Art, Worship, and the Christian Response to Culture

And part of their controversy has to do with the appearance in some circles of the invasion of worldliness into the house of God. I don’t remember whether I mentioned earlier that I was recently at a large Christian convention where several thousand people came together for a two-hour service on Sunday morning, and when it was written up afterwards for those delegates, the mention was made of that part of the worship service which was described as the entertainment part of the worship service. [00:00:21]

But then the question becomes, what’s the purpose of worship on Sunday morning? Is it to do evangelism, or is it the gathering together, the assembling together of the saints for worship? Because the difference is, if we see Sunday morning as an evangelistic outreach mission or we see it as a worship service, however we look at it will, in the final analysis, determine how we structure it, and I’m convinced that the purpose of Sunday morning worship, Sabbath worship, as established early on in redemptive history, was for the edification of the people of God. [00:02:26]

The other thing that disturbs me about the nomenclature of seeker-sensitive worship is that it makes the assumption that people who are unbelievers are seeking after God when the Bible tells us without any ambiguity that the unbeliever is not seeking after God, but is seeking the benefits that only God can give him, while at the same time fleeing as fast as they can from the immediate presence of God. [00:03:17]

And so the history of philosophy is the history of the articulation of competing systems of thought or of world views that are usually created in a very heavy intellectual ivory tower background, where we wonder whether they have any relevance whatsoever to culture. Now for the most part, and I’m painting with a broad brush here, for the most part in the history of western civilization, the way the technical ideas of the philosophers have gotten down from the ivory tower and into the market to public square and into those areas by which culture is shaped is through the intermediaries called artists. [00:05:50]

That’s why I say we have to be very careful what we borrow from the secular world and bring into the Christian life, not just in terms of music, but also in terms of paintings, art, architecture, and most of all, literature. So I want to speak – spend some time today talking about literature as an art form, and one of the finest works I’ve ever written – read on this subject is one I have with me today written by Gene Edward Veith, entitled, Reading Between the Lines, now- and the subheading is, “A Christian Guide to Literature.” [00:08:11]

Aliteracy refers to people who have the ability to read and to write but choose not to; they’re not interested in the word, in the written word. Rather, these people prefer to respond to images rather than to read books with sentences and paragraphs and words, that we’ve become more and more nonverbal, where we respond now to sounds and sound bytes on television. [00:10:05]

And so this is strange, and this is a real crisis for Christians, because for Christians, we are, from all time back, people of the word. I read a statistic not too long ago – and I don’t know how accurate these statistics are and how people come to this, but I guess they know what they’re doing – but market research indicated that only four percent of Americans walk into a bookstore, either religious or secular, in a given year to – and actually purchase a book to read, four percent. [00:11:39]

And if you go into your local bookstore and then begin to see what are the best sellers in terms of what the four percent who do read are reading, that doesn’t give us a whole lot more to be encouraged about because the literature that is found in the marketplace, again, reflects the neo-paganism of the secular culture. In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, he makes this statement: “Finally brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there’s any virtue, if there’s anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things” – that we are supposed to meditate on things of virtue, which is hard to do when you’re reading a lot of contemporary literature, particularly the novel. [00:12:38]

But you read these novels today, and it seems like you can’t pick up fiction without being immediately confronted by the most grotesque, vulgar, violent, obscene, prurient literature. It’s as if, in the publishing industry, if you’re going to publish fiction, you have a moral obligation to include within it some kind of salacious material, and many people are addicted to this as a vicarious form of sexual fantasy, to be engaged in reading books of this sort. [00:14:59]

And you take the word “obscene,” which is a very pictorial word, and it comes from the ancient Greece, and it means “off-stage.” If somebody was going to be murdered or perish in war in the classical theater, the actors would leave the stage and then somebody would come as a messenger and give the bad news that the character had been slain, had been murdered, or whatever, because it was felt, even in ancient pagan culture, to be obscene to show that right in front of the audience, which would appeal not to their aesthetic sense, but to more base animalistic impulses in the audience, and the dramatist did not want his art to be compromised by gore and by violence. [00:16:10]

And yet, if there’s anything that permeates the modern culture, it is the acceptability of blasphemy in virtually every art form that we encounter in our day. Just the other day, I watched a program on television which was Inside, I think, the Actor’s Studio, or something like that where they interview famous actors, and this was a fascinating interview of a well-known British actor, a British actor whose work I’ve very much admired over the years. [00:21:13]

In fact, we have two distinct marketplaces and two distinct annual conventions between the secular booksellers and the Christian publishers, and I remember when Francis Shaffer wrote his book, When Shall We – How Shall We Then Live, that it outsold dramatically Jane Fonda’s workout book, and for weeks, Jane Fonda’s workout book was number one on the New York Times bestseller’s list and Schaffer’s work was never even mentioned, even though in the marketplace, it had greatly outsold Jane Fonda. [00:23:02]