There is a strange quiet in most churches when the subject of art comes up. A man will stand and give a testimony about his work in construction, and everyone nods. A woman will talk about teaching third graders, and the room warms. But let someone say they write novels, or paint, or make films, and you can feel the air change. Someone will ask, gently, if there’s a way to make that “useful for the Kingdom.” What they mean is, can you turn it into a tract. Can you baptize it. Can you make it safe.
I want to argue that this instinct, however well-meaning, is one of the quiet tragedies of the modern church. We have handed over the imagination of the culture to people who do not know Christ, and then we’ve stood back and complained that the culture no longer thinks like us. We wonder why the stories that shape a generation come dressed in the New Age, in the occult, in every spirituality except the one that is true. And the answer is not complicated. We left. We packed up and left the field, and someone else moved in and planted it.
This is not a call to make more Christian art in the sense that phrase has come to mean, which is usually art with the risk taken out. It’s a call to something older and braver. It’s a call to do what Tolkien did, and Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers, and Flannery O’Connor. To make things of such beauty and truth that the world cannot look away.
The lie of the sacred and the secular
Here is the wrong framework, and it goes deep, so we have to name it before we can build anything better.
Somewhere along the way we started dividing the world into two rooms. In one room you have the sacred. Prayer, Bible reading, evangelism, church. In the other room you have everything else. Work, food, laughter, marriage, music, story. We call the first room spiritual and the second room worldly, and we spend our lives feeling guilty that we live so much in the second room and visit the first one only on Sundays.
But the Bible knows nothing of this division. Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian and prime minister, said it as plainly as anyone ever has. “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine.” Not one square inch. Not the pulpit only, but the canvas and the page and the stage and the screen. All of it is His, which means all of it is ground worth holding.
When we treat art as a lesser thing, a decoration on the edge of the real work, we are not being more spiritual. We are being less biblical. We have absorbed a way of thinking that comes not from Scripture but from a Greek philosophy that split spirit from matter and taught men to be ashamed of the physical world. The Bible does the opposite. It opens with a God who makes things, and it says the things He made were good.
The first artist in the Bible is God
Read the first sentence of the Bible again, slowly. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The word translated created is bara’ (בָּרָא), Strong’s H1254, and it is a word the Hebrew reserves almost entirely for God. It is the making of something genuinely new. Before there was a single prophet, a single priest, a single sermon, there was an Artist standing over a formless dark, and He spoke, and there was light. He made a world He did not need, and He filled it with color and taste and sound and texture that serve no strict survival purpose at all. The stripe on the tiger. The song of the whale. The absurd extravagance of ten thousand kinds of beetle. This is not the work of a utilitarian. This is the work of a Maker who delights in making.
And then He made us in His image. The word is tselem (צֶלֶם), H6754. Dorothy Sayers, in her remarkable book The Mind of the Maker, noticed something most of us read right past. When Genesis first tells us that man is made in God’s image, we have been told nothing yet about God except that He creates. “The characteristic common to God and man,” Sayers wrote, “is apparently that, the desire and the ability to make things.” To be made in the image of a Maker is to be, ourselves, makers. The impulse to create is not a distraction from bearing His image. It is one of the clearest ways we bear it.
Tolkien built his whole understanding of story on this foundation. He called what human artists do sub-creation. We do not create out of nothing the way God does. We work with the world He already made. But we make, and we make because He made us to. In his poem Mythopoeia, written to argue Lewis out of the notion that myths were “lies breathed through silver,” Tolkien wrote the lines that ought to hang over the desk of every Christian who takes up a pen.
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
And then the hinge of the whole thing.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.
We make because we were made by a Maker. To tell a story is to hold up a shard of the single White light of God’s own creativity and let it break into color. That is not a small thing. That is a holy thing.
The first man filled with the Spirit was a craftsman
If you still doubt that God cares about art, look at who the Bible says is the first person ever to be filled with the Spirit of God. It isn’t a preacher. It isn’t a king or a prophet. It’s an artist.
In Exodus 31, God is giving Moses the plans for the tabernacle, and He says, “See, I have called by name Bezalel… And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship” (Exodus 31:2-3). The Spirit of God, ruach (רוּחַ) Elohim, poured out for the first time in Scripture, and the gift He gives is the gift of craftsmanship. The word for that skilled work is melakah (מְלָאכָה), H4399. God wanted the place where His people met Him to be beautiful, and so He did not settle for competent. He anointed an artist to make it glorious. Blue and purple and scarlet, gold and carved wood, pomegranates and almond blossoms worked into the metal. None of it was strictly necessary. All of it was commanded by God.
The people of God have always known this in their better moments. The Psalms are poetry, not memos. The Song of Songs is a love poem so frank that generations of nervous readers have tried to explain it away. And when the Son of God Himself came to teach us the deepest truths about the Kingdom of Heaven, look at how He chose to do it. Matthew tells us that “without a parable He did not speak to them” (Matthew 13:34). Jesus was a storyteller. The word is parabolē (παραβολή), G3850, and it means a thing set beside another thing, a comparison, a story that carries a truth in its arms. He could have handed out doctrinal statements. Instead He told about a man who had two sons, a woman who lost a coin, a farmer scattering seed. He knew what every good novelist knows. A story gets past the guard at the door of the heart in a way an argument never can.
| Term | Reference | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| bara’ (בָּרָא) | Genesis 1:1 | H1254 | to create, to shape something new, used almost only of God |
| tselem (צֶלֶם) | Genesis 1:27 | H6754 | image, likeness. We are made in the image of a Maker |
| ruach (רוּחַ) | Exodus 31:3 | H7307 | Spirit, breath. First poured out here, on an artist |
| melakah (מְלָאכָה) | Exodus 31:3 | H4399 | skilled work, craftsmanship, the labor of the maker |
| parabolē (παραβολή) | Matthew 13:34 | G3850 | a story set beside a truth to carry it |
| poiema (ποίημα) | Ephesians 2:10 | G4161 | a made thing, a work of art. The word behind our “poem” |
You are a poem
There is one more word, and it may be the most beautiful of them all. In Ephesians 2:10 Paul writes, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” The word translated workmanship is poiema (ποίημα), G4161. It is the word from which we get poem. You are God’s poem. You are the thing He made, His work of art, and He made you in Christ to go on making. The Artist made artists. The Maker made makers, and He did not do it by accident.
