Brian Godawa Interview

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle

Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

King. We're here to take your calls as well. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

My name is Mike Abendroth. Every day of the week, we do something different. Monday, it's a tape sermon. Tuesdays, we usually talk about issues in the local church.

And on Wednesdays, we talk about books, some books that are good books that you ought to read, some books that you should burn, as it were.

So we've got page turners and burners. And today, we're going to be talking about books as well. And we have a special guest today, the author of Word Pictures, the author of, excuse me,

Hollywood Worldview. Brian, tell me how you pronounce your last name, Gadowa? Gadowa, yeah. All right, great.

Brian, we have the privilege of talking to you today. And we were just talking a little bit earlier off air.

Tell me about the last trip you came to Massachusetts. It was an interesting story. What happened? Yeah, I was shooting for a documentary that we're working on called

Schools Out. And it's just about political correctness in higher education. And in other words, that term that we know from the 90s is still very alive and well in terms of affecting the notion of knowledge in college.

And I was interviewing some professors there, including Daphne Patai, who is actually a feminist professor who is speaking out against how the women's movement within the university has become a form of irrational oppression against truth and knowledge.

And it's kind of interesting. She's an old school feminist who's against the new forms of feminism. And just a fascinating thing with all the political issues that are going on in higher education today.

I would have never imagined that would happen in Amherst. Yeah. Amazing. Brian, tell us your background a little bit, and then let's talk a little bit about word pictures in the book,

Knowing God Through Story and Imagination. Well, I've been writing for many years, and my first movie was almost, oh, eight, nine years ago,

To End All Wars. I'd been writing on the side for many years as a screenwriter and then

I got my first movie made. And To End All Wars was based on a true story starring

Kiefer Sutherland about World War II prisoners of war who, under the

Japanese, suffered great atrocities. If you've seen the movie Bridge on the River Kwai, this is the true story that you didn't see in that movie.

And that one sort of was what got me going. And since that time, I've done documentaries and some features.

And I'm a writer -director now. And in the meantime, I decided to write some books on material for Christians and religious people, spiritual people, who

Hollywood Worldview, for example, deals with how to watch a movie and with wisdom and discernment, how to understand worldviews communicated through storytelling.

Because what many people don't realize is that entertainment is not just entertainment. Movies, television, et cetera, but in my particular field, movies, movies are all communicating a worldview, a notion about reality through the story.

And I help people to be able to appreciate that and learn how to watch the movie and understand the worldview through the story.

Not as a sort of, I'm not a typical sort of culture watchdog who wants to point out everything that's bad and look at how bad everything's getting, but rather a sort of an adult

Christian who wants to help adults be able to develop their discernment so they can draw out the good from the bad.

Since most movies are a mixture of good and bad, nothing's absolute in this world. And most movies are a mixture of good and bad.

And so as we discern the good from the bad, we can allow the good to affect us in a positive way and be able to interact redemptively with our culture, with that with which we disagree.

Well, Brian, before we get to word pictures, let's continue in that vein, because in a series here on No Compromise Radio, we've been talking about legalism and is it okay to watch movies and all that?

And we're certainly not legalists here. Tell our audience, how should they watch a movie?

What kind of discernment, how to watch a plot, how to digest it? Because things aren't just as easy as Christians say, well, let's just only watch anything that's rated

G and we're set. How does a Christian watch a movie to the glory of God? Well, I think that's a very good question.

And it really starts, the biggest issue for most Christians up front is the issue of sex and violence in the movies, okay?

And in the book, I deal with that extensively in chapter one. And I think it's a legitimate issue because I think there is too much of it in many movies.

But I also think that Christians have created a subcultural understanding of sin in the art of sex and violence in movies.

A subcultural understanding that is not necessarily biblical. It may be within their certain conservative religious viewpoint, but it's not necessarily biblical because if you look at the

Bible, there's actually a lot of sex and violence in the Bible and some of it is very explicit.

Some of it is not, but some of it is. And in many places, I would argue that the Bible is actually rated

R. You know, Song of Solomon, for example, or Ezekiel in some places where God, you know, describes his relationship to Israel as a, or the relation of Israel to him as one of an unfaithful prostitute having sex with anyone who walks by and it gets worse and worse.

Of course, I can't, I probably can't say it on Christian radio. Well, I think I know the passages you're talking about.

How would you, when I look at Song of Solomon, I don't think, I think it's graphic, but I don't think it's pornographic.

Would you say 50 foot tall, 50 foot objects, women, naked body parts up on the screen, wouldn't that cross from graphic to pornographic?

