How can we Christians live openly in this world and be silent, while the unbelievers revel in music and drama, painting, poetry and dance, with a riot of color, a deafening sound raised in praise to themselves and their false gods? Why are we satisfied with bedlam for our God? Where is our concert of freshly composed, holy stringed 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? Why don’t we anymore, like the psalm-singer,
Hallelujah Jehovah! Hallelujah Jehovah all the way down from heaven and all the way back!…You young fellows, you young women, The older ones with gray in the hair, and any children: Let them all hallelujah the name of Jehovah, because Only His name is to be praised! – Psalm 148
That non-christians can make merry under God’s face and curse him with desperately, damnably forceful art should hurt us. And it does.
The Institute for Christian Art has been formed by a few Christians—artists, scholars, and plainfolk—who believe with Abraham Kuyper that “art is no fringe that is attached to the garment, no amusement that is added to life, but a most serious power in our present existence.” They see all this world as God’s: God’s cosmic theatre with a mortal religious battle going on here-and-now for domination of it.
Such a vision brings art and literature firmly into the presence of God in an earthshaking drama where angels peer expectantly over the human shoulders to see what is coming out of the palette or typewriter. For art, too, is part of our reasonable service and a necessary activity of the body of Christ, to show our God we love him here—in art—passionately.
We Christians have the wherewithal to praise our God in art. But the bedlam will not disappear until there is an active, widely shared, single-minded consciousness and determination about what we are supposed to be doing in art—when it is no longer every man counter-punching for himself.
There must be a common willingness and determination among us to probe together, simply in childlike obedience to our Lord, trusting that he will bless us on into the third and fourth generations. If there is anything the Christian community needs it is leaders, scholars, trained artists and writers who, because they virtually live out of the hand of our heavenly Father daily, stay close to the untrained readers doing the same: living out of the Scriptures. Without this common bond operating between leader and follower, all movements to develop the arts Christianly, for our God, will founder. No vaunting intellectualism by the artists; no suspicious, untrusting attitude by the followers; but all together, listening, naively, like children, to the simple Word of God for spiritual correction.
The Rub to Christian Art
Christian, critically contemporary art will not come as a creation out of nothing. You do not get Christian art simply by having Christians do it. Nor is art Christian merely because it is concerned with a biblical subject, or with the church.
Christian art must first of all be art, but art with a certain slant to it, just like non-christian art has a certain slant and damns God and man with itself.
Christian art in this post-christian twentieth century can only come up out of a Christian community where there are at least, say, “seventy-two” scholars and genuine artists who with unbending Rabbinic concentration translate their own Christian vision into language understandable by the rest of the world—although maybe, like Rembrandt, in a style too fresh and new for the status quo church member. Christian art must realize its task to lead and to be exploring-in-hope ways less traveled by both the mass of secularly minded artists and conformity-bound believers.
Genuine art will not be didactic, teaching little lessons to the observer; will not be sentimental, recalling the good old days; will not be prudish, victorian, and a host of other negatives. Christian art will plumb especially the meaning of sin, instead of staying as far away from it as possible. It will handle the ugly, the cursed. the tragic, not with sympathetic understanding so much as with awe at the terribleness of sin and the soft play of forgiveness when it falls.
A Christian style will be honest, self-effacing, serious in its gaiety; fresh, candid and confident in its naive immediacy. Perhaps at times exhilarating. Christian artists can let a certain gentle hope of life show through in the troubled ways of men. Some such touch of light will that artist bring to human acts as intimate as labor and sorrow, with his painting or sculpture or music or writing, who does it in the grip of a reforming Christian faith. Such art will not be made to entertain or to stupefy. Yet it will have a popular, parable level to it because it is necessarily diakonia, a ministering.
