Creativity and the image of God
I was recently asked to write an article for a Christian journal on ‘Five reasons why art matters’.[1] The first reason I gave was that we are made in the image of God, and creativity is part of that imageness. God our Creator has made us to be creative, and the arts in their broadest sense are part of the fun of being fully human as God made us to be, in His image.
This was supposed to be an uncontroversial, entry-level piece to encourage Christians to take an interest in the arts. So I was quite taken aback when I sent the article to some of my friends, especially those leaning towards Dutch Reformational philosophy, who replied with some force: ‘No, no. Being “in the image of God” refers to our function in ruling over God’s creation. Any relationship between human creativity and God’s creativity is merely an analogy; and, in any case, we are not really creative in the way that God is.’
As one with a long interest in Dutch Reformational thought, quoting Kuyper and sympathizing with Dooyeweerdian modal aspects, I was quite surprised by the emphatic conviction and consistency of their responses. I felt a little foolish, as though I had carelessly wandered off-side and let the team down. My friends pointed me to Richard Middleton’s book The liberating image to set my thinking straight.[2] But the effect of reading it, as I explain here, has been to convince me that our being in the image of God is not so easily defined: rather, it seems to me fundamentally rich and multi-faceted, a source of wonder and delight, like a work of art itself – and creativity is part of that imageness after all.
In what way are we ‘in the image of God’?
Middleton helpfully summarises three ways in which Christians have understood what it means for us to be made in the image of God:
Substantial: for a long time Christians held that there was something in our very substance that is like something in God. This would usually be identified as rationality, freedom of choice, emotion, and/or creativity.
Relational: based on the juxtaposition in Genesis 1:27 of ‘in the image of God he created them’ and ‘male and female he created them’, Barth and others argued that it is in our relationality that we are in the image of God.
Functional: based on the juxtaposition in Genesis 1:26 of ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness’ and ‘and let them rule…’, a combination of ideas repeated in verses 27 and 28, this view holds that being made in the image of God means our God-given function to rule over creation as the Lord’s representatives or agents in the world.[3]
Middleton also emphasises how little the Bible offers to help us unpack and explain what it means to be in the image of God. Historically, most interpretations tend towards isogesis, as writers simply read back into the concept of ‘image’ whatever they choose to highlight in their own humanity that differentiates them from the rest of God’s creatures.[4] He commendably admits that he is, as much as any writer, in danger of tendentiousness in preferring one interpretation over another; and he recognizes that the functional interpretation is particularly favoured among Kuyperians because it fits neatly with their emphasis on the cultural mandate.[5]
That said, he strongly backs the ‘functional’ explanation, this being, he says, the growing consensus among twentieth-century Old Testament scholars:
The cumulative evidence suggests that the biblical imago Dei refers to the status or office of the human race as God’s authorized stewards, charged with the royal-priestly vocation of representing God’s rule on earth by their exercise of cultural power.[6]
Middleton makes the good point that the substantialist argument ignores our physicality: if our imageness reflects aspects of the Lord’s being, then it must by definition be non-physical. But, he objects, the common understanding of ‘image’ in OT times would be of an idol in a temple: so our being made in the image of God must surely involve our physical existence, as God’s living representatives in the world.[7] This obviously ties in with the OT prohibition of making images of God, not just because we are to worship God as He is in reality and in the ways and places that He ordains; but because the OT is looking forward to the coming of Jesus, who is himself the image of God (Colossians 1:15), while we are only in the image of God. Middleton’s functionalist argument is also supported, throughout a substantial proportion of the book, by his research exploring analogies with images and gods in other cultures around OT Israel.
But, as William Lane Craig observes, Middleton seems to undermine his own case by conceding that in order to fulfil our function of filling and ruling the earth – i.e. building a culture – we need a host of other necessary capacities.
Ruling the earth and building an ever-growing civilization implies a created order in constant state of development, involving changes that need to be considered and judged. We need rationality, self-awareness, relationality, morality, imagination, exercise of the will – and creativity.[8] But these are the very qualities highlighted by the exponents of substantialism, which also seem to match qualities that the Lord has and members of the animal kingdom do not. As Craig goes on to assert, the substantialist argument is quite compatible with the functionalist argument; and in practice the functionalist argument seems to presuppose the substantialist one. We need, inter al., creativity in order to rule.
