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.'".

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial.

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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 taped 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, yes.

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 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 am writing for many years,

and my first movie was 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 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,

worldviews, for example, and with wisdom and discernment, how to

understand, don't realize that

entertainment is not just entertainment,

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

to be able to develop their discernment so they can

draw.

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,

be able to interact redemptively with our culture.

If 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, for 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 upfront 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 there's some of it,

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 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 Christian radio.

Well, I think I know the passage that 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 conserved

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, translate it as

explicit as it is.

But even with taking that into consideration, I'll definitely say that I think Song of

Solomon is definitely a more, but it does

have a sort of a covering over, it's not explicit and 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

what have you, and not just sexual sins, but violence as well.

There's some very descriptive in the

Bible.

And so, and in the

book, I try to give principles on where do you draw your line?

And a

movie

that's a lot of

excess, very, 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 have to deal with the meaning of what's going on.

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 and say yes.

The fact of 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 look at the Bible and say, well, how does the Bible deal with sex and violence?

And then craft our aesthetic.

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 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 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, they

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 the attorney said, well, we never showed anything.

We just showed a box.

There was no blood, nothing.

So the power of implying can be

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 times.

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.

And 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 of

Revolution.

It basically shows how Sharia law, 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, Ivy Press.

One would not have to paint a scene from the Bible in order to honor God with their art.

Simple orimentation, 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, I mean, at the time, the Reformation, of course, was responding to a Roman

Catholic hegemony in society.

And at the time, art was really, portraits were only done of aristocratic people

and basically people in power.

And the Reformation came along and with this notion of every man a priest, God cares, 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 a portraiture of normal everyday people.

You've got the Dutch painters like Rembrandt and such that bring out the beauty of the

normal.

And that's a form of democratization in a way, but 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 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.

I would argue, and as I love the idolatry going on at that

time of worshiping relics and icons and this kind of stuff,

that they

wrenched all

the art in there because they felt that

God was transcendent, not focusing

on God.

But of course, if you look at God in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, but

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 in the pendulum swing away from the sensate

element in the Old Testament

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 heavens and new earth.

That's of this worldly sort of eternity, not, you know what I'm saying?

And so the theology of the New Testament should

appreciation fully 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 back 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 never, and there's no content.

This is part of our bias, I think, in our Western world where we tend to

stress message

content versus the, and that's a, you know, it's an age

-long debate, but the point is that when we overstress the message, we become preachy

and we downgrade the value of,

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, or God's omniscience is shown in scripture in Psalm

139, God counts the hairs on your head.

Talk to me a little bit about that idea.

Yeah, C .S. 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?

Well, here's the point there is, because we are a post -enlightened

scientific culture, so 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.

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 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, 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 Goddower.

Thanks a lot.

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