Page 3416 – Christianity Today (2024)

For most people in Victorian Britain, Germany was a land of dark forests, romantic castles, and music boxes. The majority of the public was not yet fully aware of the controversial theories of German philosophers and biblical critics, but out of Germany had come a phenomenon that pervaded 19th-century culture: Romanticism.

Romanticism began in the 1780s and 90s as a reaction against the rationalistic universe of the Enlightenment. The German Romantic poet Novalis complained that the Enlightenment thinkers “were tirelessly busy cleaning the poetry off Nature, the earth, the human soul, and the branches of learning—obliterating every trace of the holy, discrediting by sarcasm the memory of all ennobling events and persons, and stripping the world of all colorful ornament.”

Rather than being a movement with a common code of beliefs, Romanticism was a mood, a way of looking at the world, a broad range of common concerns about how to understand knowledge and art. What unified all these new ideas was a fundamental shift in the climate of feeling and in attitudes toward emotion. Despite its secular manifestations, Romanticism in both Germany and England was primarily a religious phenomenon—a whole new way of understanding religious experience.

Truth tested on the pulses

The Evangelical Revival of the 18th century prepared the way for this transformation in England. (Its roots, in turn, were in German Pietism, one of several factors that set the stage for Romanticism in that country.) In reaction against the calm and pious rationality of the Church of England, John and Charles Wesley helped recover the lost emotional dimension of Christian faith. “Our souls o’erflow with pure delight,” wrote Charles. It is significant that, for him, this delight in response to God took the form of hymns—poetry. The proclamation that “joy” was at the heart of creativity foreshadowed the Romantic sensibility that would soon envelop the country.

“For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” said William Wordsworth, the writer most responsible for changing the climate of feeling in the first half of the 19th century. He did not merely assert the value of feeling—he showed it as a poet. After Wordsworth’s death, Matthew Arnold lamented, “But who, ah who, will make us feel?”

Known today in popular circles for such lines as “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky” and “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Wordsworth was for many Victorians preeminently a religious poet. He gave them an assurance of the overriding unity and wholeness in God’s creation that was lacking in a society passing through rapid social change. His poetry showed people once again how to feel a kinship with nature. Many Victorians received from it what they most wanted: a sense of belonging that could integrate head and heart. That truth could be tested “on the pulses” (in the words of another Romantic poet, John Keats) mattered to them quite as much as that it could be intellectually demonstrated.

Though some worried that Wordsworth came dangerously close to worshiping nature, there was always a tension in his writing between a love for the natural world itself and a longing for what lay beyond nature, a joy beyond human grasp—”something evermore about to be.” George MacDonald was perhaps the first Victorian critic to point out that this tension mirrored the classic Christian paradox of God as both immanent in nature and transcendent over and beyond it. He called Wordsworth’s point of view “Christian pantheism.”

Poetic Christianity

Wordsworth’s close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge has earned a place among the great English poets for such classic works as “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” But in the 19th century, his reputation was based mainly on his theological writings. Coleridge articulated a Christian understanding of the imagination that influenced generations of later thinkers.

Like Wordsworth and many other Romantic thinkers, Coleridge was a Unitarian for a while—and like them, turned against that tradition. Unitarianism as a religion of Reason allowed no room for the imagination and satisfied none of the cravings of the soul. Moreover, he grew to see God not as a pantheistic presence but as a transcendent Creator, immanent in the world of nature and human psychology, but simultaneously standing over against that world in judgment.

Coleridge saw his own poetic creativeness as a divine gift, a part of the wider reality of God’s creativity—”a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” The imagination is the creative faculty of the human mind, giving shape to the world and to experience through symbols and metaphors.

Coleridge believed that all religious language is poetic, containing many levels of meaning. The concrete, surface meaning is true in itself, but it is at the same time a symbol of something beyond language, an earthly lens for eternal light to shine through. Even the church is poetic—it always points to a greater reality, and yet that universal truth is inseparable from the particular, historical, ever-changing, flesh-and-blood reality of the church here and now.

The language of great literature expresses more than we can know at any one time or place. Shakespeare speaks afresh to each generation with new insights; so do the creeds; so does the Bible. Coleridge traveled to Germany with Wordsworth and realized the potentially corroding effect of higher criticism on Christian belief in England. Rather than struggle with questions of biblical literalism or “proofs of God” from design, he argued that religion is essentially an existential experience. Christianity is not a proposition, but a way: “TRY IT.” As a book, the Bible is open to the normal criteria of literary criticism and the historical method; but it is also for Christians the Word of God mediating the transcendent in and through the temporal—and because of this tension the Bible is not less, but more than ever a unified Work of Art.

The poet as prophet

In the Victorian period, literature and theology intertwined. It is no accident that the most prominent writers in “the tradition of Coleridge”—people like John Henry Newman, Frederick Denison Maurice, and George MacDonald—were both what we now call “creative writers” and also theologians.

In contrast to the individualistic and elitist “cult of the Artist” in many Romantic circles, for Wordsworth and Coleridge the artist is the mouthpiece of the community with a crucial moral role to play. Another English Romantic, William Blake, wrote that a poet must be a prophet to his age. The Romantics did so by attempting to restore what Novalis claimed had been wiped away by the Enlightenment: the colorful ornament of the world, the poetry in nature and human experience, the longing for the holy, the feeling in faith.

Stephen Prickett is director of the Armstrong-Browning Library at Baylor University and president of the George MacDonald Society. For a fuller account see Prickett, Romanticism and Religion (Cambridge, 1976) and Prickett, ed., The Romantics: The Context of English Literature (Holmes & Meier, 1981).

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

A Forgotten Place in History

Never one to be caught in an understatement, the journalist G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1905, “If we test the matter by strict originality of outlook, George MacDonald was one of the three or four greatest men of 19th century Britain.” Whether later historians agree or disagree with Chesterton’s assessment, MacDonald undeniably attracted a wide range of admirers in his own time. Queen Victoria gave MacDonald’s novels to her grandchildren and granted him a Civil Pension in 1877. Archbishop Tait said that MacDonald “was the very best preacher he had ever heard.”

Chesterton chaired the planning committee of the “George MacDonald Centenary Celebration,” held on December 10, 1924, one hundred years after MacDonald’s birth. The committee also included Sir James Barrie (author of Peter Pan), the poet William Butler Yeats, Ernst Rhys (founder of Everyman Books), and other well-known authors, theologians, social reformers, biblical scholars, ministers, a Member of Parliament, and leading luminaries of the day.

All the World’s a Stage

George MacDonald was much sought after both to preach and to give lectures on literature. Archived letters reveal that, due to reasons of health and fatigue, he frequently had to turn down requests for both. When he did give a sermon, he refused any sort of remuneration. He was actually offered the considerable sum of $20,000 per year to pastor a Fifth Avenue church in New York but was not tempted. He lectured in England, Scotland, Ireland, America, Canada, and Italy to audiences sometimes numbering in the thousands. He often spoke on Shakespeare—upon one occasion proffering the topic choice: “‘The Moral Drift of Shakespeare’s Play of MacBeth’—or for MacBeth, substitute Hamlet or King Lear.” Other subjects included Wordsworth, Chaucer, Shelley, Tennyson, Milton, Dante, and his own essay on the imagination. In the U. S., Robert Burns was a popular topic, with audiences delighting in MacDonald’s Scottish brogue (though some upper-class English listeners labeled MacDonald’s accent and manner as “poor elocution”).

