The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do - Part 9

Last post, as we continued our study of the example of the sons of Issachar (1 Chr 12:32) for Christian artists today (e.g., understanding the times, and knowing what New Israel, the Church, should do), we began to consider the question of how much artistic freedom Christian artists and audiences have artistically.  The question was asked: what things cannot be seen, heard, or considered artistically, either by the artists or the audience, without incurring sin?

To answer this, we looked at the Bible to see how depictions of the categories of human experience most frequently considered suspect by Christians today were handled by the inspired writers (2 Peter 1:20-21) of Holy Writ.  The categories we considered were depictions of nudity, sex, and graphic violence.  We discovered that all of these were addressed in Scripture in ways that would be thought wicked by a large part of today’s Evangelical Church.  (The passages discussed were: for nudity, Proverbs 5:18-19; for the sexual acts of the wicked, Ezekiel 23:19-21; and for graphic violence, Judges 3:21-22 and 1 Samuel 15:32-33.)  We concluded that all of life’s categories are to be addressed legitimately, as long as it is remembered that no category of life, artistically rendered or not, should ever promote sin.  They should, rather, promote righteousness and help inhibit sin.

The final arbiter of how that is to be done is, of course, God, and He has given us His infallible Word (2 Tim 3:16-20) to tell us how to do just that.  We clearly see from the Scriptural passages just listed that His idea of how to depict human actions like sex and violence in order to promote righteousness (the promotion of which is one of Scripture’s primary purposes) differs substantially from the ideas of most modern Evangelical Christians.  The question posed in the last post was: why is there a difference in God’s idea and we modern Christians’ ideas on this subject, especially when we claim to be ruled by Scripture?  Why do American Christians have so much difficulty accepting that these and all categories of life in godly contexts are legitimate?

At the core of the problem is confusion about what biblically constitutes holiness (e.g., how should a Christian believe and act in order to honor Christ?).  This confusion is a result of two pagan systems of thought which have crept into the Church’s views early on (and have been competing with fully Biblical doctrine ever since): Platonism and its evil child, Gnosticism.

In the world of the Early Church, educated men were trained in Platonic thought just as modern men are taught naturalism (which is the underpinning of evolutionary scientism, modern psychology and sociology, etc.).  When these educated men converted to Christ, they carried with them inadvertently a thought grid, or way of looking at the world, that was formed by Platonic thought, and this affected the way they looked at parts of the Bible.

Plato taught that the physical body should be rejected as “mortal trash,” and denounced works of art as inferior copies of the eternal Forms or Essences, useful only as a religious way to escape from the visible and the physical.  From the loins of Platonism sprang a system of thought called Gnosticism, which held that all matter and our bodies, the entire physical world, are innately evil, and that only non-physical things (like the human spirit) are good.

Splitting the created world into bad parts and good parts in this fashion is called dualism.  Dualism is in direct conflict with the Bible, which explicitly says that everything God created is good (1 Tim 4:4; Gen 1:9, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).  (I am not, of course denying the Fall and its radical and monstrous consequences, as we will see in the next post.  Remember, though that both St. Paul and Moses were very aware of the Fall, and still wrote in 1 Timothy and Genesis, respectively, about the goodness of Creation under the Holy Spirit’s direction [2 Peter 20-21]).

Generally, the Early Church Fathers renounced Gnosticism’s hard-core denunciation of the physical, but they unfortunately frequently retained the matter/spirit dualism in its milder Platonic form, which, remember, was the received educational wisdom of the day.  This led many in the Church to devalue art, sex, the body, and the physical world generally.  This viewpoint has been passed down through the centuries in various forms to today’s Church, and has been (and still is) at war with Biblical, Creation-affirming, Incarnational Christianity, watering the Faith down and radically and negatively affecting the Arts amongst Christians.

Why did the exemplary and godly Fathers of the Church continue to identify with this pagan view of reality?  Why do Christians still today continue to (though it is called by a different name now)?  The answer lies in a sad confusion of terms.  What terms?  The world and the flesh, which terms we will (God willing) consider closely next week.

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The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do, Part 8

Ehud stabbing Elgon (Judges 3)

The last two posts presented an overview of this series on a study of the Sons of Issachar (commented in 1 Chr 12:32) as a model for Christian artists.  One of the two things they were commended for was “knowing what Israel should do.”  Knowing what Israel should do translates for us today into the necessity of knowing Scripture as the divine blueprint for what we are to believe and to do as members of Christ’s Church, the spiritual Israel (Gal 3:6-9; Eph 2:11-22, 3:6; Rom 2:28-29; etc.).  This involves knowing what Scripture teaches, its content and forms, knowledge of which prepares the Christian “for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17), which includes the good work of obedience of Christ’s call to a musical/artistic ministry.

Beginning this week, we will consider the pressing question of how much freedom the Christian artist has, which is related to the question of how much freedom the Christian audience has.  What things cannot be seen, heard, or considered artistically, either by the artist or the audience, without sinning?

These are questions which face almost all Christians in America (and the world) today, not just artists, but all Christians who watch movies or TV, who read fiction, or listen to music (especially contemporary music of anysort, including modern and contemporary classical and CCM).

To answer these questions, we must see how Scripture limits the categories of human experience.  What categories are off-limits to the Christian according to the Holy Writ?  Let us look at some of the categories most objected to by Christians today: depictions of nudity, sex, and graphic violence.  Does the Bible, through which the Holy Spirit speaks (2 Peter 1:20-21), treat these categories, and, if so, how?  How does the greatest work of art in creation, the Bible, treat these subjects?  Straightforwardly? Let’s see:

Does the Bible eschew sensuality or put negative connotations on it?  Witness Proverbs 5:18-19: “May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.  A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.”  This, along with other portions of Scripture (notably the Song of Solomon) all address sexual sensuality in the context of marriage without shying away from, or pulling any punches about, sexuality.

