How Can Movies Help You Understand Your Times?

Hello again. As promised, I am posting the link to the video I hosted with a script for your perusal. Feel free to comment!

Mining Minds: How Can Movies Help You Understand Your Times?
 

If you had lived 150 or 200 years ago, your familiarity with the popular opinions and philosophy of your day would largely have depended on the scope of your library and your access to popular journals. But in our day, wittingly or unwittingly, most Americans develop their worldview from the news and entertainment programs on TV, the music in their iPods, and the images on the silver screen. We can bemoan the loss of literacy another time…. The fact is, that in order to understand your times, you must engage to some degree or another with “The Media.” If we are going to watch movies, we need to learn to watch them biblically.

When Paul preached his sermon on Mar’s Hill, he could have begun with “You’re all a bunch of superstitious Greek pagans, see… and you’re all going to hell unless you believe in Jesus!” This statement would have been true, but it probably would have disengaged his audience. Instead, he included two pieces of popular Greek culture: a quotation from one of their own poets, and an allusion to a specific “idol to an unknown god.” He starts his sermon with the latter, immediately informing the Greek listener that he had taken the time to familiarize himself with what Greeks considered important and noteworthy. Paul began with what his audience already knew from Greek culture; he then used this knowledge to lead them to their need for Christ.

We can take a cue from this. If we watch movies with a discerning mind, we can use them to understand our times [think like “Men of Issachar” in 1 Chronicles 12:32]. Rather than giving our culture a forgettable call to a general need for Christ, we can tell unbelievers just how badly they need Christ. We can show them that their movies and art are crying out for Christ, like idols to an unknown god.

Consider the movie, Batman: The Dark Knight, written by director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan. One would think this movie, at first viewing, to be a smartly-written, well-directed action movie: engaging and fun, but surely not philosophical. But looking a little closer, we see that, at its heart, it displays a fractured and empty neo-existentialism struggling and failing to find a sure foundation for justice.

From the beginning of the movie, an extremely realistic case is made for the depravity of man. The Joker is basically the protagonist of the movie, stealing the show, largely proving his single philosophical premise: that humans are all basically evil. Most of the Joker’s social experiments prove his point decisively, and for the most part, the movie seems very natural and unforced in its exposition of the innate depravity of man.

But, the screenwriters could not leave it at that. Joker could not win, could he? Thus begins a futile foray into fantasy land to create the most pivotal and, at the same time, the most unbelievable moment of the movie: a group of convicts on a doomed ferry vote to sacrifice their own lives for the cause of a non-pragmatic conviction of “transcendent” morality. This scene makes no sense at all. The movie was building a believable and logically coherent view of the world: “There is none who does good, no, not even one.”

Even Batman is a morally ambiguous figure: a vigilante dispensing justice outside the law… a “Dark” Knight. In this environment, where can one turn for a sure foundation for justice? After the movie had already established that men are predictably self-serving, it then expects us to believe that men (and criminals at that) are basically good? After the ferry scene, the movie’s logic continues to deteriorate, proving again and again that the Nolan brothers are grasping at straws, desperately attempting to escape a conclusion that the movie has already established beyond a doubt: that a merely human justice is impossible.

They justify their sudden e-brake turn into fantasy land with some voice-over commentary from Batman: “Sometimes the truth is not good enough. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” In other words, “Reality may deny our confidence in men, but we must still have faith, though it may be a futile faith without any real object. Because without this empty faith, our existence would be completely meaningless.”

Had the Nolan brothers followed the logical arc of their own creation to its natural conclusion, they would have had only two choices: seek justice beyond humans in the decrees of a transcendent God, OR deny the possibility of justice altogether and succumb to the tyranny of evil. They didn’t want to do either. They instead embraced a contradictory Platonic Existentialism Frankenstein monster. They attempted the simultaneous belief in both the intrinsic goodness of man and the futility and vainglory of human attempts at an objective standard of ethics—an irrational conclusion untenable in reality, possible only in the carefully manicured fantasy world of their movie.

Sorry, Nolan brothers… but the truth is good enough, and it is all we really have. The Dark Knight, then, is a cry for help. It longs for the satisfaction of Christ and belies the fact that all of its answers cannot satisfy the very real problems it so expertly exposes to the audience. As such, it is excellent material for evangelistic discussions in spite of the fact that its message, when all is said and done, is anti-Christian.