Grandfather of the Inklings

MacDonald had a profound influence on the circle of 20th-century British writers known as the “Inklings.” J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” and C. S. Lewis’s essay “On Stories” are both deeply indebted to MacDonald’s writings on the relationship between faith and imagination (as is the chapter “The Ethics of Elfland” in G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy). Charles Williams, in his book Victorian Narrative Verse, included MacDonald among the 15 select poets. Tolkien and Lewis (and their student W. H. Auden) discussed MacDonald as the great “mythopoeic” writer—one who creates enduring stories greater than their medium, stories that can transform the reader. Indeed, when Lewis’s character Jane (That Hideous Strength) needs to recover in bed, she is handed MacDonald’s children’s book The Princess and the Goblin to help the healing process.

Perhaps Lewis’s greatest accolade to MacDonald was having him appear as his guide in The Great Divorce (like Virgil for Dante). Tolkien was more ambivalent, sometimes giving MacDonald high praise, sometimes withdrawing it completely. But if imitation is flattery, the correlations are many and strong—even the subtitle of The Hobbit echoes one of MacDonald’s titles, There and Back. Lewis described Tolkien excitedly to his friend Arthur Greeves as “the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he also grew up on William Morris and George MacDonald … “

A Connecticut Yankee in Fairyland

George MacDonald’s son Greville recalled that his father and Mark Twain had an intimate friendship. Twain and his wife had read MacDonald’s novel Robert Falconer while on their honeymoon, and Twain joined other literati in hosting a farewell benefit at the end of MacDonald’s American lecture tour. When Twain and his wife came to England, the MacDonalds invited them to their unusual garden theater parties, including one which also hosted the African American Jubilee choir. In 1882 Twain asked MacDonald for a new edition of At the Back of the North Wind because his children had “read and re-read their own copy so many times that it looks as if it had been through the wars.” Avid fans, they even made their father invent new stories about its hero.

At one point the two authors discussed the possibility of co-authoring a novel to avoid the copyright pirating that was occurring as their novels traversed the Atlantic. Although they never did so, the striking plot similarities between Huckleberry Finn and Sir Gibbie have suggested to some that this discussion was the germ for what became two very unique—and profound—novels.

Say “Cheshire Cat”

It is thanks to Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland and one of the earliest photography enthusiasts, that so many pictures of the MacDonald family exist today. He was repaid when, after he read them his story of Alice, the MacDonald children convinced him to publish it.

“Dinna ye ken a proverb whan ye hear ‘t?”

Although much has been made of the “Scots tongue” in which MacDonald writes, it is neither as formidable nor as all pervasive as many believe. Only about half of MacDonald’s novels make use of this dialect (which, incidentally, is called “Doric,” and is still heard in the North East of Scotland today). And even in these, it is only when certain persons speak that the dialect appears. Reading the text aloud, and paying attention to the context, is often sufficient to enable comprehension. MacDonald was actually much more frustrated by the “editing” that occurred in the multiple pirated editions appearing in America than he was by the loss of any financial compensation.

No Chauvinist

MacDonald was a social reformer in the field of education and taught in schools for working classes founded by his mentors F. D. Maurice and A. J. Scott (see Gallery). From 1859-1867 he served as head of the English Department at Bedford College, the first British institution to offer higher education to women. Through his friendship with suffragette Barbara Bodichon, he became acquainted with women’s rights and social activist Josephine Butler, as well as Dr. Elizabeth Garrett, the first female doctor trained in Britain.

At Home with the MacDonalds

The MacDonald family took the commandment to “practice hospitality” quite seriously. Both in England and in Italy they became renown for opening their doors to the community around them. Letters abound which thank the MacDonalds for their listening ears or comforting words—or for simply providing a safe haven. Many claimed Louisa as a maternal figure, addressing letters to “Madre,” “Motherbird,” and “Mother.”

While offering quiet retreat, the MacDonalds’ houses were also frequently full of riotous fun. The actor Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson remembered George and the artist Arthur Hughes dressed up in bear rugs and roaring after the children “with great gusto.” Octavia Hill and John Ruskin led off the folk dancing at one gathering, after a charity performance of “Beauty and the Beast.”

When the MacDonalds moved to Bordighera, Italy, their house—funded by friends ranging from royalty to servants—was designed specifically to provide for large entertainment. A visitor described it as “the open house of the neighborhood, and naturally its artistic and intellectual centre.” Greville MacDonald said it was “home-place or concert room, theatre or dancing-room, oratory or dining-room, the heart of every occasion being our father’s and mother’s.” On Wednesday afternoons they held public readings from poetry and classic literature, and on Sunday evenings there were hymns, Scripture reading and exposition, and extempore prayer.

The large room downstairs could comfortably seat 200, and when the local Italian community was invited to view Christmas tableaux (evoking disapproval from exclusivists in the English population), 450 were said to have stood. One attendee commented that “in some wonderful way, all classes, nations, and creeds met willingly under that roof.” The all-inclusive hospitality received notice in newspapers, inspiring others to follow suit.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Left alone momentarily to work in the warden’s office, prisoner Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption), plots a surprise treat for his fellow inmates. He activates the warden’s PA system, flips on a record player, and spreads the sweet sound of opera music throughout the jail. Initially frozen with shock, the prison guards rush toward the office to silence Dufresne’s act of defiance. After they finally break through the locked door, the infuriated warden sentences Dufresne to two weeks of solitary confinement. Dufresne later boasts to his inmate friends that the time alone wasn’t too hard: He listened to Mozart in his head. “That’s the beauty of music,” he explains. “They can’t get that from you.”

The Shawshank Redemption, based on a short story by Stephen King, expresses the spiritual longing for freedom. In this instance, music represents Dufresne’s struggle to retain hope amid a corrupt prison culture. The movie borrows freely from a rich genre of prison narratives, which Christian writers have pioneered and bolstered for centuries. For some of Christianity’s most powerful teachers, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and John Bunyan, internment has been God’s agent for redemption and a stirring source of literary inspiration.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)

The Russian czar’s guards dispatched Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Siberia-bound sled on Christmas Eve, 1849. Earlier that year, he had been arrested for participating in a socialist discussion group, whose members desired to end serfdom in Russia. After awaiting their fate for more than eight months in a Saint Petersburg jail, they learned the bad news: They had been sentenced to death.

But on December 22, at the last possible moment, a guard rode in with the urgent news of their reprieve. The execution had been staged-one last measure of psychological torture before the czar doomed them to years of hard labor in Siberia.

As the sled made its way toward Siberia, Dostoyevsky was moved by the compassion of peasant women who trailed behind the prisoners. One of the women offered him a copy of the New Testament—the only book he was allowed to read in the labor camp. Thus far in his adult life, he hadn’t had much use for Christian faith. His first novel, Poor Folk, had earned him high praise as Russia’s next great author, but his growing love for humanity suffered from the socialist shortcoming he would later critique in The Brothers Karamazov: “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”

This paradox crippled most political prisoners in the labor camps. Thrown together with petty thieves and hardened killers, intellectual dissidents often struggled to adapt to the merciless system imposed by their captors and aggravated by their fellow captives. Not long after he finally returned home in 1859, Dostoyevsky published a fictionalized account of his time in Siberia. But Memoirs from the House of the Dead briefly got him in trouble once more with the government. The czar’s censors deemed his novel’s depiction of Russian prisons to be too favorable. Given the novel’s content, it’s hard to imagine what would have appeased the government. House of the Dead ponders the prisoners’ pathetic attempts to exercise freedom despite restraints and repercussions. Even normal convicts who toiled in obscurity sometimes exploded in drunken, murderous frenzies.

To avoid succumbing to this destructive jail culture, Dostoyevsky drew strength from two unlikely sources. First, despite never spending a moment alone during his four years of incarceration, he grew to love and sympathize with his fellow inmates. In his youth, Dostoyevsky had been a champion of moral causes and had trusted in the human capacity to overcome problems like serfdom. But in prison he encountered men far removed from any pretense of moral capability, and he observed how the cruel prison system only trampled them further. He wrote of his surprising compassion for these rough characters, “It thrills the heart to realize that the most downtrodden man, the lowest of the low, is also a human being and is called your brother.”