So when a Christian sits down to write a novel, or picks up a brush, or scores a film, they are not wandering away from their calling into some frivolous hobby. They are doing in miniature what God did in the beginning. They are bearing His image in one of the most direct ways a creature possibly can.
What we surrendered, and why it matters
Now to the hard part, and I’ll say it plainly because it needs saying. For most of the last century, serious Christians retreated from serious art. We got suspicious of the imagination. We decided fiction was, at best, a harmless diversion and, at worst, a lie, because it tells about things that never happened. We wanted our stories to come with the moral stamped on the front so no one could miss it. And in doing that, we made most of our art bad. Not wicked. Just bad. Thin, predictable, afraid.
Meanwhile the culture went on telling stories, because human beings cannot stop telling stories any more than they can stop breathing. And into the vacuum we left came every other spirituality on offer. The mysticism, the occult, the self as god, the long menu of the New Age. Not because those ideas are more true or more beautiful, but because their storytellers showed up and ours went home. We abandoned the imagination of a generation, and then acted surprised when that generation grew up imagining a world without Christ in it.
Flannery O’Connor understood the stakes better than almost anyone. She was a devout Catholic writing hard, violent, strange stories for a modern audience that no longer believed in sin or grace or the reality of the soul. She refused to soften them. “The novelist with Christian concerns,” she wrote, “will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” And she knew you couldn’t do that by whispering polite pieties. “To the hard of hearing you shout,” she said, “and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” That is the calling. Not to make art that flatters the church, but to make art that tells the truth so vividly that a blind and deaf age cannot help but feel it.
Stealing past the watchful dragons
This is the genius of what Lewis did, and it’s worth understanding exactly, because it is the answer to everyone who thinks the only godly art is the art that preaches.
Lewis noticed that religious language had gone dead for a lot of people. The words God, sin, sacrifice, redemption had been worn so smooth by familiarity, so wrapped in what he called their “stained-glass and Sunday school associations,” that people could no longer feel them. You could tell a child that Christ died for him and get a blank stare. The dragons were on guard. Every defense the modern heart had built against religion stood watch at the gate.
So Lewis went in another way. He wrote about a great Lion named Aslan who lays down his life on a stone table and rises again in the cold morning. He never once said the word Jesus. And a generation of children wept over that Lion, and felt the weight of a sacrifice they had been taught to shrug off, and only later, sometimes much later, understood what they had been feeling. “Could one not,” Lewis asked, “steal past those watchful dragons?” That is not deception. That is not manipulation. It is the oldest trick in the Gospel, the same one the prophet Nathan used on King David when he told him a story about a poor man’s lamb and then said, “You are the man.” A story slips the truth past the guard and sets it loose in the heart, where it can do its work before the defenses even know it’s there.
This is what Francis Schaeffer meant when he insisted that the Christian, of all people, should be the freest and most fearless artist alive. “The Christian,” he wrote in Art and the Bible, “is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.” We of all people know the world is charged with meaning. We know it has an Author. We know the veil between the seen and the unseen is thin, and that the ordinary things, a cup of coffee, a dirt road, a father and a son, are the very places where the eternal breaks through. Who should be able to write that world better than the people who actually believe it’s real?
A word to the one holding the pen
Maybe you’re reading this and something in you is stirring, because you’ve felt the pull to make things and you’ve been half-ashamed of it. You’ve wondered if writing that novel is a waste, if you ought to be doing something more directly useful for God. You’ve heard the quiet voice that says real ministry happens at a pulpit or on a mission field, and that the story you keep coming back to is just you being self-indulgent.
Set that voice down. It is not the voice of the Spirit who filled an artist first.
If God has put a story in you, that story is a stewardship, and He will ask you what you did with it. You do not have to make it preachy to make it holy. In fact the preachier you make it, the more you’ll usually rob it of the very power that makes story worth doing. Tell the truth. Tell it beautifully. Make your villains real and your heroes flawed and your world so solid the reader can smell the rain on it. Do the hard work of the craft, because a shoddy thing offered to God is not more spiritual for being shoddy. Bezalel was filled with the Spirit to do skilled work, not sloppy work.
And then trust the story to do what stories do. You may never see the harvest. Lewis didn’t set out to convert anyone with a talking Lion. He just told the truest story he could, and God used it in ways he could not have engineered if he’d tried. That is how it works. We make still by the law in which we’re made, and then we hand the making back to the Maker and let Him carry it where He will.
The field is still there. The culture is still telling stories, still starving for beauty it can’t name, still building its imagination out of whatever gets handed to it. We can keep standing at the edge complaining about what’s been planted. Or we can pick up the pen and the brush and the camera and go back to the ground that was always ours, the way Tolkien did, the way Lewis did, the way O’Connor and Sayers and Schaeffer did.
Not one square inch of it belongs to the darkness. Not one. Let’s go take it back.
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