arts

The Use of the Arts in Christmas Worship

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The arts during Christmas may symbolize the Incarnation and thus speaks in a profound way to the meaning of “God with us.” Adapt the suggestions below to local customs.

1. The greening of the church done for Advent remains through the Christmas season.

2. The Advent wreath remains hung during Christmas with all five candles lit. Adorn the wreath with a Christmas bow and change all the candles to white.

3. Dramatize the lighting of the five candles as a symbol of the presence of Christ at the beginning of the service by using the Service of the Light for the Acts of Entrance.

4. Make both the processional and the recessional expressions of great joy with persons bearing banners, crosses, incense, and with dancers who express the great joy of Christmas.

5. Proclaim one of the Scripture readings with drama, storytelling, or creative antiphonal reading.

6. For Christmas Eve, incorporate the blessing of the crèche.

The Relationship of Visual and Verbal Elements in Worship

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The following article describes how visual and verbal elements have been used throughout the history of the church, noting how the modern church has not allowed visual elements to have a significant role in worship. It goes on to describe how the visual arts can be revived and how we can learn to communicate and receive theological truths through the visual arts.

In the life of the church, the visual arts have ranged from being conspicuously pervasive to being totally absent. In no period was art as central or so important as in the Middle Ages, nor, in contrast, so programmatically and theologically absent as in the Reformed tradition beginning from the sixteenth century as well as in many churches that grew on English soil. Although such extremes do not define our time, their impact has left us with considerable ambiguity about the place and role of the visual arts in the church.

History sheds only partial light on the sources of this ambivalence. For the Middle Ages we can point to the proliferation of saints and the ascendancy of Mary to a special place in redemptive history, both widely depicted in the arts along with biblical figures, Christ and the Godhead. At that level, one would assume that the Reformation would stand for the removal of the saints and of Mary, with concentration instead on Christ and biblical subjects in works of art. But the total abolition of the arts in the Reformed churches, sometimes with frightening evidences of violence, indicates that more than the subject matter was involved.

Idolatry, of course, was the pivotal word, and the second commandment was interpreted to mean that images, not just false images, were to be destroyed. But for images to be considered idols meant that something had happened, for up to the Middle Ages an image remained an image and was not confused with the reality it represented or mirrored. But already in the Carolingian period images were viewed with suspicion, not because they would be confused with what they imaged, but because they were only images. Relics were considered more important, for they provided tangible realities in which God was literally as well as symbolically present. Seeing and touching such realities was more important than experiencing images in which the divine was not physically present. But in the subsequent medieval history, images, as well as the consecrated elements, were interpreted as if they were relics. Then images became idols, or so the Reformed tradition understood them.

That this could happen discloses something about the visual. It too, like other sensibilities, can be a power for good or evil. In much of the Middle Ages, seeing was more important for the public than hearing. The consecrated elements were lifted up to be seen, and it was believed that seeing the elements made it unnecessary for all to partake or to hear what was said.

What a reversal, then, when the Reformed tradition based everything on hearing, and its derivative, reading, along with the abolition of the visual. But what had happened to the visual in the Middle Ages now occurred with respect to the verbal. The initial symbolic power of language took on a literal meaning, as the verbal increasingly and variously was understood as propositional statements of truth, or a fundamentalist reading of Scripture, or a spiritual or moral reduction of content to management proportions. Emphasis on the words in the Word had brought a new form of idolatry.

What we need, of course, is a rightful view of both the visual and the verbal. They represent one reality through two modalities, each appropriately important and necessary for the full expression of our humanity. Theologically, considerable progress has been made in recovering the imaginative power of language, a development that bodes well for an alliance between the visual and the verbal. But among those responsible for services or worship, a preoccupation with the dynamics of the worship service has led to a conviction that only that which directly serves the liturgy has an appropriate place. Some liturgists have declared that the better the work of art, the more it interferes with liturgical practice or the worshiping community. That outlook encourages the use of poor art, including the inordinate profusion of banners, with the result that only art which has no power of its own, that is, only art that can be used for purposes other than what art conveys, is acceptable. Such a reintroduction of art is neither dangerous nor helpful; such art is simply banal.

The reappropriation of the visual for the church, for which theological seminaries can be a vehicle—and for which some have taken responsibility—requires taking the arts seriously on their own terms.

Scripture is not directly helpful on that point, for some passages are positive; some are negative. In addition to the problem of how the second commandment is to be understood, there is a reference in 1 Kings (7:14) to Solomon’s bringing Hiram from Tyre to do works of bronze, and in Exodus 31 (vv. 1–11) an artist named Bezalel is mentioned as doing works in various media for the temple. Concepts of beauty play their part in the Psalms and in sections of the New Testament, as in the lilies of the field, though these passages point to the works of God, not the works of the artists.

The other arts—music, drama, and dance—also have had an ambiguous relation to the church, but, unlike the visual arts, they have been more widely accepted. It is surely ironic that many churches will not shrink at spending large sums of money for a new organ, but not a penny for paintings or sculpture. The plea for the organ rests, of course, on the fact that music has made its way into the worshiping life of the congregation, even though, in principle, music is not necessarily dependent on the organ. Surprisingly, literature as an art form does enter into biblical consciousness. Perhaps that is because Scripture itself is a literary form, thereby making it a natural medium for those who expound Scripture, sometimes with quotations which at their best shed new light on biblical passages.

Music and literature, while banished from the church at certain periods, are art forms that have nevertheless made their way within it. They confirm rather than challenge the worship life of the community, though to be sure avant-garde music and literature can create a stir within the church.

