Why is the publication of these writings so important? What does Rookmaaker\'s legacy have to offer us in the new millennium? First, his books and essays stand as a monument to the importance of rigorous Christian art-historical scholarship.
Rookmaaker\'s is a timely wisdom, and it will inspire thousands for decades to come..
It is a wonderful thought that this man\'s rare wisdom, which so radically changed the lives of those who knew him, can now find its way to a wider audience in the pages that follow.
We need to find it and celebrate it more than ever today.
He knew there was another much more fruitful option, implicit in the Christian faith.
In his own day Rookmaaker saw that a proper refusal to isolate or downplay the arts must not be countered by a Neo-Romantic exaltation of the aesthetic.
Western post modernity relishes in the \'aestheticization\' of culture, sometimes to the point that the aesthetic threatens to swallow up everything else in a wash of images.
Fourth, nourished by the Dutch Neo-Calvinist philosophy of Dooyeweerd and his followers, Rookmaaker provides a vision of the arts that does justice both to their irreducible integrity and to their interrelatedness with other aspects of God\'s world.
In a climate when the contribution of a distinctively Christian perspective on the arts is so often ruthlessly marginalized, often to the point of extinction, Rookmaaker\'s voice is one we sorely need to hear.
We need to demonstrate carefully what place the arts have in the grand and sweeping purposes of God for history, and it was to Rookmaaker\'s immense credit that for thousands he made this breathtakingly clear.
For him it was not good enough to claim that the arts are important for the Christian, and then justify this with a few verses carelessly plucked from Scripture.
Third, Rookmaaker sets the arts in the midst of a rich and full-blooded Christian world view.
In an age of increasing specialization and blinkered vision, Rookmaaker shows us that it is quite possible to be a specialist and to be alert to the links between these specialisms and much wider issues.
He had a fascinated interest, for instance, in music (especially the spirituals and jazz), and in broader cultural concerns (youth culture, scientific discovery, and much more).
Rookmaaker\'s interests ranged far beyond the visual arts.
Second, we are reminded of the importance of breadth as well as depth.
Today, when a postmodern fascination with all things \'aesthetic\' and \'spiritual\' can easily engender scholarly carelessness and an ignorance of specific artworks, Roomaaker reminds us that Christian commitment must never be used to avoid the kind of precise, intellectual engagement which is so evident in his written words, a painstaking attentiveness to the details of particular pieces of art, and to the particularities of society and culture in which they are embedded.
For many years Professor of Art History at the Free University of Amsterdam, Rookmaaker was a fastidious scholar.
Why is the publication of these writings so important? What does Rookmaaker\'s legacy have to offer us in the new millennium? First, his books and essays stand as a monument to the importance of rigorous Christian art-historical scholarship
