T. A. McMahon & Carl Kerby (Part 2)

Program Description: Tom welcomes back guest Carl Kerby as they continue their conversation on biblical movies, focusing primarily on Son of God and Noah.

Transcript:

Gary: Welcome to Search the Scriptures 24/7, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring T.A. McMahon.  I’m Gary Carmichael. We’re glad you could join us. In today’s program, Tom continues his conversation with Carl Kerby, head of the ministry Reasons for Hope. Now, along with his guest, here’s TBC executive director Tom McMahon.

Tom: Thanks, Gary. My guest for this week’s program - it’s Part 2 in our sessions of dealing with movies - dealing with biblical movies, Christian movies, dealing with Hollywood’s influence on the body of Christ - don’t know how else to say it - and the concerns that we have. Carl’s ministry is Reasons for Hope, which, as I mentioned last week - although we’re dealing with media and visual media - he has one of the best multimedia websites around, so we’re not condemning everything along that line. Carl’s the author of a number of books, and a producer of DVDs, [the] Debunked series - he mentioned it last week - and we’ll talk about it again. He’s got an offer for you folks out there, so I would say take him up on it, because they are absolutely terrific DVDs.

Carl, welcome back to Search the Scriptures 24/7.

Carl: It’s always a blessing to be with you, my man.

Tom: Now, Carl, last week we dealt generally with movies that - some are generated by companies that profess to be Christian (some I’m sure are), but we’re also talking about Hollywood’s influence on creating movies, which are no small item, no small change - we’re going to talk about Noah; the budget on that was $126 million. We’ve got Exodus coming out at the end of the year; certainly there are some other movies. We had the Son of God, which opened to number two in the box office; that was basically a rehash of programs really made for TV, but that was supported in a huge way by the evangelical church - I think there were presold tickets [that] were somewhere around 500 thousand …

Carl: Right…

Tom: …so the people that did that production recognized that the evangelical community would be a real source of financial return for them, and it proved that way, but because…You know, again, Hollywood has recognized that there’s a marketing game plan that they can use, and that is to attempt to get the evangelical church behind it. That’s what brought about the success - we talked about this last week - of The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson, and that’s the only reason the evangelical support for this very Catholic movie - had a Catholic gospel…So Mel Gibson’s movie definitely would be the instrument, the initiation for Hollywood to get into movies that they think there’s a Christian market for. Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ - it was basically a visual presentation of the Catholic ritual of the stations of the cross. It was more about Mary than it was about Jesus - I mean, this is all documented in a book that I wrote called Showtime for the Sheep.

But the point being is that it was a success, and therefore Hollywood’s raised their eyebrow and said, “Hey, we’ve got to go after this market.”

Certainly the History Channel’s Bible was another success, as it were, financial success - millions of viewers viewed that. So Hollywood took notice of these things, then the people that produced the Son of God brought that to the big screen through - which was basically, they shot most of it for TV for the movie channel…

Carl: It was genius, quite frankly.

Tom: Well, you know, that’s the way Hollywood goes about things: they - again, these are expensive films even for a smaller production, and they’ve got to get a return on their money. So now we’ve seen the Bible in particular, starting with the Son of God as of late - the Son of God, which was a success, but it is a translation of the Bible to the screen.

Carl: Mm-hmm.

Tom: Now, Carl, I have serious problems with that, because, as I mentioned last week, when you look to movies, it’s a subjective medium. It’s visuals. In other words, Carl, we’re in a museum, and we’re looking at a painting, and we’ve got about a half dozen people there, and we’re giving our opinions of this painting. Now, is anybody wrong?

Carl: Right, right.

Tom: Well, no, because it’s a subjective evaluation, and it’s based on how I feel: emotions, whatever. “Well, this color does this for me,” and so on and so forth. That’s what visual translation will do. It moves you out of the objective realm into something very subjective and experiential. For example, again, Moses did not - when he went up to Mt. Sinai, he was not given a picture book, the problem being it’s a very subjective medium, whereas God said, “Write these things down.” So we have the Word of God - “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God,” as Luke:4:4And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.
See All... says. So my concern here is when we shift from something that God gave us, the Bible - you know, it comes down to what do people consider the Bible to be? Is it true truly God’s direct communication to mankind?

Carl: Right.

Tom: So, Carl, am I making sense here?