What is it about dance and the visual arts that make the church uncomfortable? Undoubtedly, it is because both are sensual. In dance for the church, that art form is frequently stylized to the point that it merely illustrates biblical passages and has been deprived of much of its sensual nature as dance. But sensuousness defines the very essence of dance and the visual arts.

We have come full circle. The Reformed tradition, in its fight against idolatry, defined the spiritual over against the material or sensual. Hence Reformed churches, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, or those who eschewed such connections, such as Quakers, abolished the arts, for in their way of perceiving the spiritual, the material or sensual was not a medium through which the spiritual could be manifest. Theologically, that was the great divide between the medieval world and the Reformed tradition, with Lutherans and Roman Catholics accepting that the spiritual was also manifest in materiality and through the senses, even though the latter had been abused in the past. On this issue, the Anglicans, reflecting England’s self-conscious Protestant stance, were also originally suspicious of the arts; but in the nineteenth century, they returned to more Catholic sensibilities.

In recent decades, spirituality has invaded the consciousness of most churches. Derived from the Catholic tradition, but understood partly in Protestant terms, spirituality has become a bridge on which the spiritual, the material, and the sensual have come together again. Without judging either the defects or contributions of spirituality as a movement, one can say that it has become a vehicle for overcoming the split between the spiritual and the material or sensual. Hence, it places us in a more favorable ethos with respect to the visual.

Just as the disappearance of the visual in Protestantism and its transformation in Catholicism was a theological issue, so its reemergence today is theological. This reemergence involves how we understand our various sensibilities, that is, how all our senses may be related to moral, religious, aesthetic facets of existence, involving both emotional and intellectual ingredients. One way of understanding the human scene is to admit that hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling—all of which belong to our humanity—do not form a unity. It is as if, theologically speaking, there were a split among our senses, and some of them were considered safer than others. No one would challenge the role of hearing, giving preeminence to speaking and to the printed word. More recently, we have witnessed the dominant characteristic of television and its technique of telling us what to hear through seeing. Hence it is more a verbal than a visual source of understanding. But while we accept the role of hearing, and its consequences for good, seldom do we face what may be called word pollution. For some reason, word pollution is not considered as dangerous or bad as the abuse of the other senses. In contemporary life, the verbal is surely as abused as was the visual in periods of the Middle Ages.

All of our senses belong to our humanity. Therefore, to bracket one or more out because it or they present problems, also deprives us of the good that belongs to each sensibility, that is, it leaves out something that belongs to our created humanity. That is too high a price to pay, for we are called to be fully human. Leaving out part of our humanity makes us less than that which was intended in creation, for each sense gives us something, which, while related to what the other senses convey, is also unique. The intermixture of the senses is surely evident in biblical and religious language, such as “having the eyes of our hearts enlightened,” or “taste and see how good the Lord is.” Surely, the word in proclamation and the word in sacrament are the same word; yet, in each, the mode of reception also provides us with perceptions that come to us only in that way.

Stressing the visual as well as the verbal demands visual as well as verbal literacy. The expression “I know nothing about art but I know what I like” has to go. Would one really accept ignorance as an ideal anywhere else in life? No sensibility is to be trusted unless it has been honed. An informed sensibility is the fruit of work and discipline. Just as we are schooled in the verbal, we must be schooled in the visual. Yet, schooling in the visual requires disciplines appropriate to that sensibility. While there are analogies between the verbal and the visual, schooling in the visual is not the same as schooling in the verbal.

The visual requires a discerning eye. While our distinguished artists have a special talent, as do our distinguished writers, talent is not enough. Without the disciplined exercise of the medium, which comes only with practice and learning, and usually with the help of teachers, talent burns itself out and provides nothing of enduring or transcending value.

For those of us with lesser talent, the development of a discerning eye is especially important. That can happen in two forms, sometimes separate, sometimes combined: (1) by engaging in the practice of an art form, such as painting or sculpture, or (2) by repeated seeing and careful study of works of art. Traditional learning, whether through lectures or books, about the works of art is appropriate, but as an adjunct to seeing.

Learning to paint or sculpt introduces one to the special dynamics of seeing as evident in the creative process. It has the special character of interiority, in which there is an immediacy that can hardly be secondhand. When guided by those with exceptional talent, we enter into the special world of seeing, where the eye is the pulse directing the arms and hands in the use of brush or chisel. Such an experience creates forms of perception that will make us see the world differently.

By entering directly into the making of art, those with little talent may still learn the special way in which the eyes inform and form works of art. If the process becomes recreation rather than creation, human purposes may still be served, but one has not entered into the world of art. Those with little talent for the education of their own eyes need to accept and understand the difference that talent makes in the creation of art. In the visual, as in the other arts, we need to accept the range from the average to the excellent, an outlook we have learned to accept in music. While excellence in the arts may statistically be small in volume, it provides all of us with the unimpeachable power and structure of the visual. The excellent, too, is not without its dangers, for such creations express an audacity dangerously close to creation itself. But in such creations, we may also come to know the power of the human eye in imaging God and seeing ourselves as created in the image of God.

