One thing that struck me today was a quote Mr. Leeper said
which was in order to be a good Christian artist we must, “let go of truths
that Christians have to be good story tellers.” I’m just curios how much “truth”
should us as Christians be able to let go of in order to get our message across
to the non-believer. If we want to be witnesses for Christ through digital
media are we going to want to dilute the Christian truths in our films so much
so that after watching our films the non-believer will take away whatever he or
she wants. Or do we throw the Truth right at the audience in hopes that it will
stir some sort of emotion or conviction.
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| Jonathan Edwards |
For me I think the answer should be neither. I feel like in order for us to be a witness
we must first instill in them an emotion or something (as we talked about in
class) “uncomfortable.” This will challenge the watcher and start to make them
think. When we get them thinking, in a sense, we make them open to the Truth that
we are about to show them. A good
example of this working effectively would be “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God” by Jonathan Edwards, the lead figure in the great awakening. He gives his audience a picture of their
lives hanging on strings over the fiery lake of hell and at any moment he could
decide to cut that string, ending their life as they fall to hell. This picture that Edwards presents to his
audience instills fear in them. Then he
gives them the “Truth” that they all need God in their lives to survive.
Now of course not all films need to create fear in the
audience, but I feel like in order to be a witness for Christ we do need some
foundational truths to point the audience to the direction we want them to go
towards.
Hopefully this makes some sense and I’m not just blabbering.
Ah. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". Wasn't that the sermon that basically started the great awakening? I remember reading that in high school (I went to a Christian homeschool co-op sorta thing) and being absolutely terrified.
ReplyDeleteI like your approach with starting with some sort of emotion, and I agree that some foundational truths probably should be shown...but do they need to be shown explicitly? A lot of Christian films lately seem to me to be of the Bible-bashing kind, where there is so much obvious Christian elements or truths that it generally turns off the non-christian and sometimes gets in the way of the art itself, making the movie clunky (if that makes any sense) or cheesy.
Just some thoughts. I could be wrong, but that is just how I feel. There needs to be some sort of balance between truth and the artform, and I'm just not sure how to gauge that yet.
Ya Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was his main sermon and he was the lead person in the Great Awakening. But ya, i totally agree that too much forced truth from the bible could disgust non-believers. but on the other side of that, to little truth would not really be witnessing to anyone either.
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