The first craft I remember making was a decorative crescent moon. The materials lay on low tables prepared by my nursery school teacher, and I was curious about them. I worked with a large, curved, pink piece of construction paper hanging on a strand of off-white yarn. I covered the surface with glue—back and forth, back and forth—my teacher remarking about how much I applied. And then I sprinkled on heaps of green and blue glitter. My handiwork hung in the living room for years, and it is now carefully stored in a box of childhood mementos.
I often ponder the importance of this memory to my journey as an artist. I recall the weight of the materials in my little hands, and how determined and joyful my process was. Childhood crafts can be viewed sentimentally. But the hanging crescent, swaying as people walked by and shimmering in the afternoon light, came to suggest responsiveness and transition. I am prompted to ask: how do I relate to my materials now? What does making things continue to reveal? I’ve graduated from the crafting sparkles, but I still work with paper and glue in my mixed-media collages. I’ve also embraced the Holy Spirit’s call for me to participate in God’s mission as an artist and theologian, which took exploring the visual arts beyond a mere hobby or tool. The words of Maria and Brian Fee—professor and mentor, respectively, during my final year at Fuller—echo on: “Just keep making things.” Becoming an artist-theologian began with childlike inquisitiveness and takes continued experimentation with and learning from materials. It takes receptiveness of imaginative, iconophilic stances toward the arts and God. It takes curiosity.
In this article, I explore the question: how do visual artists and the visual arts facilitate or embody evangelism? First, I consider a posture of curiosity and its relationship to God’s mission and the arts. Contextual participation in God’s mission takes curiosity, and artists are naturally curious. (I use the term “curiosity” rather than, say, “imagination” because the former implies a desire to learn before envisioning what can be.) Second, I examine biblical, historical, and contemporary case studies of curiosity and the visual arts. Third, I conclude that a posture of curiosity, as illustrated through the case studies, enables artists who are Christians to participate in the coming of God’s kingdom—in the diverse, holistic activities of being in Christ, such as being loved by him, following him, and embodying the good news in our world, with hope that Christ is making all things new (Rev 21:5).
What Is Curiosity?
Let’s be curious about curiosity itself, and how it relates to the arts and God’s mission.
Philosopher Elias Baumgarten defines curiosity as “a disposition to want to know or learn more about a wide variety of things.” He continues, “The more one has this character trait, the more often or the more intensely one will on particular occasions experience a desire or urge to investigate and learn more about something.”1 He notes that the term “is rooted linguistically in the other-regarding activities of ‘care’ and ‘cure’ (from the Latin cūrāre, to take care of)” and is conducive to close relationships.2 Applying Baumgarten’s description of curiosity to the visual arts, when artists play with materials or study themes or gaze back at their work, they exercise a curious disposition. Furthermore, artists become familiar with particular media and often care about the process as much as the output, not to mention developing relationships with those who collaborate on and behold their work.
For an artist who follows Jesus, curiosity and care intertwine in loving God and the world he made, especially in anticipating the New. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann assumes a posture of curiosity in his approach to theology. He deems theology “a tremendous adventure, a journey of discovery,” leading him to recognize the virtue of curiosity and to experiment or suggest rather than issue pronouncements.3 This humble posture is apparent in Moltmann’s approach to eschatology, which he describes as “imagination for the kingdom of God in the world, and for the world in God’s kingdom.”4 If theology is a journey and God’s kingdom is in the making, then it is faithful to be curious about such topics. Put another way, it is faithful to be curious about God’s mission. God’s holistic mission is to bring freedom, reconciliation, and transformation in our relationships with him, ourselves, each other, and our world.5 The fulfillment of this mission is his kingdom come. Theology helps us to imagine and live into this reality.
Christians who are artists are uniquely gifted to carry curiosity about God’s mission into their artmaking. Often, artists are honest about suffering and enchantment, and they can imagine and make toward healing and renewal. Art is a form of honest inquiry. It is a “wondering” that brings people “to the final wonder over the depth and breadth and height of God’s goodness, or over the horror of injustice.”6 A posture of artistic curiosity observes everything from the natural world to the mysteries of God and wonders what can be asked, known, loved, disentangled, recreated. Curiosity, embodied in artmaking, leads to transformative encounters—with self, others, and God.
