Art in the Bible
What is the place of art in the Christian life? Is art — especially the fine arts of painting and music — simply a way to bring in worldliness through the back door? We know that poetry may be used to praise God in, say, the psalms and maybe even in modern hymns. But what about sculpture or drama? Do these have any place in the Christian life? Shouldn’t a Christian focus his gaze steadily on “religious things” alone and forget about art and culture?

The Lordship of Christ
As evangelical Christians, we have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life. The rest of human life we feel is more important. Despite our constant talk about the Lordship of Christ, we have narrowed its scope to a very small area of reality. We have misunderstood the concept of the Lordship of Christ over the whole of man and the whole of the universe and have not taken to us the riches that the Bible gives us for ourselves, for our lives, and for our culture.

The Lordship of Christ over the whole of life means that there are no Platonic areas in Christianity, no dichotomy or hierarchy between the body and the soul. God made the body as well as the soul, and redemption is for the whole man. Evangelicals have been legitimately criticized for often being so tremendously interested in seeing souls get saved and go to Heaven that they have not cared much about the whole man.

The Bible, however, makes four things very clear: (1) God made the whole man; (2) in Christ the whole man is redeemed; (3) Christ is the Lord of the whole man now and the Lord of the whole Christian life; and (4) in the future as Christ comes back, the body will be raised from the dead and the whole man will have a whole redemption. Therefore, let us consider more fully what it means now to be a whole man whose whole life is under the Lordship of Christ. It is within this framework that we are to understand the place of art in the Christian life.

The conception of the wholeness of man and the lordship of man over creation comes early in Scripture. In Genesis 1:26, 27 we read, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” From the very beginning, therefore, man and woman, being created in the image of God (both of them!), were given dominion (lordship) over the whole of the created earth. They were the ones who bore the image of God and, bearing that image, were to be in charge, to tend the Garden, to keep it and preserve it before their own Lord. Of course, that dominion was spoiled by the historic, space-time Fall, and therefore it is no longer possible to maintain that dominion in a perfect fashion.

Yet, when a man comes under the blood of Christ, his whole capacity as man is refashioned. His soul is saved, yes, but so are his mind and body. True spirituality includes the Lordship of Christ over the total man.

There have been periods in the past when Christians understood this better than we have in the last decades. Some years ago when I started to work out a Christian concept of culture, many people consi idered what I was doing suspect. They felt that because I was interested in intellectual answers, I must not be biblical. But this attitude represents a real poverty. It fails to understand that if Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness. 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.
The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth, they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, including true to the ultimate environment — the infinite, personal God who is really there — then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth. Such an attitude will give our Christianity a strength that it often does not seem to have at the present time.

But there is another side to the Lordship of Christ, and this involves the total culture including the area of creativity. Again, evangelical or biblical Christianity has been weak at this point. About all that we have produced is a very romantic Sunday school art. We do not seem to understand that the arts too are supposed to be under the Lordship of Christ.

I have frequently quoted a statement from Francis Bacon, who was one of the first of the modern scientists and who believed in the uniformity of natural causes in an open system. He, along with other men like Copernicus and Galileo, believed that because the world had been created by a reasonable God, they could therefore pursue the truth concerning the universe by reason. There is much, of course, in Francis Bacon with which I would disagree, but one of the statements which I love to quote is this: “Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.” How I wish that evangelical Christians in the United States and Britain and across the world had had this vision for the last fifty years!

The arts and the sciences do have a place in the Christian life — they are not peripheral. For a Christian, redeemed by the work of Christ and living within the norms of Scripture and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the Lordship of Christ should include an interest in the arts. A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God — not just as tracts, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.

Nonetheless, while the concept of the Lordship of Christ over the whole world would seem to include the arts, many Christians will respond by saying that the Bible has very little to say about the arts. More specifically, some people say that the Jews had no interest in art because of what the Scripture says in the Ten Commandments. But that’s just what we cannot say if we read the Bible carefully. Still, because many Christians make this challenge, their view deserves to be considered and answered in some detail.

No Graven Image
Those who feel that art is forbidden by the Scripture point first to the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them; for I, Jehovah thy God, am a jealous God . (Ex. 20:4, 5). Isn’t it clear, they say, that man is forbidden to make likenesses of anything, not just of God but anything in Heaven or on the earth? Surely this leaves no place for art.

But before we accept this conclusion, we should look at another passage in the law, which helps us to understand what the commandment in Exodus actually means. “Ye shall make no idols, neither shall ye rear you up a graven image, or a pillar [that is, a standing image or a statue], neither shall ye place any figured stone in your land, to bow down unto it: for I am Jehovah your God” (Lev. 26:1). This passage makes clear that Scripture does not forbid the making of representational art, but rather the worship of it. Only God is to be worshiped. Thus, the commandment is not against making art, but against worshiping anything other than God and specifically against worshiping art. To worship art is wrong, but to make art is not.