Art is a nebulous and mysterious entity.
And often, as the Church, we just don’t really know what to do with it. Where does it fit? Does it have any practical value? What is its purpose?
To answer these questions, I want to examine a passage from the book Simply Christian by N.T. Wright:
“What I want to propose…is that the church should reawaken its hunger for beauty at every level. This is essential and urgent. It is central to Christian living that we should celebrate goodness of creation, ponder its present brokenness, and, insofar as we can, celebrate in advance the healing of the world, the new creation itself. Art, music, literature, dance, theater, and many other expressions of human delight and wisdom, can all be explored in new ways.
The point is this. The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way. The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened…. Perhaps art can help us look beyond the immediate beauty with all its puzzles, and to glimpse that new creation which makes sense not only of beauty but of the world as a whole, and ourselves within it. Perhaps.”
Even now I am struggling to express in words the place of art in existence and, more importantly, in the church. We often see art as mere entertainment and nothing more: visual pleasure, sonental charm, phonetical bliss. But it is so much more.
Art is worship. At the very least, it ushers us into a state of worship. Through beauty we see God. And even when art highlights the world’s fallen nature, we can still drop to our knees before the Restorer, the One who will finally overcome this world and finish the work he began on the cross two thousand years ago.
Thus, art is that blessed medium in which we can look at reality in its current state of existence (the beautiful with the ugly) while simultaneously straining our eyes ahead to that glorious Paradise, heaven on Earth, God with man in a world made right.
And that is something the Church would do well not to neglect.
So what are your thoughts? What do you see as art’s role in the church?
