Can Christians create dangerously?

Why orthodoxy and risky creativity are firm friends

In the 1950s Albert Camus gave a landmark lecture entitled ‘Create Dangerously’. The French novelist’s contention was that - given the social malaise of his era - creative people bear a moral responsibility to produce works which provoke, and which move towards the empowering of the powerless. For Camus this is the costly and inevitable outcome of seeking to create in a world filled with tensions and moral possibilities that impinge on the welfare of society. Addressing the medium of writing specifically he stated,

The writer cannot hope to remain aloof in order to pursue the reflections and images that are dear to him. Until the present moment, remaining aloof has always been possible in history. When someone did not approve, he could always keep silent or talk of something else. Today everything is changed and even silence has dangerous implications…Until now the artist was on the sidelines. He used to sing purposely, for his own sake, or at best to encourage the martyr and make the lion forget his appetite. But now the artist is in the amphitheatre. Of necessity, his voice is not quite the same; it is not nearly so firm.

A world living in the wake of major wars, in the shadow of a coming Cold War and in the moral aftermath of millions of lives lost, necessitates art and acts of creation which challenge both the artist and the public - and that refuse personal indulgence or easy orthodoxy. Creative work, under these terms, must be a dangerous endeavour.

In this article I want to assess how much this claim can be applied to Christian creativity and some of the implications it might carry for how we both produce work and consume it. The ramifications of potentially creating dangerously extend to how we see the world, how we represent it, and how we interact with orthodoxy in a way that is both faithful and deeply unsettling.

The risk of creative safety

One of the great ways for Christian artists to answer the question ‘can I create dangerously?’ is to counterpoint it with the corresponding question ‘can I afford to create safely?’. A sermonic culture where exegesis only ever lands on already anticipated truths, where proclamation may have some verbal alterations in its pathos but seldom in its essential content is in critically poor health. A Christian fine artist, illustrator, filmmaker, animator, author or musician who sees their faith as a creative boundary rather than a membrane through which they can enter the world of imagination, exploration and expression is doomed to a cyclical and derivative existence. Creative safety is terribly overrated.

This position, however, is all too easy to adopt. Presented with the (properly and appropriately) unchangeable matrix of beliefs that make up Christian orthodoxy, there can be an assumed sense that only those works that unquestioningly reinforce it are permissible or desirable. Market forces are just as strong here as theological convictions: Christian consumers can have a tendency to want affirmation and restatement rather than exploration and the risk of an altered worldview. This can easily move Christian art (and artists who are Christians) into a confined space where the common grace of God, and the common grit of human existence, are excessively submitted to the work of heralding the fixed points of orthodoxy. Such a move might reassure the creative Christian and the Christian consumer but it seldom carries anything other than the emaciated aesthetic of propaganda. Creative safety is a risk not worth running.

The unsafe world of biblical creativity

The better (and more biblical) way to work creatively as Christians is to embrace the blessing of danger, and the need to see that truth works within tolerances that allow volatile things to cohabit with solid faith. This is true at the level of personal wrestling with real issues, and the public representation of the difficult things that make us human and make us believers.

Biblically, the Psalms provide a powerful example of dangerous creativity when it comes to personal faith. If we are looking for formulaic and procedural songs the Psalms are the wrong place to look. If we crave a safety net of certainty to underpin how we meet God in the hard stations of life, the Psalms will disappoint us.

To read the Psalms is to have a brush with real spiritual danger. The Psalmists often sing from the centre of personal wreckage: sin in their life or in the life of the nation, impatient grappling with the injustice of the world, the isolation of personal and spiritual depression. Often these songs will provide us with a satisfying and creedal conclusion, but they regularly leave us hanging in the midst of pain and doubt and uncertainty (Psalm 88 is the most stark example of this). David and the other Psalmists knew what it was to create dangerously, to walk right at the rim of belief and apostasy and to allow language to teeter momentarily (and even permanently) on that edge.