Yeah, I would definitely agree with you there. And of course, in Song of Solomon, it's an erotic love poem.

And I do think that there are, there's some scholarship that is argued and relatively conservative scholarship that has argued that the modern translations that we have, some of the areas are a lot more ambiguously translated that the original

Hebrew is more explicit than what we have precisely because of the cultural biases of the translators who are ashamed to sort of, you know, translate it as explicit as it is.

But even with taking that into consideration, you know, I'll definitely say that I think, you know,

Song of Solomon is definitely a more, it is erotic love poetry, but it does have a sort of a covering over, it's not explicit in pornographic.

That's right. However, the point is that it deals with eroticism. And so we as Christians have to say, we have to say, okay, we have to put aside our cultural prejudices and recognize, well, if the

Bible deals with eroticism, we have to have a Christian approach to eroticism too, which is, I'm not saying that's easy, but we have to be able to deal with it appropriately.

And so there are places in the scripture that at least deals explicitly with adultery or, you know, what have you, and not just sexual sins, but violence as well.

There's some very descriptive passages that children can't read because it just is too offensive in the

Bible. And so consequently, we have to realize that maybe our own standards have to be adjusted.

And in the book, I try to give principles on how to say, where do you draw your line?

And I think the context is the biggest issue here. And that obviously a movie that is just trying to, you know, show creative ways of killing people and having sex, you know, that's not gonna be, that's gonna be an exploitative approach.

But another movie like, say, you know, Schindler's List that has a lot of excess, you know, very grotesque violence in it, but the context is redemptive.

It's showing you something that is turning you off to the wicked ways of man rather than titillating you.

So that's, you know, you have to deal with the context and that will determine a lot of the meaning of what's going on.

And so that's one beginning. Yeah, I know I'm jumping in here, Brian. Why is it that for me personally, and for lots of people

I know, I can take a movie with lots of violence more than I can take a movie with gratuitous sex scenes?

Is that some kind of false bifurcation there in my thinking? I would argue that it is.

I would argue that that is our particular Western bias. I have it too, so I admit it.

But we have to be self -reflective and recognize, we point out everyone else's prejudices, but we have to look at our own.

And I would say, yes, the fact that violence doesn't bother us, but in Europe, violence is very bothersome to them and the sexuality is not.

That's not to say truth is relative, but it definitely says we have to be careful about imposing our own prejudices.

So therefore, when you look at the Bible, though, there is violence, but there's also sexuality depicted in there.

So we have to have a more balanced approach and recognize that maybe we are too tolerant of violence, and violence can be detrimental on the psyche just as much as sexuality can.

So let's try to be, let's try to look at the Bible and say, well, how does the Bible deal with sex and violence? And then craft our aesthetic from the

Bible rather than just from our own cultural sensibilities. I think that's a good point.

I'm remembering Shakespeare and obscene means on stage.

And so there would be a murder, but it wouldn't be on stage. Some character would come running up and say, so -and -so has been murdered.

Everyone in the audience would know there's been a murder, but you didn't see the jugular vein cut. You didn't see carotid arteries pumping out.

What you said was there's been a murder. So can we craft a movie like that in your movie to end all wars, which

I really liked? How did you go about working through that violence issue there? Well, you know, it's very interesting because we actually, first of all, if you see the movie, it is very hard -hitting.

It's like Schindler's List. It's hard to see, but you have to understand that is like one -tenth of what they experienced.

So it's not even reality. But we found in cutting the movie, it was much more violent. And even

Hollywood, famous Hollywood directors who watched the movie to give us feedback were saying, it's just, it's too much.

You've got to cut back. And so it's interesting that you're right, that there's a way in which it can be communicated by not showing too much, but you have to find a little bit of balance, but you also have to show a little bit in order to make it hit home.

And that's where you, you know, it's a gray area there. And we, but we discovered that, yeah, pulling back was actually helpful.

And in some ways, filmically, you know, there's a filmic side to things that people don't realize.

Like if you show the act, it may not even be as impactful as showing the response of the person's face seeing the act.

You know what I'm saying? And sometimes people, okay, there's a classic example from the movie Seven, which was a movie about a gruesome serial killer who's killing people according to the seven deadly sins.

It's a very gruesome movie, but really they don't show almost, they show almost nothing throughout the whole movie because it's more about the psychology of evil.

Well, anyway, a woman had gone to see the movie and after a screening, she came out, she was really mad. She went up to the director of the movie and she was angry because at the end of the movie, this killer basically had cut off the person, a person's head and put it in a box.

But she walks up to the director and says, I can't believe that was just offensively grotesque that you would show that person's cutoff head.

