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A theology of artful inquiry

"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.'"

God is an artisan. He made us in His image, to be artisans after His own heart. Disciples of Christ are learners [5, p. x], just as Christ was a disciple under the carpenter or carpenters he learned his trade from. Our dominion over the earth's living and non-living material is meant to be both fruitful (that is, generative) and wise (that is, skilled by virtue of training [5, p. x]). As apprentices of Christ, we are all called to be makers [2, p. x]. The very act of knowing is a synthetic art, not a science [1, p. x]. Faith is artful inquiry: skilful, rough, creative wayfinding with the aim of understanding all that is real or true or lovely (see Philippians 4). It is the foundation of knowledge. We can't know every detail, but we can know enough to act as if we do.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

In order to be rightly apprenticed to God, we need to understand that life is entirely a gift of grace (gratuitous, abundant, life-giving love). Note that Paul says God 'made us alive' - that is, He poetically spoke life into us. He then says we are all his workmanship, God has made us His disciples and commanded us to make disciples. What better way is there to win hearts and souls than by acts of free, gratuitous creativity? There is always the power of music and film and literature to move us to action and ignite our sense of meaning or joie de vivre. Art is what gives life its colour and texture. We wouldn't be anywhere without it, whether God's own art or that of God's own artists. Proverbs 14:22 says that we 'devise' good and evil. The word is used in other parts of the Old Testament of craftsmanship [9, p. 324]. The resurrection was a creative act, planned meticulously and executed effectively. So was the Holocaust. Our God-given creativity must be driven by the Holy Spirit if we are to accomplish good things.

In order to create like God calls us to, we have to understand how God creates. God is a mathematician, and nature is written in the language of mathematics [6]. Mathematics is an art, making and connecting patterns out of abstract concepts [7]. Nature is our inspiration for most of our knowledge and creative works. Leading mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has powerfully described how inseparable mathematics and art are [8]. I suspect every aspect of life can be described mathematically, including theology and romantic or platonic love. Families are a work of art, just as life is. And families are the bedrock of civilization - what civilization is built upon. Proverbs 24:3 states that homes are built by wisdom, which as I mentioned earlier is a trained skill, an art of living well.

In Genesis 1 God primarily creates through distinguishing and then associating (e.g. distingishing light and darkness, associating light with day and darkness with night). Alston and Aquinas posited that God's knowledge is utterly simple: God only knows one thing, which is the sum of all truth [10]. If this is the case, then God was distinguishing things for our benefit, not His. That means our individual concepts are illusions: the universe is one thing, not many. Paul hints at this with his assertion in Galatians 3 that we are all one in Christ Jesus. Designers like Donald Norman [11] and Rich Hickey [12] have echoed that design is primarily about making distinctions (decomposition or disentanglement) and then associating the different pieces with each other (composition).

References

  1. Doorway to Artistry - Esther Lightcap Meek
  2. Art & Faith: A Theology of Making - Makoto Fujimura
  3. Image Bearers - Rachel Atkinson and Machel Lloyd
  4. Christian Theology: An Introduction - Alister E. McGrath
  5. The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15 - Bruce K. Waltke
  6. God and Mathematics
  7. A Mathematician's Apology - G.H. Hardy
  8. Blueprints: How mathematics shapes creativity - Marcus du Sautoy
  9. The Preacher’s Commentary: Proverbs - David A. Hubbard
  10. Does God Know an Actually Infinite Number of Things?
  11. The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman
  12. Design, Composition and Performance