For many, probably most of us, the discerning eye will be developed by the repeated seeing of works of art, habituation that creates its own discipline and satisfactions to the point that not to see is to feel deprived of a part of one’s very being. Here it is important to be specific, for merely wandering around in museums can be debilitating. It is important to start somewhere, such as choosing four or five artists that seem to interest one. Then repeated seeing of the same works, as well as other works by the same artists, creates seeing patterns of new discoveries that become the basis for widening one’s horizons. In the context of such seeing, information about the works and the artists will be enriching but is not a substitute for seeing. In fact, information is detrimental to seeing when the printed word or the verbal defines what one is to see. Information rightly provides a helping hand, but when an end in itself, it substitutes the verbal for the visual. Sad to say, there are art historians whose studies of the iconography or social setting can be carried out without actually seeing the works of art, an exercise that has been dubbed “art history without art.”

Hence, the recovery of seeing as a human discipline is essential as a prelude to the recovery of art within the church. The loss of the visual was more pronounced in Protestantism than in Catholicism. But even Catholicism began to substitute plaster saints for authentic works of art, thus providing reminders of the verbal rather than creating the fresh perceptions required of art and its appropriate seeing, which is the function of great art.

Given that seeing is so much a part of our lives, it plays a role even when we ignore it. Both space and the forms and shapes around us affect us, whether or not we are conscious of them. Hence, poor art also affects us negatively, even unknowingly. But the obverse is also true, that significant art and architecture stimulate genuine seeing that enriches everything with which we come in contact, that stretches us, that makes us comfortable on the other side of being as comfortable as an old shoe.

Surely it is ironic that the poor or the oppressed have a greater interest in what feeds the human spirit—the visual arts, theater, and indigenous cultural ingredients—than do the conservatives or the liberals who translate justice primarily into economic terms. The drive against spending funds for architecture and art when money should be given to the poor is a liberal guilt trip that contrasts markedly with the attitudes of the poor, who have no such hang-ups. Of course, extravagance is a problem; but we also know that the funds used for art and architecture would not make a significant dent in the problems of oppression.

One cannot live without the necessities of life. But there is more to life than survival. How we determine what is “more important” becomes an essential ingredient in how we perceive the needs of our society. For some, beauty and aesthetic dimensions are as necessary to the human spirit as anything else. Perhaps it is the aesthetic dimension that makes ethics full-orbed in its concern for the human spirit. It is the aesthetic dimension that makes humanity human.

Part of the problem is that liberals and conservatives alike often fail to see aesthetics and the arts as integral to being human. For liberals and conservatives, art is entertainment, or an interest that is fashionable or au courant. Hence, they show a schizophrenia about the arts, either deriding them or courting them, but they do not see them as part of one’s very humanity. A greater danger results when society attacks the fundamental nature of humanity. Theodore Gill makes the point that a part of Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis came from an aesthetic revulsion to its limited, inverted, cynical view of what it means to be human. It is not by accident that revolutionaries, whether from the right or the left, first attack the vanguard artists. Such artists are always pointing to aspects of humanity denied or being suppressed in the culture. Many people say that the arts are not important, but why do the same people attack them so vehemently when the message of the arts does not coincide with what they believe? The arts look to the future; though, to be sure, the arts can also be reactionary when they are simply a part of the establishment or are being co-opted by it.

The New Testament demonstrates clearly that Jesus was concerned about the poor. But, as Theodore Gill reminds us, his first miracle was turning the water into wine, when Jesus was the life of the party. And of course, we all know of the story of Mary and Martha, surely an approbation of considerable waste when one thinks of the cost of the ointment. In short, there are aesthetic dimensions to the New Testament as well.

Everything can be abused, and aesthetics can become an avoidance of social responsibility. But aesthetics can also be true to ethics, to that wedding in which humanity is enriched in all its facets, its physical, spiritual, and beauteous aspects. The Expressionist painter Barnett Newman wrote that the first human was an artist, that is, a human being whose imagination created worlds that made this world worthwhile.

In a world of competing visions, the aesthetic relation to the ethical can provide conceptions of the human that make us unafraid, that make our diversity a source of enrichment, that stretch our humanity, and that create common cause in our quest for an enriched humanity. The visual and the verbal express our rich humanity through diverse modalities, and the question of God will become real again when our humanity is wide and deep enough to be encompassed by its source, that is, the God who as Creator is also redemptive.

The African Recovery of the Arts

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In the midst of poverty and starvation, Christian faith and native talent in Africa are inspiring a wealth of art for worship. This art is one means by which African Christians express their faith while borrowing from their indigenous cultures.

Africa is a continent crucified by famine and war, pestilence, and poverty. For Christianity, however, it is a continent of resurrection. Even as older churches in Europe and the United States are emptying, faith is thriving in the sprawling lands south of the Sahara. As is so often the case, spiritual strength is inspiring—and being inspired by—an outpouring of artistic creation. “We are on the verge of a golden age in African Christian art,” proclaims Jesuit Father Engelbert Mveng of Cameroon. “The movement cannot be stopped and it is bursting out in flower all over Africa.”

Not since Europe’s Renaissance has such a large and varied body of living Christian art been produced. In inaccessible rural workshops, thatched-roof villages, and teeming urban slums, a firmament of fine artists inspired by Christian themes is emerging from within a much larger community of folk artisans. The movement is thriving in spite of serious obstacles. Most artists lack patrons, lucrative markets, and substantial schooling. With tools, paint, and canvas in chronically short supply, Africans work with whatever materials are handy. Wood is thus the most popular medium. If stained glass is too costly, colored resin is applied to window panes. If sculptors lack marble, they mix cheap pebbles and concrete. If budgets keep church buildings modest, they are brightened with imaginative decorations and vibrant vestments.

