The arts describe areas of human expression and creativity across all five senses including visual art such as painting, drawing, sculpting, architecture; audible art such as music; motion picture art such as film and cinematography; literary art such as novels, short stories, and poetry; rhetorical art such as speech-making or preaching; live dramatized art such as theatre or spoken-word; and other forms of aesthetic expression such as interior design, culinary and latte art, landscape beautification, and fashion. In brief, the arts are our opportunity to explore and accentuate the intrinsic beauty of God’s world.
Many will say, “But I’m not an artist.”And still we appreciate a scented candle, banana pudding, a Joanna Gaines designed home, a soft blanket, or a moving rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Art and the arts put the whole of the human experience on display in the most creative of ways provoking all the senses of sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smelling, directing body and soul toward awe and wonder.
How then might we understand the way of Christ in the arts? As merely a prelude, I offer the following five reflections on our creative activities in light of the way of Christ.
1. We Create as Part of our Nature
Just as God demonstrated his creativity through the diversity and variety of the world, so we who are made in God’s image are invited to exercise our creative gifts in all of life. While not all will claim the label of “artist,” all are creators. Whether buildings, songs, memories, families, Bible studies, gardens, coffee—by engaging with the stuff of the earth all people create and leave indelible impressions on God’s world.
2. We Create to Express Human Experience
You have heard the adage, “A picture says a thousand words.” Why is this the case? Because a perfectly timed photograph or skilled painting captures the magic of a moment in ways that plain-spoken words often cannot. Similarly, the art of poetry captures a moment in ways that an instruction manual cannot. It is no accident that poetry comprises some 1/3 of the Christian Scriptures. The prominence of poetry, I would argue, is at least in part because the medium of an epistle, for example, does not carry the emotional depth of a psalm.
- “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?”
In these words from Psalm 13:1-2 we don’t just hear David’s plea for God’s presence, we feel it! Poetry, as with other forms of art, carry us into the depths of abandonment as well as to the heights of ecstasy, that familiar roller-coaster of our emotional lives. For such highs and lows, plain speech just doesn’t cut it. We need rhythm, meter, rhyme, stories, pictures, smells, and songs to carry our souls along the journey in ways that form us more completely into the likeness of Christ.
3. We Create to Offer Perspective
Art offers a new way of looking at the world that often goes unobserved. Herein lies the contributions of such movements as realism, expressionism, and abstract art. While realism seeks to represent an image as realistically as possible, abstract and expressionist art is more concerned with accentuating shapes, colors, emotions, even distortions to offer a new perspective on a familiar image or idea.
In the past 20 years, the mysterious street artist Banksy has become popular. He has painted highly skilled pictures in public places that often carry a subtle but powerful social message about matters such as economics, justice, and environmentalism. Banksy’s unique brilliance is his ability to capture his concern for injustice with simple but powerful images. Though I do not affirm all of Banksy’s views, he has used art to help many around the world to see their surroundings from a different perspective.
4. We Create to Decry the Bad, False, and Ugly
Sin seeks to malform and misdirect what God has made good, true, and beautiful. Sin cannot make creation intrinsically “bad,” but it can and does make it ugly. Our creative activities offer the opportunity to counter sin’s ugliness and uncreative activity and redirect creation toward goodness and beauty according to God’s design.
5. We Create for Wonder
The Christian confession begins with the God who is Creator of all things. And the world he has made draws us to awe and wonder. The beauty and majesty of creation takes our breath away in awe, and wonder keeps us lingering at the sight of the sun setting into the Pacific, or the majesty of the snow-capped Swiss Alps. Such wonder inspires artists in their creative work, motivating them to capture such moments of overwhelming beauty in their songs, poetry, and paintings. As Christians, we recognize this as reflective of the character of our God, for he is the ground of all being and the source of all beauty. May our creative energies draw attention to this good God and his world, giving special attention to the redemptive work of God in the person of his Son Jesus who became ugliness for us that we might become the beauty of God in him.
Suggested Reading:
No comments have been added.