Neglecting curiosity is risky. First, there is a risk of disregarding the beauty, truth, and goodness that reflect God in the world. Conversely, to adopt a posture of curiosity is to be attentive to encountering God in any context, from historical Athens and Japan to contemporary arts communities, as we will see. Second, evangelism without curiosity risks our becoming detached and imposing. A posture of curiosity defies colonial attitudes that would erase and supplant others’ spiritual journeys. A posture of curiosity accepts learning as a mode of engagement with other people and cultures, with attentiveness to how God reveals himself through beauty, truth, and goodness.
Curiosity in Scripture
Scripture abounds with curiosity. Moses spies a burning bush and remarks, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up” (Exod 3:3). The Psalmists express longing for God, praying, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” (Ps 42:5, 11). The shepherds, having met the angels on the night of Jesus’ birth, decide, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us” (Luke 2:15). Jesus, at 12 years old, sits among the teachers in the temple, “listening to them and asking them questions” (Luke 2:46). The eunuch who would soon hear the gospel, believe, and be baptized, reads Scripture with Philip and asks, “About whom . . . does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” (Acts 8:34). Curiosity, in these instances, involves asking good questions, exercising discernment, loving wisdom, and encountering God.
One passage that demonstrates the relationship between curiosity and the arts in particular is Acts 17:16–34.7 Paul is waiting for his companions in Athens, a city full of curious people constantly telling and hearing of new things. When Paul, ever the evangelist, debates with the Jews, devout Greeks, and Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, they ask, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means” (vv. 19–20). Paul has been attentive to how the people of Athens think of and manifest religious belief. He observes, “I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (vv. 22–23). The Athenians are curious people, so curious that they make physical, material space for an unknown god. Paul, willing to engage with the artistic, religious expressions of Athenian culture, proclaims the existence of the Creator God, acknowledges humanity’s fumbling (perhaps curious, perhaps successful) search for God, and even quotes the sixth-century BCE poet Epimenides in reference to being God’s offspring. Following this exchange, those identified as Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others become believers.
The Acts passage suggests the importance of curiosity in conveying the gospel interculturally and artistically. A posture of curiosity predisposes the Athenians toward spiritual realities, including the existence of an unknown god. A posture of curiosity enables Paul to faithfully and creatively share the gospel of God’s kingdom when the Athenians inquire. Paul explains that God, who made the world and gives life, neither inhabits human shrines nor originates in human art or imagination (vv. 24, 29). However, he is not iconoclastic. Paul engages with Athenian religious visual culture. He leans into appreciating and recontextualizing the altar to the unknown god. And curiosity leads to encounter with God.
Curiosity in Missionary History
Curiosity continues through the history of the global Christian movement. The reception history of the Bible, and by extension its visual reception history, studies the ways in which people have interpreted biblical texts, as well as Christian iconography and images, in various contexts.8 Here, I will consider the case of the visual reception history of the Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) image type in Japan during the 16th and 17th centuries. This excerpt from missionary history recognizes curiosity in sharing and receiving the gospel.
From its inception in 1540, the Society of Jesus was committed to be missional, and Jesuits ordained as priests vowed to go wherever the Roman pontiff sent them.9 Commentary on the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus expounds that Jesuits are trained “to proclaim and transmit the truth revealed in Christ” and that teaching “should be such that, accommodating itself to changing ways of speaking and thinking, and adapting itself to the diverse cultures of the whole world, it can continually revivify that faith in human hearts.”10 Thus, Jesuits developed the missionary principle of accommodation (or inculturation), in which, idealistically and imperfectly, missionaries respected the intellect and imagination of local peoples and adapted the Christian message to their worldviews, enabling people to investigate, encounter, and respond to God on their own terms. This principle implies curiosity toward cultures and the contextual reception of the Christian faith beyond early modern Western Europe.11
Part of the Jesuit missionary method was to incorporate religious, devotional images into witness and worship. Francis Xavier, who became the first Jesuit missionary to Japan in 1549, set a precedent for the inclusion of the visual arts in the Japanese mission because he brought with him images depicting the Virgin Mary and Christ.12 Since it was impractical to commission and transport religious images solely from Europe, artist-missionary Giovanni Niccolò joined the Jesuits and taught local Japanese students at the itinerant Seminary of Painters. The University of Tokyo now holds in its arts collection an oil on copper painting of the Salvator Mundi, dated 1597 and attributed to Jacob Niwa (Sacam Iacobus), a pupil of Niccolò’s. This painting depicts a half-length, three-quarter portrait of Christ holding a globus cruciger (cross-bearing orb) in his left hand and raising his right hand in blessing. His body and gaze turn to his left, and he wears vibrant red and blue robes that are hemmed in gold. His facial features are delicate. Thin rays of light appear to radiate from his head. Dark clouds border the image, lightening and parting to create the illusion of a bright, negative space behind the figure of Christ.