But mere empathy would not enable the prisoners to overcome their condition. He also embraced the New Testament’s powerful redemptive possibility. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky reveals something of his own conversion from morality to redemption. The murderer, Raskolnikov, nearly grieves himself to death trying to rationalize and justify his crime. So he seeks comfort from Sonia, a faithful woman driven to prostitution in order to support her family. As she reads him the story of Lazarus’s resurrection, “Raskolnikov turned and looked at her with emotion. Yes, he had known it! She was trembling in a real physical fever. … She was getting near the story of the greatest miracle, and a feeling of immense triumph came over her. Her voice rang out like a bell; triumph and joy gave it power. … ‘And he, he too, who is blinded and unbelieving, he too will hear, he too will believe.'”

The Russian government robbed Dostoyevsky of political freedom for nearly a decade. But they couldn’t touch what he later called the “regeneration of my convictions.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918- )

The story was all too common for Stalin’s Soviet Union. A devoted communist, decorated for his service in defense of Mother Russia, dares to question the paranoid despot and thereby becomes an enemy of the state he so loves. Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered for eight years in the Russian gulags, whose conditions had improved only slightly in the century since Dostoyevsky languished there. As with Dostoyevsky, however, that which did not kill Solzhenitsyn made him immeasurably stronger.

The trouble began while Solzhenitsyn was fighting on the front against Germany in the summer of 1943. Camped and awaiting battle, he met up with an old friend who shared his passion for communism’s utopian possibilities. Yet they also shared a Leninist critique of Stalin’s draconian style. Together they secretly composed “Resolution No. 1,” which compared Stalin’s communism to feudalism.

In early 1945, Captain Solzhenitsyn was preparing his soldiers for their final assault on Berlin. But on February 9, he received an unexpected summons to brigade headquarters. With one telling question from the commanding officer—”Have you a friend on the first Ukrainian Front?”—Solzhenitsyn learned his fate. Soviet political operatives had seized “Resolution No. 1” from his friend and now charged him with conspiring to overthrow Stalin’s government.

Three months later, while Muscovites danced in Red Square to celebrate the war’s end, Solzhenitsyn watched the fireworks from prison. The fall from Red Army officer to political captive had been crushing. Even life’s most basic pleasures—sleep, human contact—had been denied him. When he was transferred from solitary confinement to a cell with three other prisoners, his spirits soared.

This simple companionship became a tremendous source of strength as he learned to cope with prison. From those who became dead to the world in order to endure, he learned that we must never surrender our humanity. “If in order to live it is necessary not to live,” he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago Volume One, “then what’s it all for?” This realization, in turn, led him to believe that his imprisonment might have purpose. He wrote to his first wife, “Years go by, yes, but if the heart grows warmer from the misfortunes suffered, if it is cleansed therein—the years are not going by in vain.”

Solzhenitsyn was still far from being a Christian. Imprisonment had greatly tarnished his reverence for the Soviet Union he had once dreamed of commemorating in literature, but there remained serious anti-Christian dogmas to hurdle. He was a true child of the 1917 Revolution, torn from his family’s Orthodox faith and indoctrinated in dialectical materialism.

Solzhenitsyn was surprised, therefore, to meet Russians who still believed in God. After undergoing urgent surgery for cancer in February 1952, he was comforted one evening by a doctor who related his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. The next morning Solzhenitsyn awoke to commotion: the doctor had suffered eight blows to the head. He soon died on the operating table. No one knows why the doctor was brutally murdered, but his open Christian faith did not help his cause in the atheistic Soviet Union. In any event, the incident was no coincidence to Solzhenitsyn. He wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “And so it happened that [the doctor’s] prophetic words were his last words on earth. And, directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.”

By this time, Solzhenitsyn felt hunted by the Almighty. He recovered from cancer and embraced Christ. “When at the end of jail, on top of everything else, I was placed with cancer,” he recounted for biographer Joseph Pearce, “then I was fully cleansed and came back to deep awareness of God and a deep understanding of life.” Neither Solzhenitsyn nor the world would ever be the same. He was released from prison in 1953, the same year Stalin died. Nine years later, he published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which miraculously cleared Soviet censors due to Nikita Khrushchev’s efforts to de-Stalinize Russia. This chilling novel, based on his gulag experience, exposed Russians and the world to everyday life as an enemy of Stalin’s communism.

Along with The Gulag Archipelago, which incited the Soviet government to send him into exile, One Day dealt a crippling blow to communism’s credibility. And it wouldn’t have been possible without a resolute faith nourished inside the walls of Stalin’s prisons.

John Bunyan (1628-1688)

Unlike Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, John Bunyan was thrown into prison precisely because of his Christian faith. Twenty-one years old when forces loyal to the Puritans beheaded the deposed King Charles I in 1649, Bunyan suffered the sting of Anglican retribution in 1660. The mere act of meeting together became unlawful for “Nonconformists” like Bunyan under the restored King Charles II. And Bunyan was a prime target. Despite his humble “tinker” background and unordained leadership, Bunyan’s sermons attracted tremendous crowds. The government jailed him in 1660 when he refused to quit preaching in exchange for freedom.

The separation from his family proved nearly unbearable. “The parting with my wife and poor children hath oft been to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from my bones,” Bunyan wrote in his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

With fresh understanding of the apostle Paul’s experiences, Bunyan ministered to his family and church from jail through letters. Suffering gave his teaching new strength. “I never had in all my life so great an inlet into the Word of God as [in prison],” he later recalled. “Those scriptures that I saw nothing in before were made in this place and state to shine upon me. … I never knew what it was for God to stand by me at all times and at every offer of Satan to afflict me, as I have found him since I came in hither.”

In 1672, after 12 long but beneficial years in prison, Bunyan was released thanks to the “Declaration of Religious Indulgence.” The declaration also enabled him to become the official pastor of his church. Tensions remained high, however, and he was again jailed, this time for six months, in 1677. Once again, what the authorities intended for evil, God used for good. During this prison stint, Bunyan authored The Pilgrim’s Progress. Born amid strife and sacrifice, The Pilgrim’s Progress gives a remarkably honest and rich allegorical account of the Christian life.

In one memorable scene, Christian and Hopeful have been captured by Giant and are being held in his Doubting-Castle dungeon. “Now, a little before it was Day, good Christian, as one half amazed, brake out in this passionate speech: What a Fool, quoth he, am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty? I have a key in my bosom, called Promise, that will I am persuaded open any lock in Doubting-Castle. … Then Christian pulled it out of his bosom, and began to try at the dungeon door, whose bolt (as he turned the Key) gave back, and the door flew open with ease.” It is the same key to heavenly escape treasured for so many years by Bunyan himself, along with Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

As a novelist and a poet George MacDonald was certainly blessed with a fertile imagination. But he was also a critic who thought long and hard about the nature of human imagination and its uses. And, as a Christian, he wanted to be able to give some account of just why it was that God made us imaginative as well as intelligent and moral beings.

MacDonald’s distinctive ideas about these things are certainly woven into the fabric of his novels and poems. But they are expressed most succinctly and carefully in two essays, “The Imagination: its functions and its culture” (1867) and “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893), both published in a collection called A Dish of Orts.

Created in God’s likeness

The first and most important thing MacDonald tells us is that imagination is something we have in common with God. Imagination is that in man, he writes, “which is likest to the prime operation of God.” As human beings, therefore, we may say that we are “made in the image of the imagination of God.”

