25 Theses About Art
1. The artist makes beautiful things to convey the truth about God, God’s Word, and God’s world in order to inspire others to contemplate the living God.
2. Art, in its highest form, is the use of beauty to make people receptive to divine inspiration and love Higher Things.
3. Inspiration does not come from deep inside human subjectivity, as if the inner desires of the person are somehow pure, as if freeing human instincts from tradition or inheritance is the pathway to beauty.
4. The human heart naturally seeks beauty as the antidote to the withering claims of materialism and rationalism.
5. Atheistic art is when the artist’s subjectivity is free from the will of God, the Nature of Things, and the artist’s ego masquerades as the source of truth.
6. Since a tree is judged by its fruit, art can be judged as beautiful if it makes people love the Truth.
7. The artist’s job is to observe, apprehend, and reproduce God’s world artistically to reveal the order of beauty and inspire a higher knowledge of the New Jerusalem.
8. God’s world has many hidden or unappreciated forms contained in it, from the tiny creatures scurrying along the forest floor, to euphonious harmonies of backup singers, to nature and its proportion, and the radiance of the cosmos. The artist's job is to abstract these things and apply them in creative ways.
9. People travel to see and experience the inspiration of neo-Gothic or neo-Classical architecture whose soaring frames, rhythmic lines, intricate ornamentation, disciplined geometry, and complex stonework speak directly to human intuition. They line up to see the Notre Dame Cathedral or the Parthenon, but not the Brutalist style of the Barbican Centre. It’s high time architecture schools started wondering why.
10. To walk in the spiritual disciplines of the Bible requires directing the passions via human habit to learn to like the art that God likes and hate the art that God hates.
11. Humans have a deep artistic impulse that arises from the need to function as an image of God. The second commandment directs the artistic impulse properly to restrict the sinful application of it.
12. Beauty is based on the objective truths of balance, proportion, permanence, life, and telos. Attraction is based on a person’s feelings about something.
13. Jackson Pollock, Duchamp, Piero Manzoni, and the like are haters of beauty, nature, and transcendence who represent the modern blight of art museums.
14. It’s never the artist himself that we are supposed to weigh and consider. In other words, art is not good simply because it expresses someone’s inner “me.”
15. The greatest art will always discern and align itself with the Truth.
16. Art must make perceptible the unseen realm. It must translate the ineffable truths of God, God’s Word, and God’s world into the language of human intuition.
17. When Truth and Goodness are suppressed in the broader culture, then Beauty is needed to fulfill the task of all three.
18. Art awakens a sense of Transcendence when it contains more than it communicates, hints beyond what is there, and makes a claim on the person who enters its presence.
19. True beauty is the earthly shadow of heavenly glory, and it is the duty of artists to represent the majesty and perfection of God.
20. Solomon learned that vaingloriously grasping after cultured refinement was vapor and a striving after wind (Eccl. 2:8-11).
21. God can make something out of nothing, while man can make something out of something, which means the eternal vocation of God is unlimited creation, and the artistic vocation of man is limited creation.
22. The beauty of art is not because of the inner subjectivity of the artist, but because of how the artist sanctifies their proclivities to an external object that is beautiful.
23. The Scripture describes God himself as beautiful and full of majestic glory (Ps. 27:4, 96:6; Mt. 17:1-8; 2 Pt. 1:16f), which means that beauty is predicated on God.
24. A non-Christian may do art that presents an eternal truth, and a Christian artist may inadvertently do art that presents a tacky and disposable worldview.
25. The world doesn’t need more art about Christianity, but more art by talented Christians covering the entire range of nature, experience, and divine beauty.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
Other Articles
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2024/08/27/seven-truths-about-art
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2026/02/02/creativity-and-the-church-or-how-to-develop-creativity
2. Art, in its highest form, is the use of beauty to make people receptive to divine inspiration and love Higher Things.
3. Inspiration does not come from deep inside human subjectivity, as if the inner desires of the person are somehow pure, as if freeing human instincts from tradition or inheritance is the pathway to beauty.
4. The human heart naturally seeks beauty as the antidote to the withering claims of materialism and rationalism.
5. Atheistic art is when the artist’s subjectivity is free from the will of God, the Nature of Things, and the artist’s ego masquerades as the source of truth.
6. Since a tree is judged by its fruit, art can be judged as beautiful if it makes people love the Truth.
7. The artist’s job is to observe, apprehend, and reproduce God’s world artistically to reveal the order of beauty and inspire a higher knowledge of the New Jerusalem.
8. God’s world has many hidden or unappreciated forms contained in it, from the tiny creatures scurrying along the forest floor, to euphonious harmonies of backup singers, to nature and its proportion, and the radiance of the cosmos. The artist's job is to abstract these things and apply them in creative ways.
9. People travel to see and experience the inspiration of neo-Gothic or neo-Classical architecture whose soaring frames, rhythmic lines, intricate ornamentation, disciplined geometry, and complex stonework speak directly to human intuition. They line up to see the Notre Dame Cathedral or the Parthenon, but not the Brutalist style of the Barbican Centre. It’s high time architecture schools started wondering why.
10. To walk in the spiritual disciplines of the Bible requires directing the passions via human habit to learn to like the art that God likes and hate the art that God hates.
11. Humans have a deep artistic impulse that arises from the need to function as an image of God. The second commandment directs the artistic impulse properly to restrict the sinful application of it.
12. Beauty is based on the objective truths of balance, proportion, permanence, life, and telos. Attraction is based on a person’s feelings about something.
13. Jackson Pollock, Duchamp, Piero Manzoni, and the like are haters of beauty, nature, and transcendence who represent the modern blight of art museums.
14. It’s never the artist himself that we are supposed to weigh and consider. In other words, art is not good simply because it expresses someone’s inner “me.”
15. The greatest art will always discern and align itself with the Truth.
16. Art must make perceptible the unseen realm. It must translate the ineffable truths of God, God’s Word, and God’s world into the language of human intuition.
17. When Truth and Goodness are suppressed in the broader culture, then Beauty is needed to fulfill the task of all three.
18. Art awakens a sense of Transcendence when it contains more than it communicates, hints beyond what is there, and makes a claim on the person who enters its presence.
19. True beauty is the earthly shadow of heavenly glory, and it is the duty of artists to represent the majesty and perfection of God.
20. Solomon learned that vaingloriously grasping after cultured refinement was vapor and a striving after wind (Eccl. 2:8-11).
21. God can make something out of nothing, while man can make something out of something, which means the eternal vocation of God is unlimited creation, and the artistic vocation of man is limited creation.
22. The beauty of art is not because of the inner subjectivity of the artist, but because of how the artist sanctifies their proclivities to an external object that is beautiful.
23. The Scripture describes God himself as beautiful and full of majestic glory (Ps. 27:4, 96:6; Mt. 17:1-8; 2 Pt. 1:16f), which means that beauty is predicated on God.
24. A non-Christian may do art that presents an eternal truth, and a Christian artist may inadvertently do art that presents a tacky and disposable worldview.
25. The world doesn’t need more art about Christianity, but more art by talented Christians covering the entire range of nature, experience, and divine beauty.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
Other Articles
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2024/08/27/seven-truths-about-art
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2026/02/02/creativity-and-the-church-or-how-to-develop-creativity
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