The introduction had an assessment of the underlying influence of the 19th and 20th Centuries on artists. I fairly consistently mistrust art critics and authors who imagine they ‘know’ what an artist was thinking when he or she painted. However, this introduction arrested my attention and set me on several hours of reflecting on the big picture. Let me just share his views and what that means to the sparks of creativity that are flooding the present new move of God’s Holy Spirit.
I must first say that Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo Van Gogh are worth reading if you are interested in the inner workings of the artists mind. The name of the book is “Dear Theo.”
Van Gogh’s empty chairs, according to the book, were a subliminal outworking of the influence of the times; an absent God.
Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings
Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger
“The Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr gives the title, ‘The Vacant Throne’ to the final chapter of an essay he wrote in cultural criticism called The Loss of the Centre.’ Sedlmayr writes: “It must be added that the artists have been among those who suffered the most in the 19th and 20th centuries, the very people whose task it has been to render the Fall of Man and of his world in their terrible visions. In the 19th century there was an altogether new type of suffering artist: the lonely, lost, despairing artist on the brink of insanity. It was a type that previously only occurred in isolated instances, if that.
“The 19th century aritsts, great and profound minds, often have the character of victims who sacrifice themselves. From Holderlin, Goya, Friedrich, Runge and Kleist through Daumier, Stifter, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky to van Gogh, Strindberg and Trakl there was a line of solidarity in suffering at the hands of the times. All of them suffered from the fact that God was remote, and ‘dead’, and Man debased.”
(Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that God was dead ushered in those ‘times’. “God is dead” does not mean that Nietzsche believed in an actual God who first existed and then died in a literal sense. It may be more appropriate to consider the statement as Nietzsche’s way of saying that the conventional Christian God is no longer a viable source of any absolute moral principles. Nietzsche recognizes the crisis which the death of God represents for existing moral considerations, because “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.” This is why in “The Madman”, a passage which primarily addresses non-theists (especially atheists), the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.
The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they themselves no longer recognize it. The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves — to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is that for which Nietzsche worked to find a solution by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than Christian values.”
Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize this death out of the deepest-seated fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant. This is partly why Nietzsche saw Christianity as nihilistic. He may have seen himself as a historical figure like Socrates or Jesus, giving a new philosophical orientation to future generations to overcome the impending nihilism).”
Present day prophets and seers have seen that God’s hammer on the anvil of creativity has sent sparks flying in all directions. Those sparks are setting fires in the arts like unto the Church’s Renaissance mandate to declare in paint and music the glory of God and His intervention into the history of mankind.
Therefore, it is our age of creativity – our reception of the spark – that should “render the reconciliation of mankind”, not the “Fall of Man”. Our rise to a heavenly perspective has unleashed a creativity that affirms that God is not only ‘not dead’ but that He is pouring Himself out on man on a thousand levels; elevating, honoring, saving, empowering, and allowing us to partner with Him.
We are ushering in the upside down world where you die to live, you give to receive. We are flipping the world’s philosophies to view them in absolute reverse context that will open the gates of heaven to mankind in a holy rush of heaven wind. We are taking back all our stolen goods. The New Age cannot keep what it has perverted. One needs only to search “Google Images” and type in ‘angels’ to see that this host of God’s messengers whose mandate is to help mankind, have been hijacked into deep perversion. That day is over as the upside down world portrays them as they are.
The move is on. It is rare that the world recognizes when it is in monumental change. Plato’s words (misquoted by the way), “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake” are applicable. The music is changing and the walls are shaking. The night the Beatles sang on the Ed Sullivan Show, many knew a major change was in the wind. The following years were historically revolutionary. The next mode change was “Love Song” and the world flipped upside down again. The repairers of the breach were loosed upon the earth and millions were swept into the Kingdom of Light.
Listen closely. Bridal intimacy is the mode change now and it is sweeping the earth. It will use paint, guitar strings, glue, light, sound, voices, pen and ink, Photoshop, Garage Band, cyberspace, keyboards, prayer positions, intercession… the world is convulsing-not yet like it will-but the world is convulsing.
Welcome the Upside-Down World!
Acts 17:6
“But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some brethren to the rulers of the city, crying out, ‘These who have turned the world upside down have come here too'” (emphasis added).
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