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.

Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.

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.

The cumulative effect of the Romantic theory of creativity, as played out in the context of belief in the virtue of the avant-garde, is that while the art world has effectively freed itself from the tyranny of artistic tradition and its historic patronage system, it has ended up inhabiting an autonomous but perceived irrelevance.

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.

Narcissism and Christianity have little in common, yet the Romantic paradigm of artistic creativity, particularly in light of subsequent Freudian ideas, has tended to foster its share of narcissism. It was the tragic fate of Narcissus that he was so preoccupied with self that he could not appreciate God, nature, or the other.

Christ, as the ultimate Imago Dei is alluded to in scripture as being without external beauty in the Classical sense, and should better be thought of as one who passed through all the slime and mire of a fallen and sinful creation in order to redeem it. His own body is to be remembered for the marks it bears-even in resurrection-of the scars of his sacrificial death. For the Christian, a theory of beauty might better begin at this point.