In his book Culture Making, evangelical thinker Andy Crouch asserts that we can only create from what we have cultivated in our culture.
If that is true, it implies that everything we create isn’t really new at all.
In such a paradigm, anything we create is simply a re-imagining of existing constructs. It makes sense considering that God created everything ex nilho – “Out of nothing”. The most inventive, creative person is unable to call anything into existence. She can only call existing pieces into a new whole.
If Solomon himself said “There is nothing new under the sun,” where is our new coming from?
The newness doesn’t come from a new thing. It comes from a new perspective.
When the magician reveals the rabbit in the hat, we all gasp and clap. But the magician didn’t create the rabbit. He didn’t even tell us that the rabbit was somewhere else, and then he was there. We all implicitly know that the rabbit was somehow there all the time. The magic is in the way he revealed it.
We aren’t in the business of creating new things. We’re in the business of finding new ways to reveal things that have always been there.
To be inspired is to breathe on something in a new way, that reveals it in a new way, but that admits it was really there all the time.
That’s why we have the head-slap moment. “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” “That was so obvious!”
We are so often blinded by our search for the new that we overlook the already.
Were there always computers and smartphones that would allow instantaneous communication all over the world? No. Scientists and creative minds looked at the possibilities and considered ways that we could communicate using technology.
However, we didn’t invent communication. We simply expanded on how we do it.
Were there always telescopes and satellites that could look into the cosmos and visualize galaxies billions upon billions of miles away? No. Man’s inventiveness and creativity saw an existing problem – wanting to see into space – and looked for ways to achieve it.
However, we didn’t create the stars. Or stargazing for that matter. That which we explore and our desire to explore isn’t ours. It’s a preexistent reality.
We all know the magician didn’t create the rabbit. He had to take what someone else created, create the allusion that it was missing, and reveal it again. And the whole time, the world knows it’s there, and waits with bated breath to see how it will reappear.
Artists are not creators in the most fundamental sense. We are revealers. We are in the Ta-da! Business.
We speak to that which is already inside. No one really wants to say, “I’ve never heard of that, and never thought it could ever exist.” When we connect with art that amazes us, or a talented person that expresses exactly what we’re feeling, what we really want to say is, “That’s something I’ve felt / thought/ wanted to say all along, and just didn’t know how to.”
We want to be connected with the now and the new. But new really isn’t new. Whatever we see as ‘new’ is always something we didn’t recognize earlier. And, now is simply the current state of our revelation. You can really measure time by the level of revelation you’ve reached. So your new and your now are entirely based what you see and how you see it.
When Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, “When I was a child, I thought as a child,” he’s admitting that once, he saw things as children see them. Not that things were actually different – only the way he saw them. His ability to make sense of the world was controlled by his perspective. But there was a reality he was unaware of due to his age and his spiritual understanding. Even as a leading teacher of the Jews before his conversion, his maturity was limited by a worldview that made him believe his purpose was to terrorize and jail a movement of people proclaiming a crucified carpenter as Lord of the universe. He once thought he was doing God’s work – until he met God face to face. Once his understanding was advanced, his job as an evangelist became simply to unpack the revelation that already existed before time began – before he was ever aware of it.
Even as I’m writing, I’m saying “Aha!” I knew this was always here. I’m probably writing ideas that someone else came up with.
So why do I feel so creative even if I’m not really creating something new? Are all of us artists doomed to be self-deluded copy machines?
No.
Because a revelation has the same feeling as a creation. We feel the same rush.
It’s new again because we see it anew.
If God says “Behold, I do a new thing”, it’s because he wants us to recognize that a new view is the same as a new life.
Leave a Reply