That the earth is the Lord’s and everything filling it is his is a recognition missing in non-christian art, an insight twisted in post-christian secular art, and a commitment that cannot be satisfactorily appended, circumscribed, or applied like varnish to an object conceived without it. It is a regrettable mistake to think that, because our gracious God’s cosmic theatre allows all men to act coherently, this absolves the Christian community from their special calling to praise God themselves, wholly, unreservedly, in the bonds-bursting power of the Holy Spirit.
Tn short, art tells what lies in a man’s heart and with what vision he views the world. Art always tell. tales 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. Art is a form of worship.
The Institute’s Program
Such “septuagint” art and literature will not come by talking, neither shall it thrive by doing (!) unless God’s people see they can no longer live here openly and be silent. The Institute for Christian Art is working to encourage and develop a body of Christian artists who know what it means to sing and paint and sculpt and to make merry with music and poetry under God’s fatherly hand.
Our program is to have a master Christian artist—painter, sculptor, composer, writer—outstanding in his field, working at his craft in a location where select, young Christian artists have the time and places in which to practice the same artistry The Institute centre provides an opportunity for the established Christian artist to work with his young apprentices in uninterrupted intensity. The idea is to spark a small group of competent artists, gripped by a common Christian vision, spark them to communal activity that will show up in a rainbow variety of ways. In this common location they have occasion to work and talk, work and think, work and respond to the challenge of the artistic work of the others, all under the watchful, seasoned eye and encouraging word of a master Christian artist. Neither “individualists” nor a “school” of art is the Institute’s aim. Neither academic credit nor exhibitionistic experiment drives its fellow artists. The Institute is simply a communion of saints practicing art, for our Lord, in circumstances that Psalm One says are happy—where craftsmen can ripen at their trade and bear fruit pleasing to God. Such is the purpose of the Institute in concrete action.*
In addition to apprentice work with master artist during the year, the Institute expects to schedule month-long summer workshops from time to time for writers, poets, composers, painters and other artists. For these shorter periods the Institute would engage a master artist in each field who then works with the artists at their various levels of competency, encouraging interaction between those participating. The Institute is also concerned to build the Christian community through publications, lectures and art exhibits, eventually making available Christian art they can own and enjoy.
The Institute for Christian Art is housed in the vicinity of Trinity Christian College (Chicago), although it is a separate non-profit organization, managed by its own board of directors. As part of the Institute’s program, its artists interact with the Trinity faculty and students through seminars, expositions and performances. Trinity faculty contribute to the Institute’s work with special lectures and by making its normal courses available to Institute fellows. The Institute is specialized in art but realizes it cannot flourish in artistic isolation. It wants to have its craftsmanship buoyed by the broader, Christian educating community, and have its sense of task reinforced and enlarged by Christian studies in history, philosophy, theology, literature and various special sciences. Trinity Christian College gladly thrives on such interaction.
An Appeal to Christians
To make this Institute for Christian Art (incorporated 1968) a living reality and to maintain its outlined program will take the whole-hearted kind of prayers that lead to deeds. That is why those who have formed the Institute invite others who share their vision of new art and song, for Christ’s sake, to join together in this communal task. We need to ask and we do it without shame—for some of your precious time, some of your energy in helping to translate this vision to others, or part of your hard-earned money, property or other assets -in short, any substantial help you have to give.
We know that vision is only the first step of any reformational work. God’s people will have to do the work, will have to make it be the work of the Christian community. Neither the vision nor the action can be the doings of a few artists and scholars. There will have to be substantial help, not piecemeal, precisely because we Christians are so far behind! It may be that some will feel peculiarly the awful sting of our twentieth century silence before God in our art and will establish a continuing foundation for Christian art which will help to provide the enormous financial reserves demanded by artistic work. Sizeable grants will be essential, not only at the beginning, but also later, should God bless our work and give us even more than the “septuagint” art we have dared to dream about.
