Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed Podcast.
I am Brian Brown. You might have noticed we
haven't recorded much lately. Well, we've got more in the
works in the near future, but in the meantime, I wanted to draw
your attention to an episode of another podcast.
I was recently interviewed by Shane Morris on the podcast
Upstream, which I highly commend to your attention.
Shane is someone who cares deeply about the things that the
Anthem Society does, and his show focuses a great deal on
questions related to how we can see heaven in the things of
earth and live accordingly. This conversation is about our
new book, Why We Create, which I encourage you to go to Amazon
and buy. But in the meantime, you can
enjoy this conversation in which we talked about what the book is
about, where it's headed, how I hope it will be helpful to
people. So listen to the episode, buy
the book if you enjoy the episode, and I encourage you to
go and subscribe to Upstream with Shane Morris wherever you
get your podcasts. Welcome to Upstream, where we
make your worldview bigger and older by taking hard questions
to the head springs of Christian wisdom.
I'm Shane Morris. My youngest son, Peter is in a
wonderful phase of life. I've always loved to draw, paint
and sculpt. And although it's been a while
since I've had much time for either, Peter has naturally
inherited the ability, both from his mother and me.
Peter regularly brings me drawings to appraise, his face
eager and his eyes keenly watching for my sincere
reaction. He presents carefully sketched
dinosaurs, birds of prey, Star Wars Clone Troopers and
Mandalorians, spaceships and sharks.
Some of them are direct imitations of things I've drawn,
others are entirely his own creations.
He wants my reaction. And instruction, because he
looks at his father as the original artist, the one who
filled his world with tokens of creativity and from whom he in
part gets his. I think all of us are in much
the same situation, whatever our artistic medium.
Only it's not our earthly parents, but our Heavenly Father
whom we have to thank for our drive to create and the
abilities we employ to do so. And like my son, we ought to
feel the urge to take our creations to our father for his
approval and pleasure. But what does this have to do
with the Christian worldview? What does it mean for our
relationship to matter? Time and space?
What attitudes and values do we need as we create?
And what if we're just no good at drawing?
To answer these and other questions, today I've invited a
friend of mine who's just coedited an eye opening book on
the topic. Brian Brown is the founder and
Executive Director of the Anselm Society, an organization
dedicated to a renaissance of the Christian imagination.
He also serves as Vice President of Programs at the Coulson
Center and has become a source of.
True inspiration and original thinking for me, especially as
I've posted this podcast. Together with Jane Charle and a
host of distinguished authors, he edited a new book called Why
We Create Reflections on the Creator, The Creation and
Creating Brian Brown. Welcome back to Upstream.
Thanks for having me on. Well, creativity, having known
you for a couple of years now, is something that you and your
family live and you can see it. Are there in your house, the
house you and Christina have set up together?
It's a beautiful place, and we've talked about that before
on Upstream. How did all this start for you?
And what's the origin story of your creative impulse?
Because I I look at your bio and you have a background in
politics and law. It doesn't seem like the kind of
the kind of background you'd have with the kind of house you
have. So what was the spark there?
Think less of politics and law and more of culture broadly.
My backgrounds in in Christian political theology, which is a
fancy way of saying the the things.
That's the great thinkers of the faith have written over the
years, grappling with the question of how we do
Christianity, how we do living as humans, who serve the God who
made us the Creator, who made us not as individuals but as groups
of people, as communities and as societies.
And that has everything to do with how we structure our
societies, but it also has everything to do with what we do
with our time in those societies.
It seems like there there's a premise that I have, you know,
baked into that question, but I I did so deliberately because
most people I think will share that premise.
And that is that creativity artistry as one category of
creativity, right, which is what I alluded to in the opening, is
a discrete thing from politics, right, which is the ordering of
our lives together. In a very basic sense, it's.
It's fulfilling part of that, that mandated creation to have
dominion, right? Well, part of dominion is
actually setting up jurisdictions of of government
where where there's rulership and an order toward the common
good. And and these things are not
responses to the fall, right. This is part of creation.
It's built into creation and therefore it's a it's part of
the creative enterprise or the fulfillment of that mandate
that's rooted in who we are as human beings.
And that's that's an interesting.
Breaking down of barriers to me, because that's exactly what this
book does. It's not just about drawing and
painting and sculpting and writing poetry and music and
stuff, as as great as those things are, right?
There's figure in heavily here. The the Theology of creation
that Tolkien draws on himself figures heavily in in here as
like a backbone of the book. But there's a lot more going on
too. There's discussions of time,
There's discussions of our relationships.
With each other of the food we eat and how food can be
artistry, things, things of that nature.
And and it makes you question, I guess that assumption that we're
talking about the John Jay Institute or something, that
something in your background that there's not also creativity
there. That there's not the fulfillment
of an act and a nature that we were supposed to exhibit from
the beginning. As human beings, well, there is
and there are connections there. It's not to say everything's
art, but it seems like to me. And then I'll shut up.
It seems like to me there is some deep connection there that
we need to tease out or or or at least question the dividing
line, right? Yeah.
And let's set aside the word art entirely for for for a moment
from the idea of creativity, because I get that sometimes
somebody will say something like, oh, I'm not creative, I'm
an engineer. Yeah, Which is baffling to me
because what they're trying to say is I am not an artist in the
technical, paintbrushy kind of sense.
I'm an engineer. Of course they're they're
creative. When you're making decisions,
you're being creative. When you're looking at something
that doesn't exist and you want it to exist, you're being
creative. Whether that is a thought or a
book or a some kind of scientific endeavor or even
cleaning house, reorganizing your room is an act of
creativity. The process of looking at
something and wondering could it be different is a creative act,
and it's one of the most fundamental impulses that's
baked into us, that's built into us as as humans, to look into
disorder and speak order, or to look into to chaos and speak
meaning. I want to make this different.
I want to make it better. That's a creative impulse.
At the start of our book, we included an NT right quote that
we actually stumbled on after the manuscript was finished.
