Book Review: Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry
| Autor: | Imogen Adkins |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Anglican Theological Review. 97:697-699 |
| ISSN: | 2163-6214 0003-3286 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/000332861509700422 |
| Popis: | Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry. By Trevor Hart. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014.368 pp. $69.95 (cloth).This is the kind of book that stays with you, draws you back for rereading, and deepens the resonances of daily life. The first in a three-volume project entitled A Poetics of Redemption, it is an "attempt to situate accounts of human 'creativity'. . . within ... a Christian account of God's identity as Creator of heaven and earth" (p. ix). To this end, Hart brings theology and biblical exposition into conversation with a whole host of secular disciplines. The result is a deep understanding of, and appreciation for, human poiesis as centered within the doctrines of the incarnation and Trinity.The book opens with a significant quotation. Steiner's phrase the "grammars of creation" (p. 1) signals, for Hart, how the word "creation" has considerable "semantic overspill" (p. 5)-yet, whatever the context of its use, it is inescapably set in "relation to divine precedent" (p. 2). Handling carefully the presumed affinities between divine and human "making," and celebrating how the differences are interwoven, are central concerns of this book.The first section of Hart's argument covers the nature of God's creative action in the world, as witnessed to by scripture (notably Genesis, Exodus 31, and John's Gospel) and church tradition (particularly Irenaeus). A strong, yet properly chastened, image of the Trinitarian God as master craftsman emerges, who both creates ex nihilo and generously resolves to require humanity's participation in the outworking of his artistic vision (that is, the establishment of a world where Creator and creature dwell "at one"). Hart is alert to the dangers of simplistic "co-creation," and so-throughout the book, but especially in the last chapter-he sets the divine desire for human agency squarely within a Christ-centred, covenantal hermeneutic. Creation theology is therefore treated as a "function of the doctrine of God" (p. 314).Hart then focuses on how human creativity is manifested within our "cosmos" (material world) and "ethos" (symbolic world), noting that we are "grateful recipients of a given world" and are, to some extent, "complicit in the construction and the giving of it" (p. 98). He detects in this hardwired "give and take" (p. 109) the blessing of divinely ordained order, for the "same perceptual responses which . . . mediate . . . reality for us are themselves part of the fundamental ?givenness' of the world that issues from God's own creative activity" (p. 107). Human language and culture also contribute to the cultivation of reality, but additionally "implicate us in conditions of re- sponsible use" (p. … |
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