In the words of Donald McGilchrist…

Never was the apostle John more inspired than when he penned this astonishing statement: ‘the Word became flesh’. Redemption infused a fallen creation.

Making art is hardly easy. We struggle to express truth among the ruins of our culture, to bring beauty into disordered lives. Sometimes, circumstances just roll over us, flattening our creative energies.

What can we do? Much, because the Word became flesh.

At the beginning, our Triune God had worked with such joy and wisdom that his material world was drenched with goodness. Unalloyed goodness. Indeed, we were the pinnacle of his workmanship. But, we crashed…and shattered the relational intimacy for which he had designed us.

End of story? No, there is hope, because the Word became flesh. God’s goodness has graced us. In Jesus, he has freshly dignified our bodies and lifted up the material world. Brian Wren captures the outcome:

Good is the body for knowing the world,
sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
feeling, perceiving, within and around,
Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

The Word became flesh. Language became life. The unfathomable voice of our holy God became his healing, caressing touch, in Jesus. The material matters! Now, we can know that nothing we do need be insignificant, provided it is crafted before the face of God, shaped in the light of his presence.

Pastries, poems, packaging, payment systems…all that we create can, indeed should, express a loving obedience to our God who designed us to do good work, including good art!

“For we are God’s works of art, created in Christ Jesus to do good work which God prepared in advance for us to do”—Ephesians 2:10.

The good news is full of beauty, goodness, and truth. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit also exhibit these and many other attributes. Romans Chapter 1 also says men can find God through creation (beauty), conscience (goodness), and truth.

For some time the emphasis in America has been to focus on truth-telling. Reaching people with the truth by first being good or beautiful has not been considered an effective way to reach the lost. The social gospel may have scared some away from using goodness to attract people to Christ, and the arts themselves have for many decades been a scary place for people of faith.

We know that Paul shared as of first importance that Christ died, was buried, and resurrected victorious in defeat of our separation from God, and that without this truth, people would not enjoy a personal relationship with Him. But somewhere along the line we lost the first importance part of this and decided it was of only importance. The result has been a good news that has largely been the bare truth; in your face, black and white, us and them; dividing the saved from the lost.

This worked for hundreds of years in U.S. history because the government, the culture, and the religion were all in synch with the message of the truth - you either know Jesus or you don’t - make a decision. But in the last 30+ years the culture, the government, and the religion are no longer in agreement about what is true. And in that environment, truth by itself can become divisive.

Jesus met people where they were, not where he wanted them to be (the woman at the well, Zaccheus in the tree, the many people who needed physical healing as well as spiritual). We would like all people to be at the point where the only thing left for them to do is to decide to embrace Christ’s resurrection, but as our culture drifts farther and farther from this never-changing truth, more and more people won’t respond to this message as our first attempt to draw them in. In fact, this direct truth-telling, or didactic approach to reaching people can have the opposite effect. If my understanding of “truth” is a long way from the actual truth, my only reaction might be to be offended by your truth.

While the good news is true, the good news is also beautiful and good, and these are values that all men seem to still find attractive, even if we disagree on the truth itself. People who would not first respond to a discussion of the truth might still be attracted to a discussion of goodness or beauty, or better yet, actual ACTS of beauty and goodness.

Via Affirmativa (The Way of Affirmation) affirms the need to be involved in acts of beauty as well as goodness, and that these acts can be used to invite people in, to create community that can create conversation, which can lead to people wanting to know Christ.

All Beauty was created by God and is owned by Him. Rather than abandoning the arts, the convinced community should be deeply involved in the arts to infuse it with beauty that is also good and true. And this Beauty should be attractional, inviting people into a conversation that will eventually or very quickly lead them to a relationship with Christ.

We don’t need to infuse our art with obvious overt symbols and/or words of religion (although some do this successfully). What we really need is to love our God with all our heart, soul and mind, love our neighbor as ourselves, produce art that is beautiful, good, and true, and become fully engaged with the culture of the artist as an artist. (We don’t ask welders to stop building cars and only weld crosses after they come to Christ. Although a welder here and there might want to do that.)

Via Affirmativa affirms the need for artists to be in the mainstream arts just as business people are in the mainstream of business. We affirm that God wants to redeem artists in their “place” not out of their place, because an artist in the mainstream of the arts who loves God can be salt and light in a place where others who love Christ may never have an influence.

Chuck Blakeman

Thought I’d share this article (click here), because I’ve always been fascinated by Tolkien’s view on Art. Please post if you have any thoughts at all, would love to hear your views on this.

Here’s a summary:
Tolkien refines “Art” into two categories:

- When we create in harmony with God’s creation, we create Art
- When we create for our own purposes, we create Power (aka Magic or fallen/corrupted Art)

What’s the difference?

In Tolkien’s view, Art reflects a sliver of God’s primary divine creation. Our secondary creative acts work like lenses to see the original Goodness, Truth, and Beauty in the divine creation more clearly. In Tolkien’s books, his Elves do this literally by creating 3 jewels that capture the divine light from the beginning of creation.

In contrast, when our secondary creations reflect our wills and not God’s, this is Power. The chief aim of Power is to use our creative urges to dominate others. For example, When oratory skills are turned into propaganda, or when graphic arts are used to promote a selfish agenda. Tolkien also refers to Power as Magic, and anyone who creates in this way as a “mere Magician” (in contrast to an Artist). For Tolkien the modern incarnation of Power/Magic is technology, and it’s off spring “progress”.

The great masters of the imagination (in this case Jeremiah) do not make things up out of thin air; they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. They then train us to see it whole–not in fragments but in context, with all the connections. They connect the visible and the invisible, the this with the that. They assist us in seeing what is around us all the time but which we regularly overlook. With their help we see it not as commonplace but as awesome, not as banal but as wondrous. For this reason the imagination is one of the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a leap out of the everyday but a plunge into its depths.

Eugene Peterson….Run with the Horses