Tonight, in my nightclass, when I should have been listening, I was actually reading Calvin Seerveld's "A Christian Critique of Art and Literature". I was blown away by the short section, "Art is Worship", which I am sad to say is all I was able to get through before dismissal. Seeing as I couldn't take it with me, I quickly scrawled an excerpt into my journal so that I could share it here in a timely fashion...
"...In the quiet of our hearts, we people here need to decide that a reformingly dedicated Christian artistic and literary activity is necessary because art and literature, whatever else they may be...and it does function in all spheres of human life, art is worship. Art is symbolically significant epression of what lies in a man's heart, with what vision he views the world, how he adores whom. Art telltales in whose service a man stands because art itself is always a consecrated offering, a disconcertingly undogmatic yet terribly moving attempt to bring honor and glory and power to something. This is my argument to you Christians: given the contemporary situation of clenched dispair and practical madness, unless you would be a pietist or synthetic Christian, in the spirit of childlike obedience to our Lord who has adoped us as His, encouraged by an unfolding and unifying Christian philosophy, how can you live openly in the world, God's cosmonomic theatre of wonder, while the (common) graciously preserved unbelievers revel color, a deafening sound raised in praise to themselves and their false gods, how can you live here openly and be silent? Are you satisfied with bedlam for God? Where is our concert of freshly composed holy stringent music? Our jubilant dance of praise to the Lord? What penetrating drama have our hands made? Why do we not break into a new song, not only ones from our slender archives? This is needed to show our God we love Him here too, passionately. We must not make a joyful noise just not to hear the other (although it is blessed not to have to stand around with sinners or sit down with mocking, scoffing company--(Psalm 1); but we must make all manner of art because we do hear the tales told by these idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That men of darkened understanding can make merry under God's nose and curse him with desperately, damnably forceful art should hurt you. God is not dead. Christ lives! Man is not absurd. He glories in the image of God. The world is not a curse, it is a good creation, struggling under sin toward final deliverance! And only different art, not censorship, will take this antithesis earnestly and meet it. "
Wow. Btdubs. This was written in 1963.
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