And the manuscript really sums up a a lot of the guiding star
of the book goes like this, right?
Says human vocation is to reflect the love and power of
God into the world and to reflect the praises of the world
back to God. There's two things going on
there to reflect the love and power of God into the world.
That's us acting creatively to act as God's representatives to
the world and then to reflect the praises of the world back to
God. That's then acting as the
world's representative back to God.
It's this priestly function that both ends of it are creative.
Both ends of it require us to think deeply about what does it
mean to speak and reflect the love and power of God into the
world. Every last bit of the answer to
that question is creative and prudential in nature.
Similarly, what does it mean to reflect the praises of the world
back to God? But you could simply sing a song
or something. But there's again a creative
process and ordering process because the the human impulse
isn't just to say, look, I mean I I live next to a 14,000 foot
mountain. You could simply have the
instinct to say God, you made this mountain, yay, the mountain
sings your praises. Scripture uses lines like that.
Sometimes it's not an illegitimate thing, but what
does it mean to to cultivate that creation, Not simply to not
touch it because you can't not touch it, we're living in it.
But that overall process of of the dialogue between the
heavenly realm and the earthly realm is an inherently creative
act, even in the most fundamental things that we do
100 times a day. With that very mountain that
you're talking about was Katherine Lee Bates right?
Is that is that who wrote to America the Beautiful.
There's a plaque at the top where or a sign up there on the
top of Pikes Peak just kind of commemorating the spot roughly
where you know she stood and sort of looked out and composed
these words and and you you can say okay here on one side
there's the purple mountains. Majesty.
I see the Rockies. And there's the fruited plain on
the other side. I can see the kind of Great
Plains. It's on the border between those
two places. And isn't this place America
great? I'm just going to write a hymn
or a poem about America to be sung by a generations hence.
And I think of somewhere like the Everglades, you know, the
Florida Everglades, where it is a place that exists in its
objectivity. But then Marjory Stoneman
Douglas comes and writes River of Grass and all the marvel and
poetry of that, and sees it, recognizes it.
Classifieds it and celebrates it in language in a way that it had
never been celebrated, at least by, you know, someone speaking
European language before. And the point of those things is
that the Pikes Peak and the Everglades were already there to
begin with, right? And they're all their objective
glory as God created them. But he had hidden them, right?
It was the glory of God to hide those things.
It was the glory of kings, of which we are all kings and
Queens, right? We're we're vice regions of God
to seek out. Those secrets.
And then celebrate them and refine them in language.
And to me that seems like the pattern of everything we do,
everything we do creatively in the world.
Peter Lighthart uses in the book the example of turning wood into
a chair, right? And he said we've actually done
something akin to what God does there because we haven't just
taken raw material, right, Wood, a dead tree and reordered it.
And now it's a dead tree in a different shape.
No, it's actually a thing we call a chair now.
It, it has a purpose, has a recognizable pattern and tell
us. And there's no person who's ever
used a chair can ever look at that piece of wood again and and
see it as anything other than what it is.
Because we create in a transformative way, using what
God has given us, the raw materials and resources as
gifts. And then we reshape them.
And that, if I'm hearing what you're saying rightly, it sounds
like that's what we do with everything, not just, you know,
clay and paint and. Pencils, but with metal and wood
and grapes and wheat and stones and and all of the other things
that we transform into something marvelous and then ideally give
back to God. Yeah.
The fundamental question that we wanted to address in the book
was this. God has made us material beings
and placed us in a material world.
What are we to do with that? What does that world tell us
about who God is? And what does that world tell us
about who we're supposed to be? So that's the fundamental
question you're addressing in the book.
I'm wondering, was there an idea or a light bulb moment that sort
of touched off the book, or perhaps a burning question that
you saw Christians asking? I knew we needed to to try to
answer, yeah. I mean, I said we were going to
set art aside, but I mean, art was the driving force.
With the Anthem Society, we run a a program that helps our
artists connect their craft and their faith better.
And we found that most of the artists who are Christians that
we were encountering really struggled with this.
They had grown up with a theology that was lacking to
explain why what they did mattered.
And the more that we worked on it with them and the more that
we thought about it, we discovered, not really to our
surprise I suppose that it's it was really a bigger problem.
It wasn't an artist problem. It was it was a churchwide
problem where we we tend to, at least in the the churches I've
been a part of in in my life, we tend to struggle with questions
of vocation. We either, in a daytoday, minute
to minute sense live like this world.
The material created thing is all that matters, which is how
most of our neighbors live, right?
The the the material world. There's no heaven.
There's no afterlife. The material world is all that
matters. Or we live like the next World
is all that matters. And we don't know what to do.
OK, I've got this whole faith thing.
I've got this whole Jesus thing. I've got this whole I want to go
to heaven someday. Think what does that have to do
with how I live now? Or my personal favorite, We know
we're supposed to do something of both of those We know.
We know that the hearing now matters somehow.
And we know that the next World matters somehow.
But since we don't know how to put the two together, we kind of
alternate. There are little chapters of our
day or chapters of our lives where we do things called going
to church, or called reading our Bibles, or called witnessing.
And then there's other chapters of our day where if you followed
us around with the camera, you wouldn't be able to tell the
difference between the Christian and their their next door
neighbor. And in any of those options, if
we don't know how to put together heaven and earth,
eternity and time, we will constantly be separating things
that are not meant to be separated.
And worse, we will be walking away from one of the primary
vocations of the human being, which is precisely to put those
two things together, those things that are hard to see in a
fallen world, but to point to material things or create with
material things and say this has spiritual significance, this has
eternal significance. God has made a world that is
designed to point us to Him, and if we aren't saying that as
humans we are failing in our duty as the Imago Day, and the
rocks themselves will be forced to cry out because we won't do
it for them. Tell us the story of Leaf by
Niggle. This is a short story by
Tolkien. And you guys kind of use it in
the book, use it in your introduction to frame a lot of
this discussion, because at the heart of the story is the
tension you're describing here between the quote UN quote
creative enterprise, like the artistic thing and then the
ordinary daytoday tasks of life and that that we view as
distractions often. And I love this story.
