Review - 'Jesus: The Man Who Lives'

 

Jesus, The Man Who Lives by Malcolm Muggeridge (Creed & Culture Books, 2026)

Melanie McDonagh’s Converts is a fascinating account of Catholic converts in the twentieth century from amongst artists, writers and intellectuals. Although, Malcolm Muggeridge was a later convert and doesn’t feature in McDonagh’s book, he was nevertheless part of that significant movement of the Spirit and was probably the first of those eminent Catholic converts that I read in any depth.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, as a young Evangelical Christian, I read a lot of Muggeridge’s books alongside the likes of Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker. My interest was primarily with those who related Christian faith to wider issues albeit, at the time, within a relatively conservative framework. My bookcases still house copies of Jesus Rediscovered, Something Beautiful for God, A Third Testament, Christ and the Media, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and In a Valley of this Restless Mind, but not, surprisingly, Jesus, the Man Who Lives. It may be that, as books were harder to come by at that time and available funds were lower, I thought that by reading Jesus Rediscovered I had already encountered Muggeridge’s key ideas when it came to Jesus.

While that would not have been entirely inaccurate, what I would have missed out on at the time was, in the words of Sally Muggeridge (Malcolm’s niece), a skilfully constructed ‘portrait of Jesus’ ‘from the perspective of an artist’. Muggeridge was, first and foremost, a great writer in his ‘uniquely free journalistic style’ which meant that he ‘engaged in conversation with his reader’. He possessed the gift of composing memorable phrases – ‘God Incarnate was Jesus, and Jesus Resurrected was God’ - while also being adept at the interweaving of engaged commentary with journalistic description and the apposite piling up of similes in ways that overwhelm emotionally and aesthetically. All these skills came into play in this intriguing profile of Christ, his incarnation, death and resurrection.

Peter Hitchens, who provides the Introduction to this Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, situates our reading of the book in relation to the ‘strong, reasoned and spirited counterattack’ that followed the “new atheist” assault on faith and has subsequently ‘revived interest in religion among the young’. As a child of his time, some of Muggeridge’s commentary relates primarily to the issues and affairs of his day, and some (particularly discussion of mental health) uses now obsolete or unhelpful language. However, that is not where the burden of this book lies, and so Hitchens’ point is a fair one flagging the potential of this revised edition to contribute to contemporary debate.

Muggeridge structures the book as a free-flowing meditation on the life of Christ covering his incarnation, three years of ministry, and death and resurrection in three chapters. The respective length of each indicates something of where Muggeridge’s interests primarily lie. Although the crucifixion and resurrection are the ‘climax of the story of Jesus, the point to which everything has been leading’, his account of both and their significance is actually relatively brief.

This means he realises the significance of the incarnation itself which, to use the frame developed by Samuel Wells, is about God simply being with us as opposed to doing with us or doing for us. In The End of Christendom Muggeridge neatly summarises the argument made more expansively in Jesus, the Man Who Lives:

‘Thanks to the great mercy and marvel of the Incarnation, the cosmic scene is resolved into a human drama. God reaches down to relate himself to man, and man reaches up to relate himself to God. Time looks into eternity and eternity into time, making now always and always now. Everything is transformed by this subtle drama of the Incarnation, God’s special parable for fallen man in a fallen world.’

His great hymn to the significance and impact of the Incarnation was written in response to what he called ‘the fathomless inanity of D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died’ and the draining of the New Testament of ‘its transcendental elements’ as found in Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus. Ever the journalist and satirist, Muggeridge needed a target to inspire the taking flight of his engaged prose.

Although Muggeridge became closely associated, through initiatives such as the Festival of Light, with a reactionary and conservative Christian agenda, this was not principally how he came to faith or where his faith interests primarily lie. The examples provided by saints and mystics who genuinely followed in Christ’s footsteps, whether contemporary, as with Mother Teresa, or literary, as with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, were what inflamed his incipient faith. He writes that it is on behalf of the ‘Holy Words’ of the Gospels:

‘that majestic buildings like Chartres Cathedral have been constructed, and that great saints like St. Francis of Assisi have so joyously and wholeheartedly dedicated their lives to the service of God and their fellow men. To the greater glory of these words Bach composed, El Greco painted. St. Augustine laboured at his City of God and Pascal at his Pensées; in them a Bunyan found his inspiration in describing a Pilgrim’s journey through the wilderness of this world, and a Sir Thomas More comfort on his way to the scaffold. In our own time, they enabled a Dietrich Bonhoeffer to go serenely to his death, and a Simone Weil to derive solace and enlightenment from the affliction that was her lot.’

