Christianity and the Arts

I have been leading a class at my church through C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. I found this short article called "TheImportance of the Arts to Christianity" by Louis Markos. It's very insightful. Markos is a Lewisian, and I found it here. Here it is:

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ARTS TO CHRISTIANITY

by Louis Markos, Houston Baptist University

1. Through a proper use of the arts, we must heal the enlightenment split between religion and science, art and technology, values and facts, myth and history, fiction and fact, emotional and rational, intuition and logic, revelation and reason, secular and sacred, poetry and doctrine. We need a re-synthesis, one that will allow us to worship God with our minds and hearts. We need to use the arts to heal what T. S. Eliot called “the dissociation of sensibility” that set in c. 1800. A proper use of the arts may even help us to re-integrate the modern Christian divide between a too-rigid focus on systematic theology and an overly-emotional emphasis on spiritual gifts.

2. We need the arts to make Christian theology come real. Art comes closer than systematic theology at expressing and capturing the mystery inherent in the Trinity. Art, in bringing together the abstract and the particular, the universal and the concrete points to the Incarnation—the central belief that Jesus was FULLY Man and FULLY God. We can learn from the Eastern Orthodox focus on icons as proclaimers of the Word made Flesh. The Incarnation baptized physical matter as a fit receptacle for divine meaning and presence. We need not be iconoclasts or fear representations of holy subjects (as do the Muslims and as did the Jews)

3. The producing, absorbing, and interpreting of the arts exercises the mind to under-stand the many levels of meaning in Scripture. Augustine and Aquinas both felt that God purposely made the Bible difficult so that we would have to wrestle with it (Bible is not stream-lined, not all slick packaging). A full wrestling with the arts and the stories that underlie them helps us to perceive and to engage sacred history. It helps us to see and understand that God works THROUGH history; Bible is mostly told from man’s perspective. (Dream of the Giant; Dante forces us to learn history.)

4. We must be salt and light in the world; we must engage our culture through the arts. The arts speak to people on a deep level; they form people’s opinions and attitudes in a way that is often not seen. The battle is often won through images, for it is around images that people often hang their beliefs and goals. The influence of rap, heavy metal and MTV is far more harmful than anyone gives it credit for.

5. The arts are vital to the artist, for we MUST use our gifts (Matt 25). Even if no one reads/hears our work, through the very fact that we produced it, we praise God. We must strive for excellence—not just be good enough to sing on Sunday morning.

6. The arts help us to perceive and/or build connections everywhere. By so doing, they allow us: a) to rebuild the sympathetic universe that the medievals saw and that Dante embodied most fully; 2) to see that Christ fulfills not only the Jewish Law/Prophets but all the deepest philosophical, theological, and aesthetic yearnings of mankind; 3) to be better evangelists and apologists through an ability to re-incarnate the Gospel in a variety of different cultures; 4) to praise God through a symphony of voices.

Louis Markos, Houston Baptist Univ., lmarkos@hbu.edu,

http://fc.hbu.edu/~lmarkos