Indeed, Middleton repeatedly connects the Lord’s ruling and the Lord’s creation. When Genesis 1 asserts that we are made in the image of God, this must, he says, mean as a bare minimum ‘that the human vocation is modeled on the nature and action of the God portrayed in Genesis 1’.[9] But this minimal definition therefore must surely point not just to ruling but to creating. Later on, seeking to distinguish the Lord’s use of power from power in the hands of sinful humanity, Middleton says that this idea of ‘rule’ is not just about power. It ‘integrally includes … wisdom and artful construction. The God who rules the creation by His authoritative word is also the supreme artisan who constructs a complex and habitable cosmic structure.’[10] He later returns to this theme when summarizing his argument: God, he says, is pictured as ‘both artisan and ruler … bringing into being a wisely crafted world through the exercise of royal power’.[11]
I can see that the argument:
God is creative.
We are creative.
Therefore creativity is part of our being made in the image of God.
has the formal hallmarks of a false syllogism. But to argue that being ‘in the image of God’ consists in our function of ruling the creation under God, and that therefore our rational, volitional, imaginative and creative capacities are, by definition, not part of our being made in the image of God, even though they are capacities necessary for ruling, shared by God and apparently not shared by the rest of creation, seems perverse. Surely ruling and creativity go together.
Do we have to choose?
Reading Middleton, I began to wonder if this is a case of Systematic Theology digging itself into a hole that does not need further excavation. At the Reformation there was a need to counter the distinction that Roman Catholicism had drawn between ‘image’ and ‘likeness’. Aquinas had argued that the Fall had affected us only in our ‘likeness’ to God, which he took to be our supernatural aspect. However, in our being in the ‘image’ of God, he argued, we were ontologically like God – of the very same substance – and therefore in those aspects, especially our reason, uncorrupted by the Fall. The Reformers rightly insisted that ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ were a Hebraism referring to the same thing, and the Fall has affected every aspect of our being.[12]
However, to go on seeking more and more precise definition of ‘image’, although obviously an intellectual itch we continue to scratch, may be seeking clarity where Scripture offers none. I wonder if we might instead find more joy with Biblical Theology, which encourages us to let the unfolding of the Bible story shape our theological formulations. Biblical Theology might prod us to wonder why, since being made in the image of God is such a big deal, the Lord seems to leave its definition so undeveloped.
The opening chapters of Genesis refer to ‘image’ three times, each reference having a different nuance. Only in Genesis 1 is it linked to ruling. In Genesis 5:3 the new-born Seth is said to be in Adam’s own image, which does not involve delegation or representation, but more likely points to his inherited sinfulness. Then in Genesis 9:6 we are reminded that mankind is made in the image of God as a warning against shedding human blood, the implication of which is to reinforce the inherent value of human beings. A strictly functionalist reading of 9:6 would imply that our value is in what we do, rather than in who we are.
As Christopher Watkin writes in Biblical critical theory, there are clear consequences that follow from our imageness: it immediately establishes our worth and forms the basis of our identity.[13] But then, he suggests, we are left to explore, in a rich, multi-faceted way, what else might be involved.
Perhaps all three options for understanding image are simultaneously correct. As Watkin underlines, it is in the nature of God, of His creation and of His word to be rich and multi-faceted, just as God’s grace is ‘multi-coloured’ (1 Peter 4:10), inviting and rewarding endless exploration, in contrast to modernism which is ‘encumbered … by its desire for logical certainty’.[14]
In his new book seeking to unite Biblical and systematic theology, Graeme Goldsworthy appears to tread this path, referring repeatedly to our being made in the image of God, but declining to define it. He refers to ruling as being ‘an aspect of the image of God’, but he also emphasises that we are made not only to rule but to relate to God in love and fellowship, and to one another in marriage and community. For this to be the case, we need to be endowed with capacities that God himself has, to hear and speak, to relate and to love.[15] It seems very difficult to mark a distinction between what being made in the image of God requires us to do, and what doing that requires us to be.
