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.

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.

In the Classical tradition, deriving from ancient Greece and Rome, beauty was perceived as the means by which the artist captured the viewer's eye in order to engage the viewer with truth and so inspire goodness.

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

Beyond the pervasive disinterest in the visual arts among the Protestant community, the core problem lies in the fact that the art world rejects on several grounds work that is in any way explicitly Christian in content and also shrugs off as naive anything that has the semblance of hope or optimism in outlook.

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.

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.