Communicating Theology Visually

Kymberli Cook  

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. I’m Kymberli Cook, one of the hosts of the show, and we are so thrilled that you have joined us today. We’re going to be talking about communicating theology visually—so theology and the arts—but even talking about, should we communicate theology visually? Visually... man, the S’s are really—they’re tough for me today. Okay, we are joined by Dr. Sandra Glahn, who has committed her life to thinking through the intersection of the Christian faith and a variety of different cultural conversations, this being one of them. So, just thank you so much for joining us.  

Sandra Glahn   

Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure.  

Kymberli Cook  

Yeah, I know Dr. Glahn’s been on this episode—so not episode, but this podcast so many times, and we’re just thrilled to have you back.  

Sandra Glahn  

Thank you.  

Kymberli Cook   

And if you wouldn’t mind, could you just share a little bit—whatever you’d like to share about yourself, but particularly how you got interested in, again, the intersection of the Christian faith and, like, visual arts?  

Sandra Glahn  

I would have to blame it on my father. So I’m a fifth-generation Oregonian. We were perfectly happy on five little acres. We’re not rich, but like one window looks at Mt. Hood and the other looks at the Willamette River. Everybody in Oregon has a view. But Dad volunteered for a transfer to Washington, D.C. He was with the federal government and the Federal Highway Administration. He wanted to expose his five children to culture, and I think also I have a hunch that there were five kids and it was expensive to go to museums when you have to pay. But in D.C. they’re all free, or at least they were at the time. And so we went and we spent our weekends all up and down the Eastern Seaboard in museums, but not just museums—you know, plantations and outdoor spaces, Civil War battlegrounds. Like, we were learning history visually and in the place, not just in the books. And Concord was a real place to me, right? And Monticello was a real place to me. So that started it.  

Kymberli Cook  

It’s through history.  

Sandra Glahn  

It was through history and how I learned history. And even thinking about when I learned about World War II, it was through watching the miniseries The Winds of War and then War and Remembrance. I loved it through story, even though the main characters were fictional. All the battles, Guadalcanal and all of that—those were real. The history was placed in time, and again, that was my much preferred way of learning. And if you think about even today, how many people enjoy learning the Gospels through The Chosen? And then you go to the text to verify what was real, what was imagined. But it’s certainly my entry point on a lot of things to go in visually, or go in through a museum, or go in through being in the space, sometimes including the food. And so I would blame it on my late father.  

Kymberli Cook   

So why do you think that is? Why do you think it hits us differently when—  

Sandra Glahn  

“I am the way” ”I’m the Good Shepherd,” “I am the door,” “I’m the living water,” “I am the bread of life.” Like, we are five-sensory people, and so if we’re getting content through the five senses—I mean, you think of what John says, that the things that we’ve felt and touched and tasted are real. As a writing teacher at Dallas Seminary, I’m constantly encouraging our students: Remember, your readers have five senses. Don’t just keep it all abstract. Yes, love is good. What is love? It’s a hug. It’s a meal when you’re sick. It’s visiting somebody in the hospital or in a prison. It’s tangible. What does tangible look like?  

Kymberli Cook   

Hmm. Interesting. So, do you think that the church historically has done a good job of communicating?  

Sandra Glahn   

I do. Until we got printed Bibles, 1550-ish or a little before, all of it had to be visual. And so, I think as Protestants, we are concerned with, you know, a cathedral might have been built and it might have ripped off the peasants, but also that was their only Bible. So when they walked in, they remembered the sermon of the Good Shepherd, and that’s their memory device: that window with the Good Shepherd holding sheep. They remember the sermon about XYZ. A lot of the cathedrals have the minor prophets, which in my Protestant spaces we don’t spend a lot of time there. So you do find different parts of the canon emphasized in the visual record, but I think initially everything’s visual because the people can’t read. And largely, even a lot of the priestly class, it’s part of their education to get to read. And so the church up until the mid-1500s was very visual. Now, there was concern that some of that had become idols, but I think maybe it’s time to not worry as much about that association for Protestants, because we’re not looking at a picture of Jesus carrying a lamb and worshiping it. There’s no risk of that, really.  

Kymberli Cook   

I could hear somebody, especially, you know, with the passage, How will they believe if they have not heard?”—that kind of thing, where it seems to be more of an emphasis on words. And even the fact that all of the different stained glass images and all of that are based on something that has been passed down through words. So we’re definitely not saying that theology and biblical truth and all of that should only be communicated through pictures.  

