Art, Beauty, God and Wonder

On the wonderful gift of great art and what it can teach us:

I often speak about books, reading and learning, noting what great gifts of God they are. So too music. And so too art. These are all good gifts from our good God. Yes, because of the Fall, all these gifts can be perverted and abused. But we can still give thanks to God for his many wonderful gifts to us.

A few years ago I posted a piece listing 40 key books on art and the Christian. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2022/07/21/christianity-and-a-theology-of-the-arts-recommended-reading/

That list keeps increasing, with more additional books added. Here I want to look at just one of the authors featured on my lists, and quote from his two recent and helpful volumes. The two Russ Ramsey books are:

–Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith. Zondervan, 2022.
–Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive. Zondervan, 2024.

In the opening chapter of his 2022 volume, he presents three reasons why beauty matters:

One, God is inherently beautiful.

Two, God’s creation is inherently beautiful.

Three, God’s people shall be adorned in beauty for all eternity.

He then offers us four main things that beauty does:

First, beauty attracts.

Second, beauty exposes error when we form impressions of people, places, and things based on biases.

Third, beauty inspires creativity.

Fourth, beauty arouses belief in God.

He elaborates on these seven points. Let me just quote from part of what he said on the first point about what beauty does:

Not only are we drawn to beauty, we are the only creatures who engage in certain behaviors purely for the sake of encountering beauty. We use vacation days to drive to places where we can see the sun come up over the ocean. We visit art museums, theatres, and symphonies. We look at the moon and the stars. We climb to high mountain lakes to put our feet in the frigid water to feel the rush and see the reflection of the summit in the ripples we have made. No other creature stops to behold something beautiful for no other reason than that it has stirred something in their souls. When we do these things, are we not like Moses and David, hungering to see the glory of God? (p. 11)

And a quick closing thought from the book:

What is your craft? What art or skill are you developing? Painting? Writing? Cooking? Raising children? Teaching? Leading a team? Organizing data? You may not develop at the rate you want, and you will certainly always run across others who are better in some ways. But don’t quit…. (p. 208)

But it is his newer volume that I want to spend a bit more time on, and quote from more extensively. Early on he tells us this:

Much of the world’s great art comes from places of sadness, and I believe that’s often why we connect with it. It isn’t that the works themselves are of a sorrowful subject matter; it’s that the artists bring their personal experience to their work to say something meaningful about the world to the viewer. We want what we say to matter. We want it to connect. We want it to help people. So artists create, not just to show us a picture of a bridge, but to show us something of this world where bridges are necessary and used by people to get from one bank to the other without going under. Some cross alone, while others walk hand in hand as the sun dances on the water and casts those leaning on the rail as silhouettes. But there we are, each living out our unfolding stories that are filled with all kinds of joy and difficulty.

 

Art shows us back to ourselves, and the best art doesn’t flinch or look away. Rather, it acknowledges the complexity of struggles like poverty, weariness, and grief while defiantly holding forth beauty—reminding us that beauty is both scarce and everywhere we look. In its scarcity, beauty often surprises us. She walks into the room in her dinner dress, and every head turns. But it is also everywhere if we will just pay attention. It’s in a child’s laugh, in the watercolor sky of the setting sun, and in the aroma of baking bread and brewing coffee.

 

Beauty pulls us upward toward something that calls for some measure of discretion, something to be treated with dignity and care, something sacred. What does it pull us toward? The truth that we were made to exist in the presence of glory. But as with Moses hidden in the cleft of the rock, true glory is often more than we can bear. This world is filled with sorrows we cannot avoid. How are we supposed to navigate the tension between glory and sorrow? (pp. 4-5)

But I especially like what he had to say about taking his daughter to Holland and visiting the world-renowned Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for the first time in 2023. I like this for various reasons. I met my late wife in Holland, and we lived in Amsterdam for a while, and we visited the great museum more than once.

And Ramsey in this chapter focuses on one famous piece by Rembrandt on the prophet Jeremiah. Like millions of others, I love Rembrandt, and Jeremiah is likely my favourite biblical character – which might tell you a bit about the sort of person I am!

