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Christians used to be the ones who were responsible for the best art in the culture. Will there ever be a day that happens again?
The Gospel of John Chapter 1 verse 29:
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (Speaking of Christ).
At the 5 minute mark in the above video clip you see Francis Schaeffer analyse this painting below:
Artist: Jan van Eyck
Start Date: 1425
Completion Date:1429
Style: Northern Renaissance
Genre: religious painting
Technique: oil
Material: wood
Dimensions: 137.7 x 242.3 cm
Gallery: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten
Image dimension 500x272px, View All Sizes
The Church’s One Foundation
Uploaded on Aug 16, 2009
“The Lamb of God” – The Ghent altar piece is in St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. Hubert van Eyck began creating the altar piece. Jan van Eyck, his brother, completed the the beautiful painting which Hubert left unfinished (1425-1429). The music is from Hymns Triumphant II and includes, “The Church’s One Foundation”, “We’re Marching to Zion”, and “I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord”. The hymns were performed by the Amen Choir. Orchestration is by the London National Philharmonic Orchestra. The musical score was arranged and conducted by Lee Holdridge.
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Monuments Men – Examining the Ghent Altarpiece
(Click image for full resolution version)
Photo courtesy of Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Lt. Daniel J. Kern and German conservator Karl Sieber examining Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, also known as the Ghent Altarpiece (1432).
Thomas Carr Howe papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
The Monuments Men – Official Trailer (2013) [HD] George Clooney, Matt Damon
Published on Aug 8, 2013
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The Monuments Men – Official Trailer (2013)
Release Date: December 18, 2013
Genre: Action, Thriller
Director: George Clooney
Writer: George Clooney, Grant Heslov
Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray
Studio: Columbia Pictures (Sony)
Plot: Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, “The Monuments Men” is an action-thriller focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners. It would be an impossible mission: with the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could these guys — seven museum directors, curators, and art historians, all more familiar with Michelangelo than the M-1 — possibly hope to succeed? But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time to avoid the destruction of 1000 years of culture, they would risk their lives to protect and defend mankind’s greatest achievements.
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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:
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Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000 years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” , episode 4 “The Reformation”, episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and episode 1 “The Roman Age,” . My favorite episodes are number 7 and 8 since they deal with modern art and culture primarily.(Joe Carter rightly noted, “Schaeffer—who always claimed to be an evangelist and not a philosopher—was often criticized for the way his work oversimplified intellectual history and philosophy.” To those critics I say take a chill pill because Schaeffer was introducing millions into the fields of art and culture!!!! !!! More people need to read his works and blog about them because they show how people’s worldviews affect their lives!
J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of a cautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”
Francis Schaeffer’s works are the basis for a large portion of my blog posts and they have stood the test of time. In fact, many people would say that many of the things he wrote in the 1960’s were right on in the sense he saw where our western society was heading and he knew that abortion, infanticide and youth enthansia were moral boundaries we would be crossing in the coming decades because of humanism and these are the discussions we are having now!)
There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.
Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.”
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Francis Schaeffer with his son Franky pictured below. Francis and Edith (who passed away in 2013) opened L’ Abri in 1955 in Switzerland.
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The first episode in this series included a feature on Tracey Emin of England and the second post featured Peter Howson of Scotland, and the third and fourth posts were extensive pieces on the art and writings of Mike Kelley of LA (sadly Kelley committed suicide in 2012). The fifth post featured the german painter Gerhard Richter and sixth post today featured Makoto Fujimura who was born in Boston to Japanese parents, but now lives in New York City.
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Makoto Fujimura pictured below:
A Conversation with Makoto Fujimura
Published on Jul 31, 2012
Dean of the School of Divinity at Cairn Univeristy, and Director of the Center for University Studies, Dr. Jonathan Master, sat down for a conversation with artist Makoto Fujimura to discuss his life and work, and his thoughts on the intersection of art, culture, and the Christian life.
