Learning to look as Christians

A book review

Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking and Learning from Art by Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, 272 pages, $30

I picked up Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt’s latest book with trepidation. The Neo-Calvinist explosion in American evangelicalism has led to a new crop of Kuyperian disciples developing Christian visions of everything from plumbing to physics. I am thankful for their commitment to see God’s Word applied to every aspect of life. And yet, sometimes I wonder how much the Bible speaks to some of these things.

Similar thoughts raced through my brain when I opened Redeeming Vision. Does Christian theology have much to offer appreciators and patrons of art? I am pleased that Weichbrodt ably proves it does.

From the start, Weichbrodt makes it clear she is developing a theology of art for viewers. A theology of making art is an interesting concept and worth exploring but not one Weichbrodt focuses on in this book.¹ Instead, her project is to articulate a theology of art for those with the task of looking at a piece of art and discerning its meaning. 

The very idea of prescribing the viewer’s role is itself fraught with assumptions and expectations. Who decides the art’s meaning? Is it the artist? The curator? Or is it each individual onlooker? Is meaning and beauty completely objective, or is there a subjective aspect? 

These are important questions which Weichbrodt addresses albeit in a slightly indirect but more interesting way. 

Three components come together to form Weichbrodt’s redeeming vision: embodied vision, loving vision, and transforming vision. 

Embodied vision recognizes the reality of our creatureliness. “We know through our bodily experience of the material world,” Weichbrodt reminds us (13). God made man and woman with limits and called them good. We exist in time and space, we think and we feel, and we are born into situations and circumstances beyond our control. Rather than vainly detach ourselves from these realities, embodied vision leans into them as we consider a piece of art which is itself a material object created by another embodied soul. 

If embodied vision recognizes who we are, loving vision acknowledges what we were made to do. Thus, loving vision “addresses our motivation,” says Weichbrodt (15). As disciples of Christ, we take our cue from Jesus who summarized the entire law as loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind and loving our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:34-40). Love for God and neighbor draws us out of ourselves. When applied within a theology of viewing art, it means “that we refuse to make ourselves the center of an encounter with an artwork” (15). Thus, loving vision (emphasizing the value of the object) moderates our embodied vision (emphasizing the value of the subject). 

Finally, vision cannot be redeeming if it is not transforming. In other words, the act of viewing art is never static but always “generative” (12). Something happens, or at least should happen, if we are looking with redeeming vision. “We should expect to be changed,” says Weichbrodt (17). Here Weichbrodt refreshingly articulates a thoroughly Protestant metaphysics: we believe spiritual truth and change can be mediated through material things. As heirs to the Reformation, we stress the doctrine of justification, but we should never forget that it was our sacramentology that separated us from Rome as much as anything. As the author and theologian Brad Littlejohn has argued so well, it is not that Protestants reject Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. We simply wonder why Catholics deny the real presence of bread and wine.² 

Art is not a divinely ordered sacrament, but the Holy Spirit works through art to grow our appreciation for God’s holiness, challenge idols, convict us of sin, and sanctify our hearts just as he uses other created things like the stars in the sky (Psalm 8) or a needy adversary (Proverbs 25:21-22). Of course, natural revelation is insufficient on its own—a point Weichbrodt emphasizes again and again. Redeeming vision remains Word-centric, testing all things against God’s supernatural and inerrant Word.

The rest of the book applies redeeming vision to a plethora of examples. Weichbrodt helpfully demonstrates that the great diversity of art is not a barrier to redeeming vision. Both Polykleitos’s Head of a Youth and Piet Mandarin’s Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red and Gray can challenge our idols; it does not matter that one is a very old statue while the other is a relatively modern painting. Genre paintings and photographs can equally soften our judgment of others as we humbly acknowledge people are far more complex than we sometimes allow. 

Overall, these chapters are incredibly effective. They successfully inspired in me a desire to go out and practice the skills I had learned throughout the book. But perhaps even more than that, Redeeming Vision is an exciting alternative to the two fronts of the culture war which wages on within the art world. 

On the one hand, it is a positive approach for judging specific pieces of art, giving us a substantive criterion for evaluating art that does not revert to blanket rejection or approval. We need not look at the entirety of visual art and determine every piece equally capable of inspiring holiness. Nor must we reject all non-Christian art as incapable of mediating spiritual truth. Applying redeeming vision leads us to evaluate art based on how well it accomplishes the artist’s goals or on the merits of those goals themselves.

And on the other, it is a constructive attitude to the world of art which right now rewards deconstructionism.

As the late, great aesthete Roger Scruton once remarked, so much of modern art is intoxicated with its own ugliness. Such is the case not simply because modern artists deny the transcendentals (In fact, I doubt very few would outright reject categories of goodness, truth, or beauty). Rather, so few artists today reach beyond the ambition of provoking discomfort. Deconstructing is the point. The art rarely speaks to the possibility of a more humane future other than by adopting the political persuasions of the artist. Thus, it is really propaganda and propaganda is so rarely inspiring. 

Redeeming vision challenges both patrons and artists to reach deeper, to the very depths of the human soul, and to investigate our shared human nature, our mutual need for salvation, and the universal hope of redemption.

Photo by Anthony Gucciardi on Unsplash

1. For further reflection on a theology of making, see Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

2. See Brad Littlejohn, “The Real Presence and the Presence of Reality,” Mere Orthodoxy, October 30, 2017, https://mereorthodoxy.com/real-presence-presence-reality-fresh-look-reformed-sacramentology.