"The Arts", the Gospel and Christmas Presents

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a furiously working mind and an excited sleepless night thinking of evangelistic Christmas pressies, Christmas being the one time during the year that you can mention/write about Jesus without being shown the door. An opportunity not to be missed!

But what evangelistic Christmas presents to give?
In many circles, original artwork (drawing, painting, sculpture, short stories, short films) is always welcome (and certainly far more welcome than those fundamentalist evangelistic books). But how can those pieces of art present the gospel clearly and faithfully?

It's one thing that your personal "religious" beliefs are inevitably reflected in your art, like what some read as the themes of recovery, escape, consolation, salvation and redemption in the Catholic JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion".
It's another thing to set out with the goal of telling the gospel clearly and faithfully in art:

• in the first place, it is sometimes argued that the gospel does not make for good art, for the gospel is only one story with one moral: acknowledge that you are a sinner that has rebelled against God, trust that Jesus has taken on your punishment for your rebellion for you and that you have been and will be saved from God's wrath. Same story every year = very boring, goes the argument; and then
• there's the longstanding querying of the ability of various media like painting, sculpture, design, fictional literature, screenplay etc to portray the gospel clearly and faithfully.
  
  Music might be the way to go, singing gospel-centred lyrics, but a good CD takes time and effort to produce and we're rather far from the musically-steeped eighteenth-century Austrian culture of presenting gifts of musical scores on cream paper tied up with red ribbon.
  
  Without a direct and clear presentation, it is all too easy for the audience, already closed to the gospel, to miss what is meant to be said.
  In primary school, we did CS Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" without any hint at all to Christianity (it had to be whispered like a conspiracy theory during an illicit hacking session in the computer lab), despite the fact that the Christian story was the obvious inspiration for the series. The author acknowledged:
  

  I said [to myself],"Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen
  
  The Magician's Nephew tells the Creation and how evil entered Narnia, The Lion etc. - the Crucifixion and Resurrection, Prince Caspian - restoration of the true religion after a corruption, The Horse and His Boy - the calling and conversion of the heathen, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - the spiritual life (especially in Reepicheep), The Silver Chair - the continuing war against the powers of darkness, The Last Battle - the coming of Antichrist (the ape). The end of the world and the last judgement.

  It's unlikely that a secular audience would say,"Oh! That must be the gospel! It must be telling me that I'm a bum sinner destined for destruction and that I must turn back to God, acknowledge him as my king and master and be saved!".
  
  It's more comfortable for a secular audience to say,"Oh! That was about the beauty of the human spirit!" or "The magnificent love of the Saviour figure is a testimony against the cold modernist society we inhabit!" or some other completely-missing-the-gospel critic-speak.

But the fact that centuries of Bible writers have written about the gospel in their own way, cycles of rebellion, sacrifice and redemption, suggests that the use of words may be the clearest of all media. Yet these works weren't quite fictional and so allegories will not suffice. The stories must be about the One True God and his work in the world. [Sometimes, people call them testimonies.]

Perhaps also, using artistic talents to create a rocking good atmosphere for Christmas party with music, dancing, great food and wine and a cutting talk on why we're celebrating the supposed birth day of a runt born 2000 years ago, might be a spiffy idea.