Here, in summary, is the argument later made more expansively by Tom Holland in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, that ‘everything truly great in our art, our literature, our music’ comes from ‘the moral, spiritual, and intellectual creativity’ which derives from the way ‘that was charted for us in the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ’.

Although his ‘despair at the decline of morality in a new age of relative affluence’ endeared him to those of a more conservative, even literalist or fundamentalist mindset, such supporters cannot have been reading Muggeridge’s actual writings on the Gospels, which were often – as with his musings on the role of Judas or the literalism of the resurrection – light years away from the established views of fundamentalism. Muggeridge’s realisation earlier in his career of ‘just how often the truth is suppressed’, which Hitchens notes as a key moment in his life and thought, led him to challenge such suppression wherever he saw it. As a result, he rarely and wholeheartedly identified with any group or movement. This quality is a part of what continues to make his prose worth reading, both in its enthusiasms and challenges.

Sally Muggeridge, in her Afterword, accurately summarises her uncle’s achievements both as a ‘controversialist’ and as a writer with ‘a unique literary style’ able to ‘write, lecture, and broadcast about faith and ethical issues’ in ways ‘to which many people found they could personally relate and respond’. Jesus, the Man Who Lives is rightly reckoned his masterpiece. One that, as well as ‘providing a fresh insight into the life of Jesus Christ and its transcendent meaning’, also enables us to ‘learn a lot about its author as an ardent convert’.

Muggeridge argued that ‘Every writer, however lowly, must seek above all else to produce words that are alive, in the hope that they, too, may go on existing gracefully and truthfully’. He then stated, ‘How much more so when they relate to the Word which became flesh in the person of Jesus!’ This is Muggeridge’s intent and achievement with Jesus, the Man who Lives, to have crafted a poetic portrait of Jesus that imparts ‘heartfelt truth’ in ways that continue to touch the lives of many, whether public figures or ordinary men and women around the world.

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James MacMillan: Tu es Petrus.

Church Times - Book review: Re-Digging Art’s Foundations: Essays on gospel and art by David Thistlethwaite

My latest book review for Church Times is on Re-Digging Art’s Foundations: Essays on gospel and art by David Thistlethwaite:

'DAVID THISTLETHWAITE is an artist who has also studied art history, researched art theory, and dealt in Old Master and Modern British art for a leading Bond Street gallery. This collection of essays contains material that spans his career and adds to the ideas explored in his earlier book The Art of God and the Religions of Art.

The essays, summarising Thistlethwaite’s main thesis regarding art, tell the story of how those ideas developed as his career played out. Thistlethwaite writes out of an appreciation for the approaches to art originally developed by Francis Schaeffer and Hans R. Rookmaaker. These aim to identify and criticise the world-view expressed through the work of artists and to encourage art that reflects a Christian world-view.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Cliff Richard - Up In Canada.

Art and faith: Decades of engagement - Introduction

Growing up in the 1970s as a child who was a voracious reader, an aspiring writer, and an attendee at various Baptist, Charismatic, Church of England and Independent churches, I was someone that was actively looking for examples of Christian artists of all stripes, types, genres and styles. They were hard to find.

At the time, I knew about C.S. Lewis and the Inklings and was reading Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker. My main sources of information, however, were Buzz Magazine and (in the 80’s) the Greenbelt Festival’s Strait, for which I later started to write. These had a primary focus on music, but I remember discovering, for example, the poetry of John Berryman through an article in Strait.

I’m grateful for all that I was able to encounter and enjoy at that time but, 50 years later, I’m also aware of how much more there was to discover and how few routes to that information seemed available at the time. All creatives need role models, not to slavishly copy, but in order to see how the work that originally inspired other artists was transmuted and changed to create something new. It is that process of transmutation and transformation that inspires and from which learning derives for one’s own creativity.

