“Who Are You Calling Dull?”: The Aesthetic Prowess of Protestant Reformers

The earlier Protestant tradition that produced a Milton, Bach, or Rembrandt, and later a C. S. Lewis or Makoto Fujimura was neither anti-intellectual nor aesthetically dull. Luther, a Renaissance-trained polymath, was the first individual since Jerome to translate the entire Bible into his own vernacular language, and he also wrote at least 36 hymns, at least one of which is in the current Catholic hymnal. It may very well be that the later, American religion that we often call “evangelicalism” had or has a less robust aesthetic vision; but the earlier confessional Protestant vision was quite robust. Read more»
T. David Gordon | “Do Protesants Have a ‘Low’ Aesthetic?” | October 15, 2021

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3 comments

  1. Sadly, the link is closed for comments, but citing Robert Louis Stevenson was a bit of an own goal, more so than citing Johannes Brahms would have been. Fortunately, there are other artists that could have been more appropriately cited, like Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Michael Praetorius, Daniel Defoe, and Jane Austen.

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