Styles range from garishly colored representational paintings to serene abstracts. The themes are the same ones that inspired a thousand Renaissance masterpieces: the Nativity, Madonna and Child, and gripping Bible stories. The most common subject is Christ’s agony on the cross, a visual testament to the Africans’ own suffering. But Zairian Catholic sculptor Ndombasi Wuma, like many Protestants, refuses to depict the Crucifixion. Says he: “I believe in the risen Christ. Why should Christ be anguished?”

African art is created not for museums or living rooms but for the community. Its function is fourfold, says Elimo Njau, a Tanzanian Lutheran painter. Art “makes Christianity African,” provides a new context for worship, stimulates devotion, and teaches the meaning of the Bible through imagery. Many works are signed collectively; others are anonymous. At Sims Chapel, Zaire’s oldest Baptist church, even Sunday school children played their part: their crude drawings provided the basis for the chapel’s stained-glass windows.

Before the missionary era, the only Christianized black nation was Ethiopia. Its austere art style remained largely unchanged since the Middle Ages. When the first missionaries arrived in other parts of Africa in the fifteenth century, they sought to stamp out tribal religions and with them idols, ceremonial masks, and ancestral images. The artistic tug-of-war intensified during the nineteenth century as the number of Christian missions mushroomed.

The latter-day art boom was fostered by Roman Catholic missionaries. Among them were Brother Marc (Stanislas Wallenda) from Belgium, who founded Kinshasa’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1943, and Father Kevin Carroll of Ireland, who in the same era came to work among Nigerian craftsmen. Most white missionary bishops back then, Carroll recalls, “thought we were wasting time.” Political independence and the increase of black clergy accelerated the process that European Christians call adaptation or inculturation, meaning the incorporation of local culture into Christianity. Today Nigeria has Africa’s largest corps of artists and artisans, and Zaire probably boasts the most important assemblage of sheer talent.

Inculturation often means nothing more controversial than transplanting the classic Bible stories into black African settings. A white policeman accompanies Jesus to Calvary. The crucified Christ wears a crown of cactus thorns. The three Wise Men bear gifts of kola nuts and chickens. More saucily, South African linocut artist John Muafangejo shows Satan urinating in fear before an angel. Sometimes even modest experiments produce scandal. Cheap reproductions hang beneath the Stations of the Cross carved by Kanutu Chenge for a Catholic church near Lubumbashi, Zaire. They are there to appease a congregation shocked to see Pilate dressed as an African chieftain and women with tribal headbands witnessing the Crucifixion.

Serious theological problems can arise when Africanization uses symbols and myths from the pre-Christian faiths. Fearing syncretism in a continent where communion with the spirits and ancestors remains a powerful belief, most Protestants are exceedingly cautious about all the visual arts. Zaire’s indigenous Kimbanguist Church strictly forbids decoration except on preachers’ and singers’ robes. But many Anglicans, once hesitant, are enthusiasts for the new church art. Methodist theologian Dkalimbo Kajoba encourages art so long as it is for “decoration” not “adoration.”

Since the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholicism has shown the most readiness to embrace Africanization. One of the boldest steps came in 1967 when the newly built St. Paul’s Church in Lagos opened its doors to reveal frankly pagan symbols and statues. A black Nigerian priest protested at the time, “You are taking us back from whence we came—paganism.” But prominent Nigerian artist Bruce Onobrakpeya notes that the Yorubas “worship God through the spirit Orisha, who will pray to God for them and obtain the blessings they desire—not so very different from parishioners kneeling before a statue of the Virgin.” The decorations remained.

Abayomi Barber, a Nigerian who makes the sign of the cross over each painting he creates, sees profound value in tribal cultures. “The birth of a child, coming of age, marriage, death, and the spirits of our ancestors—all these needed to be illustrated and represented as supernatural manifestations. This is the basis of our art. We are still interlinked with nature.”

The most sensitive question is how to portray Jesus Christ. Some tribes show him with a huge head to symbolize great wisdom or a massive chest to convey strength. But should he be depicted as an African? Urban Christians are more open to this than believers in the bush. Commissioned by the Catholic Cathedral in Kananga, Zaire, Enkobo Mpane created his first Bantu Christ from ebony in 1969. Parishioners rejected the work, so it hangs in a nearby convent. “Our parishioners still think of Christ as a Jew and not an African,” reports Arley Brown, a U.S. Baptist teaching in Kinshasa. But Nigerian Anglican architect Fola Alade insists, “If Jesus is the Son of God, how can he be just a Jew?”

For many African artists, the act of creation itself is a religious experience. Zaire’s Mwabila Pemba, a specialist in beaten copper, rises daily at 5 a.m. to pray and believes that as he works he is “in the hands of a divine force.” He is among multitudes who speak of creating through prayers, dreams, and inspiration from the Bible. Africans know that this makes them oddities among the world’s modern-day artists. Ben Nhlanhla Nsusha, who recently returned to Johannesburg after five years of study in London, says the young artists in England “can’t understand the way I think. They never do religious subjects.”

Africans are anything but embarrassed about this cultural distinctiveness. Cecil Skotnes, one of the handful of creative white religious artists in South Africa, insists, “Urgency is the basis of all great art. This urgency is no longer apparent in European or U.S. art.” That judgment may be too sweeping. Yet there is no question that African Christian art, serene and savage, florid and austere, stands virtually alone in the vigor and authenticity with which its practitioners seek to express the inexpressible.

Historical Perspectives on the Reformed View of the Arts in Worship

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Of all the theologians and church leaders who are cited as being opposed to the use of visual arts in worship, Protestant Reformer John Calvin is perhaps the most famous. The following article describes the cultural context in which Calvin worked and the specific nature of his views on the visual arts in worship, suggesting that Calvin was more concerned with confronting idolatry than with opposing the visual arts in worship.

