalms, and the Song of Solomon; the music in Exodus and Chronicles; and more. Schaeffer finds every major art form of the period in the Bible, in both sacred and secular usages; by extension he asserts that modern art forms also receive this blessing. He leaves no room for doubt that God’s commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” is an injunction not against art, but against idolatry. Therefore our primary concern must be discernment of content and of purpose: as Schaeffer notes, “It is not that every use of any of these art forms is automatically right but that they are not wrong per se.” At the same time, “we must not be misled or naive in thinking that various styles have no relation whatsoever to the content or the message.” That is, there may be a subtle message in the choice of style that is not explicit in the content; conversely, the artist cannot arbitrarily choose a style but must suit it to his subject and audience. When a work of art follows these principles and is done well--exhibiting artistic excellence, truthful content, and beautiful form--it will glorify God; in Schaeffer’s words, it “can be a doxology in itself.”

Schaeffer and Ryken are largely in agreement, and Ryken owes much to Schaeffer’s work (he even closes his essay with a comment on an extract from Schaeffer’s). Both recognize that the church has long neglected or rejected the arts, much to its detriment and shame. Both assert that art is an unavoidable and integral part of every Christian’s life, not just those specifically called as artists. The two agree that, in Schaeffer’s words, “there is no such thing as a godly style or an ungodly style,” that art need not be explicitly religious to be Christian, and that Christian artists can and should use a variety of media and styles to portray a variety of truths about God’s world. Finally, as stated earlier, both affirm that art glorifies God when it is good, true, and beautiful. Yet on this point there is a significant divergence in how each author would judge how well the work of an individual artist meets those criteria.

In Schaeffer’s view, an artist’s worldview and his success or failure at glorifying God must never be judged from any single work; each work must be taken as part of a whole body of work. “No artist can say everything he might want to say or build everything he might want to build into a single work.” For Schaeffer, the audience has a responsibility to experience and interpret as much of the artist’s work as possible, in order to see a full picture. Thus an artist has the freedom to tell different parts of the story at different times and in different works. Some works may focus on the fall of man and human depravity, “the abnormality of the revolting world,” what Schaeffer calls the “minor theme” of the Christian world view; other works may focus on the “major theme,” redemption, “the meaningfulness and purposefulness of life.” Schaeffer argues that while the major theme should be predominant in the body of an artist’s work, a body of work which never reflects the fall “is not fully Christian but simply romantic.”

Ryken agrees on the necessity of showing the whole story, even referencing Schaeffer’s idea of the major and minor themes. He suggests that if art leaves out the fall, it risks becoming “sentimental” or “kitsch,” which he defines as “tacky artwork of poor quality that appeals to low tastes.” On the other hand, if art focuses too much on the fall, neglecting redemption, it becomes too much like the “art of alienation” practiced by modernist and post-modernist artists, who suffer from “a tragic loss of sacred beauty.” Yet he differs significantly on how we are to judge and artist’s work. Where Schaeffer insists on judging the entire body of work, or as much of it as possible, Ryken seems to require that, in order to be “truly Christian,” any given work should cover both the major and minor themes:

“[W]hatever stories it tells, and whatever ideas or emotions it communicates, art is true only if it points in some way to the one true story of salvation—the story of God’s creation, human sin, and the triumph of grace through Christ.”

Interestingly, this difference is reflected in the exegesis each author uses in his defense of art: Schaeffer takes his evidence from the whole body of God’s (written) work, The Holy Bible, while Ryken makes his argument from a single work, the book of Exodus. As Ryken writes, “a creation always reveals something about its creator.”