Sandra Glahn  

I’m a writing teacher; I’m all about words!  

Kymberli Cook   

Exactly! But talk to me about that relationship between the two, and what is the role of one and the other? How do you see all of that interplaying with each other—the visual and—  

Sandra Glahn   

That’s a good question. I think it’s both/and. I mean, Jesus is the Logos. He is the Word. He’s the living Word, and you’re absolutely right: How will we hear without a preacher? And there’s content to what you hear. You have to hear that Jesus lived, died, rose again, and is coming again. All of that you won’t necessarily pick up in a picture. But particularly in the long tradition of the church’s art, East or West, there was a lot of symbolism that was standard. So you’re going to find Jesus with a halo that has a cross in it—a cruciform halo—and that to a visually literate person means He’s God and He died on the cross. Whereas a lot of us, if we don’t know what we’re looking at, it would be like looking at words in a different country in a language you don’t speak. It wouldn’t mean anything to us. But once you learn what the words are, then every time you see it, it makes sense.  

Recently, I was surprised to learn that when Gabriel appears to Mary in the typical Annunciation scene, he has two little ribbons coming off his neck that are flying, which I had never noticed. I’ve seen a zillion Annunciation scenes, and all of a sudden I started noticing it. And it’s because it’s to emphasize that he is obeying God speedily. He gets a message, and he is ready to obey speedily, which is a message to us to do that. Well, we don’t have the literacy visually to even (a) notice that, and then (b) know what it’s communicating if we even notice there are ribbons coming off of Gabriel’s neck.  

So some of my task, some of my ministry, some of my joy is helping people who don’t know what they’re looking at to see it and see what it is communicating. We tend to, I think, as Protestants, see a lot of times Mary big, Jesus little, and so Mary must be exalted over Jesus. But we don’t notice Mary’s pointing with her hand, or she’s turning her head toward Him, and He’s got a little cruciform halo. So to the trained eye, God is in her lap. But if we don’t know what we’re looking at, we just see size.  

Kymberli Cook   

Well, and like you said, to the trained eye, it’s also theologically accurate.  

Sandra Glahn   

Absolutely rooted in what the—  

Kymberli Cook   

Yeah, what the Gospels are saying about Jesus and how He was born and Mary’s role in all of that.  

Sandra Glahn  

It’s very orthodox with a lowercase “o.” Yes.  

Kymberli Cook   

So I’m curious about—it’s a little bit of a left turn, but maybe not, because here at DTS, when we’re talking about how God has revealed Himself, we like to emphasize that He’s revealed Himself in the Word, the World, and then the Word in the World. So the Word being the Bible and Scripture specifically—verbal revelation we already talked about—and also the person of Jesus, the Word in the World. But we also talk about His revelation of Himself through the world, and particularly keeping in mind passages like “the heavens declare the glory of God,” so that there’s this general revelation that God uses to tell us things that are true and things about Himself. So, how do you see that intersecting or not intersecting with this conversation?  

Sandra Glahn   

Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s both/and again, I think. So, yes, all of our students are going to get every book of the Bible, and we are deeply rooted in Scripture, and we want all of our truth to be coming from there. But then we also have counseling and pastoral ministries and media arts; we have communication of that truth. So we’re getting rooted in the Word, but we’re also expressing it. And I see art as part of the expression—it’s a form of preaching, if you will; it’s a form of communicating. So I think I see it that way in terms of it being rooted in Scripture and coming out from Scripture.  

But then, as you’re saying, there’s also the stars and the sun, and those are coming to us in a different form for us to see the majesty of God. And I do think that a lot of times walking into a cathedral has the same effect as walking in a forest or walking under a star-filled night. In the best cathedrals, you have a sense: “I’m very small, but I’m not unimportant. But I am very small in terms of the majesty of God and the awe of God.”  

But also let me add this: in the churches I’ve attended as a Protestant, there’s nothing or very little on the walls. But I sat in St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice listening to a sermon in Italian, and he might as well have been speaking in tongues because I didn’t understand what he said. But because the room was filled with so many stories, I was meditating on all the different stories that I recognized. And I think that there is a place for both. Right: there are things that are expressed without words, and then there are things that are expressed with words, and we need them both. The sun communicates, but in a different way.  

Kymberli Cook  

Yeah, that experience is part of what I had in mind, though I agree with you about needing both of them. But I guess I was thinking of like when I stand in front of a sunrise or a sunset, I know something about God because of that, but it’s not because anything verbal happened. And I think that art as a whole also offers that, where it has this kind of experience where, because of how God has made us—and because, again, you said we’re five-sensory creatures—that’s part of who and what we are. Because of that, there are just these intangible things that you can’t actually learn until you’re experiencing it, and then all of a sudden something can be communicated that is very difficult, if not impossible, to get across verbally.  

