Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human

Art is often viewed as being inherently spiritual. But what does it mean to describe an experience of art or beauty as spiritual? Is there a relationship between the spiritual experience a person has in the presence of a work of art and the Holy Spirit of Christian faith?
Theologian, musician, and educator Steven Guthrie examines particular areas of overlap between spirituality, human creativity, and the arts with the goal of sharpening and refining how we speak and think about the Holy Spirit. Through his exploration of the many different connections between art and spirituality, Guthrie uses the arts as a creative lens for exploring the Holy Spirit and offers a unique introduction to pneumatology. He also introduces an important idea from the early church that is now unfamiliar to many Christians: the Holy Spirit is the humanizing Spirit, whose work is to remake our humanity after the image of the perfect humanity of Jesus Christ.
This clear, engaging theology of the arts will be of interest to professors and students in theology and the arts, pneumatology, and systematic theology courses as well as thoughtful lay readers, Christian artists, worship leaders, and pastors.
Contents
Foreword by Jeremy S. Begbie
Introduction
1. Is There Anything to Talk About Here? Spirit and Mystery
Part 1: The Making of a Human
2. Remaking Humanity: John Coltrane and a Love Supreme
3. Remaking Human Bodies: Kingdom Come and the Kingdom of the Abstract
4. Remaking Community: Singing to One Another in Songs, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs
Part 2: The Spirit’s Making and Ours
5. Ionized Inspiration: Can a Human Voice Be Heard?
6. The Gift-Giving Spirit: (De-Ionized Inspiration)
7. Finding Our Voices: The Spirit of Freedom
Part 3: A World Remade
8. Seeing the Spirit in All Things, Seeing All Things in the Spirit: Discernment and the Restoration of Vocation
9. Beautiful, Beautiful Zion: The Spirit and Completion
10. Perfection, Proportion, and Pleasure: The Spirit and Beauty
Epilogue: The Museum of Spirituality
Indexes