The First Christian Designers
May 14th, 2008
As a designer it is always my goal to communicate a story, or message visually. I can create a beautiful piece of artwork, but if the message is lost, I have failed. Sometimes in design we focus on what is new, relevant, and flashy, but then lose our story.
I wanted to share some early Christian artwork. All they showed was the story. This was truly a form of communication for future generations. What can we learn from this?
Note to readers: Art can and has become an idol to many early and present Christians. That is sin.
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That’s pretty cool. It’s neat to look back on our heritage as Christ followers who express our faith through art.
Brad Ruggles
http://www.bradruggles.com
It’s astounding to me, the significant role visual art played in the Christian faith early on, for hundreds of years, up until relatively recently. It’s been only relatively recently that literacy and access to the written word began to supplant visual art (and oral tradition) as the primary form of communicating biblical truth.
For the current, and the last few generations, this can be a hard reality to grasp. For us, it’s often hard to understand communication of truth in any other way than we do now.
Today, visual art plays a small, minor role in the Christian faith, if even that. I consider that a loss. And with that, we’ve also lost much of the skill in connecting with truth through art, the ability to discern subtlety, metaphor and meaning that often exists below the obvious surface. It’s akin to the parables of Jesus, where discovery often lay just below the surface, and mystery played a central role.