In his book *From Age to Age*, Dr. Keith Matheson traces out God's plan for the end times from Genesis to Revelation. Go to renewingyourmind dot org slash store to add this title to your library today, and use RYM thirty to save thirty percent at checkout. You can also use RYM thirty to save on other works from Dr. Matheson at liganiere dot org when you order before November tenth.
For our listeners outside of the U.S. and Canada, you can use our WM30 to save on the digital editions of Dr. Matheson's book and other resources. The scriptures speak about God as the author, the source, and the foundation of all truth. That God Himself is true.
Well, in the same way and in the same dimension, the scriptures speak about. The beauty of God, and that all things beautiful find their source and their foundation in the character of God Himself. Are you a fan of modern architecture? But what about modern art? You've probably heard the phrase that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but is that true?
Is beauty really an entirely subjective category? These are some of the questions that R.C. Sproul will help us to consider today from his series "Recovering the Beauty of the Arts." Hello, and welcome to this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. A listener-supported program from Ligonier Ministries. RC used to refer to Ligonier's ministry partners as the backbone of our ministry, and that's exactly what they are.
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And if you stick around until the end of today's program, I'll tell you about some of the exclusive benefits that ministry partners receive. But first, here's R.C. Sproul with today's message, exploring what the Bible says about art and the nature of beauty. Today, we're going to take a look at the role of art in the Christian life and in the Christian community, and see if we can come to some simple, foundational principles about the nature. Of beauty, if you would take the time to look at your concordances of the Scripture and looked up every reference to beauty or every reference to the beautiful, you would see that that word beauty, in one form or another, occurs frequently in the pages of sacred Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament.
And just to set a framework for our investigation today, let's begin by reading a portion of Scripture from the Book of First Chronicles that includes within it, in Chapter 16, a Psalm written by David. I'd like to read that from First Chronicles 16, beginning at verse 28. We read these words: Give to the Lord, O families of the peoples, give to the Lord glory and strength, and give to the Lord glory, do His name. Bring an offering and come before Him, O worship the Lord, in the beauty of holiness. Tremble before Him, all of the earth.
The world also is firmly established, and it shall not be moved.
Now there are two elements in this portion of this psalm of David that I'd like to call attention to: two words that stand out. One is the word glory. The idea of the glory of God is pervasive throughout Scripture, and it refers to His Majesty. His heaviness, his weightiness, his worth, and his significance, and closely connected with his glory is the concept of holiness. And the psalm enjoins the people of God to worship God in the beauty of holiness.
So that the holiness of God and the glory of God are conjoined here with respect to this idea of beauty.
So it's a strange admonition, isn't it, for us that we are called to come into the presence of God and to worship that which is beautiful about God. Again, in the Psalms, and Psalm twenty-seven and Psalm twenty-nine, tell us again about this idea of the beauty of God. If I can read briefly from Psalm twenty-seven, in verse four, one thing I have desired of the Lord, and that will I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold. The beauty of the Lord, and again in Psalm 29, David reiterates what he had said in the psalm that's contained in First Chronicles, to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. But here, God is called beautiful, and I'm afraid that the idea of the beauty of God has been all but eclipsed.
In our contemporary culture, both in the secular community and in the church as well, I've said many times that there are three dimensions of the Christian life that the Scriptures are very much concerned about, and those three dimensions are the good, and the true, and the beautiful. But we tend to have cut off the third from the other two, and in fact, sometimes Christians reduce their concern of the things of God purely to the ethical realm, to a discussion of righteousness or a discussion of goodness. Others are so concerned about purity of doctrine that they're preoccupied with truth at the expense of behavior. Or at the expense of the holy. I've heard it said, and I think somewhat facetiously, that if you want to find a church that is concerned with the good, you go to the Baptist community because their morality is emphasized.
If you want to be concerned about the true, then you go to the Presbyterians or the Reformed people because they're the ones that spend so much time worried about doctrine. And if you want to learn about beauty, you have to go to the Episcopal Church because there the focus is. On the beautiful, rather than the good or the true, when in fact the biblical concern is for all three. That God, we are told in Scripture, is the ground or fountain of all goodness. All goodness finds its definition in His being and in His character.
What God is determines what goodness is, in the final analysis. And in the same way, the scriptures speak about God as the author, the source, and the foundation of all truth. That God Himself is true.
Well, in the same way, and in the same dimension, the scriptures speak about the beauty of God, and that all things beautiful find their source and their foundation. In the character of God Himself, so that God ultimately is the norm of the good, the norm of the true, and the norm of the beautiful.