What about the sexual acts of the wicked?  Does Scripture address these explicitly?  Read Ezekiel 23:19-21: “Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt.  There she lusted after her lovers, who genitals were like those of donkeys, whose emissions were like that of horses.  So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.”  Here we have the Prophet Ezekiel speaking God’sassessment of Israel’s wicked behavior as God through Ezekiel brings charges against Israel.

Does God’s Word contain graphic descriptions of violence?  Judges 3:21-22 says, “So Ehud came to him (now he was sitting upstairs in his cool private chamber).  Then Ehud said, ‘I have a message from God for you.’  So he arose from his seat.  Then Ehud reached with his left hand, took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly.  Even the hilt went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not draw the dagger out of his belly; and his entrails came out.”  Here we hear the detailed story of the violent assassination of the tyrant Eglon by the righteous deliverer Ehud, raised up by God for this purpose.

Samuel the Prophet, God’s advisor to Kings Saul and David, is graphically recorded as enforcing God’s sentence against Agag when Saul failed to in 1 Samuel 15:32: “Then Samuel said, ‘Bring Agag, king of the Amalekites here to me.’  So Agag came to him cautiously, and Agag said, ‘Surely the bitterness of death is past.’  But Samuel said, ‘As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.’  And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.”

Now, obviously, the context of sex and violence in Scripture promotes a correct understanding of these categories of human action (e.g., porn movies and hardcore slasher movies are not being justified in the Bible, or in this post).  However, all of the categories of life are addressed.  It certainly appears that God has in place His plans for both sex and violence.  Remember the context, though: No category of life, artistically rendered or not, should ever promote sin.  On the contrary, the purpose of all these categories, both in art, and all categories of life, is to promote righteousness and help inhibit sin.

Something else that should be obvious is that, in the proper contexts, neither sex (in marriage) no violence (in legitimate uses) are inherently evil.  This is patently obvious from the Scripture reviewed here, and a host of other passages.  Why, then, did Charlie Peacock receive criticism for a song in the 90’s which addressed sexuality in his and his wife’s relationship, and James Byron Huggins receive the same for his depictions of graphic violence in his Christian novels?  Why has the band Atomic Opera received criticism for the cover of their album Penguin Dust, which is of a naked child playing on a beach?  Why do some coalitions of Christians condemn any artistic depiction of violence and sexuality (even in biblical contexts) as sinful, when the Bible, as we have seen (even in the small sampling in this post), uses both violence and sexuality in godly context?  Why do Christians in America today have so much difficulty accepting that these and all categories of life in godly contexts are legitimate?  There is an answer to this question, and we will (God willing) take it up in the next post.

The Sons of Issachar and the Task of the Christian Artist Revisited Part 2

In my last post, we began to sum up the implications of what it means for the Christian artist to apply one of the two prongs of the model of the sons of Issachar (1 Chr 12:32) to his artistic vocation—“. . .knowing what Israel should do.”  As we saw then, this phrase translates for us into the necessity of knowing the Bible as the divine blueprint for what we are to believe and do, both as individuals and as corporate members of Christ’s Body.  The other prong, by the way, is “understanding the times,” which equates into the need for us to understand our historical and cultural situation in order to influence our society, by our artistry, toward submission to Christ.)  As we saw earlier, the Word of God remains our only guide to the unchanging Truth we must communicate to constantly changing history, societies, and traditions (2 Tim 3:16-17, Isa 8:20, etc.).

We must assess all things through the lens of the Holy Scripture to gauge the worth of those things, and to know how to proceed in moving the culture around us toward obedience to the Law of Christ.  This means, of course, that the Bible is absolutely central to any Christian calling, and Christian artistry is not excepted from that necessity for biblical orientation.  The bottom line is that Christian artists (like all Christians) must know the Bible as to both its content and form, and as to how that content and form impinge upon his vocation.

Now, for most Christians (especially we Evangelicals), this is almost an axiomatic truism.  We’ve heard that we must know Scripture so often that we must have stopped hearing it.  Yet most of us do not know Scripture well at all.  Why not?  There are, I think, two primary reasons for this (though there are many more peripheral reasons):

First, we are lazy.  Western civilization in general (and American culture specifically) has been growing increasingly lazier over the last forty years or so, and the Western Church has not escaped the influence of this trend (if, in fact, there is good evidence we contributed to it greatly).  Despite the fact that, at no time in the Christian Church’s two-millennia history have more helps for individual and congregational Bible study on all levels existed, fewer and fewer people are bothering to use the incredible opportunities to learn God’s Word that have been laid before us.  We increasingly insist on smaller and smaller, less challenging, more easily “digested” increments of Scripture (milk instead of meat, cf. Heb 5:12-14), and only want to sip at this insipid gruel in the few minutes set aside for preaching at the Sunday morning service we graciously interrupt our important lives to attend (provided, or course, it doesn’t run over into the ball game or our lunch time).

We must put aside our laziness and selfish pursuits to study God’s Word and Will.  God does not honor laziness, as the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25) so effectively (and chillingly) teaches.  Solomon the King wrote that the ear of the wise seeks knowledge (Prov 18:15), as does the heart of him who has understanding (Prov 15:14).  The wise, he says, store up knowledge (Prov 10:14), and the one who loves instruction loves knowledge (knowledge is imparted through instruction, (Prov 12:1)).  Proverbs 23:12 delivers a straight command: “Apply your heart to instruction, and your ears to words of knowledge.”