This is striking in what it tells us both about ourselves and about God. Biblical talk of human creation “in the image and likeness of God” has generally been linked to our ability to think intelligently and to discern right from wrong. But here MacDonald links it unashamedly to that part of us which writes poetry and tells stories, sees patterns in the clouds and hears the music produced by a bubbling brook, and which is too busy wondering what might be the case to be constrained by whatever appears to be. Significantly, he reminds us that imagination does not have to do with such playful, creative and artistic impulses alone—but these are central to it. And God, he suggests, is like this. Our yearning for the poetic, therefore, is nothing other than a direct reflection of God’s own creativity.

The God who created us made us poets and artists, and in doing so granted us a unique likeness to himself. This idea has some ancient roots, though it is one that theologians have often shied away from. But MacDonald grasps the nettle and insists that it must be so. And he sees poetry as essential to a truly human existence in God’s world.

Finding God’s poetry

As a Christian, MacDonald obviously believes that there is much more to the world than meets the eye. One of the key tasks of the imagination, he tells us, is to clothe invisible spiritual realities with material forms, enabling us to grasp them more securely. This is what the poet does, for instance, when he refers to love as “quick-e’yd,” (George Herbert), to resentment “keeping its wrath warm” (Robert Burns), or to the Spirit of God brooding over the world with “warm breast and … bright wings” (Gerard ManleyHopkins). When ideas take flesh in this way, MacDonald suggests, words are duly born anew of the spirit.

Such poetic links themselves are not born of human invention, however. “Everything of man,” he insists, “must have been of God first.” So what the poet “creates” he really only “finds.” The patterns are already present in the mind of God, awaiting our discovery. Indeed, we, too, are the products of God’s own imagination, and whenever we have a genuinely “creative” insight, there is an important sense in which we are “rather being thought than thinking.” The ideas are God’s first, and ours only by grace. It’s as though God has hidden a rich store of secrets in the world he has made, and leaves us to find them out. “The man, then, who, in harmony with nature, attempts the discovery of more of her meanings, is just searching out the things of God.” And it is our imaginative capacity that enables us to do this.

Spiritual nourishment through the arts

Of course, not every product of the human imagination is “of God” in this direct way. Like all of our created capacities, imagination is fallen, and MacDonald knows that it can be the source of great evil. But imagination is not just a tool whereby we enter more fully into the meaning of God’s world. It is also that bit of us which God lays hold of, so to speak, in drawing us ever more fully and closely to himself. Therefore, MacDonald concludes, “infinitely worse evils would be the result of its absence.”

The response to base imagining should not be to suppress it (as Christians have sometimes sought to do), but precisely to cultivate and develop it, to make it “wise.” For a wise or “right” imagination is equivalent to the presence of God in us, and it is the secret of a harmonious and joyous existence in God’s world. If we try to crush it, imagination will find an outlet just the same, almost certainly for evil rather than for good. So we shouldn’t seek to avoid dreaming dreams but pray that those we dream may be born of God’s Spirit rather than some other.

MacDonald suggests that, as well as praying, there are other things we can do to encourage this. Like the body, the imagination needs food and regular exercise in order to develop in a healthy way. Far from avoiding the arts, Christians should put themselves regularly in the way of “the finest products of the imagination.” For here is not just “entertainment” (let alone the “wiles of Satan”) but spiritual food and drink.

Of course we must be discerning (there is much dross, and some positively unhealthy material which we should avoid). But how shall we ever learn to discern, MacDonald asks, unless we become familiar with what is best? Literature, music, painting, drama—these have a vital part to play in the shaping of our souls. As Christians in particular, therefore, we have a mandate to engage with them responsibly.

No higher calling

MacDonald is best known among Christian readers, of course, for his own fiction and especially his fantasy. In such work, he muses, it may be that the artist comes closest to God’s own mode of creativity as he too makes a world and then works and struggles and suffers with it. It is here that MacDonald’s influence on later writers (Chesterton, Lewis, Sayers, Tolkien) is most explicitly apparent. Those who know Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” will find much that is familiar, not least MacDonald’s indignant insistence that “for my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” Devotees of Dorothy Sayers, meanwhile, will readily trace links between MacDonald’s argument concerning artistic creation and “law” and that developed in Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker.

It is not in specifics, however, that MacDonald’s contribution as the “baptizer” of more than one great literary imagination should be traced, but in his wider recognition and rehabilitation of imagination itself as that God-given place in our humanity where depths are plumbed and lives shaped and reshaped. There can be no higher calling, he believed, than to be an instrument of God’s continual redemptive engagements with the imagination, and through it the world.

Trevor Hart is professor of divinity and director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

In today’s public-school classrooms, boys and girls learn together with others of their age and ability. They are given pictures and hands-on materials to connect abstract concepts with the observable world around them. Their teachers address them as whole people-not just brains for the memorization and regurgitation of facts.

But elementary education did not always look like this. Schoolchildren of today, though they do not know it, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), a Moravian bishop often called “the Father of Modern Education.”

A brilliant young man whose own experience of elementary schooling was anything but happy, Comenius called the schools his age had inherited from the medieval period “slaughterhouses of the mind.” He was appalled by their oppressive strictness, their stress on abstract concepts unrooted in sense or experience, and their indifference to the moral and spiritual development of their young charges. And he set out to do something about it.

Sensitive to the developmental needs of children of various ages, Comenius divided elementary schools by grades. Believing that children must be wooed rather than coerced into learning, he invented the illustrated textbook and made experience and discovery part of the classroom environment. He taught that corporal punishment, if used at all, should be connected only with moral and not intellectual faults. He insisted that girls were as fully capable of learning at the highest levels as boys. And he preached that schools should teach all realms of knowledge, including morals and piety. The Moravian’s reforms were both praised and implemented all across Europe, with over half of European schools eventually using his textbooks.

But behind these reforms lay a deeper vision. Comenius belonged to the Unity of the Brethren-a group of Pietist Christians descended from followers of the proto-Reformer Jan Hus. This small group of Czech believers had been persecuted and exiled from their mother country since early in the bloody religious conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War. It was this background that birthed a vision in Comenius for a Christ-centered, universal education called “Pansophism.” He believed that a broad-based educational program bringing together people of diverse backgrounds in a common understanding could help avert further strife.

Comenius was no naïve visionary. He knew the foolishness and futility of the world and expressed it poignantly in his rich allegory, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. But he believed that education, though not in itself redemptive, could complement the gospel by fostering international restoration, unity, and peace. People have long understood that one potential benefit of a liberal education is the tolerance and generosity of spirit it can instill in its students. Rising above Europe’s fractiousness, Comenius taught a strongly Christ-centered version of this old ideal.

Today, focused as we are on schooling ourselves toward technical mastery and economic ends, we could stand to learn this other, deeper lesson from Comenius. In fact, today’s European Union has been doing just that. “Socrates,” a government-supported, Europe-wide education initiative, has named its elementary-level program “Comenius.” The program promotes the same values that drove its namesake’s reforms of the 1600s: pedagogical innovation, transnational cooperation, and equal opportunity for all students (see http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/socrates/). May it recognize Comenius’s Lord as well.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

“A preacher he is to the backbone.” “To talk or write is with Mr. MacDonald necessarily to preach.” These statements, taken from articles published in the 1860s and ’70s, are fitting descriptions of a man whose formal ministry was brief but whose interest in preaching and religious teaching continued throughout his life.

MacDonald began to sense a call to ministry in the mid-1840s, shortly after receiving his degree from King’s College in Aberdeen. He became minister of Trinity Congregational Church in Arundel, Sussex, in 1850, but the universalist beliefs that had emerged during his studies at King’s soon became distasteful to his congregation. Unwilling to be the cause of schism or strife, he agreed to resign after serving only three years.

He did not, however, abandon his calling. He spent some time with an informal congregation in a rented room in Manchester, and was often invited to preach in churches throughout England and Scotland.

