Art for Whose Sake?
Renewing Your Mind
Ligonier Ministries
4.8 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whether we gather in a simple room or an ornate sanctuary, art plays a role in our worship. Today, R.C. Sproul exhorts Christians to pursue art in the life of the church that conveys the true, the good, and the beautiful.
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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 | It's not whether we're going to have art or not have art folks. |
| 0:03.0 | It's whether the art that we have is good art or bad art. |
| 0:06.0 | Whether it's symphony or whether it's cacophony, whether it's order and cosmos or disorder and chaos. |
| 0:15.0 | That's the question. |
| 0:25.6 | Some of us like art, while others don't prefer it. I can remember seeing my first Rembrandt and being stopped in my tracks, |
| 0:30.6 | simply staring at the painting. |
| 0:32.6 | But if we try and avoid art, as R.C. Spraw will explain today, |
| 0:36.6 | every form is an art form, |
| 0:39.6 | and every art form communicates something. |
| 0:42.3 | So it can't be avoided, whether in a studio, a museum, or even a church building. |
| 0:48.6 | Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and welcome to renewing your mind. |
| 0:53.5 | As we continue our time in Dr. Sprole's series |
| 0:56.5 | recovering the beauty of the arts, today he answers the question, art for whose sake? Here's Dr. |
| 1:03.6 | Sprole. In our first session of our series on the Christian and art and our study of the beautiful, |
| 1:13.6 | we ended by talking about the reaction in church history against formalism, externalism, and ritualism. |
| 1:24.6 | And I mentioned that the same critiques that were leveled against these problems |
| 1:30.3 | in the 16th century Reformation were also raised by the reformers of the Old Testament, |
| 1:38.0 | namely the prophets of Israel. But again, I think it's important for us to understand that the prophets of Israel were not |
| 1:47.1 | iconoclasts. They did not try to get rid of the forms or to get rid of the externals or to get |
| 1:56.7 | rid of the rituals because they understood, first of all, that the forms that were in the temple, |
| 2:03.1 | in the tabernacle, and so on, were forms and externals that were ordained by God himself, |
| 2:11.1 | and that the ritual that was there was also ordained by God. |
... |
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