Point of View

At Prison Fellowship’s national headquarters hangs one of my favorite photographs. It is huge—six feet by four feet—featuring a close-up of a female prison inmate wearing a blue scarf and burgundy jumpsuit. Her face is lighted with a joyful smile.

This picture is a cheerful reminder of the men and women who we are reaching with the Gospel. But a reminder as well that everyday we are engaged in various kinds of art—from photographs to novels to music to films. But how many of us know how to understand and appreciate an excellent work of art and the message that it conveys?

As Francis Schaeffer wrote in his book Art and the Bible, there are four basic standards of judgment we ought to apply to a work of art: technical excellence, validity, intellectual content—that is, the worldview that comes through—and the integration of content and vehicle.

For example, when it comes to paintings, Schaeffer wrote, “One considers the use of color, form, balance, the texture of the paint, the handling of lines, and the unity of the canvas. By recognizing technical excellence as an aspect of art work, “we are often able to say that while we do not agree with [a particular] artist’s world view, he is nonetheless a great artist.” If we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life, Schaeffer added, “We are not being true to the artist as a man.”

Second, we ought to be able to evaluate a work of art based on its validity. In creating his work, was the artist honest to himself and his worldview, or did he create his art merely for the sake of making money, or being accepted—either by a patron, as in days gone by, or by modern art critics today in New York?

Third, we must judge the intellectual content of a work of art, content that reflects the artist’s worldview. The body of work of an artist “must be seen ultimately in terms of the Scripture”—to “its relationship to the Christian world view,” Schaeffer noted. Thus, we can truthfully say an artist might display great technical virtuosity, and that his work has validity—but also that his worldview is quite wrong.

For example, Rousseau’s notion of unfettered Bohemian freedom—accepted as an ideal for the artist—is wrong from a Christian point of view, Schaeffer wrote. God’s Word “binds the great man and the small, the scientist and the simple, the king and the artist.”

And fourth, we must ask how well the artist has suited the vehicle to the message. In great artwork, Schaeffer wrote, there is a correlation between style and content. When T. S. Eliot published “The Waste Land” in 1922, the form of poetry “fit the nature of the world as he saw it, namely, broken, unrelated, ruptured,” Schaeffer wrote; Eliot deserves “high marks for suiting the vehicle to the message.”

If you want to learn more about how to judge an artistic work, I suggest you read Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible. You will learn not only how to judge the merits of a work of art, but how to recognize whether the worldview he espouses with color and canvas is true or false.

Copyright © 2008 Prison Fellowship. Used with permission.