Most of us don’t even read Scripture daily, much less study and learn it.  In a time when millions of books, tapes, videos, etc., exist to help us shape our study of the Bible, this is a travesty, and a shame to us all.  Let us cast aside our weight and sin of laziness, to run with endurance our God-given race (Heb 12:1-2).  Lazy one—Repent!

Secondly, American Christians do not know the Bible well because, increasingly, the Church’s understanding of the nature of spirituality has been captured by an extremely experience-oriented doctrine that despises and/or ignores the intellectual and historical aspects of the Faith.  Don’t misunderstand me, here—it isnecessary and desirable that we experience, in a living relationship, the Lord Jesus’ Love and Fellowship.  We must have that ongoing experience as part of our lives if we are to be truly biblical in our faith.  But it is equally important that the objective content of Christian Faith be part of our lives.  Otherwise, we become warped and unbalanced.  Let me point out a few of the results of our current experientially-oriented situation.

As the Church has gradually divested Herself of ties to doctrinal content and historical reality (e.g., who the Bible says Jesus was, and that He really was at all), She has seen rise from her ranks heretics who deny that Jesus was God, or that He truly resurrected from death, or, for that matter, that He lived at all.  These things don’t really matter, these infidels say, it only matters that you know Him in your “spiritual experience” (most of these folks work at seminaries or head up denominations now).  Another group of heretics have fallen prey to the universalistic teaching of the New Ages, saying that doctrine doesn’t matter, just the experience of “the Christ we can all feel and love.”

Admittedly, these are both extreme examples, but they are also both logical extensions of the experience-dominated Christianity all too frequently taught today.  Generally, though, the influence of experientialist teaching has resulted in Christians who know about God, but aren’t that interested in working to know aboutHim, except as it helps them continue to cop their Jesus-buzz (and the less effort they have to expend on that, the better they like it).  The quest for good Christian vibrations can’t be interpreted, in the experientialists’ view, by paltry things like serving the world by bringing biblical Truth to bear across the spectrum of human need and despair, and bringing the culture of dying humanity into line with God’s All-Encompassing Word.

Since, to a greater or lesser degree, the clear majority of Evangelicals today have been influenced by experientialist imbalance, these millions of Bible studies help sell to few Christians, and our Christian bookstores are rife with books of (mostly bad) fiction, quick-fix psycho-babble, and kitschy Jesus junk, with few commentaries, systematic theologies, in-depth study helps, etc.  They don’t sell well (if at all).

This is most curious to me, because the simple truth of the matter is that the quality (and quantity, ultimately) of Christian experience disintegrates increasingly in direct proportion to the lack of knowledge of Scripture’s objective content.  The only way to tell, you see, if an experience is really Christian (and not New Age or neo-orthodox, say) is by checking it against the Bible’s Teaching.  Further, if no check is consistently made of ongoing experiences, and they do depart from orthodox Christian experience, God is highly likely to withdraw Himself from the situation, and guess who steps into the divine vacuum to give a few experiences of his own (2 Cor 11:14-15)?

Biblical balance is desirable (the opposite imbalance, intellectualistic anti-experientialism, results in cold, dead, dry legalism, by the way).

Both of these things (laziness and experientialism) that keep Christians from knowing Scripture must be repudiated and repented of by the Church for a number of reasons (the Anger of God Is a good one that comes to mind), not least of which is the one that ties in to the model provided by Issachar’s sons for the artist today:  We cannot “understand our times” unless we know the Bible.

Knowledge of the Word is primary in our artistic task, because we cannot accurately assess to any depth the times we live in without the comprehensive knowledge imparted by Scripture.  The Bible is the lens to correct our fallen vision.  Like the sons of Issachar, we must work hard, roll up our sleeves, and don those biblical glasses.

The Sons of Issachar and the Task of the Christian Artist Revisited

A few weeks ago, I began a series of posts dedicated to exploring the ways in which the example of the Sons of Issachar, recorded in 1 Chronicles 12:32, applied to the task of the Christian Artist in our time.  I feel it necessary to re-cap, at least as an overview, the general thrust of past posts, to provide continuity with what is (Lord willing) to come.

The First Book of Chronicles, in its twelfth chapter, lists the groups of warriors who came to support David the Psalmist while he was living at Ziklag in order to escape King Saul’s wicked persecution of him.  These soldiers recognized that Israel was to be given to David by the will of God (v 23), and pledged themselves and their abilities to David to help accomplish that end.  This passage lists not only these men, but also notes their talents.  Verse 32 reads, “Men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do. . .” (NIV).  I believe that these sons of Issachar displayed a vital ability that today’s Christians (especially those who are artists) need desperately to recover.  What precisely, the reader may ask, is this ability?  What does it mean to “understand the times and know what Israel should do?”