In the opening chapters of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach’s classic study of realism in literature, he compares Greek myths with Biblical stories. He argues that Bible stories miss out a mountain of narrative detail that Greek writers would have supplied. This, he suggests, is deliberately done in order to invite readers of the Bible to enter the text imaginatively, and ponder the richness of its implications for themselves, in ways that Greek myths never did, because they did not directly implicate the lives of their hearers or call them to personal response.[16]
I suspect that in a similar way Genesis 1 may leave our imageness so vaguely defined because it is something we are to explore and understand by experience, in a way that is never complete. If ruling and creating go together in the work of God, it seems reasonable to see our imageness as encapsulating not just the function of ruling but all those other qualities and capacities that the Lord Himself has and that are required in subduing, ruling, and filling.
Creativity misused
I have also come to suspect that behind the functionalist view may be a commendable humility, seeking to downplay human creativity in the face of the hubristic modern world, where it is widely misused and misjudged.
Nowhere is that hubris more clearly seen than in the glorification of ‘creativity’ in modern art, with the artist promoted to modern-day prophet and novelty becoming the sine qua non of art. In his recent Art rethought Nicholas Wolterstorff traces out how the art world of the last 50 years has been overrun by what he calls ‘art-reflexive’ art, fixating on the question of ‘What counts as art?’ Here novelty is its own justification, as artists constantly test the boundaries of what can be admitted to the artistic arena.[17] The functionalist view certainly reminds us that whatever we create should be under the Lord, and for His glory.
The idea of artists being ‘creative’, however, has been with us for much longer. The ancient Greeks thought of poets as creative: the word ‘poet’ derives from the Greek word for ‘to make’. Painters and sculptors were not viewed so highly because Greek dualism tended to look down on those who got their hands dirty: painters and sculptors were seen as mere moulders and shapers. Renaissance thinkers, consciously reviving Platonic thought, rediscovered the idea of poets as creative, but, needing to square paganism with the prevailing rule of Christianity, they married it, ironically, with a functionalist interpretation of the image of God. This resulted in a belief in a ‘godlike power that humans exercised on earth’. They ‘imagined a creative, transformative energy by which humans (in imitation of God’s own creative activity) shaped earthly life through cultural-historical action, whether in city-building, alchemy, politics, scholarship, or the arts’, the latter gradually extended to include visual artists.[18]
However, it was in the Enlightenment that the idea of ‘artist as creator’ really took off in an unhelpful direction. This was partly because the Creator God was precluded from discussion, and creativity had to be found another source. But also, as church and other institutional patronage fell away, the art market itself changed. Artists had to make works on their own initiative, and then find a buyer. This tended over time to put emphasis on the artist’s unique personality, their vision and ‘creative genius’.
The idolization of human creativity grew to a crescendo through the nineteenth century towards early Modernism. The Romantics gave primacy to the strength of their own emotions. The Impressionists and Expressionists, still producing beautiful works rooted in representation of the physical world, nevertheless foregrounded their individual experience of the world and responses to it.
Then in the early years of the twentieth century, you can almost sense the frisson as Picasso and Braque move from Analytical Cubism, in which the facets of the painted image are still derived from the reality of the subject, to step into Synthetic Cubism, where images are conjured up de novo from visual clues that the artist decides to include. Meanwhile, Kandinsky and Mondrian are moving into the complete novelty of non-representational painting: out of nothing – represented by the blank canvas – they conjure up forms that supposedly address the human soul.
For some, this humanistic optimism abruptly hit the buffers in the First World War. The British Official War Artist Paul Nash ironically entitled his painting of the churned Flanders mud as We are making a new world.[19] However, in revolutionary Russia the optimism continued: El Lissitsky, for instance, made visually stunning works with titles like The new man.[20] In France and Germany many abstract artists of the 1920s intersected with modernist architects such as Corbusier and Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus who, with an often disastrously misplaced confidence, believed they were designing a new world for a new humanity. This emphasis on novelty and personal creativity persisted through the drama of Abstract Expressionism and the mind-numbing tedium of Post-Painterly Abstraction.
