Art for Whose Sake?

Before we get started today, I wanted to encourage you to download the new Ligonier app. Not only is it even easier to listen to Renewing Your Mind directly in the app, all of our other podcasts like Things Unseen, simply put, ultimately with RC Sprawl, are also now available. And as you're listening, you can minimize the player and for the first time, search the thousands of free resources in the library. And for a limited time, we've included several newer series free to stream on the home screen. It has a new design, is even easy to use and browse, and of course, it's free.

Simply search for Ligonier in your favorite app store, and if you already have the app, consider encouraging a friend to download it, as it's a great way to introduce them to RC Sprawl and the teaching of Ligonier Ministries. Now here's today's edition of Renewing Your Mind. Some of us like art, and others don't prefer it. I can remember seeing my first Rembrandt and being stopped in my tracks simply staring at the painting. But even if we try and avoid art, as RC Sprawl will explain today, every form is an art form. And every art form communicates something, so it can't be avoided, whether in a studio, a museum, or even a church building.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Today and tomorrow, you'll hear messages from RC Sprawl's series Recovering the Beauty of the Arts. How should Christians think about beauty? What role does art play in the Christian life? These are questions that shouldn't be overlooked, and we begin today considering what is art and why we should care about it.

Here's Dr. Sprawl. In our first session of our series on the Christian and art and our study of the beautiful, we ended by talking about the reaction in church history against formalism, externalism, and ritualism. And I mentioned that the same critiques that were leveled against these problems in the 16th century Reformation were also raised by the reformers of the Old Testament, namely the prophets of Israel.

But again, I think it's important for us to understand that the prophets of Israel were not iconoclasts. They did not try to get rid of the forms or to get rid of the externals or to get rid of the rituals because they understood, first of all, that the forms that were in the temple, in the tabernacle, and so on, were forms and externals that were ordained by God Himself. And that the ritual that was there was also ordained by God. So the problem wasn't with ritual or form or externality.

The problem was what people were doing with those forms and those externals and their rituals. You know, we can pray the Lord's Prayer as a matter of rote and completely miss the content of it as an empty ritual, and any ritual as rich as it may be in its origin may lose its meaning by mindless repetitions of it. But again, it's important for us to see that the cure to formalism, the cure to externalism and ritualism, according to the prophets, was not to throw out the forms or to throw out the externals or to throw out the ritual, but to reform them and continue to associate the word to the sign. Because down through redemptive history, God has added always sacrament to word, some kind of visual aid or auditory aid to enhance the significance of the word. The Bible does not come to us simply as a disjointed verbal communication, but to the verbal communication are the gestures, the forms, the dramas, the festivals, the sacraments, and so on throughout history.

All the way back to the Noahic Covenant, God promises never to destroy the world again by flood, and then to corroborate His Word sets His bow in the sky as His outward, external, formal sign, guaranteeing the content of His Word. But as soon as you lose the verbal content, then the signs and the externals degenerate into this godless formalism and externalism and so on. Now that's one of the reasons why the prophets of the Old Testament stopped short of trying to get rid of the forms and the externals and the rituals because God Himself had ordained them. But there's another reason why they didn't get rid of all of the externals and all of the forms and all of that sort of thing and all of the art from the life of the church, and that's because it simply can't be done. There is no possible escape from art or from externals or from liturgy in corporate worship because corporate worship has to take place somewhere, and there are forms that are involved in wherever you worship. You may choose to have a church that is as plain in its ornamentation as possible, but it's still using art forms, and I'll explain that in just a moment.

Let me relay in the meantime an incident that occurred in my life not too long ago. We had a minister visit the church where I preached, St. Andrews, and reacted strenuously against the artwork that was present in our church building. And I knew that there would be at some point somebody who would not like the use of art in worship. And he was so upset about it that he went back and wrote to the publisher of some of my books and demanded that they stop publishing my books because I had this blasphemous use of art and so on. He was really exercised about it, and I thought, well, that's where we are in our situation in this day and age. And there are people who really are convinced in conscience that all art must be removed from the church building.

And my point again is that's impossible. For this reason, we need to understand every form is an art form, and every art form communicates something. We may think that this lectern that I'm using right now to hold up my Bible and my notes and so on is a purely formless piece of furniture or that it's purely functional and utilitarian. It has no aesthetic dimension to it, and that the reason why it's shaped is strictly for function, but if you look at it, you'll see that there's a step down in the boards at the bottom.

You don't need that to support that center column. The whole purpose for that is for style, for cosmetics, for how it appeals to the eye as you look at it. As plain as this is, the wood itself is finished, and it is stained a particular color. It's not painted yellow with polka dots. It's stained a dark brown.

It's very simple, very neutral, but it still contains an art aspect and aesthetic dimension to it. I mean, you look at the chairs you're sitting in. They're not merely functional. There's a color to the padding and so on. You look at the clothes of the people sitting around you. Every person in this room is wearing a different set of clothes. There is no uniformity to the dress style that's here in this room, and yet we are all dressed to hide our nakedness.

