"Bad" Movies. A Reflection on the Objectivity of Art and the Modern Church.

I know, Noah came out a month ago. People were kicking and screaming about it then. So, in a sense, I'm kind of late to the party. Then again, apparently Ridley Scott is making a movie about the Exodus story... So perhaps this blog-post is preemptive.

And, importantly, I haven't seen Noah yet. I honestly would really really like to. It intrigues me far deeper than any of the "contemporary religious movies" that were released around the same time (God's Not Dead, Son of God, and, upcoming, Heaven Is For Real). Maybe I'm a rebel. Maybe I'm a fool. Maybe I just think that I loved Les Mis, I loved Gladiator, and how could I not love a movie in which Russell Crowe portrays a Biblical hero?

But I felt very deeply distressed and disappointed as I looked out on my Facebook wall during the time of Noah's release. Left and right there were scathing and hateful reviews of the movie coming from people who either didn't see the movie or didn't give it a full chance. (To be clear: I want to respect people's rights to like or dislike a movie! For example: I watched Prometheus and I really really really hated it. That being said, there were some aspects to it [the animation, particularly] that were good.)

Why did the Church, largely, hate Noah? Most of those who responded negatively to it would say: "Because it was unbiblical!" or "It is blasphemous!" or something like that. Maybe "It supports environmentalism!" (Like Genesis 1 and 2 doesn't?) or "It supports evolution!" (... ... This one is becoming a dead horse.)

But I would say that the Church mostly hated Noah because of a false perspective of Art and a lack of integrity.

Genesis 5-9 is simultaneously a glorious amount of details on the Flood story and an amazing lack of specific detail. When we read a Biblical text, part of our hermeneutic necessarily needs to include the reality that there are details that we do not see. That's part of what a good inductive Bible study will reveal. For example: in the story of Jesus and the woman who anoints His feet with oil, we can't really understand the nature of the passage if we don't understand how Jesus is sitting at the table! In the Pharisee's house, there's a particular layout: the Pharisee at the head, Jesus at a prominent place as the visiting Rabbi. Everyone's sitting on the ground, of course, because their tables are placed on the ground. The woman washes Jesus' feet, and He looks at her while talking to the Pharisee. A 1st century Messianic Jew would have recognized immediately that Christ's decision to look upon the woman means (because of a physical reality!) that He is turning His face away from the Pharisee who invited him -- an incredibly meaningful act. This is something that we cannot understand without more information that is not given directly in the text.

So, for instance, when in the Noah movie apparently Russell Crowe has a manic-depressive moment when he considers killing his grandchildren. Don't get me wrong: I do not believe that Noah would have slain his grandchildren. But the purpose of this (again, I haven't seen the movie) in the movie is to convey the weight of Noah's consideration on sin -- he's realized that God is destroying the earth because of the sin of man, and that this sin is not only in the wicked people "out there" but "in here" -- in his family, in his children, and in his children's children. In that sense, it is a brilliant reflection on the doctrine of Total Depravity. And Noah's response upon discovering this is a logical one for someone under much theological stress.

And the depressive undertone isn't something too far-fetched -- we do read in the Bible that Noah goes from saving the world to getting himself drunk. Sounds like he may have "seen too much" and was trying to self-medicate. We could have a good theological discussion as to why Noah goes on a drinking binge, but it remains that we do not know directly why he did what he did in that passage -- and the creative license of saying "Oh! He's depressed because of the sin of man!" is a legitimate artistic perspective.


I say all of this to note one major point: As a whole, the Church does not understand Art. Think about it this way: Who gets better airplay on Christian radio, the artist who makes deeply nuanced and beautiful music with complicated lyrics (let's say... John Mark McMillan? Switchfoot? Aaron Strumpel?) or the worship leader who has written something that clearly says something theological? (Or semi-theological?)

This isn't about Noah, it's about how the Church responds to artistic media. Is a movie really "bad? I had a great conversation with some Christian friends last week, and they responded to a movie that I mentioned by saying "Yes, it's a great movie, but it's got some questionable things in it." I don't think that they were unjust in saying this (It is a great movie; it does have some questionable things in it.), but I do think that their statement was telling of how we as Christians deal with artistic media!

When I see Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, I don't think that I would say "It's great art, but theologically inconsistent" or "It's great art, but too much nudity." Or when I listen to Beethoven, I don't say "It's great art, but he was crazy" or "It's great art, but he wasn't a Christian" or even! "It's great art, but he was so clearly depressed." To me, the modern Church's perspective on Art is one dominated by a perspective which fundamentally lacks integrity. We treat "classics" differently than we treat modern media; we treat certain things that are wicked different than other things that are wicked; we prefer unrealistic perspectives on our lives to stories that tell the truth as it is (for example: think of how beautifully-profound Gran Torino is; then think about what would happen if you removed all the cussing from it).

And we must be consistent even when films or art portrays our faith. If you dismiss Noah because of the liberties taken with the story, then you should never watch Prince of Egypt ever again (or sing along with that glorious "When You Believe" song at the end), you should avoid any Christian songs with off doctrine (quite notably, from Christmas music, "We Three Kings" or "Silent Night" -- okay, that last one is more of a humorous thought about whether or not the night Christ's birth could have actually been silent...), and most definitely we should take a stand whenever someone misquotes Scripture!!!*

(*Which, using an ancient Jewish rabbinical tradition, Jesus, Peter, and Paul all do. Multiple times.)