As Wolterstorff describes, underpinning these developments in art is what he calls ‘the grand narrative’ of the arts, a deeply humanistic and hubristic story of progress, in which writers such as Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg drew on Kant and Hegel to argue that, in Modernism, ‘Art’ was progressing to find its true identity. Freed from any utilitarian end such as narrative, meaning, representation and, perhaps most importantly, morality, art was instead to be appreciated purely aesthetically. There was a kind of aristocratic snobbery about this, since such appreciation required sensibilities that not everyone might have, but, thankfully, Bell and Greenberg and their circles had them in abundance.[21] The ‘grand narrative’ was never universally held: I remember at an art historians’ conference in the 1980s listening to Charles Harrison arguing that a work of art might be explained as simply, ‘He did it for the money.’[22] And over the past 50 years the ‘grand narrative’ has proved unable to account for Conceptual Art. But the whole period is spanned by an idolization of unconstrained human creativity, as if wisdom, beauty and the joy of creativity were simply expressions of our own cleverness.
Creativity humbled
But the fact that some non-Christians use their creativity, unsurprisingly, in ways that do not honour the Creator, should not detract from our celebration of our creativity as part of being made in the image of God. Human creativity need not be a challenge to the rule of God, but a humble acknowledgement of how He has made us to be, and a means to fulfil His calling for us to subdue and fill the earth.
There are differences, of course. The Lord creates ex nihilo; we only create out of what He has created. Also, He created perfectly, by just a word. We create by our wills, but not with that authoritative precision. Most of our making involves trial and error, experimentation and discovery. Very rarely does the end product of our efforts look much like what we envisaged when we started. Usually, our creation is marked by a sense of dissatisfaction, if not disappointment, and a determination to keep on trying.
We create in subjection to our own Creator, but we do create. We make things that the Lord did not. Tolkien described us as ‘subcreators’; others describe us as improvising on the materials that God has given us.[23] We make arrangements in this world that the Lord did not. We make up stories that have never been told. We write music that has never been heard before. Our freedom and creativity is constrained – or should be constrained if we are living under the Lordship of Christ – but it is still real.
In addition, this creativity is part of how we answer our calling to rule the earth. As Watkin observes, when Adam names the animals he is constrained by what God has made, but he is also exercising intellectual and creative freedom: he is not simply transcribing names dictated by God.[24] And God is interested in what Adam will choose to do: the Lord, we are told, brought the animals to Adam ‘to see what he would name them’ (Genesis 2:19). Wheat, Ellis Potter points out, naturally grows along river banks, mixed in with other plants. Humanity’s decision to make wheat grow in fields, separated from other plants, is ‘artificial’, the result of human artifice. It is an imaginative, creative intervention by human beings in the world, different from how God originally made it.[25] The Lord has made us to do new things in His world.[26]
The joy of faithful creativity
Creativity is part of the way God has made us to be like Him, and to fulfil His mandate to rule over the earth, to subdue it and fill it. This leads, I think, to an open-ended list of delightful consequences. Let me suggest a few.
Firstly, novelty, under God, is a good thing. Modernism’s pursuit of progress was really a Christian heresy: unchained from worship of God, our culture pursues change and growth as an end in itself, congratulating itself on its own genius, just as modern art values novelty as a justification in its own right.[27] But this does not make creativity and change in themselves a bad thing. Quite the opposite: we cannot build a culture or achieve anything without them. In Isaiah 43:18 the Lord himself rejoices to be doing ‘a new thing’; and Jesus has brought in a new covenant with better promises (Hebrews 8:6).
Our creativity, like every aspect of our lives, serves a purpose: it is part of our worship and service of our Creator God, and the fulfillment of our role as stewards of the earth. But secondly, we should try to avoid a narrowly utilitarian view that creativity must always have a serious end in view. There is a proper joy to be found in creativity itself, for this too reflects the Lord’s own attitude to His creation. C. S. Lewis , I think, is suggesting this when he has Aslan singing creation into being in The Magician’s Nephew.
