WCA Session 4 – Donald Miller

Donald Miller.

I’m so excited that I get to finally hear Donald Miller. I imagine these notes will be less of bullet points and more of jumble sentences and paragraphs of thought. That’s just DM’s style.

Rembrandt often painted self portraits because he couldn’t find a person to paint. He would just get a mirror and paint himself. The church used to comission paintings, to fund the creation of art.

In the Enlightenment, humanity and culture changed what they thought the definition of truth was. Truth got limited after the Enlightenment. Truth became more about science. It was a good thing in that it changed a lot of things for the better (medicine, etc..). Printing press was part of the Enlightenment. After the printing press, truth was created in the written word more often, and artistic depictions became less and less an expression of God and theology.

Durham Cathedral – built in the shape of a cross.

Geometry of Love – building created to communicate the Gospel

Icons in the Church were created to depict and explain theology.

(Aside: “We were sitting drinking pints of coffee in Portland. It’s not a sin to drink this type of coffee in Portland. It may be a sin elsewhere, but sin is regional.”)

You can’t really reason why you love a person, say a man loves his wife. We can try to quantify why we love them: looks, spiritual, smart, kind, funny, etc… But we could replace them with someone else that is better in all these categories, but still wouldn’t want to replace our love. WE can’t really explain why we love.

There are reasons that we really come to a decision, and then there are justifications as to why that choice was right.

The Enlightenment separated truth from meaning. Truth and meaning go together.

Give “love” note to a woman that says this:

1. You have brown eyes
2. You have brown hair
3. You are 5′ 6″

It is truth, but it really doesn’t make an impact. Give her a real poem.

God doesn’t give truth in bullet points. Jesus told the truth in parables. (The Kingdom of God is like…)

Chesterton:

• “It’s the mathematician that goes mad, not the poet.“
• “The mathemetician is trying to get heaven in his head, the poet is trying to get his head into heaven.”
  

We don’t make bullet points out of Song of Songs (Robert could):

1. Her teeth are like raisins
2. Her breasts are like alpaca

Song of Songs is poetry, and it has to be taken as it is, not as bullet points.

The Bible was written as poetry and as narrative.

Poetry was used in Job at times when words really couldn’t express how bad things were for Job. It was written in poetic form to express that is was above what could really be expressed.

Romeo and Juliet was written during a time that the Protestants and Catholics were in constant battle.  Don says that Shakespeare using the fighting going on around him as examples for the play.  He says that the story really is the gospel story.  Really good stuff but hard to write and explain. Maybe I’ll try later.