Does Better Theology Make For Better Art?

It is assumed in our culture that Christianity undercuts real art, that a better Christian and a better artist are mutually exclusive. Art is seen as being about honesty and religion about wishful thinking. Art wrestles with the gritty realities of life, while religion is a crutch used to stave off life’s existential fears. Art is thought of as drawing people to the edge of their experience and understanding, while Christians draws them back to the status quo. However you want to think of it, we live in a culture where Christianity and creativity are not commonly associated.


It is counter-intuitive to say that for an artist to become a better artist he or she must (along with studying the craft itself, being involved in the community of artists, etc.) immerse himself or herself in theology. However, if we understand theology and art aright, we find this is exactly what must happen.

Theology, rather than being the study of the obscure arguments of “theologians” is simply the study of reality. If that is true then theology is the study of life is it is, was, and is meant to be, and artists who hope to tell a true story about this world must truly know the story they find themselves in. Mistake the story and an artist can still tell truth and can certainly make beauty. It would be foolish to say otherwise – there is a world of beauty that doesn’t come with the Christian label. Christians must learn to seek it, see it, and praise it anywhere it is to be found! However, theology teaches the true story that runs along the grain of the fabric of this world. It is the story that is the context of all our smaller stories – the stage they are all acted out upon. In this sense all art, all beauty, all truth merely borrows from God’s stores and has its being only in the world God has made. Theology makes better art because it is the act of climbing inside the story we are living in, and intentionally coming to understand it. When an artist does this she finds that the story climbs inside her as well. It becomes the light by which she sees all of life, including her art. It will then appear in her art – if she loves the truth, she will tell it. If it speaks truly of the world in which we were truly made then it will reach inside the viewer, the reader, the listener and ring dusty bells inside them. The “holy days on the calendar will wake up and chime.” We will all find that “I had been my whole life a bell and not known it until I was lifted and struck.”

To be specific, take two ideas Christian theology teaches and see how they have created truer art: idolatry and depravity. By idolatry I mean the complicated exchange by which we come to want things that can hurt us and the way that desire tends to turn to need, then addiction. The Bible teaches the mechanisms of idolatry, which are also the mechanisms of betrayal, of obsession, of murder, of long-simmering bitterness. It also teaches the means of repentance and the flourishing that it brings. For a lesson in how understanding idolatry makes for true stories watch the 1985 Academy Award winner, Amadeus. It is the story of one composer, Salieri, and how his love for Mozart’s music turned into hatred for the man because his own place had been eclipsed by Mozart’s greater gift. His piety turns to bitterness to God because God had denied him the one thing Salieri was using God to achieve. As an old man, with Mozart long dead, Salieri is still nursing his ancient bitterness and the power of the film is in the way it portrays him as a tired old man clutching at the threads of his own glory whose world is centered on himself and himself only.

Take another truth that Christianity teaches, that this world has gone horribly wrong and that wrong lives in each on of us as well. I have never encountered human depravity portrayed than in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. His characters are so fragile and foolish and full of bluster, yet so unexpectedly wise and tender and human. Dostoyevsky found his faith in the midst of human depravity – in the Soviet gulag – reading the pages of a borrowed New Testament. I imagine the faith he found gave him massive spiritual resources for seeing the beauty and the real ugliness in all the depravity around him. You cannot read The Brothers Karamazov without yearning for the wayward characters to make a true repentance and yet having the uttermost compassion for them whatever they do. This is Christianity coming out of an artist not as propaganda, but simply as a result of Dostoyevsky immersing himself in the theology of reality and then trying to tell a story. I can’t help but think that it is the way his art and his faith were integrated that will make his work endure as long as humanity does. It reminds me of a story in Philip Yancey’s book (UNEXPECTED PLACES>>>) when he went into the former soviet union as one of the first westerners allowed in after the iron curtain fell. He did not expect to find a thriving church in a country where Christianity was persecuted so tenaciously as it was in the soviet union, but that is exactly he found. When he asked how this could be the reply that came to him was that, “they took away our bibles, but they did not take away our Tolstoy and our Dostokevsky.”

The Father has strewn his grace everywhere. Artists have the power to join their work to that Great Work if they will only learn that their faith and their art are not separate things, but that each one draws them deeper into the other.