MADE TO SEE BEAUTY

What I find interesting is the way visual pleasure is singled out along with physical nourishment in Genesis 2:9 as a reason for the creation of trees. Trees were made to give pleasure to our eyes. God obviously cared about what we saw with our eyes. He made us to see and find pleasure in beautiful things.

Was this an accident on God’s part?  I don’t think so. If God is God, there has to be no mistake in the execution of his design. God could have create the world to be a purely functional place. But he didn’t. Instead he intentionally designed to provided human beings with more than what they needed to merely breathe and physically function. He gave every tree that is good for food and pleasing to the sight ( Gen 2:9 ).

In my view, precisely because God created the world to be a beautiful place, it can be also be said that human beings are designed to be creatures who are made to find pleasure in aesthetically pleasing things. In other words, the amazing ability to see beauty and find pleasure is one of the ways in which we are constituted to be who we truly are meant to be, namely, creatures who delight in a beautiful world that is freely given.

It’s not too hard to see why C.S.Lewis wrote, ‘we are far too easily pleased’ by the world.

It is indeed a good world.

Creation out of CHAOS or NOTHING?

Many say that God created the world out of ‘chaos’.

I DISAGREE and this is why.

1. Scripture clearly states that all things are made by God  ( John 1:1-4; Ps 145:8 )

2. It reduces God’s preeminence over all of reality. Because it implies that there is a reality that exists apart from God’s creative act.

3. It also reduces God’s absolute claim over all that he has made. This includes us! If God made me out of chaos, I am not a product of God’s perfect will and power, but a combination of what was there for God to play with and his subsequent creative act.

Now you may ask:  If God created everything, did he create ‘chaos’?

NO.  Isaiah 45:18 says that God did not create chaos.

This confusion in my view, has come from how we understand the Hebrew words ( tohu and bohu ) which are ‘often’ translated as ‘formless and void’. These words often have negative connotations in the O.T. as it describes Israel’s vain idol worship or places where there is no life and most often under judgement.   You can see why people don’t want to say that God created chaos and opt for a pre-existing chaos.

But, if you imagine God as an Artist it becomes easy to understand. Imagine making something with play dough.

1. Make a dough and play with it.
2. Think of what you want to make and start giving it a form.
3. Complete it by filling it in with specific details.

So, on Day 1-3 God makes a ‘formless and void’ material reality and starts giving it a form. Then, on Day 3-6 he starts to fill this material world with plants, stars, animals and people in it  ( Genesis 1 )

GOD IS GOD!

He is the Lord of everything in our world and not just some parts of it.

He is the Sovereign Creator who creates out of freedom, without any constraints.

This is so important because without this truth, we cannot appreciate God’s desire to reclaim his world!

What’s the point of making pictures when they will all burn away?

One question which plagued my heart in my 2^nd-3^rd year at Sydney College of the Arts was : What is the point of making art when they will burn away? No one imposed this question on me. I asked it myself as a result of the way in which I was growing as a Christian. My answer back then was : no point. I dropped art all together  and entered into paid-ministry. This was not the only reason why I went down that path. There were lots of reasons. Good ones and not so helpful ones.

Last week, I realized how inconsistent this question was.  Asking this question is like saying, ‘What is the point of eating when you will die anyway?’  I’ve never met a person who says or thinks this. Rather Christians almost always ‘embrace’ food, because of their calling to give thanks to God for his provision and to share it with others.  It powerfully reminds me of the invitation to sit at the festive banquet of the Lamb ( Rev 19:9 ).

Eating is a gift from God. It sustains our lives and though, our physical bodies may waste away, we will continue to eat in thankfulness and rejoice in the invitation of God to join in his feast and grasp hold of his promise to create us anew with new  glorious bodies.

So, instead of ‘What’s the point of making pictures when they will burn away?’ The question I should have asked myself is : Jesus is the Lord of heaven and earth. He is the Lord of my life. Then, what does that mean for my Art practice and all the other things that happen in my life?

What is Art?

Towards the end of my Fine Arts degree at Sydney University I started to ask myself this question : What is Art? After I graduated University, I was perplexed that I actually didn’t know the meaning of Art. I felt pathetic during that time of questioning but I think it was a genuinely good question that I asked without knowing where or who to get the answer from. Last year, after 8-9 years of confusion, I finally started to pull the threads together.

This is what I think Art is : It is the product of human creativity, which is the capacity to relate things in the realm of creation in an intensified and harmonious way, so as to bring about objects or situations that are new for the good of humanity and the rest of the created order.

What do you think?

Christian milk, Christian coffee & Christian art?

I often come across people who ask me : Do you make ‘Christian art’ ? I never know what to say. Partly because the answer is a “ No! My work is not Christian. I don’t draw the cross nor paste small fonted bible verses on the canvas”. Yet I also want to say “Yes! My work is thoroughly Christian in that I make sure that my work corresponds to the reality of me being in Christ”.

A couple of weeks ago I met a Christian person who said that he owns Christian art. His comment made me think hard about the word ‘Christian art’ especially because I think he attached a positive or rather superior value towards what he called Christian art as opposed to art that is unrelated or opposed to Christianity. This way of thinking seems quite natural to all of us as we all talk about Christian music, Christian movies, Christian stories in conversations.

