Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Andy Naselli

"The Gospel of John" Film

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gospelofjohn.jpgThis weekend my wife and I watched The Gospel of John film on DVD again, and I’m glad we did. I think we’ll make this an Easter weekend tradition. We watched this film for the first time in January 2006 after Phil Gons tipped me off to it, and we enjoy it so much that we’ve watched it about ten times.

About The Gospel of John film:

  • It is a three-hour presentation of the Gospel of John in the Bible. (The 2-DVD set also comes with an abridged two-hour version, but I much prefer the three-hour version.)
  • It was produced by Visual Bible International, Inc.
  • It was released in some movie theaters in fall 2003.
  • More details and links are available at Wikipedia. See also the Plugged In review.
  • It included Bruce Waltke on its board. He is one of the scholars featured in the interviews in a supplemental DVD about the movie (included in the 2-DVD set).

The Gospel of John is the best Bible film that I’ve ever seen. I enthusiastically recommend it for several reasons:

  1. The film has an inspired script. The script is verbatim from the Good News Translation and it follows it unwaveringly. (This is not among my most preferred translations, but I agree with what the KJV translators wrote in the preface to the KJV: “the very meanest [i.e., poorest] translation of the Bible in English . . . containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God.”) Except for occasionally excluding some narrative discourse indicators like “he said” or “she said,” the film script does not add or remove a single word, nor does it skip around or rearrange the material. It takes a little over two hours to read the Gospel of John straight through, so the other hour in this three-hour film is due to dramatic factors like pauses and setting the scene. Every other Bible film that I’ve seen irritates me in this regard by rearranging events, adding dialogue that is not in the text, and emphasizing themes that are not proportional to those that the text emphasizes (Cf. my review of One Night with the King.) The passion scenes, for example, include relatively little violence, which is in sharp contrast to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
  2. The film is classy. The actors, film angles, picture clarity, and soundtrack are first-class. It is evident that professionals, not amateurs, produced this.
  3. The film is tasteful and modest, not offensive or flashy.
  4. The film is creative and thought-provoking. The interpretive ways it portrays the scenes and dialogue is mind-stimulating. (This is not to say that I agree with every last detail of the film.) One creative feature is the use of black-and-white flashbacks during narratives that reference previous events in the book.
  5. The film is instructional and edifying. A film cannot replace the written word, and it can even be detrimental. This film is valuable, however, because it makes you think more about the text in its historical context. (Aside: When we watch this DVD, we often turn on the closed captioning feature.) The film has provoked me to reread and re-listen to the text of the Gospel of John and check out commentaries (like this one, my favorite) on various passages. For example:
    • Every time my wife and I have watched the film, we have been struck with how arrogant Jesus’ statements must have sounded to other people. It is easy to read the Gospel of John today and forget about the context in which Jesus uttered his statements. Seeing someone speak those same words reminds us that a human being claimed to be Yahweh. Staggering.
    • Jesus’ healing of the man born blind is vivid (John 9).
    • Perhaps the most moving part of the film is when Thomas sees the risen Lord and declares, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). It brings tears to my eyes every time I see it.
  6. The film is reverent. I dislike paintings of “God” because of their historical association with veneration and because they don’t help me worship God (not to mention how they relate to the second commandment). While watching this film, it has never crossed my mind that the actors were actually the real Gospel characters; I know that because I’ve never felt like worshiping the person acting out Jesus! But the film has compelled me to worship Jesus for His perfect obedience in life and death.
  7. The film is affordable and accessible. (This reason isolated from the others is weightless!)

Other reviews:

  1. Ben Witherington, “The Gospel of John” (with other reviews after Witherington’s). Witherington later noted this sad news on his blog: “The makers of the wonderful verbatim version of the Gospel of John which had a terrific cast, after intending to also film the Gospel of Mark are bankrupt. They had worked through three scripts and planned to film, but the Gospel of John did not do well enough either in the theaters or on DVD.”
  2. Ted Baehr, “The Best Retelling of the Greatest Story Ever Told: The Gospel of John”
  3. S. T. Karnick, “The Word, According to John: A Gospel on the Silver Screen”

Updates:

  1. Randy Alcorn, “The Gospel of John DVD“
  2. “The Gospel of John, the Film” blog
  3. Justin Taylor highlights another film on the Gospel of John that uses the NIV (also available via Amazon Prime): The Gospel of John.