Carl: Well, it’s - you know, whenever…we talked last week about disclaimers, and the disclaimer for the Bible was, “This program is an adaptation of Bible stories. It endeavors to stay true to the spirit of the book.” Whenever I see that, and this is something that is claiming to be biblical, it’s bad! I mean, there’s just no way. I mean, we’re going to “try to stay true to the spirit of the Book”? Look, the Word of God is the Word of God. It’s from the only One who’s always been there, who knows everything, who told us what happened, and when I get to the point where I can approach the Word of God with, “God, I know what You wrote, but let me tell You what You meant, because You didn’t quite understand this or this or that,” we’re in trouble. And that’s what I see going on in the church. I do a whole talk on - I call it, “Is The Bible biblical?” I got in trouble at a film festival [laughs] just about a month ago, because people were like, “You’re going to critique the Bible?”

I said, “Yeah! The History Channel television show.”

“Oh.” [laughs] They were mad at me, man. Trying to figure out what I was doing.

Tom: Well, right. Carl, again, we’re trying to - folks, we’re trying to explain this as simply as I can. Carl is - the things he’s written about the media and how it affects people - I look to my background, my training as a screenwriter…here’s the way it works: I’ve got something based on the Bible - let’s take Son of God, for example. I mean, that would be a good example of late. Now, in order for me to put that on the screen, in order for me to ask people, as a screenwriter, to ask people to come and watch this dramatic story on the screen - very expensive to put on the screen - what do I have to do? Well, number one as a screenwriter, I have to figure out what I want on the screen, what we can afford, because the movie has a budget and so on, so there are budget constraints. Then, Carl, I go to the Bible, because movies, even though they’re mostly visual, they have dialogue. Guess what? I have to make up the dialogue, because it’s not there.

Carl: Right.

Tom: Now…okay, so I’ve got to make up the dialogue, I’ve got to put these scenes in a dramatic fashion - it can’t just be like a documentary where I’ve just gone from piece to piece. No, this is a dramatic presentation of the Bible. Now you’ve got some problems, because, well, what does Scripture say? Proverbs:30:6Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.
See All...: “Add thou not unto his words lest he reprove thee and thou be found a liar.” I cannot translate the Bible to the screen without adding to some things or taking some things away.

Carl: Right, right.

Tom: And we’re not talking about, “Well, it’s just a piece here and a piece there.” You have dialogue. Carl, you haven’t seen the Son of God - but you have seen Noah, which we’ll talk about in a minute - but in [Son of God], you have dialogue between Jesus and the disciples and so on. Guess what? You’re not going to find chapter and verse for what He’s saying. You’re not going to find scenes which are trying to communicate something that are true to what the Scripture says.

I’ll give you an example: we have a scene in which the character Jesus is standing on the shore, and Peter’s out there in a boat by himself, and he’s complaining that there are no fish around and so on; it’s a bad day, and so on. So the character Jesus walks into the water. Peter’s not particularly interested in him coming aboard, but he helps him aboard. They go out, and he’s trying to fish. There are no fish, and so he’s just complaining again, and Jesus tells him to put the net down; then he puts his hand in the water like he’s motioning to the fish; they come into the net…Carl, where is that? Where is that?

Carl: [laughs] Where is that in the Scripture?

Tom: Yeah, but that’s only one aspect of men having to manipulate things, having to put things together, and then you call it the Son of God?

Carl: Yeah.

Tom: We could go on and on about this, but it’s…

Carl: Here’s something for you, though, Tom: remember - I can’t remember the name of the movie, but I remember seeing it as a young person, and the guy that was like the very involved - I think his last name was Carpenter - and it was literally just the text in the Scripture. You could read along with it; they’re doing the whole Bible - Genesis…and you could read the whole thing, and that’s all that they had in there. It’s an old movie; I remember watching it. But even if they did that, even if they just follow - even as they did that, just following the words - the images that were on there still don’t necessarily - well, no, I can’t say that, not necessarily, they don’t reflect what truly happened, and the visuals still are very powerful, many times more so than the written Word to us today, because our culture is so visual. They see it, and this is the way that it is. You see a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Eve running through the Garden of Eden - go down to the Holy Land Experience in Florida, that’s what you see in their creation film, and, I’m sorry - that doesn’t make sense!

