Hans Rookmaaker Quotes

#1. Art is a form of play rejoicing before the face of God.

Hans Rookmaaker

#2. Art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity; it should rather be the reverse.

Hans Rookmaaker

#3. How can you say that modern art is ugly,when you worship the Lord in a building painted like this?

Hans Rookmaaker

#4. What is Christian in art does not lie in the theme but in the spirit of it, in its wisdom and the understanding of reality it reflects.

Hans Rookmaaker

#5. By means of the iconic, artists express their view of reality and show their understanding of the structure of reality. They see what they know and bring this into their paintings ... They always give us more than the facts, more than the eye can see.

Hans Rookmaaker

#6. Modern art did not just happen. It came as a result of a deep reversal of spiritual values in the Age of Reason, a movement that in the course of a little more than two centuries changed the world.

Hans Rookmaaker

#7. Art tries, literally, to picture the things which philosophy tries to put into carefully thought-out words.

Hans Rookmaaker

#8. Our world has changed for better or for worse. It is for us to find truth and beauty for today, constantly re-applying the truth of God's word to our own time and our contemporary situation.

Hans Rookmaaker

#9. We are at home here. Alienation is unnecessary. Contact with reality at a deep level is part of the Christian's life. He enters into reality, rather than escaping from it. The flight from reality is a mark of Eastern and classical mysticism, not of Christianity.

Hans Rookmaaker

#10. We do not know what we see, but we see what we know.

Hans Rookmaaker

#11. Jesus didn't come to make us Christian. Jesus came to make us fully human.

Hans Rookmaaker