Ramsey describes the trip to the museum and speaks about how his daughter went off on her own for a while, and then reunited with him a bit later. He writes, “She led me into a room, pointed to the wall on her left, and said, ‘There’.” He continues:

When I saw what she was pointing at, I began to weep. By now you might think I’m a person who cries easily when I am around art. Not so. I can become solemn, a little misty-eyed, even dumbfoundedly silent. But I can’t remember the last time I openly wept in a museum. And there I was, wiping at tears that weren’t stopping. When she saw me crying, she welled up too, because that’s how she is – she feels what others are feeling. It’s one of her gifts. She said, “That’s one of yours.” And she was right. It was. Kate had led me to Rembrandt’s Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem.

 

As far as Rembrandt paintings go, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem isn’t that remarkable. It’s incredible, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t rise to the masterwork level of The Storm on the Sea of Galilee or The Return of the Prodigal Son. Nevertheless, Rembrandt’s portrait of the grieving prophet is one I have been paying attention to for decades. It’s in my personal collection. Nearly thirty years ago, I ordered a print of this work from a local bookstore, and it has been on our wall for Kate’s entire life – making the move from house to house, city to city. She has never known a day when Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem wasn’t on display in our home, and every time I see it, it reminds me of the Lord’s call on my life into pastoral ministry.

 

Back in my early twenties, I was working for the Art House, a ministry founded by Charlie Peacock and his wife, AndI, which was devoted to promoting a vision of a seamless life of Christian discipleship and imaginative living. Ligonier Ministries, founded by R. C. Sproul, had donated copies of its entire cassette library of Dr. Sproul’s lectures, which covered everything from Scripture to church history to theology to art and culture. One of my jobs was to catalogue these lectures for the Art House library. I took home one series at a time and listened to every single talk. It was the most formative theological education I had ever received. It was in listening to those tapes that I sensed God was calling me to become a pastor. I remember the gravity and fear I felt. And also the resolve.

 

In one of those lectures, Dr. Sproul talked at length about Rembrandt’s Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem. He was teaching about the call to be a minister of the gospel, and how that vocation is often filled with sorrow. He described the expression of grief on Jeremiah’s face, how Rembrandt had captured a depth of pain in the eyes and wrinkles on the prophet’s forehead, poignantly illustrating the hard truth that our deepest pains are often suffered alone. I had never seen the painting before, but I knew I wanted a copy so it could remind me of the holy weight of serving the Lord in this way. I hadn’t yet known any of the sorrow Dr. Sproul spoke of, but I knew it would come if I were to go down this road, and I wanted Jeremiah to remind me to lean hard on Scripture when I did. (pp. 178-180)

He continues:

I wasn’t expecting to see Jeremiah at the Rijksmuseum. I didn’t know he was there. After my tears subsided, I began to study him. This time I got close enough that the docent had to come over and tell me to back up. The painting was smaller than I imagined, smaller than my copy. The colours were nothing like I had imagined either. Mine had washed out to a mostly beige palette, but the original was rich with deep reds, cool greens, and soft blues. In the background, I saw a woman weeping I had never noticed. The detail of the textures and filagree and the depth of colour came together to capture this moment when the world was burning in a cacaphony of chaos as a man sat alone in the silence of his sorrow, leaning on the word of God, weary of soul.

 

It wasn’t just the composition of the painting that moved me. It was that I had been thinking about this painting for decades, applying it to my life, regarding it as a touchstone throughout my vocational journey. I felt that Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem. showed up to see me that day, not the other way around.

 

I have been a pastor for twenty years now, and I’ve known a range of joys and sorrows – those belonging to my congregation and those that are my own. That particular season – the one in which Kate and I went to Amsterdam, carried an unusual burden of grief along with an ever-rising promise of hope, and I felt that I had been sitting like the prophet, silent in prayer, while the world raged on around me, pleading for peace. (pp. 180-181)

I don’t know about you, but that moved me to tears. I guess I am getting to be an old softie in my old age. I cry easily and I cry often. But thank God for prophets like Jeremiah, painters like Rembrandt, and paintings like Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem.

Our God is a giver of so many good gifts. Art is certainly one of them.

(And BTW, I had not noticed the weeping woman in the painting either until I read his description!)

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