By mining the mind of this and other movies, we can better understand our times—its needs, longings, and contradictions—in order to engage this culture, in order to show compassion for the position of the lost, in order to reach them where they are with the hope and truth of Christ.

Been A While

Hi, everyone. I've been a busy, busy man the past months. I wanted to give everyone an update of what has been going on since I last posted (a millennium ago).

The Nehemiah Foundation is about to release two more albums of music (by San Francisco's Warbler and Dayton, Tennessee's Brock's Folly), and we are finishing up tracking on a third (a project by Phil Hodges and me entitled Songs for Friends). I have completed my book on a biblical foundation for aesthetics, called According to His Excellent Greatness, and that should be out before the end of the year. We got 501(c)3 status a few months ago... which was a whole lot of hoop-jumping, but should help us raise money. We have our first full-time employee, Phil Hodges, who signs on next Monday as our "Music Director." And... we should have a fully updated and updateable professional website by May. Very exciting times for us. When we finish up all of these projects, I plan to go on a local tour of churches to let them know what we are doing and try to raise some financial support.

I have some very ambitious plans for the future. I plan to expand my studio from a project studio to a professional one, and I think I will need between $50-100k to do it. This is a large chunk of money, and I don't yet know how I'm going to raise it, but I trust the Lord to provide what we need when we need it as He has done in the past. His providences to our small organization have been timely, and he has allowed us to grow slowly but steadily.

I am thankful for this slow growth, because I really have little idea how to run an organization. I am a worker bee. Give me something to do and I'll do it, but navigating the management of a non-profit foundation? A bit of a task for me. If God had landed me with instant and huge success, I would have floundered for sure. Just like He has done in my life, He gives me as much more than I can handle as will grow me without choking my extremely limited capacities. What a patient and perfect Father!

I will be posting again in a week or two, as I guest-hosted a web show on "Why Christians Should Watch Secular Movies." When the show is posted, I will post my script and a link. Until then, thank you for your patience and support.

Michael

Why Most Christian Music is Bad

Apparently, most Christian musicians just skipped over the many portions of the Bible that speak about the necessity for sincerity and excellence in our art. How about when David said, “Praise God according to His excellent greatness.” Doing your very best isn’t always good enough. The following are some of my major misgivings regarding mainstream Christian music:

The Music:

1) The music is cheesy and contrived. It is canned and cliché, and it abounds in either failed or successful attempts at the most emotionally manipulative of all compositional tropes: the lyrical and/or melodic “hook.” The music overflows with externally imposed affectations, most of which make clear that the artist desires to sound like another artist that has gained a listenership. Such mimicry usually results in a cheap and disingenuous copy of someone else’s sound. It is not wrong to incidentally sound like someone else, but only if your music demands it. But to impose a sound on your music in order to gain or maintain popularity is neither true to your art nor to the gospel.

2) Most of the music sounds exactly the same. How is this possible? If you go through the Psalms alone, you find so many different tones: contemplative, repentant, exuberant, depressed, angry, philosophical, etc. We know that the Psalmists did not employ only one style or only certain instruments because most of the Psalms have notes to the choir director indicating what form and musical instruments should be employed, and these can vary greatly and usually correspond to the “feel” of that particular Psalm. If your music all sounds similar in tone and approach, you have two lyrical options: avoid writing about anything that does not fit into that tone, or write lyrics that are incongruous with your music. Mainstream Christian musicians have done and continue to do both. There are huge portions of the Bible and human experience that Christian songwriters avoid altogether, and then there are other subjects that feel wildly misplaced when they are set to the same over-weening musical tripe.

The Lyrics:

1) Most of the lyrics are repetitive generalities irrelevant to the real experience of human beings. Some Christian listeners may mistake their fuzzy feelings for edification, but non-Christian listeners (what few have not already been estranged from “Christian” music) are not fooled even for a moment. In reality, general, abstract lyrics neither refresh the flagging church nor restore the lost world. Most Christian lyricists, as has been mentioned, simply avoid talking about issues that would convict. They don’t want people to leave their song “feeling bad.” If they do address matters that could turn unpleasant, they tend to salve the unpleasantness far too soon with some anthemic breakout chorus reassuring the listener that everything is peachy keen. But sometimes things just aren't peachy keen. Sometimes things are rotten. And the culprit is always sin. Christian lyricists need to grapple lyrically with doubt, uncertainty, pain, suffering, death, personal sins, the whorings of the church, the materialism of our age, etc. If they don’t know about those things from intimate experience, they have no business whatsoever writing music. They are bringing reproach on the name of Christ.

