Aesthetics in Recent History

Renewing Your Mind

Ligonier Ministries

Religion & Spirituality, Reformed, Study, Jesus, Preaching, Christianity, Scripture, Spirit, Bible, Holy, Theology, Christian, God, Teaching

4.8 • 4.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Does God care about beauty? Until recently, the church has produced history’s greatest artists. What changed? Today, R.C. Sproul considers how past Christians approached the arts, calling us recover the Bible’s teaching on beauty.

Donate today to receive lifetime digital access to R.C. Sproul’s video teaching series Recovering the Beauty of the Arts. We’ll also send you the series on DVD, together with Dr. Sproul’s booklet How Should I Approach Art?: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/4295/offer

Live outside the U.S. and Canada? Request R.C. Sproul’s digital teaching series and ebook with your donation of any amount: https://www.renewingyourmind.org/global

Meet Today’s Teacher:

R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine.

Meet the Host:

Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of media for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, and host of the Ask Ligonier podcast.

Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts

Transcript

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0:00.0	The scriptures speak about God as the author, the source, and the foundation of all truth,
0:07.3	that God himself is true.
0:10.3	Well, in the same way and in the same dimension, the scriptures speak about the beauty of God
0:17.5	and that all things beautiful find their source and their foundation in the character
0:24.4	of God himself.
0:31.6	And because of that, we mustn't ignore the beautiful.
0:35.3	We shouldn't discount art, but instead should care about the good,
0:40.0	the true, and the beautiful. Welcome to the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham.
0:48.0	Over the next few days, R.C. Sprole will help us consider what is often an overlooked subject,
0:56.0	the role of beauty and the arts in God's created world and in the Christian life. There is a long history here, both of its use
1:02.3	and its abuse, and therefore a lot of misunderstanding today. You can request the entire series
1:09.0	recovering the beauty of the arts on DVD and streamable in the Ligonier app when you make a donation in support of renewing your mind at Renewing Your Mind.org.
1:19.6	We'll also send you a copy of Dr. Sproul's title, How Should I Approach Art?
1:24.4	I'll remind you again at the end of today's message.
1:33.3	R.C. Sprole begins our study by establishing the groundwork and much of the history of aesthetics and beauty in the church. Here's Dr. Sprole.
1:38.3	Today we're going to take a look at the role of art in the Christian life and in the Christian community
1:47.0	and see if we can come to some simple foundational principles about the nature of beauty.
1:57.3	If you would take the time to look at your concordances of the scripture and looked up every reference to beauty or every reference to the beautiful,
2:08.6	you would see that that word, beauty, in one form or another, occurs frequently in the pages of sacred scripture, particularly in the Old Testament.
2:22.1	And just to set a framework for our investigation today, let's begin by reading a portion of
2:30.0	scripture from the book of first chronicles that includes within it in chapter 16 a psalm
2:38.3	written by David. I'd like to read that from First Chronicle 16 beginning at verse 28.
	...

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