Good taste is every Christian’s responsibility.

The Christian, the Arts, and Truth: Regaining the Vision of Greatness, by Frank E. Gaebelein; edited and with an introduction by D. Bruce Lockerbie (Multnomah Press, 1985, $12.95). Reviewed by James Vanden Bosch, associate professor of English, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Frank E. Gaebelein thought that Dorothy Sayers’s phrase “the snobbery of the banal” applied only too well to many evangelicals. “They are the kind of people,” he wrote, “who look down upon good music as highbrow, who confuse worship with entertainment, who deplore serious drama as worldly yet are contentedly devoted to third-rate television shows, whose tastes in reading run to the piously sentimental, and who cannot distinguish a kind of religious calendar art from honest art. For them better aesthetic standards are ‘egghead’ and spiritually suspect.”

Frank Gaebelein earned his right to speak so directly about evangelicals and taste. In the 1920s, he helped to plan and begin an experimental Christian prep school. Stony Brook School quickly became known for academic excellence and thoroughgoing commitment to the formation of Christian character. He was also an accomplished pianist, mountain climber, Bible scholar, and editor. After a satisfying 41-year career at Stony Brook School, Gaebelein took on another task—from 1963 through 1966, he was coeditor with Carl Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

But Gaebelein left one large task unfinished when he died in 1983. Since the 1960s, he had been aware of the need for a study of aesthetics from a Christian point of view. By 1980, he had done enough work on the subject (in lectures and essays) to propose such a book to Multnomah Press. He began the work—an outline, chapter headings, and notes—but the press of other work kept him from finishing a manuscript.

D. Bruce Lockerbie assembled and organized the lectures, essays, and notes that make up this collection. He has written an informative and affectionate introduction to the book, taking pains to describe what Gaebelein meant when he called himself a “Christian humanist.”

Debased Taste

Gaebelein’s portrait of contemporary culture is familiar. In the chapter “The Debasement of Taste,” Gaebelein describes a “climate of opinion that now stomachs what only a few years ago would have been spewed out as morally defiling,” a situation “in which almost anything can be said, written, or portrayed.” He describes in this essay what Christians can do to combat this tendency “to degrade public morality and debase human life.”

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Christians are not exempt from his general judgment. Gaebelein calls attention to the cultural illiteracy of American Christians, their “habituation to the mediocre in art and literature,” the “snobbery of the banal” that marks their aesthetic choices. In music, “not only does the mediocre drive out the good; there is also a certain intolerance of the excellent,” so that “piously sentimental music” seems to have won the day. In the visual arts, the great riches of Christian art and of American masters are ignored, while “the ever-present head of Christ … seems to have become a Protestant icon.” Similarly, it is Gaebelein’s judgment that “distinguished novels and short stories written by evangelicals today are almost nonexistent.”

Gaebelein suggests that this “evangelical anti-aestheticism” may be the result or expression of cultural illiteracy, of fear of “the world,” of a dislike of the arts, or of a perception that the arts are not directly relevant to Christian life and witness. But Gaebelein’s thesis is that, no matter the cause, Christians cannot afford to continue to abuse art. His book is an attempt to convince evangelical Christians to demonstrate aesthetic integrity in their use of the arts.

Not-So-Secular Humanist

Gaebelein’s “Christian humanism” is crucial here, partly because of its confidence in the power of education to mold minds and habits. But it is more to the point in his description of art as “belonging to human life” and in his repeated insistence that even art that does not grow out of godliness is important for the Christian because “all truth is God’s truth” and “art is the expression of truth through beauty.”

Lockerbie explains in his introduction; “Gaebelein meant to identify with believers throughout the ages, particularly those in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries … whose love of God found expression in their human gifts and talents as poet, musician, painter, scholar, preacher, statesman. These were humanists in the best sense of the word: human beings committed to living out their sojourn on the earth in the fullest possible realization of their attributes as creatures made in the image of God.”

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Both Lockerbie and Gaebelein discriminate between Christian humanism and secular humanism because the latter phrase has become a convenient term of abuse for all manner of real or imagined enemies. Gaebelein grounds his humanism in Christianity; he takes as a “charter for Christian humanism” the well-known words of Paul in Philippians: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (4:8). Gaebelein believes that the heritage of human artistic achievement provides much for the Christian to think on.

Gaebelein ranges freely through biblical theology to establish the rightful place for Christian aesthetics. Following Dorothy Sayers’s book The Mind of the Maker, Gaebelein uses the creation account to show God as a creator, whose “very good” suggests the beauty of God’s workmanship. The description of humanity made in the image of God allows Gaebelein to see humans being true to the divine image by the exercise of their own limited creativity. The account of the Fall requires full acknowledgement of the radical effects of sin upon human intention and achievement.

