"The church should reawaken its hunger for beauty at every level. This is essential and urgent." So writes NT Wright in his book 'Simply Christian.' Our church is one of many which is experimenting with a re-flowering, re-valuing of various art forms. Both in gathered Christian worship, and simply as worthwhile vocations and avocations.
Here is a bit more helpful 'theology of art' from Wright, for those of you who need encouragement to pursue that creative urge our creative God has put in you, a creative-image bearer. And lest any of us be tempted to continue to believe the enlightenment lie that all that matters can be adequately communicated and understood through mere propositional prose and laboratory experiment. Here you go - enjoy!
"It is central to Christian living that we should celebrate the goodness of creation, ponder its present brokenness, and, insofar as we can, celebrate in advance the healing of the world, the new creation itself. Art, music, literature, dance, theater, and many other expressions of human delight and wisdom, can all be explored in new ways."
"The point is this. The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way. The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold--and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed. Perhaps art can show something of that, can glimpse the future possibilities pregnant within the present time. It is like a chalice: again, beautiful to look at, pleasing to hold, but waiting to be filled with the wine which, itself full of sacramental possibilities, gives the chalice its fullest meaning. Perhaps art can help us to look beyond the immediate beauty with all its puzzles, and to glimpse that new creation (through the resurrection and return of Jesus, the ultimate marriage of heaven and earth) which makes sense not only of beauty but of the world as a whole, and ourselves within it. Perhaps." (NT Wright, Simply Christian, p.235-6)
