Art and the missionary in my attic

Many years ago a devout missionary couple lived upstairs in my attic. They were elderly and retired. I was young and impressionable.

Being retired, one day I was concerned that Mr. O. have things to do. So I ventured upstairs and suggested that he take up painting again, since before he left for the mission field as a young man, he had trained to be an artist.

I have never forgotten his response. He couldn’t do that, he said, because he had given art up for the cross. The idea was that art was “of the flesh,” and ought not to occupy a life of spiritual service.

Being young, not to mention being in the arts, it made a deep impression.

Roger Lundin has pointed out that some chief tenets of Protestant theology, a theology that affirms God as Creator, also unwittingly sap an ability to appreciate what He has created. If the way to God is sola fide (by faith alone) and sola gratia (by grace alone), then going to Him via natura (by way of nature) is something of an option. Materiality itself becomes potentially burdensome more than it can become potentially beautiful.

And to work creatively with material, as artists do … well, true spirituality calls us to give that up.

Now I am solely subscribed to sola gratia and sola fide (and you can add the other three sola as well). But I think Mr. O. was off base.

Logos2Go

Genesis 1.31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

1 Corinthians 6.12 All things are lawful for me," but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be enslaved by anything.

1 Corinthians 7.29-31 This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.

1 Corinthians 10.31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

Roger Lundin, "The Beauty of Belief" in The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts, edited by Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands and Roger Lundin, (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2007), 186.