And the irony is he turned and said, well, we never showed anything. We just showed a box.

There was no blood, nothing. So the power of implying can be sometimes just as impactful as actually showing something, maybe more.

Are there some movies out there that you would recommend Christians to watch? Oh yeah,

I have a slew. I've got my personal favorites or I can recommend from different genres, which

I like to reference different genres so that different people can appreciate things. For instance, one of my favorites of all time is

Braveheart and Braveheart is a great historical story about freedom and how freedom is paid through the blood of sacrifice, which is a very

Christian concept. Written by a Christian, that movie, by the way. And he even said that he sort of wrote it as a metaphor for the gospel.

So you can see the gospel notion there of sacrifice and shed blood is how we receive, that's how we find freedom, not just politically, but spiritually.

That's a great movie. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Chick Flicks, Sense and Sensibility. One of my favorites of all time.

Based on a Jane Austen movie, the one written by Emma Thompson that got an Oscar nomination, I guess.

You know, it's a great Jane Austen movie about Britain, Regency period, but it's about what real love is based on.

It's two different women. One woman is a young girl who's easily deceived by the romantic, dashing young man who exploits her.

And then the other woman is a more mature woman who waits for the right man and is patient. It contrasts those approaches to love and it shows a very

Christian approach to that. So those would be a couple movies I would recommend. And without describing the actual details of other movies,

I'll list a couple. Another one that I thought was good called The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

It was a horror movie written by a Christian and directed by a Christian, but really deals with that reality of spiritual supernatural, which in today's world, there's a lot of rejection of that.

So I think that's a powerful movie. And a recent one that should be coming out soon on DVD, The Stoning of Soroya M, made by a friend of mine, a writer -director, and it's a powerful story with Jim Caviezel in it about Iran right after the revolution.

It basically shows how Sharia law is cruelty and people really need to see that.

But again, it's another hard -hitting movie that's tough to watch. Well, I'll look forward to looking at that. I saw the first three that you mentioned, but I didn't see the last one.

Let's move from movies to art. You've got a good section in your book on page 88 on your book called

Word Pictures, Knowing God Through History and Imagination, IV Press. One would not have to paint a scene from the

Bible in order to honor God with their art. Simple ornamentation, easy for me to say, ornamentation could do so.

Still lifes took a whole new sacred meaning along with paintings of everyday life.

Tell us a little bit about the Reformed view of looking at just still life versus and in contrast to popular art today.

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, at the time, you know, the Reformation, of course, was responding to a

Roman Catholic hegemony in society. And at the time, art was really, you know, portraits were only done of aristocratic people and religious, you know, basically people in power.

And the Reformation came along and with this notion of every man a priest, God cares, you know, there are not special people that connect us to God.

We can go directly to God through the blood of Jesus, right? So that notion brings about, you know, a portraiture of normal everyday people.

You know, you've got the Dutch painters that, you know, like Rembrandt and such that bring out that, that the beauty of the normal.

And that's a form of democratization in a way, but, you know, it's basically based on a spiritual view.

And in nature itself becomes a glory to God. Now nature, before then, there really weren't too much landscape painting because the

Reformed guys started realizing the beauty of God's creation brings glory to the creator.

You don't have to have something religious in it in order for it to be beautiful. So they wrenched this notion that things have to be explicitly religious or they're not valuable.

The downside of that was that there was also a sort of an overreaction of pendulum swing,

I would argue, and as I argue in the book, that they were so fearful of the idolatry going on at that time of worshiping relics and, you know, praying to icons and this kind of stuff that they wrenched all the art out of the church.

And they were happy to have, as, you know, one of the, I think it was

Zwingli was proud of having whitewashed churches, you know, of just totally nothing in there because they felt that God was transcendent, not imminent.

Therefore, everything should be taken away so you wouldn't distract you from focusing on God. But of course, if you look at God in the

Old Testament, as well as the New Testament, but in the Old Testament where God brings so much visual beauty into the temple, the focus of worship of God in Israel, this temple was loaded with imagery and certainly

God did not consider that to be idolatrous. And so I think that, you know, in the pendulum swing, away from the sensate element in the

Old Testament and towards a transcendent aesthetic, the

Reformation brought from one imbalance to the other. And my argument in the book is that in the

Bible, in the New Testament and Old Testament, God is both imminent and transcendent. He is both separate from his creation, but he is also everywhere in every present.

And that therefore, the sensate elements of this world reflect

God's glory and are part of the worship of God. You know, we're not gonna go to heaven.