The internet has greatly increased our ability to search out such examples and role models and this technological development has gone hand in hand with an attitude shift in the Church and the Arts that no longer sees such a separation between the two as was, at an earlier time, commonly perceived to be the case. In the world of the Arts, this has reflected a post-modern focus on over-looked and under-valued stories, while in the Church there has been a breaking down of the distinction between sacred and secular. Inevitably, these shifts have only been partial while still opening up much fruitful ground for research, collaboration and discovery.

I have long felt the need of a listing demonstrating something of the breadth of the engagement that there has been in practice between the Arts and religion within the modern period and into our contemporary experience. This is because academic research tends towards the specific rather than the big picture. At one stage I had discussions with Pieter Kwant of Piquant Editions about an A-Z that would provide a summary overview, but, more recently, have thought that a decade-by-decade listing might provide a fuller sense of the range and variety of initiatives and approaches that have been in play.

In the posts that will follow in this series, that is what I will seek to provide. Inevitably, these lists will be partial as there is much that I don’t know – I’m still regularly discovering new artists from the past for the first time – and the lists reflect my interests and biases. As such, the primary, but not exclusive, focus is on artists that have engaged with the Christian tradition.

My listing begins in the 1880s as that decade is generally taken as the beginning of modern art. However, in terms of my interests the Pre-Raphaelites and the beginning of the Catholic Literary Revival precede my chosen starting point and I have, therefore, sought to reflect that in some of the early entries.

The idea is to provide a brief introduction to the artists and initiatives that were prominent in each decade to enable further research. I am seeking to provide information that will be a help to any who today feel as I did in the 70’s. In that spirit, I would welcome suggestions for additions or amendments to these listings. I will add to the listings that I post initially as I am able, rather than on a regular and consistent basis. 

When possible, I’ll also aim to provide a list of books and sites that seek to provide overviews of sorts. Much of my writing for Artlyst, ArtWay, and Church Times seeks to highlight aspects of the hidden heritage to which I am seeking to provide an entry point through these listings. Other series of posts on this blog have also sought to share similar information and ideas. To find links and indexes to these series and posts click here.

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The Killers - Running Towards A Place.

Preparing for the new thing God was doing

Here's my reflection for yesterday's lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields, on the Feast of the Birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1. 57-66, 80):

Our eldest daughter is expecting and she and her husband can’t agree on a name for their son. It’s not an unusual situation for the parents of a new born child. For Zechariah and Elizabeth it should have been relatively straightforward, as the culture of the time was for the child to be named after the grandfather.

Names were kept in the family and handed down from grandfather to grandson. This was part of a culture where the firstborn son inherited all that the family owned, whilst also being responsible for maintaining the family unit. That included the role or work undertaken by the father and grandfather before him, in this case as one of the priests at the Temple.

The naming of John was problematic because it signified something different was happening; a break with tradition. The name John was not in the family line and he would not become a priest like his father and grandfather before him; instead becoming a prophet preparing the way for the new thing that God was doing in the world in sending his Son to be one of us and save us from ourselves.

The new thing that God was doing in the world entailed a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit so, in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel we read of Gabriel promising that John will be filled with the Holy Spirit from before his birth and of his growing up strong in the Spirit. The Spirit comes upon Mary at the Annunciation, Elizabeth is filled with the Spirit at Mary’s arrival (and blesses her as a result), and Zechariah is filled with the Holy Spirit at John’s circumcision, prophesying about John and Jesus.

This fresh move of the Holy Spirit comes after a period of over 400 years during which there was no revelation from God by the Spirit. That had fulfilled the prophecy of Micah: “Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision, and darkness to you, without revelation. The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them” (3:6). The new thing that God was about to do was not possible without the preparatory work of the Holy Spirit or without there being a working together of the principal characters with the Holy Spirit.

Preparation is also seen in the upbringing of John through his separation for God’s service which involved the rejection of wine and other strong drink and time spent in the wilderness, where he wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. His calling as the one preparing the way for Jesus involved a particular kind of preparation, which may or may not have been individual to John, but which was the right preparation for the calling on his life.

What can we take from these reflections on the early life of John the Baptist and how might they bite for us? First, we can reflect on the call on our lives. That is not so dissimilar to that of John. He was preparing others to encounter Jesus. We are essentially called to do the same. When I was a young Christian I read writers like Francis Schaeffer who talked about the importance of pre-Evangelism. This involves discussion of our worldviews and the extent we live according to our beliefs, whatever those beliefs may be. Exploring inconsistencies in our lifestyles or inadequacies in our beliefs opens people to the possibility of the Holy Spirit working in their lives. None of us are evangelists. It is only God the Spirit who can bring people back into relationship with God through Jesus. Yet, like John, we can prepare people to encounter Jesus for themselves.