There is, as Watkin argues, a glorious pointlessness to our creativity, which echoes God’s creation. The Lord was not bound to create, nor – a big debating point in the medieval origins of modern science – was the shape of His creation bound by other constraints, such as Aristotelian ‘forms’.[28] There is a wonderful freedom in the Lord’s creation and, as Loren Wilkinson in Circles and the cross points out, we often overlook the sheer joy that the Lord takes in His creation for its own sake.[29] Creativity can just be fun. Lincoln Harvey makes an interesting, parallel argument for why we enjoy sport. It is the sheer pointlessness of games and the arbitrariness of the rules we choose that makes them fun. We could, for instance, conceive of a game like soccer where two balls are in play at the same time. It actually sounds like an interesting game, but it is not soccer, where, if a second ball comes onto the pitch, the game has to stop until it is removed. Those are the rules. We could have chosen different rules, which would make a different game. The enjoyment of playing is bound up with our freedom to make up the game rules. In some small way, Harvey argues, this echoes the joy the Lord has in His own unconstrained creation.[30] Art and sport are also alike in the way they can be corrupted into something ugly by money.
Thirdly, following from this sense of gratuity in creation, there is in creativity something of love and gift.[31] Unforced by outside necessities, God has freely chosen what He would create. It is characterized by richness and variety, and comes with His blessing that it may flourish and grow. It is entrusted to us for our care and enjoyment as a gift. In our own creativity, although we can doodle and make things for our own enjoyment, mostly we make things to share with others. We pay more attention to the decoration of rooms or the preparation of meals that we share with others, rather than ones that are only for ourselves. We tell stories and jokes to others. We listen to each other performing music. There is something sad about a completed novel that hasn’t been published. We channel so much of our creativity into making things for others to enjoy, and we offer them as gifts, in love.
My fourth point follows as a consequence. I have argued elsewhere that beauty is a great Christian apologetic;[32] and so too, I think, are imagination and creativity. Although our culture takes these for granted, they have no logical role in a materialist universe bound by purely physical laws. Freedom, choice and individualism are necessary for creation and our delight in creativity.[33] The daily choices we make about how to dress, how to wear our hair, how to arrange our work space or dining table, bring charm and delight into our lives because they are not the product of iron necessity, nor do they seem to assist us in a Darwinian struggle to survive, but are freely made by creative individuals, living out what we have been made to be by our loving, creative Father.
Finally, the Fine Arts – that branch of creativity that intentionally creates images that encapsulate and explore our ultimate commitments[34] – these too are a means of fulfilling our calling to ‘subdue the earth’. They are a means to explore aspects of human life and experience, as fallen creatures of a holy God. At a most basic level, for instance, drawings and paintings of the world around us help us to see what is there: they draw our attention to things we might have missed. Especially in our fallen state, where aspects of the world can seem alien, even hostile, an artist, by careful, purposeful looking at something we prefer to pass by unnoticed, can make it more familiar, and therefore less alien.[35] Calvin Seerveld has argued for many years that we need to recapture this idea of the artist as one who serves their community, creating beautiful things that invite us to constructive, imaginative observation and engagement.[36]
Works of art, such as paintings and sculptures, which more profoundly explore our fundamental beliefs are not only constrained by the materials God has made for us, but by the truth that is in Christ. Properly exercised under God, they help us to explore our experience of life, or to engage with something we have never thought of before. They can help us to interrogate our values, to gain a richer engagement with the stories that underpin our identity, to celebrate our Creator. All of these are part of the way we fulfil our calling to subdue and fill the earth through human culture under God.
Conclusion
I am increasingly convinced that a Biblical Theological understanding of our being made in the image of God points us away from a single definition. Like God’s creation itself, and like a work of art, our imageness is intrinsically rich and multi-faceted. This is frustrating to our desire for definitional clarity, but is exciting for our lived experience as creative rulers of the world, under God who loves and delights in His creation, and calls us to do the same, while continuing to form and fill it with love and generosity.