MacDonald’s doctrine and career path were a bit unconventional, but in many other respects he was very much in the mainstream of Victorian preaching. During the 19th century, there was a lively debate over whether sermons should be read from manuscript or delivered extemporaneously. Like Charles Spurgeon and a host of other preachers, MacDonald came down firmly on the “extemporaneous” side. He used only notes in the pulpit, with stenographers helping to prepare transcripts for publication in religious magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He also followed the common practice of publishing several books of sermons, which often included works he never had the opportunity to preach.

The importance of being earnest

Both the sermons he preached and those he published met the 19th-century criteria for good preaching. First, the Victorians wanted their preachers to be “earnest,” a term they used to describe sincerely Christian men who could communicate a sense of moral authority to their congregations. An article published in the Spectator in 1901 gives a good sense of MacDonald’s charisma in the pulpit:

He told his hearers of what he knew. [His sermon] was no piece of brocaded oratory, no set theological essay, it was a simple yet most profound message from a human soul to his brother souls. Here was one, you felt, who had been on the Mount of Vision and who had seen and heard things beyond mortal ken. You forgot mere logic, you were rapt into an “ampler ether, a sublimer air” than you were wont to breathe every day.

Earnestness is, of course, best expressed in person, but MacDonald apparently managed to convey it through the printed page as well. One critic praised some of his Unspoken Sermons as “arresting and illuminating,” and another noted that while his books could not capture the full force of his “striking personality,” those who read his sermons would get at least some sense of his “searching spiritual power.”

“If we are not practical, we are nothing”

Being earnest was important, but it was not enough. Once preachers had captured their congregants’ attention, they were expected to show them how to live sincere Christian lives of their own. The Victorians regarded practical application as the single most important element of preaching. A talk could be on a religious subject, and it could even be delivered from a pulpit, but if it did not offer clear and specific instructions for holy living, they judged it to be a lecture rather than a sermon.

MacDonald’s emphasis upon exhortation permeates the transcripts of his spoken sermons. A typical example is this warning against schism from a sermon on Philippians 3:15-16:

My honored friends, if we are not practical, we are nothing. Now, the one main fault in the Christian Church is separation, repulsion, recoil between the component particles of the Lord’s body. … If you delight to condemn, you are a wounder, a divider of the oneness of Christ. … Let it humble thee to know that thy dearest opinion … thou art doomed to change, for it cannot possibly be right, if it work in thee for death and not for life.

Practical application is not as immediately evident in his published sermons. These discourses are often technical or philosophical, reminding us less of Spurgeon’s preaching than of E. B. Pusey’s Lectures on Daniel or John Henry Newman’s Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford.

Application is not, however, entirely absent. In the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons, we can find several instances of MacDonald calling his readers to be diligent in prayer, to love their enemies, to worship God rather than wealth, to grow into the likeness of Christ. John Ruskin focused on the practical impact of these books in a letter he wrote to MacDonald in 1868: “They are the best sermons I have ever read, and if ever sermons did good, these will.”

MacDonald’s sermons earned Ruskin’s admiration and gained the attention of some critics, but his reputation during his lifetime was based largely on his novels. The case is much the same today. Aside from C. S. Lewis, whose anthology of MacDonald quotes extensively from the Unspoken Sermons, few people have given much attention to his preaching. In his fiction, MacDonald speaks through other characters, but in the sermons he speaks to us himself. Experiencing MacDonald’s pastoral heart firsthand can add another dimension to our understanding of his religious passions and ideas.

Robert H. Ellison is professor of English at East Texas Baptist University.

Sermon Excerpt

“To the Church of the Laodiceans”

The Christian life is a constant fighting. … You think Jesus Christ came to save you from any suffering and to do you good. He came to save you from your sins, and until you are saved from them He will step between you and no suffering. “As many as I love I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent.” [Rev. 3:19]

What does repent mean? To weep that you have done something wrong? No; that is all very well, but that is not repentance. Is repentance to be vexed with yourself that you have fallen away from your own ideal … ? No; that is not repentance. What is repentance? Turning your back upon the evil thing; pressing on to lay hold of that for which Christ laid hold upon you. To repent is to think better of it, to turn away from the evil. No man is ever condemned for the wicked things that he has done; he is condemned because he won’t leave them. …

The Son of the Father—the Eternal Son, with my heart and soul I believe, Who was ever and always with the Father; we cannot understand these things, but we get a little nearer to the profoundest truth of the Universe when we know something of the relation of the Son to the Father, for upon that the whole universe hangs—I say, the Eternal Son of the Father speaks of Himself as a suppliant at our door. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” … Do you hear Him knocking at your hearts? He wants to get in. What do I mean by that figure? Well, I mean this, that He wants to get to your inner house, your consciousness, your life, and to clean it out for you, and to turn out that self that you are always worshipping—to turn it out, and put the Eternal Father in its place … It is His Father that He wants to see ruling there. He is to be one with us in a way that there is no power in our hearts to understand the closeness of it, no figure in our language to say how close it is, for except you know how close the relation of Jesus Christ to the Father you cannot know how close the relation of every child of God, every creature that He has made, is to his Father, his origin. …

When you are unhappy, restless, dissatisfied, do not know what to do with yourself, it is just because you have not Christ as your friend. To know God by knowing Christ, that is salvation, that is redemption, and nothing else is.

Excerpted from George MacDonald’s sermon “To the Church of the Laodiceans,” in George MacDonald in the Pulpit, compiled by J. Flynn and D. Edwards (Johannesen, 1999). Used with permission.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

Sounds like … The Kry’s signature mix of melodic and acoustic rock, a la Bob Dylan or Tom Petty, with the alternative praise motif of Telecast or Common Children.

At a glance … instead of phoning in predictable worship, The Kry serves up inventive instrumentation and creative lyrical adaptations direct from the Bible.

Even without the help of a major label and playing ping-pong with several indies, The Kry has endured for nearly 15 years. Along the way, it has amassed a dedicated underground following and made marks on the Christian music world at large with three number one singles and nearly 400,000 cumulative album sales. After a three-year hiatus, brothers Jean-Luc and Yves Lajoie return completely on their own terms with God of Infinite Worth, a worship-focused endeavor under the self-run LeKri Music.

Throughout the thirteen tracks, the French-Canadian pair have retained and even updated many of the qualities followers have come to appreciate over the years. For one, they steer away from the safe and easy contemporary Christian craze, instead blending their musical palette with a mix of rootsy and ethereal instrumentation. On the lyrical front, the duo shies away from clich豠in favor of creativity, while sticking very close to their biblical beliefs. Take, for instance, the harmonica-soaked “Be Exalted/We Exalt Thee,” inspired by the Psalms. It’s far from predictable modern worship, sounding more like Bob Dylan searching his soul than any CCM industry flavors of the week. The same can be said about “Jesus Lord of Heaven,” an organic, momentum building jam fitting for fans of The Jayhawks.

“Faithful” and “Holiness” further show The Kry’s far-reaching scope, falling within the melodic, Brit-pop influence of Coldplay or Telecast. Jean-Luc’s voice soars on the dreamy ballad “In the Image of Christ,” while the instrumental “Selah” possesses an even more delicate feel given its luminous string arrangement. Such a widely stretched scope proves that a band can experience longevity without having to fit directly into formula.

Copyright © Christian Music Today. Click for reprint information.

Between the Spy Kids and El Mariachi franchises—to say nothing of his work on the original From Dusk Till Dawn—Robert Rodriguez has been making live-action cartoons for so long, it was probably only a matter of time before he made a live-action comic book.

