By David Thistlethwaite
Solway. £19.99
ISBN 1 900507 78 1
This is a many-sided polemic against most of what passes for mainstream modern art in our culture, and against its apologists. It is written from an overtly evangelical standpoint, and will be of interest to Christians who are thinking about the arts. However, it is also clearly intended to be read by non-Christians, to provoke them into seeing some of the shortcomings of mainstream modern art and the mindset that it embodies, and to see the reasonableness of the Christian gospel as a way of life and as a critical tool.
The book is worth buying for chapter 5 alone. Here, Thistlethwaite deals with art as a means of knowledge, and defines knowledge in terms of a relationship between subject and object. In the age of post-modernism, where evangelicalism still seems to be hamstrung by its emphasis on propositional truth - a legacy of its Puritan roots in the age of rationalism - a move to regain a more rounded notion of truth, which according to the Bible is ultimately a person and not a proposition, is very welcome.