I'll just say this, I love this story so much because for it
seems autobiographical. For Tolkien in so many ways,
because. We know he was obsessively bound
to this world that sprang into his imagination almost unbidden,
and he spent so much of his life crafting it.
And I know at times he had to have seen that on Monday in
ordinary segments of life as unrelated to his true calling,
which was to bring Middle Earth into into fruition.
Tell us that story and the significance, because I think
you you've got the message exactly right.
Well, you can be a single person, a married person, a
married person with kids. You can be at any stage in life
and and the following situation will, will, will resonate with
you. There's something you're working
on that you care about very much and you're trying to focus on it
and things keep interrupting you.
Those things might be texts and phone calls.
They might be the need to feed yourself.
They might be laundry, they might be small children.
They might be the fact that you have a day job which has nothing
to do with that thing that you're working on that you
really want to do. We've all been there.
We're all there. I mean I'm there dozen times a
day and leaf by niggle is is a a parable that is tokens answer to
the question what am I supposed to do with that?
What is the relationship between the things I view as
distractions and the things that I view as important.
And so the story goes, this man niggle is trying to do a
painting of a a tree and it's going to be his his master work
and he's got a neighbor that keeps coming over and saying my
wife is sick, my roof is leaking all the things.
But in terms of number of pages most of the story actually then
happens in the afterlife and and happens as both as the vague
heavenly beings in the story are wrestling with what we do with
relative worth and at the acts of grace above and beyond that
worth. But it also deals with what
niggle process of learning, how that all fit together.
And you can, if you're not paying attention, you can walk
away from the story with the idea that, well, the
distractions were what mattered all along.
And I think, I think frankly, a lot of Protestants live like
this. They look at things that appear
unnecessary, appear extra like a rose, or that story that
someone's trying to write. Oh, that's not as important as
these sort of very earthy, raising the kids type things.
But yeah, I think what Tolkien's trying to do with the story and
what we're trying to illuminate in more detail in the book is
not that it was the ordinary things that mattered all along.
It was that there are no ordinary things.
That's something that's a concept that we've talked about
a lot over the last couple of years and it's made it actually
into the the part of the tagline or description of Upstream.
If you go to Apple podcast or Spotify and you look at the
description at the top, there, there are no ordinary things is
part of what appears in that. And this is an idea that's
emerged out of our conversations.
I mean, I owe a lot of this to you.
What does that mean though? There are no ordinary things
because it seems like a sacralizing.
Of all of life in a way that maybe breaks down important
distinctions. And I can see the the Protestant
impulse in that direction. And I can see how someone with a
more sacramentally oriented tradition would look at that and
say, oh, you're robbing. You're not elevating the
ordinary life so much as robbing the really special stuff, right?
The the Eucharist and and baptism and the what happens in
Church of its special significance?
Help help us understand the distinction there where you draw
it. Yeah, And that's a really
important conversation to have, because I think given how
Protestantism started, there is a deep, maybe not an ethic, but
certainly an instinct towards suspicion.
We have a fairly short list. At least your typical Protestant
has a a fairly short list of propositions that they know are
central to the faith, and they're pretty suspicious of
anything outside of that, or at least anything outside of that.
That claims some sort of authority over them, right?
If it's the if, it's the the spiritual pot bestseller of the
summer and I found it helpful, that's one thing.
But if the author is claiming everyone should accept this, I'm
very suspicious of it. And in some ways, the
Protestantism at its worst is like the the renegade dwarves at
the end of The Last Battle in CS Lewis.
They're so determined not to be taken in that they can't see the
glory when it's literally right in front of their face.
So there there is a danger in in accepting something that is not
true as true, but there is a corresponding, you know,
pendulum swing danger of not accepting true things as true
because you're so scared they won't be true.
And I think many American Protestants, because of this
sort of ethic of suspicion, have no mental category between
indifference and idolatry. OK, I'm going to say that again.
We have no mental category between indifference and
idolatry. This is a really important point
to develop this because I've often thought the same thing.
Well, we're so scared of idolatry that we think
indifference is the only alternative.
So, so I'll give you an example. We are so scared of worshiping
Saints that we don't know the stories of any of them, right?
Right. We have no because we don't want
to worship them. We think.
You know, worth ship. We don't want to ascribe
ultimate worth to them. Therefore we can't ascribe any
worth to them. We can't.
We don't. My my version of church history
is the book of Acts. Martin Luther and me.
That's a lot of the cloud of witnesses that we just skated
over. From a a historical standpoint
let alone from a role model standpoint will you get this
with with heaven and The Who was it that coined the phrase or not
not coined the phrase but use the phrase on upstream at some
point that I really appreciated the the middle heavens.
We do this with the spiritual world where it's instead of the
the sort of rich spiritual world of medieval imagination and and
and cosmology, right, the pseudodionysis, the world view
of all the different levels of angels and species and ranks and
all that they're doing. And behind the scenes it's like
we go to scripture and say okay, what's there's this guy, there's
this guy Gabriel, there's this guy named Michael.
There aren't any other angels really, right?
And their role was very, very minimal besides that.
Mostly it's just God and then it's us and then there's the
devil off somewhere doing something that you know to to
destroy us and and pervert God's work.
But when we encounter, you know, something like CS Lewis Space
Trilogy and his his image of an entire universe, just like
thromming with life, just thick with angelic life, and the Earth
is this, is this one little point of, you know, conflict in
a universe of otherwise harmonious obedience to the will
of God. That's I I guess there's an
impulse that says, well, where's that in scripture, you know,
where Louis is just making all this kind of stuff up?
Well, I mean is he though Because we're we're told what we
need to know for redemption in Scripture.
But never does scripture say this is the whole picture.
This is everything there is. And you you have no license to
imagine or reflect further or with the typology in scripture
or we'll say okay, explicit typological links.
