As Martin Luther famously never said:
“The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”
It is unfortunate that I cannot attribute it to him or some other famous theologian because it strikes me as profoundly true.
To me it is obvious that God should be interested in quality. God does not merely define The Good because of some decision He makes (which would imply that he could in fact have defined it in some other way); God simply is The Good. Plato captured this in his concept of the Form of the Good.
A key biblical concept here is from the Genesis creation story:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
We were placed in The Garden (symbol for the world) to work it – to use the resources God has given us in the wonderful world He has made; and to take care of it – we must be careful how we dig out the coal and the copper and the oil so we do not trash this beautiful Garden God has placed us in.
That God is interested in Quality, in us delivering the best, that He may be interested in craftsmanship for the sake of the quality of the craftsmanship rather than any utilitarian function or function in formal worship, is difficult to justify from direct Bible quotes. Support for this position has to come from a secondary theological reflections.
In the Old Testament we certainly find a concern for quality in the building of the Temple and any articles used in cultic practices around sacrifice and the office of the priest. That of course is clearly ‘religious’; it would translate today into that which is directly related to The Church. It is an idea entirely absent from the New Testament. What is missing is a more general concern with quality and craftsmanship and human creativity whether directly related to worship in the Temple or not.
What we need is a theology of quality which applies to ‘everyday life’: the worlds of paid work; the way we run our households; the hobbies we engage in; our cooking; our sport. Very importantly this is exploring life outside The Church and its rituals and activities.
Bringing this very much down to earth and to an example from the focus of this blog: technology. Why should God care about the difference between the build quality of my 1981 T4 Moto Guzzi and my currently owned 2009 V7 Guzzi? The former was beautifully engineered to last (I would not be surprised if it is still on the road) and the latter which is rather cheap and nasty. Lots of plastic – including as I have recently discovered – the chrome headlight housing. The plastic lugs in this, which hold in the light unit, have unsurprisingly broken; because they are plastic. The chrome headlight housing on my 1939 Velocette is metal; it is still, after 80 years, holding the light unit itself firmly in the housing.
Intuitively I think the God who embodies perfection would care about this. However a strand of theology which has a strong sacred-secular divide may suggest that God does not care about motorbikes. The root of this discussion probably lies therefore in the split between the sacred and the secular and a theology which leads people not to care about the secular.
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