Creature or Creator?

It is not that they do not know the truth about God; indeed he has made it quite plain to them. For since the beginning of the world the invisible attributes of God, e.g. his eternal power and divinity, have been plainly discernible through things which he has made and which are commonly seen and known... (Romans 1:19,20 Phillips translation)
It's a long held understanding in Christian teaching that one of the ways in which man shares in God's image is that he creates; and certainly one of the things man creates is art. Sacred themes are so dominant in the history of the art of Western civilization that they far outnumbered secular subjects for many centuries. The Renaissance in Southern Europe and the Reformation in Northern Europe brought the most pronounced changes in this regard, but with different outcomes as argued by Francis Schaeffer in How Should We Then Live? Both still held God as the sovereign creator, and celebrated the sacred with perhaps the most superlative craft, artistic achievement, and beauty ever produced by human hands. See, for example, from Southern Europe, Carrivaggio's Madonna of the Rosary:


And from Northern (Reformation) Europe, Rembrandt's Abraham and Isaac:



However, Southern Europe perpetuated the secular/sacred divide taught by prior generations of theologians, followed the humanist philosophical thread of the Renaissance by such philosophers as Erasmus that eventually lead to the centrality of man in the Enlightenment. The Reformation theologians, by placing scripture in ascendancy over tradition and the hierarchy of the clergy, taught a worldview that denied a secular/sacred divide, that instead affirmed that all vocations were in equal service to God. In this view all representations of God's beautiful creation, that through the skill of the painter celebrated that creation, were acts of worship. So then even the domestic scenes of Vermeer, who, although he had converted to his wife's Catholicism nevertheless painted for a reformed christian clientele, were seen as glorifying to God. Or Albrecht Durer's Young Hare



is of equivalent reverence as his Praying Hands.




As the atheistic philosophers of the Enlightenment began to exert more and more influence in the circles of the intelligentsia of Europe, some of the first to reflect this thinking empirically in their work were artists. Detached from God and any consideration of his creation, the underlying motive was no longer a celebration of beauty and the extant creation, but a celebration of the artist's inner vision. The goal was no longer to represent the truth of an objective reality, but to conceive an object of originality from the artist's unique perceptions. This started first with mere distortion of the visible world with the Impressionists such as Monet, Renoir, and Degas. Post-Impressionists Van Gogh, Cezzane & Seurat followed quickly on their heels. Observe the fragmentation of form and color in Van Gogh's Starry Night, and its shattering difference from the paintings above:




Even at this, there was still a tenuous connection to the real world, distorted as it was--but it wasn't to last long. As the culture became increasingly removed from God, and any remnants of faith more compartmentalized in the artist's worldview, painting became more and more idiosyncratic so that all connection to reality was sacrificed to the goal of originality, novelty and the artist's conceptions. Abstract Expressionism, Cubism and a host of other "schools" of painting flourished in the fine art world. In the 1930s Jackson Pollock made a "splash" on the New York art scene with his drip style of painting.




It is something of the ultimate idiosyncrasy, born of whim, chance, and seemly thoughtless kinetic expression, without the slightest intent to represent anything other than what the observer sees: a random and disorganized mix of color and contrast that Pollock called simply, No. 5. But even this pales to Shawn Eichman's National Endowment for the Arts funded piece she called the "Alchemy Cabinet," which displayed her own dismembered second-trimester aborted baby next to the obligatory twisted wire coat hanger.

When we apply Paul's injunction to the Colossian church--Whatever you do, put your whole heart and soul into it, as into work done for God, and not merely for men - knowing that your real reward, a heavenly one, will come from God, since you are actually employed by Christ, (Colossians 3:23,24 Phillips translation)--we can exercise creativity, whether in the industrial, service, or fine arts, and know that we are participating in the nature of God, and even worshiping God by our work. If, however, we take the view that our work is something separate from our relationship with God, that our work life resides in a compartment delineated from our faith life, we run the risk of going down the path that has lead to the abominations that are so much of modern art.

...whatever you do, eating or drinking or anything else, everything should be done to bring glory to God. (1 Corinthians 10:31 Phillips translation)

Eulogy for Uncle Bud

My wife's uncle "Bud" Throckmorton just passed away in Colorado Springs. The following is a eulogy I gave for Bud at a family memorial service we had here in Tigard, Oregon at my sister's-in-law house.

I knew very little about Uncle Bud other than his quiet demeanor and his occasional dry wit, so I called Uncle John the other night and asked him to tell me what he could remember. It seems John was a very young child when Bud shipped off to Europe in World War II, so he has no memory of him until his return from the war. He was able to tell me little about Bud's war experience other than he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded the bronze star, since Bud was reluctant to ever speak of what he had seen or done. He had had long talks with Grandma Throckmorton when he first got back, but then rarely ever spoke of it again. And whatever he told her went with her to her grave.

Soon after his return, Uncle John, Grandma and Grandpa Throckmorton went to Venezuela for a year, leaving Bud and Great Grandpa McChesney (Grandma Throckmorton's father) to take care of the farm. Bud found, during that year, that he loathed farming which he called "dirt grubbing."

He married his first real girlfriend, Aunt Jean, whose ambition was to have 10 children--they only made it to 7. With all those mouths to feed, hunting was a necessary supplement to the family food budget. It was a skill he had honed from prior necessity during his childhood during the Great Depression. John said that during hunting season, he would often leave before dawn during work days to hunt a few hours before heading to his job. Venison was a family staple.

I'm sure there a thousand examples of this kind of stoic practicality in Bud's life, a man who was typical of his time, who answered the call of his country to war and without complaint, endured its horrors, then returned and set about the business of raising a family, getting the things done that needed doing--but I can only guess at them. He didn't leave a written record, or, if the few pictures Nan was able to find of him is any example, much of a pictorial one either. But he left the legacy of 7 children and the 50 plus years as a faithful husband of one wife. I guess that will speak better than any words he might have written, or that any of us can say.

One bitter-sweet detail that John told me is that at the end, as Bud knew his time was short, he expressed the fear that the things he had been obliged to do during the war would prevent his entrance to heaven. I'm saddened to think that the gospel message had not been made clear to him that it is not our good deeds that gains us access to God's presence, but God's grace through Jesus Christ, as Paul said to the Ephesian Christians, "...he shows for all time the tremendous generosity of the grace and kindness he has expressed towards us in Christ Jesus. It was nothing you could or did achieve - it was God's gift to you. No one can pride himself upon earning the love of God. The fact is that what we are we owe to the hand of God upon us." (Ephesians 2:7-9 Phillips translation) And the apostle John said, "...the blood which his Son shed for us keeps us clean from all sin. If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, then we live in a world of illusion and truth becomes a stranger to us. But if we freely admit that we have sinned, we find God utterly reliable and straightforward - he forgives our sins and makes us thoroughly clean from all that is evil." (1 John 1:7-9 Phillips translation)

Uncle John said someone--I don't remember who--set his mind at ease. So now, after all the hardships and good times, the disappointments and joys, and after all the plain hard work of his life, I hope Bud has finally entered the rest promised in the letter to the Hebrews, "There still exists, therefore, a full and complete rest for the people of God. And he who experiences his real rest is resting from his own work as fully as God from his." (Hebrews 4:9&10 Phillips translation)