Christ is the last Adam, right. We've got the we've got the
references for that. We can go there.
But I remember at one point my friend Seraphim Hamilton, who I
had on the podcast before, I referred to Christ as the second
Adam. And he goes, I don't really like
that that phrase Scripture calls in the last atom.
But there have been lots of atoms since Adam in between.
You know, before Christ, Noah was an atom, Abraham was an
atom, Joseph was an atom, David was an atom.
All the, you know, characters with whom God covenants and then
establishes something new. It's like there is a repetition
of that pattern. Where's that in scripture?
Well, it's thematic. You have to look at it as
literature in order to pick that up.
And it's just getting over that minimalistic tendency that I
need a chapter and verse to explicitly say something before
I reflect on that, as as a Christian seems to me that's
that's an important habit to get over.
Yeah, and you and you need to get over the habit with regard
to nature as well. You know, if you think about it
as it might have been Serif. I'm actually who in that
conversation talked about the idea of their God writing two
books. Humanity lived for quite some
time without any of the scriptures at all.
And when the scriptures, when the Torah was written, and
everything thereafter, there's so much nature imagery in there,
and it's there for a reason. There are very, very offhand
references throughout scripture to the natural order, and
they're usually not unpacked all that much.
Because the writers take it as a given that we've been paying
attention to the first book. Or if, if you if you like, the
scripture is the words and nature is the pictures.
Scripture assumes that you are paying attention to natural
revelation, to what God has shown you in the world that he's
made in the world that he's placed you in.
And part of the reason that it assumes that is because.
From the beginning, that's that's what we are.
It's part of what we are made for.
Why are we here? We are here precisely to bear
witness to the glories that we say we see.
The the rabbits are appreciating the grass that they're eating in
in my lawn right now, but they're not telling us what the
grass has to teach us about God. But that's precisely why we're
here to to see. God and his nature and his
fingerprints at every turn and and bear witness to that not
only to each other, so that we can get each other into heaven
someday, but literally to the cosmos, to everything The
heavenly beings are watching this and the backbone of this,
of of our why we create book, is the idea of of what we call the
the Eucharistic life. And again, Protestants like
freaking out right now because I just used the word Eucharist.
But think about Eucharist in the term of the in the sense of
Thanksgiving. The the Eucharistic life is to
pay attention to what God has done to give thanks for it.
It's it's fundamentally A gratitude based impulse.
Maybe Able says the wrong word, a gratitudebased virtue.
It's it's something that you can cultivate, even if it doesn't
come naturally to you. It doesn't come naturally to me.
And then, having given thanks for it, what do we do?
We work with it, We steward it. And you know, it's it's in the
the communion language. And having given thanks, he
broke it and made it into something else.
And it's not an accident that that impulse is throughout the
Old Testament, and then it is consummated in the death and
resurrection of Christ that we celebrate in communion.
You take what God has given you create with it.
But the process of that creation can be done better or worse,
right? If you've been to most of the.
I I was going to say summer blockbusters this year.
There haven't been many summer blockbusters this year because
the stories were so dreadful that whoever went opening
weekend left and told their friends not to go.
My my favorite place to go to hear bad creativity thoroughly
destroyed and panned, is this YouTube channel called The
Critical Drinker. I'm not.
Let me just say this. I'm not recommending this
YouTube channel in a in a straightforward way for my
listeners, he he has a very salty mouth.
He's this kind of got this Scottish accent and he just
destroys all these movies, especially the recent Disney
remakes. Right?
But oh man, it's so it's so true, like the lack of stories.
But then when something really good does come out, it it stands
out, it sticks out because you're like, oh, that's what
that's what's happening here. Remember last night?
I know this was last year's movie, but last night we watched
the new Puss in Boots, right? This is from the Shrek
franchise, right? Okay.
Shrek hasn't exactly been for 20 something years, a fountain of,
I guess, high culture. It's it's mainly exists to mock
existing cultural artifacts. But something really cool
happened with this movie. I don't know if you've seen it,
but there was all this, like, character development and
dealing with using these really funny and goofy characters to
deal with deep questions about the human condition and about
what it means to to care about others as much or more than you
care about yourself. And it was like, that's why life
matters. That's why any of your lives
matter if you're a cat. And that was I just said I
turned to Gabby and went this character development happening
here. What on earth?
It's been so long since I've seen this quality in a story,
and it makes it stick out for sure.
You can tell. Pretty much.
Whenever a major studio is is not paying attention to the
plot, that's when we seem to get good movies right now.
Like the ones that are not hacked to pieces by people who
are agonizing over how they're going to appease different
crowds and how they're going to get just the right formula.
As though the formula is working.
You get Disney movies and Disney Plus and what's what's what's
the one decent story that's been told on Disney Plus and or which
was told by a single writer who had a story to tell and who
clearly wasn't meddled with all that much.
The kind of stuff flies under the radar.
I've definitely noticed that Brian we just reviewed kind of
the worldview of Tolkien on creativity as told in his short
story or parable rather leaf by niggle.
The ending of that has always somewhat puzzled me, and I want
to get that that ending or kind of spoil it for listeners here,
just because it serves as a central motif by which each of
the authors in this book, each of the essay, is to reflect on
Christian creativity, go back and reinforce this, this premise
or this thesis that there are no ordinary things.
So what happens at the end of Leaf by Nagle?
Because I'm confused like he did ordinary stuff in purgatory and
then he gets his tree. What's up with that?
Yeah, he's been trying to work on this painting of a tree his
whole life and all he ever finishes in this life is 1 leaf,
which is generally acknowledged to be very good, but in in the.
Yeah, the the the afterlife as it's portrayed he he comes upon
this tree and he immediately recognizes that it's his tree
but that it but it is also A finished and B far more
beautiful than he ever dreamed of.
He instantly recognized like this is what I was trying to do,
but he also instantly recognizes.
It's far better than I could ever have done.
