The biblical conception of God as holy has profound significance for the philosophy of the worship arts. The biblical worshiper encounters the Lord as the Holy One. The basic connotation of holiness (Hebrew qodesh) is not the goodness or righteousness of Yahweh but the fact that he is encountered as one “set apart,” sacred or sacrosanct, unlike that which is experienced in the ordinary events of life. There is, in other words, a numinous aspect to the encounter with the Lord, a quality of mystery, dread, and fascination in his presence, which calls forth a spontaneous and intuitive response of worship. The rational mind cannot encompass his being, nor can human language adequately bear the majesty of his presence. Worship, like theology, must express itself through transforms of the experience of the holy, symbols that point beyond themselves to the real reason alone cannot grasp.
It is here that the fine arts make their essential and distinctive contribution to the worship of Almighty God. Whether visual, auditory, literary, choreographic, or liturgical, art forms can augment the worshiper’s sensitivity to the sacred in a way that common verbal communication cannot. Language, as a means of communication, depends on the premise that a symbol used by one speaker will be intelligible to another and therefore involves a rational process that issues in some kind of linear, conventional ordering of phonemes and thought units. Art forms, as well, require the application of rational processes in their creation and appreciation, but as a means of communication, they operate at another level, touching the intuitive faculties of the human psyche. Art may be a window into unseen realities. The Last Supper fresco of Leonardo da Vinci is more of a humanistic tour de force of Renaissance technique than a vehicle for grasping the passion of Christ. By contrast, the roughly contemporaneous Last Supper of Tintoretto, its scene shading from the table of Christ and the disciples into the heavenly host, is a numinous window into the eternal truth “This is my body”; and the Isenheim Altarpiece of Grünewald, with its massive, distorted depiction of the crucified Christ, conveys with compelling force the weight of sin and suffering borne by the Savior.
The Bible is full of artistic creations, symbols fashioned or enacted by worshipers as expressions of that which cannot be encompassed by ordinary speech: the tabernacle and the temple, with their furnishings; the vesture of the priests; the ark of the covenant and its cherubim; the symbolic acts of liturgy and sacrifice; sacred gesture such as bowing down and lifting hands and festival processions; the many word symbols of covenant liturgy, hymn, and psalm, prophetic song and vision, parable and preaching. The colors used in the Mosaic tabernacle and its priestly vesture are sometimes interpreted as prophetic, standing for some theological truth or concept; in fact, their “meaning” is to serve as artistic expressions of the numinous quality of the house of God.
As an art form, even unintelligible speech, or speaking in tongues, conveys such a meaning in relationship to the presence of the holy and is not an ecstatic or emotional activity as some nonpractitioners suppose. The most numinous of the arts is music, which speaks most directly to the intuitive capacities of the worshiper, bearing a sense of majesty, wonder, mystery, and delight, and bringing a release of the soul even without recourse to words. It is well to recall, in this connection, how much of the Bible is poetry and song. God is not an idea but a reality encountered at the deepest level of being; from this perspective, art is not only permitted in biblical worship, but it is also mandatory.