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Our college recently built a large chapel designed in the style of a traditional New England church, with a tall white steeple. Inside are simple pews, white walls, large clear windows with a few smaller bits of medieval stained glass in the front preserved from the earlier chapel on campus. It is a beautiful building and one quite comfortable for many American Christians. Christians from the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire, or the Baroque period in Europe, however, might be startled by the austerity of the place. Where are the images of Christ and pictures of biblical narratives? There are no heavenly glimpses of angels with gilded wings or ornately carved furnishings.

While in our own time the visual arts are largely thought of as a sphere separate from Christian faith, this is an anomaly historically. For most of the last two millennia, Christian art was the norm. Painters and sculptors, like musicians, saw their work as bringing glory to God. Churches, private chapels, and tombs were adorned with explicitly Christian images that communicated the faith of artists, patrons, and their communities. We see bits of this art preserved in museums and European cathedrals, but we rarely see the art functioning in its original liturgical context, contributing to a worshipful environment. To better appreciate what is missing from our worship spaces today, it helps to explore Christians' first attempts to express their faith through images.

Christian art got off to a slow beginning. The earliest Christians expected the imminent return of Christ, so they were slow to adopt a program of transforming culture! But there were other obstacles. Christians in the ancient world tended to be suspicious of art and images—for good reason. In the Greco-Roman world, art was inextricably linked with pagan religion (as were other aspects of culture, including education, the theater, and athletic games). Classical myths about the gods and goddess were the subject of much artwork, but the problem went deeper than that. Sculptors, painters, and even gold and silver smiths were employed in the manufacture of idols.

There is evidence for this in the New Testament when Paul's friends earn the wrath of the silver smiths of Ephesus who made idols of Artemis. The artisans feared that the preaching of the gospel might jeopardize their livelihood, and so they dragged the missionaries to the theater for judgment, chanting, "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" (Acts 19:23-30) At the beginning of the second century, Hippolytus gave this advice for screening candidates for baptism: "If a man be a sculptor or a painter, he shall be taught not to make idols. If he will not desist, let him be rejected …" So if an artist converted to Christianity, he stood to lose a big cut of his business.

The second commandment provided a Scriptural basis for ambivalence about image making: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:4 KJV; more modern translations rightly clarify the problem as idolatry, not images themselves). The Hebrew God was spirit and could not be depicted with metal or stone; the creation was not to be worshiped in place of the Creator. There were, however, Scriptural commands to decorate the tabernacle and the liturgical items that filled it (Exodus 25). Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman eras did use art, sometimes even pagan symbols such as the zodiac or the sun god, to decorate their synagogues.

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