False Piety...

In his Review of "Hollywood Worldviews", JollyBlogger does a nice job describing how Christians should be engaging the arts and media, in particular the Hollywood movie houses. He also highlights some of the struggles we have in particularly difficult areas (sex, violence, profanity, etc...).

Here is an excerpt:

And, having said all of that I agree with Godawa that we need to look deeper into movies and look beyond the sex, violence and profanity to the story itself. He points out, as many others do, that stories are all about redemption. A more profitable way to view movies is to view them in terms of their themes of redemption instead of the scoresheet mentality of how many sex scenes, violent images and uses of profanity are in the movie. We can view them more intelligently by looking at who or what is in need of redemption, what is the problem or conflict they are being redeemed from, what they are being redeemed to and how that redemption is accomplished. Analyzing films this way will help us get at the underlying message of the stories in the movies we watch.

These ideas speak to my recent growing frustration with the unbibilical, moralistic ideas of Victorian purity that are throughout the church today. Rather than engaging culture in discussion of fallen man and the redemptive promises of Christ, many Christians have disengaged from all such discussions and created a Christian sub-culture full of selfrighteous prudes. In this sub-culture, the imputed righteousness of Christ is largely obscured by our civilized false propriety. Franky Schaeffer describes this well in his essay, sham pearls for real swine:

Civilized, the Bible has become a devotional prop of middle-class values instead of being the rude challenge to false propriety it actually is. The Bible is 'a dangerous, uncivilized, abrasive, raw, complicated, aggressive, scandalous, and offensive book. The Bible is the literature of God, and literature — as every book burner knows — is
dangerous. The Bible is the drama of God; it is God's Hamlet, Canterbury Tales, and Wuthering Heights. The Bible is, among other things, about God, men, women, sex, lies, truth, sin, goodness, fornication, adultery, murder, childbearing, virgins, whores, blasphemy, prayer, wine, food, history, nature, poetry, rape, love, salvation, damnation, temptation, and angels. Today the Bible is widely studied but rarely read. If the Bible were a film, it would be R-rated in some parts, X-rated in others. The Bible is not middle class. The Bible is not "nice." The Bible's tone is closer to that of the- late
Lenny Bruce than to that of the hushed piety of some ministers.

As Christians we need to repent of our piety and righteousness and return to complete reliance on Christ's all-sufficient sacrifice. We need to break free from the bondage of man-made rules that deny the sufficiency of Christ. We need to re-engage the world around us without fear. We need to be authentic in our relationships and take off this veil of false righteousness. We need to stop being so squeaky clean and get our hands dirty engaging a fallen world, taking the real Christ with us to redeem those we meet.

B

P.S.- If you would like to read the entire Schaeffer essay, I'd be glad to email it to you.