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Believing we serve a creative God and are made in His image, the mission of the
Whitefield Academy Arts program is to assist our families in enabling students to
discover and develop their own God-given creative gifts, to know and understand
their culture and their own deeply held beliefs through the arts, and to reflect
a distinctly Christian world and life view.
A Christian Perspective
Mind is the root. Science is the stem. Art is the flower.
- Frank E. Miller
Despite the common misconception that the arts are just a form of entertainment,
we know that the arts are a tool disseminating truth. The Christian perspective
is that, “All truth is God’s truth.” Therefore the stage is not just a career field
but arguably a mission field as well. It was C.S. Lewis who reported, “…a good story
arouses in us sensations we have never had before as though we had broken out of
our normal mode of consciousness….It gets under our skin, hits us at a deeper level
than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles our oldest certainties till all
questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for
most of our lives.” Christ understood this concept first with the use of parables,
a method that has proven timeless in illuminating moral and spiritual lessons. Since
human beings are made in His image, we too possess the gift of a creative imagination.
J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings said this, “Fantasy remains
a human right: we make in measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made:
and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”
There is a redeeming value, no matter how subtle, when we scratch the surface of
art to find the value within. God has shown us that he communicates who He is through
thinking and understanding. After all, God’s world is full of beauty, pain, turmoil,
and justice. These aspects are evident in the lives of all people – saved and unsaved.
God continually proves His omnipresence in that He is present in the lives of all
of us. All art may not be intended to communicate a Christian message but we believe
there is often the potential for moral implication. We study to show ourselves approved.
(2 Tim 2:15) We study diligently and fervently. (Eccl 9) We study in pursuit of
truth, thus giving honor to God. (Micah 9) Fine arts are not the only means for
experiencing the presence of God; however at Whitefield it has proven to be a viable
tool in reaching our youth and community.
[From the Dramatic Society’s program for Medea]
Whether watching a movie or television show, listening to a pop song, or reading
a novel or poem, discerning Christians would do well to ask, "What redemptive value
can there be in this art?" It is an important question, and one that Ms. Hutson
has asked me to answer with respect to tonight’s play. Allow me to begin a bit broadly.
Classical Greek tragedy makes at least two assumptions about its audience: first,
that most people want to better understand what being human means, and, second,
that this desire is best satisfied by posing uncomfortable questions—about truth,
justice, government, existence, ethics, God. Clearly, the Christian can agree with
these assumptions. Beyond that, the Christian’s challenge, sometimes exhilarating,
will be to grapple with the answers the Classical tragedians give to those uncomfortable
questions. We may of course disagree with them, but the goal of a tragedian, as
Aristotle made clear, is to have the audience, emotionally moved by the events portrayed,
learn something of themselves more clearly. In the case of Medea, we are
forced to take a deep look into human frailty and neediness and as a result discover,
for instance, how easily sin may spring from love, how futile revenge is, and how
cruelly indifferent to loyalty we can be.
In his book Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale,
Frederick Buechner argues that the redemptive value of any art can be found only
in its capacity to tell the truth. But perhaps there is a deeper concern here for
some: can we really believe that the pagan can tell the truth? We must remember
that as Euripides was a Greek he thought of the gods and Man’s relationship to them
in humanistic terms. This was the Greek way. But it did not inhibit the apostle
Paul from quoting the Greek playwright Menander while evangelizing the Athenians
(Acts 17). Since all people are created in God’s image, even pagans must be able
to say something true, even of the nature of God and Man. This isn’t to say at all
that we ought to expect from Medea an invitation to trust in Christ (Euripides lived
300 years before the Incarnation). But Greek drama, or any pagan art for that matter,
may bring us to a place where such an invitation is easier to accept. It may very
well reveal to us something of our sinfulness or goodness, helplessness or strength,
perhaps even of the omnipotence of God, and in so doing illumine our understanding
and therefore quite possibly incline us to ponder our condition.
By Ryan Lutz, Former US English Teacher
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