The fourth criterion for judging a work of art involves how well the artist has suited the vehicle to the message. For those art works which are truly great, there is a correlation between the style and the content. The greatest art fits the vehicle that is being used to the world-view that is being presented.

A clear example is found in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” When Eliot published this in 1922, he became a hero to the modern poets, because for the first time he dared to make the form of his poetry fit the nature of the world as he saw it — namely, broken, unrelated, ruptured. What was that form? A collection of shattered fragments of language and images, and allusions drawn seemingly haphazardly from all manner of literature, philosophy and religious writings from the ancients to the present. But modern poets were pleased, for they now had a poetic form to fit the modern world-view of unrelatedness.

The breakthrough in painting came in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a painting which takes its name from a house of prostitution in Barcelona. Picasso began this work in the vein of other paintings of the period; but as one critic describes it, Picasso ended it as “a semi-abstract composition in which the forms of the nudes and their accessories are broken up into planes compressed into a shallow space.” More specifically, Picasso began on the left by painting the forms rather naturally, toward the middle he painted more like Spanish primitives, and finally on the right, as he finished his work, he painted the women as only abstract forms and symbols or masks, and thus succeeded in making monsters of his human subjects. Picasso knew what he was doing, and for a moment the world stood still. It was in fact so strong an expression that for a long time even his friends would not accept it. They didn’t even want to look at it. Thus, in his painting of the women Picasso pictured the fractured nature of modern man. What T. S. Eliot did in his poetry, Picasso had already done in painting. Both men deserve high scores for suiting the vehicle to the message.

No art should be judged on the basis of this criterion alone, however. We should ultimately see all art works in the light of their technique, validity, world-view, and suiting of form to content.

Art Can Be Used for Any Type of Message
6. Art forms can be used for any type of message, from pure fantasy to detailed history. That a work of art is in the form of fantasy or epic or painting does not mean that there is no propositional content. just as one can have propositional statements in prose, there can be propositional statements in poetry, in painting, in virtually any art form.

Some years ago a theologian at Princeton commented that he did not mind saying the Creeds, providing that he could sing them. What he meant was that so long as he could make them a work of art, he didn’t feel that he had to worry about the content. But this is both poor theology and poor aesthetics. A lyric can contain considerable iderable theological content. An epic can be as emphatically (and accurately) historic as a straight piece of prose. Paradise Lost, for example, contains many statements which while artistically expressed are almost straight theology. just because something takes the form of a work of art does not mean that it cannot be factual.

Changing Styles
7. Many Christians, especially those unused to viewing the arts and thinking about them, reject contemporary painting and contemporary poetry not because of their world-view, but simply because they feel threatened by a new art form. It is perfectly legitimate for a Christian to reject a particular work of art intellectually — that is, because he knows what is being said by it. But it is another thing to reject the work of art simply because the style is different from that which we are used to. In short: Styles of art form change, and there is nothing wrong with this.

This sort of change is not only true of art forms; it is true of whole word systems. Chaucer wrote English, and I write English. But surely there is quite a difference between them. Is it wrong for me to speak my kind of English rather than Chaucer’s? Would you read what I wrote if I were writing in Chaucerian English?

As a matter of fact, change is one difference between life and death. There is no living language which does not undergo constant change. The languages which do not change — Latin, for example — are dead. As long as one has a living art, its forms will change. The past art forms, therefore, are not necessarily the right ones for today or tomorrow. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois failure. It cannot be assumed that if a Christian painter becomes “more Christian,” he will necessarily paint more and more like Rembrandt. This would be like saying that if the preacher really makes it next Sunday morning, he will preach to us in Chaucerian English. Then we’ll really listen!

Now, some may say, “Well, I don’t want Chaucerian English, but I would certainly like King James English.” I personally love King James English. It is still my language because I was educated in a day when it was one of the marks of the educated man to read it and the language of Shakespeare with facility. Reading it endlessly, I made it my own. But must I preach in King James English or be considered a failure? Must I always pray using King James English, the thee’s and thou’s, for example? To think so is a mark of a bourgeois mind. Christians must absolutely and consciously separate themselves from such thinking.

Not only will there be a change in art forms and language as time progresses, but there will be a difference in art forms coming from various geographical locations and from different cultures. Take, for example, Hebrew poetry. It has alliteration and parallelism and other such rhetorical forms, but it hardly ever rhymes. Does this mean it is not poetry? Or does it mean that most English poetry is wrong because it rhymes? Must all poetry be frozen into the form of Hebrew poetry? Surely not. Rather, each art form in each culture must find its own proper relationship between worldview and style.

For example, I may walk into a museum I have never been in before and enter a room without seeing its identifying plaque, and I may immediately say to myself, “Ah, this is Japanese art.” How can I tell? From the style. The crucial question is, of course, should it show its Japaneseness? The answer is obviously yes.

Then what about the Christian’s art? Here three things should be stressed. First, Christian art today should be twentieth-century art. Art changes. Language changes. The preacher’s preaching today must be twentieth-century language communication, or there will be an obstacle to being understood. And if a Christian’s art is not twentieth-century art, it is an obstacle to his being heard. It makes him different in a way in which there is no necessity for difference. A Christian should not, therefore, strive to copy Rembrandt or Browning.

Second, Christian art should differ from country to country. Why did we ever force the Africans to use Gothic architecture? It’s a meaningless exercise. All we succeeded in doing was making Christianity foreign to the African. If a Christian artist is Japanese, his paintings should be Japanese; if Indian, Indian.

Third, the body of a Christian artist’s work should reflect the Christian world-view. In short, if you are a young Christian artist, you should be working in the art forms of the twentieth century, showing the marks of the culture out of which you have come, reflecting your own country and your own contemporariness, and embodying something of the nature of the world as seen from a Christian standpoint.

Modern Art Forms and the Christian Message
8. While a Christian artist should be modern in his art, he does face certain difficulties. First, we must distinguish carefully between style and message. Let me say firmly that there is no such thing as a godly style or an ungodly style. The more one tries to make such a distinction, the more confusing it becomes.

I remember being in Cambridge once at a symposium of Christians who were addressing themselves to the nature of Christian art and art forms. One of the Christian artists — a very fine organist — insisted that there was a Christian style in music. We discussed this at some length, forcing him to say just what the criterion for Christian style would be. He finally replied, “Christian music is music that you can tap your foot to.” This is meaningless.

Yet, while there is no such thing as a godly or ungodly style, we must not be misled or naive in thinking that various styles have no relation whatsoever to the content of the message of the work of art. Styles themselves are developed as symbol systems or vehicles for certain world-views or messages. In the Renaissance, for example, one finds distinctively different styles from those which characterize art in the Middle Ages. It does not take much education in the history of art to recognize that what Filippo Lippi was saying about the nature of the Virgin Mary is different from what was being said in paintings done before the Renaissance. Art in the Renaissance became more natural and less iconographic. In our own day, men like Picasso and T. S. Eliot developed new styles in order to speak a new message.