Down to Earth (3/4) | The unlikely invitation
This article continues a four-part series that goes along with our new Advent devotional journey, Down to Earth. The journey and accompanying Sunday videos and ...
Read
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
PSALM 19:1–4
—
Human beings have always made art. It’s not just something we do on the side once we’ve sorted life out: people make art in lean times as well as rich. When we make useful things, we often also make them beautiful. In all its various modes – visual, musical, literary, embodied, and sculptural – art is a human impulse, one that profoundly shapes our common life. So, where does art-making fit into God’s purposes?
In the first place, let’s consider delight. The world is full of colour and sound, light and form. It is excessively beautiful – and it draws delight out of us like nectar from a flower. We are captured by the undulations of a cloud formation, we are arrested by a blackbird’s evening song, we keep glancing at the tree outside, its repose and light-filled form. The world is beautiful, eloquent with meaning. This delight offers us an important clue about art’s place in the big picture.
Artists often want to respond to the world’s beauty by joining in. Indeed, our delight in the world can make us want to respond to its source: to express awe and gratitude, praising the Artist behind all this beauty. Psalm 19 does exactly this. The world, it claims, isn’t random but is a creation: the work of the glorious Creator. Despite the travail of sin and evil, this world is fluent with delight. In its purpose-filled radiance, it offers its life back to the Maker, declaring the glory of God.
What is our part in all this? And where does art come in? Well, Psalm 19 is itself a poem – a memorable, beautiful, work of art. Scripture frames human beings as God’s image-bearers, stewards of God’s good rule who are uniquely placed to represent creation to God in a free response of love. Indeed, as theologian Jeremy Begbie has explored, human beings are made to voice creation’s praise – and art-making is key to this. Alert to the beauty of the world, artists are called to respond by giving voice to creation’s praise and also – as the rest of the Book of Psalms so clearly shows – to its lament. Art can’t be merely for its own sake. Rather, art is one distinct way that we express creaturely life to God and before God.
There is of course more to say! But here, as you head into this week, stay alert to delight: it’s an invitation to join in on the concert of creation.
Dr John Dennison
John is a poet, essayist, and Director of Resources at Venn Foundation in New Zealand. Venn is an education institution that helps people embrace the riches of Scripture and the Christian tradition for the good of their homes, workplaces, universities, churches and communities. John’s the author of Letter to An Artist, a beautiful, practical, and readable reflection on the nature of art-making and its place in God’s purposes.
In what everyday ways do you delight in the created world? How might you voice creation’s praise, participating with a sketch, song, or poem?
So glad you are starting 2025 with this series. An artist friend wrote to me recently quoting ‘The arts world can be a hard place to be a Christian, and the church can be a hard place to be an artist’. I had never heard that quote before. It is certainly true but I pray it may change.
I have been to numerous church seminars and conference on Christianity and science but not one church I have worshipped in over the past half century has run an event on Christianity and art. You would never know from the inside of most allegedly ‘bible-believing’ churches that the first person the scriptures record as being filled with the Holy Spirit was an artist. Glad to see an evangelical leader recently calling for a ‘ theology of Christian imagination’. It is much needed.
Sounds good!
The opening paragraph here has triggered a memory of a childhood toy. It set me thinking, are children playing with toys, an artistic expression? I’m thinking of toys that mimic the real world, e.g. playing with a toy cooker, toy pans and plastic food, dolls or a workbench with plastic tools. I don’t think they are just mimicking their parents actions, but exploring the real world in a far deeper sense than we take them credit for.
So a child rocking a baby doll in their arms, is not just copying an action, but rehearsing for parenthood in all its depths and nuances. Therefore I encouraged my own children to treat their baby dolls with the care and respect they would with a real child. Unlike Christopher Robin dragging Pooh Bear up the stairs by the foot.
So on to my memory from childhood – I was maybe 10 or 11 (late 70’s), but had a baby brother and so the house still had toddler toys knocking about. I had just rearranged the furniture in my room (possibly a Sunday afternoon, as we weren’t allowed to play outside). I desperately wanted my own TV in my room. So I found a FisherPrice wind up TV and placed it where the TV would go. I had no intentions of winding it up and watching Row Row Row you boat, but it was an expression of what my heart most wanted. I remember my dad coming into my room and looking at it and asking if I was not too old for a toy like this. But I didn’t feel embarrassed and just thought he doesn’t get it.
What’s your thoughts on a toddler holding a toy mobile phone and staring at it for 15 minutes?
Thank you for this. I’m fortunate to be part of a local church that encourages those with creative gifts. [I love that the Alpha course includes reference to Spirit inspired craftsmanship. ] We are denying expression of a vital part of the body of Christ if we don’t incorporate the creative arts into our worship and our mission. I think it was Mark Oakley who said that poets worship with a pen in their hand (I know I do). What can we do as a church to facilitate the presentation of our artistic expression as part of our ‘spiritual worship’?