God said through his prophet Joel: Someday I shall pour out my Spirit upon everybody—your sons and daughters will prophesy; the old graybeards will dream dreams; the full-grown young men will see visions (Joel 2:28). Filled with the Holy Spirit, the apostle Peter told the crowd at Pentecost that God was fulfilling that Old Testament prophecy “in these last days,” after Christ’s resurrection. Our concern now, as board of the Institute for Christian Art, is that we all, as a believing generation, be obedient in art to the call of that prophecy. That we assume the challenge of helping young, Christ-believing artists to express, as artists, their prophetic mission, priestly service, and royal domination of art for Christ’s sake, so that our Lord’s body be not silent but busy, here and now, confronting the secular world with a Christian artistic witness: this is an imperative!
We appeal to you who are older and more affluent to have the mercy to present a gift which we may take in trust and put to work for making real the task of Christian art on earth. Help us show the joy our Lord gives his adopted sons and daughters, as he judges and extends mercy upon the doings of the world, while he prepares to return in glory.
Our prayer that molds the whole forming of the Institute for Christian Art comes from Psalm ll5:
Not for us, Lord, not for us:
But do something glorious for your name! Make something solid and shining to show your covenanting
Grace and utterly dependable faithfulness! Why should the peoples all around say, “And where now is their God?”
Our God is in heaven!
Everything that pleases him, he completes!
We pray that He will complete this work of our believing, sinful, forgiven hands because we do it in faith.
Working Board of Directors, Institute for Christian Art, Box 79, Chicago Ridge, Illinois
Willem Hart, commercial artist, Hart Graphics, Toronto
Mary Carolyn McIntire, Chicago
Henk Melles, painter, student, Grand Rapids
Calvin Seerveld, professor of philosophy, Trinity
Christian College, Palos Heights, Illinois
Mary Steen land, painter, student, Holland, Mich.
Fred W. Tamminga, writer and poet, Christian school teacher. Vancouver, Canada
News item: The artist in residence to be engaged for the academic year 1969-70 at the Institute for Christian Art is European artist Henk Krijger from the Hague, Netherlands. Applications for competent young artists with a reformational Christian sensitivity are available from the Institute.
*For more information on study with the artist-in-residence for the current year, consult the Institute’s Bulletin.
Dr. Calvin Seerveld is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, Palos Heights, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Christian Art.
Hallelujah Jehovah! Hallelujah Jehovah all the way down from heaven and all the way back!…You young fellows, you young women, The older ones with gray in the hair, and any children: Let them all hallelujah the name of Jehovah, because Only His name is to be praised! – Psalm 148
That non-christians can make merry under God’s face and curse him with desperately, damnably forceful art should hurt us. And it does.
The Institute for Christian Art has been formed by a few Christians—artists, scholars, and plainfolk—who believe with Abraham Kuyper that “art is no fringe that is attached to the garment, no amusement that is added to life, but a most serious power in our present existence.” They see all this world as God’s: God’s cosmic theatre with a mortal religious battle going on here-and-now for domination of it.
Such a vision brings art and literature firmly into the presence of God in an earthshaking drama where angels peer expectantly over the human shoulders to see what is coming out of the palette or typewriter. For art, too, is part of our reasonable service and a necessary activity of the body of Christ, to show our God we love him here—in art—passionately.
We Christians have the wherewithal to praise our God in art. But the bedlam will not disappear until there is an active, widely shared, single-minded consciousness and determination about what we are supposed to be doing in art—when it is no longer every man counter-punching for himself.
There must be a common willingness and determination among us to probe together, simply in childlike obedience to our Lord, trusting that he will bless us on into the third and fourth generations. If there is anything the Christian community needs it is leaders, scholars, trained artists and writers who, because they virtually live out of the hand of our heavenly Father daily, stay close to the untrained readers doing the same: living out of the Scriptures. Without this common bond operating between leader and follower, all movements to develop the arts Christianly, for our God, will founder. No vaunting intellectualism by the artists; no suspicious, untrusting attitude by the followers; but all together, listening, naively, like children, to the simple Word of God for spiritual correction.