Genius Is Where You Find It

Gaebelein reverts regularly to the doctrine of common grace, that God’s grace extends beyond his saving grace toward the elect to include the illumination and blessing of all humankind.

Thus genius and creativity are to be valued and acknowledged wherever they manifest themselves—in an ancient Greek or in a contemporary atheist. Gaebelein takes this proposition seriously in the essays themselves: he borrows from a wide variety of sources. He quotes with approval a sentence from Alfred North Whitehead, a phrase and an orientation from Dorothy Sayers, a dictum from T. S. Eliot, and ideas from Jacques Barzun, Denis de Rougemont, Jonathan Edwards, and Emil Brunner. Gaebelein is catholic in his taste and generously admits his indebtedness to the great tradition that enriched his life.

From this variety of sources Gaebelein assembles standards for judging art. First, art must be true. For Gaebelein, the “truth” of art does not mean first of all propositional or doctrinal truth. Art is true when it exhibits four characteristics: durability, unity, integrity, and inevitability. He discovers these virtues both in the classical critical tradition and in scriptural precept and example.

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Second, a work of art must be excellent. Gaebelein considers God’s “surpassing excellence in creation and beauty as in all else,” and insists that human work in the arts must also strive for perfection, “the unattainable.” All significant art will express truth through beauty, but art created by a Christian will have the added value of revealing the reality of God. The beauty of good art is a reflection of “something of God’s own beauty and glory.”

Gaebelein has taken on a job that very much needs to be done. His description of Christian anti-aestheticism rings true. And his goal is laudable—to urge upon Christians their responsibility to make appropriate use of the gifts of art.

Unfinished Symphony

But there are problems in Gaebelein’s work. The book is not, after all, a finished work but rather a collection of diverse expressions of Gaebelein’s thought. Several long passages are duplicated in the book, there are only a few instances in which it is possible to tell when and for what occasion an essay was produced, and there are very few notes for the many sources referred to.

These relatively minor problems, however, are part of a larger problem. Although the book has a single problem in view, it lacks the architecture and proportionality that would give the argument a sense of unity and inevitability. Perhaps such a problem is unavoidable in a project like this.

For many readers, however, the content of Gaebelein’s aesthetics will be problematic. His insistence upon an aesthetics based on the paired concepts of “truth” and “beauty” will make it difficult for many to follow him to his conclusions. He uses the terms in the riddling manner of Keats—what is beautiful is true; what is true is beautiful. Gaebelein’s reliance on “beauty” is part of the problem of the book. The term is too vague for some of the work that needs to be done and too narrow for naming what it is that marks a successful work of modern art. Modern aesthetics regards the concept of beauty as not very useful.

Gaebelein also seems to endorse many of the assumptions of the institution of high art, assumptions that restrict a work of art to being an object for aesthetic contemplation. Art properly has many functions, and to insist on restricting it to one use is to diminish all that art can be and do in entertainment, persuasion, and criticism.

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Moreover, Gaebelein seems to accept the heritage of Western art without much struggle. Although he concedes that sin and man’s fallenness make it possible for art to corrupt and debase us, he is more likely to affirm the humanizing possibilities of exposure to the arts.

Many Christians working in the arts and criticism will find that Gaebelein has raised many questions that need more satisfactory answers. But these questions indicate the need for more Christian reflection on the arts. It would be uncharitable to blame Gaebelein for failing to accomplish in this book what evangelical Christianity has not achieved and yet so urgently needs to be done: the construction of a complete and compelling framework for a Christian approach to the arts. It is more consonant with the spirit of Gaebelein’s book for me to recommend his essays as making another contribution to that rich inheritance of things that are of good report, honest, and virtuous—essays that Christians should think on and be thankful for.

Act Like A CEO

Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge, by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus (Harper & Row, 1985, 244 pp.; $19.95). Reviewed by Robert K. Johnston, dean of North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

According to the authors to the authors of Leaders, “most organizations are managed, not led.” Yet the decline in credibility of those in authority makes leadership crucial as seldom before. Thus the importance of this book, which has insights relevant to business, church, and home alike.

Bennis, a management professor at the University of Southern California, and Nanus, director of USC’s Center for Futures Research, have interviewed and observed 90 top leaders—CEOs, orchestra conductors, coaches, labor leaders, among others—hoping to discover common characteristics of effective leadership. And what Tolstoy concluded concerning families—“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—turns out to be true of leaders.

Key Strategies

Those who were queried employed four common leadership strategies:

First, a leader must be able to create a new and compelling vision. Leaders create focus, not arbitrarily or unilaterally, but through paying attention to their teams. Like conductor and orchestra, leader and organization must be one. Only as an organization has shared meanings and interpretations of reality can there be focus for new action.