But one example in the reception history of Salvator Mundi iconography, Niwa’s painting appears to bridge cultures. The Salvator Mundi image type is characterized by depicting Christ holding an orb and raising a hand of blessing, as well as being of small-scale devotional size suited for personal or domestic worship. Niwa’s rendition was likely painted after a Flemish engraving by Hieronymus Wierix, a copy of which would have been transported by Jesuit missionaries from Western Europe. The brushwork is delicate, modelling the facial features and perspective after the Western European source. But also, Niwa’s aesthetic choices such as the striking robe colours resemble depictions of Buddhist deities or samurai, and the negative space of the background resembles expanses of gold leaf in Japanese folding screens. 13 The subtly hybrid nature of Niwa’s painting suggests curiosity toward both Christ as imagined by European missionaries and also Christ as reimagined in the Japanese context.
Additionally, Japanese artists carried Salvator Mundi iconography into other art forms, such as folding screens called nanban byōbu. These multipanel screens were made using ink, colour, and gold on paper. They depict elaborate scenes of Japanese-European exchange, such as the bustling port of Nagasaki, including Christians venerating images of Salvator Mundi in churches.14 The inclusion of miniature Salvator Mundi images within the folding screens suggests that 16th and 17th century artists were curious and observant of intercultural exchanges. Artistic interpretations of the Salvator Mundi suggest that Jesuit missionaries and Japanese Christians considered Christ to be the Saviour of the world, and that other artists recognized the centrality of this image in Christian devotion.
Curiosity in Contemporary Ministry
Over the past two years, I have participated in and led a postgraduate group of multidisciplinary artists and theologians affiliated with the University of St Andrews and its wider community. The group’s strength lies in its openness: curiosity toward various ideas, hospitality toward diverse people, willingness to explore art and faith together. It has been a personal journey of deconstructing false ideas limiting what a community of theologians and artists can be and tending to a shared, hospitable space that reimagines what being a Christian and an artist looks like in relation to my community. The experience has been an opportunity for me to be curious and to care.
First, I was curious about how the group would take shape and what we would make. We decided to meet weekly to share works in progress, and we also held a creative spiritual retreat and an arts exhibition. During the exhibition, Enfolding: A Study of Margins & Centres, artists contributed multimedia works exploring marginalization and belonging. For example, in Map to Somewhere, I layered maps of Scotland, images of outer space, and packing paper. The surface was a grid, with sections cut and folded to bring dimension. I drew with pencil and marker to emphasize the organic shapes in contrast to the technical lines. Through this collage, I reflected on navigating between margins and centres, and on our proximity to “the other,” neighbours, and God. Fellow artists related margins and centres to identity, mental health, death, the earth, and the Eucharist. As Makoto Fujimura explains, “By Making toward beauty in the context of brokenness, through sanctified imagination, we are proclaiming God’s Good News. How? Evangelism is the proclamation of the New.”15 The exhibition offered solidarity, illumination, and hope of belonging. It was oriented toward the New.
