The stuff of earth

Seventeenth-century scientists theorized about a fire-like element that caused things to burn. This element, phlogiston, was thought to be contained in all burnable materials (e.g., wood, wax, and witches). The theory held that combustible materials released their phlogiston when burned. Plants collected it back out of the air, thus making plants combustible and keeping the air from exploding! For nearly a hundred years, various scientists continued to search for phlogiston. Yet today phlogiston theory is an amusing footnote in scientific history, because it turned out that phlogiston didn’t exist. We now know that combustion is a chemical reaction that chiefly involves oxygen, one of earth’s most abundant elements. In other words, the only thing that combustible materials really have in common is that, under the right circumstances, they burn.

Clarifying art

Today we have a growing abundance of visionary arts-in-ministry approaches, experiments, and ideas—praise God! Yet I believe we are encountering our own phlogiston-style problem. “The arts” is a kind of philosophical junk drawer term, connecting various forms and products, but the underlying theory that connects these arts remains elusive and hazy. Open an art textbook and you’ll find we can’t agree even on the basic definition of “art.” We see the effects of these various items—from haiku to brutalist architecture, funk music to pointillist painting—but we haven’t identified the art-like element which connects them.

Correctly understanding combustion led us from campfires to space rockets. Likewise, the unintelligibility of art and how it functions holds us back in our artistic and ministry endeavors. As most artists experience, at a certain point, theory and practice must come together to unlock greater things. As Proverbs puts it, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29:18 KJV).

This haze surrounding art theory impacts what and how we make, those to whom we hope to minister, and those who partner with us in ministry. Some may reject or become indifferent to the arts or their application to ministry. This isn’t necessarily a rejection of beauty or aesthetics per se, but rather a rejection of the unintelligible nature of the work or ministry in question. On the other hand, embracing the unintelligibility of art creates an almost-gnostic atmosphere. Artists appear to have access to a mysterious power that other Christians lack, making the artist into a kind of cultural guru.

Both of these dynamics can breed mistrust among our brothers and sisters in Christ. For instance, supporters may mistrust missionaries who speak about doing art as ministry, or a church may misplace trust in charismatic artists whose technical ability outstrips their character. So we need to answer the questions: What is art? and What does it do? If we can do that, then we will better understand, evaluate, and communicate the value of art generally and art in ministry, for Christ’s sake.

Understanding our materials

Phlogiston theorists began looking inside materials trying to find the mysterious element central to their theories. Many have approached art the same way, looking in art products for a defining element such as beauty, illusiveness, or nearly anything else. But it was the chemical reaction—the burning itself, not the materials—that grouped combustible things together. The stuff inside the materials was simply the normal stuff of earth, so combustion was simply stuff of earth undergoing a chemical reaction. The truth of art runs parallel: the stuff inside art is simply the “stuff of earth” and art is stuff of earth undergoing an aesthetic reaction.

Therefore, for an artist-Christian hoping to catalyze a reaction, rightly understanding our materials is key. Even before we put fingers to instruments we are standing on holy ground, working from prepared soil. Psalm 19 tells us that the materials of earth arrive in our hands already singing of their Creator: “Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world” (Ps. 19:2–4, NLT). The base ingredients that we make into pigments and paints, alloys and inks, lights and ligatures—these very things are already pouring forth an unquenchable fountain of praise to our creator God.

Furthermore, fallen creation recognizes its state of decay and is groaning and yearning for the new creation to be realized (Rom. 8:19–23). Jesus’s blood reconciles every part of fallen creation to his lordship: “All the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross” (Col. 1:20, MSG). Already, before we have even begun the dance, the dawn rays of new creation burst forth beneath our feet.

Art is an act of interpretation

Yet, “the creation of God is unfinished,”¹ its materials and meanings buried in the stuff of God’s world, “waiting there to be unleashed in a new chorus of praise for the Lord.”² With our base material already speaking (as Psalm 19 tells us), we could then say that art-making is a work of translation. Transforming, fusing, remixing, and catalyzing stuff of earth into bits of something new is a way of interpreting the speech of creation. In other words, just as a physicist scientifically interprets God’s world, so the artist aesthetically interprets God’s world. Of course, the artist-Christian must do so in light of God’s revelation in Scripture, so we go one step further to say that our work mirrors God’s own: reimagining and remaking old creation into new creations, of which we are the firstfruits (Col. 1:20, Eph. 2:10, James 1:18). The artist-Christian aesthetically interprets God’s world after God.

Our responsibility as artists

We as artist-Christians bear aesthetic responsibility to creation itself and to the ongoing work of God in it. We must not “perjure the plants,” as Calvin Seerveld says, for “we may in no way ruin the testimony built into the Creator’s workmanship.”³ Making things that deny the reality of God’s speaking world results in artworks we often label kitsch (poor taste or quality). Of course, our artwork will be of varying quality and quantity, made by beginners or hobbyists or professionals, and may give misguided or even wrong interpretations at times. But we wholly reject “the Gnostic view of creation as inherently evil on the one hand and the romantic view of nature as an unfallen perfection on the other.”⁴ Instead we hold in creative (even redemptive) tension the now-but-not-yet, playground-and-battlefield, brokenness-and-beauty of this real world.

Nicholas Wolterstorff described art as an act of world projection.⁵ The artist creates a world of meaning that viewers, listeners, and observers inhabit for a time. (This imaginative inhabiting is why advertising works: we watch a commercial and imagine ourselves in that happy on-screen world, complete with that one particular brand of dishwasher detergent). C. S. Lewis said that one such world “baptized” his imagination and set him on the path to believing in Christ. That experience eventually became Lewis’s motivation to write The Chronicles of Narnia. This is the kind of aesthetic reaction an artist-Christian aims to catalyze.

If we look at God’s own handiwork, we can see that even now creation itself is in the midst of undergoing a world-projecting reaction. On the first pages of the Bible, we see the world that God imagined come into being. Of course the world God imagines actually becomes reality! And on the final pages of Scripture, we behold an artist’s rendering of God’s new creation, the heaven-come-to-earth world that God has imagined and is making real.

We artist-Christians, then, have the strongest possible footing for our work! We are apprenticed to the Master Craftsman, creating in his workshop and with his tools, made by him and redeemed with his own blood, to the praise of his might and mercy. Our materials already speak of their Maker, and as believers we work under the illumination of Scripture that reveals for us the true state of the world and what God is doing to bring it about. We work in harmony with our Creator; that is, the artist-Christian aesthetically interprets the world after God. Our artwork projects worlds of meaning that our audiences inhabit, where—if we are transparent enough—they may even be captured by a glimpse of the beauty and truth of Jesus.

1. Calvin Seerveld, Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Tasks (Toronto: Toronto Tuppence Press, 1980), 25.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, 14, 23.
4. Benjamin P. Myers, A Poetics of Orthodoxy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), 54.
5. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1980).