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Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Theological Q&A > (No Subject)
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/9/2006 3:35 PM (GMT -6) |   | | I like the French Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Manet, Pissarro, and Degas too). A lot. Being from Virginia, I've enjoyed many hours in D.C.'s National Art Gallery. Spent a lot of time just gazing at Renoir and Monet. One of my favorite's is a set of three paintings of Nortre Dame, each painting capturing the church at a different time of day (and so different lighting). Amazing.
I'm a fane and not a trained critic, but as I understand it, the impressionist style of painting bascially attempts to give a general impression of a scence using unmixed primary colors and small strokes in an attempt to facilitate the actual reflection of light. It attempts "to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour." If you haven't had the pleasure of enjoying Impressionist painting, it won't do to get online and look at photographs. You have to encounter the painting's texture to enjoy the interaction of light and the composition depending on how far away you stand. Very interesting, and lots of fund.
I remember showing my daughter Jessica (our artsy daughter) Monet's set of three painting of the Notre Dame for the first time. I made her close her eyes when we entered the room and walked her right up to the paintings, as close as we were allowed to get (about 18 inches away from the canvas). Then I had her open her eyes and tell me what the paintings were paintings of. She couldn't tell. The paint is globbed on, almost randomly, haphazardly pasted on. The closer you are the less clear the overall picture becomes. So I had her slow back away while looking at the paintings and tell me when the overall impression actually become the Notre Dame. It was about 5 or 6 feet away that she say it, "Oh! Cool! It's the Notre Dame church in Paris!" As she backed away even more it got better. You could feel the time of day, the temperature, as well as smell and hear. Amazing paintings.
But the interesting point about Impressionist painting is that there comes a point where you get TOO CLOSE to the details to make out just what it is your looking at. Close up, all you've got are small stokes that look like mistakes. Just chunks of paint here and there. And the colors are raw and unmixed. Sometimes you get the feeling that there colors are a bit incompatible, that they don't go together, that you'd never put them together yourself. But when you back away the messy details fade and the beautiful composition emerges.
AAAANYHOOOW...
What if we were to view the Bible as inspired, as inerrant, as authoritative, in a similar way, and say that at one level (or from one distance) there are some messy details, inaccuracies, false assumptions and beliefs? You notice these and feel uncomfortable with them when you look to them in and of themselves for the overall composition. But at this distance one looks at the biblical canvas and says, "These facts don't fit; this is wrong, this is incompatible with that." But when you back away all the messy details fade and the overall picture emerges. The details are still there and are still what they are when viewed up close. But from a certain distance they "fade" into the background. You don't notice them. They then become consistent, indeed constitutive of, the overall picture. What seem incompatible with any meaningful message at one level (from one distance) are seen to be quite compatible with an overall and meaningful impression when view at another distance.
Might this be a way of viewing scripture as a meaningful composition that makes the overall impression intended by God but does so through fallible human writers whose fallibility really does show up in the text (or 'texture', since we're considering it as a painting) in (but not exclusively in) the inaccuracies (historical/theological) of the worldview of their day. But rather than constituting grounds for disbelieving the Bible's message, or for claiming that the effect God wishes scripture to have in us can't possible be had now, this messiness close-up doesn't undermine the overall impact intended.
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/9/2006 4:03 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/9/2006 7:45 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff: What is "the overall impact intended?" And what is "the Bible's message?" If that's all we need, and you got it, you can save us a lot of time.
Tom: Know what bugs me most about you Jeff? You hit the space bar two times after a period!  That rule applied to old manual typewriters. It’s been out for years. It’s just ONE cotton-pickin space after a period now! Sometimes it drives me crazy. I have to go through all my quotes of you before I post a response and remove one of the spaces.
What were we discussing? Oh yeah, impressionism. And I know what I wanna call it—LITERARY IMPRESSIONISM. The canvas is the ‘text’. Of course, I’m just tossing the analogy out. It might not work. And what the overall impression (message) of the Bible might be is a good question—THE question! But before we answer that, would you at least agree that what I’m suggesting is possible? That is, if we were to agree on what the God-intended message of scripture is, would you agree that inaccuracies and mistakes at SOME level is consistent with scripture’s overall truth?
Tom
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 1/9/2006 10:25 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Tom: That rule applied to old manual typewriters. It’s been out for years. It’s just ONE cotton-pickin space after a period now!
