lassical Protestantism is the soundest expression of Christianity. Many of us who would also like to defend its effects on culture, however, find ourselves faced with the charge that Protestantism does not produce beauty. With one hand, attackers on the aesthetic front dangle Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox church beauties in front of us: images, liturgies, medieval religious painting and writing. And with the other they throw "Puritanism" at us like a handful of dust, blinding us with a confused cloud of misconceptions associated with black clothing and dour expressions. This dust is a mixture of ignorance and occasional, deliberate falsehoods about history by those who would rather assert than study. A short, refresher course will shed a little light in this unnecessary darkness.
Who was one of the greatest musicians? A large percentage of the time the answer to this question will include J. S. Bach. Bach was a Lutheran from Germany, and some of his church music is said by many critics to be the highwater mark of Western musical composition. Listen to any of his music, but particularly the Mass in B Minor or the Passion According to St. Matthew, and, if your ear is not totally atrophied by a diet of modern junk food music, you will recognize that Bach is second to no one in the production of pure musical art, and that his work reflects his devotion. Another who ranks high in the musical world is Handel, who produced one of the most well-known pieces of music -- the Messiah. That composition is an expression of the classical Protestant understanding of the centrality of Jesus Christ in Scripture.
Who were among the greatest poets? Few people could disagree with a list that contained names like this: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton. The last is considered by the judgment of history to be the heir of the first three in his epic ability, but he was an English Puritan. No one since has been classed with those four poets; they are the standards for great epic poetry, and of the four Milton is read by far the most.
What about novels? A tougher question, but no one could honestly deny that two that deserve to be at the top are Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe. The first was written by a Nonconformist preacher whose sermons (preached to huge crowds of working-class people near London) were so good that John Owen, the most erudite Puritan divine of all, often went to hear him. When King Charles II asked Owen why a man of his learning would listen to a tinker preach, Owen replied, "I would gladly give up all my learning if I had the tinker's abilities." The second, Robinson Crusoe, was written by Daniel Defoe, a Whig sympathizer and convinced Protestant of the eighteenth century. The book contains such an outstanding account of the genuine repentance and conversion of Crusoe that many modern publishers, afraid of losing their reading audience, edit the section entirely out of the book.
Who were among the greatest painters? Rembrandt is included as often as anybody. He was a Protestant, drawing on his repeated reading of the Scripture for many of his paintings, such as The Reconciliation of David and Absalom. One of his most famous paintings is Night Watch, which, like many of his others, reflects the dignity of individuals, a theme that is founded distinctively upon Protestant biblical interpretation. He was a native and inhabitant of northern Holland, which by his day had been a hotbed of Reformed Christianity for a century, deeply influencing the art of the Dutch school of painters.
All of these men, as well as many of their contemporaries, spoke out of a distinctively Protestant worldview, and most of them were convinced personally of that worldview. Shakespeare, for example, spoke from a perspective informed by the strongly Protestant climate of late Elizabethan England.
Chaucer, living two centuries earlier, is another major name in literature, and was a major influence on Elizabethan Protestants like Shakespeare and Spenser. Chaucer was influenced heavily by John Wyclif, the "Morning Star of the Reformation." They moved in the same circles, and Chaucer's satires on religious corruption reflect exactly the attacks that Wyclif, the Lollards, and other proto-Protestants made against a system of salvation that demanded human efforts as a necessary ingredient.
There is another reason for the assumption that the Protestant worldview does not produce aesthetic loveliness: in modern times it has not. But modern evangelical Christianity has deviated from the fundamentals of classical Protestantism, and has become shallow in life and doctrine, and has compromised with man-centered social, cultural, and political goals. All disciplines of the mind have suffered, but the history of Protestant Christianity demonstrates that where it penetrates deeply and consistently into a culture its fruit is art of the highest sort.