Tom: Carl, it not only doesn’t make sense, it is a distortion of the Scriptures. You say, “Well, wait a minute, it has the actual words from Scripture!” Yeah, one of the things I’ve learned about movies and being trained to write for movies is that, look, when you present something, the most important thing, even though you’re writing dialogue, is the visuals, because people leave with those images. They don’t leave necessarily with the words. So in terms of…okay, so we have Scripture, and then we have visuals included.

Carl, what about this example: let’s take Mel Gibson; he’s got his art director, he’s got his camera man, he’s got his script advisor and so on, and there they are on the Mount of Olives, the real Mount of Olives just outside Jerusalem, and they’re looking around because they want to film a scene in the Mount of Olives; and they’re looking around, and they’re looking through their viewfinders and all of this stuff, and finally, they all come to the same conclusion: “Nope, this is just not going to work. But I know a place in Italy where we could do this!”

You see, it all has to do with convincing the audience…it’s perception, it’s emotion, it’s experientialism, and it’s not truth. You’re not going to get truth, because whatever you add to it - you know, I quoted the Scripture before from Proverbs - no, we’re not to add or take anything away from God’s direct communication to mankind. That’s what we base our life on, and…go ahead.

Carl: Well, I was going to say what I find interesting is that I could only make it so far through the Bible series. I could only make it to Sodom and Gomorrah, and once the ninja angels came in and started doing their thing, I was like, Dude, give them ten more minutes and these angels could take out the whole town. You don’t need pillars of fire, you’ve got these angels going off on them! So that was like my point where I said, “I just can’t do this.” It takes me an hour to go through the first five minutes in that talk on “Is the Bible Biblical?” - five minutes takes an hour to go through and critically evaluate.

Now, there’s some decent things in there. You know, I say, “What’s true? What’s false? and What’s speculation?” and do it like that, but the visuals are the key, because you’re absolutely right: that’s what they walk out with.

Tom: Now, to give you another example, Carl - maybe you’ve seen this - you see, when marketing has taken over the church, and it has to a great degree, incredibly - we’ve got marketing organizations telling us how to go about promoting the Bible, pushing the Bible, and we’ve got every kind of Bible that you could ask for, or not want, okay? - but in terms of trying to get young people from middle school on excited about the Bible, guess what? We came up with the Bibleman! Have you ever seen that series?

Carl: I’ve seen pictures of it; I’ve never watched it.

Tom: Okay, well, the point is now we have this replica of whether it be Spiderman or Ironman or whatever, but now he’s the Bibleman, and it’s supposed to get kids all excited about the Bible. Carl, you raised kids. I have five kids. So I’m giving them the option of this exciting Batman, Ironman-type Bibleman to go through the Bible, and then I say, “Okay, guys, now let’s put that away; now let’s go to the Word of God.” Are they going to get excited about that? “Hey, where’s the Bibleman in here? I don’t see it.”

Again, folks, we’re not trying to put down everything, we’re just trying to get people to think about what’s being done today as believers: how marketing has taken over, how Hollywood’s taken over, and they are serious, serious issues.

Carl: I’ll probably get in trouble with you on this one, but when I do my talk on the media thing, it is one of the points that I raise is that we’ve got a generation that’s been raised on Finding Nemo, Lilo and Stitch, and The Incredibles, and that’s reality. Doesn’t matter if I like it or not, that’s what they have been raised with, taught with, and when you’re trying to reach that generation, they’ve got a 2.2 second attention span, man; it is tough, so that’s why I use so many visuals in my presentations and clips and those types of things, because they are so visual. So, again, I don’t want to come across condemning everything - there’s a reality, and it’s not a good one. I’m not saying it’s good in any way, shape, or form, but we have a generation that this is all they know, because we’ve turned the TV into a babysitter.

Tom: Carl, I’m really on your side with that, because I have seen your videos Debunked. They’re fast…I mean, you have truth, content in there, which you are presenting in a way that young people can receive; and not just young people, but I think they’re terrific for everybody. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about trying to translate the Word of God to the screen, which can’t be done…

Carl: I agree.

