Art – Divine Council

Art

Art of Salvation

By Terence Gillespie April 5, 2019

“Art of Salvation” is the Art section of DivineCouncil.org’s new online store!

Believing Artists celebrate the wonder of salvation in art. By their gifts — through the eyes of the Spirit — God is glorified. And with the work their hands find to do, another view of the Art of Salvation is revealed.

Our first offerings are from Angel (Isaiah McCann) with her “Eden Tree Collection” and J9 who’s been able to “realize on canvas” some long-held visions by working with Angel.

Click Here to View Everything in the Store!

Eden Tree Collection

Mark 8:24 And he looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking.”
“It may be that my imagination gets carried away on this verse, but it inspired me to create people who look like trees.

Another inspiration for my trees, was an article titled “Sacred Trees in Israelite Religion”, that was later put in the book, “The Bible Unfiltered, Scripture’s Sacred Trees”, by Dr. Michael S. Heiser.”
— Angel Isaiah McCann

(NOTE: There are 14 available sizes for each work and please make sure to see the preview for your choice before ordering.)

Collaborations with J9

J9 describes how the collaboration with Angel came about:

It was in early 2017 that the Lord led me to what has become a very fruitful relationship with an Artist Lady, who co-incidentally goes by the name Angel.

Needing a way to describe the vision which I had in my mind for over a decade, I drew a rough sketch and, after some email exchanges containing “what-if’s” and “tweaks,” was presented with the finished product as you see it here.

Stay tuned for more inspiring and useful things to be added to the Store!

Art

How to Read the Prophets

By Guest Post January 20, 2019

A transcript of “How te Read the Prophets” by The Bible Project.

Ezekiel, Obadiah, Habakkuk What do these names have in common? Well, they are three of the 15 prophets that have their own books in the Bible.

And if you have tried to read these books, odds are you got lost in their dense poetry and strange imagery. But these books are super important for understanding the overall biblical story.

So, let’s talk about “How to Read the Prophets“.

When I hear the word “prophet”, I think of a fortune teller, someone who predicts the future.

That is what being a prophet means in many cultures, but not in the Bible.

While the biblical prophets sometimes speak about the future, they are way more than fortune tellers.

How should I think about them?

Well, they were Israelites who had a radical encounter with God’s presence and then were commissioned to go and speak on God’s behalf.

Like a representative.

Right! And the thing that they cared about the most. It is the mutual partnership that existed between God and the Israelites.

Right! the partnership. God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt and invited them to become a nation of justice and generosity, that would represent his character to the nations.

So, this partnership required all Israelites to give their trust and allegiance to their God alone. In the Bible, this partnership is called the “Covenant”.

But the leaders — the priests, the kings — led Israel astray and they broke the covenant.

So, this is where the prophets came in, to remind Israel of their role in the partnership. They did this in 3 ways.

First, they were constantly accusing Israel for violating the terms of the covenant. The charges usually include idolatry, alliances with other nations and their gods and allowing injustice towards the poor.

So, they are like covenant lawyers.

Right. So, second, the prophets called the Israelites to repent, which means simply, “to turn around”. They spoke of God’s mercy to forgive them if they would just confess and change their ways.

But, Israel and its leaders didn’t change. Things went from bad to worse.

And so that brings us to the third way that prophets emphasized the covenant. They announced the consequences for breaking it which they called, “The Day of the Lord”.

Oh, yeah! The apocalypse. Visions of the end of the world.

Well, sort of. The prophets were mostly interested in how God would bring his justice on Israel’s corruption and on the violent nations around them. And while explaining these local events, they often used cosmic imagery.

Cosmic imagery?

Yeah! like Jeremiah. He described the exile of the Israelites to Babylon as the undoing of creation itself. The land dissolves into chaos and disorder, no light, no animals or people. Or Isaiah described the downfall of Babylon as the disintegration of the cosmos. Stars falling from the sky, the sun going dark. For the prophets, when God acts in human history to bring justice, it is a “Day of the Lord”.

So, the prophets aren’t talking about the end of the world?