The knowledge of what Israel, God’s People, should do, can be based on one thing only: Holy Scripture, which as the Light of our path (Ps 119:105) and the Way to Life (Prov 6:23), is the Church’s only infallible guide and standard for faith and duty (Prov 29:18; Isa 8:20, Gal 1:8, 1 Thess 2:13, 2 Tim 3:16-17, etc.).  The Bible speaks to the entire spectrum of human existence, providing for mankind’s guidance and illumination for every situation ever to be faced by our race.  The Word of God is the divinely-inspired body of written Truth that reveals the knowledge of the Triune God, His Creation, and His Saving Acts on behalf of His people.  This body of knowledge is the basis of theology (“the knowledge of God” in Greek), and all Christians should strive to learn and understand Scripture so that they may have an ever-increasing knowledge of God (theology) to inform and shape every aspect of our lives and actions, so that we might know what God would have us do in every circumstance we pass into.  The importance of theology for the obvious: it provides the biblical “way of seeing” that gives the artist the content or subject matter of his art, as well as influencing the form of his art, as the artist learns how the various art forms in Scripture are used by God and His Church to communicate knowledge of Him to different (and all) cultures.

The sons of Issachar knew the Bible and its commands and precepts (and so should we).  But what, then, does it mean to “understand the times?”  This means that the sons of Issachar knew the meaning of the historical situation that Israel found herself in.  They understood the history (the origins, development, culture, sociology, etc.) of Israel and the nations surrounding her, as well as the interchanges and relationship of Israel within herself and with the nations round about.  They knew the temper and mood of their people and culture.  They had obviously put serious effort into studying their nation’s history and cultural development.  This type of knowledge is just as important for Christians today as it was in David’s time.  If we as artists fail to understand our history and cultural development, it will hamper the effective fulfillment of our artistic calling greatly.  Only as we understand these areas will we know how to effectively communicate the timeless Truth of Christ in such a way that the culture of our own time will understand and be engaged by it.  Only an understanding of our culture’s place in history (how it developed into the cultural nexus it is, and what it is developing toward) will clue us in as to the forms of art that will most readily be received today by the people around us, and as to what the most pressing needs of our contemporary society are (such as the current abortion holocaust crisis, and the breakdown of the concepts of absolute right and wrong, etc.).

Both types of knowledge (the historical and the theological) were necessary to the sons of Issachar’s ability to discern the times, and both are necessary to us today if we as Christian artists are to be any help to the Church’s mission to fulfill her Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20).  Issachar’s sons were only able to interpret their time because of their knowledge of the key to the parable of history, the Bible.  However, if they had not intimately known their history and cultural development, they wouldn’t have been able to apply scriptural revelation to it, and thus their scriptural knowledge, while good, would have been useless to God’s people in a practical (or applied) sense.  Both kinds of knowledge together are what allowed the sons of Issachar to help fulfill God’s Will in their own lives, and in the life of their nation.

This is no less true for us today.  If we are to speak effectively as artists (or as Christians of any other calling) to what the Church and our culture are to do, we must emulate our ancient brothers in the Faith, and seek to understand the times through the lens of Scripture.  God willing, we will finish the re-cap next week.

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Symbols

This week, I am diverging a bit to recap the influence of symbols on the revelation of God in art.  Following are examples of the impact of symbological reality in various people’s lives.  St. Patrick used the common Irish clover to help the pagan and newly-converted Irish understand the concept of the Trinity.  There was oneclover plant (showing the ousia, the unity of being or essence in the divine Trinity, e.g., the unity of God), but three separate leaves on it (representing the hypostases, or Persons in the Trinity, e.g., the diversity of God), altogether giving a symbolic analogy of the Trinity.

Patrick believed that God had made the plant, the clover in that way, to image an aspect of His Being.  He was also helped by the fact that the Druidic religion taught a Divine Being who had three faces or aspects (Duw-a-digon), which Patrick took as a foreshadowing of the coming of the full revealed truth.

In the same vein, Don Richardson, in his three excellent books, Peace Child, Lord of the Earth, and pre-eminently, Eternity in Their Hearts, demonstrates forcefully that God has set symbolic pointers to Himself in every pagan culture.  

If we see these key pointers, we can use them as a springboard for effectively and meaningfully preaching the gospel to a pagan society.  In Peace Child, Richardson discusses the difficulty missionaries had in presenting the gospel to a primitive culture to whom the greatest good was treachery.  In their view, Judas was the hero of the gospel story!!!  Only by realizing that the generally frequent warfare between the (naturally treacherous) tribes could only be effectively halted by the mutual exchange of hostages (the respective chiefs’ sons, generally) who lived as a peace-child, and by presenting Christ as the Peace-Child between God and man, were there (numerous!!) conversions.

Eternity in Their Hearts shows how such symbolic representations exist in every culture (they have to, because of the nature of reality), and how effective they have been, can be, and are in missions work, if we understand and use symbolic theology.  I wept through this book.  It restored my flagging faith in missions.  I was calling friends and reading (large) portions over the phone to them.

Pastor C.H. Kang, a Chinese minister, in distributing Bible portions of the Book of Genesis as a chaplain in a mission hospital in China about fifty years ago, noticed that the ideographic Chinese written character for boatwas comprised of a combination of simple characters meaning “a vessel,” “eight,” and “person,” and thought it interesting that Noah’s Ark, the first great boat, had just eight (human) passengers: Noah and his wife, his three sons, and their wives.

He noticed that, also, the character for to create consisted of the components “dust” (mud), “mouth,” and “able to walk.”  He thought of Genesis 2:7: “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed (with His mouth) into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being (not a baby, but an adult, able to walk).

Devil is “son” plus “garden” (field) plus “secret” (private), plus “alive” indicating Satan’s (an angelic “son of God” [Job 1-2, Gen 6:1-4]) secret approach to Eve in Eden.  The devil radical plus “cover” and “two trees” equals a tempter, i.e., Satan tempted Eve under the cover of two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Four decades later, Pastor Kang had traced the history of Genesis up to the Tower of Babel (Gen 1-11), and traced the migration of the Chinese to their present locale in the 4,500-year-old Chinese script.  He had also written a book on the subject called Genesis and the Chinese.  He had led many Chinese to Christ through the demonstration of this truth.

