Years ago I was talking with a pastor friend of mine about how we each came to faith, and the obstacles that God had to overcome for us before we did. I started to explain that, having grown up in a relatively conservative Evangelical home, one of my difficulties in embracing the faith as a young man was the feeling that I would have to give up something that I cared about deeply, if I did.
My friend thought he saw where I was headed with this, and he said: “You felt you’d have to leave you brains at the door?” He was thinking of the strong anti-intellectualism bent that is present in many conservative Evangelical traditions
But that wasn’t it for me. “No,” I said. “Not my brains. I thought I’d have to leave my imagination at the door.”
I have always had, by nature and nurture both, an artistic temperament. Creativity is one of my core values. I was an English major and an art minor in University. I write songs. I write poetry. I once wrote a musical. I am working on a novel. I’ve blogged before about my passion for the arts.
Because of this heart for all things creative, and because of the Evangelical tradition’s tendency to employ the arts simply as bait-and-switch advertisements for a truncated Gospel, I’ve always struggled to believe that there was in my tradition a real place for art as art, with all its polyvalent ambiguity and unresolved tensions, and especially its honest effort to brush up against the true nature of things. The only art I ever encountered in the churches of my childhood were those kitschy Warner Sallman portraits of silken-robed and carefully coiffed Jesuses knocking warmly on the heart’s door, those superficial church plays that resolved their conflict neatly and without remainder by a straight-forward asking of Jesus into said heart, or those saccharine love-songs where every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before ever since he came in. Somewhere in the midst of all that I picked up the not-so-subliminal message that art was a useful thing, and only “useful” so long as it was clear and straight-forward and unambiguous, but there were quite clear (and narrow) boundaries within which it must operate.
In one of the journals I kept during my University years, I put it like this: “Because something (God, did you put it there? Is it sin to listen?) Inside me sings of the beauty and Truth of creation, and because something even deeper longs to capture, magnify, reflect and thus join the beauty and truth of creation, I am a poet. … I stare at that word on the page, and am flooded with questions impossible to answer: Can I be a poet & serve God?” It’s a bit maudlin, I realize, but it illustrates the point: somewhere along the journey of Faith, I picked up this idea that a “real” poet couldn’t serve God, and, more to the point, there was no real place in his Kingdom for a “real” poet (the witness of John Donne, John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot not withstanding).
I have long since resolved this dilemma, and as a Christian and a Pastor I’ve found my way into God’s service without leaving my imagination at the door, helped in great part by the writings of Francis Schaeffer, his son Franky, Madeline L’Engle, Jeremy Begbie and others. I am thinking about it today, however, because I have been reflecting recently on the creative nature of the Christian life and the “artistic” (for lack of a better word) nature of the Christian disciplines. Not only is there a place for the artist in the Christian faith, but to live the life of a growing Christian well actually requires us to use those very faculties that the artist hones and develops and employs as a matter of course in the production of their art: imagination, creative expression, story-telling, visioning and re-visioning the world.
I do not mean, in saying this, that artists make better Christians, or that all Christians should be “artistic,” in the normal sense of that word. I mean something simpler, and yet more profound: that the Christian life is in its very essence artistic, and whether they realize it or not, whether they conceive of it in this way or not, whether they every write a poem or paint a picture in their lives or not, still, serious, growing disciples of Jesus are—by the very nature of what it takes to follow Jesus—becoming artists.
This goes back, actually, to the very beginning. In Genesis 1:27, we’re told that God created human beings by the power of his speech and that he created them in his image, "male and female, in the image of God made he them." There's far more going on in these few simple words from Genesis 1:27 than could ever fit into a 500 word blog post (indeed, they've inspired theological words-in-response at a ratio of something like 1,000,000:1) but what I want to focus on is the fact that, in the ancient world, a king who had conquered a land would then set up his image (zelem) in that land, the idea being that the image would effect, extend and continue the King's reign even when the King himself was not physically present. And in the ancient world's framework for cosmogony (stories to explain how the cosmos came to be), creation always happened through an act of conquering and subduing chaos. So in Genesis 1: God conquers the formless-and-void chaos of the world-in-the-beginning, and, once the wild and waste world is formed and filed with verdant life, he sets humanity as his kingly "image" in the newly-conquered-Creation. The implication here (among other things) is that humanity is called to extend, effect and continue the creative work he has begun. Being made in the image of God is being made for a certain kind of “creativity”—a world-nurturing, creation-blessing, God-reflecting creative life in the world.
(With this all in mind, I can't help but notice that the words we most often use to describe the human act of "singing/drawing/carving/writing/making original things that didn't exist before" link it to divine things. There's "creativity" itself, but there's also "inspiration" (to be "breathed" into), and there's "imagination" and "visionary" and "musical" (connected, of course, to the Greek Muses). All of these words seem to be feeling around the etymological edges of that spiritual "thing" that happens when human beings act creatively.)
Of course, two thoughts follow this observation. One is that the rest of the story describes how human beings failed in this calling to properly Image God in the creation. Forbidden fruit was eaten; Humans were exiled; Paradise was lost. The Image of God itself is not lost. It is something intrinsic to being human, and the New Testament affirms that even this side of the Fall people are still in the Image of God. But the image has been marred by sin and distorted in our exile. That’s the first thought: we see the Image now as if in a mirror darkly. The second thought is good news, however: that in Jesus Christ, God has recapitulated the Image of God for us. Jesus is the true Image of the Unseen God (Col 1:15), and by his Spirit Christians are being shaped into his Image and Likeness (Romans 8:29). Through Christ the Image in us is being restored to its former glory and beauty.
And its former creativity. Which is the point I want to make today: if it’s true that the Image of God originally included a call to creative activity in the world on the Creator’s behalf, and if it’s true that in Christ the Image is being restored in us, then it follows that there is something intrinsically creative in the life of discipleship that He’s calling us into.
Again, let me stress that I don’t mean Jesus wants us to paint paintings, necessarily, or write short stories, per se, or take up interpretive dance even. He loves it when we do these things for his glory, I think, but that’s not my point. My point is that if the Christian life really is about having the Image of God restored in us, then the Christian life is itself a creative way of being. It is about looking at the world with a sanctified imagination, and responding to it creatively, and putting our hands to it with skill and care and craft, and leaving behind something original and expressive and true. To the extent that this is also what the artist tries to do whenever she picks up a paint brush or puts down a word or what have you, to that extent there is something fundamentally artistic about the Christian life. The growing Christian is, you might say, an artist in the truest sense of that word.
Over the next few weeks at terra incognita we’re going to spend some time exploring this idea: the connections between Christianity and creativity. If you’re an artist yourself and you’ve ever wondered if the Faith has any genuine room for your particular artistic passion, I hope you’ll come along for the ride. If you’re not an artist, and have never really felt any draw to the arts, I hope you’ll join us all the more. Either way, I hope we’ll discover that not only do we not have to leave our imaginations at the door, we actually need them—and our poetic expression, and our carefully-crafted stories, and our artistic visions and our full creativity—if we’re to love him well.
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