"Roger Lundin surveys the history of Christian engagement with the arts, noting that the Reformation and Romantic movements, which encouraged inwardness and freedom as opposed to the new science of impersonal laws of nature, scuttled medieval contemplation, which had enabled art as mimesis of an enchanted cosmos. Modernists and fundamentalists in the twentieth century ironically shared a common aversion to nature and culture, positing a Manichean divide between the material and spiritual worlds. In the mid-twentieth century, evangelicals began to call for reengagement with culture, but with the exception of Dutch Calvinists were handicapped by shallow theology and limited cultural understanding. Lundin suggests that black church music has been evangelicalism’s greatest contribution to the arts, and highlights contemporary evangelical thinkers such as Wolterstorff, Begbie, and Vanhoozer, who in their different ways see art as useful action."
January 1, 1970