Sandra Glahn   

How do you explain taste to somebody who’s never tasted something until they do? Music is the same way, right? Like in our typical services, we might have a sermon, but we’re also hopefully communicating what is true and singing to each other and singing to God. There’s something about the part of the brain that is engaged when you’re singing and hearing music that reaches you in a different way and is an expression from you in a different way from simply writing or saying words. We need it all; we’re complex, embodied human beings.  

Kymberli Cook  

So it’s understandable. Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about how the church has historically been attuned to that complexity in us and trying to minister and reach in a variety of ways. So I do feel like, again, as Protestants, we have to talk about—okay, so that was really heavily done by what we now know to be the Roman Catholic Church. And so when we as Protestants are engaging historic Christian art, how have you kind of worked your way through? Because it is communicating theology, how can we trust it? How can we read it so that we don’t accidentally, like, take in bad theology? How have you worked your way through that?  

Sandra Glahn   

Yeah, another really good question. So I think the first thing that happens—I take a bunch of students to Italy every other year, and we are studying medieval art and spirituality, and we sort of pretend we can’t read and learn theology or see theology as the church has told it. And the place we really have to start is that there wasn’t a Protestant/Roman Catholic divide till 1500. A lot of times we might start with the catacombs at 300. So I have to say, this isn’t Roman Catholic art; this is the root of our faith, early Christian community. All the branches of Christianity here can claim this as their own tradition.  

In the early church and those expressions, you have a lot of Jesus as a Good Shepherd, which makes sense because it’s a funeral space. You think about a program today at a funeral; it’s often going to have Psalm 23. That’s a different part of the Bible than Colossians 1 or Philippians 2. But you do see that as soon as the church gets physical space in around 380, and it’s legal and they’re not afraid, the first mosaics are of Christ on a throne. He’s an emperor; He’s power. And for the longest time, people would say, “Well, that’s because Jesus got promoted as the theology developed.” We knew from the written record that wasn’t true, but the visual record wasn’t really supporting that until the Megiddo mosaics dating to 230, which is well before Constantine. And you have somebody who spelled out dedicating an altar to “Christ God.” So they’re calling Jesus God in the art early on, and that’s in the last 20 years we’ve found that.  

So all of that to say, we’re 1,500 years in before we’re getting a Catholic split, and even 1054 when you get the East/West split, everything you’re looking at before 1000 is the church art, and it’s very, very orthodox. Where we would probably as Protestants split off from that some would be what we consider canonical. You’re going to have a lot of art in the early church that is going to point to Mary’s story and how Mary was raised in the temple and how she ends up marrying Joseph. We’ve got some early writings on that, but they’re not in the canon, so we have to sort through what’s canonical. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true, right? So there’s that whole thing that we have to go with our timeline in with us, but also sort of a knowledge of—you’re not really seeing Gospel of Thomas kind of stuff. You’re seeing more the Protoevangelium of James, which is Mary’s story. So all of that’s there.  

You’re also going to see a lot of Dante imaginations, particularly on the ceiling of the Florence Cathedral, and again, you have to go—  

Kymberli Cook   

You walk from the heights of heaven to, like, view up the bottom of Dante’s Inferno—  

Sandra Glahn   

And up close looking at it, you’re like, “That creature is eating a human!” But you have to say this is fiction; it’s an imagination. It would be similar, I think, to us having in our sacred spaces The Lord of the Rings or the White Witch being defeated. It doesn’t mean that we think that’s canon, but we might need a little help a couple hundred years out reminding us that that’s C.S. Lewis, that’s Tolkien. But it’s an effort to align with what’s true; it’s just adding the imagination to it. So that’s where the discernment really comes in.  

One of the things we’ll see, like in the Orvieto Cathedral, is Homer looking out of his little cell up at the Last Judgment, and again you go, “That’s not historical.” But what they’re trying to communicate is that even pagans acknowledged some things. You might even see Sibyls, which again, in an orthodox (lowercase “o”) Christian church, what they’re trying to communicate is that the Jews and the Gentiles prophesied that there was a Messiah coming. It’s not that we believe in sibyls, but that’s the danger: you have to know what that is and say, “That doesn’t mean we listen to sibyls or other voices.” In that context, what they meant at that time was the whole world in some way acknowledged Messiah was coming.  