The Rub to Christian Art
Christian, critically contemporary art will not come as a creation out of nothing. You do not get Christian art simply by having Christians do it. Nor is art Christian merely because it is concerned with a biblical subject, or with the church.
Christian art must first of all be art, but art with a certain slant to it, just like non-christian art has a certain slant and damns God and man with itself.
Christian art in this post-christian twentieth century can only come up out of a Christian community where there are at least, say, “seventy-two” scholars and genuine artists who with unbending Rabbinic concentration translate their own Christian vision into language understandable by the rest of the world—although maybe, like Rembrandt, in a style too fresh and new for the status quo church member. Christian art must realize its task to lead and to be exploring-in-hope ways less traveled by both the mass of secularly minded artists and conformity-bound believers.
Genuine art will not be didactic, teaching little lessons to the observer; will not be sentimental, recalling the good old days; will not be prudish, victorian, and a host of other negatives. Christian art will plumb especially the meaning of sin, instead of staying as far away from it as possible. It will handle the ugly, the cursed. the tragic, not with sympathetic understanding so much as with awe at the terribleness of sin and the soft play of forgiveness when it falls.
A Christian style will be honest, self-effacing, serious in its gaiety; fresh, candid and confident in its naive immediacy. Perhaps at times exhilarating. Christian artists can let a certain gentle hope of life show through in the troubled ways of men. Some such touch of light will that artist bring to human acts as intimate as labor and sorrow, with his painting or sculpture or music or writing, who does it in the grip of a reforming Christian faith. Such art will not be made to entertain or to stupefy. Yet it will have a popular, parable level to it because it is necessarily diakonia, a ministering.
That the earth is the Lord’s and everything filling it is his is a recognition missing in non-christian art, an insight twisted in post-christian secular art, and a commitment that cannot be satisfactorily appended, circumscribed, or applied like varnish to an object conceived without it. It is a regrettable mistake to think that, because our gracious God’s cosmic theatre allows all men to act coherently, this absolves the Christian community from their special calling to praise God themselves, wholly, unreservedly, in the bonds-bursting power of the Holy Spirit.
Tn short, art tells what lies in a man’s heart and with what vision he views the world. Art always tell. tales 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. Art is a form of worship.
The Institute’s Program
Such “septuagint” art and literature will not come by talking, neither shall it thrive by doing (!) unless God’s people see they can no longer live here openly and be silent. The Institute for Christian Art is working to encourage and develop a body of Christian artists who know what it means to sing and paint and sculpt and to make merry with music and poetry under God’s fatherly hand.
Our program is to have a master Christian artist—painter, sculptor, composer, writer—outstanding in his field, working at his craft in a location where select, young Christian artists have the time and places in which to practice the same artistry The Institute centre provides an opportunity for the established Christian artist to work with his young apprentices in uninterrupted intensity. The idea is to spark a small group of competent artists, gripped by a common Christian vision, spark them to communal activity that will show up in a rainbow variety of ways. In this common location they have occasion to work and talk, work and think, work and respond to the challenge of the artistic work of the others, all under the watchful, seasoned eye and encouraging word of a master Christian artist. Neither “individualists” nor a “school” of art is the Institute’s aim. Neither academic credit nor exhibitionistic experiment drives its fellow artists. The Institute is simply a communion of saints practicing art, for our Lord, in circumstances that Psalm One says are happy—where craftsmen can ripen at their trade and bear fruit pleasing to God. Such is the purpose of the Institute in concrete action.*
In addition to apprentice work with master artist during the year, the Institute expects to schedule month-long summer workshops from time to time for writers, poets, composers, painters and other artists. For these shorter periods the Institute would engage a master artist in each field who then works with the artists at their various levels of competency, encouraging interaction between those participating. The Institute is also concerned to build the Christian community through publications, lectures and art exhibits, eventually making available Christian art they can own and enjoy.
