“The Nativity” and Bible Movies

The Nativity star Keisha Castle-Hughes is pregnant out of wed-lock, and Christian leaders urge a Christ-like response to it. Okie dokie: “Neither do I condemn you; go your way. From now on sin no more.”:”(John 8:11, New American Standard Bible)”: I saw no mention of that in the article.

Rather, she is continually praised for her acting, while Christians are admonished to separate reality from fiction and to not mar the movie by holding Castle-Hughes to the standards of the role she plays, that of the highly favored Mary wife of Joseph.

No mention at all is given of respecting Mary by disallowing those who live in sin to portray her. And yet just as happened with The Passion of the Christ, it is of course more important to maintain the integrity and quality of the movie no matter what sort of actors we have to play history’s holiest people.

The Christian response? “What a wonderful, scriptural movie!” I couldn’t have counted the number of times I heard The Passion called “biblically accurate” if I tried, and now I’m hearing and seeing the same nonsense about The Nativity. We aren’t told a great deal about Jesus’ younger life, or Mary and Joseph’s prior to His birth. A biblically accurate depiction of this on screen would probably take about 15 minutes or so, give or take depending on how much material one would want to use of their travels to Egypt and back, and so on. The dialogue wouldn’t fill up much time at all, however.

But strictly in the name of entertainment (and without much thought at all to the Bible), Christians step aside and forgive the immense amounts of creative license Hollywood takes with the Word of God. The impression I get reading the epistles is that zero amount of creative license ought to be taken with the Word when teaching and preaching it. It should be pure and unadulterated. That is, unless it is being acted out on the silver screen. Suddenly, the Bible is freely interpretable, and we can still call it scripturally accurate, perhaps because the warnings against adding to and taking away from the Word haven’t ever been put on the silver screen.

I’m also pretty tired of hearing people say that such movies makes the Bible come alive for the lost and will reach them for Christ and blah, blah, blah blah blah. I know exactly what will reach those ordained unto salvation: it is the preaching of the Word of God.:”(Romans 10:14)”: A movie is not preaching. It’s barely even the Word of God!

And about that “makes it come alive” nonsense? How easily do we forget that the Word of God is that which is alive and active, able to pierce the very heart of man!:”(Hebrews 4:12)”:

Even if such “scripturally accurate” movies do cause more people to attend church, at best all they are doing is adding to the number of false converts within the churches. By mass marketing the “word of God” to the world at large, our pearls are cast before swine, so don’t be surprised when they come into your church and trample all over biblical truth in the name because of some feel-good moment they had at the cinema.:”(Matthew 7:6)”:

Having faith that God will use the preaching of His Word to see converted those who have been ordained unto eternal life is comforting. It means that we don’t have to come up with our own ways of reaching the lost. Simply trusting God and the methods He has laid out for us in His Word is, as it has has been, sufficient.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Use your Gravatar-enabled email address while commenting to automatically enhance your comment with some of Gravatar's open profile data.

Comments must be made in accordance with the comment policy. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam; learn how your comment data is processed.

You may use Markdown to format your comments; additionally, these HTML tags and attributes may be used: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

the Rick Beckman archive
Scroll to Top