The Work
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art was first published in 1980 by Harold Shaw Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois. It has been continuously in print, with a Convergent Books edition (2016) bringing it to a new generation of readers. At approximately 200 pages, the book is organized as a series of meditative essays on the relationship between art, faith, and creativity, drawing on L'Engle's experience as a novelist, playwright, poet, and - in the book's background - a church musician at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where she served as librarian and writer-in-residence for several decades.
The book's title draws on the Gospel account of Peter walking on water (Matthew 14:22-32) as a metaphor for the artist's vocation: to step out of the boat, to risk the impossible, to trust that the creative act - like Peter's steps - is sustained by something beyond the artist's own resources. When Peter looks down at the water and begins to sink, Jesus reaches out and catches him. The artist, L'Engle argues, must keep looking at Christ rather than at the impossibility of what they are being called to do.
Biblical Engagement
John 1:1 - 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh' - is the theological foundation of L'Engle's theology of creativity. The divine Word (Logos) is both the agent of creation ('All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made,' John 1:3) and the model for all creative acts. The artist participates in the ongoing divine act of creation through the making of works that incarnate meaning - that take abstract vision and give it flesh in word, sound, or image. This Incarnational theology of art is the book's generative insight.
Genesis 1:27 - 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him' - grounds L'Engle's claim that the capacity to create is constitutive of human identity. To be made in the image of the Creator is to be given a creative vocation: human beings are sub-creators, participating in the divine act of making meaning from chaos. The artist who accepts this vocation is not doing something peripheral to Christian life but enacting something central to the imago Dei.
Jeremiah 1:6-7 - 'Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the LORD said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee' - provides the model for L'Engle's account of artistic vocation as prophetic calling. The artist, like Jeremiah, is called to speak what others are afraid to hear, to give form to truth that the culture suppresses or ignores. The twenty-six rejections of A Wrinkle in Time - and its subsequent award of the Newbery Medal and sales of millions - are her personal illustration of this prophetic calling: the truth she was given to tell was initially unwelcome, but it was given to her and she was responsible for it.
2 Corinthians 3:3 - 'Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart' - provides L'Engle with her image of the artist as instrument: the work is written through the artist, not by the artist. The best work - the work that truly communicates - is written through the artist by the Spirit, as the Christian is a letter 'of Christ.' The artist's task is not to express the self but to become a sufficiently transparent medium for the truth the work requires.
Matthew 14:29-31 - the account of Peter walking on water - is invoked throughout the book as the central metaphor for artistic courage. 'And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him.' The artist must keep looking at Christ - at the source of creative truth - rather than at the apparent impossibility of the creative act. When the artist looks down (at the market, at critics, at the difficulty of the work), the work begins to fail.
Author and Context
Madeleine L'Engle Camp (1918-2007) was born in New York City to artistic parents (her mother was a pianist; her father a journalist and author). She was educated at Smith College and spent years in theater before turning to fiction. Her marriage to actor Hugh Franklin in 1946 and the subsequent years in a small Connecticut town provided the domestic context for A Wrinkle in Time (1962), which was rejected by twenty-six publishers before Farrar, Straus and Giroux accepted it. Its Newbery Medal in 1963 established L'Engle as a major American children's author.
Her Christianity was Anglican (Episcopal) and sacramental rather than evangelical, and she was suspicious of the 'Christian fiction' genre as it was typically practiced - she believed that art is diminished when it is used as a vehicle for predetermined messages. Walking on Water was written as a sustained argument for the integration of genuine artistic craft and genuine Christian faith without reducing either to an instrument of the other.
The book emerged from lectures L'Engle gave at a camp for Christian artists and writers. It was shaped by her conviction that the American evangelical subculture was producing bad art because it valued the message over the work - resulting in fiction, music, and visual art that was preachy, sentimental, and falsely optimistic. Good Christian art, she argued, requires the same artistic honesty, technical rigor, and willingness to confront darkness that good secular art requires.
Themes
The book's central theme is the distinction between 'using' art and 'serving' art. To 'use' art is to employ it as a means to a predetermined end (evangelism, moral instruction, emotional uplift); to 'serve' art is to submit to the work's own demands, to follow the truth wherever it leads, to allow the work to be what it needs to be. L'Engle argues that Christian artists have a special obligation to serve truth in this way, because they are accountable to the God who is Truth.
A related theme is the relationship between the conscious artist and the unconscious creative process. L'Engle draws on Jungian psychology and on her own experience to argue that the deepest creative work comes from a level of mind that the conscious self does not fully control or understand. The artist's task is to create the conditions - through prayer, silence, discipline, and trust - in which the deeper creative intelligence can work.
Reception
The book was welcomed by Christian artists across every medium as a theological validation of their vocation. Its combination of personal testimony (L'Engle's own creative struggles), theological reflection, and practical wisdom gave it a breadth of appeal that purely theological or purely craft-focused books could not achieve. It has been particularly influential in Christian writing conferences, art schools, and theological seminaries.
Legacy
Walking on Water established a canon for the theology of Christian creativity that has been extended by subsequent works including Makoto Fujimura's Refractions (2009), Michael Card's Scribbling in the Sand (2002), and N.T. Wright's engagement with beauty and the arts in Simply Christian (2006). L'Engle's influence on the integration of artistic seriousness and Christian faith in the late twentieth century is foundational.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Genesis 1:1-2:3 (creation and the artist God), John 1:1-18 (the creative Logos), Jeremiah 1:4-10 (the reluctant prophet called to speak truth), Matthew 14:22-33 (Peter walking on water), and Colossians 3:17 ('whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus').
Further Reading
- Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (1941) - the theological predecessor to L'Engle's argument, applying the doctrine of the Trinity to the structure of creative work. - Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life (2017) - the most influential recent continuation of L'Engle's vision. - L'Engle's autobiography, A Circle of Quiet (1972), provides the biographical context for the theological convictions expressed in Walking on Water.