Second, I was curious about how I would grow as a minister as I cared for my academic and artistic community. Like the Athenians, the Apostle Paul, the Jesuit missionaries, and the Japanese artists who were curious about objects of religious visual culture and the arts more broadly, I was curious about my fellow artists and their artmaking. The group was comprised of Christians of various traditions as well as people who are spiritual but not religious. Common interest in art and faith sparked relationships. This was a community in which I could accompany people on their creative and spiritual journeys. I was able to see how artists and the arts facilitated and embodied evangelism. Rather than manufacturing evangelistic outreach, the group inclined toward sharing the slow, authentic process of artmaking and the theological reflections that prompted or arose from the work. And since artists glorify God simply by making things, simply by reflecting the imagination and creativity the Creator God imparts to us, curious accompaniment became witness. I noticed how theology and art happened simultaneously. I felt how artists and theologians blessed one another and the wider community. Artists uniquely, faithfully participate in God’s mission by facilitating and embodying curiosity through our lives and artworks.
Curiosity into the New
Through case studies from Scripture, missionary history, and contemporary ministry, I have illustrated a posture of curiosity related to the visual arts and God’s mission. A posture of curiosity attends to what Scripture conveys about the Creator God, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ and is encountered through the arts. A posture of curiosity learns from historical, intercultural exchange, such as the Jesuit missionary movement and the Japanese reception of Christian iconography. A posture of curiosity reimagines what a hospitable community of artists and theologians can be as we together explore art and faith. As we angle toward “God’s creative future,” curiosity enables us as artists and followers of Jesus to participate in the coming of God’s kingdom.16
+ Banner image: Map to Somewhere by Melody Bellefeuille-Frost. Papers, pencil, ink, 2023. See more of Melody Bellefeuille-Frost’s art in the opening and closing covers and on pp. 10–11, 32–33, 73 and 93 of this issue of FULLER magazine.
Melody Bellefeuille-Frost is a PhD Divinity candidate at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) at the University of St Andrews. Her research project compares images of Christ in European Jesuit and Japanese Christian art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the aim of better appreciating the missiological themes apparent in the artworks. In 2022–2023, Melody was the ITIA Artist in Residence and led Transept, a postgraduate group of artists and theologians associated with the University of St Andrews and its wider community.
The first craft I remember making was a decorative crescent moon. The materials lay on low tables prepared by my nursery school teacher, and I was curious about them. I worked with a large, curved, pink piece of construction paper hanging on a strand of off-white yarn. I covered the surface with glue—back and forth, back and forth—my teacher remarking about how much I applied. And then I sprinkled on heaps of green and blue glitter. My handiwork hung in the living room for years, and it is now carefully stored in a box of childhood mementos.
I often ponder the importance of this memory to my journey as an artist. I recall the weight of the materials in my little hands, and how determined and joyful my process was. Childhood crafts can be viewed sentimentally. But the hanging crescent, swaying as people walked by and shimmering in the afternoon light, came to suggest responsiveness and transition. I am prompted to ask: how do I relate to my materials now? What does making things continue to reveal? I’ve graduated from the crafting sparkles, but I still work with paper and glue in my mixed-media collages. I’ve also embraced the Holy Spirit’s call for me to participate in God’s mission as an artist and theologian, which took exploring the visual arts beyond a mere hobby or tool. The words of Maria and Brian Fee—professor and mentor, respectively, during my final year at Fuller—echo on: “Just keep making things.” Becoming an artist-theologian began with childlike inquisitiveness and takes continued experimentation with and learning from materials. It takes receptiveness of imaginative, iconophilic stances toward the arts and God. It takes curiosity.
In this article, I explore the question: how do visual artists and the visual arts facilitate or embody evangelism? First, I consider a posture of curiosity and its relationship to God’s mission and the arts. Contextual participation in God’s mission takes curiosity, and artists are naturally curious. (I use the term “curiosity” rather than, say, “imagination” because the former implies a desire to learn before envisioning what can be.) Second, I examine biblical, historical, and contemporary case studies of curiosity and the visual arts. Third, I conclude that a posture of curiosity, as illustrated through the case studies, enables artists who are Christians to participate in the coming of God’s kingdom—in the diverse, holistic activities of being in Christ, such as being loved by him, following him, and embodying the good news in our world, with hope that Christ is making all things new (Rev 21:5).
What Is Curiosity?
Let’s be curious about curiosity itself, and how it relates to the arts and God’s mission.
