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”.

John,
May I suggest that your understanding of the way language works owes much to scientific fundamentalism in which facts are facts and there exists a consensus on what words mean within a very limited field? If everything is judged according to very simple rules of meaning we would never have poetry or literature, let alone theology. The statement that God made the universe is never made in the bible. What we have instead are a collection of legends and the initiation of a history. These cannot be reduced to the materialist concern about who made the world, for this was not the author’s intention. Rather, their intention was to provide an understanding of the ways things were from a human perspective. It was important to indicate that animals were distinct from men and that God was not part of the material world. Likewise it was important to understand the world as natural in opposition to the Babylonian myths of creation in which the world was composed of the God’s body parts. There are all sorts of understandings in the creation narratives that we take for granted. So to reduce them to statements about the origin of the universe is entirely mistaken. May I make a suggestion, read a good commentary on Genesis 1-11 (Westerman is good but a bit long) and you will find a whole world rich in insight.

John,
Some more thoughts. I detect a familiar agenda in your questions. It is indeed infuriating for a Christian writer not to fit into the well worn stereo-typical fundamentalist. I find it interesting that out of an article with so much to say about many things you latch on to one sentence about creation. In the face of sophisticated theological reflection the only thing you can do is to try to bring the argument around to something that you are sure of: Christians believe a lot of nonsense that can easily be shown for what it is. That may be a safe place for you to stand but it does not get us into a real discussion. Sure there are many Christians out there who believe lots of guff and they are fair game but I am not one of them. I maintain that they do not represent the centre of the tradition even though they out number me. I also maintain that Christian theology is a rational pursuit that has and still does, occupy some of the finest minds. The great pity of this is that theology has been so alienated from our educational systems by those bent on shoring up secular power that it is hard going to get a decent discussion going.

I am off until after christmas. Be in touch in the New Year. I am surprised that noone has joined in.

Peter, I am puzzled. You say that “ the statement that God made the universe is never made in the bible”. Yet the very first sentence in the King James version of Genesis says that “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”. I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who attend a christian church on Sunday take those words to mean that God created the whole universe and everything in it. No doubt the original compilers of the bible also regarded heaven and earth as comprising the total universe.

To deny that God did not create the whole universe implies that He exists in only part of it. That would reduce Him to only one of the tribal, or familial, gods of more primitive times. Gods like Zeus who lived in close proximity to humans; just up the road on a mountain.

There is no doubt more to be said.