ONE of the charges I have made of late peek-a-boos at movies and literature with evangelistic pretensions, occasions a look at how so-called "Christian" movies and literature run against the dramatic medium of cinema and literature - dramatic art forms of a descriptive and dramatic nature, rather than a prescriptive medium.
Moreover, I have also tried to examine on dominium that the Christian writer's attempt to use dramatic art for evangelistic purposes in order to create uniquely "Christian" art, reduces the scope of cinema and literature because it reduces the observable world men and women, Christian or non-Christian, live in. Such reality, then, ceases to imagine the world the triune God - Whom no greater being can be conceived - has been pleased to decree into existence ex nilo before the foundations of the world.
Writers of the past, from JRR Tolkien to CS Lewis, have been examples I have used to show literature need not be "Christian" to realise imaginatively, the dramatic world realised by writers who are Christian saints. Such work, though not evangelistic, speaks far more resolutely of the plausibility of Christ's Holy Gospel found in the testimony of Sacred Scripture without warring against the inherent confines of the dramatic medium.
But there is another.
Her name, Flannery O'Connor. In the lovely O'Connor's essay, The Church And The Fiction Writer, the late Roman Catholic novelist and essayist considers a long held "tension" between religious affection and piety and the import of secular artistic mediums.
When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete observable reality. If the writer uses his eyes in the real security of his faith, he will be obliged to use them honestly and his sense of mystery and his acceptance of it will be increased.
A belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the believer to it. It will, of course, add to the writer’s observation a dimension which many cannot, in conscience, acknowledge; but as long as what they can acknowledge is present in the work, they cannot claim that any freedom has been denied the artist. A dimension taken away is one thing; a dimension added is another, and what the Catholic writer and reader will have to remember is that the reality of the added dimension will be judged in a work of fiction by the truthfulness and wholeness of the literal level of the natural events presented. If the Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is. A purely affirmative vision cannot be demanded of him without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God.
Finally, O'Connor concludes,
It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life, and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the sense of the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost. Fiction, made according to its own laws, is an antidote to such a tendency, for it renews our knowledge that we live in the mystery from which we draw our abstractions. The Catholic fiction writer, as fiction writer, will look for the will of God first in the laws and limitations of his art and will hope that if be obeys those, other blessings will be added to his work. The happiest of these (and the one he may presently least expect?) will be the satisfied Catholic reader.My project, therefore, takes off from where the late Ms O'Connor's essay ended. In my examination, I contend there is fixed laws and limitations to art; hence, art cannot do the business Christians desire evangelistic art to do; for dramatic art, unlike Christian theology and practise is not of the apologia; nor the proclamation of the Word of God. To try to force such a limitation on dramatic art is one reason out of many so called Christian movies and literature are unable to obtain a serious reflection upon society as Babylon - a redemptive dramatic theatre where God's purposes are worked out in Sacred and secular spheres.
It is preciously because most "Christian" artists who impose unnatural evangelistic designs upon dramatic, descriptive art forms, cannot themselves arrive at a literal depiction of natural events glimpsed in the world and experienced by non-believers and believers alike; the art itself becomes untruthful to this world. Whether fear of offending a Christian audience, or a belief that reality is too ugly for fellow Christians to contemplate; filmmakers and writers with evangelistic designs too often fail to reveal the world as is, in contradiction to obedience to Christ and the world God in Christ the Messiah has pleased Himself to purpose into existence for His own eternal Glory.
Such a failure, then, creates an imagined universe removed from what any audience knows truly about the circumstances and sweep of this life; this side of Christ's first and second advent. It is in the truthful observence of God's creation and revealed decrees in dramatic form that best defends Christian faith.
Certainly, no two Christians will render such reality the same, but whatever they may imagine in a piece of work, must tell the truth of this world in order to take up the challenge of rendering a world an audience can rightly see as glorious, but also, broken.
Fiction, no less than gravity, is governed by laws. In realising at the deepest level those dramatic laws the artist who is Christian has at their fingertips all they need to depict the distortions of human life; all it's vagaries, as dramatic distortions, and alien to our humanity. Therefore, it is because the Christian faith fulfils the good the natural world declares; the paradigmatic reality of nature and grace can be properly acknowledged subconsciously by those viewers who are themselves, non-believers. And so, whatever that art maybe, it becomes truthful because of man's inescapable status as imago dei.
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