Liturgy is a muscular word, an image derived in part from its intrinsic visual quality. The worshiping community gathers around the Table, pulpit, and baptismal font. Water is sprinkled; bread is broken and wine poured; hands are folded and knees are bent; collection plates are passed. Because of the visual nature of liturgy, the church from its very beginning perceived the opportunity to teach and edify itself by producing works of art that would enrich these various aspects of its liturgy. More importantly, there was little distinction, if any at all, between art for life and art for worship, as the church understood that the spiritual was discerned through the material.

But during the sixteenth century, distrust of symbols began to take root in the European church. The Protesters rejected many forms of liturgical art. Leaders of the Reformed tradition, in rethinking the role and use of symbols and iconography, forged so strong an understanding of the arts that it is reflected in almost every Reformed church building to this day. In one of the most astonishing transitions in the history of the church, the church reversed its role from artistic proponent to artistic opponent, all in a time span of less than a generation. John Calvin was one leader responsible for this fundamental shift.

Calvin in Context

In the sixteenth century, Christian belief emphasized God’s immanence. God was believed to be always close to earth working miracles and protecting Christians through venerated relics. The great domes of the basilicas were held in place by large, over-proportioned columns, not because the domes required such heavy pillars to support them, but because the dome, representing the orb of the universe, was being tied down close to the earth and the church. Europe pulsated with expectations of the miraculous. Medieval Catholicism held that the actual body and blood of Christ could be found in the consecrated host. The practice of obtaining and housing icons and relics became big business, for the power of God was thought to be in and around the pieces of bone, wood, canvas, or fabric.

This is the world into which John Calvin was born and a world he would, in turn, shape and change. In particular, Calvin redefined the understanding of God’s presence in the world. For Calvin and the other Reformers, the medieval church limited access to God’s grace to ways that were too one-sidedly “visual” in their orientation. The Reformers, instead, asserted a transcendent understanding of the presence of God. In this awareness, God ruled from Heaven, though his power permeated the world. The centerpiece of Calvin’s theology is not so much humankind grasping for concepts of God, but a gracious God revealing himself to humankind. As such, basing his reasoning in part on John 4:24 and the second commandment, Calvin asserted that true worship of God does not happen through the aid of worldly trappings, but only through the Spirit of God.

The second matter that characterized the world of the sixteenth century was the rise of humanism. The rise of biblical scholarship urged a re-emphasis on the Bible as the standard for worship instead of tradition. The printing press aided literacy and learning. Rhetoric led to the exaltation of the spoken word, encouraging a revival in preaching. For the learned Reformed leaders, these verbal, scholastic expressions came to be invested with greater authority and value in worship than its visual aspects (Philip W. Butin, “Constructive Iconoclasm: Trinitarian Concern in Reformed Worship,” Studia Liturgica 9:2 [1989]: 133-139).

At the root of this theological paradigm shift was a revived interest in Neoplatonism. This phenomenon was an expression of the Renaissance at the time of the Reformation. In the manner of Neoplatonism, Lefèvre, Calvin, and other Reformers seem to have favored the spiritual over the material as a more vital contribution to Reformed worship.

Yet, the Reformed are not primarily antimaterial or antiaesthetic. Rather, as Carlos Eire points out in his recent and thorough treatise on the subject, Reformed iconoclasm was primarily an attempt to avoid all idolatry (Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986]). Reformed aesthetics, therefore, stems from a broad, theologically motivated concern to avoid all forms of idolatry in worship. Admittedly, it was formed largely as a reactionary defense, in response to various criticisms of perceived liturgical abuses. Calvin argues for simple, direct (i.e., nonvisual) communication with the Deity.

Calvin’s Biblical Understanding of Aesthetics

As Calvin forged his aesthetic theology, he was prone to reference two key Scripture texts. First, Calvin’s theology emphasized the role of the law, as summarized in the Decalogue. In particular, the first and second commandments were persuasive in warranting the expulsion of anything considered idolatrous. A second text, John 4:24, was also prominent. In John 4:24, Jesus, as exegeted by the Reformers, was calling for true worship is worship “in spirit and in truth.” A Reformed liturgic—shaped by the writings of Zwingli, Bucer, and Calvin—is influenced by these two texts. These texts are the basis of the ongoing Reformed concern to avoid idolatry, while also contributing to an essentially positive thrust that promoted the idea of “true worship.” This may be illustrated through a discussion of John Calvin’s development of what constitutes “true worship” and a right understanding of Reformed aesthetics.

Although Calvin never explicitly writes about aesthetic theory per se, his approach can be discerned from his writing on liturgical art and icons, particularly from his various warnings about worshiping relics (John Calvin, An Admonition, Showing the Advantages Which Christendom Might Derive From an Inventory of Relics, in Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, vol. 1, ed. Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983]). In addition, some of his commentaries and sermons provide us with his thought about beauty and the arts.

To understand Calvin’s view of aesthetics, it is necessary to pull together his reflections upon the nature of art and the nature of worship; it is these two areas that Calvin does explicitly address, often in tandem. Understanding Calvin’s view of aesthetics grows out of studying Calvin’s theological reflection upon nature, human nature, and the function of art.