Well, hold on. They are doing many things at once. The cosmic imagery shows how these important events of their day fit into the bigger story of God’s mission to bring down every corrupt and violent nation once and for all. The prophets cared about the present and the future. And the cosmic imagery allowed them to talk about both at the same time.

Got it. So, no matter when you live, the Day of the Lord is bad news if you are part of Babylon.

But, it is good news if you are waiting for God’s kingdom. The Day of the Lord pointed to the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. And once again, the prophets use cosmic poetry to describe it. They see a New Jerusalem, like a new Garden of Eden, with all humanity living at peace with each other and with the animals. And, there is a new Messianic King who restores God’s kingdom in a renewed creation.

Beautiful! So, those are the three themes in the prophets. These prophets must have been very powerful, persuasive speakers.

Well, some were. But others lived on the margins. They would often perform strange, symbolic stunts in public to communicate their message. Like when Ezekiel lay in the dirt and built a model of Jerusalem being attacked by Babylon. Or when Isaiah walked around naked for 3 years as a symbol of the humiliation of exile.

So, did people pay attention to them?

Not really. The stories in these books show how the prophets were a minority group mostly shunned by Israel’s leaders. And their writings were a kind of resistance literature. Most people ignored them. That is, until their warnings came true in the Babylonian exile.

And after that, people began to take their word seriously.

Yes! The works of these earlier prophets were inherited later by unnamed prophets who studied these texts intensely. They’re the ones who arranged the Hebrew scriptures as we know them, including the books of the prophets.

Okay. And there are 15 books of the prophets. The big 3 are Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Then, there is a collection of 12 smaller prophetic works unified on a single scroll. And in each of these books, you will read stories about the prophets and their poems and visions, all arranged to show the cosmic meaning of Israel’s history. How God will turn their tragic story of failure and exile…

…into a story of hope and restoration for all nations.

And it’s that twin message of prophetic warning and of hope that the prophets cared about so much. And, it is a message that we still need to hear today.

Art

A Christian ‘Drudge Report’

By divinecouncil April 10, 2018

Adam Ford, the man behind The Babylon Bee, has started a Christian “Drudge Report” called the “Christian Daily Reporter.” If you enjoy Adam’s comics and humor on “The Bee,” you might be interested in the daily news articles Adam finds important enough to share with other believers.

At the bottom of the Christian Daily Reporter page, Adam links to a manifesto where he explains the motivation and purpose of his new website. His two headers say it all:

Stop letting Facebook and Google dictate which news and opinions you are allowed to see.

The Christian Daily Reporter is a source for the most important news and content from a Christian perspective — and it lives outside the tech-giant information choke hold.

Divine Council

‘A Hymn to Jesus the Conqueror’ by Zechariah

By divinecouncil April 1, 2018

Storytelling

Two Movies: ‘Paul, Apostle of Christ’ & ‘Full of Grace’

By divinecouncil March 19, 2018

These two movies are from the same director, Andrew Hyatt. “Paul, Apostle of Christ” is coming out this Friday the 23rd, see the trailer and behind the scenes videos, below.

Another Christian movie from Andrew Hyatt, “Full of Grace” has been posted online in its full-length since November of 2016.

Paul, Apostle of Christ

“Risking his life, Luke ventures to Rome to visit Paul — the apostle who’s bound in chains and held captive in Nero’s darkest and bleakest prison cell. Haunted by the shadows of his past misdeeds, Paul wonders if he’s been forgotten as he awaits his grisly execution. Before Paul’s death, Luke resolves to write another book that details the birth of what will come to be known as the church.”

Behind the Scenes

EWTN Interview Jim Caviezel, Raymond Arroyo

Full of Grace

Released in October 2015, this movie has been posted online for quite a while so I infer this is the producer’s preference. I have not seen the whole movie, yet, but am encouraged by this review.

“Mary of Nazareth spends her final days helping the church regain its original encounter with the lord.”

Full Movie

Art

When Christian Artists Learn Apologetics

By divinecouncil February 13, 2018

Apologetics gives artists confidence to speak into the darkness.

Article by Alex Aili for “A Clear Lens“.

