From where does my creative desire come? Specifically, the desire to create art for the sake of creating art; the minority activity that is creativity as an end (a painting, a poem, a story, a film). Because sometimes it feels like self-centred indulgence. So should I just stop?
The God-given mandate….
I believe that humans are made in the image of their creator God, a natural outworking of God’s own creativity. Therefore we are inherently creative, just as our creator God is creative, in whose image we are created.
….which has been rejected….
We have questioned the rightness and the goodness of God’s intentions. By rejecting God’s rule, by no longer being content with the order of things, we have rejected the human mandate that accompanies the rule. Instead of being God’s agent, his charge over his creation, we desire to possess the creation for ourselves. We have rebelled. We want to rule. We want to be God. We want to mandate ourselves.
….which impacts my creativity.
In this state of existence (as with all forms of my human work) my artistic activity is a painful toil. In this state of existence, I am able to create but what I create is corrupt and not God-orientated. I am a corrupted creator. I retain my inherent desire but I am limited to the flawed beauty of the fallen and the finite. I make art to glorify myself. I create for my own praise, for recognition and praise of my ability. I have forgotten that God is the source and the enabler of every aspect of my artistic output. I have rejected the God who gifted me my creativity.
The response of God….
But God has not forgotten me. Such is his dominion and such is his love that he entered into time and creation and subjected himself to our desire for a godless, wholly human-centred world and to the ultimate act of corrupted creativity – the killing of the Creator himself.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem
In this way God reclaimed me once and for all. He bought eternal restoration between his fallen creation and himself. Just as he made me through his own word and power, through his action of self-sacrifice he made it possible for me to be re-born, to be renewed. It is the perfect act of creativity, and re-creativity.
….which impacts my creativity.
My artistic aspirations are under a curse, they are frustrated aspirations. Self-centred indulgence is a real possibility. But my fallen state should no more stop me attempting artistic creativity than my flawed efforts to love Christ and to love others as he has loved me. Before considering what art I make (because it is a given that I will), I should consider the heart and the attitude with which I make it.
Christ is my future. Christ is my restorer. Christ opens my eyes to see my creator and to see that my desire to create exists because I am made in the image and likeness of God himself. And he sacrificed himself to ensure this true human identity would not be lost - and instead would endure forever. Christ has opened the way back to the order and the mandate that was always intended for me; to be in full communion with God, to subdue and rule and declare a God-ordained authority over all of creation. This is truth in creativity and the foundation of creative value and meaning.
God is preparing me for heaven, a place that will be infinitely more beautiful than anything created that has been before. It will be beautiful because there will be no rebellion against God. I will live with him, knowing he is my perfect, all-surpassing creator. It will be beautiful because there will be no corrupted, or corruption of, humans. I will exercise my God-given and God-like creativity, in perfect harmony with him. I will be a perfect creator creating perfectly with rightly exercised freedom, completely fulfilled in the presence of God himself.
The response of the artist.
Until that time comes I strive to grasp my status as a redeemed creator, saved from hell and being refined, made ready for the new creation. Expressions of God-given creativity are an outworking of a characteristic that existed before The Fall and therefore before the call to prophecy and to evangelism. But I exist post-Fall. The art I make – with whatever array of human ideas, mediums, techniques, innovation and originality – will sit somewhere along the narrow way that stretches from acknowledging and lamenting the rebellion and the corruption and the human struggle, to the complete wonder and beauty and truth of God himself. It will sit somewhere between earthly truth and heavenly truth. It will celebrate and it will warn. The fallen and the finite, even when beautiful, will one day be subject to God’s judgement and a terrible end. But God himself saves.
I create as a created creator with the imagination that God has given me, inspired by what he has already created. What I see - past, present and future - is what God sees. Self is not the highest form of authority. Personal autonomy is subservient to the God who made each self. I am who God determines I am. My creativity is self-determined only to the extent that God allows it to be. He allows me moments of artistic mastery within his creation. I must not disregard how infinitesimal is my ability compared to God.
Creating art does not give me an identity. Rather it is the outworking of the identity already given me. It is within this framework that I make art. I am a fool if I look for an exclusive fulfilment through acts of artistic creativity. I am a fool if creating art is nothing more than an attempt to escape from truth and reality. I don’t need to produce art to prove myself or to assert myself. I create because of who my Creator is. I create as a fallen yet inexplicably and wonderfully redeemed human. Whatever my artistic achievements, they result from the ability God has given to me. No art is pure human self-achievement.
Within that, I have a responsibility of output. It becomes relevant what my art says and what it celebrates, and who it celebrates. Creativity as an end, exercised in the arts, believing that human rebellion has been punished and human corruption reversed, will have a distinctive type of output, born of the Spirit and re-birth. The world can be beautiful but not eternally beautiful. I must grasp that there is nothing I can do that reveals what God does not already know. The avant-garde is only so to human eyes.
I will make art that is beautiful, because God is beautiful and his creation is beautiful, but not at the cost of ignoring rebellion and corruption and eternal destiny. I will make art that tells an audience how I believe things are and how I believe things will be (and sometimes how I want things to be). Art that reflects the creation / fall / redemption narrative, that counters the bend to self.
Within this framework, the scope for artistic vision is vast.
I will find spaces to create and spaces to inspire and spaces to rest in creativity. I will make art as one who does not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb. I will create as one who is of Christ, entrusted with mysteries that God has revealed. This is what I can contribute to art discourse, to humanity’s self-reflection.
