Wordle - Nice Pictures

Someone pointed me to Wordle, which creates nice pictures from words.

Here's one I did of the book of Ephesians, in the NIV.

And here's my personal favourite - from 1 Peter in the TNIV:

Beauty and Creativity

One of the things I've been thinking about a bit recently is the important place that beauty and creativity should have in the Christian life. I'll give some theological justification for that later. In the meantime, here's a (not especially good) creative thing I did based on the opening of the Te Deum.

And yes, my girlfriend is away on mission. Can you tell from the fact I'm blogging a lot more?

Mary and Princesses

It's Advent...

One of the things that has quite surprised me in getting to know people is the number of women with huge princess fascination complex things. I'd quite like to try to figure out why it happens - I think it's a wanting to feel valued and beautiful thing, but there's got to be more to it in some of the extreme cases I know.

One of my best friends here at college has a young daughter who is fascinated with princesses too (so it's not just 20 somethings). And he wisely tells her that she is a princess only because she is a daughter of God, the King of the Universe.

And this kind of strikes a resonance with the build-up to Christmas. In a lot of the art representing Mary, she's depicted as wearing blue. Originally, this was because that shade of blue could only be made from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, so it showed she was really important. In some, probably the majority in this selection, she is depicted as well-off, which she'd have to be to own blue clothes. In the picture above (the Annunciation by Conrad von Soest, 1403), she looks like a noblewoman, and that's quite common in the art of the period.

But that seems to me to be almost completely missing the point.

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you."

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

Luke 1:26-33, NIV

All the evidence we've got points to Mary being a peasant girl. She's from Nazareth, which was a small village in a provincial backwater. But she's clearly a peasant girl who is really devoted to God, as seen from her response "May it be to me as you have said". She is a peasant girl, yet she is to become the mother of the King of Kings because she has found favour with God.

Mary is not a princess. She doesn't even come close. Except that she's a daughter of the Most High God. If you have to compare this to a fairy story, it's much more like Cinderella (with the very major difference that it's true) - God comes and takes a peasant girl and makes her the mother of his King.

It's scandalous really. And it's meant to be. And it shows that God gives hope and brings light not to the princesses of this world, but to the poor who seek him. As Mary's response shows, that's what God's always done.

Icons

I don't like labels when they become an excuse for rejecting other people and their views without thinking about them, which they often are. But sometimes labels are useful because they identify certain common characteristics. For example, my background is strongly conservative evangelical, and us conservative evangelicals are just about starting to realise that we don't have to overreact against what some Roman Catholics believed in the 1500s any more.

One of the aspects of old Roman Catholic culture that we reacted strongly against was the use of images - it's pretty clear that some of what they did went much too far towards idolatry, and it's also pretty clear that some of the response has led to some evangelicals being more theoretical and anti-visual than Jesus (for example) was.

One thing that struck me when I started discussing the issue of icons with Orthodox people was that some of their justifications seemed fine. For example, it is obvious that in Christian doctrine, Jesus is God, and Jesus was visible. Therefore, if someone had taken a photo of Jesus, the result would be an accurate (but by no means exhaustive) picture of God. (It's just as well no-one did, otherwise we'd probably be worshipping the picture or anyone who looked vaguely like it.) And then you get to thinking about interesting questions such as "What does the Incarnation mean for the prohibition of images?"

You also get use of icons which seems to be quite similar to the later Western phenomenon of Christian biography - icons as a kind of devotional biography for a non-literate culture, leading to a focus on God because of the life of the saint involved.

Of course, there's plenty of unhelpful stuff associated with icons too. For example, the icon pictured is Rublev's famous icon of the Trinity. It's meant to have all kinds of deep significance. But to my (horribly uncultured) mind, its main significance is that it makes the Trinity look like three women with dodgy necks. That suggests that maybe Rublev had been reading too much Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory of Nyssa was a famous theologian and bishop in the late 300s AD, who argued that the reason his understanding of the Trinity didn't imply that there were three gods was that actually it was incorrect to say "three men" because all men had the same essence.