Art is dependent upon beauty, says Calvin, and beauty comes only from God. In fact, Calvin often interchanges the words art and beauty. Beauty, as expressed through the arts, is related to God and his existence as Creator. Calvin believes that God’s beauty is transcendent but that it can be perceived in the created physical world and in the moral order. In describing God as the author of physical and moral creation, Calvin clarifies how God is able to be known as the Trinity. God, the Father, created the heavens and earth; he is the consummate artist since he formed the world and everything in it. These creative acts of God, the paradigm artist, are exhaustive and complete (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1:5 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959], 59). Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, came to earth and exhibited a perfect spiritual beauty. His spiritual presence, self-sacrifice, and love exemplify the lovely. The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, exhibits moral beauty, placing in the hearts of people such virtues as love, justice, goodness, wisdom, and compassion.

In addition to seeing God’s beauty as revealed by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Calvin also believes that humankind, in both the physical and spiritual sense, is beautiful. We are the chief creatures of God’s creation. We are made in God’s image: awesome, mysterious, complex, and beautiful. These attributes are vestiges of the imago dei (the image of God) and testify to heavenly grace, even though they are sullied by sin.

True Worship and Aesthetics

Calvin’s understanding of art had implications for the use of art in worship. His view of liturgical art involves an understanding of the worshipers and the effect of beauty upon them. Visual imagery was thought to be too powerful a force, especially in the relic-packed Catholic churches of Calvin’s time, to be used successfully in worship. As beholders of art are sinful and have a natural inclination toward idolatry, the majesty of God was to be guarded against any idolatrous confusion with images used to worship or represent him, the very issue addressed so directly in the second commandment. Thus, in order to resist the temptation to idolize and worship the works of creatures rather than the creator, Calvin railed against the use of many art forms in worship (Calvin, Inventory, 290).

Calvin was more interested in worshiping in “spirit and in truth” (John 4:24); that is, worshiping the Creator directly without relying on the works of his creatures. To this end, Calvin’s worship environments were purged. Altars were removed and plain tables were brought in. The pulpit—representing the preaching of the Word—took central place; the centrality of the Word was represented architecturally by placing the pulpit in the middle of the chancel. Baptismal fonts were brought to the front of the sanctuary, forming a triangle with a pulpit and table. Organ cases were closed (at least during the worship service proper) and relics and icons were removed. All these actions brought the central acts of worship before the congregation in a clear, simplified way (James White, Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], 65-66). The result was a re-formed Reformed worship service that simplified the visual and accentuated the verbal.

Later Calvinist Manifestations

Later expressions of Calvinism continued to glean the implications of its original concern to avoid idolatry in worship. The Puritans, for one example, were heavily influenced by the Calvinistic aesthetic. More recently, Dutch Calvinist thinkers such as Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd sought to refocus the problem of idolatry by warning against the idolatrous potential of misdirected worldviews. Another Dutchman, Gerardus van der Leeuw, though he takes Calvinism down a different path, nevertheless expresses again the role of Christ as the unique expression of God, who alone is worthy of ultimate loyalty. Karl Barth focused the problem of idolatry on idols of culture, race, and state. Reformed churches, in short, following the model cast by John Calvin, have always intentionally attempted to counteract anything that would replace Christ as the central focus of the church or worship. This can especially be seen in recent attempts to counteract nationalism, militarism, racism, and sexism.

Yet it cannot be denied that the Reformed concern to avoid all forms of idolatry has come with a cost: a cost many perceive to be the loss of imaginative and artistic expressions in worship. In a grand irony, many see the perceived lack of creativity to be unrepresentative of the Creator God—the God so many Calvinists are attempting to worship in a non-idolatrous way. And, though confessionally Trinitarian, many see Reformed worship as predominantly the worship of God the Father, with little emphasis on God as revealed in Jesus Christ or as revealed in the mysterious nature of the Spirit.

Fortunately, this understanding of Calvinism and the practice of it are changing. The ecumenically oriented liturgical movement has facilitated an openness to new expressions from the broader streams of Christian worship, albeit sometimes slavishly uncritical and eclectic in its borrowing.

Calvin’s concerns remain valid for today. Reformed worshipers agree that they must not, in the rampant liturgical renewal, confuse an image with its reality, or a symbol with the reality symbolized. A distinction must be maintained, the Reformed insist, between symbol and adornment. Symbol is necessary; adornment should be used judiciously, if at all. We must not develop an autonomous taste for the sensuous or romantic. Nor can we delight only in the forms we have produced, unable or unwilling to discern the enabling grace of God in and through the forms. Likewise, the iconoclastic urge must continually be tempered so that the connection between the mystery of God and the beauty in creation and in our creativity is maintained.

Thus, the chief contribution of the Reformed tradition is to insist that all imagination and art is a servant to the word of God. The Reformed liturgist is one who asks, “How can every action, color, banner, anthem, sermon point away from itself to God?” And the Reformed Christian is one who sings with the English hymn writer William Cowper, “ … the dearest idol I have known, whatever that idol be, help me to tear it from thy throne and worship only thee.”

How Christians Have Appropriated the Arts

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Christians have responded to various art forms in many ways over the centuries. Four typical responses are described in this article. These approaches to art in general necessarily influence how the Christian community approaches the visual arts in worship.

From the very beginning God’s people practiced the arts. Adam composed the first poem in the world, about Eve:

Bone of my bone,
Flesh of my flesh,
She shall be called wo-man,
For she was won-from man. (Gen. 2:23)

Aaron’s sister Miriam choreographed a dance to celebrate Israel’s deliverance from the pursuing Egyptians (Exod. 15:20). God gave Moses blueprints for the tabernacle’s architecture and the ark with its sculptured angels made of gold and decorated candlesticks (Exod. 25:9–40). The Lord poured out especially the Holy Spirit upon silversmiths Bezalel and Oholiab so they could practice their arts with special skill (Exod. 31:1–11).