Now, again, as I've mentioned, we live in a time of crisis in the secular culture and in the church, with respect specifically to this dimension of the beautiful and how this works out. In the arts, I hear all the time from Christian artists, whether they're musicians, sculptors, painters, architects, whatever they are, literary people. They are feeling cut off from the rest of the Christian community because they tell me that they are treated as pariahs because their vocation is considered somehow worldly. And not worthy of Christian devotion, and that's a very sad commentary on the state of affairs today. Particularly when we look at the history of the church, and we see that the Christian church historically has produced some of the greatest giants in music, and in art.
And in literature of any group that's ever produced them, where else do you find a Milton, a Handel, a Bach, and so on, as we see in the Christian history, Shakespeare, and others, of course, who have been pioneers of greatness in the arts. But today, that's not where the scene seems to be. And part of this goes back very early in church history to the first iconoclastic controversy that had to do with the church's use of icons in worship, and there were great protests raised against that, and created some differences between the Eastern Church and the Western Church, and so on. And also, the question was brought to bear at that time about the use of art in church at all. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church defended her abundant use of art as saying that the art in the church were the books published for the illiterate, and we've heard the story: one picture is worth a thousand words.
And so, in the Middle Ages, particularly when the people of the towns roundabout were not literate. One of the ways in which the church communicated her theories and her doctrines and her truth was through the art that was used in it. If one would go to the Louvre or to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and peruse the history of art, you would see that it's dominated by a religious orientation and specifically by a Christian orientation. Because art historically has been at the center of the concern of the Christian community. When we go to the Old Testament, for example, and we see there that the first people who are said to have been filled by the Holy Ghost were the artisans and craftsmen that God selected to prepare the objects for.
The tabernacle, and when we talk about artists who were inspired, here these artists were inspired by God, the Holy Spirit, for their craftsmanship, for the furniture, for the making of the gowns and the robes for Aaron, and his priestly garb was to be made for glory and for beauty, and so God was concerned. To not only use artists in the building of his sanctuary in the Old Testament, but also to endow those very artists with the power of His Holy Spirit to make sure that what they were doing met with the standards of excellence that He Himself wanted. Yet at the same time, we also see in the Old Testament strong prohibitions against the misuse of art, and even in the Ten Commandments, one whole commandment dedicated to a prohibition against the making of graven images that become part of a practice of idolatry. And so there is a hedge put around the use of art in the Old Testament. Obviously, there were some forms of art that received the blessing of God.
There were other forms of art that did not receive the blessings of God. And so one cannot come to the pages of Scripture with the simplistic conclusion that all art is good art, or that all art is bad. Art, but now we live not only after the period of the Old Testament, but we also live after the period of the Protestant Reformation, because part of the crisis in the 16th century involved the use of art in the church. We had a new iconoclastic movement following the Lutheran Reformation in Germany. When Luther.
Gave his famous statement at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Said, "Here I stand," and all of that. And as he was leaving the hall at the Diet, he was kidnapped by men on horseback and whisked away into the woods. And the whole kidnapping, of course, was staged by Luther's friends to protect him from the wrath of the Emperor, and so on. And he was whisked away and placed in hiding to the Wartburg Castle.
Where he donned the disguise of a monk, Juncker Georg or Sir George the Knight, and wore a beard and so on, and wore the clothing of a knight, and retired to that castle retreat to begin his work of translating the New Testament into German. But while he was at the Wartburg, word came back to him from Wittenberg. That one of his chief lieutenants, Karlstadt, had gone over the edge in pushing the envelope of the Reformation by leading raids and parties against churches and smashing their stained glass windows, smashing and destroying the artwork in the local churches as his revolt against the Catholic Church. And this was what it was that made Luther quit the Wartburg at the risk of his life when a price was on his head to return to Wittenberg, to stop this rampage of some of his disciples against artworks in the churches of Germany. And so, in the Lutheran Reformation, under the direction, particularly of Luther, art remained a very important part of the worship of the Lutheran community, both in music and paintings and architecture and so on.
Meanwhile, in the Reformed movement in Switzerland, where the chief leader, the magisterial reformer of the Swiss Reformation, of course, was John Calvin. Calvin took a different approach to the function of art in the church from what Luther had done before him.
Now Calvin was in total agreement with Luther about the central significance of the Reformation movement of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And sometimes we have a tendency to think of Luther and Calvin as being the same age.
Well, they lived at the same time, but Luther was older, twenty years or so older than Calvin. And Calvin looked at Luther as his hero. And Luther was the innovator, the one who started the Reformation. And Calvin learned much from the teachings and writings of Martin Luther, and agreed with Luther completely, not only on the on the understanding of the gospel of justification by faith alone, but also shared Luther's concern of its importance and of its significance. Luther had said that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is the article.
