Will Treaty wrote:
Hans Rookmaaker called Art Needs No Justification, from which the following is one of my favorite quotes:
Handel with his Messiah, Bach with his Matthew Passion, Rembrandt with his Denial of St. Peter, and the architects of those Cistercian churches were not evangelizing, nor making tools for evangelism; they worked to the glory of God. They did not compromise their art. They were not devising tools for religious propaganda or holy advertisement. And precisely because of that they were deep and important. Their works were not the means to an end, the winning of souls, but they were meaningful and an end in themselves, to God’s glory, and showing forth something of the love that makes things warm and real. Art has too often become insincere and second-rate in its very effort to speak to all people, and to communicate a message that art was not meant to communicate. In short, art has its own validity and meaning, certainly in the Christian framework.
Good quote. But the thrust of it is not that "art needs no justification," but rather that the glory of God is sufficient justification for art.
However, fiction---the one art form it doesn't mention
---has additional consideration. The idea that it can be moral for a Christian to write fiction at
all is not self-evident (we call it "fiction" nowadays because it's
not true---isn't that lying? is the argument), and was hotly debated in the Elizabethan era. As Sir Philip Sidney argued in his Apology for Poetry, "poetry" (what we would call fiction) is permissible because it carries or contains truth that wouldn't be served as well by a sermon or argument. The glory of God and the edification of our readers are the two justifications for our art---not that we need to start with the themes or facts that our readers will gain, but if anything doesn't glorify God or would hurt our readers we ought to consider seriously whether it should be left in.
A Christian author indeed has the
freedom to describe anything or anyone in any way he or she chooses---but that freedom carries a grave responsibility. "May" does not imply "should."
Will Treaty wrote:
Aemi Kurisuchan wrote:
I think David usually made it clear that the lies about God were something he was
feeling. By the end of the psalm, he's almost always realizing the truth and praising God for it.
I said this in my post. And yes he did. But there is legitimacy for being honest with God.
The
most relevant point about the Psalms as they relate to this discussion, in my opinion, is that they are devotional poetry addressed largely
to God, rather than stories
about him.
