“"Test the Spirits" (part 3)”

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Last week we considered another example of how God’s word can be misrepresented and twisted to mean the opposite of what God intended—the protest folk song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” While it’s catchy and inoffensive at the casual first listen, attention soon yields the realization that the singer, in his sanctimony, believes the greater part of his audience is insufficiently enlightened to desire peace, of all things, and must be directed by his moral betters in the…entertainment industry…to pursue what is good. This week, we’ll follow the same theme, using a different medium.

Fact, or Truth?

So far we have considered two songs that abused the Scriptures in order to insinuate the opposite of what they mean. What happens, when artists openly alter or add to God’s word, for artistic purposes?

Almost since the motion picture industry’s birth, religious material has represented a sizeable share of its output. In particular, adaptations of biblical stories have been common. Every last one of these is riddled with inaccuracies, of course, and religious commentators are keen to tell us about them! From Zipporah’s creative backstory in 1998’s The Prince of Egypt, to Jesus’ bar mitzvah in 1977’s Jesus of Nazareth, to the exploding golden calf in 1956’s The Ten Commandments, to the soap opera antics of 2014’s Noah, there’s always extrabiblical material in these presentations. If they become public sensations, you’ll find very serious-minded individuals denouncing their lack of faithfulness to the source material. In their view, this is blasphemy. For some reason, one never seems to hear such criticisms of a film like 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, which manufactures details as much as any biblical epic. In fact, it’s widely considered to be among the most accurate war films ever made! But some people create unattainable standards for anything religious.

On the other hand, it’s easy to go too far in the opposite direction. Ted Neeley, who portrayed Jesus in 1973’s Jesus Christ Superstar, recalled that Pope Paul VI told him, “I believe it will bring more people around the world to Christianity than anything ever has before.” One can at least hope that Neeley doesn’t understand Italian very well, and something was lost in translation. A similar folly is evident in the credulous idolatry of a select few who hold up artistic representations as basically revelations from God. This is the very problem the grumpy purists feared! Even though many of these adaptations are accompanied by disclaimers, to the effect that they are not intended as a replacement for reading the Bible, some people take what they like and cling to it, regardless of what the Author says. In fact, the Monty Python crew produced a movie mostly focused on mocking this very tendency, 1979’s cutting (but highly raunchy) Life of Brian, a parody of the “life of Christ” film genre. It’s a sad state of affairs, but anything you create is liable to be misused, if enough people get their hands on it. Nothing is foolproof, to a sufficiently talented fool.

So, how should Christians approach modern religious art, which largely consists of film and TV adaptations of biblical stories? A verse from last week helps: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ec 3.1). If you keep them in their proper place, there’s no reason not to make good use of them. If you demand perfect adherence to the text, then, well, no one’s stopping you from reading your Bible! But it’s an impossible standard, for any artwork. We don’t know how a single one of these people looked or sounded; just by putting a face or a voice to Ruth or Barnabas, you’re adding extrabiblical details. You may say those details don’t matter; but the artists would say that, in a visual medium, they matter just as much as Simon the Zealot’s backstory, which likewise is not recorded in the Bible, but makes useful fodder for contemplation, and perhaps even edification. Art is supposed to affect us for the better, and its effectiveness is not limited to its words. When King Saul was tormented by a harmful spirit, “David took the lyre and played it with his hand. So Saul was refreshed and was well” (1Sa 16.23).

Of course, this power can also be perverted into sensuality, as was the case with the later King Herod, who was so “pleased” by his step-daughter’s dance that he gave her as a reward the severed head of an innocent man he’d intended to keep alive (Mt 14.6ff). That’s making the art into an object of worship—an idol. But if we avoid that hazard, artistic depictions can be edifying, precisely because they are fantasies. We interpret reality all the time, but it’s limited in its scope. Art helps us to exercise our spiritual discernment by contemplating hypothetical situations. We can use Frodo, or Aslan, or Yoda, or Batman to make moral observations which, in turn, enable us to see the real world more clearly. These are the furthest thing from factual accounts, yet they help us to grasp truths.

Despite being largely fantasy, most of the biblical adaptations available today, from the absurdly irreverent Jesus Christ Superstar to the unsettlingly realistic The Passion of the Christ, contain well-crafted presentations of important spiritual insights. The same is true of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and—yes—even Star Wars and Batman. If you want to know what really happened, read and study the Bible. If you want to understand heaven and earth better…well, read and study the Bible for that, too; but then give your powers of discernment a good workout, by observing and contemplating art.

Jeremy Nettles

*3/26/15 interview with Michael Heaton for Cleveland, OH newspaper The Plain Dealer

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