God's Creativity is NOT Like Ours
A series on music's essence and role: part 4
Welcome back to the newsletter! Over the past three issues, we introduced the importance of music for corporate worship, traced God’s creative work in forming and filling the world, and discussed how his work enables our work to having meaning.
In this issue, we consider the topic of human creativity and start with a warning: God’s creativity is NOT like ours.
As an illustration, consider my favorite restraint—Chipotle.
One day, I introduced my young sons to Chipotle. We walked into Chipotle and my sons said, “Daddy, we have never been in Chipotle before. What type of food do they have?”
“You’re gonna love Chipotle, boys,” I said.
“Okay, okay. What type of food do they have here?”
“Oh,” I said, “you should get a burrito.”
“What’s in a burrito, Daddy?”
“Meat, cheese, lettuce, salsa, and lettuce wrapped inside a large tortilla. You’re going to love a burrito!”
“Umm …” they said, “that doesn’t sound delicious, dad. What else do they have here?”
“Oh,” I said, “you should get a taco.”
“What’s in a taco, Daddy?”
“Meat, cheese, lettuce, salsa, and lettuce wrapped inside three smaller tortillas.”
“Dad, that’s gonna taste the same as a burrito. What else do they have here?”
“Oh, you should get a taco salad,” I said.
“What’s a taco salad, Dad?”
“Meat, cheese, lettuce, salsa, and lettuce wrapped inside … well, no tortilla! It has no tortilla.”
“Dad, that doesn’t sound good. That sounds like removing an ingredient. That’s going to taste exactly the same!”
God’s Creativity and Human Creativity
This illustrates the difference between God’s creative activity and human activity. After discussing the creative capabilities that he has filled his world with, it is easy to be mistaken about the extent of human creativity when compared with his.
God’s creative activity and ours are not the same. Human creative activities are like Chipotle: mixing together the same few ingredients over and over again. Humanity’s most creative new thing is simply a new mixing of the same old ingredients. Often, a “new song” someone has just composed has the same five chords recently heard in another song. Meat, cheese, lettuce, salsa, and lettuce. We often are just mixing the same five ingredients together.
Even the most brilliant humans remix ingredients. Consider Ludwig van Beethoven, whose amazing symphonies are undisputed works of pure brilliance. The closer people study his compositions, the more they notice how he took ingredients from Mozart and Haydn, and added some harmonic development. Or people who study his string quartets notice how he used similar harmonic and structural ingredients in his symphonies.[1] Even his famous Ninth Symphony, that work of real innovation, was an act of combination of existing ingredients — the brilliant revolution of combining a choir and an orchestra during a symphony.
Now, without getting bogged down in musical criticism, my simple point is this: artists use ingredients. In Western music, there are twelve notes that composers combine in different ways. If they combine C, E, and G, it forms a happy major chord; but if you change ‘E’ to ‘Eb,’ it’s a sad minor chord. Again, this is not to disparage musicians or artists, but to warn against the view that treats human creativity like a divine power within us.
By contrast, God’s creativity is not like human creativity. God creates ex nihilo—out of nothing, without ingredients. At first, nothing existed, and then, by the word of his power, God created
quasars and quicksand,
pollen and polyphony,
nebula and nerve endings,
hydrogen and hemoglobin,
Niagara Falls and nanoscale light fields,
white blood cells and dark energy.
God’s creative activity is divine while human creativity is derivative. The concepts are related but not identical, and people must not to confuse them.[2]
A Word of Warning
Tread carefully when creative people clamor about the importance of their creative work by saying “When people create, we join our creating God.” That sentiment isn’t completely wrong, but those creativities are not symmetrical. We design, but only in a way designated; we derive but only in a way derivative.
Our identity cannot be found in the things we make; but is defined by the truth that by God we are made. We are not saved by our good works, but we are saved by being his work.
Consider the immense pressure that drives so many artists live destructive, escapist lives. The world says to creative people, “You did one great thing. Now, do it again in a way that we can monetize.”[3] Because modern culture has made creativity into a god, there is far too much pressure on creative people to save us. Because our culture views music as a universal language, a solution, and a sacrament, society turns to artistically minded people for advice that is irrelevant to their artistic skill. It destroys the artistic people in our culture. It’s heartbreaking.
Having clarified what human creativity is NOT, our next issue will consider human creativity actually IS!
[1] Note the similarities of the second movements of his 4th String Quartet and 1st Symphony. Interested readers might see the discussion in Gonçalo Nogueira, “Symphonic Beethoven vs Chamber Beethoven,” The Gleaming Sword (October 3, 2020), https://medium.com/the-gleaming-sword/symphonic-beethoven-vs-chamber-beethoven-cb9664977238.
[2] It is analogous to God’s creative activity, but not equivalent. See the discussion of univocal, equivocal, and analogical throughout Reformed thinkers (e.g. Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology, 34–5; The Christian Faith, 54–57, 126–29)
[3] This situating of the divine inside the artistically minded human is not new, but it’s a symptom that has grown more acute in our modern age. Even in ancient Greece, no one ever called a person a genius. A genius was a small sprite who lived in your walls. So, instead of labeling a person as a genius, people would say “He has a genius,” which simply meant there’s a little sprite who lives in your walls who calls out ideas to you. (See Elizabeth Gilbert’s famous TED talk, “Your Elusive Creative Genius,” TED 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_creative_genius/transcript?language=en)