The Artist Who is a Christian vs. Christian Art

If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose. Do not make the absurd attempt to sever in yourself the artist and the Christian. They are one, if you really are a Christian, and if your art is not isolated from your soul by some aesthetic system. But apply only the artist in you to the work in hand; precisely because they are one, the work will be as wholly of the one as of the other. Do not separate your art from your faith. But leave distinct what is distinct. Do not try to blend by force what life unites so well. If you were to make your devotion a rule of artistic operation, or turn the desire to edify into a method of your art, you would spoil your art.  —Jacquest Maritan, Art and Scholasticism (1920)

It is the lifelong body of work that counts. One individual work cannot say everything. There is no Christian or unchristian subject matter. There is no such thing as Christian art.  Your whole lifetime body of work will express something of who you are as a person. If you are a real Christian, this will in some way naturally manifest itself in your work. —Franky Schaeffer quotes from Addicted to Mediocrity (1980)