There's there's more here. It's it's almost like because
he's he's standing there and ultimately he's standing there
with his neighbor with his friend who was interrupting him
the whole time. He's he's experiencing in
community and in dialogue with the quote UN quote ordinary
things the the fruits of not only his labor but what God's
grace did with that labor. I love that.
I I think every artist has the ability to resonate with that.
Just the sense that you're because you're never quite
satisfied with anything you do. Even he he talks about how parts
of the tree that he had only imagined for the briefest moment
were there in their completion, in their full beauty, exactly as
he imagined them as well as he imagined them.
I've I've always assumed that this was autobiographical, that
the the one leaf was like the bit of the history of Middle
Earth that Tolkien was able to give us the like the what would
he publish in his life? Like 2 books.
The Lord of the Rings which is one book, and The Hobbit
essentially. And then he's he's got all this
other stuff written and published and Christopher comes
along and tidies it up, edits it and and starts to give us a
glimpse at the bigger picture of the whole story.
Right. But we only had this little bit
about the hobbits and stuff but boy was it a good bit.
I wonder it it really opens the possibility when you're someone
who also likes to write or do any of the traditional, you
know, creative things, will we have a chance to finish those?
Will we have a chance to complete them?
I've never been satisfied with anything I've done and I doubt I
ever will be. Not, not in the, not in the
sense that I hoped originally, but that's a beautiful, that's a
beautiful thought. But the thing that that gets me
about it, Brian, is that he completes it or receives it in
completion, not through niggling over it some more because that's
a that's a verb, right, Niggle. But he does the ordinary tasks
that he he neglected in life as almost like a purgatorial
penance. And then the tree appears and
then he gets the the tree. What's going on there?
And what do you think is in Tolkien's mind?
He's learning what he failed to learn in his time on earth.
Which was this the significance of all of it?
And but it's not just I don't. I also think it's not as simple
as there. There was a lesson learned.
Right. We're so quick to ask what the
moral of the story is. It's very much not that he
consciously apprehends a moral of the story that he missed.
It's that the repeated habits of fulfilling his duties shape him
over time into someone that he would not otherwise have been.
So it's not simply that he's told something like his his eyes
are made ready. To see the tree, to be the
person that God has always intended for him to be.
But it's precisely the the repeated engagement in certain
kinds of activities that forms his soul over time.
This is why I I started our conversation by saying it's not
about art, It's about vocation. It's about who we are as.
Humans. If I'm trying to clean my room,
I'm doing something creative. If I'm trying to build a
business, I'm doing something creative.
If I am trying to do anything in a way that is good and excellent
and better yet doing it Christianly right.
I'm not simply behaving myself. I'm not simply going to work and
oh by the way, witnessing to my coworkers or something.
I'm trying to ask a fundamental question about the nature of
doing life and. There are books about this.
There are many, many wonderful, usually very scholarly books
that deal with pieces of this question.
The problem that I've run into is that you got to read like 20
of them, and they're mostly very scholarly.
I can't, I can't go to someone who is putting dozens of extra
hours into mastering a craft and say, well, here's 20 theology
books you should read on the side.
So essentially what we did was we went to.
As many of those 20 authors who were still living and said would
you write a chapter for a book? Because there were.
There are a lot of ideas in this eucharistic life that we wanted
to be able to explain more quickly and more memorably.
What does it mean to look at the world God has made and asked the
question who is he based on that?
So in in the book we look at the relationship between heaven and
earth and the idea that. They're actually far more
connected than we give them credit for.
And then given that, we take a look at the material world and
explore, all right, what if we What if the material world isn't
mundane? What does that mean?
You know, this is my father's world.
He shines in all that's fair. And then we do the same thing
with time. What does it mean for our
stories to be part of God's story?
God is outside of time. We we made-up this word,
eternity, to describe this thing we can't begin to comprehend.
So why did God, who is not bound by space and is not bound by
time, give us those limits? Why did He put us in a world
where we are constantly bound by things that we consider to be
distractions and inconveniences? And what does it mean to begin
to look at those things? As intentional gifts of grace
that we have been overlooking our entire lives.
And then if we were to process all of that.
All right, I've thought about the world.
I've thought about God. I've thought on some level about
the idea that all of this stuff matters.
It's not it's it's designed to point to something bigger,
right. That's not idolatry.
I am not loving the thing for itself.
I am loving the thing in its. Partially for itself because it
is a good thing, but but mostly because it is, it is showing me
something bigger and is specifically in in dialogue with
that bigger thing. I'm not just adding that
connection. And then all right, well if if
that's the world and if that's the God who made it, what does
it mean to be the imagoday? What does it mean to act like I
am created in the image of that God?
What does it mean to be created in the image of that God?
So the rest of the book then explores very practical
questions of. Okay.
What's this whole gratitude look like?
A whole gratitude thing look like?
What does this memory thing look like?
What is? What is tokens word sub
creation? What is it?
What does it mean, in other words, to for me to create an an
act of humility instead of of of an act of hubris and
selfworship. And we go through all these
different pieces of it. You'll need to sit down for a
Jane Charles chapter on time because it's a it's a little bit
mindblowing. She she pushes the IT.
It's like a Christopher Nolan movie, man.
You're going to it. It works your thinking a little
bit, but it's pretty cool. And that's what Christopher
Nolan's good for. He doesn't always have the
answer to the question that he asks, but he asks really good
questions. And he and and that's what he's
trying to do. He's trying to push your mind
past what it's used to. And that's what Jane's trying to
do. And on some level, that's what
all these authors are trying to do.
That's what it mentally speaking.
I mean, that's that's what it is to be human, to look at the
material world, recognize that we were made with.
This is so Herman Bobink, a 19th century Reformed theologian.
This is part of how he explains what it means to be the amount
of day. Part of it is to recognize that
we're designed to participate in the heavenly realm, that we are
actually separated right now from a part of reality that
that, in the in an ultimate sense, we are made for.
So when we are, when we have that, that.
Sort of homesickness or ache for something that we've never seen
and we can't explain it. Or when something good and
beautiful makes us want to cry, what are we doing there?
