Creative Writing with Truth, Selflessness, and Beauty

an essay on why christ-followers create and how it can best glorify God

The art of writing. Alphabetic characters forming sounds with meaning, written into tablets, inked on a surface, often preserved to continue communicating a message to an audience beyond earshot here and now. The art of writing is incredible when you think about it. I sit here writing this paper without the ability to imagine my life without the written word. At that, writing could have been plain and austere, sufficient in producing a point but without invoking emotion or anything more. And, not only is the world of creative writing one that every human is glad to enter into whether as a writer or a reader, but it is also a world in which God Himself stepped into to reach His children of mankind. God cares about creative writing; His written Word is living proof that He is a creative writer. The channel of creative writing must be viewed with the perspective that it is an opportunity to glorify God in the writer's life. The most essential way that the Christian writer must glorify God with creative writing is by abiding in truth, selflessness, and beauty. To each of these aspects, we will give greater attention.

The Christian writer is called to glorify God in his creative writing by abiding in the Truth. Out of the three elements, it is most fitting to start here, because this is the place each Christ-follower ought to start every morning when his feet touch the ground. Being a follower of Christ, one knows truth through Jesus who is the Truth (John 14:12), and to be in Christ, that person has been made a new creation: "The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." (2 Cor. 5:17). The Christian, then, called to abide in Jesus Christ (John 15:1-17), should aim to abide in the truth always. His endeavor of creative writing should not be compartmentalized outside of that Christianly calling. And at worst, refusing to abide in truth is a sin against God (Proverbs 12:22; Colossians 3:9).

The opportunity to glorify God in creative writing presents itself in a few different ways in the aspect of truth. The truth can be involved in artistic integrity and in the content. First, in the way the artist expresses himself, he needs to uphold artistic integrity, and hold to the truth of who he is. I have already introduced the artist as a redeemed child of God, acknowledging Jesus, who himself is the Truth, and acknowledging the new creation Jesus makes the Christ-follower into. The Christian writer must write out from that in every way. Before getting to the content itself, when he considers writing a piece, is he reverting back to an expression of the unsaved person he no longer is? That would not be true and it would compromise his artistic integrity. There is a part of writing that comes usually at the beginning, sometimes during, hopefully not after, when the author makes a moral decision or a few. In these decisions is an opportunity to consciously choose to abide in the truth that Christ has become in the writer's life. At the beginning of her essay, "Novelist and Believer," Flannery O'Connor models the decision to abide in artistic integrity and truth as has shaped her life. She said in the end of the explanation, "I shall have to speak, without apology, of the Church, even when the Church is absent; of Christ, even when Christ is not recognized." (Christian Imagination, 160). This aspect of truth starts with the writer's integrity, and from there the expression of truth should flow into the content of what is written.

Secondly and majorly, the content, which is what is being said, abides in truth as it agrees with the biblical worldview. The truth of the content is allowed to be complex as long as it is ultimately true. Fiction, though not true in one sense, can and should still abide in the greater ultimate message of truth. A character's complaint or cry of distress, such as "God, why are you far from me," may not be true because God is omnipresent, but it still abides in truth by presenting the real human emotion of feeling ignored by God. As sanctified people who have been taught the truth by God's word (John 8:32, 17:17; 1 John 4:6; 2 Timothy 2:15, James 1:18), Christians have the ability and responsibility to write with minor themes and the ultimate message that is God's truth in the reality of the world He created. In Richard Terrell's essay on Christian Fiction, he iterates, "Christian art expresses the nature of God's creation and is informed by knowledge of God's mystery of creation, incarnation, and redemption," (Christian Imagination, 251). These themes are foundational to every other theme that can be explored. Terry and Lister, writing on God-honoring creativity for The Gospel Coalition said: "Sometimes it will speak between the lines, and other times on the title page" ("Why Your Creativity Matters to Christ"). Regardless of whether or not he references a Bible verse in parentheses, the content of his creative writing is a great opportunity for the Christian writer to glorify God by upholding the truth of God's word.