Tom: …because you are moving from - as I said before - you’re moving from the objective Word of God, and we can deal with the Word of God objectively through hermeneutics, through understanding the Word - but it is God’s Word as opposed to the opinions, the suggestions, the translations that are subjective. Again, I give this example: we see a painting; it’s visual, and we have reactions to it, and they’re not going to be wrong, because they’re experiential, emotional, whatever it might be. But then right next to that painting, Carl, we have a sign that says, “When the alarm goes off, go quickly to the exit,” okay? Now there’s no debate about that. When the alarm goes off, we’re not giving our opinions, we’re all heading for the door, okay? That’s the difference. It’s one difference between the objective Word of God or the written Word of God, or writing as opposed to visual stuff.

Now, Carl, you have seen Noah.

Carl: Yes.

Tom: Give us your view on that.

Carl: One word: bad. [laughs]

Tom: Okay, no, you’ve got more words than that, Carl, I know that. Go ahead.

Carl: It is bad! I was - I’ll be honest with you, the only reason I went and watched it was because, you know, you talked with me and said, “Hey, let’s do this radio thing,” and so I just wasn’t going. I put it like this: when the director tells you that this is the least biblical biblical film ever made, that should give you a clue to how bad it really is, all right? You know, the only thing that can be semi-accurate is the fact that you did have a man named Noah and he did have three sons, and those names were accurate, and there really was a character in the Bible named Tubal-cain, and there was a boat, and there were animals, and there was a flood. But that’s it, man. I mean, after that, you are just talking bad. Now, you mentioned something in the last episode about Expelled being one of your favorite movies, and it’s one of mine, as well; but what an interesting twist that here you have two men, neither one of them are Christian -  they’re both Jewish - and one makes Expelled and one makes the mess Noah. Very interesting how worldviews impact the way that we create things. It was just bad. I mean, the special effects were - there were some good ones in there; the actors - I mean, good actors, but it was just bad.

Tom: Yeah. Well, this was not a movie that, unlike Son of God that basically the evangelical church supported by preselling tickets–there were some who kind of took offense at that, and you say, “Oh, that’s good,” but for what reason? So they okay one, which - Son of God may be more dangerous in the long haul than a movie that’s so far-fetched like Noah. But at the same time, when we’re looking at these things, there were some things that as I watched Noah, something I thought was just ludicrous, and that was something they did not promote; you won’t find it in the press releases, you won’t find it in the trailers…

Carl: Let me guess: the rock monsters. [laughs]

Tom: The rock monsters. [Both laughing] Now, see, we’re laughing, but you know, the director of the film, Aronofsky - he did Life of Pi; claims to be an atheist - but he’s into spiritual things and so on. One of the things that he’s into, or at least he had researched, was the kabbalah, and you know, I just found an article where they talked about the rock monsters - this is a part of kabbalahism. This is a part of the shoah, which, you know, I missed that part, because to me, it was just, hey, you’ve got these supposed angels that come to help men against God’s will. God turns them into lava rocks, okay, but they end up trying to work out their salvation, get back to God’s graces by protecting Noah…oh, by the way, Carl, did you notice in the movie they helped him build the ark? So…

Carl: Yeah, exactly. That’s how they could do it so quickly. They had the rock monsters doing it.

Tom: And, of course, you mentioned Tubal-cain, another name at least from the Bible. Did you know he was a stowaway before you went into the movie? That he actually stowed away…

Carl: No, no I didn’t. When I saw that I was like, “Oh my goodness. This is just bad.”

Tom: So here we have two examples of influencing people. Now, you’d say, “Well, that couldn’t have influenced many Christians.” Listen, I’ve talked to some Christians who thought it was a terrific movie.

Carl: Yep.

Tom: Now, what does that tell me? That tells me they…whether they be young Christians or whatever, their discernment is nil, if that.

Carl: Yeah.

Tom: They have the Word of God, but somehow they’re not making a connection between what they’re receiving - what somebody’s pushing and promoting with regard to the Word of God.

Carl: Amen.

Tom: And I really take to task all of the - and I think I list them in the article that I did on the “Bible According to Hollywood 2”, because I did a previous one to that - but when you see all the names of these evangelical leaders, you know, Rick Warren, Luis Palau, some people highly respected in the evangelical community (I’m talking about the Son of God now, not Noah), but they not only promoted the film, some did trailers for the film and so on, for something that’s not the Bible.

