Artistic vision - Books - Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue - Book Review

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Deborah Sokolove, William Dyrness

Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue

Baker Books, 2001. S21.99 (cloth).

Art and theological aesthetics are uneasy partners. For theologians who consider aesthetics, questions of beauty and the relationship of beauty to God are of primary interest. For many serious artists, as well as for those who write about their work, questions of beauty have largely been irrelevant for at least a century. Even artists who want to make work that is beautiful think less about what "beauty" means than what their art means. The primary questions of art, or what some might call "theories of art," have largely been those of meaning.

In Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue William A. Dyrness attempts to bridge this gap. Dyrness is a professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary and a founding member of the Brehm Center for Theology, Worship, and the Arts based at that institution. With impeccable credentials in the somewhat conservative Christian Reformed tradition, he struggles to bring together the disparate fields of theology and art for an audience that is largely ignorant of the visual arts, and which is struggling to come to grips with a culture that is increasingly visual. A second intended readership is the growing number of artists who identify themselves as Christian, but find themselves unable to bring their artistic vision and their theological understanding into harmony. His primary purpose in writing this book seems to be to articulate a new vision of art for that part of the Christian world that has been alienated from it, and to find a way for art to speak the Christian message to those w ho are alienated from Christianity. As he puts it,

The fact that much controversy attends the use of arts in worship, that artists in Christian communities continue to be marginalized, and that Christians still express confusion regarding their engagement with the arts indicates unfinished business. (67)

This "unfinished business" is, first, educating his audience about the historical connections between art and faith, and, second, providing a theological grounding for engagement with the arts. For those who are Dyrness's intended audience, much of what he writes is absolutely essential; for those who are not, it is a sometimes fascinating, sometimes frustrating window onto a conversation that may seem a littie peculiar.

Because he knows that many of his readers are not familiar with the territory, Dyrness begins with a survey of the historical connections between art and the church. He looks at examples of art in each period, from the earliest Christian centuries through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, and into twenty-first century America, and shows how these paintings, sculptures, and other works epitomize a particular theological stance. He points out the recurrent tensions between those who stressed a pure, inward faith, and those who recognized that images can be helpful to understanding what is heard and read. This tension was an important factor in the repudiation of the use of art in worship during the Protestant Reformation.

As he traces this history beyond the Reformation divorce between art and the church, Dyrness attempts to show that not all the Reformers were completely anti-art, and that even those that seemed to be most antagonistic to the arts nonetheless placed some value on the visual. He attempts to lay a foundation for Christian artists today to understand their role in the world and in the church by noting, for instance, that most of the best-known artists of seventeenth-century Holland were Christians, or "at least ... influenced by a reformed view of the world." Similarly, he argues, a disproportionately large number of the founders of the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture were Reformed Protestants. Unfortunately, in this discussion and elsewhere, Dyrness seems to use the word "Christian" to mean "conservative Protestant." While this usage is common among those to whom Dyrness seems to be speaking, it ignores the fact that Roman Catholics and members of the various Eastern Orthodox churches, as well as liber al Protestants, are also Christian.

The middle section of Visual Faith moves away from art as such. One of the battle cries of the Reformation was sola scriptura--only Scripture is authoritative in matters of faith. For Dyrness's intended readership, this reliance on the Bible as the word of God makes it imperative that any approach to art be solidly grounded in a biblical aesthetic. This, as Dyrness points out, is difficult because the Bible doesn't actually provide much guidance towards a positive view of art.

What the Bible does provide, according to Dyrness, is a holistic worldview in which beauty and goodness are inseparable. A long section is devoted to the study of a number of Hebrew words, each of which has as one of its meanings something akin to "beauty," and whose other meanings are things like "honor" or "fittingness" or "desirability" or "goodness." Another section stresses the visual nature of many biblical passages, especially those in which God's holiness or glory is made manifest. A third section, titled "Toward a Biblical Aesthetic," wrestles with the second commandment's supposed condemnation of imagery. Here, Dryness asserts that idols, not images, are the issue. The Bible says that God actually commanded humans to make objects to be used in worship, and that many of these objects included images, so using images in worship cannot be the meaning of this commandment. Lest we think that, because of their potential power to effect change, symbols are the problem, he notes that the Bible, like art, is full of symbols.