Review of Art and Faith by Makoto Fujimura (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020)
Makoto Fujimura, an American artist of Japanese heritage and training, has put together a remarkable little book on the relationship of art—broadly construed—to faith. One would have to think so given the blurbs he received: who else can lay claim to endorsements from both a former Archbishop of Canterbury and Martin Scorsese? And yet, that is what he has done, and the plaudits from theologian and director are certainly deserved for his meditation on the sacred act of creating and creation, and on the role of faith and art in God’s world of abundance.
Abundance and making are the two key words to Fujimura’s view of art and faith. Abundance because God’s world is an abundant place, full of grace, and making because when we participate in making—the kind of making that the Greeks called poesis—we inject God’s abundance into a natural world that, without faith, would only be marked by scarcity. Making is also crucial in this sense because it is a rejection of the utilitarian and consumptive uses of the world. In making—in being artists—we participate in the world as God intended, as guardians and stewards in our exercise of dominion over the world. Accordingly, artist is a broad term, not only to define those like Fujimura who create and participate in the fine arts, but also to teachers, engineers, cooks, and businesspeople. It is to follow God’s pattern of creating out of love. The alternative is not only abuse of the world and its creatures, but abuse of ourselves as well, as our failure to participate in God’s making as makers ourselves leads us to be enslaved to the powers and principalities of the current age—in our case, patterns of consumeristic consumption.
Key to this process is realizing our place in the world and our role in God’s creation. God has chosen to reveal himself in a work of creativity: in a book. Additionally, we must recognize that God has not created us out of necessity and does not need us, but has created out of love. God’s abundant creation of love is greater than any creation born of necessity (not, at least in this case, the mother of invention). While many would look for God to simply “fix” what went wrong at the Fall, a stance towards redemption that Fujimura calls “plumbing theology” and which would make God into little more than a deus ex machina with a cosmic plunger, Jesus promises that he makes all things new. Similarly, the Holy Sprit in divine creativity does not need us, nor does the Spirit need art to be labeled Christian in able to reveal God and his truth to the world, but can speak through a Hemingway or Picasso.
The modern Christian world, per Fujimura, misunderstands this so fundamentally. Certain strains of Evangelicalism in particular can be prone to set up a rigid analytical and propositional faith that distrusts intuition and experience. But in rejecting intuition and experience—in rejecting art and relying only in analysis—we not only miss so much of what makes this world good, but we cannot but bow to the gods of pragmatism and consumption. Christians of old thought it was worth it to build extravagant cathedrals as a testament to God’s abundance, but many modern Christians seem to think it fitting to worship in a strip mall, as a tenant no different from a supermarket or department store. But this is not to participate in God’s abundance, but to kowtow to modern consumerism—with “church” as just one more option in the retail marketplace.
So much of this is tied up with other issues where the modern Church has misunderstood God as creator. Growing up in evangelical churches, I was trained to look forward to, as Fujimura puts it, a future that would go in up in flames. Much of my childhood was spent among Christians who expected God would bring history to a close in an apocalyptic fury, with raptures, anti-christs, and violent armageddons. Accordingly, a church engaged in culture war to save souls at all costs would be appropriate—even if such culture war means engaging in politics of hatred and wrath. But this is not God’s way. It would not be in the character of God as artist to create to only have his creation disappear. Jesus taught us to pray that his will would be done on earth just as it is in heaven, so that this world without end would be transformed anew, not annihilated.
Fujimura instead points at a positive vision for the Church and the Christian in the world, grounded in art. Seeing work as art, as participating in God’s making, transforms work. Seeing the Church as God’s abundant life in the world can lead us again to creating and sustaining the institutions the Church once built from the ground up and has lately ceded to the city of man, like universities and hospitals. A whole human and a whole human society joins together the intuitive and experiential with the rational and analytical, not as dualities, but as complementing parts of the human personality. And this whole human is not afraid of the darkness. God’s way is to shine into the darkness with light, to bound the darkness up and infuse it with his grace—to work, as Paul says, all things for the good. Fujimura gives the example of kintsugi, a form of Japanese pottery where broken pottery is reassembled with gold in the crevices binding it back together. The effects of the darkness remain but are redeemed, just as Jesus appeared to the disciples in a resurrected body still bearing the scars of his crucifixion.
We can see this clearly in the stories of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Mary, at Jesus’ feet, shows us the contemplative way, sitting quietly, taking in Jesus’ teaching. As the woman with the alabaster jar, she shows us the extravagant way, the way of God’s abundance. Fujimura points out as well that Martha, for all her fame as the one who Jesus gently rebukes for her judgment of Mary’s wastefulness, is the first to recognize and identify Jesus as who he says he is. Thus, both intuition and reason point us in the direction of Christ.
But the ultimate lesson is in the story of Jesus and Lazarus. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept. His tears over the darkness of the world, the evil of death and destruction of his creation, should be our tears as we encounter the same in our world today. But his tears should also inform our creativity, as he made all things new, resurrecting Lazarus. Lazarus then also informs our lives today, having seen and tasted death—he lived as one not afraid of death. For Fujimura, Lazarus is an example for how we ought to live: relaxed, confident, and faithful. Relaxed, confident, and faithful, actively participating in God’s creative process, and unafraid of the darkness of this present world—sounds like shalom to me.