2) The lyrics that purport to “praise” God are worse than the lyrics about human experience. Repetitive, mantric generalities about God's greatness don't give a single person the vaguest idea of how God is great. Most songs about God seem more interested in the act of worship rather than the object of worship. “Here I am to bow down... here I am to worship... here I am to say that You’re my God.” So what? So you’re here. Who cares. We’re not here to focus on you.

But, you may say, the song goes on to praise God. It pretends to. But vague and general statements don’t convince God any more than they convince spouses. If a husband tells his wife over and over again: “You’re altogether lovely. You’re altogether wonderful to me,” eventually she is going to ask, “But how am I lovely? How am I wonderful?” The Song of Solomon, as well as the other praise literature in the Bible, must guide us. Solomon doesn’t just call his love beautiful. No, he creates some of the most imaginative metaphors ever conceived to describe every beauty of every part of his beloved's body (one of my favorites is that her temples are like pomegranates). Generalities purporting to praise God are not found in the Bible unless they are in the context of specific praise of God for specific deeds He has done or is doing, which deeds the artist takes special care to connect to both his and his listener’s real, present experience.

General praise does not instill a longing in an unbeliever to know a real God. Most non-Christians hear our general praise, and they think, “Well, if you know Him personally, why does it seem like you only know Him from a distance?” If I told you I was friends with a celebrity, how would I prove it? I certainly wouldn’t prove it by telling you things you could find out from a casual glance at your local grocery store tabloids. I would have to give you real details of my long-term interactions with the celebrity. The same is true of our relationships with God. If an unbeliever doesn’t believe in God, how is God-concerned tabloid fare going to convince him? It’s not. If a Christian is struggling with doubts, how are general statements about God going to bring Him certainty? They won’t. God wants specific praise, and if you can’t think of any specific praises, your relationship with God is probably shallow, and again, you have no business writing Christian music.

Conclusion:

Not many of us are to be teachers. This means that worship leaders and Christian artists will be and are held to a higher standard. We have to stop making music in order to get people to listen to it. Our responsibility is firstly to God! Whatever he demands of us, we must do. Our music should be composed to support the message (the whole message) that God has given us to transmit, no matter what negative impact that may have on our popularity or album sales. Our labor is not in vain if it is unto the Lord. You want to be successful in the eyes of God? Listen to Solomon: The fear of man brings a snare, but he who trusts in the Lord will be exalted.

Mission Statement of the Nehemiah Foundation for Cultural Renewal, Inc.

Since I began this blog to further the ends of The Nehemiah Foundation for Cultural Renewal, it seems fitting that the first post should include its mission statement:

The Nehemiah Foundation for Cultural Renewal is dedicated to the production and promotion of any Christian media sources that both Praise God for His mighty deeds and Praise God according to His excellent greatness; and to the education of clearly called but as yet artistically unskilled or nominally skilled Christians who seek discipling in either the artistry or artisanship of holistically Biblical Christian media production.

Toward the reconstruction of the world by the gospel through any means that can in good conscience be consecrated to God's service;
Toward the transformation of the church from a market of consumers courted by the world's sin merchants into a community of producers prevailing against the gates of hell;
Toward the vindication of Christ's name, which has been defamed by scoffers on account of the shameful fragmentation of the visible church in America and the anemic irrelevance of its representative cultural output.

We are Christian artists and artisans pursuing accountability for both the integrity of our artistic methods and message and the maturity of each individual's walk with God while cultivating collaboration within the church across genres, mediums, and denominations through the generous monetary patronage of godly Christians who share our vision.

I hope to use this blog to talk about art and to promote NFfCR projects. I started this foundation in 2008 because I saw that there was a serious need for Christ-centered art that was actually well-done. I do not intend to offend, but I must speak frankly. We must follow Jeremiah's lead: pluck up, break down, destroy, overthrow; then and only then can you begin to build and plant. We come into the temple and the city of God and find it desolate, a laughing-stock, a travesty. We must clear the rubble and rebuild. This blog will probably weigh more heavily on the demolition side with about 2 parts demolition 1 part reconstruction. Seems to have worked out alright for Jeremiah.