Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

films

Piper on “Planet Earth”

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Last summer I published a blog post entitled “Planet Earth: A Theological Documentary.”

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Yesterday morning during a painfully freezing (!) early morning run, I was listening to an MP3 from John Piper’s 2007 regional conference on “The Pleasures of God.” In part 2 (MP3 | video), Piper describes the pleasure of God in His creation, and he enthusiastically endorses the above “Planet Earth” DVDs.

In the MP3, start at 38:08 to get the context (“God loves the world that He made”) and listen until 42:43. Here are a few highlights:

  • 39:30: “There are many aspects of nature that no human ever sees.” And then some BBC cameraman comes by and captures it!
  • 40:54: This is where the “Blue Planet” and “Planet Earth” endorsement begins.
  • “My wife and I and little girl have worshipped for eight hours watching these unbelievable works of God! There are all these pagans producing this worship DVD!”
  • While they were watching the DVDs, Piper kept saying to his daughter, “That can’t be happening! That can’t be happening!”
  • “I hate evolution. It is so worship destroying! I mean that. Secular, atheistic evolution is worship destroying.”
  • “I get so much pleasure talking about what God has done in creation. It’s way better than talking about movies, but that’s another story.”

“Know Your Roots” Video: Kantzer, Henry, Carson

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“Know Your Roots: Evangelicalism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” (1991) is a video that was professionally recorded on the campus of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. It consists of four parts that are about thirty minutes each:

  • Video 1: Carl F. H. Henry, introduced by John Woodbridge, lectures on evangelicalism.
  • Video 2: Kenneth S. Kantzer, introduced by John Woodbridge, lectures on evangelicalism.
  • Video 3: D. A. Carson interviews Kantzer and Henry on evangelicalism (part 1).
  • Video 4: D. A. Carson interviews Kantzer and Henry on evangelicalism (part 2).

Many thanks to The Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding for making this 120-minute video available digitally!

Aside: I wish this would have been available earlier! I wanted to watch these videos last year, but they were available only in VHS format. And since Jenni and I live in the twenty-first century, we don’t own a VHS player. So I checked out the VHS videos from the TEDS library during Christmas break and brought them with us on our visit to Greenville where family members have VHS. It was worth it—not least to compare and contrast how Drs. Carson and Woodbridge look and sound today!

D. A. Carson recounts one of the video’s highlights in Basics for Believers: An Exposition of Philippians (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), p. 58 (19:23–21:21 in video 4):

Several years ago I was asked to interview Dr. Carl F. H. Henry and Dr. Kenneth S. Kantzer for a videotaping. These two American theologians have been at the heart of much of the evangelical renaissance in the Western world, especially, but not exclusively, in America. Each was about eighty years of age at the time of the videotaping. One [i.e., Henry] has written many books; the other [i.e., Kantzer] brought to birth and nurtured one of the most influential seminaries in the Western world. They both have been connected with Billy Graham, the Lausanne movement, the assorted congresses on evangelism, the influential magazine Christianity Today, and much more. The influence of these Christian leaders extends to the countless numbers of younger pastors and scholars whom they have helped to shape not only by their publications and public teaching but by the personal encouragement at which both have excelled. Both men gave lectures for the video cameras before several hundred theological students, and then I interviewed them. Toward the end of that discussion, I asked them a question more or less in these terms: “You two men have been extraordinarily influential for almost half a century. Without wanting to indulge in cheap flattery, I must say that what is attractive about your ministries is that you have retained integrity. Both of you are strong, yet neither of you is egotistical. You have not succumbed to eccentricity in doctrine, nor to individualistic empire-building. In God’s good grace, what has been instrumental in preserving you in these areas?”

Both spluttered in deep embarrassment. And then one of them [i.e., Henry] ventured, with a kind of gentle outrage, “How on earth can anyone be arrogant when standing beside the cross?”

That was a great moment, not least because it was so spontaneous. These men had retained their integrity precisely because they knew their attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ (Phil. 2:5). They knew that they had been called not only to believe in Christ but also to suffer for him. If their Master had viewed equality with God not as something to be exploited for personal advantage but as the basis for the humiliating path to the cross, how could they view influential posts of Christian leadership as something they should exploit for personal advantage?

Planet Earth: A Theological Documentary

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Last month one of my close friends emailed me a link to a 14-minute video that serves as a preview for the recently released Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series (also available in HD DVD and Blu-ray). After reading more about this BBC series, I became aware of another BBC series released a few years ago called The Blue Planet: Seas of Life.

