Chris -

Thanks for your reply to my last comment and for outlining some intriguing themes linking together the first 12 chapters of Genesis. But now I’m looking again at your original post and what seems to be your central concern. The Temple artist was filled with the spirit, revealing the importance of aesthetics not just to the ancient Israelites but also to God. You then lament the cultural and aesthetic impoverishment of the church today, its monotonous banality reflecting the sorry state of the Western culture in which it is embedded.

I think it’s difficult to build a theology of aesthetics from the Bible. We can talk about the glorious literary style of various Biblical passages (offset, one has to acknowledge, by its fair share of monotony). We can identify the occasional passage after Genesis 2 that alludes to human creative endeavor (often as not in negative terms). For the most part, however, the Bible is about man’s moral relationship with God: sin and forgiveness, law and sacrifice, condemnation and repentance, punishment and reward. When man does create something commendable in Scriptures, it’s usually built to God’s specifications — like the Temple, as you noted in your post.

In Genesis 1 God’s creative project reaches its culmination in man, made in the image and likeness of the creator. Be fruitful and multiply, God tells man. Neither the Bible nor the church spends much time on how to fulfill that first commandment, but we seem to be pretty good at it anyway. Maybe creativity is the same sort of thing: it just comes naturally to us.

Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, published a few years ago, says that some 30 percent of Americans work in what can be broadly construed as “the creative sector” of the economy, representing a tenfold increase from a century ago. Perhaps the church’s emerging sensitivity to aesthetics — in liturgy, in decorative arts, in narratives — reflects changing trends in the larger culture. Florida contends that the rise in creativity results from a transition in capitalist society from the Protestant ethic — hardworking, thrifty, mainstream, conformist — and the bohemian ethic — hedonistic, aesthetic, intuitive, individualistic. Of course Florida sees this transition as a good thing.I wonder whether the emerging church’s attempts to shake itself free from its “square” Protestant heritage reflects this broader cultural turn toward the bohemian ethic.

I also wonder whether the broad cultural upsurge in creative work is really generating much true aesthetic excellence. The marketplace doesn’t just shape culture; it reflects it, producing a lot of banal junk that people can’t wait to buy. Can the emerging church, newly infused with a bohemian aesthetic sensibility, free man’s innate and godlike capacity for creation, a capacity that has perhaps been stifled even more in the modern church than in the secular culture? Can there be an emerging Christian aesthetic that strives for aesthetic excellence without being shackled by excessive concern about its “good taste;” i.e, its Protestant conformist ethos, its insistence on overtly uplifting and moralistic themes that too often veer into kitsch, its insistence on focusing only on specifically “Christian” art, its valorization of the old (i.e., Biblical) stories at the expense of wholly new ones?