In addition to writing in truth, the Christian writer has an excellent opportunity to bring glory to God if he writes abiding in selflessness. Writing is most glorifying to God when it is centered on God Himself, others, or the Truth (as Jesus Christ), but not when centered on serving the writer's self. This selflessness goes closely with abiding in truth because in bearing the truth, it is to doing good to one's neighbor. This is especially important to consider while creating high-quality art that will be more influential to the reader, a thought that Schaeffer touches on in his essay on perspectives of art (The Christian Imagination, p. 40). As the writer is creating, he should intentionally ask himself about the meaning behind why he is writing. If the answer is to bring glory to himself, then he is in the company of countless other secular writers in the world who have this drive unashamedly. This reason for writing, though, is vanity and has no eternal significance because self-glory is temporal and bears no fruit. The author of James even calls this act of selfish ambition "demonic" and the place where you find "disorder and every evil practice" (James 3:14-16). Creative writing should not come from this ungodly motivation for selfish ambition.

The Christian writer can put the reader first in his writing, and he can also put God first, directly glorifying God through the writing as an act of worship. Worship, defined by John Frame in his book on the subject, is not just song-singing, but any act of acknowledging God's great work in both adoration and action ("Worship in Spirit and in Truth," 1-2). The Holy Spirit is intentional in inspiring the Christian, and as long as the Christian is willing to take action, the Spirit can lead him in so many ways to write in adoration of God. This may be to write a vulnerable memoir, a convicting exhortation to fellow believers, or a piece on a topic that God has called him to process according to His Word. Besides direct worship, putting God first in a work of art may even be agreeing to practice the skills of writing, even though it is tedious and difficult, but for the sake of excellence and glory to God. In many scenarios, the creative writing process requires work and sacrifice on the part of the writer, but it truly brings glory to God. It is appealing to abandon the project because it is an easy and self-gratifying thing to do, but to press on is to abide in selflessness and glorify God.

The last essential element to glorifying God as a creative writer is abiding in beauty. In the pursuit of truth and selflessness, it would be a terrible mistake to forget the simple reality of the form in which a writer creates: this is art. The creative writing, then, must be art. The theology of beauty is a lifelong study, so understand that as it is merely introduced here. In the creative art, the artist is given an opportunity to live out the God-likeness that He created mankind with from the beginning, the imago Dei, the image of the Creator God, that is established in Genesis 1:27. By fulfilling the creation of something out of nothing, creators reflect their Creator and bring glory to Him. This creating is imagination and has the potential to reach beyond the surface, to true God-reflecting beauty, and meaning. In one online writing, John Piper calls imagination a Christian duty, he calls boring the creative audience a sin, and he concludes it in the glory of God: "All of this we do, because we are like God and because he is infinitely worthy of ever-new verbal, musical, and visual expressions," ("Obey God with Your Creativity," Desiring God Blog). It is not just through the clear proclamation of light and the resistance to the darkness that the writer witnesses to God, it is by the beauty of the art itself.

At each point of the creative process, the creative writer who calls himself a Christian has the opportunity to bring glory to God through his art, and he must do it. At the foundational level, this requires three aspects: truth, selflessness, and beauty. The creative writer must start here and continue abiding here almost as closely as he abides in Christ because art is a process and each step of the journey plays an important role in the artist's life. It is a gift to skillfully participate in the art of creative writing, and it ought to be used in every way humanly possible to bring glory to the Creator God who reigns above every word, every language, every work, for all of eternity. 

works cited

Frame, John M. Worship in Spirit and in Truth. Phillipsburg, NJ, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1996.

O'Connor, Flannery. "Novelist and Believer." The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken, Waterbrook Press, 2002, 159-167.

Piper, John. "Obey God with Your Creativity." Desiring God, 8 October 2018. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/obey-god-with-your-creativity Accessed 9 Apr 2020.

Schaeffer, Francis A. "Perspectives on Art." The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken, Waterbrook Press, 2002, 35-47.

Terrell, Richard. "Christian Fiction: Piety is Not Enough." The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken, Waterbrook Press, 2002, 239-259.

Terry, Thomas, and Ryan Lister. "Why Your Creativity Matters to Christ." The Gospel Coalition, 6 September 2018. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/creativity-matters-christ/ Accessed 9 Apr 2020.