Philosopher Elias Baumgarten defines curiosity as “a disposition to want to know or learn more about a wide variety of things.” He continues, “The more one has this character trait, the more often or the more intensely one will on particular occasions experience a desire or urge to investigate and learn more about something.”1 He notes that the term “is rooted linguistically in the other-regarding activities of ‘care’ and ‘cure’ (from the Latin cūrāre, to take care of)” and is conducive to close relationships.2 Applying Baumgarten’s description of curiosity to the visual arts, when artists play with materials or study themes or gaze back at their work, they exercise a curious disposition. Furthermore, artists become familiar with particular media and often care about the process as much as the output, not to mention developing relationships with those who collaborate on and behold their work.
For an artist who follows Jesus, curiosity and care intertwine in loving God and the world he made, especially in anticipating the New. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann assumes a posture of curiosity in his approach to theology. He deems theology “a tremendous adventure, a journey of discovery,” leading him to recognize the virtue of curiosity and to experiment or suggest rather than issue pronouncements.3 This humble posture is apparent in Moltmann’s approach to eschatology, which he describes as “imagination for the kingdom of God in the world, and for the world in God’s kingdom.”4 If theology is a journey and God’s kingdom is in the making, then it is faithful to be curious about such topics. Put another way, it is faithful to be curious about God’s mission. God’s holistic mission is to bring freedom, reconciliation, and transformation in our relationships with him, ourselves, each other, and our world.5 The fulfillment of this mission is his kingdom come. Theology helps us to imagine and live into this reality.
Christians who are artists are uniquely gifted to carry curiosity about God’s mission into their artmaking. Often, artists are honest about suffering and enchantment, and they can imagine and make toward healing and renewal. Art is a form of honest inquiry. It is a “wondering” that brings people “to the final wonder over the depth and breadth and height of God’s goodness, or over the horror of injustice.”6 A posture of artistic curiosity observes everything from the natural world to the mysteries of God and wonders what can be asked, known, loved, disentangled, recreated. Curiosity, embodied in artmaking, leads to transformative encounters—with self, others, and God.
Neglecting curiosity is risky. First, there is a risk of disregarding the beauty, truth, and goodness that reflect God in the world. Conversely, to adopt a posture of curiosity is to be attentive to encountering God in any context, from historical Athens and Japan to contemporary arts communities, as we will see. Second, evangelism without curiosity risks our becoming detached and imposing. A posture of curiosity defies colonial attitudes that would erase and supplant others’ spiritual journeys. A posture of curiosity accepts learning as a mode of engagement with other people and cultures, with attentiveness to how God reveals himself through beauty, truth, and goodness.
Curiosity in Scripture
Scripture abounds with curiosity. Moses spies a burning bush and remarks, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up” (Exod 3:3). The Psalmists express longing for God, praying, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” (Ps 42:5, 11). The shepherds, having met the angels on the night of Jesus’ birth, decide, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us” (Luke 2:15). Jesus, at 12 years old, sits among the teachers in the temple, “listening to them and asking them questions” (Luke 2:46). The eunuch who would soon hear the gospel, believe, and be baptized, reads Scripture with Philip and asks, “About whom . . . does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” (Acts 8:34). Curiosity, in these instances, involves asking good questions, exercising discernment, loving wisdom, and encountering God.
One passage that demonstrates the relationship between curiosity and the arts in particular is Acts 17:16–34.7 Paul is waiting for his companions in Athens, a city full of curious people constantly telling and hearing of new things. When Paul, ever the evangelist, debates with the Jews, devout Greeks, and Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, they ask, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means” (vv. 19–20). Paul has been attentive to how the people of Athens think of and manifest religious belief. He observes, “I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (vv. 22–23). The Athenians are curious people, so curious that they make physical, material space for an unknown god. Paul, willing to engage with the artistic, religious expressions of Athenian culture, proclaims the existence of the Creator God, acknowledges humanity’s fumbling (perhaps curious, perhaps successful) search for God, and even quotes the sixth-century BCE poet Epimenides in reference to being God’s offspring. Following this exchange, those identified as Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others become believers.
