Rightly Discerning?

Receiving B&C every two months is like receiving a box of gourmet chocolates. While sampling the dainties in the Jan./Feb. issue I came across Roy Anker's review of the film Devil's Advocate, which went down like a tasty morsel. As I digested it, though, I wondered if someone might have accidentally dropped some bits of hazelnut shell into the truffle mold.

Let me explain. As reviews go, it was well done. It included everything I would expect in a movie review—basic plot, character sketches, plausibility judgments, and so on. I came away with a pretty good idea of what Devil's Advocate is about and whether it's worth seeing. Here's the sticky part: As a Christian man (in the gender-specific sense), there is no way I can view a movie that I know contains graphic sex and violence. Now, of course this is an indictment of my own weakness and not of the review. But I suspect there may be other men in the same situation. The questions raised here are huge; as we participate in the surrounding culture (and, hopefully, as Christians, reflect Christ to it), are there some aspects that are too tainted for us to experience? Just how do we go about being in the world and not of it?

Of course, it's grossly unfair to expect this to be answered in a movie review (which, I repeat, was well written); but I posit that everything done from a Christian world-view must carry at least some sense of the New Testament paradigm of this world as a battleground for the souls of men. If the paradigm is correct, and there really are ideas and experiences that can harm us, can we recommend to each other books, movies, and so on that may be spiritually toxic?

John Maulella
Glendale, N.Y.

Roy Anker's "Preacher Man" [March/ April], a review of Robert Duvall's The Apostle, left us wondering why Books and Culture fell into the trap of praising a movie that left us feeling as if we had watched a Christian version of Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Anker claims Duvall wanted to portray a Pentecostal preacher and "give credence" to a people suspected by the nation's culture brokers. That intention erred in numerous ways.

Duvall's Reverend Sonny Dewey commits murder, flees the scene of the crime, deserts his family, is in bondage to liquor, and tries to seduce a woman in his new congregation. That he does not seduce her is no credit to Sonny but rather results from her rebuffs of his obvious advances. Anker credits Duvall with creating a character who is "far from being any kind of saint." Anker claims that "what happens to Sonny is redemption" and that at the end, "Light and Love have happened, even for the likes of a homicidal rube preacher. All should be so lucky." Pardon us, but when did redemption stop including restitution and start including flight from sin? Genuine Pentecostalism stresses a power available through the Holy Spirit that delivers persons from the dominance of sin and enables them to control sinful tendencies as described in Galatians 5:16-26. Sonny is at best a caricature, a blue-collar Elmer Gantry.

Duvall and Anker continue to discredit Pentecostalism. Although Duvall's error may be excused because of his zeal and theological insensitivity, Anker should know that Pentecostalism no longer is identified with the culturally despised. Pentecostalism joined the Establishment when James Watt went to Washington as secretary of the interior.

The church's positive response to the movie indicates an eagerness among the evangelical establishment to applaud any treatment of religion in the movies rather than ask for worthier portraits of profound spiritual regeneration. Anker's appreciation of The Apostle demonstrates an accommodation to culture, a diluting of Christian values, and supports the lingering suspicion that our cultural pundits too often leave their critical-thinking skills at the theater's door.

Jonathan D. Lauer and John E. Stanley,
Messiah College
Grantham, Pa.

Beyond Reason

Philip Yancey demonstrates his usual perspicacity in the essay "Nietzsche Was Right" [Jan./Feb.], neatly summing up the epistemological dilemma that secular moral theorists pose for themselves, and cleverly enlisting the great icons of postmodern philosophy, including Darwin and Nietzsche, to make his point.

There is one crucial aspect of this argument, though, to which Yancey only alludes, and which needs much closer attention than it usually receives. He notes that, since the Enlightenment, many thinkers "have tried to make reason, not religion, the basis of morality," and implies that the failure of that project helps account for the poor condition of morality as an idea today. Secular moralists haven't been able to use reason to establish as "self-evident" any natural rights or values inhering in human life and conduct. Only the great religions are still able to assert that honestly, and believe it.

So it's interesting to note, in this essay as elsewhere, a real reluctance to abandon the belief in a rational basis for morality. Maybe, because we want to save "traditional morality," we're willing to embrace any strategy that tries to give it solid grounding. Maybe we would sooner have another failed attempt to turn this epistemological lead into gold than a successful proof that such a thing can't be done. That would explain the eagerness of Christian thinkers to embrace C. S. Lewis's argument in The Abolition of Man, Alasdair MacIntyre's in After Virtue, or Allan Bloom's in The Closing of the American Mind, where reason is always final arbiter, and Plato, Aristotle, and Kant are greater moral authorities than men and women of faith.

But reason won't help Christians any more than it's helped secularists in establishing their moral rules. As David Hume first pointed out, reason can't help anybody with moral issues, because it can't address, or even comprehend, questions of value. Anything ultimately true and valuable, Hume once declared in a letter to his clerical critics, can be neither logically nor practically based on reason, but only on "the light of Revelation." If we want to hold on to a "traditional" morality, whatever that is, or a morality of any sort, we need to stop relying on the idolatrous tool of human reason and look instead to the commandments of the living God.

Duncan Holcomb
Anniston, Ala.

Jesus in Mississippi

Your coverage of the civil rights struggles in Mississippi [March/April] was good, including the article "Jesus in Mississippi," but it would be a gross miscarriage of justice were you to fail to include an update on that which Jesus is doing in Mississippi today!

Mission Mississippi is a biracial movement of businessmen and pastors in Jackson. They have achieved a remarkable degree of reconciliation in that city and elsewhere in Mississippi and, to some degree, in cities in Alabama. The degree of their success can be partly observed at their reconciliation rallies, which have been attended by as many as 25,000. There are numerous occasions when the new level of trust between pastors has prevented racial violence. The effect upon businessmen has been tangibly measured in economics. I strongly recommend that you contact the director, Dolphus Weary, for further information. Without it, your coverage is significantly incomplete.

By the way, I am writing this as a resident of Mobile, Alabama, a city in which racial reconciliation has begun embryonically as a result of the Mississippi model.

Gary Henley
Mobile, Ala.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.