Christianity and the Arts Linking Christian faith and theology with the arts is not something new. Christians have enjoyed a rich history of using the arts as a way of teaching and of bearing witness to the Christian faith. During the Middle Ages, the arts were specifically employed for their teaching or didactic functions and incorporated into daily Christian practice, instead of being isolated as a separate sphere of human activity. Artistic activity was highly valued because it expressed religious ideas through concrete forms like stained glass, stone, chants, hymns, paintings and plays. Cathedrals were the centre of community life where visual and aural images expressed people's understanding of God, good and evil, life and death. The creative arts, religion, and life were intimately related. However, as the arts became less prominent in the religious and secular rituals of the late Middle Ages, they lost their aura and began to accumulate an “aesthetic discourse and to acquire the status of an institution” (Jusdamis, 1991, p. 90).