Filed under: Finding God in the Ordinary | Tags: art, church, creativity, faith
Came across this great article today from Collide Magazine from an interview with Donald Miller. I agree with it, do you?
Donald Miller on Artists, Metaphor, and the Church
Scott McClellan – Originally posted Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Photo Credit: Jeremy Cowart Photography
I wrote a feature for our September/October 2009 issue called, “Donald Miller: Storyteller,” in which I discuss an interview I did with Miller and his new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. In preparing for that interview (conducted at the end of March) I came across a talk Miller gave at Willow Creek’s arts conference, “Creativity and Art, Why You Matter as an Artist.” I was immediately intrigued by what Miller might have to say on the subject, so I asked him about the role of artists in the Church. That section of our conversation didn’t make it into the print article, but I felt compelled to share it with you. Though short, I hope you find it validating and thought-provoking.
COLLIDE: What is your view on the importance of the artist’s role in the Church?
Donald Miller: It’s complicated. I think I’m not convinced the gospel can be arrived at through rational thought. I don’t think much of anything can be arrived at through rational thought that’s of great import. And all of life is performance art. It’s God’s performance art to sort of make poetic grunts back at him and say, “I’m like light, I’m like love, I’m like sheep to shepherd, I’m like king to subject.” Those are dynamics that are created by Him in order to educate us about who He is.
And so God uses art to do that, and so I feel like the Christian artist, like the secular artist, has this opportunity to point to greater truths. And the gospel exists in a realm of greater truth than what we can arrive at with a calculator. Does that make sense?
COLLIDE: Yeah, absolutely. You rattled off a few metaphors there – sheep to shepherd – and it occurs to me that we reduced that to sermon illustrations like, We’re like a precocious kid in Sunday School who said this, and that’s metaphor in large pockets of the Church. But the artist really explores metaphor and narrative far beyond the spoken word.
Miller: Yeah, and if you look at the writings of Moses you have narrative, narrative, and then he breaks into parallelism. He breaks into ancient Hebrew poetry. Job is almost fully a poem. Song of Songs is an opera heavily influenced by Solomon who’s interested in the Orient. You have artwork through the whole thing. I think Revelation is pretty trippy. I don’t know that there are any bullet points in the whole book, are there? There may be a few in building the temple.
COLLIDE: Maybe “Six things the Lord detests,” something like that.
Miller: The Ten Commandments.
COLLIDE: The fruit of the Spirit, maybe. More the exception than the norm, certainly.
Miller: Yeah, exactly, and even the fruit of the Spirit is an artistic metaphor.
So there you have it. To dig deeper into the idea of metaphor in the Bible, I believe Eugene Peterson had some things to say along those lines in his book Eat This Book: The Art of Spiritual Reading. Also, be sure to check out Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. He doesn’t necessarily teach on metaphor, but the book is a brilliant example of its proper use. Finally, check out “Donald Miller: Storyteller” in the September/October 2009 issue of COLLIDE.
Scott McClellan is the editor of COLLIDE. Original Article is here
