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)