David wrote many songs and hymns for use in worship (Psalms). Solomon’s artisans carved, with God’s specific handwritten approval (1 Chron. 28:11–19), bas-reliefs of flower blossoms, palm trees, and angels in the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 6:23–25); and the artists carved hundreds of pomegranates on the free-standing columns arranged like sentinels in front of the temple (1 Kings 7:13–22). Musicians and a Levite band of instruments frequently accompanied worship (2 Chron. 5:11–14 and Psalm 88 subtitle).

The Bible also tells us that from earliest history people who did not fear the true God practiced art as well. Lamech’s son Jubal played the harp and flute (Gen. 4:21), and Lamech’s own oratory was boastful bombast (Gen. 4:23–24). The ziggurat tower at Babel was an architectural monument to human pride (Gen. 11:1–9).

The Bible uses without prejudice all kinds of literary art, from Jotham’s fable (Judges 9:7–20) and Samson’s riddles (Judges 14:8–18) to the majestic poetry of many psalms and passages like Isaiah 40. God has even revealed his will in Scripture through a dramatic chorus of voices like the book of Job and the artful parables of Jesus (e.g., Luke 10:30–37; 16:19–31).

The point is not whether followers of Jesus Christ should be busy in art or not. Since the very creation of the world, the problem has been whether these arts have been fashioned and used by men and women as vehicles of praise to the Lord or whether they have been conceived and executed as expressions of human vanity.

For centuries, Christian craftsmen practiced their art as a service to the church. Nobody thought of art as “fine art,” as if art were something utterly special for and by itself. Guilds of painters, sculptors, and architects were on a par with guilds of weavers, silversmiths, and carpenters. Music and literature were the skills of tradesmen called musicians and minstrels. The medieval church put all such artistry into its service.

Art was conceived by Christians as (1) a liturgical means for worshiping God. Plainsong became Gregorian chant used in the Mass. Rhetoric was converted into pulpit homilies. Sculpture ranged from baldachin to gargoyle; artists in lead, colored glass, and precious stones taught catechism lessons in brilliant, stained glass windows; architects preached Gothic cathedral sermons in stone. Artistry was understood to be a worthy natural means by which talented men could lift their neighbor into a church experience of God’s grace.

As the church lost its monopoly control over cultural life during the Renaissance, and as art came into existence as “fine art,” patronized by rich nobles at their courts even more than by archbishops and popes, a new position firmed up on the relationship of Christians to the arts. Art was given its independence from being an audio-visual aid for ecclesiastical worship, but Christians still wanted art not to contradict biblical truth. Art was to be (2) autonomous but bound to the general norms or beauty, truth, and goodness of humanity and God’s natural world.

The idea that art had its own inviolate realm separate from explicit Christian indoctrination meant art became somewhat secularized. Fifteenth-century frescoes of Bible stories on inner church walls gave way to sixteenth-century portraits of wealthy people for their homes. The change from devotional poetry, which one could use like prayer beads, to medieval romance like Roman de la Rose and Dante’s Divine Comedy, continued. The tale remained devout, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, especially in its allegorical dimension, but the story was one of human love and ordinary experience that had no Bible story prototype. Morality plays in the churchyard gradually turned into the enormously rich dramas of Shakespeare in the playhouse. Many Christians felt comfortable with the theater, painting, and poetry as they were developing as long as these arts did not undercut their Christian beliefs.

Another position taken by Christians on the arts is that art is normally (3) a sensuous temptation that is dangerous to faith. This view has inhibited followers of Christ from participation in the arts. If one believes that composing, performing, or viewing art is playing with fire, then one withdraws from that kind of activity. Sometimes only certain arts have been prohibited—like theater, painting, and dance—while others—like song, music, and poetry—are permitted. The first is considered earthbound and physical while the others are more spiritual in nature.

Christian iconoclasts of the eighth-century a.d. destroyed thousands and thousands of sculptures, paintings, frescoes, mosaics, and illustrated manuscripts because the pictured images had occasioned a cult of icon worshipers and misled the populace into trusting such images as if they were akin to miracle-working relics. English Puritans destroyed art in churches during the seventeenth century in the fervor of ecclesiastical politics, but also because they did not believe sensible art could lead one to spiritual realities. Eighteenth-century European pietism tended to be restrictive of artistic expression for similar reasons. Pietistic Christians are hesitant about imagination and are fundamentally distrustful of artistic illusion because it seems to be deceptive rather than straightforwardly true.

One final important way Christians have viewed art in history is the way of accepting it as (4) a God-given mouthpiece for the human witness of the Lord’s great works or for cursing our existence. This position, which the historic Protestant Reformation set in motion, believes that for art to be Christian, art does not need to be narrowly liturgical. Art is also not intrinsically normative nor is it intrinsically more seductive than any other human activity. Art is simply a certain kind of cultural calling that has its own legitimacy as a sensible, crafted, allusively symbolic artifact. Art can be a vehicle of insight thanking God for his mercies in our world or a vehicle of hate and blasphemy, no matter how expertly done, depending upon the spirit it embodies.