[1] Nigel Halliday: ‘5 reasons why art matters (whether it has a capital A or not)’, The big picture 8 (November 2023), pp. 3–6 [published by the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge] [also available on this website: click here].
[2] J. Richard Middleton: The liberating image: the Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005).
[3] Middleton, pp. 17ff. See also p. 26.
[4] Middleton, p. 18.
[5] Middleton, pp. 31, 32, 35.
[6] Middleton, p. 235.
[7] Middleton, p. 24.
[8] William Lane Craig: ‘Doctrine of Man (Part 4): evaluating construals of the image of God’, 29 January 2020. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-3/s3-doctrine-of-man/doctrine-of-man-part-4 Accessed 25 October 2024.
[9] Middleton, p. 60.
[10] Middleton, p. 89.
[11] Middleton, p. 271.
[12] Graeme Goldsworthy: In these last days: the dynamics of Biblical revelation. Biblical and systematic theology in the service of understanding Scripture (London: Apollos, 2024), pp. 149–50, 263, 268.
[13] Christopher Watkin: Biblical critical theory: How the Bible's unfolding story makes sense of modern life and culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2022), pp. 86–95.
[14] Watkin, p. 61. See also p. 86. On the reductivism inherent in modernism see Patrick Deneen: Why Liberalism failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
[15] Goldsworthy, e.g. pp. 283, 483, 550, 569.
[16] Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: the representation of reality in Western literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), chs 1-2.
[17] Nicholas Wolterstorff: Art rethought: the social practices of art (Oxford; University Press, 2015), chs 17–18. Wolterstorff sees this development as an interesting development that shapes how we think about ‘art’, whereas I see it as a parched desert into which modernism has been led by its presuppositions and commitments. But that is an argument for another time.
[18] Middleton, p. 29. See also p. 35 n. 66.
[19] Paul Nash (1889–1946): We are making a new world (1918; oil on canvas, 71.1 x 91.4 cm; London: Imperial War Museum).
[20] El Lissitzky (1890–1941): New man (1923; colour lithograph, 33 x 33.7 cm).
[21] See Wolterstorff, ch. 3.
[22] See also Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison, Mel Ramsden: ‘Art history, art criticism and explanation’, Art history 4:4 (December 1981), pp. 432–56.
[23] Watkin, pp. 96–8.
[24] Watkin, p. 99.
[25] Ellis Potter, Staggering along with God: an interview biography (Destinée Media, 2018), p. 111.
[26] A recent cartoon in the London Guardian (Saturday Magazine, 28 September 2024, p. 78) showed the Lord trying to come to terms with Adam and Eve’s decision to resurface the Garden of Eden with astroturf. They explained that it was easier to maintain, especially as Cain and Abel, seen pummelling each other in the background, had been churning up the grass playing soccer.
[27] See Watkin, p. 525.
[28] Watkin, p. 63.
[29] Loren Wilkinson: Circles and the cross: cosmos, consciousness, Christ, and the human place in creation (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2023), p. 80.
[30] Lincoln Harvey: A brief theology of sport (London: SCM Press, 2014).
[31] Watkin, pp. 61ff.
[32] Halliday: ‘5 reasons’.
[33] Watkin, p. 38.
[34] I am here following Hans Rookmaaker. See my ‘Rookmaaker and art theory’, The big picture 3 (Hilary 2022), pp. 13–16 [published by the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge]; and ‘5 reasons’.
[35] In 1904 a client who had bought a Monet painting of London wrote to the painter: ‘It is the first time that I am back in London since seeing your Thameses, and I must tell you all the joy I had to see once against this wonderful landscape, which you have enabled us to understand better. There was today one of those luminous half-fogs: I stopped ten times on the bridges and the banks thinking of you.’ (Quoted in the notes to Monet and London: views of the Thames (London: Courtauld Institute, 2024).
[36] See e.g. Calvin Seerveld: Bearing fresh olive leaves: alternative steps in understanding art (Carlisle: Piquant, 2000).
[This article was first published in Faithful lives: reflections on the world (2025), published by the College of the Ozarks, Point Lookout, MI), pp. 51-67