Crisis and the Creativity of God’s Church

If you were to list your top three most creative people, who would be on that list? Maybe Vincent van Gogh? Walt Disney? JK Rowling? Thomas Edison? Leonardo DaVinci? Marie Curie?

What would the world be without creatives in our midst? Creativity takes the mundane and makes it special. Creativity solves seemingly intractable problems. Creativity causes smiles, surprise, and thinking.

There was a time that Christians were those on the cutting edge of creativity. Take a look at a medieval cathedral and you can’t help but be impressed. Dig a little deeper at the imbedded symbolism and mathematic artistry in its design and your jaw will drop.

Today’s church doesn’t have a great reputation for its creativity. That is partially its fault (the offerings of Christian movie makers and mainstream visual artists, for instance, have been, for the most part, weak in their creative merits). This is not as it should be. Christians’ thinking ought to be characterized not by its safety, nor by its sentimentality, nor by its predictability.

Whoever tops your list of the most creative people in history is dramatically eclipsed by God. In the beginning, the source of all creativity was. And there was nothing else. And then, with a word, God formed electrons and stars and Loriciferans (look them up!) and Venus Flytraps and Baobab trees and Filbert Weevils and platypuses, and sunsets.

Undoubtedly, part of the way in which we image our creator is in our creativity. While God creates ex nihilo, we create from God’s creation and within the parameters of his order. And it delights him when we do so.

The church is often at her best in crisis. And I believe that the church has been at her creative best in the midst of this COVID-19 outbreak.

Let’s not soft-pedal this. Christianity’s claims about the Bible are patently absurd.

Let’s pause and consider Christianity’s claim. Christians claim that we have in our possession a book that contains a message from the Creator of the universe to us. The book we are talking about was written in a time period roughly between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago. To claim such an ancient book has any relevance whatsoever for a modern reader is an absurd enough claim, but to claim it is the word of the source of all life itself? That is hard to believe.

Isn’t this book written by human beings full of legends? Isn’t it full of contradictions? Hasn’t it been proven false?[i] How can we possibly trust that it is the message God has for us?

Let me make the stakes of this conversation completely clear. If we can’t trust the Bible, then it’s a book that might have use for historians or perhaps to be read alongside Aesop’s Fables. But if it is the Word of God, we ought to devote ourselves to this book. If God really wrote a message to us, then every person is duty-bound to take this message seriously.

The skeptic’s challenge is that the Bible is a story, it is not reliable history. I’m going to respond to this challenge with seven responses. The first will be shared in this post, the following six in the next two weeks.

The most important question regarding the trustworthiness of the Bible is whether or not there was a man named Jesus Christ who lived in the first century in Palestine, who claimed to be the Messiah, who died on a cross and rose again. The trustworthiness of the Bible stands or falls on its claims about Jesus of Nazareth.