Creativity, Orthodoxy & The Christian Mind
by Steven Faulkner
I grew up as an independent, fundamentalist Baptist and maintain respect for those who defend biblical truth and try to live thereby. They have a certain lively sense of orthodoxy. But occasionally, one bumps into the sort of “fighting fundamentalist” who, without sufficient caution or reason, drops visor, lowers lance, and rushes blindly upon anyone suspected of theological creativity. To such persons (though I realize they do not compose the whole fundamentalist camp), the sight of creative ensigns fluttering in the breeze signals man’s manipulation of a divine gift. They rightly argue for a Word of God “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” a “faith once for all delivered to the saints”; unfortunately for them, it is set like concrete and about as fertile. They fail to realize that although divine truth is indeed changeless, the Church has developed her understanding of that truth over the last two thousand years, and her expression of that truth varies with time, culture, and individual genius.
The human mind was created with this capacity for a godlike creativity. Creativity is at the heart of the human experience. We must not surrender its legitimate place to bombast and vituperation. We can no more shut out creativity than we can stop thinking. And thinking about God, a subject who is mysterious and transcendent, requires a great deal of creativity.
For, as St. Paul has said, we are dealing with a type of knowing which surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:18)—not exactly a routine and prosaic endeavor. Malcolm Muggeridge put it this way:
I understand that something more important, more tumultuous, more passionate, was at issue than our good causes, however admirable they might be. Something to do with the deep, inner nature of life itself—mine, and all life. Something inescapable, pursuing and pursued, forever beyond my reach and yet under my hand; part of the air I breathed, and lost in the wide firmament above.1
And he quotes William Blake:
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.2
To explore the limitless Being of God and the truth which he reveals is the proper objective of theology. And I see this with orthodox reflection and study specifically in mind. Such a study calls for three things: 1) a grasp of the content of the Christian faith, its doctrines and history, 2) a searching imagination—not to redefine the faith, but to discover new insights and to express it, to communicate it in new ways to each generation; and 3) a divinely sanctioned connection with the Person of God. For in this last regard the Christian mind believes in and seeks a spiritual communion with the very Mind of God. As St. Paul has said, we Christians have received “the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.” For who can search the Mind of God but he who receives the Spirit of God? (1 Cor. 2:11-16)
Even more to the point, Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” We see immediately that Christian theology is an encounter and a journey with a Person, not with a set of definitions. And such a personal encounter must be, if anything, creative.
Moreover, faith in transcendent values, rooted in a moral and personal God, in a reality greater than ourselves, not only requires some measure of creativity, it is logically and historically the best ground and guarantee of creativity, for it gives meaning to our creative efforts and opens the widest possible vistas.
Yet for all of this, many conservative Christians (Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox) fear creativity when applied to theology: they fear speculative theology. Man naturally seeks security. A precisely defined theology, engraved in granite, the meaning explained, the application prescribed—this is comforting—for it not only provides man with a reliable system, but it confines God to a manageable size. Man shapes a structure to house his God and house himself. It is all very convenient. Theologians and clergy erect a reasonable facsimile of the infinite, ineffable Being and gladly bow before this comfortable, dependable, immobile structure. Man reads his scientific descriptions of the sun, fails to raise his eyes to the dazzling light: the book eclipses the sun. Jesus himself condemned the religious leaders of his day for searching the Scriptures but missing the Messiah who stood in flesh and blood before them.
A healthy orthodoxy must first admit that no system, no mind, no set of doctrines, can neatly circumscribe God. He is absolutely infinite. Without doubt we need definitions, creeds, and doctrines, for God has indeed revealed himself in word and action, and through the Church itself. We can observe his words and works, we can discuss them, we can systemize them; but we must never substitute the theology for the encounter. As Martin Buber said, “without truth of the encounter, all images are illusion and self-deception.”3 We cannot reduce the splendid and dark, the overwhelming and subtle, the ethereal and concrete, the loving and terrifying God to a boring idea. We must by faith reach out to touch One who transcends thought.
For his part, God deigns to meet our groping and he speaks to us in the words of men in time and culture. He speaks Hebrew, Greek, and yes, even English. And he permits us to use the language of a particular time and place as a means to approach him—a means, but never an end. Conservatives should guard against the tendency to pigeonhole God by recognizing two things about this process: 1) the natural limitations of language itself, and 2) the conditioning inherent in the historical development of Christian theology. Both factors have required immense creativity from the best of our theologians, in order to fight against reductionism and the fossilization of a living faith.
Language
Even when God expresses himself in human words, the meanings of these words are not univocal, that is, they do not convey to all hearers or readers one and only one meaning with a mathematical type of precision. We can rarely strap deity to an airtight definition of a particular word. Words are reasonably precise, but not mathematically so. My image of a red barn does communicate something of redness and “barnness,” but what shade of red? What kind of barn? It is reasonably precise in what it denotes, but rich with varied associations slightly differing in the minds of different persons. And what shall we say of specific difficulties of vocabulary, grammar, and figures of speech? Human speech resembles not so much a mathematical equation as a painting, whether of a Dutch realist or a Renoir.