Kymberli Cook   

So, let’s say you’re listening to this conversation and you’re thinking, “Okay, but there’s no way that I would know all of those things. So is this the type of thing that I just shouldn’t engage, or what’s a good way to step into all of that?”  

Sandra Glahn   

Well, that is part of why we created the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity. Thank you for asking that—you didn’t know we were going there!  

Kymberli Cook   

I didn’t! I really wasn’t!  

Sandra Glahn  

Because that’s a really important question. Do we just throw it all out because we don’t know how to look at it? Of course not.  

Kymberli Cook   

Just like anything else, it’s a different language.  

Sandra Glahn   

And you don’t want to look at it undiscerningly either. So one of the tasks of the Visual Museum Gallery online—it’s free, all the pictures are high quality and made for easy download, you don’t have to get permission. All the work that the photographers did was work-for-hire so that we could get all this stuff from behind a paywall. It’s been very hard to access until we’ve tried to make it more accessible.  

Three of us co-founded it, and Lynn Cohick, who was at Northern Seminary when she was doing this part of it, had her master’s and doctoral students—she’s a New Testament scholar—write some of these short essays explaining: “This is what you’re looking at. This is the person you look at. Here’s her story. Here’s some of the hagiography. But here’s what we know, and here’s what we don’t know.” You know, some of these saints, they get stories and you’re like, “They had nine lives; that just can’t be.” But then we don’t learn the biography of the person at all, which is probably a really important martyr story because it’s been exaggerated or embellished. So this is part of our effort to provide a couple of academic sources with each paragraph that’s being vetted, and tell people what they’re looking at and what it would have meant to those who were seeing it in the original context.  

And the joy of that project has been that when the Protestant Reformation happened, we rightly as Protestants were concerned that certain people are called “saints” when all Christians in Scripture are called saints. So it felt like sort of a stair step Christianity. Well, we did keep the fun parties—I mean, everybody knows whose Saint’s Day is February 14th, and we’re familiar with March 17th. We kept the good parties! We know who Saint Nick is, and we still do gifts. But in general, we threw out the saints.  

What we lost in that was the daily biographies. You or I might still hear the story of Francis or Saint Patrick, but every day of the year has a saint in the church calendar, and a martyr story or a story of great courage. And particularly for women in the church, in losing the female martyrs and not having a tradition of nuns, you really sort of stop seeing a lot of females in church services or mention of them in history. And this is another thing that we are concerned to bring back, because as you well know, the big demographic leaving the church in the United States of America is young women. One of the reasons is they don’t see themselves. And we’re saying the traditional church has seen you. We might need to strip some of the titles off of what we called them, but let’s not lose their stories.  

The visual record has blown me away, because as I’ve gone to teach classes in these spaces, the first thing I started noticing was there are a lot of women! That’s not how I learned church history, no offense. We were learning the councils, which I likened to the elder board meetings. But we want the church bulletin that also says when the meals are taken, the prayers are done, Awana happens, and the bunco parties are happening, right? And the visual record gives us—  

Kymberli Cook   

 where the vast majority of the life of the church was actually occurring! Exactly, where real people were following Jesus.  

Sandra Glahn   

Exactly! Bingo, cha-ching! And the other thing is men and women are together, and that was a pleasant surprise. There’s one church in Rome where Paul has his arm around Praxedes, and Peter has his arm around Pudentiana, and they’re commending them to Christ—these sisters in the Lord who are descendants, probably, of Pudens, who’s mentioned in Second Timothy. Their job was to be bone collectors. They would go when somebody was martyred, and they would risk their lives by identifying with them and collect their head or their fingers or whatever got cut off, clean it, and give it a proper burial. You’ve got to have courage to be that kind of woman!  

I’ll tell you a quick story about that: I told that story, and picture this probably 90-year-old woman. She’s really tiny, and she has this really bony hand. I’d just done a lecture on the different kinds of things I saw women doing in the early church. She came up to me, shook my hand, and goes, “I would have been a bone collector.” Great, you go, girl!   

Kymberli Cook   

Please don’t do it now  

Sandra Glahn   

—a little bit creepy, but fun, too.  

Kymberli Cook   

I appreciate—  

Sandra Glahn   

I appreciate—  

Kymberli Cook  

—the fire—  

Sandra Glahn  

—the courage in that. Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook  

Okay. So for one more moment, because if we’re talking about communicating theology visually, we’ve already talked about the Roman Catholic branch. I think we do need to talk about the capital-O Orthodox branch as well, and icons. How do you see icons in this conversation? Is it similar to what you’re talking about with the discernment needed with Roman Catholic, more medieval-type theological art, or how do you approach that, especially in light of what they represent theologically in the Orthodox tradition?  

