Kuyper on Calvinism and Art

I Found a gorgeous quote in some of Abraham Kuyper's lectures.

"That artistic ability, that art capacity, as such, can have room in human nature, we owe to our creation after the image of God. In the real world, God is the creator of everything; the power of really producing new things is His alone and therefore he always continues to be the Creative Artist. As God, He alone is the original One, we are only the bearers of His image. Our capacity to create after Him and after what He created, can only consist in the unreal creations of art. So we, in our fashion, may imitate God's handiwork. We create a kind of cosmos, in our architectural monument; to embellish nature's forms, in sculpture; to reproduce life, animated by lines and tints, in our painting; to transfuse the mystical spheres in our music and poetry. And all this because the beautiful is not the product of our own fantasy, nor of our subjective perception, but has an objective existence, being itself the expression of a Divine perfection."

I love the part about "In the real world, God is the creator of everything." That is important because, historically, Kuyper was dealing with a hardcore Modernism that believed in the real world but totally divorced God from it and believed only in the real world. They divorced art, relationship, sex, and everything else that is so important to life, from God and from the supernatural. Thus, for Kuyper to say, "In the real world, God is the creator of everything," and then connect art to God was unthinkable in a Modernist mindset. This is why I like Kuyper so much, he genuinely believed that, in the words of Francis Schaeffer, "Christianity is truth for all of life," and refused to foolishly divorce Christianity from the surrounding culture, understanding that art is a gift of God and real engagement with the real problems and questions of the culture was necessary and must not be shirked. In fact, after reading about Kuyper and hearing some of what he has said, I am near convinced that Schaeffer didn't say anything new and "borrowed" everything he learned and said from Kuyper. I have always thought he was a prophet with a fresh message but most of what he said I have found in Kuyper. Interesting really...there is nothing new under the sun.

Soli Deo Gloria

R. D. Thompson