“But if you mix brilliance with bravery then we can ignite something, even this conversation alone can ignite the people that are going to change the world because there's people who have been anointed. You can't teach the brilliance and the anointed people who hit the game of life. And they've got something that they're going to do no matter what school they go to. They know they just know how to do it. They knew how to do it before they got here and they were going to do it. And these people just need to see what it looks like to overcome. The smoke screens of public humiliation of bankruptcy. I was in debt, the fear of loss, I lost my mom, or the fear of death, you know, what other fears are there? There's a lot of fears. But the thing is, when you remove, like even in the schools, you remove prayer, you remove God, you remove the fear of God, you create the possibility of the fear of everything else. But watch this. If you instill the fear of God, you eliminate the fear of anything else. And it's not that I am fearless. I am deathly, literally deathly, shaking and in so much fear of my Father. I fear God and I don't fear nothing else.”
- Kanye West, JRE #1554
What would I create if I feared God more than I fear imperfection, imposter syndrome, failed innovation, or public approval? Rather than channel some sort of Buddhist detachment or imbue humanistic vain-glory into our view of creative work, only the Christian frame of man’s true place before a holy God preserves the divine order set for both process and product. Disordered fear, like disordered love, occurs when we lift what’s been given above the Giver.
Is brave work provocativity? Sometimes. Is it political defiance or sticking with a style long-thought irrelevant? Occasionally. Bravery in product will vary, but it’s bravery in the process that is the heart of the matter.
Kierkegaard literally wrote the book on ‘purity of heart is to will one thing.’ Perhaps strength of heart is to fear one thing. The black and white simplicity here is attractive, but not in the same way legalism paints itself in its avoidance of gray. The yoke of God is easy and lighter than the burden of man (Mat. 11:29). He invites us to trade our innumerable fears, even within our creativity, for the all-encompassing mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the tremendous and fascinating mystery, that comes with seeing Christ’s supremacy. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, Proverbs 9 begins. Knowing who your God, your Creator, your Redeemer is defines all. If we know Him in His Majesty, we will fear Him in His Holiness.
The Creator calls us into co-creation with him, not as an equal, but as a worshipper and emissary. What would rightly-ordered fear free us to create?
My dad says that our relationship with God is the main gear of our being. As long as that me-and-God gear is spinning smoothly, all the other aspects of our life under our control will move at the pace they should. But if the teeth won’t catch, if we’re noticing a drop in our torque, then it only makes sense to check the main gear first. Our view of God informs our work deeper than we think.
The possibilities that unspool from re-ordered fear are legion. How might this impact the overtly evangelistic, positivity-marketing tone modern Christian art has embraced? Would we be more cautious in our portrayal of the biblical God, careful not to dilute Christ to a wish-granter of mere sentiment? How would this impact our aesthetics? Would this change how I arrange my space, what influences I consume, how I process critique? In allowing the fear of God to consume our spirits, we leave little room for the emotional entanglement we get caught in when we receive both negative and positive reviews. Eyes fixed on Christ, clear of chaff, see the things of this world objectively. The implications are ad infinitum. When we fear God over man, we sweep the table of our hesitancies.