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Jenni and I had the opportunity to watch these series, and they are excellent! Over the last three years, we have checked out a few dozen nature DVDs from the library (e.g., many produced by IMAX), but none of those compares to Planet Earth! Wow. It includes five DVDs: the first four contain eleven 50-minute episodes, and the fifth contains three episodes on “the future” and environmentalism. The last ten minutes or so of the eleven episodes on disks 1-4 share interesting stories about what the film crew endured to secure such unusual footage. (Warning: Occasionally a crew member’s speech is a bit offensive.) The footage on the main episodes is stunningly majestic and detailed, colorful and brilliant. The vistas are breathtaking. I learned something new in every episode, usually viewing (1) fascinating animals and plants on God’s earth that I never knew existed and (2) behavior by well-known organisms that shocked me because I had never heard of such things (e.g., a pride of lions attacking an elephant).

In preparation for watching these, we listened to John Piper’s sermon “The Pleasure of God in Creation,” which Piper later published as this chapter in The Pleasures of God, my favorite book by Piper. Thrilling! Moving! Worshipful! Watching first-class films about God’s planet is a worshipful experience—even if the people who make the films have entirely different agendas! How many more reasons do we have to praise God than did the authors of Scripture, whose knowledge of God’s earth was significantly limited in comparison to ours today? Piper calls Ranger Rick “a theological journal,” and I think it is appropriate to call Planet Earth a theological documentary.

Related: Piper on “Planet Earth”

“One Night with the King”

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Last weekend Jenni and I checked out from the library the DVD One Night with the King, a dramatization of the book of Esther. It was a disappointment.

1. About

2. Brief analysis: The film is deeply disappointing in both content and form.

  • Content: Jenni and I have grown up hearing and reading the book of Esther, and the biblical plot is fresh on our minds because we worked through the book of Esther in one sitting both the night before and the morning after watching the film. I am just stunned by reviews that claim that the film’s plot is faithful to the biblical plot. The film’s plot mutilates the narrative that God inspired. It would take a long essay to substantiate this, and I have no desire to take the time to do that. Suffice it to say, most of the key points in the film change significant details in the biblical narrative with both addition and subtraction.
  • Form: The film made us laugh—but for the wrong reasons. We laughed because many of the characters and lines are so corny. The film is light and comical with slapstick humor similar to The Princess Bride (but not nearly as funny!). Though not as outrageous as Veggie Tales, the form of the film does not fit the weightiness and gravity of the biblical narrative. Esther, for example, behaves like a flighty, immature teenage girl.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rank the film at 1 or 2. It’s really that bad. I would go a bit farther than Phil Gons, who cautiously recommends watching the film. If you haven’t seen it, my advice is simple: don’t waste your time on it. Read the book of Esther instead. (And if you’re looking for a Bible film to watch, my top recommendation is The Gospel of John.) Films that take dramatic license with biblical narratives almost inevitably compromise the message of the text. Narrative is a literary genre that a film cannot perfectly reproduce. The problem with One Night with the King is not that it fails to reproduce the biblical narrative (that would be an unfair standard), but that it twists and distorts both its content and form.

3. Learning from the story of Esther

In 2002, I prepared a sermon on Esther entitled “Trusting God’s Silent Providence.” I’d no doubt tweak it if I preached it today, but my outline (which reflects Layton Talbert’s Not by Chance—see below) highlights many details in the biblical narrative that the film alters.

  • God’s silent providence directs man’s wrath.
    • It directed King Ahasuerus’ wrath (because of proud embarrassment) against Queen Vashti (1:12; 2:1).
    • It directed Bigthan’s and Teresh’s wrath (because of political hatred) against King Ahasuerus (2:21).
    • It directed Haman’s wrath (because of offended arrogance and racism) against Mordecai (3:5; 5:9).
    • It directed King Ahasuerus’ wrath (because of a mistaken impression) against Haman (7:7, 10).
  • God’s silent providence includes “chance.”
    • It included King Ahasuerus’ call for Queen Vashti and her refusal (1:10-12).
    • It included Esther’s replacement of Vashti as queen (1-2).
    • It included Mordecai’s uncovering of the assassination plot against King Ahasuerus (2:21-23).
    • It included Haman’s unexplained promotion (3:1).
    • It included the lot (“pur” in Hebrew) that Haman cast to determine when to destroy the Jews (3:7).
    • It included Esther’s hesitation to petition King Ahasuerus at the first banquet (5:6-8).
    • It included King Ahasuerus’ inability to sleep and the reading of Mordecai’s unrewarded deed (6:1-3).
    • It included the timing of Haman’s appearance at King Ahasuerus’ court when the king desired to reward Mordecai and Haman desired to murder him (6:4).
    • It included the reversal of what seemed to be certain destruction for the Jews (8-9).

4. Some recommended reading on Esther and/or the narrative genre

(If you’d like to share comments about One Night with the King, I’d recommend doing so here.)

"The Gospel of John" Film

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gospelofjohn.jpgThis weekend my wife and I watched The Gospel of John film again, and I’m glad we did. 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 released in some movie theaters in fall 2003.
  • More details and links are available at Wikipedia.
  • 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 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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