As I was thinking about it, I asked myself : Why don’t we ever ask farmers whether they make Christian milk? Or Baristas, Christian coffee, especially when coffee making is seen as an art form? I take it that this is because these objects do not have the ability to communicate truths of the gospel in a logical, intelligent and understandable way.

However, I want to suggest that attaching the word ‘Christian’ only to things that explicitly outline the logic of the gospel undermines the fact that,

Objects which do not explicitly tell the logic of the Gospel are

1. Firstly, capable of being Christian, that is related properly towards the Son and thus to the Father in the Spirit. Jesus says in Luke 19:40 that if the disciples didn’t praise God the rocks would cry out! The rocks which are mute objects are seen to be related to Christ in such a way that they are able to praise him.
2. Secondly, they are also able to point people to the glory and praise of God. Psalm 19:1 says that the heavens are telling the glory of God. Also in 1 Peter 3:1 the wife who has an unbelieving husband is to conduct her life in a way that is fitting to the Christian story so that her husband may believe in God without a word being preached by the wife.

So when someone asks me : Do you make Christian art ?

I will say: I make art as a Christian in ‘prayer’ so that somehow perhaps in ways I won’t understand in the here and now, God’s Spirit will enable others and myself to give praise to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Hoping For A New World That Is Physical

I met a friend in the city a couple of weeks ago and she asked me this question last week: You say that heaven is going to be a physical place, but does it make a difference for me now?

This conversation made me realize that it is one thing to state the truth and another to state the implications.  I don’t think I answered my friend’s question at all. I simply restated the truth again as I told her why I believe that to be true. I said, ”The very fact that Jesus’ Death and Resurrection was in the flesh as one of us means that the new world which he promises is going to be a world that is physical.”

So does the fact that the New Creation ( heaven ) will be a physical place have any significance for us now? On the surface the answer seems like a ‘no’, because at the end of the day whether the New Creation is physical or non-physical, all that matters is whether I am accepted into that new world or not. But I think this is a dangerous way to think and live. Because it doesn’t recognize the reality from which you were redeemed from and for. We are redeemed from being part of a physical world that is decaying and redeemed for a physical world that is full of beauty and life.

Hypothetically speaking, if the New Creation is not physical we might as well have faith in God and long to die. Because, there really is no point in living, working, relating, resting in this world in the present when you know you will depart from it one day. Our life becomes pointless simply because there is no connection between what I do, say and eat to what the new world will be. Especially more so, when you know that entering that world is outside of your means.

Rather, as people whose hope is bound up with the New Creation that is physical we ought to live out that reality in the here and now as God works in us to work out our salvation. This new reality is a reality that is anchored in rightly relating to God the Father through the Son and in the Spirit. This is tremendously exciting because we not only wait for the New Creation to come but we usher it in by living out that reality now, in our work, in our speech, in our feelings, in our minds and in all spheres of human activity. When we live out that reality, we are not mimicking and practicing like a shadow what the New Creation might be, but we are actually bringing into concrete reality into the present the New Creation. It then becomes a special moment for us to taste, see and feel the New Creation and for those who aren’t part of that new world it becomes a powerful invitation to join.

Isn’t it great that we can taste and see the New Creation that God is creating right now in our world? It’s exciting! Praise be to Earth’s redeemer who wept with people in a dark world and laid down his life to give them life yet again ( John 11:35 )!

Being Affected…

So, I’ve change the name of this blog from ‘Touching Earth’ to ‘Embracing Earth’.  Let me tell you why..

We struggle to do well the most significant and obvious thing : relating. We not only fail to properly relate to persons but to the  impersonal ‘stuff’ of our world. In the past I have failed,  by neglecting to relate properly to created things and therefore in hindsight I can see how I’ve  missed out on the richness of  what it means to be a human being living in  an earthy world.

Neglecting to relate properly to the  stuff of our world is detrimental to our personal existence on so many levels. Here are some: epistemology, theology and our personhood.  Epistemology suffers because  we know things in and through our world.  Last year, my Supervisor David Höhne introduced me to a guy called Polanyi. Polanyi offers a helpful way of seeing how humanity interacts with the world.  He presents us with a dynamic and holistic picture of a person as a compound of sense and reason, action and passion, acting upon the world not simply to dominate and control but so as to receive. Interaction with the world, then  becomes a  dialogue through which we discover things about the world, about its creator and its dwellers.

Theology suffers because creation itself is so bound up (contingent) with the God who made it and redeems it. It would be fair to say that theology that is alienated from the sphere of redemption, namely creation,  is inherently opposed to the underlying logic of the  gospel of the Resurrected Incarnate Son. For, it is only in the Incarnate Son who gathers up in himself the whole of the created order that Creation finds its purpose and goal (Col 1:16).

Also, our personhood suffers because we were created  to dwell in the world to live within  the structures of the world as God  placed them in the first place to discover things about God, others and the rest of the created order by being in proper relation to it.

This why I think embracing is a better to word to convey what I want to communicate. It not only says that we touch our world but it also says that we are affected in our being  by it as well.  Relations by definition is always reciprocal. When you see or make a piece of art work, when you garden, when you eat, when you become a victim of evil, even when you sin and are sinned by someone it affects who you are.