That's one utilitarian purpose. A second one is to protect ourselves from the elements, from being too cold or whatever, and some of you, not to be too warm here in Florida, and that's the way you choose your clothes. But why a plaid shirt? The plaid in that shirt right there adds nothing to the utilitarian value of that garment, does it? It's there strictly for aesthetics, strictly for style, strictly for beauty, if you will, just as God was concerned to design the robes of the priesthood in the Old Testament for beauty.

They were not simply there to hide nakedness or to keep cold out of the body. Now, this is something that we understand because we are very careful all the time about the clothes that we buy and the clothes that we wear because we want to look nice, and when we say we want to look nice, we're making a statement about art. We're making a statement about beauty.

Nobody wants to look ugly, and so we choose our clothing not just for how they work to keep us warm, but also for how they look. All forms are art forms, and every art form communicates something. If I walk into a church that is completely plain, unadorned, there's a message to me from that plain and unadorned church. We've seen in our day an attempt to de-churchify church, and so to remove all of the accouterments of churchiness from our church building because we understand that this modern generation doesn't want to be invited into these old, outmoded, traditional houses of worship that look like churches and have the muskiness and staleness of them.

And so the architecture changes dramatically. When we were building our church at St. Andrews, the workmen, the contractors that were there would try to joke with me all the time because as they were building the chancel, every time I would come in, they would say, how do you like the stage, Reverend? And they knew that would get my goat because I would say, this is not a stage. This is a chancel because the idea of stage conjures up the idea of entertainment, not of worship. But I hear that all the time now in the churches where you don't even enter into the sanctuary. It's a worship center, and in the worship center you don't have a chancel. You have a stage. You don't even have a pulpit anymore. You have a plexiglass portable lectern that you can move out of the way for the drama skit and so on.

And so a message is communicated. I would say to my students in my seminary classes, how many of you have ever been in a Roman Catholic cathedral? Well, they all had. I say, tell me your experience, your sensation when you walked in the door. Now these were people who were Reformed, who were convinced advocates of Reformation theology who were not Roman Catholic in their thinking, but every single one of them would say, I had this overwhelming sense of awe of the sacred.

And I said, do you think that was an accident? Or do you think that the architects who built those cathedrals thought through what kind of form would draw the spirit of a person heavenward? What kind of a form of the church in the form of the crucifix? Why did they build it where the entryway was darker than the nave, where the light and the clear story windows let light into the sanctuary, but rather to communicate that you're walking from the darkness of this world into the light of the presence of God? And all of that was communicating something.

And in many cases, people had no idea what that something was, but they felt it nevertheless. You have a quite different feeling when you walk into a town hall or a civic meeting center where our churches now more and more are being built after that model because the idea there is to make people comfortable that we're going to have a place where people can come without fear, where we can enjoy fellowship, where they won't be inhibited by any threat of a transcendent holy God. So all of the symbols of transcendence, all of the symbols of holiness are removed to make room for creature comfort, and you wonder why a sense of God Himself has been eclipsed in the life of the modern church.

But again, most people say it doesn't matter. God's looking for people to worship Him in spirit and in truth. It doesn't matter whether you worship Him in a tent or whether you worship Him outside or if you worship Him in a storefront or if you worship Him in a medieval cathedral. Well, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter if you are in fact worshiping in spirit and in truth.

God does not require that He be worshiped in a Gothic cathedral, obviously. But all I'm saying is that don't forget that when you pitch that tent, that tent is going to communicate something. And the whole idea of religion in tents has a history in the United States of America, and it's not a good one. And it's not one that I think is a good idea to perpetuate in terms of symbol and symbolic associations.

But all I'm pleading with people is to remember that no matter what you do, you are choosing an art form, and that that art form is communicating something to the people who visit it. I went to a church in Pennsylvania where the minister came to me one day, and he said to me, he said, you know, he said, I don't understand it. Our church is the most theologically sound church in the whole district, and our people are dedicated and devoted people to the things of God. But we have this reputation in the community that our church is dead. He said, but I see the signs of spiritual life all over our parish, and I don't understand where this image comes from in the community. I said, I know where it comes from, and he said, where? I said, have you ever walked into your church from the outside? Take a deep breath.

Your olfactory senses are absolutely assaulted by the mustiness and the sense of decay that's in that old building of yours, and the building subliminally communicates to every stranger who walks into it the scent of death. He said, you're kidding me. I said, no.

I said, if I were you, I'd do something. You know, I'd get up in the rafters, and I'd get pine boughs or something or some kind of spray in that church and get rid of that odor. There's a restaurant not far from here that's changed hands at least five times in the last ten years, and it's a magnificent ornate wood-carved restaurant that has the same problem, the last five owners that haven't got rid of the problem.

