Second Thoughts

I want to base what I have to say on three facts which I think indisputable. The first is that the Bible belongs to literature; that is, it is a piece of art. The second indisputable fact is that the Bible is an imaginative book. The third indisputable fact is that the greatest artist of all, the greatest imaginer of all, is the one who appears at the opening of Genesis. [...]
Now when we look from these three facts to contemporary evangelical Christianity, we find a great oddity. The people who spend the most time with the Bible are in large numbers foes of art and the sworn foes of imagination. And I grow in the feeling that these people have quite an astonishing indifference to the created world. [...] Furthermore, when evangelicals dare attempt any art form it is generally done badly. [...]
Evangelical Christians have had one of the purest of motives and one of the worst of outcomes. The motive is never to misleed by the smallest iota in the precise nature of salvation, to live in it and state it in its utter purity. But the unhappy outcome has too often been to elevate the cliche. [...]
There is a simplicity which diminishes and a simplicity which enlarges, and evangelicals have too often chosen the wrong one. The first is that of the cliche--simplicity with mind and heart removed. The other is that of art. The first falsifies by its exclusions; the second encompasses. The first silently denies the multiplicity and grandeur of creation, salvation, and indeed all things....The contrast suggests that not to imagine is what is sinful.

from "The Aesthetic Poverty of Evangelicalism" March 1969