The Acts passage suggests the importance of curiosity in conveying the gospel interculturally and artistically. A posture of curiosity predisposes the Athenians toward spiritual realities, including the existence of an unknown god. A posture of curiosity enables Paul to faithfully and creatively share the gospel of God’s kingdom when the Athenians inquire. Paul explains that God, who made the world and gives life, neither inhabits human shrines nor originates in human art or imagination (vv. 24, 29). However, he is not iconoclastic. Paul engages with Athenian religious visual culture. He leans into appreciating and recontextualizing the altar to the unknown god. And curiosity leads to encounter with God.
Curiosity in Missionary History
Curiosity continues through the history of the global Christian movement. The reception history of the Bible, and by extension its visual reception history, studies the ways in which people have interpreted biblical texts, as well as Christian iconography and images, in various contexts.8 Here, I will consider the case of the visual reception history of the Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) image type in Japan during the 16th and 17th centuries. This excerpt from missionary history recognizes curiosity in sharing and receiving the gospel.
From its inception in 1540, the Society of Jesus was committed to be missional, and Jesuits ordained as priests vowed to go wherever the Roman pontiff sent them.9 Commentary on the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus expounds that Jesuits are trained “to proclaim and transmit the truth revealed in Christ” and that teaching “should be such that, accommodating itself to changing ways of speaking and thinking, and adapting itself to the diverse cultures of the whole world, it can continually revivify that faith in human hearts.”10 Thus, Jesuits developed the missionary principle of accommodation (or inculturation), in which, idealistically and imperfectly, missionaries respected the intellect and imagination of local peoples and adapted the Christian message to their worldviews, enabling people to investigate, encounter, and respond to God on their own terms. This principle implies curiosity toward cultures and the contextual reception of the Christian faith beyond early modern Western Europe.11
Part of the Jesuit missionary method was to incorporate religious, devotional images into witness and worship. Francis Xavier, who became the first Jesuit missionary to Japan in 1549, set a precedent for the inclusion of the visual arts in the Japanese mission because he brought with him images depicting the Virgin Mary and Christ.12 Since it was impractical to commission and transport religious images solely from Europe, artist-missionary Giovanni Niccolò joined the Jesuits and taught local Japanese students at the itinerant Seminary of Painters. The University of Tokyo now holds in its arts collection an oil on copper painting of the Salvator Mundi, dated 1597 and attributed to Jacob Niwa (Sacam Iacobus), a pupil of Niccolò’s. This painting depicts a half-length, three-quarter portrait of Christ holding a globus cruciger (cross-bearing orb) in his left hand and raising his right hand in blessing. His body and gaze turn to his left, and he wears vibrant red and blue robes that are hemmed in gold. His facial features are delicate. Thin rays of light appear to radiate from his head. Dark clouds border the image, lightening and parting to create the illusion of a bright, negative space behind the figure of Christ.
But one example in the reception history of Salvator Mundi iconography, Niwa’s painting appears to bridge cultures. The Salvator Mundi image type is characterized by depicting Christ holding an orb and raising a hand of blessing, as well as being of small-scale devotional size suited for personal or domestic worship. Niwa’s rendition was likely painted after a Flemish engraving by Hieronymus Wierix, a copy of which would have been transported by Jesuit missionaries from Western Europe. The brushwork is delicate, modelling the facial features and perspective after the Western European source. But also, Niwa’s aesthetic choices such as the striking robe colours resemble depictions of Buddhist deities or samurai, and the negative space of the background resembles expanses of gold leaf in Japanese folding screens. 13 The subtly hybrid nature of Niwa’s painting suggests curiosity toward both Christ as imagined by European missionaries and also Christ as reimagined in the Japanese context.
Additionally, Japanese artists carried Salvator Mundi iconography into other art forms, such as folding screens called nanban byōbu. These multipanel screens were made using ink, colour, and gold on paper. They depict elaborate scenes of Japanese-European exchange, such as the bustling port of Nagasaki, including Christians venerating images of Salvator Mundi in churches.14 The inclusion of miniature Salvator Mundi images within the folding screens suggests that 16th and 17th century artists were curious and observant of intercultural exchanges. Artistic interpretations of the Salvator Mundi suggest that Jesuit missionaries and Japanese Christians considered Christ to be the Saviour of the world, and that other artists recognized the centrality of this image in Christian devotion.
