Arts and the Christian Imagination: Essays on Art, Literature, and Aesthetics by Clyde S. Kilby (review)

Have Evangelical Christians lost their sense of beauty? Must we fear the dangers of the arts? From iconoclasts to iconophiles, The Arts and the Christian Imagination offers Clyde Kilby’s lifelong reflections on questions related to the arts and their role in the imagination, primarily focused on the Christian response to both. Kilby’s thoughtful commitment to a complex Christian aesthetic is one that should make us pause before we dismiss any art.

William Dyrness and Keith Call have superbly edited this collection of Kilby’s work, and have included some unpublished content from a large manuscript that Kilby spent years writing. This unpublished work is most of the first section, “Christianity, the Arts, and Aesthetics.” Kilby ranges the gamut of aesthetics with discussions of vocation, the role of sacramentality and beauty, grace through the arts, the nature of the self, and the various interpretations of how the elusive concept of “form” has been understood to relate to art through history. Kilby’s constant refrain is that all beauty comes from the ultimate object of beauty: God. Without Christian perspectives on art, Kilby argues, secular art would lose its purpose and meaning since it would devolve even further into “art for art’s sake,” having no transcendent value. Art would become even more a tool for propaganda and the misshaping of mass belief.

A unique discussion of the relevance of music to the Christian imagination also appears in the first section where Kilby does not limit himself to his expertise of literature. All art is his purview, and Kilby does well to maintain a balanced and nuanced discussion that is approachable to readers, as is his usual style. He questions where the value of music exists and explores music as an important part of the human experience because it is part of human nature. He rounds out this first section with discussion of biblical symbolism and the Evangelical position (which he laments) on the arts.

The second of four sections offers Kilby’s reflections on the “vocation of the artist.” Here he ranges from an exploration of Christianity and its role in culture to defending Beauty and human freedom. The first topic of culture finds Kilby asking about the origin of our desire to create and its possible implications for Christians and culture. In defending Beauty, Kilby argues against some critics that the second commandment is not a denial or imposition against creativity, but against idolatry alone, defending Hebrew culture as imaginative. In “Vision, Belief, and Individuality,” Kilby shows that metaphor is at the heart of human understanding and at the heart of knowledge in creative and scientific (qualitative and quantitative) disciplines.

Finally, Kilby laments the retreat of Evangelicals from the arts over the past century and continues the remainder of the book (at various points) to recall Evangelicals to a complex (dare I say robust?) aesthetic. Instead of being afraid of the dangerous nature of Christianity by trying to tame it with the “expository demon”—a phrase Kilby borrows from Lewis—we must give up our “heresy hunting” and our “orthodoxy of prose” in order to be the poems (God’s poema) that the Scriptures claim we are. Kilby offers suggestions for Evangelicals who wish to reclaim such an aesthetic: accept good art wherever it is found; more use of the parable and allegory in story and interpretation; a return to the use of the symbol; care with manuscripts on the side of the publishers—not publishing “trash”; a desire to lift the Evangelical taste with quality work; establishing an Evangelical writers’ colony and Evangelical writers’ conferences; Evangelicals reading more great authors of the past; and finally loosen up to be able to poke fun at ourselves.

“Faith and the Role of the Imagination” provides the framework of the third section, which shows Kilby transcending the limitations of his particular social setting...