Artistic, literary, musical inspiration vis-a-vis Calvinists

>Well, Olsen does have a point, though it may not be the one he was going for. Before accepting his theological challenge, we've got to recognize our failure at his artistic one. Calvinists are notoriously bad at artistic "stuff" in general (when was the last time we saw a good Calvinist movie?). Before we can even think about writing a doctrinally correct response to the Shack in novel form, we've got to get our act together and get some decent writers reading Kuyper's Fifth Stone Lecture. Then maybe we can respond theologically to the challenge...

Arguably the artistic output of Elizabethan England is Calvinist. Arguably, the best of American literature is Calvinist since it grows from Calvinist soil. But the bigger point is this: truly universal and inspired art is more in the realm of general revelation and is tainted when it is mixed with special revelation (which is not the same as visual artists painting biblical scenes or Bach setting parts of Scripture to music). Palestrina, Bach, and even an atheist, or quasi-atheist like Beethoven all drew from the same source for inspiration, despite themselves in the case of the atheist or quasi-atheist.