I agree, Peter. You're talking about becoming more humble so that truth can manifest. This could lead to thoroughly subversive art and sermons. Exciting!

Yes, self-indulgent "concept art" beware!

Another thought... if we are to take a modern artist - the composer Avro Part - I think we might see an example of what you seek.

Of course, his music is religiously inspired and he takes much from the tradition of baltic church music, and thus is religious music. What I find more interesting is his work with "tintinnabulation"... the distinctive ring of bells, which he says is made by three tones, the middle of which is equidistant form the high and low. He forces himself into a pattern... each sound must lead to another and to another preserving the tintinnabulation, mimicking bells, and the layers and layers of tintinnabulation create whole pieces. His humility before the wonder and mystery of the music, and he could be said to "preach" this humility and openness to the mystery.

Peter, it is not always easy to try to follow a preacher’s thread but you say, in part: “…the Christian understanding of the world as the creation of God, he alone creates out of nothing. Given this, the creative work of the artist is never the creation of a genuinely new thing”.

If God was there to create something it was not out of nothing because He was there; or do you mean that He was nothing and He created the world out of Himself. It is just one of the little puzzles that crop up when one tries to explore the so-called mystery by giving accepted meaning to words. What do you think you mean?

John,
I appreciate that theological use of language is difficult and I welcome the opportunity to try and explain myself. Our major problem is that most people understand God as an individual subject who is able to interact with the material world. The Enlightenment philosophers had a field day with this concept and laid bare its contradictions. However the God they demolished was itself a formulation of Enlightenment thinkers who attempted to hold together their investigations into nature and into theology. Nature won and we were left with a God that Israel would not recognise as its own.

So when we talk about God as creator we do not understand that in terms of a supernatural being ordering the constants of the universe and bringing matter into being as in the unfortunate correspondence between big bang theory and the theology of creation. Rather, we mean that God creates a history by calling Abraham to leave his home to become the father of many nations. The material world is the setting of this history and is not primary. The theology of creation does not turn to nature but to the history of the covenant, to salvation history, in which we are led to a real understanding of ourselves and our relation to the world.

So, you see, your conundrum about God creating out of nothing misses the point. Nature and man in it exist in a state of nothingness, of non being. It is not until they receive the breath of God, in the form of the Holy Spirit that they become beings proper. That is why we can so easily talk about the absurd, the resurrection of the dead. Salvation is not, after all about a continuation after death but of being raised from a state of death to life.

The only way to understand this kind of language is to become a kind of atheist that distinguishes between the farcical theism of the Enlightenment and to seek out how Israel understood YHWH and how the early church understood the Trinity. This is not a trivial task.

Peter, I hope your reply stimulates further contributions. I find it difficult if not impossible to participate in a discussion where some of the words have a hidden and obscure meaning, or a meaning only available to the initiates. I expect that the bulk of believers believe, like me, that when they say that God created heaven and earth they believe that He brought them and human beings into physical existence from nothing. But you seem to be saying that they were already there in a state of non-being until they received the breath of God which made them beings proper.

In case you missed it, I would recommend a look at the Ogden and Richards book “The Meaning of Meaning”.