I want to go back to one more point in terms of visual imagery. Again, talk about making people upset - we’re not trying to do that, folks, we’re just trying to lay out some things that they need to think through. Let’s talk about the image of Jesus. You know, it was certainly throughout not just Son of God [and] Passion of the Christ; I mean, we could go to TV movies and so on - the one thing I would say about that straight out is it’s a false Jesus. It’s not Him. You know, we don’t know Jesus anymore after the flesh, the Scripture tells us. But people leave, Carl, they leave the movie - I remember when people were upset about being concerned about Jim Caviezel - well, who can play Jesus? Who can play the God-Man, the perfect God-Man? I mean, this is ludicrous at best, and it’s blasphemy at worst. But you have these individuals…and we said this isn’t Jesus, it’s a false Jesus. I don’t care whether it’s a painting, a drawing…having grown up in Roman Catholicism, that’s all we had was imagery. You go into any Catholic Church today, there’s an image of Christ hanging on the cross, because he didn’t finish the job. He’s still hanging on the cross and he’s being sacrificed on their altars day after day.

Now, so my point is this is not Jesus. But I had a lady write to us and say, “But you don’t understand how comforting that was, now that I have something tangible to visualize - to see as Jesus.” Carl, have you ever asked the young people, “When you think of Jesus, what image comes to mind? What do you think about when you hear the name Jesus?” What image?

Carl: Me? The first thing that flashes through my mind is someone with children, holding children, loving on children, because I just have that image of the children coming to Jesus…

Tom: Yeah, but visually.

Carl: Yeah, visually.

Tom: Yeah, okay, you see, what I’ve had people tell me, speaking specifically - not things that He did; you could visualize a - to use the term - a figure walking on water. We know Jesus came in the flesh, okay? But I’m talking about what He looked like.

Carl: Yeah.

Tom: Now, I’ve had people say, “I can’t think of anything. I don’t know anything.”

Carl: I can’t think of His face.

Tom: Yes, that’s where it should be, because if we’ve got an image, that’s going to be false, number one; idolatrous, number two, just dead wrong. I mean, we can’t do that.

Carl: But, you know, that’s really weird, because that’s exactly what I was thinking. Like, if I had a face in my mind, I know it’s not that. [laughs] I know it’s not that. So…

Tom: But in this day…go ahead.

Carl: I was going to say one thing: I wanted to take it back to Noah for one second, because you know I laughed about it being bad and all that, but here’s something that I can’t laugh about that broke my heart: how was God and Noah - how were their characters depicted? You know, when I heard Russell Crowe do interviews…and early on, man, he was very aggressive. “Hey, Noah wasn’t a nice guy. This is the guy that stood by and watched all of the people die. He was not a nice guy.”

And I’m like, whoa, hold up, man! You are totally attacking the character of God, and that’s not what the Word of God talks about. When you take the Scripture as a whole, we know that God doesn’t want anybody to perish. We know that Noah was a preacher of righteousness, so Noah and the boat, that’s like a picture of Christ and salvation. So you have taken the character of God and the character of Noah and totally distorted - and my big fear is…you know, you talked about Christians - like when I got up, I was listening to the audience; I wanted to hear what they had to say, and one lady behind me said, “Well, what’d you think?” And the other lady that was with her - they were elderly - she said, “Well, they took a lot of liberties with the Bible, that’s for sure.” But of the young people that were in there, they don’t have a clue. That now becomes their Bible. That’s who Noah was, and that’s God. God not answering Tubal-cain, God not answering Noah - that is not the God of the Bible, and that was the thing that I can’t laugh about. That really broke my heart.

Tom: And that’s the view of God, and the view of Noah, that the world receives, especially as the movie’s popular.

Carl, thanks. We’re out of time, but again, terrific! We’re going to send all the emails to you…[laughs] and I’m not going to give them your cell phone number, so…

Carl: [laughing] Thank you!

Tom: You got it. Anyway, God bless you brother, and thank you for your time.

Carl: Blessings, man.

Gary: You’ve been listening to Search the Scriptures 24/7 with T.A. McMahon, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. We offer a wide variety of resources to help you in your study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials and a free subscription to our monthly newsletter, contact us at PO Box 7019 Bend, Oregon 97708. Call us at 800-937-6638, or visit our website at the bereancall.org. I’m Gary Carmichael. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you can be here again next week. Until then, we encourage you to Search the Scriptures 24/7.