Upon which the church stands or falls, he said, "It's the Lord, it's the Master, it's on which everything depends." And in like manner, Calvin said, "It is the hinge. That is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. It's the hinge on which everything turns." So they shared this common commitment to the central importance of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. But for Calvin, his overarching passion in reforming the church, as important as he saw the gospel was, obviously, he also carried this burden through his whole life of the reform of the worship of the church, because he was convinced that there was a link between the eclipse of the gospel. And the practices that he regarded as idolatrous in the medieval Catholic Church, and so the Church had directed its attention away from the Word, away from the Gospel, to the sacraments and their trappings, in all of the images, the statuary, and the artwork that was an integral part of the Roman Catholic religion.
And so Calvin sought to reform the life of the church and the worship of the church by driving out of the church all negative worldly influences of art that would obscure the word of God.
Now Calvin acknowledged in his own day that art was not inherently wrong. He did not take the position that the Bible outlawed all art in the life of the church, but he said the times were so perilous, and the people had become so addicted to the images, the statues, and all of that which were part of the trappings of the Roman Catholic Church that he said at least there has to be a temporary time out. From the use of these kinds of artworks, so that people would get their attention back to the Word of God and away from these sensuous presentations of art. And in fact, when Calvin first came to Geneva, there was no congregational singing whatsoever in church on Sunday morning. It wasn't until he was banished from Geneva and went to Strasbourg that there he saw congregations singing hymns and psalms and saw how much that enhanced their devotion and their spirit of worship.
That then he later, under very strict conditions, allowed music into the worship there at Geneva, and in that Reformed tradition. We saw further hardening against the use of art in the church in any way by the Puritan movement. One of the things the Puritans wanted to do was to purify the church from any unbiblical intrusion from the world that would obscure the purity of the word of God. In the English Reformation, we know. That there were Puritan pastors who lost their jobs, and in some cases were tortured, and in some cases even lost their lives, but they were persecuted because they refused to wear the white surplice, part of the garb of the priesthood of the Anglican Church.
And we look at that from our day and age, and we say, "How could these people be so exercised over whether one wore a surplus or didn't wear a surplus?" But again, they were driven by this concern to make sure that worship was pleasing and acceptable to God, and that no worldly elements would come in and upset the purity of worshiping God. In the beauty of His holiness.
Now, this reaction, in part, involved a reaction against what we're going to call formalism, a reaction against externalism, a reaction against ritualism, because they saw that in the decay of the medieval church. People were substituting for true religion of the heart and of the soul devotion to external forms. Just going through the motions. This is the same problem that emerged in Old Testament Israel, and where the prophets came on the scene. They had to speak strongly against this externalism or formalism.
And our Lord Jesus Himself also was very critical of the Pharisees, who were so particularly devoted to keeping the forms. And doing the externals, but they missed the heart and soul of true worship. And people put their confidence in the ritual. Remember Jeremiah's temple speech in Jerusalem, where he says, "You people say this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. You recite the words." But on your lips, these are lying words—words that cannot profit, because the truth of God, that we're supposed to be.
Mediated and communicated by the forms of the Old Testament and by the external actions of the tabernacle and the ceremonies and so on, and that the rituals that God Himself had devised and introduced into the history of the Jewish people—all of these things were designed by God to emphasize, enhance, and corroborate the truth of His Word. But what happened in Israel, and then again in the medieval church, was when you add this suffix, the ism on it, the forms, the externals, and the rituals became a substitute for the word of God and directed people's attention away.
So you still had beauty without the truth. And so, what happened in this crisis was, there were those zealous to recover the word, zealous to recover the truth, and they said, "What we're going to have to do is not just reform, but deform the church." That here the abuse of forms, the abuse of externals, and the abuse of ritual, led to the ceasing of the use of forms and externals and ritual, which then created a whole new crisis in the life of the church, which we'll look at in our next session. Thanks for joining us today for this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
So many of the world's Christians simply do not have access to faithful Bible teaching, like the message that we heard today. Ligonier's ministry partners play a vital role in making trusted discipleship resources available to more people in more languages. When you become a ministry partner, you'll also receive streaming access to our entire teaching series library, a copy of the Reformation Study Bible, and each month's issue of Table Talk magazine. Ministry partners also enjoy exclusive features in Liganiere's Grow app, including the Ask Liganiere intelligent assistant and the Reformation Study Bible notes. You can learn more about becoming a ministry partner today by visiting renewingyourmind.org/partnership.
And let me thank you in advance for standing with us as we seek to further the gospel and to serve God's people. Whether our churches gather for worship in a simple room or an ornate structure, art plays a role in our worship in some way. Join us next Saturday as R.C. Sproul encourages us to pursue art and beauty in the life of the church here on Renewing Your Mind.
