Did you know that Fuller’s Brehm Center has a film and theology division?
Reel Spirituality is great–and a great resource to the Church with its even-handed thoughts on faith and film (and faith in film).
So like every other Christiany blog, The Burner will post about Noah, but unlike every other blog, we’ll steal it from a partner publication:
As the credits rolled, I found myself once again in the all-too-familiar position of being perplexed by the very Evangelical community with whom I identify. Noah was a great film. It was epic, captivating, and imaginative in all the right ways. Even the much-maligned “artistic license” Aronofsky used had to do with portions of the biblical text that are simply ambiguous or downright baffling (e.g. the Nephilim of Gen 6). Sure, he emphasized certain unexplored elements of the Noah story in order to flesh out the protagonist’s central struggle and to create a dramatic arch that works well in cinematic form. But at the end of the day, Aronofsky very much succeeded in making a God-affirming, creation-affirming, and even faith-affirming film.
Among other things, Noah is a film about humanity’s inexhaustible hubris, its propensity to see justice and mercy as separate realities, and the burden of living as God’s chosen representative in a world given to violence, power, and oppression. Put differently, the film is profoundly biblical. Yes, biblical. Yet, so damning was the early “Christian” response to the film, one would have thought that Russell Crowe played the Noah character as a deranged lunatic, or that the antediluvian world was populated by nothing but topless women. After seeing the film though, I realized that the reality was far worse. In Aronofsky’s “radical re-writing” of the biblical tale, Noah is… a vegetarian. Shudder! All sarcasm aside, the Christian community’s mostly negative response to Noah before they had even seen it brought back (*ahem*) a flood of memories.