Second, the Holy Spirit was moving in a new way through the birth of John and Jesus, and Elizabeth, Zechariah and Mary were among those who discerned it and responded. Like them, we can seek to discern what the Holy Spirit is doing and how the Spirit is moving within our own day and time. When Jesus opened the scriptures and read ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me’ that anointing was for the bringing of good news to the poor, release for captives, recovery of sight for those who were blind, freeing of the oppressed and proclamation of the Jubilee when land and property was returned to those in debt. Where we see these things happening today, we can discern the work of the Holy Spirit.

Third, John needed a specific form of preparation for his ministry which involved him making commitments, not generally made by others. That is the approach we use here within the Nazareth Community as its members commit themselves for a year at a time to silence, sacraments, study, sharing, service, Sabbath and staying with. This kind of commitment, whether the Nazareth rule of life or something different can be a helpful practice and discipline enabling us to live out and deepen the calling on our lives.

As we reflect on our calling, the needs of our world and our practices as Christians, it may well be that John the Baptist is the role model in the Gospels to whom we most need to turn.

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Godspell - Prepare Ye The Way Of The Lord.

Start:Stop - Every person is a special kind of artist

Bible reading

Then Moses said to the Israelites: See, the Lord has called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; he has filled him with divine spirit, with skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft. And he has inspired him to teach, both him and Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. He has filled them with skill to do every kind of work done by an artisan or by a designer or by an embroiderer in blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and in fine linen, or by a weaver—by any sort of artisan or skilled designer. (Exodus 35. 30 – 35)

Meditation

The first person in the Bible to be described as having been filled by the Holy Spirit was an artist - Bezalel, who worked on the Tabernacle. As the first Spirit-filled person mentioned in the Bible, Bezalel, was chosen by God to be skilled, knowledgeable and able to teach in all kinds of craftsmanship. So, to be biblically inspired is to make or create.

Creativity, this passage suggests, is a gift of God. Ultimately, creativity is a gift of God because God is creative and we are made in his image. He is the Creator, the one who said "Let there be" and life came to be; the One whose glory is proclaimed by the heavens and the work of whose hands is proclaimed by the skies. We are made in the image of the Creator God and therefore we too are creative. We are all creations of the Creator, created in His image, to be creative!

God is the ultimate creator, who created from nothing, and we are sub-creators, able to, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, "rearrange the unalterable and indestructible units of matter in the universe and build them up into new forms." As J. John has said, 'Creativity has been built into every one of us: it is part of our design. Each of us lives less of the life God intended for us when we choose not to live out the creative gifts God gave us.'

It is easy to think that this only applies to certain chosen people who have the aptitude for creativity – to think that we should all strive to be 'artists' in the sense of being musicians, novelists, poets, painters etc - but that is not the witness of the Bible, taken as a whole. God's Spirit gives each person gifts, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12, but the gifts that we are given differ from person to person. This means that we are all creative but in differing ways. Edith Schaeffer, in her useful book Hidden Art, says that this does not mean that we should all strive to be 'artists':

"But it does mean that we should consciously do something about it. There should be a practical result of the realization that we have been created in the image of the Creator of beauty ... the fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical area of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than in a gradual drying up of creativity."

She continues by writing that, "it may be helpful to consider some of the possibilities all of us have for living artistically, but which are often ignored." This is what she calls 'Hidden Art'; the development of our talents (whatever they are) and their use in a way which will enrich other people's lives. By doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

God’s image in us means that all people are creative in some way. A creator God has created creative people! Therefore, whether we’re writing, cooking, painting, composing, acting or taking photographs we can all use our creativity to learn from God and express our worship to him. As the saying goes, ‘The artist is not a special kind of person, every person is a special kind of artist.’

Intercessions

Creator God, we remember and give thanks for those who pour their souls into music loud and soft, those who put pigment to surface, carve wood and stone and marble, who work base metals into beauty, those building upwards from the earth toward heaven, those who put thought to paper by computer and by pen; the poets who delve, the playwrights who analyze and proclaim, the dreamers-up of narrative, all those who work with the light and shadows of film, actors moved by Spirit and dancers moving through space. Lord, remember your artists. Have mercy upon them and remember with compassion all those that reflect the good, the ill, the strengths and the weaknesses of the human spirit.