The odor in that place assaults the senses, and nobody wants to eat there, and until they get rid of that, they're not going to be successful in their restaurant because of that sense or sensory response of people. So again, we need to ask ourselves, why do we have the forms that we have? Why do you wear the clothes that you choose? What message are you trying to communicate to people with the clothes and the style that you choose? Because every style, as I said, every form is an art form, and every art form communicates something.

Now, again, this current crisis is anti-art. Art is seen as worldly, but you cannot escape the world insofar as you can't escape the five senses, and all of them are involved in our worship, what our music sounds like, what our building looks like, as I've just mentioned, what our building smells like, and so on. All of those are sensory dimensions that are added to the verbal content and the intellectual concepts that we are proclaiming in our churches. So for me, the final question is not whether there will be art in church. You can't have church without art, or whether you're going to have ritual, because even in a Quaker meeting when everybody's sitting there and there's no order of worship and people just speak as they're moved, there's still some kind of order there, some kind of regular sequence that goes on that you can't… Every church has a liturgy. Every church has externals. Every church has forms. So the question is not whether we're going to have church with forms or without forms, with externals or not externals, with liturgy or not liturgy. The issue is whether the forms are good forms or beautiful forms, true forms. Do they enhance the truth and the goodness and the beautiful?

Or are they bad forms? It's not whether we're going to have art or not have art, folks. It's whether the art that we have is good art or bad art, whether it's beautiful or whether it's ugly, whether it's symphony or whether it's cacophony, whether it's order and cosmos or disorder and chaos.

That's the question. And that's why I think it's very important for the Christian community to examine this whole matter of beauty so that we, as we have studied what is good, what is true, we also need to be studying what is beautiful because, again, I remind you that God is the foundation of all truth because God Himself is true. And God is the foundation of all goodness because God Himself is good. And God is the foundation of all beauty because God Himself is beautiful. When we think about the relationship of God as the Creator to the creature and to the creation, we see that God not only is the author of art and the inspirer of art, but He Himself is an artist in a very simple way.

We observe that every single day. And God doesn't need paint, who doesn't need brushes, who doesn't need a canvas, but by the power of His Word can create worlds of beauty and fill empty voids with real things and triumph over the unformed abyss prior to His speaking the Word of creation. When I think about God, we're all moved. I mean, you never get bored, certainly not in Florida, at looking at sunsets. Sometimes the sunsets here in Florida are so spectacular, they're breathtaking. I've been looking at sunsets all my life, you know, and you sometimes hear people say in such maudlin terms, oh yes, I believe in God because I see Him in the beauty of the sunset and all. And we can say that in a maudlin way, and yet you can see a sunset that is so incredibly beautiful that it stops you in your track. You can look down into the Grand Canyon, into that abyss, and just be in awe.

I mean, there's a reason why we sing of the purple mountain's majesty. You fly over the Rockies in the winter in particular and see the snow-capped peaks there, and you see the hand of the Creator in the design work there. The thing that amazes me, if you've ever played around with painting, you know that one of the most difficult things is the use of color and how you mix and match colors. You all worry about that when you get dressed in the morning, but God can have a landscape with 500 different hues and tones of green, none of which clash, none of which are ugly, but He's the master mixer of color. You look at the sea and watch the sea.

I've been mesmerized watching the sun and the waves on the sea and watching the blues and the tones change by the second kaleidoscopically, and yet each one is as magnificent as the one was before. He's an artist. He's a clothier.

He's a cobbler. The deer lives his whole life with one coat, and the coat serves him whether it's hot or whether it's cold, whether it's snowy, whether it's rainy. He doesn't have to run down the street to buy a new overcoat.

It lasts him as long as he lives. It's one pair of shoes, and his shoes are magnificent. He doesn't have to go to the catalog in order of Baswegians, in order to adorn his feet, and we can pick any example from the animal kingdom and see how God has clothed them, how He clothes the lilies, how He clothes the sparrow, how He gives beauty and glory of all kinds of diverse things in the world that He makes. He's not only the source of art, but He Himself is the greatest artist in the history of creation. And so in this series, we're going to look to see if we can find transcendent norms found within God Himself that give us clues as to what is beautiful and what isn't. Not only is God the source of art, as R.C. Sproul just said, He Himself is the greatest artist in the history of creation.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and you just heard a message from R.C. Sproul's nine-part series, Recovering the Beauty of the Arts. In this series, Dr. Sproul explores the influence of music, drama, and even architecture from a Christian perspective. This series can be yours on DVD for a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. You'll also gain lifetime streaming access to the series, so request Recovering the Beauty of the Arts, a topic that is not often discussed among Christians today, by calling us at 800 435 4343 or by visiting renewingyourmind.org. R.C. Sproul ended today's message, stating that he was going to consider if there are transcendent norms found within God Himself that give us clues as to what is beautiful and what isn't. That's what he'll tackle tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. .