Curiosity in Contemporary Ministry
Over the past two years, I have participated in and led a postgraduate group of multidisciplinary artists and theologians affiliated with the University of St Andrews and its wider community. The group’s strength lies in its openness: curiosity toward various ideas, hospitality toward diverse people, willingness to explore art and faith together. It has been a personal journey of deconstructing false ideas limiting what a community of theologians and artists can be and tending to a shared, hospitable space that reimagines what being a Christian and an artist looks like in relation to my community. The experience has been an opportunity for me to be curious and to care.
First, I was curious about how the group would take shape and what we would make. We decided to meet weekly to share works in progress, and we also held a creative spiritual retreat and an arts exhibition. During the exhibition, Enfolding: A Study of Margins & Centres, artists contributed multimedia works exploring marginalization and belonging. For example, in Map to Somewhere, I layered maps of Scotland, images of outer space, and packing paper. The surface was a grid, with sections cut and folded to bring dimension. I drew with pencil and marker to emphasize the organic shapes in contrast to the technical lines. Through this collage, I reflected on navigating between margins and centres, and on our proximity to “the other,” neighbours, and God. Fellow artists related margins and centres to identity, mental health, death, the earth, and the Eucharist. As Makoto Fujimura explains, “By Making toward beauty in the context of brokenness, through sanctified imagination, we are proclaiming God’s Good News. How? Evangelism is the proclamation of the New.”15 The exhibition offered solidarity, illumination, and hope of belonging. It was oriented toward the New.
Second, I was curious about how I would grow as a minister as I cared for my academic and artistic community. Like the Athenians, the Apostle Paul, the Jesuit missionaries, and the Japanese artists who were curious about objects of religious visual culture and the arts more broadly, I was curious about my fellow artists and their artmaking. The group was comprised of Christians of various traditions as well as people who are spiritual but not religious. Common interest in art and faith sparked relationships. This was a community in which I could accompany people on their creative and spiritual journeys. I was able to see how artists and the arts facilitated and embodied evangelism. Rather than manufacturing evangelistic outreach, the group inclined toward sharing the slow, authentic process of artmaking and the theological reflections that prompted or arose from the work. And since artists glorify God simply by making things, simply by reflecting the imagination and creativity the Creator God imparts to us, curious accompaniment became witness. I noticed how theology and art happened simultaneously. I felt how artists and theologians blessed one another and the wider community. Artists uniquely, faithfully participate in God’s mission by facilitating and embodying curiosity through our lives and artworks.
Curiosity into the New
Through case studies from Scripture, missionary history, and contemporary ministry, I have illustrated a posture of curiosity related to the visual arts and God’s mission. A posture of curiosity attends to what Scripture conveys about the Creator God, who became incarnate in Jesus Christ and is encountered through the arts. A posture of curiosity learns from historical, intercultural exchange, such as the Jesuit missionary movement and the Japanese reception of Christian iconography. A posture of curiosity reimagines what a hospitable community of artists and theologians can be as we together explore art and faith. As we angle toward “God’s creative future,” curiosity enables us as artists and followers of Jesus to participate in the coming of God’s kingdom.16
+ Banner image: Map to Somewhere by Melody Bellefeuille-Frost. Papers, pencil, ink, 2023. See more of Melody Bellefeuille-Frost’s art in the opening and closing covers and on pp. 10–11, 32–33, 73 and 93 of this issue of FULLER magazine.
Melody Bellefeuille-Frost is a PhD Divinity candidate at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) at the University of St Andrews. Her research project compares images of Christ in European Jesuit and Japanese Christian art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the aim of better appreciating the missiological themes apparent in the artworks. In 2022–2023, Melody was the ITIA Artist in Residence and led Transept, a postgraduate group of artists and theologians associated with the University of St Andrews and its wider community.
Ryan K. Bolger, associate professor of church in contemporary culture, discusses challenges, opportunities, and hopes for the church amidst a shifting technological landscape.
