Kingdom furniture and artificial grace
If you haven't been following Christianity Today's This Is Our City project, I've got to tell you you're missing out on some really great stuff. The project aims to tell stories about Christians seeking the flourishing of their cities in all sectors of public life. Portland and Richmond have been highlighted so far, and Phoenix is up next.
Most recently, they introduced a new short film by Nathan Clarke, featuring a furniture maker in Richmond named Harrison Higgins who believes that the work of our hands can either be a sacrament or a sacrilege (an idea he borrows from Wendell Berry).
Here's the film:
Philosophy professor and author James K.A. Smith has now written a wonderful meditation on the film as well, called "Artificial Grace: Why the Creation Needs Human Creativity." Here's an excerpt:
[F]or Higgins, there is no simplistic opposition between nature and culture, between a pristine creation and human artifice—the creative "work of our hands" that gives birth to artifacts, to cultural goods. To the contrary, good artifice is its own kind of grace: to make is to serve, is to bear God's image to and for the creation. A Christian theology of creation is not the same as Mother Earth mythologies of "the natural" that ultimately end up lamenting humanity's presence as a blight on creation. No, we worship the Maker of all, the Artificer we come to know in Jesus of Nazareth, the son of a carpenter. A Christian affirmation of the goodness of creation is also an affirmation of artifice—redeeming the very word, we might say, from its association with the fake and the faux. In an older sense, artifice attests to creativity and craft.
You can read the rest here. When you get some time, I'd encourage you to spend some time perusing all the great reporting, essays, and short documentary films This Is Our City has produced.
[Photo credit: This Is Our City]
Art, imagination, and liberation
I don’t normally think of myself as an artist, but being made in the image of the Creator God, all of us have a bit of that God-given creativity in us, I think. We have all been given different creative instincts; we’ve all been called to create something good using the raw materials with which we’ve been entrusted. For many, art is seen as a mostly indulgent, frivolous undertaking. But that’s a narrow view of art. Art takes a million forms, and while it can certainly distract or dehumanize, it can also be used to liberate. Art is liberating when it turns our focus away from ourselves -- turns us outward, possibly even upward.
In his excellent book Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity (InterVarsity Press), singer, songwriter and Biblical scholar Michael Card makes the connection between art and the biblical prophets, emphasizing the generally overlooked spiritual significance of the imagination.
“Through the prophets we come to understand that God is out to recapture all that we are or can hope to be,” he writes, “not just the mind or the heart but the mind of the heart, the heart of the mind, which is the imagination.” Looking at the biblical prophets, we see that the imagination is recaptured mostly through images and parables, but also, at times, through what can only be considered “bizarre activity.” The burden of the prophets was to show the people of God the error of their ways, to plea with them to change course, to return to God, and to do so without wasting another day.
The need for the recapturing of the imagination continues today. And there are few tools better suited to this task than art, which in a million different ways can turn us outward and upward, pointing beyond ourselves and to the one in whose image we have each of us been fearfully and wonderfully made.
[Painting credit: Scott Erickson/derekwebb.com]
Henri Nouwen on creative ministry
Henri Nouwen, the well-known Dutch priest, wrote a lot of books, though I've found some more helpful than others. In the Name of Jesus, for instance, is one of my absolute favorite books, and I re-read it more or less annually. I just finished Nouwen's Creative Ministry, and while I wouldn't say it's his best, I thought this excerpt was a real gem:
Ministry means the ongoing attempt to put one's own search for God, with all the moments of pain and joy, despair and hope, at the disposal of those who want to join this search but don't know how. Therefore, ministry in no way is a privilege. Instead, it is the core of the Christian life. No Christian is a Christian without being a minister. There are many more forms of ministry than the five I have discussed in this book [teaching, preaching, individual pastoral care, organizing and celebrating], which usually fill the daily life of the ordained minister and priest. But whatever form the Christian ministry takes, the basis is always the same: to lay down one's life for one's friends.
But why does a man lay down his life for his friends? There is only one answer to that question: to give new life. All functions of the ministry are life giving. Whether a man teaches, preaches, counsels, plans, or celebrates, his aim is to open new perspectives, to offer new insight, to give new strength, to break through the chains of death and destruction, and to create new life which can be affirmed. In short -- to make his weakness creative.
- Henri J.M. Nouwen, Creative Ministry (Doubleday, 1991)
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