The word “artist” is like the word “culture” — in common usage, its meaning has disappeared. People don’t know what they mean, when they are saying it.  The knock-off entertainers sure aren’t artists, no matter how many times someone says they are.

God is the prototypical Artist.  Art proceeds from the Bible in definition like everything that can be right and good, except the word in the King James Version isn’t “art,” but “craft,” and the artist is a “craftsman.”  The Hebrew word could be translated “artificer,” which is someone skilled.  As late as 1828, Webster’s defines:

The disposition or modification of things by human skill, to answer the purpose intended.

If you go back to the etymology of the word, it is “artifice,” and the “artist” is an “ingenious workman.”  The assumption of artifice from which comes “artificial” is that it is a copy, not the original, so something imitating something else.  Someone is able to make something very close to the original, so that it looks like the real thing.  The artist is imitating something, originally something of God, not inventing something new.

God, of course, is the Creator, and though we can’t create ex nihilo like God, something out of nothing, we take the components of God’s creation and orchestrate them into portrayals of God’s handiwork, which is divinely defined reality.  Since beauty starts with God, it is objective, reflecting His nature.  The handiwork of God declares His glory (Psalm 19:1), that is, the perfections of His attributes.  Anything that clashes with the nature of God isn’t beautiful or lovely, but is ugly.  This takes us to the objective nature of beauty and, therefore, art.

1 Chronicles 16:29 says,

Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come before him: worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.

Beauty relates to the glory due unto God’s name and His holiness.  Glory, God’s name, and holiness are essentially the same.  They all relate to His attributes, their perfection.  This is a baseline for beauty.

The skill of art is the ability through both nature and nurture to represent the divine reality.  It is objective, because it focuses on the object, which is a proper object, one that is right and true and of the highest value.  The object is what makes the effort worth it.  The term “depiction” is a good word to associate with objective, because Someone (God) and something (His creation) is being depicted according to God’s perspective.  This contrasts with the subjective or relativistic.

Modern art shifted from the objective to the subjective, like modernism, and even worse then, postmodernism.  Some today think that they are more “artistic,” even and sadly professing Christians, because they are modernistic and postmodernistic.  They’re imitating others, that is, being worldly.  They don’t know what they are talking about.  They’re just saying it and anything goes today.  Hardly anyone is going to judge, because hardly anyone judges anything, except whether someone’s feelings are hurt.

The subject became “art” according to the “eye of the beholder,” which is in reality to turn from God to man, man becoming the center of things.  This made autonomous imaginings of the “artist” the standard, which are his expressions.  He’s expressing himself.  This philosophy of art in general is expression or expressionism, with lots of sub categories.

A biblical understanding, a Christian worldview, says that man is depraved, so the shift to the subject brings distortion.  The subject isn’t neutral, even if he thinks he is.  He’s affected by his own evil imaginations.  Today someone might say, “he’s messed up.”  Modern art allows the “artist” to create his own reality out of his own imagination, so that he shapes his own subjective reality and in so doing, becomes a god-like figure.  It is a subjective reality that leads people astray in modern culture as much as anything.  Sadly, some of you reading this don’t even care, and you think it’s a joke.  You’ll find out before everything is over, but the earlier the better.

Professing Christianity has started buying into a false view of art, the modernist and postmodernist view, for awhile, even when judging children’s finger paintings like they are something great.  They are without skill.  The child may not need an art lesson, to teach him how to “depict” what he sees, because it doesn’t even matter.  Just keep “expressing yourself.”  It’s wrong.  Several very bad things also happen.

Objective reality, the depiction of God, is not separate from emotions.  Some of you reading might have been wondering about feelings, because you think or feel they’re the essence of art.  They are not, but even so, scripture teaches rightly ordered emotions, what Jonathan Edwards called affections versus passions in his Treatise on the Religious Affections.  This also represents God, who is impassible, not subject to mood swings.

C. S. Lewis wrote about feelings or emotions in his book, The Abolition of Man, and this was a concern of his.  The two greatest commands of God are “Love God” and “Love your neighbor,” and both of those are at risk without getting them right.  Someone can’t obey God when he disobeys those two commands.  “Inordinate affection” is a sin (Colossians 3:5).  Lewis exhorts (pp. 28-29) of  “the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it,” asserting that “the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.”  He continues (pp. 31-32):

[B]ecause our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore, emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason. . . . The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

Lewis wasn’t promoting the expressions of someone’s imagination, but the correct emotional response to the right or true thinking about what is of the greatest value.

People who still want to profess to be Christian are changing exegetical and historical Christianity by merging it with modernism or postmodernism under the guise of “freedom.”  I read the language of “personal and creative liberation” that had been pent up by conservative Christianity, which put the “artist” in a “box.”  The limitations held back the creative expression of the artist that now he can unleash.  This freedom is called “grace,” so that now they’re really experiencing grace like they haven’t before, and that feeling flows through the art.  This isn’t actual Christianity.  The attempt to conform Christianity to lust is just departing from Christianity.

Another term, that I often hear to describe a modern or postmodern emotional quality, is “authentic.”  The “artist” is really “authentic.”  Most often this term is associated with someone who isn’t authentic, according to the dictionary definition of the term, but using it instead in a subjective fashion different than its objective meaning is apropos.  From the wrong usage, a postmodern variety, “authentic” is a highly subjective expression of someone’s feelings, usually distorted and often corrupt.  That also makes it “true,” true simply because the subject “feels it.”  It is unlikely that the “artist” “truly” or “really” feels the way he is expressing, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s what he’s expressing at the moment in an ironically inauthentic way, which is what does matter.  Instead of being “authentic,” usually it’s contrived, because it is entertainment, intended to “relate” with the audience (fool it), giving approval to the same feelings it might have, which very often are lust.

What motivated me to write this post was a recent promotion by someone of “country artists” out of Nashville.  I wasn’t expecting art or artists, which it and they were not.  The expressions reduce art to the lost wanderings of fallen men, rebelling against God’s created order, which brings chaos.  It perverts truth, goodness, beauty, and validates inordinate emotions.  It denies God as the true basis for all reality and conflicts with the truth of scripture.  It is not denying self, but expressing self with all the lack of constraint.  God is not and cannot be glorified and others are likewise influenced.

Rather than expressing imagination, true art, what Christians should solely accept and enjoy, shapes the moral imagination.   This is the true meaning of the world that God created.  The thinking and the emotions reflect God.  God is known in an accurate and better way.  The hearer can turn to God or grow closer to God, which is what a Christian wants.  He shouldn’t be promoting either the world’s twisted  perversion of art or artists or the depraved expressions of the ungodly culture from which they come.