The Arts and the Christian Life

Book excerpt: Many find their engagement with works of art raises questions concerning where value is found and how meaning and import are understood and experienced. For persons of Christian faith, a parallel question arises concerning the significance such experience holds for the Christian life and the spiritual journey. This collection of essays pursues questions that address how we perceive value in our experience of the arts, how this experience leads to a greater measure of human fullness, and what significance engagement with the arts holds for the Christian life. The author argues that human experience and the quality of our personhood are enriched in and through the imaginative life and that our spiritual lives are profoundly impacted by our aesthetic engagements. An underlying assumption is that all great art, all that is beautiful, is inherently religious: that is, it embodies qualities that reflect the glory of God and is therefore valuable to the Christian life and one’s spiritual experience. Indeed, insofar as the noetic privileges language and reason, the arts and the domain of the aesthetic provide an alternate pathway by which we are able to encounter the Divine.