Brian Godawa is a member of a growing cadre of savvy evangelicals who are making a place for themselves in Hollywood. He is known in the entertainment industry for his screenwriting, having written, among other things, To End All Wars (2001) and the PBS documentary The Wall of Separation (2006).
Within evangelical circles he is perhaps better known for his book Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom & Discernment (IVP, 2002). Its title tells the tale. It is essentially worldview critique applied to popular film. It proved helpful to the many people who wanted to venture outside the ghetto of "Christian films" in safety.
Whereas his earlier book was essentially defensive in posture, his latest, Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination, encourages Christians to create visual art with the goal of communicating a Christian worldview. Like Hollywood Worldviews, it comes with an impressive set of endorsements.
Mr. Godawa makes his case with a good deal of postmodern panache. He informs us that the problem with modern Christianity is modernity. Most evangelicals are just too logocentric and rational. What the world needs is a more sensual, more visual Christianity. His prescription is a return to what he calls the "equal ultimacy" of word and image.
He begins with showing how images are already present in the biblical text. Chapter 2, "Literary vs. Literal," is worth the price of the book. Here he points out something every literary artist already knows–most people don't know how to read.
Fruitful reading depends on two things: first, observing the conventions of the genre you're reading; and second, doing so tacitly–by feel. (Consulting a guide is like consulting a rulebook at Wrigley Field. When you're looking at the rules, you're not watching baseball.) But most folks don't even know there are rules for literature, let alone different rules for different genres. Instead they rely on a standard set of rules they've absorbed by osmosis. As the old saying goes, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," so they hammer away. Since modern people want Bibles that are flat-footed and factual, they miss subtle and allusive appeals to the imagination. Sadly, this preference for propositional truth at times subverts the Bible's persuasive beauty.
But subversion isn't always a bad thing. Whereas chapter 2 scolds moderns for subverting biblical literature through bad reading, chapter 6 ("Subversion") encourages us to read culture properly with the goal of subverting it. Here Godawa uses the apostle Paul at Mars Hill to show how it is done. His treatment of Acts 17 is helpful, particularly in demonstrating how Paul, for most of his address, worked within the storyline of Stoic teaching, waiting until the very end to introduce the resurrection and its radical implications.
It's worthwhile to pause and remind ourselves that Paul was not a postmodernist. Radical postmodernists, in their enthusiasm for autonomous texts, untether cultural and literary narratives, leaving them to float along with no basis in reality. But here the apostle Paul demonstrates that history and truth are not merely modern preoccupations. The Bible is a record of real events, literary tropes notwithstanding. Stoicism was subverted not merely rhetorically but in fact by God. Don't credit nifty storytelling; credit an empty tomb.
Chapters 3 through 5 take up the quest for "equal ultimacy" in earnest: "Word versus Image," "Iconoclasm," and "Incarnation." Notice a progression?
Chapters 3 and 4 assail the primacy of words, using the modifier "mere" with distressing frequency, as in "mere words." But the whole tenor of the argument struck me as off-key. Throughout most of the Bible, "word" does not denote "proposition" or "idea" or "rationality" but the richly evocative image of something spoken.
In both testaments, wonderfully ambiguous Hebrew and Greek words connect God's speaking to God's breathing life into dead things. That's one reason why, when ancient Jews and Christians gathered, they came to listen rather than to see. Sometimes they listened to stories, other times to poetry, and sometimes they even listened to propositions. But the important thing was that they listened to words from God. And the hope was that faith would result from hearing them, and with faith, life.
This brings us to Godawa's use of the word "incarnation" in chapter 5: "Images are concrete expressions of abstract ideas, the existential embodiment of the rational word. Images, whether they are stories, pictures or music, are incarnations of ideas–words made flesh" (102).
What should we say to this? This appeal to the incarnation appears to be the keystone of his argument. But it fails. The differences between what humans do with their arts and what God did in the incarnation makes the analogy unpersuasive. The second person of the Trinity is not an idea, he is a person. In the actual incarnation, the Son takes on flesh to redeem what he has already made and in so doing remakes it; whereas Godawa's view seems to imply that "concrete expressions" make "abstract ideas" real to those with whom we communicate. In the biblical incarnation, the conferral of reality moves in the other direction.
In our day of PowerPoint preaching and JumboTron talking heads, Word Pictures will likely find a ready audience. But do people really need more emotionally charged imagery, or do they need the real presence? Where must we look to find it? This is why I come away from Word Pictures even more committed to the divinely ordained media for communicating the gospel, Word and Sacrament. Whatever power our arts have to communicate saving grace, they derive from them. Our arts do not make them more real. The movement is in the other direction. As artists as diverse as Rembrandt and Flannery O'Connor have shown, whatever reality our arts convey, they receive from the means of grace.