In terms of creative endeavour meeting the public space, the writing prophets provide us with a model which is disconcerting but also corrective of much of our saccharine and sentimentalist creative instincts. The prophets lived on the periphery and often only approached the centre of covenantal life as a holy irritant, as disruptive voices which created dissonance with the tendency of God’s people to form a choir of uncreative contentment carolling the status quo. The language of the prophets, their performance art, their incarnated representations of the irreducible brokenness of covenant and community, were so dangerous that their lives were often at risk because of the work they produced. ‘Thus says the Lord’ did not ring from community sponsored platforms but from the gadfly territory of Israel-troublers, visual disrupters and verbal ragamuffins who made up the company of the prophets. Creating dangerously was normative for those tasked with ministering prophetically.

Posing a danger to ourselves

Christian creatives, then, have a precedent and a holy calling to eschew safety in favour of the edgy and uncomfortable expressions of common human life, faith and hope. Their Christianity is not a censor on how much they can say or how critically and disturbingly they can think but the very means of creating dangerously in the first place. Christian creativity accesses the full word-hoard, refusing to breathe the recycled air that is mainstream Christian writing and publishing. Christian creativity can grasp the fullness of human experience, mining and mimicking its vulgarity and sublimity. Christian creativity can bring critique of assumptions and easy beliefs right into the heart of a community which can be self-defensive and other-dismissive. Creating dangerously allows these avenues to be explored, it allows loose-ends to be left untied and it opens the possibility of reaching right into the heart of things with God at our side.

Marilynne Robinson provides a powerful example of what this can look like,

Over the years of writing and teaching, I have tried to free myself of constraints I felt, limits to the range of exploration I could make, to the kind of intuition I could credit. I realised gradually that my own religion, and religion in general, could and should disrupt these constraints, which amount to small and narrow definitions of what human beings are and how human life is to be understood.

One need only think of the intellectual range of Dostoyevsky as he probes the soft tissue of human suffering alongside the religious instincts of characters who are contradictions of themselves. Or, one could range into the work of Flannery O’Connor with her sharp eye for bathos, for the sheer absurdity of our prejudices and predilections - factors that often sit alongside faith rather than outside of it. These writers could fix some bearings in belief (however firmly held) and then plot the reality of human existence and contingency with startling and disarming effect. For them, creating dangerously was simply the stuff of the life they lived themselves and the lives they observed around them.

This work of creating dangerously is not restricted to the world of fiction, poetry and drama. Some of the most prophetic voices within Christianity in recent years are those who have been willing to stand outside of it and show believers who they are, and what churches can be. This presents a danger to ourselves. Whether it is the courageous work of Rachel Denhollander or the forensically faithful writing of Diane Langberg, some of the most dangerous Christian creativity has been in telling the church the hard and unpleasant story of who she can be when her eye is off Jesus. The resistance and dismissal that such writers’ work attracts from those within Christianity suggests that they may just be playing in the prophetic register. Creating dangerously can be our hardest task and yet yields the greatest truth, tough as it is.

Shocking and outraging thoughtless people

In his introduction to the story of art, Ernst Gombrich reflects on the artist’s ability to bring fresh truth to communities inoculated against the radical newness of Christian orthodoxy. Citing Caravaggio’s commission to paint St Matthew for the altar of a church in Rome, Gombrich shows how the artist’s insistence on portraying the earthiness of the apostle brought him into conflict with church authorities who saw his work as derogatory of the gospel writer’s dignity. Needing the money from the commission, Caravaggio had to rework this piece to be in line with Christian expectations, losing something of the vibrancy of his original work along the way. Gombrich reflects,

It was usually those artists who read the Scriptures with the greatest devotion and attention who tried to build up in their minds an entirely fresh picture of the incidents of the sacred story. They tried to forget all the paintings they had seen, and to imagine what it must have been like when the Christ Child lay in the manger and the shepherds came to adore him, or when a fisher man began to preach the gospel. It has happened time and again that such efforts of a great artist to read the old text with entirely fresh eyes have shocked and outraged thoughtless people.

Creating dangerously will (and should!) produce precisely this shock but if allowed to exist in an environment that is open to new apprehension of old and unchangeable things, this very risk of remaking can be the means of re-seeing and re-believing what safe work sullies by its very predictability.

Can Christians create dangerously? Undoubtedly. Christian artists might just serve the cause of orthodoxy precisely by raising our cultural heart-rate by a few beats; by seeming to risk the truth only to show us more clearly its resilience and its ability to live and be represented in the real world of imagined things.