Creative God, fill us with your Spirit that we might use your creativity in our lives and work.

Teach us, Lord, to use wisely the time which You have given us and to work well without wasting a second. Teach us to profit from our past mistakes without falling into a gnawing doubt. Teach us to anticipate our projects without worry and to imagine the work without despair if it should turn out differently. Teach us to unite haste and slowness, serenity and ardour, zeal and peace. Help us at the beginning of the work when we are weakest. Help us in the middle of the work when our attention must be sustained. In all the work of our hands, bestow Your Grace so that it can speak to others and our mistakes can speak to us alone. Keep us in the hope of perfection, without which we would lose heart, yet keep us from achieving perfection, for surely we would be lost in arrogance. Let me never forget that all knowledge is in vain unless there is work. And all work is empty unless there is love. And all love is hollow unless it binds us both to others and to You.

Creative God, fill us with your Spirit that we might use your creativity in our lives and work.

God, we are truly bearers of the light from above, within and around us. Help us to be bearers of that light to others who seek a vision of the goodness and beauty of Your Creation. We ask that you help us and our creative work to be witnesses to your love, your kindness, and your care for us. Continue to inspire us with the gift of your imagination.

Creative God, fill us with your Spirit that we might use your creativity in our lives and work.

The Blessing

Bless all who create in your image, O God of creation. Pour your Spirit upon them that their hearts may sing and their works be fulfilling, and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.

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Arcade Fire - Ready To Start.

Restoration engraving in Bankside exhibition

An engraving by Peter S. Smith which was commissioned for St John's Leytonstone to celebrate the completion of major restoration works to the church can be seen in the forthcoming Society of Wood Engravers exhibition at the Bankside Gallery from 27th January to 9th February.

The Society of Wood Engravers exists to promote wood engraving. It is the principal organisation and rallying point for those interested in the subject; it also maintains a lively interest in other forms of relief printmaking. Essentially, it is an artists' exhibiting society. There are around seventy members, practising artists who have been elected or invited to membership on merit.

Simon Brett has written that Peter S. Smith was:

"among a group of like-minded young artists who sat at the feet of the Dutch Calvinist art historian Hans Rookmaaker. Rookmaaker (1922-77), himself part of Francis Schaeffer's evangelical L'Abri movement, brought a deep understanding of contemporary art to bear on what a Christian might do in what then seemed like cultural end-times."

Brett writes that Smith "has always been one of the few artists to use wood engraving for a truly personal and genuinely contemporary vision, untrammelled by even the best conventions of the medium."

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Iona - Let Your Glory Fall.

Steve Scott dialogues 5: Art & Evangelism

These extracts come from a dialogue on art and evangelism as part of the scoping of an arts project:

SS: I'm guessing `evangelism' in its most comprehensive (and appropriate) sense. An arts event that models/demonstrates core values (both on the canvas and in the community), international/multicultural alongside local expressions ... all rooted in the singularity and supremacy of Christ and his work. Artists can talk about what they do and why they do it. An event that attracts people to and (therefore is supportive of) the local church(es) .... those tasked and commissioned and empowered to be ongoing salt and light in the community long after `we' are gone. Churches proclaim, demonstrate and live out the gospel in the local context. An event (and conversations up to/and around) that `evangelizes' the artists/participants i.e. deepens their own thinking and faith in regard to their callings and practice. We learn more about the love of God `Together with all the saints.'


JE: I don't think the Arts are essentially evangelistic. I think the Arts can be used to communicate explicit messages, as occurs in advertising for example, but that doing this narrows their impact to the specific message being communicated and thereby screens out of the artwork the nuances and depth of meaning which characterise truly great art. In other words, evangelism uses the Arts for its own purposes instead of allowing the Arts to communicate on their own terms. I would, therefore, prefer that, in working together, we create something that allows the art created to speak on its own terms rather than packaging it in a box marked evangelism.


SS: I heartily agree, especially in the light of Jonathan's insights and concerns about`art' as an evangelical tool being on a par with advertising. Here's why. In my experience this approach actually reduces the person and work of Jesus, and then tries to sell this on.