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Edward Hopper
The God-given mandate….
I believe that humans are made in the image of their creator God, a natural outworking of God’s own creativity. Therefore we are inherently creative, just as our creator God is creative, in whose image we are created.
….which has been rejected….
We have questioned the rightness and the goodness of God’s intentions. By rejecting God’s rule, by no longer being content with the order of things, we have rejected the human mandate that accompanies the rule. Instead of being God’s agent, his charge over his creation, we desire to possess the creation for ourselves. We have rebelled. We want to rule. We want to be God. We want to mandate ourselves.
….which impacts my creativity.
In this state of existence (as with all forms of my human work) my artistic activity is a painful toil. In this state of existence, I am able to create but what I create is corrupt and not God-orientated. I am a corrupted creator. I retain my inherent desire but I am limited to the flawed beauty of the fallen and the finite. I make art to glorify myself. I create for my own praise, for recognition and praise of my ability. I have forgotten that God is the source and the enabler of every aspect of my artistic output. I have rejected the God who gifted me my creativity.
The response of God….
But God has not forgotten me. Such is his dominion and such is his love that he entered into time and creation and subjected himself to our desire for a godless, wholly human-centred world and to the ultimate act of corrupted creativity – the killing of the Creator himself.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem
In this way God reclaimed me once and for all. He bought eternal restoration between his fallen creation and himself. Just as he made me through his own word and power, through his action of self-sacrifice he made it possible for me to be re-born, to be renewed. It is the perfect act of creativity, and re-creativity.
….which impacts my creativity.
My artistic aspirations are under a curse, they are frustrated aspirations. Self-centred indulgence is a real possibility. But my fallen state should no more stop me attempting artistic creativity than my flawed efforts to love Christ and to love others as he has loved me. Before considering what art I make (because it is a given that I will), I should consider the heart and the attitude with which I make it.
Christ is my future. Christ is my restorer. Christ opens my eyes to see my creator and to see that my desire to create exists because I am made in the image and likeness of God himself. And he sacrificed himself to ensure this true human identity would not be lost - and instead would endure forever. Christ has opened the way back to the order and the mandate that was always intended for me; to be in full communion with God, to subdue and rule and declare a God-ordained authority over all of creation. This is truth in creativity and the foundation of creative value and meaning.
God is preparing me for heaven, a place that will be infinitely more beautiful than anything created that has been before. It will be beautiful because there will be no rebellion against God. I will live with him, knowing he is my perfect, all-surpassing creator. It will be beautiful because there will be no corrupted, or corruption of, humans. I will exercise my God-given and God-like creativity, in perfect harmony with him. I will be a perfect creator creating perfectly with rightly exercised freedom, completely fulfilled in the presence of God himself.
The response of the artist.
Until that time comes I strive to grasp my status as a redeemed creator, saved from hell and being refined, made ready for the new creation. Expressions of God-given creativity are an outworking of a characteristic that existed before The Fall and therefore before the call to prophecy and to evangelism. But I exist post-Fall. The art I make – with whatever array of human ideas, mediums, techniques, innovation and originality – will sit somewhere along the narrow way that stretches from acknowledging and lamenting the rebellion and the corruption and the human struggle, to the complete wonder and beauty and truth of God himself. It will sit somewhere between earthly truth and heavenly truth. It will celebrate and it will warn. The fallen and the finite, even when beautiful, will one day be subject to God’s judgement and a terrible end. But God himself saves.
I create as a created creator with the imagination that God has given me, inspired by what he has already created. What I see - past, present and future - is what God sees. Self is not the highest form of authority. Personal autonomy is subservient to the God who made each self. I am who God determines I am. My creativity is self-determined only to the extent that God allows it to be. He allows me moments of artistic mastery within his creation. I must not disregard how infinitesimal is my ability compared to God.
Creating art does not give me an identity. Rather it is the outworking of the identity already given me. It is within this framework that I make art. I am a fool if I look for an exclusive fulfilment through acts of artistic creativity. I am a fool if creating art is nothing more than an attempt to escape from truth and reality. I don’t need to produce art to prove myself or to assert myself. I create because of who my Creator is. I create as a fallen yet inexplicably and wonderfully redeemed human. Whatever my artistic achievements, they result from the ability God has given to me. No art is pure human self-achievement.
Within that, I have a responsibility of output. It becomes relevant what my art says and what it celebrates, and who it celebrates. Creativity as an end, exercised in the arts, believing that human rebellion has been punished and human corruption reversed, will have a distinctive type of output, born of the Spirit and re-birth. The world can be beautiful but not eternally beautiful. I must grasp that there is nothing I can do that reveals what God does not already know. The avant-garde is only so to human eyes.
I will make art that is beautiful, because God is beautiful and his creation is beautiful, but not at the cost of ignoring rebellion and corruption and eternal destiny. I will make art that tells an audience how I believe things are and how I believe things will be (and sometimes how I want things to be). Art that reflects the creation / fall / redemption narrative, that counters the bend to self.
Within this framework, the scope for artistic vision is vast.
I will find spaces to create and spaces to inspire and spaces to rest in creativity. I will make art as one who does not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb. I will create as one who is of Christ, entrusted with mysteries that God has revealed. This is what I can contribute to art discourse, to humanity’s self-reflection.
Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Edward Hopper