Four Standards of Judgment
5. What kind of judgment does one apply, then, to a work of art? I believe that there are four basic standards: (1) technical excellence; (2) validity; (3) intellectual content, the world-view which comes through; and (4) the integration of content and vehicle.

I will discuss technical excellence in relationship to painting because it is easy to point out through this medium what I mean. Here one considers the use of color, form, the texture of the paint, the handling of lines, the balance, composition and unity of the painting, and so forth. In each of these, there can be varying degrees of technical excellence. By recognizing technical excellence as an aspect of an art work, we are often able to say that while we do not agree with such and such an artist’s world-view, he is nonetheless a great artist.

We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn or ridicule. Instead, if the artist’s technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world-view. Man must be treated fairly as man. Creative ability and technical excellence are therefore important criteria.

Validity is the second criterion. By validity I mean whether an artist is honest to himself and to his world-view, or whether he makes his art only for money or for the sake of being accepted. If an artist makes an art work solely for a patron — whether that patron is the ancient noble, or the modern art gallery to which the artist wants access, or the modern art critics of the moment — his work does not have validity. The modern forms of “the patron” are more destructive than even that of the old noble.

To bring it down to earth, let’s see what happens in the art form of preaching. There is many a pastor who does not have validity. Some preach for material gain and others in order to be accepted by their congregation. It is so easy to play to the audience, to adjust what one says or the way one says it to produce the kind of effect which will be most beneficial to the preacher himself. And when one sees the issue in relationship to the gospel, the force of the dishonesty is especially obvious.

We can think of the contemporary dramatists whose future is in the hands of the critics of the passing moment. In drama, art, music and cinema, we have a set of New York and London critics who can make or break the artist. How easy it is to play to the critic and not to take one’s art as a serious expression of what the artist himself wants to say and do.

The third criterion for the judgment of a work of art is its content, that which reflects the world-view of the artist. As far as a Christian is concerned, the world-view that is shown through a body of art must be seen ultimately in terms of the Scripture. The artist’s world-view is not to be free from the judgment of the Word of God. In this the artist is like a scientist. The scientist may wear a white coat and be considered an “authority” by society, but where his statements impinge upon what God has given us in Scripture, they come under the ultimate authority of His Word. An artist may wear a painter’s smock and be considered almost a holy man; yet where his work shows his world-view, the content must be judged by its relationship to the Christian world-view.

I think we can now see how it is possible to make such judgments concerning the work of art. If we stand as Christians before a man’s canvas and say that he is a great artist in technical excellence and validity — if in fact he is — if we have been fair with him as a man and as an artist, then we can say that his world-view is wrong. We can judge his view on the same basis as we judge the views of anybody else — philosopher, common man, laborer, businessman or whatever.

Let’s be more specific. The notion of Bohemian freedom which Jean-Jacques Rousseau promulgated and which has been so prevalent in modern society has no place in Christian thinking. Rousseau was seeking a kind of autonomous freedom, and from him stemmed a group of “supermen” whose lives were lived above reason, as it were, and above the norms of society. For a long time this Bohemian life was taken to be the ideal for the artist, and it has come in the last few decades to be considered an ideal for more than the artist. From a Christian point of view, however, this sort of life is not allowed. God’s Word binds the great man and the small, the scientist and the simple, the king and the artist.

Some artists may not know that they are consciously showing forth a world-view. Nonetheless, a world-view usually does show through from the body of their work. Even those works which were constructed under the principle of art for art’s sake often imply a world-view — even the world-view that there is no meaning is a message. In any case, whether the artist is conscious of the world-view or not, to the extent that it is there it must come under the judgment of the Word of God.

There is a corollary to this third criterion. We should realize that if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art, it can be far more destructive and devastating than if it is expressed in poor art or prosaic statement. Much of the crude art, the common product of counterculture communities and the underground press, is laden with destructive messages, but the art is so poor that it does not have much force. But the greater the artistic expression, the more important it is to consciously bring it and its world-view under the judgment of Christ and the Bible.

The common reaction among many, however, is just the opposite. Many seem to feel that the greater the art, the less we ought to be critical of its world-view. This we must reverse.

An example of the devastating effect of great art with nonChristian content occurs in Zen. In Zen, the world is nothing, man is nothing, everything is nothing; but Zen poetry says it beautifully, so much more beautifully than the counterculture press. Swearing in four-letter words, the counterculture press often declares that man is nothing, the world is nothing, nothing is nothing. And one thinks to himself, “Ah, but if it were said with some beauty, maybe there would be something.” And then Zen comes along as a high art form and gives this message with beauty. And now you’re dead twice.

There is a second corollary related to judging the content of an art work. It is possible for a non-Christian writer or painter to write and paint according to a Christian world-view even though he himself is not a Christian. To understand this, we must distinguish between two meanings of the word Christian. The first and essential meaning is that a Christian is a person who has accepted Christ as his Savior and has thus passed from death to life, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God, by being born again. But if a number of people really are Christians, then they bring forth a kind of consensus that exists apart from themselves and sometimes non-Christians paint and write within the framework of that consensus even though they as individuals are not Christians.

There are, therefore, four kinds of people in the realm of art. The first is the born-again man who writes or paints within the Christian total world-view. The second is the non-Christian who expresses his own non-Christian world-view. The third is the man who is personally a non-Christian, but nevertheless writes or paints on the basis of the Christian consensus by which he has been influenced. For example, in another area, if one were to ask whether Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson personally were Christians, the answer, as best we can judge from what they have said, is no. Nonetheless, they produced something that had some sort of Christian framework because they were producing it out of the Christian consensus of Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex. Thus, from a Christian framework Jefferson and Franklin were able to write that men have certain inalienable rights, a notion derived from a specifically Christian world-view.

The fourth person is the born-again Christian who does not understand what the total Christian world-view should be and therefore produces art which embodies a non-Christian worldview. In other words, just as it is possible for a non-Christian to be inconsistent and to paint God’s world in spite of his personal philosophy, it is possible for a Christian to be inconsistent and embody in his paintings a non-Christian world-view. And it is this latter which is perhaps the most sad.