There is an … important kind of art that cannot give us the comfort of the gospel but can give us another kind of comfort, the comfort of destruction. … You may say that destruction is evil, but I tell you that the destruction of evil is good. The power of art to destroy the evil in contemporary culture is good. … We can speak of … artists who portray the whole gamut of miserable life without the gospel. Most of the art of the twentieth century is … quite ruthless in its way of depicting what humankind is like without God. …
The prophets are always emphasizing the wretchedness of humanity without salvation, and if we read them again we shall realize how important emphasizing that is. People, after all, have to be awakened to their wretchedness, just as they have to be awakened to their salvation. … Outside the gospel, we must expect despair, and therefore, those who give us the greatest despair are those who, if we do not already believe in the gospel, will drive us to it because there is nothing else.
Arthur Henry King, Arm the Children, pp. 159-160
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