Sandra Glahn   

So my late mother was an Antiochian Orthodox Christian. My brother, who is an art curator at a museum on the Columbia River Gorge, is an Orthodox Christian. And so you can imagine that we have had many, many conversations; there has been deep thought. But it’s been excellent because, for example, I discovered that the way I was using the word “divine” was different from the way my mom was using “divine.” When she would say something was divine, she meant heavenly, and I heard God, right? And so lots of long, spirited conversations.  

As you say, understanding, and so I hope to seek to strive to stand, and— 

I am a committed Protestant, but I am also committed to us having understanding. If we’re going to disagree, let’s do it with understanding instead of based on misunderstanding. I think that, again, so much of the iconography that we are looking at is fourth century or seventh century—this is long before there are these branches of the church. The vast amount of what we’re looking at, if it wasn’t made then, is copying what was made then, and is deeply theological. Certainly, you don’t want to worship the thing rather than the Creator. My mother would liken it to kissing a picture of me. She’s like, “Well, you could say I’m venerating you, but I love you; that doesn’t mean I love the picture of you. But the picture is precious to me, and I would fight you if you tried to take it. But that doesn’t mean that the picture itself is the thing.”  

There are believers for whom it has been a problem, but also I would argue there are Protestants for whom the other extreme has been a problem as well.  

Kymberli Cook   

And what would that other extreme be?  

Sandra Glahn  

The other extreme just being—when I was editor of DTS Magazine (or what we call it now, but it was Kindred Spirit), we had a photo of the Jesus film, and somebody wrote in and said, “You have put an image of God in your magazine. How dare you? You’ve violated one of the Ten Commandments.” It’s like, Jesus was in the flesh! He was in the flesh, so we can depict Jesus because He was in the flesh. We shouldn’t worship that picture of Jesus, but that’s not what we were doing with a picture of Him. So that’s what I mean by the other extreme: the thought that you can’t have any imagery when we are embodied creatures.  

Kymberli Cook   

He is the image.  

Sandra Glahn   

He is! That’s part of the beauty of Christianity: we celebrate physicality.  

But also, here’s another extreme that’s a bad one. Most of us love the Sistine Chapel and the Father touching Adam, but the Father has a physical body depicted there. That’s heresy, right? The Father does not have a body. Jesus has a body. In the earlier church, you would see a hand coming down from heaven—there’s a hand over that mosaic of Peter and Paul with their arms around the sisters. The Father is not represented with a body. Often you’d have an empty throne representing that Jesus will sit on a throne one day, but also that God inhabits that throne. Or you would have a throne with a cross in it that would hint to the Trinity, often with the Holy Spirit depicted as a dove.  

So that’s another extreme, too: thinking that God the Father is a physical male. Jesus was obviously male, but to think that just because we’re using the metaphor of Father, that means He’s a physical father and we should depict Him as embodied—the earlier church did not do that.  

Kymberli Cook   

Interesting. So we’ve walked through all the variety of ways that the church has tried to communicate its theology and biblical truths visually. What does it look like today? Especially in my opinion, we’re only moving more and more toward being an almost completely visual society. Talk to me about that.  

Sandra Glahn   

Good news: the deep theological work to translate complex theological truth into visual images has already been done and done well for centuries, and we can borrow that tradition and play with it. And I don’t mean play with by tinkering; I mean add our own generation’s approach to it. But nevertheless, the work has been done.  

It’s been really fun for me to take students into some of these spaces. Let me give you an example: in the Siena Baptistery, if you look on the roof, the Apostles’ Creed is told in pictures. It was sort of a cheat sheet for adults because you had to say the creed as you’re being baptized and so they descended into hell, right, that’s that one. I had a student see that, loved it—he was a visual artist—and so he made a series of minimalist posters for fifth graders, and he walked through every one of the lines of the Apostles’ Creed based on the Siena Baptistery, because they’d already done the work.  

In each one of those little triangles up there, there’s a little tiny human, and the words coming out of his mouth are—it’s credo, which is Italian, says “I believe”—and you have God the Father, and then the stars, Maker of heaven and earth, and then you have Jesus... and you just go around and get each line of the Apostles’ Creed. They did it in art so that they could teach theology as mnemonic devices, but it’s also translatable to a fifth grader today just as flashcard of saying, “Who is God?”  

