The Middle Ages featured “mystery plays” that reenacted Bible stories in theaters or public squares. The Reformation replaced theatrics with biblical exposition.The difference was that mystery plays appealed to the senses, while the preaching of the Word of God made its appeal to faith, “the evidence of things not seen.” About the Lord Jesus, Peter wrote, “Whom having not seen you love, in whom though now you see Him not, yet believing you rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” While the Bible is vivid in its imagery, and lends itself to story-telling, the things it says (and the things it leaves unsaid) are designed to make real the invisible realities of the spiritual realm.
Through the years since, Christians have sensed this rivalry between theater and pulpit, and generally have held the theater in suspicion. One chief reason for this was the concern that the physical senses might smother the higher senses of thought and volition, and worse still do away with the appetite for a faith relationship.
In my library I have books about actors’ conversions, telling how newborn Christians immediately renounced the theater, or the testimony of opera singers who refused to perform anything but Christian music. Of course these books are more than a hundred years old. Today’s evangelical has long since shed these ideas, and seems ignorant of the thinking behind these longstanding attitudes. But perhaps the old thinking is not all wrong.
When the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association began to promote gospel films, A. W. Tozer wrote a stinging rebuke, “The Menace of the Modern Religious Movie” in which he warned against this very danger of the senses being acted upon to move the crowd, all the while never eliciting real faith in God.
Mel Gibson’s controversial movie, The Passion of the Christ, graphically displays the betrayal, torture, crucifixion and then resurrection of Christ. Gibson is a Roman Catholic, and therefore is insensible to this danger. Roman Catholicism promoted the mystery plays of the Dark Ages. They erected crucifixes, images and stained glass windows for the maximum effect on the physical senses. The Vatican has actively promoted a religious experience that can be felt and seen and heard. When John Henry Newman published his Roman Catholic views in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Darby’s answered in a 103-page review. On the first page, Darby writes, “The secret of the course of Dr. Newman’s mind is this: it is sensuous; and so is Romanism.” Darby’s use of the word “sensuous” is not to mean lustful. He meant that Newman was caught up in the outward senses that the Roman system encouraged, with its appeal to formulas, rituals, architecture, artwork, vestments, mystical sounds, candles, and the rest. Newman’s infatuation with sensual religion kept him from a settled faith in the unseen and eternal realities.
Of course, God speaks today as well through His creation which necessarily involves our senses. The danger is not that we might become emotional and actually feel something; would to God that we would all have more emotion toward Him. The danger is that we would mistake a sensuous experience for faith in God. A viewer can weep as well for the sufferings of William Wallace in Braveheart as shed tears for the Man on the middle cross. Are the tears any different? We cannot expect Hollywood to do in the soul what only the Spirit can accomplish.
God’s Word is not bound. To the degree that the Scripture is accurately conveyed in films like The Passion, people will have reason to seek God. But this is a mixed medium and sends a mixed message. Souls may have been saved while looking at the “stations of the cross” in a Roman Catholic chapel, and we can expect to see souls coming to God while watching Mel Gibson’s film, but let no one imagine that being overcome by emotionally charged special effects is synonymous with faith through the Word of God. “For we walk by faith, not by sight…Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer” (2 Cor. 5:7, 16).