Movies Can Make Your Witnessing Efforts Easier

Engaging people with the Gospel is tough, especially in today's post-Christian culture. People hold to a different worldview; they operate using different assumptions and different stating points, making it more difficult to agree about things like the existence of God, objective morality, and what counts as sin. If someone doesn't believe in such a thing as absolute right and wrong, it's pretty hard to convince them they are sinners in need of a savior!

In the abstract, it's easy for moral relativists to deny absolute moral values and duties. When pressed, they will try to justify their position, even to the point of saying rape may be OK. Usually that type of reaction isn't honest, though. Because the discussion is happening in the abstract, the relativist is simply trying to save face and apply his or her pre-stated ethic consistently. Still, once the conversation has descended to that level, it's hard to get the other party to admit anything.

Try Using Film as Clear Examples

Most people are not taught to reason from a beliefs to its real-world implications. They separate these two concepts, which is why so many people feel so satisfied in their beliefs even though they may lead to contradictions. They simply don't see the connection and they therefore don't see the contradiction. One of the ways I've found that helps avoid this problem is to leverage popular movies as a common point of reference with those with whom I'm engaging.

Blockbuster motion pictures are one of the primary references that most people have in common. If the filmmakers have done their jobs, the audience will all have a similar experience understanding the story. We want Truman Burbank to discover he's being deceived. We recognize Neo as the hero and Cypher as a bad guy. We see the humans on the ship in WALL-E surrendering their full humanity for mere creature comforts. Film not only tells us a story, but it makes us feel a certain way and it makes us care for the characters. One has to only look at Anakin Skywalker's struggle with the Dark Side of the Force to see how film connects ideas and the ramification of those ideas.

The Apostle Paul Leveraged the Culture of His Day

The idea of drawing on the arts in witnessing is not a new one. In previous generations, books were the common cultural reference point and these could be used to quickly explain more abstruse ideas. The Apostle Paul modeled this kind of evangelism in Acts 17 when he began witnessing to the citizens of Athens. Given their Greek background and their worship of many gods, Paul would have a hard time communicating the Gospel message to them by using the Old Testament. Instead, Paul leveraged the popular poetry of the day to make his point. In Acts 17:28, he quotes two famous poets to show that there is one God to whom we are all accountable. He leads with the phrase "In him we live and move and have our being" which was penned by the 6th century BCE poet Epimenides in his Cretia:

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one—
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being. 1

In the same verse, Paul draws upon a line from the Phaenomena by Aratus, a poet who was popular at that time to demonstrate that all people owe their existence to God ("For we are indeed his offspring") and therefore should seek to finds out who God really is.

By leveraging the connections that people already have to films and characters, one can more quickly and easily make difficult ideas clearer. Because film is a visual medium, it also makes it more difficult to leave the concepts in the abstract. I offer these ideas a tools for you to try in your witnessing efforts. They don't work in every case, but they may speed up your discussion and give you a new and interesting way to engage with others. For more specific examples on how you can use film in your witnessing, check out my podcast series "Using Hollywood Blockbusters to Share the Gospel."

References

1. Hotchkiss, Mark A. Legend of the Unknown God. S.l.: Tate Pub & Enterprises Ll, 2014. Print. 170.
Image courtesy wearedc2009 Scholars [CC BY 2.0]

Why Doesn't God Just Make Everyone Love Him? (video)

One of the objections to the Christian message of salvation is that those who don't follow the Christian God are condemned to eternal torment. But, if God is all powerful, couldn't he just have created people who would automatically love him? in this short clip, Lenny answers that objection by demonstrating that any compulsion to love created by God wouldn't really be love at all.

Image courtesy sleepyrobot13 [by-nc-nd/3.0/]

Why the Gospels Cannot be Dismissed as "Religious"

Yesterday, I was part of a panel answering questions at the local college. A member of the Secular Students Alliance approached us and asked about the historical nature of the resurrection of Jesus. As I explained to him, the vast majority of New Testament scholars from the most conservative to the most skeptical (think Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, and other Jesus Seminar scholars) hold to certain central facts about Jesus, namely his death by Roman crucifixion, his followers truly believed he rose from the dead, the dramatic conversion of the apostle Paul from church persecutor to Christian evangelist, and even how most hold to Jesus's tomb being empty. 1 These count as evidence towards his resurrection.

However, the student kept rejecting the Biblical accounts as legitimate sources of knowledge. He waved off the accounts as "a single source" from "a religious book." But his dismissal is simply wrong for a couple of reasons, both of which should be clear to anyone who wishes to approach the evidence thoughtfully.

The Bible Isn't a Single Source

The first and most flagrant error the student made is to assume the Bible is a single source documenting Jesus's life on earth. This is simply an error of his modern mindset. As I've said, the Bible isn't a single work; it's a collection of sixty-six books written by about forty authors over a 1500 year span. When counting independent sources that discuss the resurrection, one would count at minimum Mark, John, and Paul's account in 1 Corinthians 15. Matthew and Luke draw from Mark's Gospel so scholars may not count them as independent, but dependent on Mark. However, as Michael Licona in summarizing N.T. Wright notes, "dependence may be also be an illusion resulting from a 'natural overlap' in oral tradition or the presence of terms that would be common even if all four Gospels were completely independent when they included reports of women going to the tomb, discovering it empty and being told by an angel that Jesus has risen from the dead."2

Regardless of whether Matthew and Luke (and even the theoretical "Q") count as independent sources, historians would still agree that we have at least three independent sources that describe the resurrection. Multiple attestation is a huge deal when trying to uncover ancient historical events; it's the best data we have and shouldn't be dismissed so easily. The Biblical accounts of Jesus's resurrection by any measure cannot me seen as a single source.