John Donne’s amorous sonnets or his poem on “The Will” (1633) treat human passion with large, redemptive horizons. Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox (1655) depicts the stunning glory of ordinary meat hanging in a butcher shop. The Well-tempered Clavier by J. S. Bach (1723) presents keyboard music that resounds with toccata-like joy and intricate contrapuntal rhythms that celebrate a creaturely rich world. Such poetry, painting, and music exemplify the way Christians can witness our redeeming Creator’s handiwork within the artistic idiom, irrespective of the “topic.”

These four basic historical positions on how Christians should best conceive, practice, and relate to the arts represent roughly the major groupings within the worldwide Christian communion today. Each position shows certain strengths and weaknesses. How do Christians most responsibly come to terms with the utter secularization of the arts without trying to set back history? If Christians stay away from the arts (position 3), godless people have undisputed control of the arts media and can expand the influence of their worldview. If Christians adopt the best artistic forms current (position 2) or try to utilize professional, secular artistry without adapting it to the church’s missionary outreach (position 1), Christians’ cultural expression may be coopted. If the Christian community tries to develop its own particular style of art (position 4), it runs the risk of being permanently off, amateurish, and obscurantic.

But the deep secularization of modern art is a fact. Surrealistic painting, by and large, calls into question the sanity of ordinary life and most traditional values. Salvador Dali (1904–1989) posited a Freudian universe and painted everything he treated into an erotic, hallucinatory vortex—even when he took biblical themes. The canvases of Rene Magritte (1898–1967) are fascinating artistic achievements that juxtapose objects in a way as disturbing as the unanswerable koans of Zen Buddhism. Martha Graham’s choreography is also rigorously erotic, reaching for a new dance idiom of mythic power that repudiates the aristocratic niceties and elegant pirouettes of classical ballet. Many great innovators in modern art have been intensely self-conscious of their rejection of a bourgeois, Victorian worldview and their commitment to a non-Christian primitivism.

Much contemporary architecture, painting, and instrumental music rightly give Christians pause today, too, because of their hard-bitten secularity. It became possible around 1900 to use concrete and reinforced cement to construct buildings. Under the influence of the Bauhaus and architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965), large buildings of all sorts became standardized into functional shells with unobstructed interior spaces (e.g., movable partitions for walls); practical metals like aluminum, nickel, and chrome intensified the feel of cold brightness inside such structures already occasioned by the profusion of physical and electric light. In effect, office buildings, classrooms, and homes took on the aspect of being factories, which quite naturally provided little personal and private space. Painters like Malevich (1878–1935), Mondrian in his later works (c. 1917–1944), and Josef Albers (1888–1976) used a very restricted range of forms to construct what looks like geometric blueprints in paint, and they did it with repetitive ingenuity and tenacity. Such rigorous, purist art, however, has a tendency to sterilize life.

An additional complication to the problem of how Christians are to confront both sexually aggressive art and the dehumanizing technocratic style around us is the fact that so much art today is mass-produced and mass-consumed. A futuristic novel like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) sells hundreds of thousands of copies. A brilliant portrayal of aimless violence as a way of life and death, like Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange (1972), is seen by millions of people. Self-righteous pornography like Oh! Calcutta runs for years on stage in London and New York. Mindless entertainment, pop star culture, and films interrupted by paid advertisements immerse children from infancy to adolescence. Superb means of mass communication rain secular art upon the earth with an almost brain-washing effect.

Christian families are called upon to face the secularized arts today in the strength of the Holy Spirit (John 16:13) and to show themselves approved of God (2 Tim. 2:15–16). But how can we do that with respect to the arts? The answer is that Christians must, first of all, become deeply rooted biblically so that their faith life flowers as a rich plant unafraid in God’s world, rather than as a poor, undernourished stick in the mud. Second, they must study both the nature and the history of art so they will not be fooled into approving or judging the wrong things.

Let me mention a few examples. The subject matter or topic of a novel or film provides little clue as to its worth or insight. Seduction can be graphically portrayed in a text like Proverbs 7:6–23, to our edification, or twisted into a scene that dirties and bores our sensibility, as in Last Tango in Paris. It is also a mistake to demand “beauty” and “harmony” from painting and music as if distortion and dissonance violated artistic norms. Grunewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece of Christ’s crucifixion (c. 1510–1515) is grotesque and unpleasant, but an impressive presentation of our Lord’s agony. Schoenberg’s atonal Variations for Orchestra (1928) is important music that wakes a listener up musically to the important tensions we really know in our day. “Creativity,” too, is more often a slogan than a sound idea for helping us to judge whether a given painting is truly art or bogus. A “creative” person can be one who uses his gifts to glorify God or one who idolizes frenzied experimentation (witness certain paint-dripping canvases by disciples of abstract expressionism). If one thinks of art as “creative,” and if “creativity” is colored by the romantic adoration of “artistic genius” so that the necessary element of craftsmanship in art is neglected, one goes wrong in approaching art.

The most important thing for Christians to understand is that the arts are skillful and thoughtful manmade objects characterized by allusiveness. All the arts—music and sculpture as well as drama and poetry—present an artist’s religious perspective in ambiguity. Art is not by nature a confusing matter, but art is by nature a fused presentation of knowledge necessarily rich in suggestion. It is both normal and normative for the arts to be oblique and symbolical in the way they bring things to our attention as spectators, readers, or audience.

If poetry tries to be as straightforward as a roadway sign, it will be poor poetry. If poetry or painting is overly complicated, like a crossword puzzle, it will also be defective. But poetic, painterly, and musical knowledge are not at core “verbal” or “propositional.” Poetry, painting, music, and all the arts present knowledge that can certainly be talked about and analyzed, but the final character of artistic knowledge is that it is knowledge full of nuance.