Sin City is based on a series of graphic novels (from Dark Horse Comics) written and drawn by Frank Miller, and it is difficult to imagine a director better suited to Miller’s pulpy, anarchistic style than Rodriguez. Miller may work on more mainstream titles from time to time—recent comic-book movies like Elektra (based on a character created by Miller) and the upcoming Batman Begins (inspired, in part, by Miller’s classic Batman: Year One storyline) definitely bear his imprint—but the independently produced Sin City arguably captures Miller’s sleazy, sadomasoch*stic cynicism in its purest form. There is a wildness, a craziness, to Miller’s stories that bleeds—no, sprays—off the page, and whatever else we might say about this film, Rodriguez does capture that element very well.

Although this movie makes good use of the sax-heavy music and world-weary narration that are common in film noir, Rodriguez’s mostly black-and-white visuals are influenced more by Miller’s original comics than by any cinematic conventions. The blood—and there is a lot of blood here—is given the red spot-color treatment on some occasions, while on others it looks like bird droppings, a patch of white against someone’s black coat. In at least one scene, someone stands against a brick wall and, in the shadow, we see not simply a darker version of the rest of the wall, but more of a reverse image—dark bricks with white lines between them. And the city itself looks like a monochromatic variation on those all-digital sets we saw a few months ago in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

But there is one crucial way in which Sin City, the film, is not like Sin City, the comics. Each of the original stories was meant to be digested on its own, but the film strings several of them together, and the cumulative effect of sitting through so many grim, morbid, hyperviolent tales is numbing to the soul. You can only introduce, and then bump off, so many protagonists before it gets a bit wearying. And that’s before we take into account the sheer repetition of all the dismemberings, beheadings, and wounds to the male groin.

Some actors fit very well into this milieu, others less so. Mickey Rourke, of all people, is the stand-out as Marv, the ugly brute who is framed for the murder of a hooker named Goldie (Jaime King) who gave herself to him for free; he then tortures and kills as many people as it takes to avenge her death. I was startled and worried for Rourke when I saw the remake of Get Carter five years ago—it looked like he had taken enough steroids to kill a stable full of horses—but in this film, he’s one of the few actors who wears prosthetics on his face, and the added bit of freakishness actually helps to make him more sympathetic and human.

Bruce Willis is also quite good as John Hartigan, who may be the only good cop in town, and whose stoic, years-long efforts to defend the life and honor of an 11-year-old girl are not repaid in quite the way he expected. After violently saving young Nancy (Makenzie Vega) from a pedophile (Nick Stahl) whose father just happens to be a powerful senator, Hartigan is hospitalized and sent to prison on trumped-up charges, all because he won’t reveal where Nancy is. His wife abandons him, but Nancy writes him every week, for years. And then, one day, Hartigan’s prison sentence ends, and so he goes looking for Nancy—only to find that she has become a stripper played by Jessica Alba, and she’s in love with him.

Sin City is very much an exercise in male fears and fantasies. All of the voice-over narration is provided by men like Marv and Hartigan—it is their heads we get inside—while the women tend to be something “other.” More often than not, the female characters are there because they need protection, though there is at least one major exception. In one story, Clive Owen plays Dwight, a guy who sets out to protect his new girlfriend, Shellie (Brittany Murphy), from an abusive ex-boyfriend (Benicio Del Toro), and somehow, along the way, he gets drawn into an all-out war between the mob and a gang of heavily-armed prostitutes. But of course, the sight of skimpily-dressed streetwalkers brandishing swords and machine guns is meant more as a turn-on for men than an expression of female empowerment; the point of all this is how Dwight’s affections turn from the tremulous Shellie to Gail (Rosario Dawson), the psycho prostitute that Dwight calls his “warrior woman,” his “valkyrie.”

Female assassins of this sort naturally bring Kill Bill to mind, and as it happens, Rodriguez’s buddy Quentin Tarantino is listed in the credits of Sin City as a “special guest director,” and the film is populated by actors who have worked with both directors before—including Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs) as Hartigan’s corrupt partner, Elijah Wood (The Faculty) as the creepiest Christian cannibal you’ll ever see, Carla Gugino (Spy Kids) as a lesbian parole officer, and Josh Hartnett (The Faculty) as a gentlemanly hit man. (Trivia note: this is Rodriguez’s first film since the original El Mariachi that does not feature either Antonio Banderas or Salma Hayek.) But Sin City suffers by comparison. Tarantino, perhaps despite himself, turns his pulp source materials into genuine works of art that pose interesting moral and spiritual questions, but Rodriguez, more often than not, is content to toss off films that look cool but offer nothing of any lasting spiritual benefit.

If there is one theme that comes through in Miller’s works, it is a deep distrust of authority, whether of the political or ecclesiastical kind. In one scene, the senator played by Powers Boothe—whose brother, Cardinal Roark (Rutger Hauer), is deeply implicated in Goldie’s murder—says true power comes not from a gun but from getting people to play along with your big lie. (“Powers” Boothe talks about “power”? And come to think of it, Mickey “Rourke’s” character ends up going after a Cardinal “Roark”? Were these actors hired for the sheer punworthiness of their names?) In Miller’s world, authority of any sort is the “big lie,” but once this deception has been ripped away, there is nothing to take its place but pure demonstrations of force—and, occasionally, an act of self-sacrifice.

I’m still mulling over whether these acts of self-sacrifice tilt towards something redemptive or something more resigned and fatalistic. It is quite possible they point in both directions, but the world Miller and Rodriguez have created is so bleak and nasty it’s difficult to see what lasting value any sort of redemption could have here.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Marv says, “I love hit men. No matter what you do to them, you don’t feel bad.” Dwight also expresses concern that a potential victim of violence may not deserve what he’s getting. Do the main characters in this film have any sort of moral code? Do they treat some people as more bad or less bad than others? Do we? Should we?
2. Do you think some sins are worse than others? What are we allowed to do, if anything, to someone who has committed “worse” sins than us? How do we understand such things in light of what the Bible says about human righteousness, or the lack thereof (see Romans 2:6-11, 3:23, 12:17-19)?
3. What sort of attitude should we have toward authority, whether of the secular or ecclesiastical kind? What about when authority is abused? What is the relationship between divine authority and human authority? Does authority really exist, in some sense, or is it a “big lie”? If it is a lie, then what do we make of God’s authority (see Romans 13:1-7)?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Sin City is rated R for sustained strong stylized violence, nudity and sexual content including dialogue. There are frequent scenes of torture, dismemberment, and wounds to the groin. One story involves a serial killer who devours the souls of his victims with the approval of a Catholic cardinal, and another involves a pedophile who undergoes drastic surgical enhancement.

Photos © Copyright Dimension Films

What Other Critics Are Saying

compiled by Jeffrey Overstreetfrom Film Forum, 04/07/05

Sin City is a comic book for grownups—specifically for grownups who appreciate film noir.

Film noir, as a genre, lacks a specific definition. Landmark noir films are characterized by a prevalent darkness, both visual and spiritual. The “heroes” find themselves in difficult situations, where they have to rebel against the system to achieve their goals; thus noir often focuses on criminals driven by necessity or do-gooders reluctantly employing desperate, violent, illegal methods. Authority figures are typically portrayed as corrupt. Most have a femme fatale—an exaggeratedly sensual woman who spells trouble for the conflicted protagonist. Villains often make an impression by exhibiting an air of amusem*nt as they inflict cruel and unusual punishment. Innocent people are rarely involved, but when they are, they suffer greatly.

We’re left with an abiding sense that film noir characters live in a godless world, alone to mete out their own messy justice. We wouldn’t want to live in a noir world, but as an exercise in storytelling about what the world looks like to those without faith, it has its merits. For a thorough exploration of noir’s history as a style and a genre, read this summary by Eddie Muller (GreenCine).

