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In other words, beauty and quality are not static states or final conditions. In the Christian view of things, they are graduations in a long journey. As such, things of true greatness and nobility are bonded to the lesser, coarser things, and the practitioners of each are one with each other as images of God. Except for the sordid minority of aesthetic sluggards—the artistic Laodiceans of any culture or any age—quality and beauty are commonly desirable. And it is precisely because they are so desirable, even in the least of us, that they can become idols.

Beauty and quality become idols when they become intermediaries and spiritual screening devices, things that interpose themselves in the act of worshiping God through Christ, as if God were more interested in showing himself in a performance of Bach's B Minor Mass than the singing of "Majesty." For us to assume that our versions of beauty, per se, afford quicker access to God is to commit a fatal error. The beauty of holiness is not aesthetic beauty, nor is aesthetic ugliness a sign of ungodliness. God sees every believer, irrespective of personal taste, exactly the same way: in Christ. It is his cleansing, rather than the quality of our art, that makes us presentable. For us to assume that raising standards is directly connected to growing up into personal holiness is to put beauty and truth back into a cause-effect relationship. But the mysterious thing about truth is that it can be deeply understood and radically applied in an aesthetically bumbling way. Likewise, falsehood can be dressed in glorious aesthetic finesse and still be falsehood.

I am slowly discovering how irrelevant artistic choice is as an interpreter of people's standing with Christ. This does not mean love for beauty has been taken from me. Rather, it means I am learning that the pursuit of holiness is of a completely different order than the pursuit of beauty, even though the latter should not be forsaken in pursuit of the former. I am always driven back to this question: is the perfume that I pour over the feet of Jesus the best I can knowingly procure, or is it something less than I am knowingly capable of offering? Notice the word "knowingly," for here is where the secret of pursuing quality lies for the authentic worshiper. When I know the artistic difference between excellence and tawdriness and I refuse this difference for one reason or another, the refusal itself is idolatrous, because it, rather than beauty, has come between me and the Savior.

We can easily make an idol out of the results we want our art to produce. Here is where artistic action and thinned-out versions of evangelization and seeker sensitivity can be such comfortable bedfellows. But I quickly add that popular art forms and careless versions of seeker sensitivity are not the only culprits. Many "fine arts Christians," the classicists, wag their fingers at the seeker-sensitive popularists without realizing that the kind of seeker sensitivity that depends on Bach and Rembrandt rather than Graham Kendrick and Thomas Kinkade is just as flawed. Why? Because in either case, effectiveness is the intermediary. The point I am trying to make is that anyone using any kind of art can compromise the gospel by choosing art primarily for the results it produces, rather than to glorify God. The final dilemma with choosing art on the basis of the audiences it draws is that once the audience is drawn they will assume an equation between what draws them and what keeps them. In this condition change of virtually any kind is impossible. Then we find another idol, that of stasis and sleepy continuity, joining up with the idol of immediacy and results. The body of Christ then finds itself incapable of undaunted creativity and faith-driven change.

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April (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48