It’s only April, and it’s been a crazy year for Christian movies. They’ve been crazy successful, crazy controversial and, in some moviegoers’ minds, just plain crazy.
On one hand, the spring of 2014 has proved what Christians have long insisted: That there’s a market for faith-based movies. For years, we Christians have lamented the lack of good Christian-themed entertainment. “Make movies for us, and we’ll see them!” we said. Hollywood picked this year to listen. And guess what? We were right.
But just because we’ve been given our faith-driven movies, that doesn’t mean we have to like ’em.
Heaven Is for Real landed in second place this weekend and took in more than $22.5 million (surprising many experts). But I’ve heard from lots of Christians who believe the film peddles universalism and questionable theology.
Son of God, essentially a reworking of footage we already saw in the History Channel’s The Bible, earned nearly $60 million in two months (surprising many experts). But we’ve fielded some criticism of the movie’s less-than-strict chronology.
Noah landed atop the box office its first week of release and could perhaps crest the $100 million mark—the traditional measuring stick for a bona fide blockbuster (surprising many experts). But … well, if you haven’t heard, the movie has been rather controversial in Christian circles.
Even God’s Not Dead—a very traditional Christian movie which did boffo business at the box office (surprising many experts)—has its critics, mostly for the way it handles the whole Christian vs. non-Christian dynamic.
Now, of course, each of these films has problems in varying degrees. Every film does. There’s no such thing as a perfect movie, and we dutifully noted most issues and quibbles with these flicks in our reviews. But the fact that so many of these films have generated such a backlash is still pretty interesting. And it triggers a whole host of questions for me.
For instance: Have we always been equally sensitive to how faith-driven themes play out in popular entertainment? Was there any sort of Christian backlash for, say, Cecil B. DeMille’s rather imaginative 1956 interpretation of The Ten Commandments? Did literate Christians protest the publication of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (featuring a faux-heroic Satan) in 1667?
Do we hold our faith- or Bible-based movies to a different standard than we do, say, your standard superhero movie? Should we?
Do these controversies speak to the natural friction between what we see as theological truth and imaginative storytelling?
It’s the last point that’s been particularly bounding around in my brain.
It seems to me that theology is all about us trying to get at The Truth—that is, the ultimate truth. Who God is, why we’re here, all that sort of stuff. We Christians believe that our faith addresses the biggest questions we have. And it forms a blueprint for not only how we operate, but the universe itself.
Storytelling tries to get at truth, too, but in a squishier, dreamier sort of way. If theology can serve as a precise blueprint for life, the universe and everything, stories are more like a painting (and often a surreal painting at that). They use color and flow instead of form and function. By their nature, they’re flawed and imperfect—some irredeemably so, some would argue. But stories, too, often try to get at some sort of truth, and sometimes even try to ferret out those biggest of truths.
But it’s nigh impossible to make, say, a impressionist painting of a blueprint and have it still work as a blueprint. The two serve very different purposes and stimulate very different parts of the brain. Both, I think, are important. But the only thing that’s ever been able to combine both rock-solid theology and beautiful storytelling is, well, the Bible itself. And of course, that required a divine Creator.
Now, none of this mitigates any specific issue found in any one of this year’s crop of faith-themed movies (or any other such movies past or future). But I kinda like looking for truth, even hints of truth, in them, despite their imperfections. After all, our understanding of Christianity is the result of divine revelation, deep thought by some of the world’s greatest minds and thousands of years of practice. I don’t expect a 4-year-old who said he went to heaven to have a great grasp on all those theological intricacies. Sure, I might have questions. I might bring up problems. But they don’t make me, well, crazy.
But that’s just me. What about you?
Recent Comments