When joined with a good Reformation theology of vocation and the freedom of a Christian, Fujimura’s vision for culture care is something all Christians can embrace, regardless of whether they are artists in the formal sense.
As an author who is also a Christian, I often think about how I can use my abilities, such as they are, to benefit Christ’s kingdom. When one attempts to practice a discipline that is highly revered and yet simultaneously undervalued by society, questions of identity are certain to arise. But for the Christian, these questions go deeper: How does my identity as a writer—indeed, as an artist—fit in with my identity in Christ?
These questions drove me to read the book, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life, written by the Christian artist Makoto Fujimura, known not only for his internationally acclaimed creations of brilliant color, but also his efforts to promote positive Christian engagement with culture.
“Culture is a garden to be cultivated,” Fujimura writes, but much like the Garden of Eden, all is not well (Culture Care, p. 40). “The paralysis stemming from culture wars has decimated the fundamental trust in ‘the other,’ and we are unable to move beyond the conflict,” he argues (p. 27). The result is nothing less than a crisis.
It is widely recognized that our culture today is not life giving. There is little room at the margins to make artistic endeavors sustainable. The wider ecosystem of art and culture has been decimated, leaving only homogeneous pockets of survivors, those fit enough to survive in a poisoned environment. In culture as in nature, a lack of diversity is a first sign of a distressed ecosystem (p. 30).
This leads to a natural question: “What happens to communities when our souls are fed from the produce of a polluted ecosystem?” (p. 30).
The Goal of Culture Care
Fujimura developed the idea of culture care partially due to a simple action taken by his wife. During a time of financial hardship, she brought home a bouquet of flowers she had purchased. At first, he objected to the expense. After all, they didn’t need flowers. But his wife explained that their souls also needed to be fed, a concept that stuck with him. As the years passed and his Christian faith deepened, he became convinced that culture must be cared for just like the human body and mind. The source of our cultural illness, according to Fujimura, is that we feel ourselves too locked in a struggle to be generous with others.
Cultural fragmentation comes…when we fall into the trap of treating survival as the bottom line and thus neglect the holistic approaches that demand personal growth and point our civilization toward a greater vision. Fragmentation comes when we forget the importance of beauty for our lives and the necessity—for both individual and social flourishing—of sharing the experience of beauty in community (pg. 33-34).
The goal of culture care, as Fujimura explains it, is to focus on being generative, which is to say, life-giving. “When we are generative, we draw on creativity to bring into being something fresh and life giving…What is generative is the opposite of degrading or limiting. It is constructive, expansive, affirming, growing beyond a mindset of scarcity” (pg. 22).
This will immediately set off alarm bells in some Christians’ minds. When we hear Christians are being “expansive” and “affirming” in their mindset, we may take this to mean they are being tolerant toward the very evils poisoning our culture. But that is not what Fujimura intends when he speaks of being “affirming.” Rather, he means we should acknowledge the image of God in others. Essentially, we are to love them as our neighbors, which means desiring the fullness of life for them.
“Reminding people of our common life—that we are neighbors first—is a task of culture care. We acknowledge openly the borders of our groups and acknowledge too the legitimate things that divide us. Our responsibility, then, is to rehumanize this divide. An emphasis on our role as neighbor as part of our identity begins this process by reminding us of our shared cultural and geographical spaces and the fact that proximity brings responsibility. Even apart from Jesus’ call to love our neighbor, we know that our common flourishing depends on each other” (p. 65).
The pursuit of beauty is key for Fujimura, who explains that our creations point back to the one who created us all. “Our sense of beauty and our creativity are central to what it means to be made in the image of a creative God. The satisfaction in beauty we feel is connected deeply with our reflection of God’s character to create and value gratuity. It is part of our human nature” (p. 51). Beauty therefore calls us into a spiritual realm where we can encounter Christ.
“What Christians call ‘repentance’—from the Greek metanoia, to turn back—is often sparked by an encounter with the beautiful…I said earlier that Jesus is the source of beauty. As that source, Jesus is appealing, and knowing him brings delight—an assertion with consequences for the activities and approach of every individual and community that reflects Jesus, not least the church.” (pp. 54-55).
Is Culture Care the Goal?
Fujimura’s dream of a culture renewed through the witness of artists is noble, but should this really be the prime focus of Christians? After all, what ails our culture is no different than what ails our world: sin. Scripture and experience demonstrate that sinners can encounter beauty and still walk away with hardened hearts. Fujimura does not seek to deny this, freely acknowledging that “our very state of being affects our ability both to perceive and to create beauty. If we doubt that beauty exists, for example, we will have a truncated experience even when we encounter it” (p. 47). However, some may conclude he goes too far when he seems to connect culture care with the gospel itself.
As I’ve developed this thesis, I have come to realize that at the heart of culture care is my desire to know the full depth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. What is the ‘good news’? The reductionism of our modern assumptions has caused the gospel to be truncated, limited to pragmatic and tribal concerns rather than the good news of the whole of the Bible—true life, the never-ending restoration and new creation of all things in Christ (p. 91).
I am always on the alert for potential gospel confusion among Christians, particularly when they try to make our standing before God dependent on the creation of heaven on earth. But look what Fujimura says the problem is with the “good news” Christians have been sharing: it is “limited to pragmatic and tribal concerns.” In other words, the forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake is not being proclaimed to the world. Those outside are not being invited in; rather, the insiders are battening down the hatches, afraid of what lies beyond. This is not a circumstance in which gospel proclamation is likely to flourish.
Fujimura says the gospel is “true life, the never-ending restoration and new creation of all things in Christ.” We know this to be true. There is a great biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. As Fujimura explains, “I have noticed, as an artist prone to looking on from the margins, that churches often present the middle two elements (fall and redemption) but rarely connect the whole story of the Bible—that begins in creation and ends in new creation—with the stories of our present lives and communities” (p. 95).
Certainly, this principle could be taken too far. We live in the “already” and the “not yet,” as Christians often say. But Fujimura is not calling for us to fully realize the new heavens and earth now. Rather, he ties the work of culture care to our personal vocations given by God.
Instead of speaking of God primarily in personal life and church settings, we must proclaim God as the source of all illuminating life. We must find God in the very fabric of our callings as teachers, as nurses, as engineers, as artists, and as writers. We must see our occupations as part of the glorious reality in which God has already manifested the Spirit’s incorruptible visage (p. 83).
Which is to say, everything we do can point to Christ and provide us with opportunities to share the gospel. Every vocation given by God can be used for his glory and the good of our neighbor, and when they see the love of Christ displayed in us, they may even be drawn to that beauty.
“Artistic expressions are signposts declaring what it is to be fully human,” Fujimura writes (p. 81). Surely we are never more fully human than when we are joined to Jesus Christ, the one who restores us and allows us to breathe clean air once again, empowered by his Word and his Spirit.
When joined with a good Reformation theology of vocation and the freedom of a Christian, Fujimura’s vision for culture care is something all Christians can embrace, regardless of whether they are artists in the formal sense. For the power of cultural transformation comes not from us, but from the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the power of salvation to all who believe.
