Missions Resources - Bibliography
Art and the Bible (IVP Classics)
Authors: Francis Schaeffer
ISBN: 083083401x
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Number of pages: 94
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary: reviewed by Paul Grant
Francis Schaeffer died nearly a quarter-century ago. A giant of 20th century evangelicalism and a role model of living and dying well, Schaeffer’s fingerprint is all over the church. Many who take issue with his strongly-held opinions, and many more who have never heard of the man, nevertheless carry on a conversation started by him.
In the same way that some actors dominate the screen with their offscreen persons—people like John Wayne—Francis Schaeffer the person resides at the center of every Francis Schaeffer book. There was something magnetic and fascinating about the man (whom I never had the privilege of meeting). More than the power of his intellectual output, it is the life he led—the conversations he frequently found himself in, his endless curiosity, and his vision for integrating the life of the mind with manual labor—that keeps him relevant as a cultural critic, long after culture has moved on.
InterVarsity Press has just republished Schaeffer, making him accessible to a new generation of young thinkers. In so doing, they help us avoid reinventing theology. Instead we may proceed deeper and farther than Schaeffer himself ventured.
In Art and the Bible, for instance, Schaeffer takes a culturally timid American evangelical church to task for its knee-jerk reaction to modern art. The dragons he sought to slay with this 1973 essay—dragons of cultural disengagement—have mostly been banished from evangelical faith, but still hover in the background. A requisite reading of this short book should help us keep them banished, and engage the culture in the right ways. (Rather than indiscriminately consuming culture, he is interested in our understanding it and—to borrow a phrase from Andy Crouch—create it ourselves.)
Art and the Bible is Shaeffer’s attempt to more than merely justify Christian art: he demands it. After building a convincing list of art in the Bible (music, dance, sculpture, architecture and even drama), he builds a case for culturally relevant 20th century art.
His simple conclusions are thus both necessary and surprising in their implications: Art has value in itself, but art is not sacred in itself; Christian art is not always religious; Christian art should live in the present, rather than in an artistic golden age that never existed; there are no inherently godly (or ungodly) art forms.
And so on. This short essay is today older than much of its intended audience, but should be read by anyone who feels that there is more to life than making money and consuming culture.
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