The Institute for Christian Art is housed in the vicinity of Trinity Christian College (Chicago), although it is a separate non-profit organization, managed by its own board of directors. As part of the Institute’s program, its artists interact with the Trinity faculty and students through seminars, expositions and performances. Trinity faculty contribute to the Institute’s work with special lectures and by making its normal courses available to Institute fellows. The Institute is specialized in art but realizes it cannot flourish in artistic isolation. It wants to have its craftsmanship buoyed by the broader, Christian educating community, and have its sense of task reinforced and enlarged by Christian studies in history, philosophy, theology, literature and various special sciences. Trinity Christian College gladly thrives on such interaction.
An Appeal to Christians
To make this Institute for Christian Art (incorporated 1968) a living reality and to maintain its outlined program will take the whole-hearted kind of prayers that lead to deeds. That is why those who have formed the Institute invite others who share their vision of new art and song, for Christ’s sake, to join together in this communal task. We need to ask and we do it without shame—for some of your precious time, some of your energy in helping to translate this vision to others, or part of your hard-earned money, property or other assets -in short, any substantial help you have to give.
We know that vision is only the first step of any reformational work. God’s people will have to do the work, will have to make it be the work of the Christian community. Neither the vision nor the action can be the doings of a few artists and scholars. There will have to be substantial help, not piecemeal, precisely because we Christians are so far behind! It may be that some will feel peculiarly the awful sting of our twentieth century silence before God in our art and will establish a continuing foundation for Christian art which will help to provide the enormous financial reserves demanded by artistic work. Sizeable grants will be essential, not only at the beginning, but also later, should God bless our work and give us even more than the “septuagint” art we have dared to dream about.
God said through his prophet Joel: Someday I shall pour out my Spirit upon everybody—your sons and daughters will prophesy; the old graybeards will dream dreams; the full-grown young men will see visions (Joel 2:28). Filled with the Holy Spirit, the apostle Peter told the crowd at Pentecost that God was fulfilling that Old Testament prophecy “in these last days,” after Christ’s resurrection. Our concern now, as board of the Institute for Christian Art, is that we all, as a believing generation, be obedient in art to the call of that prophecy. That we assume the challenge of helping young, Christ-believing artists to express, as artists, their prophetic mission, priestly service, and royal domination of art for Christ’s sake, so that our Lord’s body be not silent but busy, here and now, confronting the secular world with a Christian artistic witness: this is an imperative!
We appeal to you who are older and more affluent to have the mercy to present a gift which we may take in trust and put to work for making real the task of Christian art on earth. Help us show the joy our Lord gives his adopted sons and daughters, as he judges and extends mercy upon the doings of the world, while he prepares to return in glory.
Our prayer that molds the whole forming of the Institute for Christian Art comes from Psalm ll5:
Not for us, Lord, not for us:
But do something glorious for your name! Make something solid and shining to show your covenanting
Grace and utterly dependable faithfulness! Why should the peoples all around say, “And where now is their God?”
Our God is in heaven!
Everything that pleases him, he completes!
We pray that He will complete this work of our believing, sinful, forgiven hands because we do it in faith.
Working Board of Directors, Institute for Christian Art, Box 79, Chicago Ridge, Illinois
Willem Hart, commercial artist, Hart Graphics, Toronto
Mary Carolyn McIntire, Chicago
Henk Melles, painter, student, Grand Rapids
Calvin Seerveld, professor of philosophy, Trinity
Christian College, Palos Heights, Illinois
Mary Steen land, painter, student, Holland, Mich.
Fred W. Tamminga, writer and poet, Christian school teacher. Vancouver, Canada
News item: The artist in residence to be engaged for the academic year 1969-70 at the Institute for Christian Art is European artist Henk Krijger from the Hague, Netherlands. Applications for competent young artists with a reformational Christian sensitivity are available from the Institute.
*For more information on study with the artist-in-residence for the current year, consult the Institute’s Bulletin.
Dr. Calvin Seerveld is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, Palos Heights, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Christian Art.