Bias against Religious Texts

The other reason the secularist dismissed the biblical accounts is because they were what he deemed "a religious work."  On this point I tried very hard to make him understand that such a classification is misplaced. As Licona explains, prior to 1990 there were a large segment of New Testament scholars who believed the canonical Gospels fell into a literary genre of their own, a kind of mythical approach to the life of a real person written in order to advance a belief system.3 However, since that time, scholarship has changed dramatically.

In his book The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, Craig Keener reviews the different literary genres used at the time the Gospels were written and demonstrates that they fit the category of ancient biography especially well. Keener also notes that skeptical scholar Richard Burridge (who sought to disprove the notion that the Gospel accounts are biography) fits the genre better than any other. Keener comments "So forceful is Burridge's work on the gospel genre as biography that one reviewer concludes, 'This volume ought to end any legitimate denials of the canonical Gospels' biographical character.'"4

It is only because the Gospels are understood as religious texts today that the student's bias has any weight in the mind of others. But using modern glasses to view ancient texts is a poor way to do history. The fact that my interlocutor would not accept my explanations to him concerning the classification of the accounts of Jesus's life says a bit more about his biases than it does the reliability of the Gospels themselves.

References

1. For detail on this, see Gary R. Habermas, and Mike Licona. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2004. Print. 48-77.
2. Licona, Mike. The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010. Print. 207.
3. Licona, 2010. 201.
4. Keener, Craig S. The Historical Jesus of the Gospels. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2009. Print.

The Necessity of a Biblical Worldview (audio)

Recently, I was interviewed by Pastor Mike Spaulding of Soaring Eagle Radio on apologetics and how we are losing the Christian worldview, both in the church as well as in the greater culture. In this discussion, we discuss the need for apologetics in the church, how apologetics ministers to both believers and non-believers, how to answer questions nonbelievers offer, and ways you can grow in your own apologetics efforts. Listen to the recording below or click here to download the mp3 recording.

Star Wars, Super Heroes, and How Relativism Doesn't Satisfy

Today is October 21, 2015, known as "Back to the Future Day" in pop culture circles. In Back to the Future II, today is the pivotal point where Marty travels to the future, Biff steals the time machine, and the entire course of history is changed where the villain becomes triumphant. Marty must restore the timeline so the good guy wins and evil is vanquished.

Another popular movie franchise is also on everyone's lips this week as the last trailer for the seventh installment of the Star Wars saga has been released. I found it interesting that people were lining up and crowding movie theaters to see the trailer for the film! People have already bought tickets to a showing that's two months away. The Avengers and other comic book hero films are similarly popular. All one has to do is look at the top all-time box office grosses to see how superheroes and genre films like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings are massively successful. What's causing all the attraction to these kinds of films?

A Rising Culture of Moral Ambiguity

One reason why my curiosity was piqued at the popularity of these films is their very simple portrayal of good and evil. Star Wars and comic hero films draw very clear lines between good and evil. The characters may have some inner struggles, but they aren't an anti-hero like the television series Dexter or Breaking Bad. Those characters have become more popular as they reflect the moral relativism held by so many people, especially the younger generation. As the television site Flow notes:

Dexter possesses a key element common to a lion's share of the series that critics, fans and scholars laud as contemporary quality television: a central character that is, at best, morally ambiguous and, at worst, either so pathologically self-centered or self-contained that his/her actions stretch our common lexicon for one who has "emotional baggage" that often ends with blood (and lots of it); in other words, "amoral" or "immoral" don't seem quite fit the discursive bill.1

Clearly, the belief that morality is relative is increasing. It is the default position on college campuses today, and students are so entrenched in it they would rather say rape is OK than admit that there are objective values and duties to which we all must conform. The clear good/evil distinction seems out of place in such a world, so why are films that reflect is so incredibly popular, especially with the youth?

How to Kill a Dragon

I think the answer is a simple one. Moral relativism may sound great, but inside most people there's a nagging suspicion that it isn't true. People long for good to triumph and evil to be vanquished. Underneath it all they really want there to be a right and a wrong, a good and an evil, and they want to be able to identify which is which. Hero movies meet this need.

G.K. Chesterton famously observed:

Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.2

We used to tell myths of knights and dragons to communicate the idea of good conquering evil and right overpowering wrong. I know of no parent who reads such stories to their children any longer. While our film experiences let us escape in the wonder of a world that is morally clear and encourages us to slay our own dragons, our television choices week after week paint in all greys and show how self-justification can be leveraged to help us do what we want, just like Biff Tannen in Back to the Future II. The only question is which timeline will remain as part of our future?

References

1. "Darkly Dreaming Of Dexter: If Loving Him Is Wrong I Don't Want To Be Right." Flow. Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin., July 2007. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. http://flowtv.org/2007/11/darkly-dreaming-of-dexter-if-loving-him-is-wrong-i-don%E2%80%99t-want-to-be-right-pt-1/.
2. Chesterton, G. K. Tremendous Trifles. Project Gutemberg. 5 Jan. 2013. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8092/8092-h/8092-h.htm