Art: Form and Content

While Francis Schaeffer was being treated for the cancer which later killed him, Philip Yancey interviewed him. Among other interesting topics, the two men discussed art:

[Yancey]: Some Christians have come away from you confused about how they should relate to the arts. You refer to a "line of despair" which implies that the forms used by modern artists and musicians and writers are somehow tainted or immoral. The only way I can function as a Christian artist, people have said to me, is to leapfrog back a century and pick up old forms.

[Schaeffer]: Oh, no .... Technique is neutral, and you can't say that a certain technique is godly or ungodly. But there is a form of the world's spirit for every generation, and this infiltrates all kinds of things, including Christian thinking, unless we consciously reject it.

In art, techniques have been born of the really brilliant people in those fields trying to find a vehicle to express their worldview. I don't believe that these people necessarily sit down in the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich, where dadaism was born, for example, and construct these things. I would just say that a person's worldview, consciously or unconsciously, naturally shows itself with some consistency in the totality of life. Be careful here, because they're still made in the image of God, whether they know it or not; so there are brakes. But in general what I've said is true.

Because modern forms of art were brought forth in order to express a certain world view, it therefore becomes very tricky for the young Christian artist or writer. The techniques are neutral, not godly or ungodly. But it's easier to produce a world view through the vehicle conceived to express it than it is to convey another world view. Therefore I am not opposed to modern forms of art, but I think you do have to keep in mind why the form was produced.

As literature and writing professors, both of us have tried to explain this to students. Form may be neutral in a vacuum, but in the context in which it was created, it is not neutral: Hip hop, for instance, was created to express anger and rebellion against the governing class. Trying to express praise or thankfulness through that form results in a disjointedness that, rather than being artistic or "edgy," might just be muddled. The form doesn't match the content; the form doesn't elicit the emotions the content demands.

While the forms of hip hop might work to express rebellion against the "prince of this world," the machismo and swagger tied up in hip hop are at odds with the attitude of courageous humility that Jude calls us to when he reminds us that even the archangel Michael, when arguing with Satan over the body of Moses, told him, "The Lord rebuke you," rather than, "You want a piece of me?!" Redeeming the form of hip hop requires more than merely tacking Christian lyrics onto it. It requires the probing imaginative work of gifted artists willing to think deeply and sensitively about such matters.

The belief that form is strictly and always neutral is a manifestation of dualism--the belief that body [form] and soul [content] are separate and unaffected by one another, when in reality God created us as both body and soul intermingling, each affecting and being affected by the other. Dualism and its offspring, gnosticism, miss the deep mystery of the incarnation. One task of the Christian artist is to remind people of that mystery, in and outside the church, both in word and form.

--Jonathan and Amanda Witt