AUC Worship Ministries

From Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts by Harold Best:

Psalm 29:2 admonishes, “Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (NKJV). Here, once again, we face the reality of worship as a continuing state, because holiness itself is a continuing state to which we are called as redeemed outpourers. Furthermore, the relentless holiness of God is the only beauty that he possesses. It is not aesthetic beauty but the beauty (there no other English word for it) that self-inhering holiness exudes. Yet when we mention the beauty of holiness in the same breath we use to speak of God as the consummate Artist, we set a trap and then fall into it. Because of our flirtation with the idea that beauty is truth and truth is beauty, and because of the tendency of many to assume that the purpose of the arts in worship is to create a sacred bridge into the holy of holies, we are prone to reverse the order of the verse like this: “Worship the Lord in the holiness of beauty.” All philosophies of “the beautiful,” if they are biblically grounded, must stop short of connections between aesthetics and holiness, no matter how temptingly close they might superficially appear to be.

Any concept of God as the consummate Artist is worrisome even apart from the discussion about beauty and holiness. If he is the consummate Artist, then he is also the consummate Plumber or Engineer or Farmer, but we do not usually talk this way because these activities are not perceived to reach to the mystical level that art does. The problem with hooking God up to art the way we do is that a special justification and otherness are too easily imputed to art. Because we have named God as the ultimate Artist, we imply that our artistic creativity is a cut above other kinds of human creativity.