Seth Barnes Aug 3, 2007 8:00 PM

The kingdom of God in literature and the arts

Literature and the arts intersect with the Kingdom of God all the time. Fantasy is a genre of literature that is perpetually touching on the Kingdom. ...

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Literature and the arts intersect with the Kingdom of God all the time. Fantasy is a genre of literature that is perpetually touching on the Kingdom. Think about just a few titles where the main characters stumble into an alternate reality:

A Wrinkle in Time

Narnia

Alice in Wonderland

The Matrix

The Wizard of Oz

In the realm of art, impressionists soften the harsh light of reality and summon up echoes of the garden. Monet's paintings, for example, remind me of C.S. Lewis'

Perelandra, a book depicting the Kingdom of God as it might originally have existed - a world where the fall of man never occurred. It's a theme Milton first addressed in Paradise Lost. It's a theme we as humans continually bump up against.

In the original zombie movie, "Night of the Living Dead," zombies couldn't be killed. They walked around unthinkingly, mindless inthe material world. As humans, we intersect with and touch the eternal all the time.

But too often, we dismiss such intersections as being coincidental - we look for some rational explanation. We're like zombies as long as we live in this alternate reality and mistake it for the real thing.

We are not human beings having a temporary spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a temporary human experience. We need to wake up to reality.

We can look at any number of artists and writers and see a lot in an indirect way from the diffuse light they give off.

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