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Highlights of Encounter 11: Mako Fujimura on Being Generative
Published on May 30, 2012
“Being Generative” is the theme of Encounter 11. Makoto Fujimura invites us to consider that “being generative” means dwelling in the liminal spaces of culture. He suggests that the poet Emily Dickinson best exemplifies this generative quality through her use of dashes that humanize her poetry.
View full video here at http://vimeo.com/25191805
More of Mako on Emily Dickinson at: http://www.makotofujimura.com/writing…
Bio:
Makoto Fujimura is an artist, writer, and speaker who is recognized worldwide as a cultural influencer by both faith-based and secular media. A Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts (2003-2009), Fujimura has contributed internationally as an advocate for the arts, speaking with decision makers and advising governmental policies on the arts. Fujimura’s second book, Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art and Culture, is a collection of essays bringing people of all backgrounds together in conversation and meditation on culture, art, and humanity. Fujimura founded International Arts Movement in 1991.
Fujimura, Makoto – VM – Cisca Ireland-Verwoerd
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Evangelicals start push in the arts
By Eric Gorski, AP Religion Writer | July 26, 2007
There are no crosses in Makoto Fujimura’s paintings. No images of Jesus gazing into the distance, or serene scenes of churches in a snow-cloaked wood.
Fujimura’s abstract works speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging.
After the 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center, three blocks from Fujimura’s home, his work explored the power of fire to both destroy and purify, themes drawn from the Christian Gospels and Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.”
“I am a Christian,” says Fujimura, 46, who founded the nonprofit International Arts Movement to help bridge the gap between the religious and art communities. “I am also an artist and creative, and what I do is driven by my faith experience.
“But I am also a human being living in the 21st century, struggling with a lot of brokenness — my own, as well as the world’s. I don’t want to use the term ‘Christian’ to shield me away from the suffering or evil that I see, or to escape in some nice ghetto where everyone thinks the same.”
By making a name for himself in the secular art world, Fujimura has become a role model for creatively wired evangelicals. They believe that their churches have forsaken the visual arts for too long — and that a renaissance has begun.
On the grass-roots and institutional level, evidence is mounting to support that view: Art galleries are opening in churches; prominent seminaries are investing in new centers exploring theology and the arts; and, graduates from evangelical film schools are making Hollywood movies.
These artistic evangelicals, though still relatively small in number, are striving to be creators of culture rather than imitators, said Dick Staub, a Seattle-based radio talk show host and author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture In an Age of Christianity-Lite.” There is a desire, he said, to avoid inventing a parallel arts universe with Christian knockoffs for Christian audiences.
“They want to make art that connects to everybody,” Staub said. “The call is first and foremost to make good art.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean overtly religious art, but rather art informed by faith. Fujimura, for example, shares more with abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock than with Thomas Kinkade, a self-described devout Christian whose brushwork of idyllic landscapes, crosses and churches are big sellers.
As a result, Fujimura — whose work has been displayed at museums in Tokyo and Washington, D.C. — gets questions from his fellow believers dubious about abstract and modern art.
“The Bible is full of abstraction,” said Fujimura, an elder at a Greenwich Village church he helped start. “Think about this God who created the universe, the heavens and the earth from nothing. In order to have faith you have to reach out to something, to a mystery.”
It isn’t always an easy sell.
Evangelical unease with the visual arts dates to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Andy Crouch, editorial director for Christianity Today’s Christian Vision Project, which examines how evangelicals intersect with the broader culture, notes that Protestantism traces its origins to an era when noses were snapped off sculptures in a rejection of Catholic visual tradition while the word of God was elevated.
Attitudes began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, when Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer and Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker challenged believers to emerge from their cocoons and engage the culture, including in the arts.
Now, Crouch said, those ideas are resonating with a younger generation of believers who live in an image-saturated culture. They sense a disconnect worshipping in churches bare of anything that’s visually arresting.