In other words, I am asserting that Rublev emphasises the threeness too much at the expense of the oneness of the Trinity, and that for me at least that makes it difficult to appreciate the other clever bits of significance in the icon. [It's worth adding of course that lots of people can and do find Rublev's icon helpful, but the use of imagery often introduces unwanted ambiguities, which some people then see as the main point.]

Taking the other side for a moment, consider this argument. If in your church, over on a side wall, there was a little photo of Jim Elliot, (or Luther, or Calvin) with a five line biography underneath and something saying "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose", (or equivalent), with no candles or kneeling or kissing or anything, would you think that was potentially helpful? Probably, yes. Would I see anything objectionable in it? Probably not, no. Certainly as a kid, I'd have found it interesting and thought provoking.

If you accept the Jim Elliot / Luther / Calvin example, the issue over use of images isn't a black-and-white one. Instead it's a question of how best to use images in worship. How do we work with a heavily visual culture, avoiding the danger that says that God isn't concerned with the physical, yet at the same time avoid the danger of idolatry? That's a better question...

Israel 2 - The Dome of the Rock

Lots of potential to offend here... In fact, the Dome of the Rock and surrounding area is just about the most politically sensitive area in the world. In fact, an old fat politician just visiting the area managed somehow to trigger the Second Intifada. I'm neither aiming to offend or not offend here - I'm simply aiming to describe the world the way I see it. On the right is a picture of me not seeing the Dome of the Rock.

It's pretty certain that the area was the area used for the Jewish Second Temple (as built in Ezra and Nehemiah, as enlarged by Herod and as visited by Jesus. Jews claim (with pretty good evidence) that it was also the site of the First Temple (destroyed in 587/586 BC), and before that the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite which was bought by David in 2 Samuel 24. Muslims deny at least some of that, mostly because it would mean that the Jews were probably the legal owners of the site, which they claim was where Muhammad ascended into heaven from (that's at one end of the site, covered by the Al Aqsa mosque).

The Dome of the Rock is built over a rocky outcrop on the site, thought to have been the actual threshing floor of Araunah. A later tradition also identifies it with the rock where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac in Genesis 22. The Muslims, of course, claim that it was Ishmael who was nearly sacrificed (though that claim doesn't seem to appear in the first 2000 years or so of the story being told, but that sort of thing never really seems to worry Muslims much).

It is a very noticeable and beautiful building when seen from a long way away.

It is even more amazing from a hundred metres or so away.

But close up, it becomes very apparent that it is in fact the most prominent and famous building in the world to be built almost entirely out of horrible 1970s B&Q-style tiles.

The Dome of the Rock is meant to be one of the key early examples of Islamic art. It is therefore interesting that it actually seems to have been commissioned by Muslims, but designed and built for them by a group of Syrian Christians....

Islamic Art

I was in a (very obviously) Muslim-run takeaway last night, and noticed the decor.

The Qur'an doesn't officially ban pictures of people, even of Muhammad, so there is a lot of Islamic art depicting him (see here for examples). But in common with Christianity and Judaism, there's a ban on worshipping images of people. (Some Christians sometimes give the impression of worshipping images - what they say they are doing is using the images of people as a kind of visual biography to recall to mind what those people did and help them focus on God through what he has done in the lives of people. I reckon that's possible - it's between them and God but personally it's not something I do much.)

In modern Islam, the ban on worshipping images has grown into a virtual ban on images of people in art, with the result that even early on their art became very heavily based on geometry and letter forms - it looks very nice actually. Some Christians have gone down the whole prohibiting images of people line, but when they have usually haven't produced such nice alternatives.

Anyway - back to the take-away. The decor was mostly geometric with Arabic words in, with some big framed photos of Islamic shrines, mosques, etc. What suddenly struck me as odd though was the television in the corner. The Christians I know who don't like any pictures of people don't like television either. I just don't get how people can be against any pictures of people in their art, yet be absolutely fine with them on television. Are good films not art?

Another bit of me wants to point out that they're actually making images of everyone they see on their retinas - otherwise they couldn't see them.