At the time the written language of China was being formulated (BC 2500), the Chinese were a monotheistic people who worshipped Shang ti, the Emperor of Heaven.  It wasn’t until two thousand years after that Taoism and Buddhism (both polytheistic cults) arose in or came to China.

Thus the Oriental alphabetic ideograms (214 radicals, or pictographs; 700 ideographs comprised of two or more simple characters united to give a new idea; and some 20,000 phonetic characters that are radicals brought together for sound rather than meaning [relatively modern]) in their earlier (radical or pictography) state parallels the history of Genesis to the eleventh chapter.

Pastor Kang and an American pathologist who served in Thailand for years, named Ethel Nelson, together wrote a book about this called The Discovery of Genesis.  (Highly recommended)

G.K. Chesterton, English journalist, novelist, lecturer and scholastic man of letters was a devout Roman Catholic, and one of the few Victorian Christians who castigated and debated publicly (and with great success) the advent of evolutionary theory, rather than turning tail and hiding his head under a mound of anti-intellectual pseudo-“faith.”

He wrote the Father Brown detective stories, Napoleon of Notting’s Hill, voluminous amounts of excellent poetry, biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, and apologetical works, The Everlasting Man, Heretics, and Orthodoxy.  The last three works were answers to the secularistic thought of his day, espousing over against them historic, orthodox Christianity as the only real alternative.

A deep understanding of symbols and allegory was central to his apologetic (or defense) of Christianity as Reality.  For instance, one of the two major arguments in Orthodoxy was presented in a chapter called “The Ethics of Elfland,” in which Chesterton argued that the symbolism even in children’s fairy tales mirrors the pattern of reality so much (especially since even fairy tales are part of God’s created order) that one can see reality’s basic nature (i.e., general revelation) in the tales themselves.

This is just a small sampling that shows the influences of symbols and their importance on the revelation of God in Art.

For additional teaching on The Arts and Symbology check out the Worship series and the Windows to Glory series www.patreon.com/kempercrabb

The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do, Part 7

In the past few weeks, we have examined the meaning of symbols for men generally and for the Christian (and Christian artist) more specifically, seeing that created symbols (which every part of Creation, both separately and together, constitutes) are used by God to reveal Himself to men (Ps 19; Rom 1; Gen 1; etc.).  

We saw also that God has constructed Reality in such a way that symbols simultaneously carry multiple meanings.  Primarily, they symbolize God in one or more of His Persons, or His Character or Actions.  Secondarily, they mean themselves and related meanings (e.g., a man means a man, but also may mean a father, son, king, servant, etc.).  We saw as well that mankind’s ability to rightly interpret these symbols as revealing God was greatly crippled by the Fall and the deliberate spiritual rebellion that occasioned it (Gen 3; Rom 1:18).  Finally, we saw that part of the Christian artist’s calling is to help restore the primary meaning of Creation’s symbols to men so that they might see God’s Glory, and turn to His Service.  This is especially true since artistry is essayed through the use of symbols.

We must remember that Christ has made Reality one.  All things interlock; all created things, as symbols, point to and reveal God on all levels.  Modernity, the modern anti-Christian mindset, atomizes—it attempts to split Reality apart and say that things mean nothing beyond themselves (and thus, ultimately, nothing at all).  The increasing result of modernity is that modern Western Man is alienated from God, society, family, and even himself.  The fact that Christianity teaches that all things interlock and have ultimate meaning is itself a great source of hope for modern despair-riddled, meaning-starved men, because that fact means that life, reality, work, even ourselves have real meaning before God.

Within fallen man, though, is lodged the tendency to suppress the Truth that Reality’s symbol reveals (Rom 1:18-32), and this devilish trait causes a most dire result:  it causes men to deny the primary, most important meaning of any symbol (the revelation of God), and attempt to interpret all symbols in terms of one or more of their interlocking secondary meanings (normally, in terms of themselves), fighting in depth to deny the obvious, primary meaning and claiming that the secondary meaning(s) are all that symbols mean (thus, of course, cutting the God they don’t wish to be accountable to out of the loop).  This inevitably leads to spiritual schizophrenia (and, consequently, other types of schizophrenia as well).

The most important consequence of the modern approach to symbols, though, is that it ultimately leads to the denial of any meaning for Reality.  If there is nothing to give ultimate meaning to things, then that is exactly what they mean—nothing.  If Reality (including mankind) is not the result of the purposeful action of a Personal Creator-God, if it is rather the result of only time plus chance plus energy alone, then ultimate meaning is absent—we are a cosmic accident.

This is why it is so important for Christians to demonstrate first that there is ultimate meaning behind all of Creation (made easier by the fact that God has inscribed this Truth on the knowledge of all men—Romans 1:18), and secondly, that all of the various meanings of things interlock not only with themselves, but also with the primary meaning of God’s Existence as well.  The demonstration of this is a powerful argument for Scripture’s Truth, and Christian artists, since they regularly work with symbols in varying degrees, are in a terrific position to make just this demonstration.

With this realization of the multiplicity of meanings inherent in symbols arises a question:  How explicit must my art be to accomplish this goal?  A good question, and one that, Christ willing, we will examine next week.

