Art and the Bible by Francis Schaeffer, Part I

August 6th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker

According to IVP’s website, Francis A. Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible argues, “Many Christians, wary of creating graven images, have steered clear of artistic creativity. But the Bible offers a robust affirmation of the arts. The human impulse to create reflects our being created in the image of a creator God.”

I am working on my second read through of the book (it’s 94 pages), and here is my impression so far.

Schaeffer starts off asking whether art can play a real role in Christianity rather than simply bringing “in worldliness through the back door.” He raises the question, “Shouldn’t a Christian focus his gaze steadily on ‘religious things’ alone and forget about art and culture?” (13)

He only raises that question to debunk the notion, lamenting that evangelical Christians tend to narrow the lordship of Christ to a small area of ’souls’ rather than embracing the wholeness of man. By the wholeness of man, Schaeffer refers to the tangible, of this earth stuff: art.

This argument proved controversial, as Schaeffer admits:

A few years ago when I started to work out a Christian epistemology and a Christian concept of culture, many people considered what I was doing suspect. They felt that because I was interested in intellectual answers I must not be biblical. (16)

Schaeffer rejects this view: “Christianity is not just ‘dogmatically’ true or ‘doctrinally’ true. Rather, it is true to what is there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.”

This wholeness leads to culture, which again “evangelical or biblical Christianity has been weak” on: “About all that we have produced is very romantic Sunday school art. We do not seem to understand that the arts too are supposed to be under the lordship of Christ.” (17)

Next time we will unpack Schaeffer’s comments on the Ten Commandments, but at this point he’s got me scratching my head and playing Philistine’s advocate. Just because Christ has lordship over art, doesn’t mean everyone who believes in Him has to become a painter or art appreciator. Thus far, Schaeffer has yet to prove convincingly that a Christian should embrace the arts any more than she or he should embrace curling or archery or building sand castles. If the game is totality of the man, then absolutely everything (presumably evil and blasphemy as well) ought to figure in to the Christian experience. This cannot be of course, as we will discuss in part two.

   Post in Christianity, Book Review