We're our Our deepest spiritual impulses are being activated,
and we are supposed to lean into that awareness and learn more
about it and explore. Because.
In doing that, we are pursuing the practice of of what we will
be doing for eternity when when the veil is lifted.
Talk about the way that the book is organized.
It's in three really discrete parts.
God creates, we create, and then an epilogue by Anthony Eslin
called God Meets Us in Creation. And those first two parts have,
you know all of these essays that we've talked about, all
these reflections on memory and time and matter and space and
the art of naming. For instance, all these concepts
that are involved in fulfilling this grand and expansive call
that we have been given by God. What's the the rationale behind
how it's organized and how does it reflect the the central idea,
what you're doing? So the God Creates section is
exploring most of what I was just talking about.
It's getting into all right. What precisely is the
relationship between heaven and earth?
And if I'm not worshipping the creation for its own sake, what
does it look like to ascribe proper worth to it, as opposed
to nothing, right. A category between idolatry and
indifference? And then we do the same.
That's that's the material world.
That is space. Then we do the same thing with
with time. What does it mean to be
timebound beings who are living like we're part of eternity and
having? Yeah, I mean, I was going to say
wrapped all of that up, but it really, it's really, again, it's
trying to introduce you to an idea.
There are bigger, longer, scarier books that are well
worth your time on. On that front, Hans Bursma's
book Heavenly Participation, Gerald Mcdermott's book Everyday
Glory actually is probably the one I'd recommend to start with
if you read our chapters and want more about the dialogue
between. Symbolism in the created order
and symbolism in Scripture. Or James Jordan's book Through
New Eyes, developing A biblical view of the world.
All of these books deal with the question of the relationship
between earth and heaven and what that relationship tells us
about God. But then we have to ask that
question of all right, if I am made in the image of a creator
God created in this kind of way and made this kind of world and
made me to see it and how do we create?
And that's where we get this idea of of the Eucharistic life
and it's where we get a theology of sub creation because you can
create in a way that's just hubris, right?
I'm creating from my own genius for my own glory.
What does it look like to not do that?
And gratitude is the first step of that life.
It it begins to order everything else.
To say that even that good idea I just had isn't mine.
It didn't pop into my head, It was placed in my head.
And frankly, this is the part that I personally struggle with
the most when I'm confronted with a difficult problem,
especially a something that is near to my heart, where I'm
really trying to ask a hard question about who I'm supposed
to be. I try to get there through sheer
force of genius or or sheer effort and the art of gratitude
is is it's almost the hurdle you have to get over before you can
do much of the rest of it terribly well.
I noticed this when I was a kid very early on I mentioned the,
you know, the drawing, dinosaurs and stuff like that.
My, my son's doing the same thing.
He's in the same phase. But I noticed that when I would
sit down and say, okay, I'm going to draw this one and this
is going to be the best drawing I've ever done.
And it is going to be, it's going to be knock your socks off
good. Everyone's going to be impressed
with it. I would.
Get frustrated and burn out on that drawing because I just the
standards were too high. The pressure was too great.
My sense of how great it had to be was leading it.
And at this point you know, like I'm I'm an 8 year old, so it's
going to be it's going to be nothing anyway.
But I found that when I just sat down and doodled just for the
fun of it, I was really pleased with those and everyone else was
really pleased with those and what was happening there.
And I was baffled at the time. Now I look back and realize oh.
That same thing applies in a lot of life.
It's that you're actually allowing the creative juices to
flow as it were, allowing the process to unfold as it is was
meant to, instead of as the fulfillment of some idolatrous
desire to do the best you've ever done like that.
You will kill art that way. You will kill creativity that
way, yeah? And how do you get the creative
juices to flow better? I've had long stretches of
writers call it writer's block, but it applies to absolutely
everybody who's trying to do anything creative.
Architects have skyscraper block.
Fun fact, that sounds scarier somehow.
And then there are stretches where I'm coming up with good
ideas and I end up doing something I'm reasonably proud
of. But what does it look like to
internalize a different creative process that lets God be the
initiator from the beginning? Maybe for some people it's as
simple as just opening with a prayer, right?
God let me hear your voice and that sort of thing.
For me, I find that it's a lot more complicated than that.
And there are there are components to sub creation,
creating with the raw materials that God has made for his glory
that we have found working with, particularly artists, because
that's our area. But it applies everywhere.
There are pieces that we find are not well taught by modernity
as we know it by modern life, whether it's the business world
or the artistic world or whatever.
So gratitude is one. Another is memory.
Let me talk about memory and naming, actually.
So naming. Why does Adam name the animals?
Why does God do all this creative stuff and then stop
creating and then tell Adam to go create?
We have a whole chapter that unpacks the significance of of
naming because it's been rightly pointed out elsewhere that
naming is a creative process. Of course it is.
And it's one that God himself honors.
That was, the chapter points that out as well, that God
starts using those names henceforth.
Those are human names, right? Yeah, we're invited into his
creative process, and because of that we owe something to the
person who's delegating this to us.
It is. It is a creative function, but
it is also still and and artists can struggle with this
conceptually, where they tend to accept it very quickly when you
unpack it a bit. It's also still a duty bound
function. If you think about naming not
simply as creating a set of letters to assign to something,
but naming in the sense of conveying meaning.
You have to pay attention to the nature of what it is you're
naming. So what is it that's going on?
When I'm, you know, let's say I'm a scientist, then I've, I've
discovered a new element. What is this thing?
What is the nature of this thing?
How does it work? How do I name it in a way that
does justice to that? So that theology of naming
actually gets you much closer to an idea of the relationship
between your work and God's work.
And diving into it is is a profoundly formative exercise.
Memory is the same way. You know this is one of the 10
commandments. Honor your father and mother.
It's not children to obey your parents.
That is a separate commandment given elsewhere.
Honor your father and mother is about much more than 8 year old.
