COMMON, UNCOMMON GROUND

By David Beilstein

I have written previously about the problematic idea of “Christian” movies. I have maintained cinema and literature are uniquely secular focused - both descriptive media forms, and unable to do the prescriptive work Christian evangelism requires. Christian evangelism is unnatural in storytelling because of what Christian evangelism is, and also, what storytelling is as a media form. Such issues create room to unpack the proper line to draw the antithesis, and prayerfully determine where that antithesis lies between what is Sacred and what is secular.

In determining the proper grounds upon which the Christian exile lives in the temporal age - taking part in culture and cultic activities in a dual citizenship - we must first inquire the differences between believing saints and non-believers.

In Gen. 3, the pre-figuring of the Kingdom of God through the Messiah comes. In Gen. 4, the prefiguring of the city of man begins. Gen 4, in an ironic foreshadowing manner, lays the foundation for cultural work and the secular activities of men through Cain. But the covenant of the common kingdom breaks into history fully with Noah in Gen. 9. This covenant was made by God with all peoples, non-believing and believing.

It involves all cultural activities.

The covenant made with Abraham is a cultic covenant. It is made with Abraham and his future offspring - the people of God’s choosing through the Covenant of Grace. Abraham was culturally similar from non-believers around him. But he was cultically dissimilar. It is upon this firm foundation in Sacred Scripture an antithesis between believer and non-believer begins. But it is an antithesis based upon ultimate concerns, things pertaining to the Kingdom of God, of eternal salvation as the reword of the heavenly Kingdom.

There is common ground, objectively speaking, with non-believers, in the profane, or common kingdom of man pre-figured with the city Cain built in Gen. 4 and officially established with the covenant of Noah in Gen. 9. The New Testament Scriptures, particularly the book of Hebrews, treats NT saints as sojourners and exiles glimpsing back, as it were, to Abraham and the patriarchs - including the Babylonian exiles, Daniel, et cetera.

New Testament saints, therefore, have commonality with non-believers culturally, but stark dissimilarity when it comes to cultic things - or things Sacred. The Christian living post the ascension of Christ The Lord, therefore, is a citizen of two distinct realms - or kingdoms. One, encompassing civil, cultural affairs, the other, Sacred affairs, meaning those cultic distinctions represented in Christ’s Church.

Christ is Lord of both realms. But Christ The Lord rules (or mediates) them differently.

Christ’s Kingdom is ruled through the Covenant of Grace. It is a spiritual kingdom, mediated by Christ through the historical manifestation of the Church. It is spiritually discerned by faith in Christ alone. The civil kingdom is ruled by Christ, but differently; through God’s divine eternal decree.

The foundation for Christ’s Kingdom, pre-figured in the Garden of Eden in Gen. 3, is unpacked in St Matthew’s Gospel in The Great Commission. The foundation for the civil kingdom is also pre-figured in Gen. 3 with Cain’s city, but periscopes back to the cultural mandate of Gen. 1:28, refracted (post-fall) in the Noahic covenant of Gen. 9.

It is through this premise, I contend that movies are a common cultural task. Objectively, the Christian is using the natural design of storytelling to do the same kind of dramatic “work” non-believers peruse of storytelling. There need not be any objective difference between the storytelling of the non-believer and believer.

There will, however, be subjective differences.

First, Christians do everything subjectively to the glory of God according to St Paul. But this does not mean the objective task (movies, plumbing, engineering, et cetera) will be objectively different for the Christian and non-believer.

To use the adjective “Christian” to describe subjective differences within common kingdom activity - in light of what storytelling is - seems to buttress all kinds of improper categories. The desire to use those subjective differences to categorize the storytelling of Christians verses that of non-believers as distinctly “Christian” misconstrues the true cultic differences the believer and non-believer have. Worship can be Christian, because worship can be uniquely Christian. The Lord’s Day and the Lord’s Supper are distinctly Christian.

But cinema and storytelling in general is different. Storytelling perceives and investigates in descriptive dramatic context the penultimate realities of human experience. Storytelling corresponds and describes things as they are in the common kingdom. Storytelling is uniquely festooned to the ways and manners (and ontology) of the common kingdom. It does not discern things spiritual.

It does not reckon with ultimate things - things pertaining to Christ and His salvation.

Storytelling can certainly involve characters who believe things about Christ and His salvation. But as I have indicated before, the beliefs of characters wrongly or rightly understood are for the unfolding narrative of the story-in-question and do not hold prescriptive intentions for the audience. Movie characters believe what they must believe in order to act - and they act in order to push the narrative forward within a dramatic framework.

Thus, movies imitate in dramatic metaphor things temporal. Storytelling is a post-Fall, pre-World To Come media narrative. Storytelling presumes the secular world - where conflict and men’s imperfections create vagaries of imperfect (and dramatic) experience. This narrative framework whether visual or prose, is descriptive, not prescriptive… prescription being the necessary confine of Christian apologia and evangelism.

Likewise, movies show in dramatic, visual metaphor man’s place in the temporal order of things and his anthropological character in dramatic contextual design. If there is a distinctly “Christian” charter upon the Christian who writes secular movies, literature, - it is a duty to capture and render the world and the creature man truthfully, descriptively and dramatically. The more verity here - since movies’ soil is based upon penultimate concerns - the more the Christian says something true both temporally and eternally about God’s world the creature man as imago dei lives in. The non-believer will acknowledge the penultimate concerns of the dramatic piece in question, but only if the natural order of things (general revelation) - the light of nature - is rendered truthfully.

Cinema and literature are not unlike other temporal creations of God. Designed for distinct, but temporal purposes. Science being one of them. Science cannot determine the truth of the Holy Gospel. It cannot discern the Holy Gospel. Science cannot prove or disprove the Holy Gospel. Science can perceive evidences that God has designed and brought into existence an ordered universe. If science is done properly it will correspond (where it can) with the truth of God’s creation of the world ex nilo, but it cannot prove it by itself without the lense of special revelation (Holy Scripture) to interpret science. Since Holy Scripture is not written to be a science book, and science is science, interpretive issues will arise. 

The point is, just because science, alone, cannot prove the Holy Gospel does not mean science is useless. 

It means science has its God-given parameters. It’s limits. All things temporal have limits. They will not be eternal. Science, then, has its purposes - it’s design for a penultimate age unable to discern the things of the age to come. Those drawing near to God - an ethic of the age-to-come, ironically, breaking into the temporal age in a spiritual manner, taste the Holy Gospel, and its attendant realities, in the Christ’s Church.

A blood test can determine whether a person’s kidney function is optimal. But it cannot establish if a person is a citizen of Heaven. Blood tests are not useless, but they are penultimate. It would be a mistake to say unless blood tests can be made to evaluate things pertaining to Christ and His Salvation, Christian’s have no use of them.

Christians have use of blood tests in this age - the secular age. Blood tests are good, but non-Holy.

The conflation of the cultic and the cultural is disharmonious with the Sacred Scriptures. From this conflation, theological movements assume such unbiblical isms such as pietism and asceticism. And it is these paradigmatic “systems” a product of Christian pilgrims needing unmediated life and liveliness of faith - instead of reckoning the truth of faith - as found in Word and sacrament in Christ’s Church.

The evangelical mission to Christianize movies (amongst other secular activities) is one that does not comprehend the natural world God has ordained and brought into existence with the covenant with Noah. Whilst Christianity is the necessary premise to account for the intelligibility of things secular - the paradoxical, but distinct relationship between cult and culture does not cease to exist.