By David Beilstein
WHEN it comes to the issues I have thus far discussed it is important to look at some of the theological issues influencing my thinking on issues confessional Christians encompass when glimpsing relationships of secular culture, specifically, cinema and literature.
St Augustine of Hippo unpacked in his magnus opus, The City of God, an antithesis between Christians and non-believers in the present age concerning ultimate things related to the Kingdom of God. In St Augustine's schema, the Bishop of Hippo laid out duties and experiences Christians and non-Christians share and can agree on in distinction with those things which divide the elect of God, chosen by God's merciful grace in Christ, and those under the just enmity with God, the unregenerate non-believer.
In The City of God St Augustine illustrates a basis between ultimate things - things pertaining to salvation; of the Sacred Kingdom of God glimpsed in the gospel proclaimed by Christ's church - and those things penultimate - things common, or profane, encompassing duties, behaviours, that are not inherently sinful, but are nevertheless, non-Holy. It is here the rubber hits the road.
Movies, cinema, as much as literature, concern themselves with penultimate interests. Thus, they can only describe those things experienced on a secular level. A common, profane level of experience of life and its glory and brokenness. While dramatic art forms can describe people and actions of the Sacred Kingdom, they do so in the interest of dramatic storytelling, not to prescribe proclamation.
Suffice to say, a character in a movie can proclaim Christ accurately or falsely, but said character does so because of an unfolding narrative - couched in descriptive, dramatic purpose; not for prescriptive apologia, or evangelism. It is also true that God's creation has specific purposes, not all decreed in order to bring men to Christ. Holy Scripture is clear how this work manifests itself through the work and act of the triune God alone.
Let's peek-a-boo at an example: wine and food are good for the body, but neither brings men and women into reconciliation with God through Christ's Gospel. And these earthly elements, though profane, need not be Holy to be purposeful and good gifts of the triune God of Holy Scripture. In ultimate terms, it is certain that without the presupposed truth of Christ and His Gospel, the ultimate purpose of wine and food goes misunderstood by those outside the Covenant of Grace.
Nevertheless, I have argued movies and cinema (literature too) rely on penultimate purposes as their basis - apart of the dramatic storytelling medium; to achieve their design. And it is because these art forms are penultimate, they fail to gird up the antithesis Christians desire them to be in contradistinction to ultimate things, which do erect a natural antithesis between those belonging to the city of men, and those brought into a state of grace, awaiting the promised consummation of the City of God through Christ.
This contention, however, does not mean the Christian who writes movies and literature is left without a personal voice. All writers and filmmakers bring their individuality to their work. There should be no debate, here. And those who do not have failed any meaningful aesthetic purposes. The writer constructs his ideal world in a dramatic contextual design, and it is the requirement of the Christian who is an artist to imagine a world in consistent harmony with the world Sacred Scripture's God has ordained. Our world, brimming with vagaries of all kinds, is itself beautiful, corrupt, broken - immensely expressive of God's wondrous character in nuanced, incomprehensible, but particular ways.
Nothing the Christian saint imagines should construct a false view of the world. But we must emphasise caution. For the dramatic conflict between protagonist and antagonist organises the narrative of any story, true or feigned, within a dramatic meeting - a combustion - where numerous characters will have false ideas about the world and human experience and purpose. Quite obviously, such dramatic complexity will be one of the major reasons for the conflict marinating the unfolding narrative; a consequence of the author doing his abled best to observe and describe the epic sweep of human existence, in penultimate terms.
People believe many another untrue things, Christian and non-Christian. Those beliefs happen upon an edge of conflict, running against and contrary to other character beliefs and actions. As such - because of human experience or dramatic story needs - characters must be equally wrong, equally right, and equally duplicitous - in order to create the foundational apparatus for drama to work.
Drama works because of the humanity - man as imago dei, denied or accepted - of the audience. Thus, the goal, if that is the right turn of phrase, for the Christian who writes secular movies and literature, is as Flannery O'Connor described: to describe distortions, as distortions; the result of man's fall into enmity with God in the Garden by the first Adam, a type of Christ, resulting in the paradigmatic broken anthropology St Paul describes in the Apostle's Epistle to The Romans, Chapter three. Thus, the writer of Christian faith should describe distortions in the human experience as unnatural and bitterly tragic; as foreign to our humanity.
We come to a specific paradigm, then. If one of the hallmarks of proper Biblical exegesis is the law-gospel distinction (especially related to the doctrine of Justification through ex nos imputation to sinners by Christ's cross-work) we may define a distortion-beauty-conflict-inducing arch - in a penultimate sense - as the proper function of dramatic storytelling.
The most successful writers of confessional Christian faith have understood dramatic narrative parameters; the laws, as it were, of dramatic storytelling. And they have realised the non-prescriptive nature of the dramatic-storytelling craft. Likewise, these writers comprehend the limits and the design of the art forms they peruse. And it is these same writers who have occasioned in their work, more darkness, more beauty - more earthiness and humanity; than the Christian trying to force-feed evangelism into dramatic storytelling designs and purposes it simply cannot execute because of what dramatic art is as created by God.
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