My point: How do we as Christians experience Art? I'm not saying that you should sift it through your theology -- most certainly do so! that's part of why I despised Prometheus, as explained in the link above -- but I am saying that you shouldn't judge the quality of a work's Art based on how it stands on your theological stances. We should take Art in the context that it is written. Noah was directed by an atheist who wanted to dramatically retell the Genesis story. I don't know yet whether I'll like it or I won't, but I recognize going in that the director does not believe that God truly is -- I'll judge the work according to its artistic quality, not its theological impact.

Our Massacres. A Reflection on Sin.

Today I read up on the Rwandan Genocide twenty years ago, and I feel somber. Half a world away, while I was growing up in happy little Gillespie, Illinois, nearly a million people were brutally raped and murdered within the course of three months.

This was not some historical genocide that happened half-a-century ago -- which, of course, does not make something like the Holocaust or other mass-murders less terrible -- but this was a real, live, touchable (nearly) expression of how of sin affects the human soul. I wince on the inside as I consider how hundreds of thousands of Rwandans today now experience the HIV/AIDS epidemic due to war rape. I wince all the moreso from reading about the UN Peacekeepers who left a school full of 1,000 refugees, who were subsequently murdered by the drunk men outside.

And I have some problems of my own.

You see: Sin causes hurt. It causes hatred. It causes pain. It causes bitterness. Its effects are complete and total throughout the whole human being. One might say that those who died in the massacres were the fortunate and blessed ones: death is sweet compared to the active work of sin in the world.

Now, I may not have witnessed genocide in my life, but I have witnessed the workings of sin. In America, sin never functions as simply as it does in the rest of the world -- here sin prefers a more insidious system to dissolve the human spirit. It avoids murder for that "nicer" sin of hatred, which leaves a man hating his brother and murdering him in his heart for years, leaving him as an empty husk devoted to hatred. It avoids rape for simple objectification, which leads to sex trafficking and prostitution, enslaving young women to a hopeless life, and enslaving young men to a world of being abusers.

Sin has fooled the Church to reject rational thinking; and it has (strategically) fooled the rational thinkers into rejecting theology; and it has fooled the theologians from accepting a real and living God; and it has fooled the charismatics from accepting a logical and rational God. It has lied about God's supernatural power, and it has lied about His living mercy and justice.

You see, in America sin has lied to us about what sin is. Our Protestant-work-ethic, Bible-belt, Sunday-school mentalities have brought us to an understanding that sin is when you think a woman is hot, when you cuss at your neighbor for letting his dog poop in your yard, when you don't attend Sunday morning service. In America, one finds two groups with different perspectives on sin: the liberals who say that there is no sin (if they call themselves Christians, we can safely [alongside St. Augustine] call them followers of Pelagius); and the religious folk who say that sin rests in action.

But sin is a much bigger problem that our lust, our hate, our selfishness, our imposition of our will (our witchcraft), our murder, our theft, our lies, our massacres. Sin is a much much more offensive issue than any Holocaust or Rwandan Genocide. Sin is much much more destructive than the death of 800,000 men, women, and children, than the 50% divorce rate in America [and the broken families that result, than the 50,000 women who are brought into the US every year for sexual slavery.

The root-cause to our massacres is simple: we have chosen our leadership against the leadership and kingship of the Only King of Life. We have been disconnected to life and pleasure and goodness and mercy and love, and in that world outside of Him, which we can only accurately describe as Hell, we massacre. Sin is our state of rebellion, massacre is our response to living in the state of sin.

I write all of this with a heavy heart: the world is covered, as C.S. Lewis once said, by one dark shadowy wing. Evil rules our streets. Even today, sin is acting among people from sea to sea, from land to land, in obvious ways and in subtle ways, in overt wickedness and in sublime deception.

I do not write this to scare you, dear reader. My heart feels heavy as I thought on the massacres in Rwanda. I am sad. And I see its repetition, like that scene in The Last of the Mohicans, when the caravan is assaulted, or the moment in Blood Meridian when they attack the Indian village. Massacre is in our blood. Like when Russia directed Ukraine's former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych to fire upon the crowd amassing against him. Like Robert Mugabe. Like the unrest in Congo. Like the suicide bombers of the Middle East. Like the massacres that happen here in America: how we slay one another with our tongues and think that we are better off than "those African countries."

Again, my goal is not to scare you. But, perhaps, to sober you. This is to illuminate, not condemn. God says that He sends His Spirit to "convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment" (John 16:8) -- His conviction is His merciful revelation of our massacres.

I say none of this without Hope. My blog is called Apolytrosis -- that is, "Redemption." I do not believe in a God who gives up on us. Even in the days of Noah, God did not give up on His Creation, but He sent the floods as a demonstration of His mercy. (We can talk about that later!) The Gospel's summation is that God sent Christ in the midst of the depth of our death and human condition in order to save us and deliver us from our massacres.

Praise God, that He has set up the Way for us to be free from this world of massacre and death. Praise God! When Christians discuss the coming Kingdom, we should do so with the hopeful expectation of the coming King's Power to bring all things under His authority -- only in such a Kingdom can we truly be safe, can we truly be free from death, can we truly be free from massacre.