Begbie offers an additional valuable contribution by rejecting the traditional emphasis on beauty, in its Platonic sense, and instead suggesting that beauty be reconceived in Christological terms-as disorder redeemed.

In as much as Christ's mission was to bring all things into submission to God, and to restore not only humanity, but also the whole creation to its proper purposes, to make straight what is crooked, and to redeem both humanity and the creation from the curse of sin, then herein can be found the possibility for a full and wholesome realization of human artistic activity.

It would be a serious oversight to limit our understanding of the impact of theology to strictly religious art, and overlook its pervasive role in shaping human understanding and artistic expression thereof within any given culture-regardless of the subject matter at hand.

Who is one's audience, the spiritually hostile professional art world or one's visually insensitive Christian neighbour?

Put crudely, one is left with a choice between two unsatisfactory combinations: artistic integrity married to spiritual compromise; and spiritual integrity married to artistic banality-or, worse, art compromised on both counts. Neither one will satisfy those who recognize the fundamental necessity of integrity in both faith and art.

Advertizing, television and film all wield mighty powers to visually seduce us, while much fine art leaves us indifferent, confused or, at worst, repulsed. There is a desperate need for creative Christians to redeem the visual arena from both forms of excess, cutting through all the false glamour, tawdry baseness and dense obfuscation.

Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.