CREEDS SHOULD TELL THE TRUTH

'The necessary condition for assessing the value of creeds is that we should fully understand that they claim to be, not idealistic fancies, not arbitrary codes, not abstractions irrelevant to human life and thought, but statements of fact about the universe as we know it.'

Dorothy L Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p.14.

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

'Every act of creativity is an intuitive response to offer back to God what has been given to us. We twist this intuition and may create something transgressive and injurious, but the source of the creative impulse is the Creator.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.177.

HOW THE PSALMS GET US LOOKING FORWARD

'The book of Psalms, God's poetry, gives us an ecosystem of metaphors and a garden of words to describe the thriving offered to us in the New Creation.'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.37.

A PARABLE FOR MAKING

'Here, then, is the central parable for our Making journey:

Imagine a father taking his child to the beach. The father watches his child make a sandcastle, which will be washed away by the high tide.

But the father happens to be an architect. Imagine that this father loves his child so much and is astonished at the design of the castle that is child has made.

Several years later, the child looks in amazement as the father creates a real castle that is based on the the sandcastle that the child created.

This may be close to what the New Creation will be like. God desires in God's heart to be with the child as the child plays on this side of eternity. God chooses, out of God's gratuitous heart, to co-create into the New World. There is no particular need for the architect father to create an actual building, but the father re-creates in love, and he has the power to do so. The New Creation is filled with such attentive, self-giving outworking of God's love toward us.'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.35.

HOW BEAUTY SUSTAINS

'Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. Christians can have a foretaste of what is to come by celebrating through making and through the exegetical work of culture. Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through the works of non-Christians in the wider culture.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.34

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

'Beauty is our sensory access to holiness. God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for.'

Eugene H Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.80.

WHAT BEAUTY DOES

'Beauty. It arrives through a sustained and adorational attentiveness to what is there: a rock, a flower, a face, a rustle in the trees, a storm crashing through the mountains. When our senses dull and our attention wavers, writers and singers and artists grab us by the ears and say, "Look, listen, feel. Embrace and respond to Life within and around you!"'

Eugene H Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.79.

WHAT PRAYER DOES

'Prayer is not a way in which we order things; it is a way in which we become ordered.'
Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God, p.75.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MAKING THINGS

'I have come to believe that unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God's being and God's grace permeating our lives and God's Creation.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.7.

WHAT WE SHARE WITH GOD

'The characteristic common to God and man is apparently...the desire and ability to make things.'

Dorothy L Sayers in Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.6. 

THE LIMITS TO SERMONS

'Some things, of course, are best conveyed in a three-point sermon. But we would lose a great deal if we heard the Good News delivered only as linear, propositional information, for the gospel is a song!'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.6.

WHY EVANGELICALISM IS FAILING TO EVANGELISE

'I often wonder whether the younger "None" generation (meaning they mark "None" when asked on forms whether they belong to any religious denomination or group or espouse a particular creed), for whom the old wineskin of how church is done may no longer seem relevant, is now limited to experiencing God authentically primarily through culture and nature, two areas that evangelicalism in the United Sates has abandoned in order to "evangelize" the world.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, p.5