I think the role(s) art can play in the evangelistic efforts of the local church are more `roadclearing' (John the Baptist) and seed planting. I also think it is legitimate and appropriate for an artist to have strong convictions about why they make art, and to make wise use of any afforded opportunity to speak out about those convictions ..... especially in a multifaith and multicultural context.


Because it's my conviction that an artist in the spirit will have one eye on the opportunity to speak (and listen) one eye on the humanity of the listeners and one eye on the long term implications of the relationships being built that moment. So one aspect of our inquiry becomes: how can artists of faith engage in practices conducive to honouring Christ and supporting the best efforts of those organisations (churches?) mandated/anointed to both proclaim and live out the gospel faithfully in a multifaith and multicultural society? The apostle Paul reminded the Corinthians (some of `Paul', some of `Peter' or `Appollos' .... each exercising different teaching styles and foci) that God appointed (and anointed) those that planted seeds, those that watered, and those that brought in the harvest all equally. I would never deny an artist (so led) any role in any phase of that process, but by the same token I would be wary of suggesting that art is only valid as a platform or a pulpit. The New Testament has many suggestive images and metaphors for the different phases of God's church building process, and it is among those I see both hospitality and opportunity for the arts.


Another inquiry: (so) what role can we play in helping artists of faith towards best practice? Discussions like this one are sorely needed as a way of encouraging `one another to (genuinely) good works, even more as we see the day approaching' as the author of Hebrews puts it. My favorite piece of `evangelical art' is the Gospel of John. My current, second favorite (constantly changing) is the song `Ambulance' by a music group called Eisley (its a video on youtube) breathtakingly clear, simple, and yet it's a beautiful, haunting song.


JE: One person has said that art simply by being has the ability to speak to people about God and wants to provoke thought about spiritual issues by presenting Biblical truths in a visual format and Christianity as a living and relevant faith using culturally relevant delivery methods. Steve has written of an arts event that models/ demonstrates core values (both on the canvas and in the community), international/multicultural alongside local expressions ... all rooted in the singularity and supremacy of Christ and his work. Artists talking about what they do and why they do it. An event that attracts people to and (therefore is supportive of) the local church(es) .... those tasked and commissioned and empowered to be ongoing salt and light in the community long after `we' are gone. An event (and conversations up to/and around) that deepens the thinking and faith of artists and participants alike in regard to their callings and practice.

I think these are actually very similar visions and one's which I can endorse. However, they are evangelistic in the very broadest sense and not in the sense of an evangelistic event where every aspect of the event is designed to bring people to a point of decision and commitment during that event. Steve calls what we are talking about seed planting, Francis Schaeffer would have spoken of it as pre-evangelism. Drawing on the writings of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy I would prefer to talk in terms of creating epiphanies for people of the reality of life and their lives. Whatever we call it, I think we need to acknowledge that whatever Arts event we organise, while it would clearly point to Jesus, it will not be explicitly and specifically designed to bring those that come to the event to faith there and then but instead will stimulate thought and reflection opening up faith as a possibility for exploration. I don't think arts events can and should do more than that in terms of evangelism.


SS: What I sense going on here in our work at listening to the vision that is emerging, is something that I believe would constitute a teaching and empowering moment for all the artists and others that became involved in such an enterprise. As we clarify the role(s) of art, both in planting seeds in local cultures, but also in the concerns of communicating faith and value across cultures, I sense the emergence of a conversation thatcould have long term implications for what artists/artisans do in the future. There WAS a `position paper' that came out of Lausanne 04 on the arts ... and it was all worthy, well argued and comprehensive etc ... but I'm wondering if part of our brief might be to nudge the conversation a little further along ...


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Athlete - Chances.

The Art of Life

In one translation of Exodus 31. 6 God says, "To all who have an aptitude for crafts I've given the skills." Creativity, this passage suggests, is a gift of God.

This phrase however can sound as though it is only certain chosen people who have the aptitude for creativity but that is not the witness of the Bible, taken as a whole. God's Spirit gives each person gifts, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12, but the gifts that we are given differ from person to person. This means that we are all creative but in differing ways. As the Archbishop of Canterbury has said, "artists are special people and every person is a special kind of artist."

