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

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

While all of this biblical exegesis is interesting, as an artist and a Christian, I found myself constantly arguing with Dyrness. I found myself more than once frustrated at the lack of precision in his use of terminology. For instance, he seems to move among notions of beauty, textual descriptions of visual events, and concrete images without making the connections explicit. Especially slippery is his use of the word "art," which sometimes seems to mean essentially painting and sculpture, and other times seems to include dance, drama, film, music, and other art forms. I realize that this is in part unavoidable because of contemporary cultural understandings of the nature of art, but I found myself wishing he would clarify, for instance, how an aesthetic derived from biblical passages that use visual imagery might apply to arts like drama or dance. As some other Christian writers on the arts have pointed out, the opposite of aesthetic" is "anesthetic"--that which makes us unable to feel. I wish that Dyrness h ad spent some of his theological discussion on the broader issues of God's blessing on all our senses, and art's power to help us regain the ability to use them.

The last part of Visual Faith returns to a more focused look at the role of art in contemporary society and the role of Christian artists within and outside the church. Dyrness calls for a renewal of Christian involvement in the arts, and a return of the use of the arts in Christian worship. He notes that the development of certain forms of contemporary art, especially those that require the active participation of the audience, seem to respond to a hunger for ritual that is lacking in most people's lives. Collaborations between, for instance, visual artists and musicians, as well as the inherently collaborative arts of film, video, drama, dance, and music, are one of the marks of contemporary culture that Dyrness believes speak to the need for human interaction in an increasingly disconnected world. Further, he points out, much of modern and postmodern art reaches for a deeply spiritual experience, which speaks to a longing that, in his view, only Christian faith can finally provide.

In his concluding chapter, Dyrness contends that Christianity needs a "threefold renewal: a new vision for the arts, a renewal of the worshiping life of the church, and a restored tradition of Christian art" (155). In an increasingly visual culture, he argues, Christians can no longer afford to ignore the visual. He writes of congregations that regularly commission artwork to mark the seasons of the Christian year, and wonders what would happen if more church leaders would make a practice of commissioning artists to prepare materials for the worship and devotional life of their congregations. More grandly, he suggests that artists be commissioned like missionaries, to bring what he calls "their sanctified imaginations" into art schools and the larger world of secular art.

It is in this last chapter that Dyrness shows his true passion for both art and the church. The careful outline of art history, the patient biblical exegesis, and the analysis of contemporary culture, were simply a foundation for his enthusiastic recognition that a new, living tradition of Christian art is already coming into existence. While some parts of this book might be hard going for someone who does not share Dyrness's particular religious convictions, it is a valuable contribution to the two-thousand-year-old conversation about the relationship between Christianity and the arts.