Before delving into the tensions of religious struggle in van Gogh’s Nuenen art, we must first investigate the role organized religion played in the artist’s life. Growing up with a pastor father and an uncle who was a celebrated theologian, van Gogh found Christianity at the center of his daily existence from a young age. He was initially drawn to the God of his father’s Dutch 
Reformed, Groningen-school theology: a God who manifested himself both through His Word in the Bible and through the natural creation. This theology’s central focus on Christ as the ultimate example of Christian consolation would also prove highly influential in forming van Gogh’s belief system (Jansen 16). As Thomas Buser relates in his essay “Van Gogh as a Religious Artist,” Vincent’s fixation on this idea of Christ led him to repeatedly read Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. Buser notes that
"The Imitation especially suited his temperament, and its spirit and message of consolation amid suffering stayed with him for life. […] It preaches an asceticism of humility, simplicity, self-deprecation, and contempt for the world in order to prepare oneself for the only true comfort and consolation that will appear in an afterlife. The sufferings of Christ, whose whole life was a cross and a martyrdom, are offered as a psychological model." (Buser 41)
Connecting to this “psychological model” of Christ, the despondent van Gogh longed for the eventual consolation found in life with God after death, and modeled his life around Kempis’ interpretation of Christ’s example. To fulfill this call to “humility, simplicity, [and] contempt for the world” van Gogh first studied theology to prepare for ordained ministry, but abandoned these studies after finding them too hypocritical. As recorded by van Gogh biographers Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, Vincent turned 
instead to a more Christ-like existence – full of “self-deprecation” – as a poor missionary in the Borinage. This service-centered life of poverty would last only a year, when the Church revoked van Gogh’s appointment for fear all religious leaders would be expected to sacrifice so fanatically (Hanson 47-9). This rejection, combined with that of his disappointed pastor father, caused van Gogh to turn against the Church, angrily writing in a December 1881 letter to his brother, “I frankly [think] their whole system of religion horrible” (L166.1). Yet, van Gogh makes it clear that it is the system, not the God, of religion that he believes to be “horrible,” and other letters (such as one to his brother, Theo, in July of 1880) continue to reveal the artist’s dedication to and worship of the God of nature, love, and the arts (L133.2-4). This tension between his longing for God’s consolation and the hypocrisy of organized religion which he despised (symbolized, for him, in his father) profoundly affected both van Gogh’s life and his art.