I really appreciate this.

Actually, I just wrote about this ‘dilemma’ of art and speech act, particularly as it concerns Christian art, in a blog post I call “a theology of emoticons”. I invite your response to it on my blog at http://www.2mites.com.

I add a personal reflection. When I first encountered Mr. Knippers’ big panels, they frightened me. Because the powerful figures were stripped of all cover-ups, it was impossible to avoid the understanding we have as children: that the body reveals the soul and spirit. We grow up, we become more sophisticated, and we discount it, but the knowledge is still with us. The human body incarnates the soul and spirit, but it also expresses them. The earlier paintings such as “The Prize” confront us with Biblical characters, immediate and terribly human, but they also lead to the realization that the viewer shares that humanity, that those around us can read us as well as we read them. That leads to repentance, humility, and a longing to become “a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” who sees us even more clearly than we see one another. It was because the paintings showed me how “naked” I am, that at first I was afraid. I am grateful for that fear.

While the earlier paintings lead to self-examination, repentance, and the hope of resurrection, the more recent paintings proclaim that hope and lead to awe, wonder, and worship. Without losing any of the physicality of the previous works, as Ken Eilers put is, “The overlap…between human bodies and a profusion of refracted forms of light and colour is an attempt to locate this place, this startling moment in which the world of God intersects and interpenetrates our own material world.” More than that, they lead us to understand that His life intersects and interpenetrates our material world continually, if we will only see it.