Art and Faith: A Theology of Making

by Makoto Fujimura

I understand now what I did not understand as a child: that every time I created and felt that charge, I was experiencing the Holy Spirit.

When I explain to strangers this sacred dimension of creating art, sometimes non-Christians have an easier time grasping it. Christians have many presuppositions about what Christianity is that are often based upon an analytical approach to understanding truth as a set of propositional beliefs, such that understanding and explaining take dominance over experiencing and intuiting.

What if the entire Bible is a work of art, rather than the dictates of predetermined “check boxes” for us to get on God’s good side? What if we are to sing back in response to the voice of eternity echoing through our broken lives?

“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”

As I have noted, the consummation of God’s plan as it unfolds in the Bible is not a utilitarian restoration but an imaginative New Creation.

In building for the Kingdom now, we must move beyond the goal of fixing things and instead set our hearts on the art of Making.

Christian imagination today obsesses over the End rather than scanning for the New Creation in our midst.

It takes about fifteen minutes before we can feel settled to truly see something. Most of the time, we are trained not to see, but to categorize and move on.

Let us reclaim creativity and imagination as essential, central, and necessary parts of our faith journey. Imagination is a gift given to us by the Creator to steward, a gift that no other creature under heaven and earth (as far as I know) has been given.