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The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do Part 6

Last week we saw that, besides the vital propositional Truth given us in Scripture, God has also revealed Himself to man by means of Creation, which is designed by God to be a Symbol of Himself (each part of Creation as well as all of Creation together).  We saw also, that the Fall blinded men to a large extent, so that we will not, in our sinfulness, allow ourselves to see the Glory of God revealed in His Creation-Symbols (Rom 1:18-32).  We saw, as well, that God has acted through Christ to save sinners and to heal our sin-blinded vision by effecting a spiritual re-birth in those who turn to Him in faith and repentance, causing us to begin to clearly see His Glory reflected in Creation again, as we gaze at Reality through the corrective lens of the Bible (John 3:1-21; etc.).  We saw finally that the reborn Christian also begins to learn by his Scripture-corrected vision how to help others see God’s Glory at the Heart of Reality (the primary task of the Christian artist).

How is it that we learn to help others see God’s Glory in Reality?  Well, remember that Creation itself is a Symbol (composed of myriad smaller symbols) that reveals God (Rom 1:18-22; Ps 19:1-4), and let us first look to see how the infallible Scriptures use symbols for this purpose.

The Lord Jesus calls Himself “the Door” (John 10:7), “the Light of the World” (John 8:12), “the True Vine” (John 15:1-27), “the Bread of Life” (John 6:32) and “the Good Shepherd” (John 10:11).  In other places in Holy Writ, He is called “the Branch” (Isa 4:2), “the Sun of Righteousness” (Mal 4:2), “the Word” (John 1:1), “the Lamb of God” (John 1:29), the “Rock” (1 Cor 10:4), “the Root of David” (Rev 22:6), “the Rose of Sharon” (Song 2:1), and on and on.

Each of these symbols reveal something about the Lord Jesus’ Nature, Character, or Actions.  Because we know what a door is, we can understand that Jesus is a Way, the Door to God the Father.  Because we know what light is, especially in its relationship to darkness, we can understand that He is the Light Who drives the world’s darkness away.  Because we know the beauty of a rose, we understand what it means to call Christ Jesus the Rose of Sharon.

These usages illustrate the primary or main purpose of all symbols: to reveal God.  This purpose gives the primary meaning to everything that exists.  This is not, however, the only meaning of symbols; they also mean themselves.  For example, a man is made in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27)—he images God to the world.  But that man also images himself for what he is, a man.  That man also may be a husband.  He is also a son.  He may also be a brother, and a father, and even a king.  All of these various functions mean various things, but this man can mean all of them simultaneously.  These are all (except for the image of God) secondary purposes of symbols, and they are important (just not as important as their primary purpose).

Thus, all symbols have multiple meanings, with the primary meaning (that of revealing God’s Glory) as the most important one.  These meanings all interlock and interact to give nuance and depth to Creation, glowing from inside with the transcendence of God’s Glory (the reason why a sunset or a mountain or a rose is beautiful).  The problem is that because of the Fall sinful man attempts to suppress the knowledge of Creation’s primary purpose (the Revelation of God) that God has put in every man’s heart (Rom 1:18-23), confusing Creation’s secondary meanings with the primary one, and thus escaping responsibility before God to live as God demands.

One of the reasons Scripture was given was to clearly restore to men the objective, Spirit-inspired Knowledge that all things primarily symbolize God, indeed, that all secondary meanings are ultimately meaningless unless they do ultimately show forth God.  Christ came to restore men to fellowship with God so that men could see God as fully as possible, glorifying Him in all things.

Thus, part of the calling of all Christians is to restore the true, primary meaning of Creation to men so that they might see His Glory, and turn to Him and serve Him.  This is especially true for Christian artists, whose main mode of fulfilling their callings is through the use of symbols (whether visual, such as in painting, poetry, prose, photography, or dance; or aural, such as in music or speaking, etc.).  Next week, by God’s Will, will be an exploration of how Christian artists should help to do just this.

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The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do Part 5

In our continuing look at the model of the Sons of Issachar in 1 Chronicles 12:32, and how that two-pronged example (understanding the times and knowing what Israel should do) applies to the artists of God’s Spiritual Israel, the Christian Church (Gal 3:6-9; Eph 2:11-22, 3:6; etc.), we saw in my last post that “knowing what Israel should do” translates into the necessity of knowing Holy Scripture as completely as possible, since It is the Divine Blueprint for all of life (art included).  We examined there the importance of a systematic, integrated approach to biblical theology for a balanced doctrinal approach to help prepare us “for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17), including the good work of a calling to musical ministry.

Doctrine is, of course, vital to truly biblical life and action.  It is a truism among Evangelicals that doctrine is primarily presented in Scripture as what is called propositional Truth (I know this seems kind of dry and technical, y’all, but hang in there with me on this, because, although it is complex, it’s also very important for Christian artists).  Propositional Truth is so called because it presents propositions, or straight-ahead statements about the Truth it presents (e.g., “. . .the Word was God” [John 1:1] or “God is light” [1 John 1:5]) and gives direct teaching (or didactic) commands (such as “Flee youthful lusts” [2 Tim 2:22] and “Thou shalt do no murder” [Exod 20:13]; etc.).  Most Christian teaching these days centers on propositionally presented biblical teaching (which is, of course, vital to the Church’s task).

Most Evangelicals would be surprised to realize, however, that the propositional presentation is not the only way that Truth is taught in the Bible.  God has also arranged another mode of communicating His Truth that complements the propositional method: the Representational or Symbolic method.

God has structured Reality in such a way that symbols stand at its heart.  What do I mean by this?  Consider the following:  Romans 1:18-22 teaches that God’s Invisible Attributes are clearly manifest, seen and known in God’s Creation; Psalms 19:1-4 teaches that the heavens themselves declare God’s Glory to the ends of the earth; Genesis 1:26-27 says that man himself was made to bear God’s Image.