Another thing that you’ll often see is Jesus holding up—well, it’s a sign of blessing in one part of the empire, but it’s also the dual nature of Christ: two fingers touching for the dual nature of Christ, and then three fingers sticking out. I bet you can figure out what the three mean: “Who is God? He’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and the Son of God has a dual nature. I took that to Kenya, and we were meeting under a tree in a church. My husband did what some speakers do to embarrass you: they’ll say, “I think we’d like to hear from my wife. What would you like to say?”  

Kymberli Cook   

Thank you, love.  

Sandra Glahn   

But I whipped out my hands and said, “Everybody, hold up your hands: Who is God? Who is our God? He’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” And you see people all week doing this. That’s really translatable and very easy to teach theology. It’s been done, and now you’re going to see it everywhere. When you see iconography that’s got Jesus in it, often He’s giving a blessing, but He’s also telling us who God is.  

Kymberli Cook   

Interesting. I feel like artists, at least in American culture, sometimes get a bad rap where it’s like, “You’re going to be an artist? Okay... how are you going to feed yourself?” That kind of thing, which is not an invalid complaint on the part of parents. But I think a similar concern or critique could be volleyed at somebody trying to do art in ministry: “Is that even really serious ministry?” You’re giving us a good example of that, but talk to me a little bit more about the ministry of art.  

Sandra Glahn  

Yeah, so we have to look at both.  

Kymberli Cook  

Sorry, real quick—just in both communicating theology, but also creating just art, too. Dual ministry.  

Sandra Glahn   

I don’t know what you mean by the second.  

Kymberli Cook   

Like the gentleman who made that series of minimalist posters—I want to say Nicene Creed, but Apostles’ Creed. That to me is a very clear example of somebody communicating a theological truth and using art to do that. Whereas there might be somebody who is making an abstract painting that isn’t necessarily trying to communicate something directly from Scripture or from theology, but in and of itself is also a ministry.  

Sandra Glahn   

Oh, gotcha. Sure. A couple of things come to mind. The first is that we had a student with us in Italy who was actually stationed in the military in Vicenza, Italy, which was a 20-minute train ride from Venice. What he discovered in this part of the world was that after we were done, he would take people when they came to visit to Venice. And he said, “I began to teach theology by pointing out, ‘Oh, look at what Jesus is doing. Did you know...?’“ It already exists in many cultures, and so you just take people back to rediscover what is there. When the Iron Curtain fell back in the ‘90s, I remember some of our translators said to us, “You are actually bringing back what the communists took from us. It’s not that you’re bringing something new; you’re just helping us see with new eyes what was already here, but we didn’t get trained in what we were looking at.” So I think there’s part of that, but also, I don’t want to be heard saying that art always has to be functional, any more than watching TV at night when you’re tired has to be functional. There’s just a place for beauty, and there’s a place for expression and self-expression. It ruins something if you always have to monetize it. And I don’t want to be heard saying that all art has to be overtly ministering, and I know that’s not what you’re saying either. But   

Kymberli Cook  

I’m actually trying to open the door to make sure that we do not say that.  

Sandra Glahn   

But that said, I think often visual artists feel so hammered a lot of times to always be teaching through their art that there’s sometimes a recoiling against having to make art have a function or make it utilitarian. My encouragement in that would be: well, it doesn’t have to be. But also, certainly there’s a long history and tradition. There has been great philosophical thinking in the church through time on this very issue. Gregory the Great has a pretty long treatise on how important it is that we—it’s not that we use art in the way that you would use people, but that we celebrate this as one of the many creations and creativities that God has given for expression.  

And that’s where I think we really should look beyond visual art, but include it. Writing can be an art form; poetry is an art form; but so is good prose. I’ve wept over beautiful prose in an otherwise dry theology book! There’s something about being artful, or about noticing as you go through your day.  

My husband and I just moved into a new house, and one of our windows looks at the sky. We didn’t think that that was going to greatly improve our quality of life, but seeing a lightning storm last week and watching hail come down, I was like, “God, You are big and scary in a good way.” Who would have thought? Just having access to the sky. All that to say, we didn’t put that there to teach us theology, but thank God it has.  

Kymberli Cook  

Oh, wonderful! Well, our time is up for today but thank you so much for joining us again. We really appreciate you being here, and we want to thank you for listening. If you like our show, leave a rating or review on your podcast app. It’s a great way to support the show and help other people discover it. And join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life.