The Disconnect: Why Evangelicals Make Bad Art, Part 23
In the past twenty-two posts, we have essayed to assay the reasons that Evangelical Americans, who reportedly comprise betwixt one-fifth and one-fourth of our population, have produced so few examples of quality art of any sort. We have divined that this paucity of works of art is largely due to limited (and/or distorted) views of Biblical teaching (or a failure to act on the implications of its teaching), despite the fact that artistry is unquestionably one of “every good work” in which Scripture is to instruct Christians (2 Tim 3:16-17).
We saw the negative effects of sub-Biblical beliefs on the doctrines of Creation and Eschatology, which result in denigrations of the physical world and time as appropriate theaters of God’s Purposes, encouraging pessimism concerning history, and of seeing the world as Satan’s domain, which needs only to be escaped from, rather than redeemed and fulfilled.
We also saw that deficient perspectives on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity lead to a destruction of Scriptural justification of symbols as simultaneously revealing both multiple and unified meanings. Deficient Trinitarian views lead as well to seeing men not as mysterious bearers of God’s Image, but as simplistic machines manipulable by quick-fix formulae.
We turned then to a consideration of the implications of Christ’s Incarnation, in which God, in the Second Person of the Trinity, joined Himself to a fully Human Nature and Body, in order to be the Perfect Sacrifice to atone for fallen mankind’s sin by dying in their place. As summed up by the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451), the Incarnation is realized in Christ Jesus since He is “at once complete in Godhead and complete in Manhood, truly God and truly Man…”
This doctrine is a refutation of the Classical and Pietistic views which pit matter and spirit against each other despite the Scriptural teaching that physicality is a proper arena for spirituality (Rom 12: 1-2). We saw also that, since Jesus is fully Human, every area of human life (except for sin) are both proper and necessary to humanity’s vocation before God.
A departure from an emphasis on the Biblical teaching that the Lord Jesus is both fully God and Man simultaneously inevitably yields a distorted view of reality and redemption, resulting, among other disasters, in a malformed and shallow artistic expression.
Many Evangelicals today reflect an unBiblical perspective on the Incarnation which mirrors in key ways the heretical distortions of Nestorianism (from about 428 A.D.), which believed that Christ Jesus’ Human Nature was only loosely united to His Divine Nature, so that His Humanity was not truly joined to His Divine Nature and Person.
The Biblical view that Christ is One Person, both fully Human and fully Divine, was deemed by the Nestorians as a blasphemous assault on Christ’s Divinity, which the Nestorians saw as too holy to be conjoined with anything human.
Such a view leads to the conclusion that, just as Christ’s Humanity was seen by Nestorians as something which had to be only tolerated in its close proximity to His Divinity, and as an unfortunately necessary base for the really important Divine Nature of Christ in His Revelation and Divine Mission, so also the particulars and generalities of humanity are seen as things to be at best loosely tolerated and at worst ignored, and as irrelevances to God’s Revelation and Mission.
For a Nestorian, humanity is at best peripheral to the importance of God’s Being and Purposes, rather than something which itself is an arena for spiritual importance, relevance, and revelation, as the Incarnation teaches us.
Since many Evangelicals in their imaginations and doctrine consider Jesus as only or primarily God, rather than the Incarnate God-Man (as fully Human as He is Divine), the importance of the full spectrum of human life (politics, art, science, etc.) is denigrated as inherently unspiritual and thus spiritually irrelevant.
This view inevitably flattens and enshallows reality, resulting in flat and shallow depictions of reality in our artistic expressions, giving these expressions the lie, showing them to be distorted and flawed as art, and rightfully to be ignored. We must return to a fully-orbed, robustly Biblical view of the Incarnation if our art is to be seen as valid and truthful.
For additional teaching on Biblical worldview, visit Patreon.
A helpful book on Biblical worldview:
