"Faith and Pop Culture Bible Study" is part of a larger series put out by Christianity Today which explores ways Christians can engage the culture without compromising their faith. One of my mentors said to me personally and also during sermons that, because Jesus lays claim to the whole world by his work on the cross, all things in the world either point to Jesus Christ or point to the need for Jesus Christ. He was a devout Calvinist, and his favorite book was Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. And certainly, his view of Christ's claim upon the world is a very Reformed vision. He is also a devout rock n' roller, a horror movie fan and an all around great Christian man.
I bring up my mentor's perspective because it was a great help to me in that I could engage the culture with a mind toward Christ. What do I mean by that? Well, I have said to many people that I first gave my soul to rock n'roll, then to Jesus Christ. I remember when I heard Kiss Alive 2 for the first time in a friend's living room in the 4th grade. The ripping guitars, the driving bass, the wall of sound, with Paul Stanley's full-bodied wail over the top of it all changed my life forever. Soon after, I heard Aerosmith's Toys From the Attic, then Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced?. My life changed forever. More to the point, I had a way of relating my spiritual experiences to sound and vision (to quote David Bowie). My experience of God felt like the jumpy groove of "Walk This Way"; it sounded like "Crosstown Traffic". As I got older and my tastes either refined or devolved into punk rock, I could look to Minor Threat, Big Black, Black Flag, or to the New Wavers, like Joy Division, New Order, The Cure, The Smiths, etc. etc. for my religious and spiritual analogies of life.
The same can be said for movies in my life. Just to speak to some recent, highly influential movies for my spiritual process, you will be surprised. What in the world, you may ask, is a preacher doing looking for the spiritual in "Sin City", "Fight Club" and "Shoot 'Em Up"? But remember, everything either points to Christ or the need for Christ. When I watched "Sin City" for the first time, I immediately saw the redemptive aspects floating to the surface. The sacrifice of the Bruce Willis character at the end for the sake of innocence sure looked to me like a kind of analogy to the restoration of innocence that Christ does for us on the cross. And what are we to make of the whole track of "Fight Club" where, in the midst of its outrageous violence, Jack/Narrator is constantly being stripped of all the things that make him of the world - his Ikea apartment, his low-key 'deep in the machine' job, his ambivalence toward relationships, his money problems - all of which Tyler Durden asks him while on an airplane, "So how is that working for you?" At the end, Jack/Narrator sees the coming of the Year of Jubilee, which is the release of all debt in the fiftieth year in Jewish tradition. For further analysis of this type, one might look to depth psychologist Robert Sardello, who was a Christian back in the 1990s and probably still is. In one of his books, he does a depth psychology analysis of "Die Hard" and ties in some of the spiritual elements of the film (Christmas time, the restoration of relationship, the defeat of evil).
These are the kind of questions "Faith and Pop Culture" seeks us to ask of the media we are assaulted with on a daily basis. This Bible study is very in depth and asks excellent questions without making overt judgments. I was particularly impressed with the article on sports, not being a great sports fan myself. The suggestion by the writer that we don't take sports seriously enough in our culture was striking. He points to the analogies to sports that Paul often draws on to show that our focus is completely off with regard to how we understand sports in our culture. In fact, it appears it is a form of idolatry, which is more about what we have done to the thing than the thing itself.
The article by Mark Storer entitled The Good News According to Twain, Steinbeck, and Dickens was an excellent examination of the ability of the novel to bring one into deep communication with the nuances of the Christian faith. As an English major in undergraduate school, I had a strong appreciation of this approach. It made me think of how powerful it was for me to read Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky when I was returning to the faith.
In general, all the articles in this study series by Christianity Today were quite good and thought provoking. I noted that all the articles dealt with a negative - sports, movies, television - and how our faith should relate to these negatives. The only exception was the one on novels. I would have liked to see some articles on classical music, art through the centuries (think of Mark Rothko's paintings for the chapel in the Alps) and rock and roll (Tommy James seems to be singing about the act of communion in "Sweet Cherry Wine").
More than anything, asking us to engage the culture while maintaining our Christian faith is what Jesus asks us to do when he sends the disciples out into the world to spread the Good News. The Good News means very little if it is not relating to the people we are speaking to 'out there'. Consider Paul on Mars Hill as he speaks directly to the Greeks with intelligence, irony and without condemnation of the culture in which they participate. Church in America is very good at creating its own isolated culture. It is another thing entirely for church to give the tools of critical thought and analysis in such a way that we seek out Christ in the culture we participate in, but are not of. To that end, this is a very helpful Bible study which I will seriously consider using.
Peace,
Rev. Seth Jones
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
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