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Phil Johnson on “Why I Am a Calvinist”

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The Pulpit Magazine Blog has posted a very readable (i.e., non-technical) eight-part series by Phil Johnson entitled “Why I Am a Calvinist . . . and Why Every Christian Is a Calvinist of Sorts.” The series begins with this explanation: “This post is adapted from a transcript of a seminar from the 2007 Shepherds’ Conference, titled ‘Closet Calvinists.'” Check it out: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

N. T. Wright Lecture Series

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Today I went to hear N. T. Wright for this lecture series on sacramental theology at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake / Mundelein Seminary. (For more info on Wright, see this unofficial N. T. Wright page and this collection of his works.)

I went to see Wright in order to get a glimpse into how his mind works and to see how good he is at answering questions.

Here are a few of my (not very profound) impressions:

  1. N. T. Wright is a gifted extemporaneous speaker (especially in Q & A).
  2. Wright has a very likable personality.
  3. Wright is witty and clever.
  4. Wright has a refined British accent. I love it. I’ve heard it before on MP3s but never in person. That accent can make the most trivial things seem interesting and intellectual.
  5. Wright’s presentation style disappointed me, mostly because I strongly dislike being read to in person (though I don’t mind it on MP3). It felt like I was being talked at, not talked to. Since these lectures are going to be published in the seminary’s journal, Wright carefully wrote out the lecture as a journal article and consequently spent several hours reading to us.
  6. Wright paints with a massive brush. He approached the issue at hand by taking hours to discuss time, space, and matter with reference to realized eschatology and a proper framework for assessing the meaning of the “sacraments.” I brought my GNT, but I didn’t crack it once; exegesis was pretty much non-existent. This is not to say that he can’t do exegesis; rather, I’m saying merely that he didn’t do it, probably assuming that we can go to his books to find that. His time constraints no doubt had something to do with this.
  7. Wright and I have at least one thing in common: when teaching from a lectern, we both use a laptop (and I think his was a Dell, too). I typically use my laptop when teaching and preaching–though I tend to walk around a lot. Wright stayed behind the lectern the entire time except for the very last bit of Q & A after the second lecture. I was sitting in the middle of the third row from the front, so I could see him only from the neck up. He looked like a talking head.

I have a lot of questions about Wright, and I have not yet read enough by Wright himself for my opinion to be worth much. See Ligon Duncan‘s “The Attractions of the New Perspective(s) on Paul” and his interview with Mark Dever: “Justification and the New Perspective.” Cf. two posts by Phil Gons: “New Perspective on Paul” and “Wright on Imputation.”

Curt Daniel on Calvinism

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On our honeymoon in July 2004, I brought along a small pile of books (which I didn’t finish until after we returned home!). I did, however, manage to work through a good chunk of this one:

  1. This excellent work is bound like a typewritten dissertation and is a compilation of handouts that Daniel used to accompany a series of messages delivered from 1987-1989.
  2. The 75 lectures are available for free downloading here. (My wife listened to all 75 of them on her MP3 player!)
  3. Daniel is an expert in Calvinism as evidenced by his Ph.D. dissertation on John Gill, which is some 900 pages long (University of Edinburgh, 1983).
  4. He divides his work on Calvinism into seventy-four chapters, which are handouts he used for lecturing on the topic.
  5. My first impression of the book was poor: (1) the format is unpleasant to the eye with tight line-spacing and a font resembling an old typewriter, and (2) Daniel does not formally cite his sources in footnotes.
  6. My impression changed, however, as I read the book from cover to cover. The first twenty-four chapters (pp. 1-172, 36% of the book) are the most enlightening. It covers the history of Calvinism in an irenic, informative way and includes chapters on Augustine; the Reformation; Calvin; Puritans; Westminster Assembly; Covenant Theology; High Calvinism; Amyraldism; Hyper-Calvinism; Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinism; Princeton Theology; Calvinistic Baptists; and Dutch Calvinism. Each chapter ends with a select bibliography.
  7. I recently learned from Phil Johnson that this is available for free as a Word doc! (I bought my hard copy for $30.) [Update: It is also available for free as a 574-page PDF!]

Two Convicting Quotes from Piper on Owen

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I read this article this morning:

I found these two quotations particularly convicting and challenging:

  • “Packer says that the Puritans differ from evangelicals today because with them, ‘. . . communion with God was a great thing, to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely of their daily experience of God.'”
  • “One great hindrance to holiness in the ministry of the word is that we are prone to preach and write without pressing into the things we say and making them real to our own souls. Over the years words begin to come easy, and we find we can speak of mysteries without standing in awe; we can speak of purity without feeling pure; we can speak of zeal without spiritual passion; we can speak of God’s holiness without trembling; we can speak of sin without sorrow; we can speak of heaven without eagerness. And the result is a terrible hardening of the spiritual life.”