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Second, a leader must communicate his or her vision effectively, persuading and not coercing. And since corporate communication is more than words, the leader must also make the necessary changes in management processes, organizational structure, and management style to support the values called for by the new vision. When leaders’ actions are appropriate to their visions, followers discover their own roles and worth. Common pride, commitment, enthusiasm, and energy result.

Third, leadership is only possible in an atmosphere of trust. In fact, the accumulation of trust is a measure of the legitimacy of leadership. Not only must the leader articulate the vision clearly, there must be constancy, reliability, and predictability in both speech and action. Leaders will have to exercise “courageous patience” to overcome the corporate inertia and inevitable opposition to the changes needed in the “social architecture” of the organization.

Fourth, the positive self-regard of a leader induces positive self-regard in others. A leader’s knowledge of his or her strengths, together with the capacity to continue both to develop them and to exercise them, is contagious. Effective leadership empowers others “to translate intention into reality and sustain it.”

For Bennis and Nanus, “leadership is what gives an organization its vision and its ability to translate that vision into reality.” Effective leadership “knows what it wants, communicates those intentions, positions itself correctly, and empowers its work force.” It instills vision, meaning, trust, and self-regard.

Thoughts Provoked

The authors included a number of observations that are thought-provoking for Christian readers. Here is a sampling:

1. Leadership is recognized to be “not so much the exercise of power itself as the empowerment of others.” One thinks of Jesus’ redefinition of leadership in Mark 10—servanthood, not superiority.

2. Almost all 90 leaders interviewed were happily married and enthusiastic about the institution of marriage. (The authors were surprised.) Such findings are confirmed by George Valliant’s longitudinal study of Harvard graduates. Perhaps people with healthy relationships make the healthiest leaders.

3. The higher the leadership post, “the more interpersonal and human the undertaking.” The authors discovered that the top executives they interviewed spent roughly 90 percent of their time with people and virtually the same percentage of their time concerned with “the messiness of people problems.” Leadership, that is, has to do with enabling others to fulfill their full humanness better.

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4. Although leading is a job (often a well-paid one), equal reward comes from the sense of adventure and play engendered by the task. Charles Garfield’s study showed that “optimal performers” work with “intention and delight” rather than “with determination and for relief.” And Jesus said that shepherds are more likely to be devoted to their work than are hirelings, whose only reward is their pay.

Christians need to continue to reflect theologically on such insights from our wider culture. As they do, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge might prove to be a profitable source.

The Wallenda Factor

Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.

—Karl Wallenda, 1968

“Perhaps the most impressive quality of the leaders we studied was the way they respond to failure. Like Karl Wallenda—whose life was at stake each time he walked the tightrope—these leaders put all their energies into their task. They simply don’t think about failure, don’t even use the word, relying on such synonyms as ‘mistake,’ ‘glitch,’ ‘bungle.’ Never failure.

Shortly after Wallenda fell to his death in 1978, his wife recalled: ‘All Karl thought about for three straight months prior to it was falling. It was the first time he’d ever thought about that, and it seemed to me that he put all his energies into not falling rather than walking the tightrope.’

From what we learned from the interviews with successful leaders, it became clear that when Karl Wallenda poured his energies into not falling rather than walking the tightrope, he was virtually destined to fail.

Consider Ray Meyer, who led DePaul University to forty-two consecutive years of winning basketball. When his team dropped its first game after twenty-nine straight home court victories, we called to see how he felt. His response was vintage Wallenda: ‘Great! Now we can start concentrating on winning, not on not losing.’ Meyer reframed for us the Wallenda factor, the capacity to embrace positive goals, to pour one’s energies into the task, not into looking behind and dredging up excuses.

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The Wallenda factor is basically about learning. And all learning involves some ‘failure.’ We propose a general rule for all organizations: ‘Reasonable failure should never be received with anger.’ Spinoza said that those who respond to failure of others by anger are themselves slaves to passion and learn nothing.

Tom Watson, Sr., IBM’s founder and guiding inspiration, put that principle to work. A promising junior executive was involved in a risky venture for the company and lost over $10 million. When Watson called the nervous executive into his office, the young man blurted out, ‘I guess you want my resignation?’ Watson said, ‘You can’t be serious. We’ve just spent $10 million educating you!’

Although leading is a ‘job’ for which leaders are handsomely paid, what they truly value is a sense of adventure and play. Like explorers and artists, they focus their attention on their task, forget personal problems, lose their sense of time, feel competent and in control. When these elements are present, leaders truly enjoy what they’re doing and stop worrying about whether what they are doing will work. They are walking the tightrope.”

Adapted from Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge,© 1985 by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus.

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