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I know that title doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “Fight! Fight! Fight!” But so be it.

Here are a couple of good discussions going on right now.

(1) Christian Filmmaking

John Starke writes:

Reflecting on the movies produced by Sherwood Baptist Church, Andy Crouch imagined the scenario where “one or two Christian kids with real talent somewhere in this vast land are going to see these movies, get the sacred-secular dichotomy knocked out of them at an early age, move to Los Angeles, work their tails off, dream, fail, and try again . . . and one day make truly great movies.” What would these movies look like? What advice would you give to a Christian screenwriter, director, or producer who wants to make a film with artistic excellence from a Christian worldview? The Gospel Coalition posed these questions to writers, filmmakers, and artists to reflect together about Christianity and film.

Here are the three responses TGC commissioned:

See also Cosper’s response to Joe over at his own blog—along with their interaction in the comments section.

All of this is worth reading, and I won’t try to summarize the various points and counterpoints. I do think this point, raised by Joe in the comments of Mike’s blog, is worth considering as some want to swing the pendulum away from the heavily evangelicalized version of art:

I understand that many Christian artists don’t want to be relegated to the “Christian subcultural ghetto.” I can even sympathize. But how do we ever get out of that ghetto if our best artists refuse to consider their art Christian?

To me it is similar to Christian scholarship. Young academics are afraid to produce work that is overtly Christian for fear of not gaining tenure. And why do they have that fear? Because older academics were also too afraid to have their work labeled as Christians, they’ve created a self-perpetuating system. How will it ever change unless a few Christians are willing to courageously take a stand?

Doug Wilson recently commented on the criticism that Reformation Protestants don’t make good art because they tend to downplay or denigrate images in contrast to Roman Catholics. Along the way he made this point:

I have no problem with evangelicals receiving criticism for producing schlock. That is what criticism (rightly conceived) is for. What I cannot abide is schlock criticism — memes that make no sense getting endlessly repeated as though they were some kind of wisdom. One of those memes is that evangelicals are unique in their ability to produce this stuff. Anybody who says this cannot have been in a video rental store recently. Evangelicals make bad movies because making good movies is hard, which turns out to be the same reason why people generally make bad movies. Evangelicals make bad movies for the same reason evangelicals have ten toes — they are people and people tend to generate lots of crapola.

You can read that whole post here, along with this take by Wilson after Fireproof came out:

This was not what we should call a successful attempt at the movie-makers art. The phrase tour de force does not come to mind.

But it was a very successful motion picture tract. This was edifying propaganda, and when I use the word edifying I am not putting quotation marks around it. The word propaganda is, if memory serves, the Latin passive periphrastic, meaning “things to be propagated.” Most made-for-tv movies and soap operas have low production values and they propagate the most frightful didactic drivel. This was a movie within that same genre that communicated the gospel clearly, and which walked people through some very basic and very real principles that contribute to the success of marriage relationships. It was not sophisticated at all, and revolved around a rudimentary come-to-Jesus appeal. And you know what? That is just what a lot of people need.

If I set myself to think of couples in marriages that I think would be greatly helped by watching this movie, I would run out of fingers inside of a minute. I can also think of Christians who would be offended by the schlock, but many of them would be those who know more about how a movie ought to be made than about how a woman ought to be treated. And they would rather watch a movie about a woman being abused so long as the movie was made right than to have the woman treated right in a movie that offended their refined sensibilities. So which is the altar and which is the sacrifice? Makes me think of Augustine’s comment about rhetors who cared far more about avoiding grammatical misuse of the word man than they cared about their actual treatment of actual men.

One more additional reading you can add to the list: Peter Leithart’s First Things post contrasting the storytelling of October Baby and Tree of Life. Here’s his conclusion:

My advice to earnest filmmakers with a message: Make movies. Let the message take care of itself. Or, as the St. Francis school of cinematography has it: Preach always and everywhere; when necessary, use words.

This seems like it’s saying the more explicit one is about the gospel the less artistic it is. But read through these pieces yourself and come to your own conclusions.

(2) Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Stereotypes

Speaking of Joe Carter, he’s begun a nice new feature at TGC—called “Debatable“—summarizing (and “scoring”) key discussions in the blogosphere. Here he looks at a recent post by Mike Horton—responding to some “things in the air” by John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Doug Wilson, and others—along with a response by Wilson and one by Denny Burk.

Since in a previous post I highlighted some of Horton’s arguments, let me highlight a clip from both Wilson and Burk on the interplay between creational differences and cultural differences.

Wilson:

Suppose you overheard one of the kids from your church telling one of the sweet little church ladies to “eff off.” Suppose you confronted him about it, and he defended himself by saying that the meaning assigned to those particular sounds were assigned by our culture, and not by the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture. Suppose further that he scoffs and says that the whole thing is “linguistically arbitrary.” And, you know, he’s right, and I suppose you also know that he is entirely and completely in the wrong. It is linguistically arbitary, and he still doesn’t get to speak that way.

The Bible never tells us that men should take out the garbage, or that a gentleman holds a seat for the lady, or that opening a car door for your wife is a class act, and so on. Never. But that is irrelevant. Our culture gives us the vocabulary of honor, but the Bible tells us how we must do something with that vocabulary.

And Burk, on 1 Corinthians 11:14-15:

So here is an instance in which the apostle Paul himself says that God-ordained gender roles must be lived-out with an eye toward cultural expectations of masculinity and femininity.

There are other texts that we could go to that illustrate this same principle (e.g., Deut. 22:5), but let’s leave it at just the one for now. The point is that we have to live out our gender roles in the culture that we find ourselves in. The apostle Paul probably never wore trousers. But that doesn’t mean that he was less masculine for wearing something that would probably have looked more like a dress to us. His own culture informed the way he obeyed God, even though the creation norm remained an ever-fixed mark. He had an eye to his culture’s impressions about masculinity and femininity. I don’t think we can do any different.

I commend all these posts to you as time and interest permit. It’s a joy to see iron sharpening iron as brothers dwell together in unity—and are able to discuss things like grown-up gentlemen.

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