Beauty and the Arts
The good news is full of beauty, goodness, and truth. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit also exhibit these and many other attributes. Romans Chapter 1 also says men can find God through creation (beauty), conscience (goodness), and truth.
For some time the emphasis in America has been to focus on truth-telling. Reaching people with the truth by first being good or beautiful has not been considered an effective way to reach the lost. The social gospel may have scared some away from using goodness to attract people to Christ, and the arts themselves have for many decades been a scary place for people of faith.
We know that Paul shared as of first importance that Christ died, was buried, and resurrected victorious in defeat of our separation from God, and that without this truth, people would not enjoy a personal relationship with Him. But somewhere along the line we lost the first importance part of this and decided it was of only importance. The result has been a good news that has largely been the bare truth; in your face, black and white, us and them; dividing the saved from the lost.
This worked for hundreds of years in U.S. history because the government, the culture, and the religion were all in synch with the message of the truth - you either know Jesus or you don’t - make a decision. But in the last 30+ years the culture, the government, and the religion are no longer in agreement about what is true. And in that environment, truth by itself can become divisive.
Jesus met people where they were, not where he wanted them to be (the woman at the well, Zaccheus in the tree, the many people who needed physical healing as well as spiritual). We would like all people to be at the point where the only thing left for them to do is to decide to embrace Christ’s resurrection, but as our culture drifts farther and farther from this never-changing truth, more and more people won’t respond to this message as our first attempt to draw them in. In fact, this direct truth-telling, or didactic approach to reaching people can have the opposite effect. If my understanding of “truth” is a long way from the actual truth, my only reaction might be to be offended by your truth.
While the good news is true, the good news is also beautiful and good, and these are values that all men seem to still find attractive, even if we disagree on the truth itself. People who would not first respond to a discussion of the truth might still be attracted to a discussion of goodness or beauty, or better yet, actual ACTS of beauty and goodness.
Via Affirmativa (The Way of Affirmation) affirms the need to be involved in acts of beauty as well as goodness, and that these acts can be used to invite people in, to create community that can create conversation, which can lead to people wanting to know Christ.
All Beauty was created by God and is owned by Him. Rather than abandoning the arts, the convinced community should be deeply involved in the arts to infuse it with beauty that is also good and true. And this Beauty should be attractional, inviting people into a conversation that will eventually or very quickly lead them to a relationship with Christ.
We don’t need to infuse our art with obvious overt symbols and/or words of religion (although some do this successfully). What we really need is to love our God with all our heart, soul and mind, love our neighbor as ourselves, produce art that is beautiful, good, and true, and become fully engaged with the culture of the artist as an artist. (We don’t ask welders to stop building cars and only weld crosses after they come to Christ. Although a welder here and there might want to do that.)
Via Affirmativa affirms the need for artists to be in the mainstream arts just as business people are in the mainstream of business. We affirm that God wants to redeem artists in their “place” not out of their place, because an artist in the mainstream of the arts who loves God can be salt and light in a place where others who love Christ may never have an influence.
Chuck Blakeman