Chinatown is considered a masterpiece of film noir, and so is Blade Runner—the supreme work of sci-fi noir—but American film noir had its beginnings from the ’30s to the ’50s. Classics include Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon.

Sin City takes noir a step farther. It takes the conventions of the genre and exaggerates them to the edge of lunacy. A colleague of mine described it as “camp noir.” Director Robert Rodriguez, creator of El Mariachi and the Spy Kids franchises, uses startling, stark animation with live footage, and achieves a different result entirely from last year’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or, for that matter, the original live-action/computer-animation blend of Tron.

The film, like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, delivers three relentlessly violent, sordid stories straight from the graphic novel by Frank Miller. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is a policeman with a bad heart who promises to protect a young stripper (Jessica Alba.) Micky Rourke plays Marv, a beleaguered loner on a mission of vengeance after the death of his lover (Jaime King). Clive Owen plays Dwight, who’s in love with a blonde (Brittany Murphy), but works to defend women of Sin City’s red-light district (Rosario Dawson, Devon Aoki, Alexis Bledel) from a corrupt policeman (Benicio Del Toro).

The problem with Sin City is not its genre. The problem is the way that it exaggerates the conventions—brutality, morally misguided heroes, monstrous villains, and sensuality. People aren’t likely to come away talking about the ethical dilemmas of the heroes; they’ll be buzzing about the sensationalized blood, guts, and sexuality. The film ends up appealing to a viewer’s baser appetites, which contributes to ensuring that our own world is, ultimately, a little darker.

“There is one crucial way in which Sin City, the film, is not like Sin City, the comics,” says Peter T. Chattaway (Christianity Today Movies). “Each of the original stories was meant to be digested on its own, but the film strings several of them together, and the cumulative effect of sitting through so many grim, morbid, hyperviolent tales is numbing to the soul.”

Chattaway describes this collection of stories as “an exercise in male fears and fantasies,” and says that the theme of the stories seems to be “a deep distrust of authority, whether of the political or ecclesiastical kind.”

He also compares this film to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and finds Tarantino’s work to be superior. “Tarantino, perhaps despite himself, turns his pulp source materials into genuine works of art that pose interesting moral and spiritual questions, but Rodriguez, more often than not, is content to toss off films that look cool but offer nothing of any lasting spiritual benefit.”

David DiCerto (Catholic News Service) calls it “a hard-boiled fever dream of highly stylized brutality, morbid humor and sexual imagery which—though intentionally over-the-top—pushes the envelope of even its restrictive R rating.”

Steven Isaac (Plugged In) does not disguise his disgust with Rodriguez’s film. “I’m compelled to note, first, that the way each ‘hero’ goes about doing ‘the right thing’ is beyond flawed. It’s demented. So as not to prolong my own agony (or yours) by continuing to dwell on the sordid details of Sin City, I’ll condense my conclusion to 10 words Bruce Willis says onscreen: ‘There’s wrong, and then there’s wrong, and then there’s this.'”

You won’t get a rave from Brett Willis (Christian Spotlight) either. “[The film] has no overall purpose, other than pushing the envelope just for the sake of ‘art.’ It didn’t need to be made, and no one needs to see it. A mature adult who lives right and who has absolutely no imbalances or secret sins could probably watch it with a minimum of personal side-effects. Anyone else REALLY needs to stay as far away from this kind of material as possible.”

Maurice Broaddus (Hollywood Jesus) gives Sin a more positive spin. “An exercise in style that threatens to supplant substance, the movie is visually stunning and demands viewing. If nothing else, it reminds us that our spiritual journeys are relational, not propositional (a matter of following or reciting a formula). The characters live out their beliefs, showing that even in Sin City, love, in the form of self-sacrifice, can be found.”

On the same site, Matthew Hill says the violence “feels like violence for the sake of violence—and just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.” But he adds that the movie is about “people’s undying sense that things are not right with the world. That we all, in fact, live in Sin City. And, going further, it’s yet another story about our undying sense that we need to be saved from such a place, because we won’t be able to do it alone. That we all need a knight in shining armor. That we all need God.”

Most mainstream critics are so impressed with the cast, the blend of live action and animation, and the imagination onscreen, they say the pros outweigh the cons. But some of them find themselves dispirited by the relentless darkness.

Anthony Lane (The New Yorker) says, “We have, it is clear, reached the lively dead end of a process that was initiated by a fretful Martin Scorsese and inflamed … by Tarantino: the process of knowing everything about violence and nothing about suffering. Rodriguez is pleased to flash his hipster credentials, proud of the hole where his heart is supposed to be … “

from Film Forum, 04/14/05

Sin City: Brett McCracken (Relevant) says, “If completely gratuitous, anachronistic serial pop art is your cup of tea, this film will be pure bliss. But be forewarned, the film is … full of every kind of violence imaginable, nudity, coarse language, and many other vices. Granted, the violence tries to be cartoonish in the vein of previous Rodriguez or Tarantino films, but there comes a point where even cartoon violence goes overboard. This gruesome picture steps over that line.”

Kevin Miller (Joy of Movies) says, “Despite a veneer of redemption, Sin City is a film that glories in every blood-soaked moment of depravity it depicts. I’m still not sure why the film exists. To urge us not to trust authority and to think for ourselves? To showcase Rodriguez’s considerable artistic and technical ability? To remind us of the sinfulness and depravity at the core of every human soul? I’m for all of these things. However, this film makes me wonder at what point the desire to depict evil accurately begins to create a fascination—in the filmmakers and the audience—for the very evil they are trying to warn people against.”

But on the same site, J. R. Cillian Green says, “This film is one of the most incredible movies I’ve seen this year, and quite possibly the best comic book movie I’ve ever seen.”

Mike Parnell (Ethics Daily) observes, “When the movie ends, there is no redemption—only the continued sin of those who live on its mean streets. And when all is said and done, the Psalmist rules the day: ‘They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.'”

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Noel Castellanos is the founder and president of the Latino Leadership Foundation, and was founding pastor of La Villita Community Church in inner-city Chicago.

Bill Hybels is senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, one of the most influential congregations in the United States.

Soong-Chan Rah is senior pastor of Cambridge Community Fellowship Church, a multiethnic, urban-ministry-focused church reaching postmoderns in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Frank Reid is senior pastor of the historic Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore.

CT editor at large Edward Gilbreath and managing editor Mark Galli moderated the discussion.

The main argument of United by Faith is that Christian churches, “when possible,” should be multiracial. What is your gut-level reaction to that assertion?

Reid: I think it is valid and necessary. The challenge is similar to the moment in Galatians 2, when Peter and Paul clash on fellowshipping with Gentiles. What the early Christians did not have to deal with to the same extent that we do today is how race has become an idol. On both sides of the racial divide, so much is twisted by the social constructs we’ve formed and cling to about race.

Castellanos: God has made clear that in Christ we’re all one. There is no Greek, no Jew, no Gentile, no male or female. But from my experiences, both inside and outside the church, multicultural fellowship is a lot harder to achieve than anybody can ever imagine.

When I first went into full-time ministry in a majority white organization, I naïvely embraced the theology that in Christ we’re one—and that even though we were in a Mexican community, we could be one with our Caucasian brothers and sisters and anybody else. But as you try to live that out, you realize there are incredible implications. It’s not easy.

Rah: If the statistics in the book bear out, it means that less than 6 percent of American churches are multiethnic, given what I think are the authors’ fairly generous guidelines of 80 percent of one ethnic group and 20 percent of another. Those are pretty wide guidelines, and still less than 6 percent of American churches approach that.

If we were to hear of any other institution in the United States that had those kinds of statistics, we would be outraged. If less than 6 percent of universities or government institutions were integrated, we would say there is something seriously wrong.