Understand what this means—God made all of Reality together, and each part of Reality separately, to reveal Himself.  This is the primary and highest meaning of everything created:  to reveal the Glory of the Creator God.  Everything is a symbol of God, with man, the specific Image-bearer, as a special symbol of Himself.

The Fall has blinded us to God’s Glory in Creation, so that we will not, in our sin, allow ourselves to recognize the Truths that are inescapable in all created things, including (and especially) ourselves (Gen 3; Rom 1:18-32).

God through Christ has acted to save us from this spiritual death and blindness, bringing reconciliation and healing of vision by the Holy Spirit’s re-birth of those who turn in repentance and faith to Jesus (John 3:1-21, 1:1-17).

In this rebirth, men begin to be able to see God’s Glory in Creation again, and the Bible acts as a corrective lens for us to look through and see Him in all of Reality, His Symbol of Himself.  The reborn man also begins to learn by His Scripture-corrected vision how to help others see the Glory at the Heart of Reality (a primary task of every Christian artist).

Next week, we will (God willing) explore the importance of symbols to the artistic calling, and to knowing what Israel should do.  Selah!

For more teaching on Worship and the Arts go to www.patreon.com/kempercrabb

The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do Part 4

Knowing what Israel should do translates for us today into the necessity of knowing Scripture as the Divine Blueprint for what we are to believe and do as members of Christ’s Church, the Spiritual Israel (Gal 3:6-9, 26-29; Eph 2:11-22, 3:6; Rom 2:28-29; etc.).  This involves knowing what Scripture teaches, its Content, knowledge of which prepares the Christian “for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17), which includes the good work of obedience to Christ’s Call to a musical or artistic ministry.

As we saw last week, doctrine (a belief or teaching about something the Bible says) and theology (which means “knowledge of [or about] God”) are important.  Theology is comprised largely of an orderly arrangement of interlocking doctrines.  Christians, for as long as the Church has existed, have been engaged in an effort to organize the body of biblical doctrines into a coherent and consistent system of thought.  The results of these efforts are called, unsurprisingly, systematic theology, and it would behoove all Christian artists to be familiar with theologies of systematic arrangement.  (I recommend for beginners H. Berkhoff’s A Summary of Christian Doctrine, and for the more adventuresome, John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God.)

The great value of systematic theology (besides the fact that it renders doctrines more comprehensible, and thus easier to grasp and remember) is that it attempts to present doctrines in a balanced relationship one to another.  This is very important to the Christian artist, especially to the songwriter, because it helps to keep him from taking a biblical doctrine out of context, and presenting through his song an unbalanced and distorted view of that aspect of the Faith.

For instance, Jesus’ Command to “Judge not, lest ye be judged (Matt 7:1)” has frequently been represented in songs as meaning that we should never exercise judgment toward another person at all.  This is a distortion that takes no notice whatsoever of the fact that Jesus elsewhere commands us to “judge with righteous judgement” rather that according to mere appearance (John 7:24), and that St. Paul teaches that, though we do not judge infidels, we must judge those within the Church (1 Cor 5:3-6:7).  (This particular distortion is especially popular with televangelists and other prominent Christian leaders who are discovered in sins of sex or mammon, and who don’t want to be held accountable for it.)  It’s also not unusual to hear songs dedicated to promoting a Gospel of “Belief” alone, without any reference to those pesky and embarrassing Commands to repent (Matt 3:2; Luke 13:3; Acts 3:19, 17:30; etc.).

These are not inconsiderable points of difference, even taking into account the inherent restrictions on content that exist of necessity in short songs (a subject to be addressed later in this series).  The only hope that men have in the world is to be learned in God’s Word, and any distortion of Its presentation inevitably results in increased confusion and despair for those who are seeking to learn truth from it.  It is also true that God does not take kindly to those who misrepresent His Word (Deut 4:2, 12:32; Prov 30:6; Rev 22:18-19).  Doctrinal distortions of this type would be greatly lessened if Christian songwriters would become familiar with the balanced presentation of doctrine contained in most systematic theology.

Doctrine is to affect content (we are, or course, not to promote any content in our art that contradicts Holy Scripture in any way) in our art in a variety of ways:  The doctrine of Creation demands that Man be shown as God’s creature and, thus, as accountable to Him, finding no satisfaction outside of Him; and that men are made in God’s Image, thus having worth, and not to be murdered or treated inhumanly; and that God made matter as good, and that matter is used by God to reveal Himself, with the whole world as His arena of revelation.  The doctrine of the Trinity shows that, as God is both One and Three simultaneously, our societies are to reflect the value of both individual (the One) and men as a gathered many (the Three), and that checks and balances (political and otherwise) are desirable to achieve and continue that balance.  The doctrine of the Incarnation also shows us that the created world (which Christ entered as Man) is good, and that normal (unsinful) human activity is a vehicle for spiritual reality and holiness.  All of these doctrines (and many, many others) have important implications for the life of both Church and World.  We must let these doctrines, in their proper balance, inform all our art with their Truth.  To fail at this is to have failed in the task of the Christian artist, and to being reduced to offering stones as bread, and serpents as fish (Matt 7:9-11).

To know what Israel is to do, we must know the Bible well, and systematic theology is one of the best tools we have available to accomplish this.