During the first class of the morning at the small Christian college, our professor stopped the lecture and used his walking stick, curiously similar to a wizard’s staff, to step from behind the podium to the front of the class. He did this when he really wanted us to listen.

He leaned on the staff as if he was Pastor Gandalf and scanned the class before muttering a kernel of weathered wisdom. It was a heartfelt opinion, but it resonated with the force of a command: “Christians ought to be at the forefront of every discipline.”

Are we at the forefront of the Art that’s shaping our culture?

No. We’re lagging, relying on tropes and stereotypes to preach simplistic sermons when people want to experience compelling stories (although The Case for Christ is a recent example of success).

So yes, we must learn how to make better art, but what good is that if we aren’t speaking the same language as the culture around us?

In Apologetics and The Christian Imagination, Holly Ordway insists that the lost meaning of Christian terminology is what prevents many believers from being intelligible to unbelievers. For example, our world doesn’t hear “Jesus,” “faith” or “sin” as defined by Christians. She argues that an effective, and underused, way to reclaim lost meaning is to create art with sound doctrine (her specific focus in the book, however, is apologetical literature).

In a word, Christian artists need to learn apologetics in addition to their craft. If you have the creative drive and you believe Jesus is the Son of God, then learn apologetics. Know what you believe and why. Your art will be better because you’ll be confident enough to tackle tough issues.

Christian artists don’t have to hide in the realm of “self-expression.” If we study apologetics, the more we’ll naturally see how we can demonstrate Christianity’s implications in our work.

For a start, here are 4 habits to ignite artistic apologetics (although my primary focus is narrative art, creators of other forms may still benefit).

Develop the Worldviews Behind the Central Conflict

Art enables us to raise deep worldview questions without coming across as hostile. How? Well, in storytelling, there is a single question called the dramatic question, which involves the protagonist’s (main character) central conflict with the antagonist.

This clash arises from conflicting desires, which arise from conflicting values, which are motivated by their conflicting worldviews (or perhaps variations of the same worldview).

To put it plainly, the main character wants something and the bad guy wants something else. But they both can’t get what they want because they value different things, so a conflict arises.

For example, the dramatic question of The Lord of the Rings is: “Will Frodo destroy the ring?” And the antagonism is that Sauron wants to reclaim it.

If desires drive characters, values drive desires, and worldviews drive values, then destroying the ring drives Frodo, selfless heroism drives his desire to destroy it, and Goodness motivates his selfless heroism.

With Tolkien creating this conflict, we are drawn in. We want to know what happens to Frodo.

When we empathize with characters by vicariously experiencing their journey (not to mention the world they inhabit), we participate in the worldviews involved in the story as well, albeit indirectly.

So whether we agree with it or not, we let the protagonist’s worldview speak as we follow the story because the answer to the dramatic question unearths deeper worldview implications based on which desires were met and which values are maintained.

How do we develop the expertise to naturally develop worldviews into our art? For starters, learn the craft of dialogue, character development, sentence structure, description, scene structure, etc. Study award-winning stories and the conflicts that generate them. Take a poorly-rated movie, TV show, or song and rewrite it. Then use that as an inspiration or primer for your own work (don’t plagiarize, obviously).

All it takes is the desire to learn. Ask experts. Google it. YouTube it. The Internet Age has its benefits!

Embedding worldview into the central conflict is perhaps the most important element in creating art because when it’s done right, deep questions are raised, which demand inward attention on the audience’s part.

Wrestle with the Darkness

Christian art cannot be pigeonholed into what is family-friendly (although the genre is necessary), aesthetically unambitious or, worst of all, thinly-disguised proselytization. It requires provocation with novelty and sound theology with beauty. It must engage with our world and be relevant.

Please read the rest of, “When Christian Artists Learn Apologetics.”

Art

Transformation

By divinecouncil February 8, 2018

Artist’s Description

Some symbolic meaning in this: She has butterflies around her eyes, butterflies represent resurrection. There are four, which represents creation, the fourth day when God created luminaries, light, to separate the day from night. She has one eye that is filled with light representing the one light that matters: CHRIST. She is glowing in the dark representing that she is separate from the darkness.
She has died with Christ, and risen in CHRIST, and Transformed.