Mike Farris:
Dr. Veith, last time we talked about winning the culture war and a lot of people think about the culture in terms of the arts in particularly one of the issues that comes up these days is art is so subjective. Is that true, or can there be an objective approach to what art is and what is beautiful?

Dr. Gene Veith:
Well, according to the classical Christian thinkers that go back for centuries, beauty is one of the absolutes. The absolutes were the true, the good, and the beautiful. And we’ve now come to a state of relativism where people think truth is relative and goodness is relative and beauty is relative and this is what a lot of Christians have bought into that. Beauty does involve a subjective response, but it’s a response to something objective that God built into the world. The Bible talks about the beauty of holiness; writers have talked about the beauty of God’s creation, God is the artist who created this universe that we can respond to as we see how beautiful it is, how ordered, how harmonious, and in other arts, those qualities put there by God are objective measures that define beauty. And we would do well to recover that sense. Christians would do well to recapture the sense in which beauty is an absolute.

Mike:
Thanks so much, I’m Mike Farris.