Ultimately, creativity is a gift of God because God is creative and we are made in his image. He is the Creator, the one who said "Let there be" and life came to be; the One whose glory is proclaimed by the heavens and the work of whose hands is proclaimed by the skies. We are made in the image of the Creator God and therefore we too are creative.

God is the ultimate creator, who created from nothing, and we are sub-creators, able to, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, "rearrange the unalterable and indestructible units of matter in the universe and build them up into new forms."

Does this mean that we should all strive to be 'artists' in the sense of being musicians, novelists, poets, painters etc? Edith Schaeffer, in her useful book Hidden Art, answers that question by saying no, of course not:

"But it does mean that we should consciously do something about it. There should be a practical result of the realization that we have been created in the image of the Creator of beauty ... the fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical area of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than in a gradual drying up of creativity."

She continues by writing that, "it may be helpful to consider some of the possibilities all of us have for living artistically, but which are often ignored." This is what she calls 'Hidden Art'; the development of our talents (whatever they are) and their use in a way which will enrich othr people's lives. By doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

Just as the expressions of our creativity will be diverse because we all have differing gifts and differing contexts for the use of those gifts, so creativity itself often also results from diversity. This is increasingly being recognised within society as, for example, in the recent sixth Brussels Debate where participants argued that cultural diversity enlarges and values the different ways of seeing and doing things in other cultures and that this opennes gives the capacity to select and absorb elements of other cultures, helping to produce new ways of thinking, seeing, imagining and creating.

Each photo in my weekly Windows on the world series (see examples above) aims to tell a similar story. Each photo has both a foreground object which acts as a frame through which we glimpse something beyond. This mirrors the way in which each of us view life both from our own individual perspective and are able to see and engage with the perspective of others and, even, of God. These photos are, therefore, an attempt to see ordinary scenes from different perspectives and through fresh eyes. This is what art at its best does for us and, through seeing differently, we are opened up to new possibilities.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has argued that human being is possibility; that we are constantly changing by constantly exploring the possibilities of who we are and who we can become. This exploration occurs as we imagine possibilities that help us clarify the essence of who we are. We come to know the essence of a thing by exploring its various possibilities through imaginative variations. The philosopher Edmund Husserl gave an example of this in identifying the 'Essence' of a table. By 'free imaginative variation' we can alter the form, colour or material of the table. WE can also imagine possible uses of a table: we can eat a meal on it; we can write letters or do a jigsaw puzzle on it; we can stand on it to fix the lightbulb etc. By then looking to see what there is in common among the various examples, we can determine the essence of the table.

We see this happening too in what is otherwise a rather strange Bible story. In Genesis 2. 18-25, God brings all the animals in the Garden of Eden to Adam for him to name and, at the end of this naming process, Adam recognises Eve as his soulmate. The key to this story is that names in ancient times described the essence of the thing that was named. So Adam looks and listens in order to understand the essence of each different creature and then creates a name that reflects that essence. By so doing, he also sees what is different between himself and the creatures, so that when he sees Eve he is able to immediately recognise her as his soulmate.

This is also what I understand the Bible as doing for us. The Bible is a diverse book. In fact, it is more of a library than a book; a library of 66 different books containing biography, drama, history, law, letters, prophecy, poetry and proverbs. Mike Riddell calls it "a collection of bits" assembled to form God's home page while Mark Oakley uses a more poetic image in writing of the Bible as "the best example of a collage of God that we have." They use these images because the Bible contains, as Oakley writes, "different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers" drawn "from disparate era, cultures and authors" which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states: "The bits don't fit together very well - sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history."

The point is that the Bible gives us many different perspectives on God and on human beings. These different perspectives produce new ways of thinking, seeing, imagining and creating in us. As we see God and human beings from different perspectives and through fresh eyes we are opened up to new possibilities. As we see and imagine possibilities we have the same experience as Adam and come to know ourselves better - we see the essence of who we are - and we change to become more like the people that God created us to be.

This is living creatively, living artisically, and it is something each of us are called to do and be. The art of life is to be open to the diversity of life in order to see life's possibilities from different perspectives and, as we compare and contrast these possibilities, to identify the essence of who we have been created by God to be and to become. By understanding ourselves and by responding to the essence of otherws, we are able to develop and use our talents for the enrichment of other people's lives. In doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

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The Call - Uncovered.