Art and the Image of God
January 9, 2010
I heard a story recently about a scientist working to publish a paper. He was going through the footnotes and making the necessary citations when he came across a scientific journal with an article title that sounded eerily similar to something he could name his own. Opening up the journal, he found the article, and began to read. Much to his surprise, two scientists all the way around the world had been doing some experiments of their own and come to the exact same conclusion he did.
In his own words, “Of course they came to the same conclusion. I realized that they’d have to, because I was right.”
And then he began to wonder what was the point of his being a scientist. If he wasn’t specifically needed for the discovery of something, if that truth simply existed out there for anyone to discover, then his personal importance no longer mattered.
Do you know what he did next? That scientist became an artist.
Why? Because in art you create something that would never have existed without your action.
It brought to mind the book of Genesis.
In Genesis 1 we read about God creating the universe. And in creating the universe, he set all things into place. Stuff was created. How those things are put together was set. How those things interact with one another was set. From top to bottom, from largest to smallest detail, the ways in which the universe functions, all of this was set. And even though it’s taken us many, many, many, many, many years to uncover these details, all we have been doing is uncovering the truth that already exists in the world.
And then there are these verses:
(26) Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (27) So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
This “image of God” (or “imago dei” if you want to sound fancy) is something that gets discussed quite a bit. Does it literally mean we look like God in form and features? Is it that we rule over the earth kind of like God rules over everything? Is it that we have the ability to choose? Just what does that mean exactly?
And to be honest, I’m not exactly sure. But I’d be willing to guess it’s a number of things, one of which, I’d say, is our ability to create, just like God.
If I draw a picture, or write a song, or do a dance (or any other manner of thing), I’m bringing into the world an image, sound, movement that didn’t exist before my creating it. And these are just the most rudimentary of means for creation. Look around you at what our race has put together, things that did not exist before our imagining them. And I think that our ability to do such things is a direct result our being made to be like a God who makes things.
He created the natural world and set up laws for how those things work. And then he made us with the ability to understand the truth of how he put his world together, and also gave us the ability to manipulate these natural things into entirely new creations. This is part of the image of God, that we may create. We create dance. We create music. We create art. And even at the most basic level, we create new life. I don’t know how you get much more “the image of God” than that.
