The Lord wants double edged artistry, praising God's name and setting things straight.
Aesthetic life is not something sophisticated - that's a humanistic lie. Aesthetic life is as integral to being human as building sandcastles on the beach and giving your children names.
A faith project in Christian artistry will never be healthy among us until there is a living sense of Christian community, and the misplaced emphasis on the 'individual' has been corrected. God has set things up so that cultural endeavour is always a communal enterprise, done by trained men and women in concert, gripped by a spirit that is larger than each one individually and that pulls them together as they do their formative work.
I am convinced that we Christ-followers need an understanding of playfulness if we are going to take sanctification by the Holy Spirit seriously.
It is short-sighted, not to say stupid, in the correct desire to be relevant as Christian artists in an unchristian age, to pick up the secular fashion of the immediate generation before us and immerse oneself in that as your tradition. That's why Christian artists so often seem to be a generation late.
Atrocities are now shown in 30-second bites. Hardcore artistic horror is an expression of hating your neighbour. The gruesome imagination feeds on vanity, lust, self-indulgence and despair, rather than the hope of the Holy Spirit. The Body of Christ needs to look and repent of our own fallenness.... Whatever arena Christians withdraw from goes to hell.
Art is mainly about wrestling with material reality, not striving after a spiritual ideal.