The Sons of Issachar: Knowing What Israel Should Do Part 3

In the last post, we continued to explore the implications of the example of the Sons of Issachar in First Chronicles 12:32, that of knowing “what Israel should do,” and what that example might mean for Christian artists.  (The other branch of the two-pronged example of the Issacharians was “understanding the times,” which equates to the need to understand our historical and cultural situation, so that we can effectively engage and change that situation for Christ, which we considered in some detail in past posts.)  Knowing what Israel should do translates into the necessity of knowing Scripture as the Divine Blueprint for what we are to believe and do as individuals and members of Christ’s Church.

In my last post, we looked at two main reasons that have kept today’s Church from truly knowing Scripture (e.g., laziness and content-rejecting doctrine), and in the post before that saw that we must view all things through the lens of the Bible, in order to gauge the worth of these things, so that we can know how to proceed in moving our culture toward obedience to Christ.  This is why Christian artists (like all Christians) must know God’s word as to both Its Content and Form, for both of these aspects of the Bible have important repercussions for Christian artistry.  This week, we will begin to look at the need to know Scripture’s Content (since the Bible’s Forms cannot be easily assessed except in light of Its Content), looking at Biblical Forms (God willing) in weeks to come.

In many circles of the Church today, theology is considered to be a bad word.  We are told by those who frequent these circles that theology is bad because it is much concerned with doctrine, which is thought to be only divisive, leading to argument and alienation between Christians who reach different conclusions about what various parts of the Bible mean.  Therefore, those in these circles teach, we should not involve ourselves with either theology or doctrine itself, since these things are held to take our focus off of Jesus Himself and our relationship with Him.  It is not unusual for those who believe this to adopt the slogan, “No creed but Christ; no law but love.”  Is this view valid (or even honest)?

It’s easy to see why people would adopt this belief (which is, humorously enough, a set of doctrines).  History is replete with doctrinal disputes between Christians which have been badly handled and which ended disastrously (generally because those involved in the disputes forgot to heed the biblical doctrines of humility and love for the brethren, sadly enough).  However, theology has contributed almost immeasurably more to the growth of the Kingdom than it has detracted from that growth.  How so?  Because of what theology and doctrine are, and what their function is.

Theology means “knowledge of (or about) God;” it is a system of interlocking doctrines about God and His Purposes that attempts to be consistent with Scripture.  A doctrine is simply a belief or teaching about something the Bible says.  Every person who is a Christian holds doctrines, since Christianity is defined by a set of beliefs the Bible teaches, and that Christians hold, about Christ Jesus:  who He is, what He has done, etc.

Paul the Apostle thought doctrine was very important:  he commanded that sound doctrine be taught by Church leaders (Titus 1:9, 2:1), that sound doctrine conforms to the Bible and was taught by the Bible (1 Tim 1:9-11; 2 Tim 3:16); he taught that we and those who hear it would be saved by heeding sound doctrine (1 Tim 4:13-16), and that we should follow his doctrine-teaching example, which he learned from Christ (1 Cor 11:1). Paul obviously had no problem with sound doctrine (though he was death on unbiblical doctrine (1 Tim 1:3-4, 6:3-5).  Christians are supposed to live by biblical doctrine. 

Theology is just an organization of doctrines that allows us to see how doctrines fit together in Scripture, so that we can more easily understand God in His Nature and in His Relationship with us and the world (and, of course, what He wants us to do in His world).  Theology was largely responsible for the making of the Western world into a Christian civilization; as biblical theology progressively loses its hold on our society today, our culture becomes increasingly anti-Christian.

In light of this, let us look at the slogan of today’s anti-theologians.  “No creed but Christ” seeks to drive a wedge between Jesus and creedal teaching, but all Christian creeds are only mini-theologies summing up the central biblical doctrines about God and His Salvation (the primary creeds being the Nicene, Apostles’, Chalcedonian, and Athanasian creeds, all based on creeds in Scripture such as the one in 1 Tim 3:16, and all of which sum up the essence of the Faith that all Christians hold common, which C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity”).  Jesus cannot be known apart from the Revelation by the Spirit of the biblical doctrine about Him.  To seek to separate Him from His Own Teaching about Himself is suicidal.

They also say “no law but love,” and in this we see the practical need for theology even more clearly.  How do we know what love is?  By what the Bible defines it as.  What does Jesus say is the distinguishing mark of love for Him?  “If you love Me,” He says, “keep My commandments” (John 14:15, 23-24, 15:10).  How do we know His Commandments?  They are written in His Word, of course.  But there are many of them, especially when you consider that all Scripture is His Word and contains His Commands, both New and Old Testaments (2 Tim 3:16-17).  To relate those many Commands (some of which seem at first sight to contradict each other, though they don’t really do so) to each other, and to set those Commands in their proper context, both in their background and in their relation to Christ and His Purposes, is the function of theology.  To love Christ we must keep His Laws, and this requires an organized theological approach to do so effectively.

All Christians, because they believe doctrines, have some kind of theology, even if it is only a basic, poorly developed, and inconsistent one.  We are all responsible to develop our theologies so that they are increasingly consistent with the Bible.  This is not easy, requiring us to study the Bible (not just have a little devotional three minutes a day, or just listen on Sundays at church, though these things are also important), learning well what it says across the whole Book, how it relates part to part, working to remember these parts, paying serious attention to those whose gift is teaching, working to advance our knowledge of Scripture and how the Bible relates to all the areas of life (such as art).

This is important to us as artists because theological doctrines directly affect the content and form of our art.  Indeed, theology is (or should be) the ocean that we, as Christian artists, swim in.  We will begin next week (Christ willing) to examine how doctrine informs our artistic endeavors, as we seek to “know what Israel should do” in our day and time.