Free to Receive

Cinema & New Media Arts | On Feb 05, 2013

Daniel Siedell writes about being good recipients of art at Cultivare.

Let’s face it. Evangelicals are a pretty grumpy lot when it comes to the arts and culture. We’re perpetually on the lookout for artistic evidence to prove that this is the most evil of generations. In fact, it seems as if many of us delight in being offended so that we can crow about the good old days when the Church was the patron of the arts and collectively bemoan the consequences of the Enlightenment.

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What the world does need, and needs desperately, are Christians who embrace our freedom in Christ to such a degree that we can listen to and participate in the art and culture that is at hand. What the world needs are less makers, doers, and theorizers and more receivers. The world needs us to pay attention to the insightful art, music, film, and poetry that’s already out there. We need to rediscover our freedom to receive the art and culture that our neighbors are producing.

The world desperately needs us to live out of the grace that God gives to the Jews in Babylon—to build houses, plant gardens, have families, and seek the welfare of the city (Jer 29: 4-9)—to live not as righteous cultural judges, but as broken sinners bearing witness to God’s sustaining grace amidst the city of the arts. This frees us from the cultural burdens we so often carry in order to love our artistic neighbors by loving their art, poetry, music, and film.

We are free to make ourselves vulnerable to it, allowing it to work on us as art (not as moral messages or threats to our morality). And we are free to mobilize our faith in loving service to that work of art, that painting, that film, that novel, or that poem in order to deepen our understanding of it and to open its depth for others, even (and especially) those who do not share our faith.

The Christian is the ideal audience for all art, for all aesthetic artifacts of the imagination—even (or especially) the most scandalous and offensive. It is often the most scandalous and offensive works that reveal the pain, suffering, and desperation of the human condition in the most compelling of ways. And it is the Christian who can receive all things—including poems and paintings—as a gift, who can hear the echoes of grace that are often present in them. It is the Christian who sees God at work in the world through artists, writers, and filmmakers, who produce artifacts that often contradict their own beliefs, artifacts that strain toward Christ, like trees on a mountain bending toward the warmth of the sun.

Every work of art yearns for a viewer, a reader, a hearer who confesses, “all things were created through him and for him…and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1: 16;17).

Read the full post here.