An example from C.S. Lewis’ essay on religious language is helpful here. He cites three examples of language:
1) It was very cold.
2) There were 13 degrees of frost.
3) “Ah, bitter cold it was!
The owl, for all his feathers was a-cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass.
And silent was the flock in woolly fold;
Numb’d were the Beadsman’s fingers.”4
Lewis then notes that examples two and three are elaborations of the first, which he calls “ordinary language.” The second example, the “scientific” description, is superior in a certain sense because it gives a precise measure for cold. But scientific language has its limitations: it scarcely captures our imagination; it speaks but vaguely to our experience. The last example, “poetic language,” has, I think, despite its lack of technical precision, obvious advantages: it conveys an image that speaks vividly to human experience.
Religious language, as Lewis points out,5 is generally poetic. All the psalmists and prophets were poets.
The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness,
The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord makes the oaks to whirl,
And strips the forests bare;
And in his temple all cry, “Glory!” (Psalm 29:7-9)
And Jesus constantly employed metaphors and spoke in parables:
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matt. 13:45, 46)
The Bible is never a scientific document, never a technical manual in precise religious terminology. It is the record of the clash and communion of God and man. The resulting conflicts and cooperation have produced a rich literature of song and story, proverb and prophetic oracle, gospel narrative and epistle. Such language speaks of concrete realities: it speaks of changeless truths; but it is no flat projection of truth for some manual of theology. With all its varied moods and subtle nuances, it is a creative canticle calling us home to God.
Does this then mean we are awash in doctrinal uncertainty? On the contrary, such imaginative language and historical narrative actually communicate truth more effectively, more humanly, than the precise, machined definitions of scientific language.
Conservatives, then, would do well to recognize that language itself, even the language of the Bible, is not univocal; it is full of allusions and connotations. It is human. It is a tool the theologian must use creatively, not to define a new or different faith, but to discover and express the ways of a God who is “ancient of days,” and can be studied, analyzed, and described; but is not a “museum piece” to be confined to a comfortable theology.
History
Of course Christianity has not only produced religious poetry, it has also produced precise definitions. Precise language is the medium of learned controversy, and Christianity has had its full share of that over the centuries. Heretics forced the Church to think deeply about doctrine and find creative answers. Consequently, the Church’s understanding of doctrine has not remained static. While insisting that no one should alter the teachings of Christ and his apostles, the early Church Fathers explored those teachings and sought ways to express them unambiguously to the world. Over the first five hundred years of Church history, as Calvin Beisner says, they moved from the simple affirmation, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” to the explicit and highly technical language of the Athanasian Creed: “…the Catholic Faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance…”,6 and so on for hundreds of words.
Generations of theologians wrestled with distinctions and argued terminology. Councils met and formed creeds in order to accurately represent the truth and defeat the heretics. Concepts sufficiently defined to counter the Gnostics did not meet the contentions of the Arians; arguments against Arians did not work against Pelagians. Again and again, various heresies challenged the intellectual foundations of Christianity. Christians recognized early that to combat the dilution of the original faith, or to counter a misrepresentation of its doctrines, was critical; otherwise God was misrepresented and the path to salvation obscured.
Every generation of Christians has faced new controversies, new opposition. Christians must explain the faith anew to each culture, each generation. The language that defeated Arianism will not shake Communism. The words and rationale that get through to an American will not communicate as effectively to an African. By definition God is unchanging. And the essential truths about God do not change; but the theologians must discover the apt expression, the precise term, the appropriate metaphor, that opens the minds of thinking, seeking men. “Like apples of gold in settings of silver, is a word fitly spoken.” (Prov. 25:11) This has been the task of theologians and Christian thinkers through history, a task requiring endless creativity. John Chrysostom (called “golden-mouth”) spoke brilliantly to early fifth century, Byzantine audiences; John Wesley to the eighteenth century English. Each was a convinced adherent of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3); each crafted his speech to win the minds and hearts of his hearers. The Truth is changeless; the expression of Truth changes with every age, every culture. Thus, whether in poetry or in pointed, vigorous prose, whether dealing with practical implications and applications or with philosophical abstractions, the Christian mind must explore and express its faith with great creativity as it gropes to open doors to the limitless, infinite excellences of the mind of the God with whom we have to do.
Notes:
1. Muggeridge, Malcolm. Jesus Rediscovered. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979, p. 55
2. Ibid.
3. Buber, Martin. The Eclipse of God. New York: Harper, 1952. p. 34
4. Lewis, C.S. Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967. p. 129
5. Ibid, p. 130
6. Beisner, E. Calvin. God in Three Persons, Wheaton: Tyndale, 1985. p. 12
Steven Faulkner is pastor of Holy Trinity Congregation in Topeka, Kansas.