Do what daddy says. Honoring your father is about
father and mother is about a right relationship with the
past. And that's worth taking into
because a great deal of the damage that is being done to our
world right now is being done by people who have a posture of
anger and bitterness toward the past.
And So what does it mean to honor your father and mother in
a way that isn't rose colored glasses?
It does justice to the evil and sin that has happened in the
world. But I'm still honoring my
father. How does that work?
That's a pretty important question to to answer.
And at the same time, in learning the art of how to learn
from the past, how to learn what the cumulative human experience
before me has discovered. What's the relationship between
reason and imagination? That's a key component to
memory. Christians should be artists of
memory. That should be one of the things
that we are best at. Scripture has the word remember
in it how many times. And it's not just call to mind,
it's it's the art of seeing the flow of time as something that
has meaning in it. Rationality gives me facts.
Imagination assigns meaning to those facts.
That's important. That's important because this
that's part of the creative process too.
That's part of being human. Human history didn't begin with
you, and it won't end with you in an earthly sense.
So what's your role in the flow of time?
Beginning to answer that question again with a posture of
gratitude puts you in a position where instead of judging
everything before you and cursing everything after you,
you're there in a posture of of humility.
Again, not simply a proposition to be accepted, but an art to be
explored. I think this is one of the the
eye opening moments of the AHA moments that happens when folks
go through the Coulson Fellows program.
So every time I get together with Michael Craven.
He and I talk about this and and you and I talk about this as
well. There's this sense that
Christians from a particular background, especially American
evangelicals, have going into a study of the faith and how it
affects all of life. That really there's not a lot of
life that ultimately matters. That there is this kind of sharp
bifurcation between the heavenly things and the earthly things
and that the earthly things, as, as you say in the introduction
things of earth, will grow strangely dim in the light of
his, his glory and grace. Right.
And this is part of the hymnity. But then there's this alternate
theme in hymnity, that this is my father's world.
And to my listening years, all nature sings around me rings the
music of the spheres, and that the ultimate destiny of this,
this whole project is for earth and heaven to be one, as Maltby
Babcock says at the end of the last verse there.
And this is a this is a very dramatic shift to make in your
thinking, to to think of God's world as still the world that he
made and said is very good. Despite the corruption of the
Fall, to see our place in it as still very much in continuity
with the place that Adam and Eve had at when they were put into
the garden, and to see that Commission that they were given
as still active, as still in force, we that was never
rescinded or or done away with, neither by the Fall nor by
redemption. And So what does that mean for
the place we're at? That's a mind shift.
When you start talking about that, the question Why should we
care about creativity? It's put in a whole new light
because this place matters to God.
I mean, we can we can talk about eschatology and how that affects
everything, and and Michael Craven and I often do.
But at the heart of it, every Christian should be able to
acknowledge that this place matters to God, that he still
considers it very good, and that he considers the things we do in
it that aren't just immediate evangelism, right.
That aren't just getting people to believe the gospel.
Most important thing we can do here besides praise God,
absolutely Amen. But that's not all we're
supposed to do here, nor is it disconnected from all the other
things that we're supposed to do.
The most effective gospel presentations I've ever seen
have been over a dinner table, and that involves stuff in this
world. We have to care about it because
God cares about it. Seems to me that central it is
and and when you when you bring around these creative
conversations from the the conceptual theological level to
the practical what do I do level if you're if you're serious
about the relationship between your human creativity and God,
it's worth working. It's worth doing the legwork
doing the hard process of of working through some of these
kinds of ideas. And we wanted you to be able to
read you know 100 something pages in one book instead of 20
books to at least start that that process.
But the other part of it is, is, is how do I live differently?
Of course. And as you say, so much of great
Christian witness happens not when Christians disdain the good
things that God has given them, acting as though I'm just
sitting on my hands and come Lord Jesus, but caring about the
the material things more than our neighbors.
So you can have sort of the the idolatry of of of hedonism where
I I'm just worshipping the whatever pizza or.
Or I can say the pizza doesn't matter at all or I can serve the
pizza to my neighbors in such a way that I mean if I made the
pizza, hopefully they're saying this is the best thing I've ever
tasted because I've put that much kind of care and love into
the craft. But hey, most of us are not
gourmet chefs. There's there.
There's a hospitality component to it, too.
We're we're thanking God for it. We are drawing significance from
it, and we're sharing that significance with others.
We do some weird prewritten prayers before whenever we have
guests over for like an Easter feast or something like that.
And, you know, most of them don't come from a background
where that's normal behavior, but they always like it because
we're drawing connections between the material gifts of
God and the spiritual gifts of God and between the creation and
the Creator. And they're just, I've never
seen a role this way before. If they're not getting that from
Christians, who are they going to get it from?
This sort of collection of reflections, in brief that
enables you to digest a lot of the conceptual material of a lot
of different authors and a lot of different books is a little
bit. Of what I was going for with
this recent five books on public theology offering that we've
we've done for Upstream. So it's it's sort of brief PDF
format, very well put together. You know it's got beautiful
illustrations but it's just five books that have done exactly
this sort of thing for me. Most of them are pretty short
books. We've mentioned a couple of them
right here in this conversation. But public Don't let public
theology scare you away that. That's just a phrase that means
essentially. How Christianity matters for all
of life, how it affects everything we do, including our
creativity. And a lot of the the stuff that
happens in the books I'm recommending is conceptual
groundwork to kind of get you past a lot of those bad
assumptions about the world. The idea that it's not charged
with glory, that it's just ordinary matter.
The idea that it doesn't scream symbolism and symbolic truths at
you, wherever you go, whatever you read, whatever you consume,
whatever natural beauty you see, all of that is.
It's it's I guess a modern framework that needs to be taken
apart so we can see the world the way I think God meant us to
see it. So you can check that out by
going to coulsoncenter.org/public
Theology. We had a lot of fun putting
together that resource and I think my listeners will really
enjoy that series of books. So on this one though and and
this is where we really get to the the cash out.
I think if I'm a reader, who is getting these essays and and
getting a lot of this conceptual material for the first time.