“The very parched nature of evangelical visual culture is making people who have grown up in this culture thirsty for beauty,” he said.
Increasingly, that ground is being explored on seminary campuses. One of the most ambitious examples is the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., founded in 2001 and bankrolled by a $15 million donation from a Virginia couple that earned a fortune in information technology.
The center aspires to be an evangelical arts think tank, with five stand-alone institutes focused upon worship and music, film and moving images, art and architecture, drama, journalism and creative writing, preaching and the study of the “emerging church,” which incorporates painting, dance and other fine arts into worship.
Craig Detweiler, co-director of the center’s Reel Spirituality Institute, said students are fascinated with finding the sacred in the mundane and exploring life’s mysteries. In other words, themes with far-reaching appeal.
“Maybe 20 years ago, young filmmakers wanted to tell stories for their own audience,” said Detweiler, a screenwriter. “Today’s young filmmakers … find holy moments within mainstream movies and want to create more of the same.
“For too long, Christian art has implied pale imitation,” Detweiler said. “We’re trying to get back to the days of the Renaissance, where the church was the patron of the finest art.”
In another sign that institutional evangelicalism is taking the arts seriously, a Center for Theology and the Arts was founded last year at the flagship seminary of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. The center’s work begins modestly this summer with a workshop drawing parallels between the art of drawing and Bible study, arguing both are about seeing and observing.
“If we as Christians believe that creativity and imagination is a gift from God, why have we neglected it for so many years?” said center director Steve Halla, a former Dallas Theological Seminary professor and a woodcut artist.
Already, evangelicals are exerting greater influence in the film industry.
Even before the success of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” Southern California was home to a Christian screenwriting factory called Act One, an on-the-rise film school at the evangelical Biola University and a film studies center sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.
More recently, evangelicals have turned their attention to the contemporary art world. For the past two years, students primarily from Christian colleges and universities have studied and interned at galleries and graphic-design firms through the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, a satellite of Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn.
“We are not trying to recruit missionaries into New York City or anything like that,” said James Romaine, an art historian and the center’s director. “We’re helping young artists grow and become the best artists they can be.”
Echoing others, Romaine describes an evolution in evangelical thinking about the arts.
“For people of my parents’ generation, there was always a question of, ‘Can you be a Christian and an artist?'” he said. “When I was a student, the question was, `How can I be a Christian and an artist, in a philosophical sense?’ Now, there’s a sense of, ‘Let’s get to it. How can I be a part of this art world?'”
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The painting “White Tree”
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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 3 PAUL GAUGUIN’S 3 QUESTIONS: “Where do we come from? What art we? Where are we going? and his conclusion was a suicide attempt” (Feature on artist Mike Kelley Part A)
___________________ How Should we then live Part 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer examines the Age of Non-Reason and he mentions the work of Paul Gauguin. Paul Gauguin October 12, 2012 by theempireoffilms Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, France, on June 7, 1848, to a French father, a journalist from Orléans, and a mother of Spanish Peruvian descent. When […]
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 2 “A look at how modern art was born by discussing Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley, Degas,Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Picasso” (Feature on artist Peter Howson)
__________________________ Today I am posting my second post in this series that includes over 50 modern artists that have made a splash. Last time it was Tracey Emin of England and today it is Peter Howson of Scotland. Howson has overcome alcoholism in order to continue his painting. Many times in the past great painters […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” (Schaeffer Sundays)
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence” (Schaeffer Sundays)
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation” (Schaeffer Sundays)
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” (Schaeffer Sundays)
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 6 “The Scientific Age” (Schaeffer Sundays)
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” (Schaeffer Sundays)
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 4 “The Reformation” (Schaeffer Sundays)
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
“Schaeffer Sundays” Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance”
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 2 “The Middle Ages” (Schaeffer Sundays)
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 1 “The Roman Age” (Schaeffer Sundays)
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
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The Daily Hatch 