Today, I have the unique privilege of reviewing Sam Mahlstadt’s very engaging Creative Theology.
Creative Theology is a simple book that imparts a careful wisdom. Sam carefully traces a narrative of Creation to Fall to Restoration and bids all of us, made in the image of the Creator, to journey these scenes toward a new found sense of the creative spirit within the fabric of our souls. As a principally popular work, the careful, cursory reflection on the place of the creative call within each of our lives is at once engaging and convicting. We are taken into a conversation that expects a response, a narrative that we find our very being within, whether we realize it or not.
As an artist myself, moreover as an artist who is being trained theologically to engage the discipline and practice of creation from the perspective of serious scrutiny and engagement with the Church, I found several strengths to Sam’s book that I haven’t yet noticed in other popular works in the past few years about the people of God and the creative process. Sam is careful to identify each and every one of us as creatives, not as artists. The advantage to this is multifaceted. First, he takes care in allowing those called to the discipline of art to find their calling legitimate. Second, while honoring the call of the artist, he also honors the creative call that is upon all of us, upholds it, and recognizes that the children of God by nature create, but their awareness of this beauty is often truncated by self-deprecation and doubt. Sam manages to at once universalize the creative spirit and, at the same time, keep the integrity of the artist’s particular vocation.
Moreover, Sam envisions what I would consider one of the more realistic hopes for the Church when it comes to its relationship to the arts. As opposed to other works that celebrate a liberal view of art to the extent that the Church becomes a storehouse for whatever thing has been haphazardly pieced together, Sam draws from the Tradition and upon history, looking back to note the deep theological care that was part of artistry for centuries which made it such an important facet of the Church. While Sam, like many, passionately advocate the restorations of the arts to the Church, he refines this plea with a theological sensitivity that at once holds the mooring of orthodoxy and, at the same time, invites the broad brushstroke of the creative questioner.
Finally, Sam has produced a work that is particularly aware of the tension it stands it. Near the close, he articulates well the mystery of Faith, the Christ who has come, is come, and shall come. The kingdom is at hand, the kingdom shall be. Sam places the need for beauty in the breath between this life and the eschaton and articulates the reason for our creative spirit as being intrinsic to the reason of God.
As we are told, those He called, He also justified. It might well be considered, those He called, He also justifies in their labor, in their skill, in their creation.
As a popular book for a non-academic audience seeking to consider the place of creativity in the life of the Church, I warmly commend Creative Theology.
Full disclosure: I did receive a copy of the Creative Theology eBook from Sam for review. But, as always, these words are mine and exactly what I think.