The goal is not to go to heaven and be disembodied spirits floating around in the ether. The goal is the physical resurrection of our bodies into a new heaven and new earth.

That's of this worldly sort of eternity, not, you know what I'm saying? Yes. So the theology of the

New Testament should include a greater appreciation for the this worldly side of the spiritual realm.

It's interesting. I was reading a Leland Ryken book on imagination and worship, and he was talking about how

God, for the temple, wanted the Israelites to have blue pomegranates there in the temple.

And so there's no such thing as a blue pomegranate, but they're sure pretty. And that's what, and that's a symbolic expression of what

Francis Schaeffer had pointed out years earlier. That is abstraction.

You know, when Christians have this sort of like disdain towards abstract art because it just doesn't mean anything. It's just, you know, just a bunch of pretty colors or whatever, and there's no content.

This is part of our bias, I think, in our Western world, where we tend to stress, over -stress, message to the extent that we downgrade the style or the, it's the content versus the medium, you know?

And that's a, you know, it's an age -long debate. But the point is that when we over -stress the message, we become preachy, and we downgrade the value of the beauty that God values beauty and values aesthetic.

It's not just a secondary component. I think that's a good insight, Brian. How about, in the same note, some of the metaphors in the

Bible, some of the biblical images? Part of the book that I really appreciated was on page 74, table two, modern theological terms and corresponding biblical images.

So instead of saying God is omnipotent, you say, Psalm 89 .13,

God has a strong right arm. Our God's omniscience is shown in Scripture in Psalm 139.

And God counts the hairs on your head. Talk to me a little bit about that idea. Yeah, C .F.

Lewis said, which is more touching to the human spirit, to say that God is a transcendent ground of being, or to say that God is a father or a shepherd who loves us?

Well, here's the point there is, because we are a post -enlightened scientific culture, so we have, our language has become reducible to materialistic concepts and scientific concepts, which is not inherently wrong, but it is certainly a prejudice that we need to become aware of, and we need to be careful not to let our current, whatever our current cultural bias is, to let it draw us away from a more balanced biblical approach.

So those terms of omniscience and omnipotence are basically scientific terms, and they're not, like I'm saying, it's not that they're wrong, but you can see the danger of where you become, if you start to use science in your understanding of theology and you get away from narrative, you get away from poetry, symbol, metaphor, all the things in the

Bible that the Bible's full of. The Bible's not a systematic theology. It's a book of images, symbols, metaphors, poetry, narrative, stories.

And so when you get away from that, there's a danger of dehumanizing, depersonalizing your theology into a scientific system, and you can lose the heart of God in so doing.

So there's an advantage to science in terms of helping us be a little bit more precise, but we can't let it become an idol such that we lose the personal aspect of the theology of the

Scriptures. Well, this is No Compromise Radio Ministry. We're talking to Brian Gadawa, Word Pictures, his new book.

Brian, we only have a couple more minutes left, but I'm kind of an old school guy. By the way, I really liked your book. I like your energy.

I like your ideas. I'm fairly old school, maybe kind of a B .B. Warfield, Princetonian guy.

Tell me the role of propositional truth in a local church service. I don't think you're trying to denigrate the preaching of the

Word of God. Just walk me through that or convince me that you still like preaching propositional truth.

Yeah, I'm a Kuyperian. I'm a Venturian and Kuyperian myself, but I've also been affected by other writers as well.

But yeah, look, I make the argument in the book that God values propositional truth, that God does use reason and logic, et cetera.

But I do make the argument that I feel that we have overstressed that to the extent that we're not as biblical.

And so I would argue that if you're gonna apply to a church service, not just our life, but a church service,

I think that we have, I think that it is a cultural prejudice, a modern cultural prejudice to make the sermon be the climax toward which everything is pointing.

And we have all of our chairs in one direction looking up at the elevated podium. These are all cultural expressions of a certain kind of elevation of that.

Now, I'm not saying that's not important, and I certainly believe it's part of the service, but I would suggest that that's where there's an overstress, and there's a corresponding neglect of the other elements as mere accoutrements.

So things like worship and things like visual elements of a church, those are relegated, pushed aside.

And I'm just saying we need to recognize the equal value of those elements in the service as well.

And I know that there's a lot of people who reject things like that they did in the Old Testament, like dancing and drama and all that kind of stuff.

And how much that can be put into a service, I don't know. That's all debatable. All right, Brian, I only have 10 seconds.

I want to say thank you very much. Excellent book. We might disagree on that last point, but I think you're a great writer, and you have good insight.

I hope people get the book. God bless you, Brian Goddowa. Thanks a lot. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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