And getting very excited about it.
The question I'm going to have at the end of this book is not
necessarily, oh good, I know it all now how can I go out and put
it into action? It's going to be how can I meet
more Christians who think like this?
How do I find out more? Because I want to talk with
these people and get to understand this way of thinking
about my faith better. How does how does someone do
that? I think there are two easy ways.
One is institutional and one is individual.
So on an institutional level, you can gravitate towards
programs that already exist that have collected these kinds of
people around them. So the Ants on Society is based
in Colorado Springs and some society.org.
You can contact me through that and we have friends and lots of
places that I might be able to connect you with if I happen to
know people in your city. Decent chance I do.
There are other organizations like ours.
There are programs like the Colson Fellows program which are
are likewise good sort of spiritual reboots, but also good
openings to a larger community of people who've been more
deeply schooled and thinking this way.
So that's the institutional connection.
Find people who have planted a flag and brought an army around
the flag and go ask them where they can meet the army.
The other is to plan to flag yourself and that's the
individual level action. That's how, I mean this book is
is the end of a It's not the end, but it's the culmination of
a 10 year process that started with my wife Christina and I
planting a flag, looking around and going.
We've been taught to think this way and live this way.
We feel kind of alone where we are.
Well we could move. We could try to find somewhere
else where everyone lives perfectly.
I'm I'm, I'm told there is such a place, but not by anyone who's
actually found it. Or we can create.
We can respond to what we see as chaos and disorder or something
missing, and we can create. We can start building.
And in our case, the best way that I can frame it is planting
a flag. So do weird things.
There's there's so much of how we are trained to encounter the
things that mean the most to us that makes them private.
Books are privatized stories, usually by ourselves or just
with one or two friends, or we order our favorite food from
DoorDash and eat it by ourselves in our houses.
What does it look like to take the things that you're most
passionate about if assuming you are already thinking about?
And how do I connect this passion to my faith?
And again, like books like this are helpful for that.
How do I invite other people into it?
So for for us, it's been a lot of hospitality, and specifically
hospitality around the things that mean something to us.
So that's been food and wine and cocktails.
Those are always great excuses to have people over.
But sometimes we layer things on top of that because books are
privatized stories. What does it look like to share
stories together? We'll have storytelling nights
where we'll just get a couple people we know who are good at
acting, really at oral storytelling, and ask them to
retell a favorite story or tell a new one.
And we invite our friends over and say, or sometimes it's not
even friends, right? You just let your church know
this is happening. I'm telling you, if you become
known in your church as that person, the one who's organizing
trips to the Art Museum or the one who has movie nights and
discussion, or the one who, we had people in our house last
weekend reading a Shakespeare play together.
We did not rehearse. We did not have professional
actors, generally we did not. There was almost no prep
involved. We bought the script, assigned
roles and said, hey, we're going to potluck the food and read
this play together. And everybody had a blast.
If you get known as the person who's doing that kind of thing,
it's not just that people who share your interest in that kind
of thing that are going to come out.
It's the people that share, that have a hunger for community with
the people who see the world this way.
So that you can have that moment that Lewis describes in.
The four loves where he says You too.
I thought I was the only one. Boom.
A friendship is born there. If you can't, yeah, if.
If they don't know what the U2 is, if they don't know that you
care about this, If you're not making it, If you're not taking
your theology public. I I I.
Have seen this? It's not just our story.
I'm not just extrapolating my experience to everyone else's.
I've seen this literally hundreds of times, all over the
country, all over the world, to some extent.
If you allow the things that are most good and true and beautiful
in your life, that you're most passionate about, that help you
see God, if you allow the enjoyment of those things to be
something that can be shared with others, it's visible that
so that they can find it. Even if they don't know you, you
will be shocked at how not alone you actually are.
I think this is since we started with.
Tolkien, it's good to wrap up with him.
I think this is, and I've long thought this is a lot of what
people are appreciating when they see the sort of opening
portrayals of life in the Shire. I don't think they're
necessarily appreciating anything fantastical about that
because they're actually, when you drill down to it, there's
not a lot fantastical about the Shire.
The only magic there is either in an envelope on the on Bilbo's
night stand or or his his hearts, right?
Or Gandalf brings it in. Everything else is very, very
ordinary and we just love that ordinariness.
Something about it charms us and speak to it speaks to us.
And of course, it's a transmutation or a fantastical
portrayal of Tolkien's own beloved places of the the
countryside around Oxford, for instance.
You know, and I think we can. Read something into that we can
feel and discern a hunger that people have there, and then
start to fulfill it in some ways.
And I'm not saying that we should all become hobbits.
I'm saying that a lot of what's happening there, what is, what
does Bilbo say in the movies? He says, But our our chief love
is good. Tilled earth and peace and
quiet. And it's it's kind of, I forget
the exact words that grow, the things that grow.
That's it. Yeah.
And that doesn't just include the plants, by the way.
It includes the little kids that are running around everywhere.
And people want that. Yep.
And it's in. It's in Return of the King.
At the end of towards the end of Return of the King, Mary
literally says this out loud. He he says he's he's seen the
great high towers and the great kings and all of the.
He's seen on on some level. He's seen heaven.
He's seen the fancy version of everything.
And he says he sees a connection between that and the ordinary
things at home. And he comes back to the Shire
and he says to Pippin, I think I'm.
I'm glad I've seen those. I'm paraphrasing now, but I'm
glad I've seen those heavenly things.
I'm glad I have seen the connection between those things
and the ordinary things, because they make me better fit to love
the ordinary things. Absolutely.
My guest today has been Brian Brown, coeditor of the new book
Why We Create Reflections on the Creator Creation and Why We
Create. Brian, thanks so much for
joining me on Upstream. Again, this was super fun and I
had a great time reading this book.
I'm I'm feeling very inspired at this point to go out and create
and not just draw. It's great being on the show.
It's always fun talking to you. Shane.
Upstream is a program of the Coulson Center When it comes to
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