Beholding Beauty: Worshiping God Through the Arts: One Reader’s Response
Beholding Beauty:Worshiping God Through the Arts explores a range of arts and their intersection with Christian faith. Painting, sculpture, fashion, ballet, choreography, poetry, songwriting, popular music, novel, short story, theater, cinema, culinary art, winemaking, and fragrance are all set in the context not only of their importance to the church but in light of God as the original artist and art as worship. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection/discussion and with spiritual exercises.
Many of these essays invite us to think more deeply about the arts. For example, “Drama is Required” explores how theater not only touches the priestly role of holding up things that are good for us to reflect on, but how it tackles the prophetic role of calling out our brokenness, of holding to the light that which is “hollow, pretentious, cheap, and evil.” The essay invites us to see beyond the surface, to see past foul language and the darker sides of human experience, to instead notice the author’s attempts to wrestle with issues like racism and privilege and pride. That call to hear the prophetic is critical to a Christian response to the art.
The chapter on listening to popular music notices how this music expresses and responds to philosophical questions humanity has wrestled with for millennia, just as Paul did at the Acropolis (Acts 17:16ff). Instead of rejecting songs because they are “secular”, this chapter invites us to listen more deeply and carefully, to engage with songs and reflect on how they’re true, how they reflect the beliefs of our age, and how we might enter into discussion with them. This chapter also explores how, in addition to being thinking beings, we are first and foremost lovers; this touches the power of art to touch and move hearts in addition to intellects.
The chapter on cinema reminds us that art asks us to explore important questions about our own lives and how we engage with others. The chapter on painting reminds us that art may highlight beauty or brokenness, both of which accurately reflect this world. The chapter on poetry illustrates how poetry can lament and wrestle with pain and difficult social issues. The chapter on fashion draws attention to the fact that multiple valid principles may lead to different artistic expressions. Various sections, including the chapter on dance, remind us how the arts capture emotion when words fail, how art can “make the beautiful more beautiful” (52), and that “vulnerability and suffering go into art” (54).
Several essays call us to rethink the divide we’ve made between sacred and secular, and to find sacrament in beauty and in sharing with each other. These essays remind us that we need beauty and not just bread, that the arts care for our souls, that art and beauty point us to the source of all beauty. They remind us that we crave beauty and that beauty echoes with qualities that transcend this life. Art, even when not propositional, invites us to grasp the beauty of God and to enter into his creativity.
It wasn’t that I loved every aspect of the book. Each chapter is arranged as a little liturgy with a responsive call to worship, a hymn, and a scripture; for me these elements distracted from the particular art the chapter was exploring. Essays seemed mixed in quality; some engaged me more than others. And while some chapters explored how a current practice or response to the arts might flow from our spiritual practice; others seemed to merely use art to springboard into lengthy and only tangentially connected Biblical and theological reflection. There’s a place for Biblical reflection, but I came with an interest in how we might think more deeply think about art and the creation of art; and some chapters missed this mark.
Despite parts that worked less well for me, the book offers a useful contribution to a Christian interaction with the arts, and each essay offers something worthwhile. The book invites us to see the importance of the arts to the whole person, to see the arts as a way to connect with heart and not just mind. The book invites us not to fear secular views, but to hear what’s really being said and to engage in honest conversation. And it invites us to see past language and lifestyle choices, see past ideas that make us uncomfortable even, and instead to listen to the important issues being wrestled with. In short, this book invites us to engage with the arts and to let ourselves be engaged by them.
