What do you expect from the Renew the Arts Podcast? Do you want a trusted checklist for beauty, so you can discern with little effort between good and bad art? Looking for rules to keep your media consumption safe for the whole family? Want a podcast that recommends similar artists within your current tastes? Well, look no further than … somewhere else.
No, but all joking aside, we have found that many Christians enter into discussions of the arts with very specific expectations and fears. To be frank, we probably won’t meet those expectations or allay those fears. But, if you can open up your heart and mind ever so slightly to what the Bible teaches that the arts can and should do in the church, I think you’ll find we offer something far more bracing, freeing, and edifying than quick and comfortable answers.
We aim to frame the right kinds of questions to stir you up to seek out God’s wisdom about the arts in the Bible. Ultimately, we don’t want you to trust us blindly as experts or tastemakers. Instead, we want to equip and inspire you to have the diligence and generosity to search out and support those artists who most glorify God and most edify the church.
With that, I want to orient you to the way we talk about the arts on the podcast, since it might feel unfamiliar. I think knowing what to expect beforehand will save you some frustration. I have written more extensively on all of these matters in According to His Excellent Greatness (which you can acquire in every format for free), so I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version here with some pertinent quotes from my book.
Art: Unified in Principle, Diverse in Application
In contrast to the appearance orientation of men, God does not delineate the necessary form or appearance of things in the Bible, but instead gives underlying principles that derive flesh from their application in the lives of saints through the working of the Spirit. . . .
The Christian cannot ignore appearances altogether, but he should learn to interpret appearances first as effects rather than causes. Forms follow the dictates of foundations, and foundations are laid in the heart. Lasting change to the compromised discipline of aesthetics must occur in its foundation—then it will manifest that change in a burgeoning variety of profitable and God-pleasing forms.1
Most of us have not been given great insight into such subtle arenas as visual art, poetry, and sacred architecture. So instead, we tend to focus on the easily discernible superficial characteristics. We want concrete checklists verifiable in committee: Christ figure? Check. No drums? Check. Vaulted ceilings? Check. Warehouse look? Distressed fonts? Exposed rafters? Check. We fear the frustrating ambiguity of real insight. So instead, we hide our ignorance behind the authority of either trusted classics or contemporary fads. This produces tribalism, and it marginalizes good art.
Many people ask us for rules concerning beauty and art, and they often grow frustrated when we insist on withholding these rules. They grow even more frustrated when we tell them superficial rules don’t legitimately exist—only principles in need of wise application. They then ask, “If art can’t be judged by absolute and objective appearances, can it be judged at all?” How do you look beyond appearances into the heart of art?
Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?
The chameleon quality of art has driven some in the church to hopeless frustration. Why even bother? If one cannot find truly normative examples and fixed and objective aesthetic forms, then it must be that artistic standards are hopelessly “subjective,” right? I hear this all the time: “Art is subjective.”
But when most people say “subjective,” they really mean “arbitrary.” These are not the same things. To quote again from my book:
Intimacy with God is the only path to true knowledge. Because we live in a scientistic (though not scientific) culture, we tend to consider subjectivity as a detriment to true knowledge, but the Bible does not see it this way. The seat of reason in the Scriptures is not the head, but the heart. . . . In the Scriptures, knowledge is directly related to intimacy. Because we cannot achieve transcendence over reality (since we cannot become God), we must achieve an assurance of knowledge by becoming intimate with Christ. Therefore, any path to knowledge that does not start with the complete reverence and intimate adoration of God—the “fear of the Lord”—leads only to destruction (Ps. 111:10; Prov. 1:7).
Whereas our transcendence merely pictures God’s, our immanence is real. Immanence as a road to knowledge more aptly suits finite creatures; for this reason, the Bible gives preeminence to intimacy over objectivity as the foundation of human epistemology.2
Art has more to do with applying principles than presenting them. Most people find it difficult to reconstruct the seed of the principle when it has already burst into the plant of application. Which leads me to my next point.
Principles vs. Practice
It is difficult to balance the exposition of pure principle with the application of that principle to real circumstances. . . . If this book proceeds no further than abstract principles, no matter how true or biblical those principles may be, some may claim that the book fails to apply to real circumstances. If I have too many applications, however, some will criticize me for straying too far from the Word into the realm of mere opinion.3
This problem most definitely extends to our podcast. If you talk about principles alone, people will say, “Yes, but what does that look like?” Bring in examples, and people often get hung up on them. They say things like, “Yes, but I really like the art you criticized. So that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
If we don’t intend to provide normative examples in the podcast, what do we intend by using examples? We want to use our examples to illustrate, not legislate. I’m sure we regularly fail to pick the best and most illustrative examples, however. Please provide others if you think they might work better. We would love to hear them.
The Importance of Dialogue
Dialogue and discourse have all but died in our time. So much of the world has self-segregated into chest-thumping tribalism and shrill finger-pointing that sometimes it seems that no one remembers how to disagree productively anymore. Let me tell you about the best compliment I think we have received concerning the podcast.
One listener told Justus that while he listened to the podcast he started to contradict us out loud. He forgot for a moment that he was listening to a recording! He explained that our tone and open-endedness seemed even to invite criticism and pushback.
You might be thinking, “How did Michael view that as a compliment?” Well, it did not seem so on first accounting. But then I realized that our listener had pointed out two very important things: 1) Our podcast sounds good enough that you might almost mistake us for being in the room. 2) People want to enter into the conversations we’re having, and they feel comfortable enough to do so—even to disagree with us.
How encouraging! Our claim that we want to cultivate conversation is no front or pretense. We really do want to hear from you. We want our podcast to stir up these important conversations and inspire you to wade in.
Conclusion
In closing, we do not believe others must of necessity share our opinions and tastes. Disagree with us. Contradict us. Offer counter-examples and pushback. We invite you to do so! However zealously we might contend for what we consider good, we intend the podcast to stir up conversations—not shut them down.
We know that our support of the arts and artists would wither into self-service as soon as we elevated our own personal aesthetic over everyone else’s, so we try to carefully make space for all God’s children at this creative table. Our mission statement is “to liberate Christian creativity.” We would hardly be doing a good job of that if we merely exchanged one arbitrary and narrow aesthetic for our own!
I hope our commitment to dialogue, Christian liberty, discernment, and durable principles refreshes you in a time when people pay lip-service to such things while denying them in all but name. Please, and know that we mean this, if you have any questions or want us to address something in a podcast or just want to say hello, reach out in a comment or email! We feel so very blessed by Jesus to have the privilege to serve you in this.
You can listen to the Renew the Arts Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or right here on our website.