Jeff: You're kidding? I didn't even know that. Are you serious?? Besides, I'm from the deep South. We're decades behind everybody else. So I'm just right for my environment.
Tom: ...would you at least agree that what I’m suggesting is possible? That is, if we were to agree on what the God-intended message of scripture is, would you agree that inaccuracies and mistakes at SOME level is consistent with scripture’s overall truth?
Jeff: I would agree that errors at SOME level would not be any more of a hindrance to community than the diversity of human intellects and sensibilities are now for those who hold to innerrancy. Yeah. But the "SOME" in "SOME level" is the key thing. For there is a degree of error which undermines epistemological community to the point that we might as well just do philosophy.
And that would be fine, too. I've had to really hone my own thinking since I've been on this forum. Not with respect to eschatology or anything like that. But certain big picture perspectives have had to be re-evaluated. So I'm fine with JUST philosophy as long as that approach recognizes some common ground, too--something like an agreement on what basic intuitions are.
Post Edited (jefscott) : 1/9/2006 10:02:24 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 1/10/2006 9:01 PM (GMT -6) | | Didn't Augustine kinda have the same kinda "mosaic" idea about how God sovereignly uses good and evil in God's tapestry?
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 1/11/2006 7:17 AM (GMT -6) | |
MephEternal said...
Didn't Augustine kinda have the same kinda "mosaic" idea about how God sovereignly uses good and evil in God's tapestry? I think I'd add in the element of man. That God uses us, and made us to participate and prophets, priests, and kings. (Luci, Edmund, Peter...)
I'd also add the illustrations of winnowing chaff, and burning it in the fire.
This last part does not need to be approached as per "burning people" but BURNING WORKS. Where onlye the good works, their relationships, their making sacred of the world, their eucharist-izing (becoming themselves praise to the Creator), etc.
This last part is also seen in the "refiiner's fire" illustration.
(What's a Bible without pictures?)
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/11/2006 8:14 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Cezanne. Yes, veeery nice. But I can't deny that I favor Monet. Here are two of the set of three Monet did of the Notre Dame which hang in the National Art Gallery, DC. It's just not possible for a picture to capture the REAL thing. But check out the difference between the two. Same cathedra. Different lighting. Kinda like the differences between the synoptics!
And the colors are ON FIRE!
Until you've stood in front of one you haven't lived. I spent hours sitting in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris fixated on this stuff. Anita had to threaten to divorce me if I didn't leave. Oh well.
Tom
Post Edited (TGB) : 1/11/2006 7:25:25 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 1/11/2006 9:52 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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JEE
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2004
Total Posts : 1466
| Posted 1/12/2006 2:51 AM (GMT -6) | | As another fan who's definitely not a qualified critic (I only took Intro to Art in college) Monet's art always puts me in mind of a semi-intoxicated, blurry dream. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, really).
Oddly enough, I've always preferred van Gogh and Salvador Dali to Monet & Co. Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" and Dali's "Persistence of Memory" have been my two favs for a long time. My wife prefers impressionism and cheap dimestore Victorian scenes, while I prefer surrealism and other weird art, though I can't say I like all modern art. One thing that has always piqued my interest about van Gogh was his long struggle with depression and his tragic suicide, having suffered from debilitating bouts of depression for much of my own life, and having lots of depression and bipolar in my extended family. Praise God for modern medicine.
Particularly interesting is the following quote from a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1880:
"Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting."
My wife also can't stand the "crazy" jazz music that I absolutely love. Coltrane's the bomb! Good thing we both like blues, country, and rock. We are a very happy couple who happen to be sheer opposites on many things.
Betcha never would've thought I'd be a fan of Coltrane, van Gogh, and Dali.
Post Edited (JEE) : 1/12/2006 2:24:14 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 1/12/2006 8:54 AM (GMT -6) | | |
One my favorite Van Gogh's. No kiddin, when you see this in person you just sware there's really a light hidden somewhere that's shinning under the awning.
Tom
Post Edited (TGB) : 1/12/2006 8:00:35 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Corey
Five with a Four-wing
Date Joined Feb 2003
Total Posts : 1893
| Posted 1/12/2006 11:10 AM (GMT -6) | | There's a "feature" of this board software that attempts to protect against script attacks... anyway, it sucks because it does a lot of false positives. So to see your image, Tom, people will have to cut-and-paste this url into their browser:
http://people.bu.edu/aha/Assets/Van%20Gogh.jpg | | Back to Top | | |
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