Art and the Bible

For those of you interested in the arts, I wanted to pass along the name of an old book that I recently encountered by a great Christian thinker of the 20th century. Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible is a brief but powerful handling of the intersection of the arts and the Christian worldview.

Moving from biblical exploration to key contemporary questions, Schaeffer succinctly lays out a basic Christian apologetic for the importance of the arts in our lives as followers of Christ.

While there is much that could be shared from the book, I was particularly gripped by this introductory thought.

The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth, they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, including true to the ultimate environment – the infinite, personal God who is really there – then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth. Such an attitude will give our Christianity a strength that it often does not seem to have at the present time (377).

Art and the Bible can be found in a volume on its own or in Volume 2 of the now out-of-print The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer entitled “A Christian View of the Bible as Truth.”