Hybels: Willow Creek started in the era when, as the book noted, the church-growth people were saying, “Don’t dissipate any of your energies fighting race issues. Focus everything on evangelism.” It was the hom*ogeneous unit principle of church growth. And I remember as a young pastor thinking, That’s true. I didn’t know whether I wanted to chance alienating people who were seekers, whose eternity was on the line, and who might only come to church one time. I wanted to take away as many obstacles as possible, other than the Cross, to help people focus on the gospel.

So now, 30 years later, as I read this book, I recognize that a true biblically functioning community must include being multiethnic. My heart beats so fast for that vision today. I marvel at how naïve and pragmatic I was 30 years ago.

What were your “aha” moments on this issue?

Hybels: Alvin Bibbs is an African American who leads our extension ministry and helps us with our inner-city partnerships. A few years back, when I was leaving to go on a family vacation, I said to Alvin as I was walking out the door, “God’s stirring in me about the reconciliation issue. If you can give me one book on the issue to take with me, I’ll read it while I’m gone.” He grabbed the book Divided by Faith, and I took it with me on that week-long vacation. And that book just wrecked me.

I was like the stereotypical person that Divided by Faith talked about. I didn’t view myself as being racist in any way. I therefore felt that there was no issue I was responsible for. If it was okay with me and my individual multiracial friendships, then it was all okay. And when I got to the section about the ongoing structural inequities, it devastated me. I thought, How could I have not seen this? And that was the beginning of my journey. I felt so badly about being a pastor for 25 years and having been as oblivious as I was to these kinds of issues. It was embarrassing. But these days I’m trying to make up for lost time.

Reid: One moment came in 1990 when Taylor Branch, a white author of two acclaimed books on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke to our congregation. We developed a friendship. And he said to me after about the third month of visiting, “Frank, I love the preaching. I love the work of the church. But you’re so Afro-centric that, while my wife and I would love to join the church, I’m afraid our children will get nothing of their cultural heritage here.” My internal response was, Well, all these years black people in America have had to accept the white Jesus and white angels and a Euro-centric view of Christianity, so that’s your problem.

Shortly after that, though, we had a black member who is interracially married, but I didn’t know it. So, in one of my sermons I regrettably made a negative reference to interracial marriages, and shortly thereafter she left the church. I saw her in a supermarket sometime later and asked her, as any pastor would, “Where are you now? How are you doing? Why did you leave?”

She said, “Pastor, you offended me because you were insensitive to people like my husband.” Those two events led me to meet with Curtiss Paul DeYoung, one of the coauthors of this book, to talk about reconciliation and how to start a movement for multiracial Christianity.

While the authors recognize different types of multicultural churches, they hold up “integration” as the ideal. What does true integration look like to you?

Rah: One image that most of us have discarded by now is the “melting pot,” because what it ends up becoming is a soupy mixture that has no flavor at all. A second metaphor is the “salad bowl,” where you have all these different vegetables that sort of make up different flavors. But it turned out that the dressing was still creamy ranch, and it smothered everything else.

So we’ve got to start looking for other models that point to what we hope to become in a multicultural ministry. Are we looking to boil everybody down into one unrecognizable mass? Or are we trying to smother everything with one culture so that everybody is the same flavor? We need to be honest about this.

An African American at our church should get the sense that who he is as an African American believer is to be affirmed rather than subjugated. He shouldn’t feel like he needs to become Asian or white to fit in. And that’s one reason why this is so challenging, because it means we, as pastors, have to become cultural anthropologists in addition to all the other roles we fill.

Reid: This is where our theology becomes important, both in word and practice. If we’re serious about building multicultural congregations, I think the church itself will become our new culture.

Castellanos:United by Faith draws on the thinking of Latino theologian Virgilio Elizondo, who talks about the mestizaje process of cultural mixing that took place in what’s now the country of Mexico. The Spaniards blended with the dominant pre-Hispanic indigenous culture, and out of that was birthed the Mexican people. There were two contributing cultures, but it was a third culture that emerged.

The vision for multiethnic churches is not that people should leave behind their unique cultures, but that we should be able to come together to celebrate our diversity and to allow the blending of our differences to give birth to something new. I think there’s an incredible amount of blessing in that.

Hybels: In the Willow Creek Association, we train pastors around the world. And probably the most intense experience I’ve ever had in this area of multiethnic ministry was in 2003 in South Africa, where after 10 years of meeting with the various groups separately, we were finally able to bring together the whites and the coloreds and the blacks for a single conference. We trained a thousand people in the middle of Soweto, and when we sang a couple of songs together in that environment there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. We spent the whole day talking about the power of community and what we could become if the church is working right.

So all this is about the challenge of keeping the value of culture, and having the power of Christian community be the galvanizing force that draws different people together.

How does that look at a big suburban church like Willow Creek?

Hybels: It would be very rare for you to come to Willow now and not see cultural diversity intentionally represented on our stage. You didn’t see much for 25 years, but now we’re very intentional about it, whether it’s in our drama, in our worship team, in our band, or whoever is the host of the services, there’s almost always going to be color and ethnicity represented. Again, we’re still just in the embryonic stages, but our early attempts have been to celebrate the different cultures and to bet the farm that the power of Christ can bring us into something that’s truly transcultural.

In every congregation, someone has to have a vision for what the church should be biblically and then the practicality to ask, How do we move toward that? In my opinion, a church doesn’t have much of a chance of moving in the direction this book describes until the senior pastor has a “conversion experience” about this issue.

What in your experience has been the biggest obstacle to making multiracial churches work?

Reid: It’s hard to talk about multiracial congregations without addressing the reality of spiritual warfare. Ephesians 6 says our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities and powers of evil. Satan does not want to see unity in the church. And one way spiritual warfare manifests itself in everyday life is through the issue of power.

If a denomination or local church is going to become a true multiracial entity, that needs to be reflected in the composition of the leadership. But when you start talking about sharing power, that’s usually when people get nervous.

Rah: Despite all the strides we’ve made with civil rights and racial reconciliation, American evangelicalism still looks dominated by white culture and white leadership.

One of the scriptures that we challenge our congregation with is Micah 4, which presents a picture of everybody laying down their swords in order to come to the house of God in humility. I think that image foreshadows people laying down their power to come into God’s presence together.

Laying down power will mean different things for different communities, but I think for Asians the laying down of power means our willingness to make friendships across racial lines. We in the Asian community tend to be tight-knit within our own cultural circles, often to the exclusion of others. And I think with whites, laying down power comes down to a willingness to be in places of submission to those outside of their own community. How many whites have had non-white mentors?

Hybels: I think the way a Caucasian hears the power question is a little different. It has been a turnoff to me, because the language doesn’t line up with our core values at Willow. Besides redemption itself, our church’s highest value is servanthood.

It’s never been about power. We’ve never recruited “powerful” people. We’ve watched God raise up people who have powerful and anointed ministries because they were humble and willing servants.

And so, that’s an issue that pushes my buttons. But that’s another reason why it’s so helpful for me to be around tables like this one, because it helps me understand that the question is not so much about power-grabbing as it is about justice and inclusion.

But somehow, on all sides of this question, we have to do a better job with language, because in corporate America if someone talks about power, we all know what they mean. In church, however, power can stir up other notions.

As pastors, what have you done to encourage your congregations to be more multicultural?

Hybels: First, I had to communicate at a rate that could take people along with me as opposed to blowing the church up. If I’d done a month-long series after I read Divided by Faith, it would not have been constructive. I started by giving brief personal remarks about the issue, and that led eventually to sermons.

I also started working behind the scenes to give more visibility at our services to the various ethnic groups in our church. I wanted it to become a normal part of our church before having to declare some big change that people could fight against.

We also added an African American to our board and have been intentional in seeking out people of ethnicity when filling vacancies in our senior staff. We now offer classes on bridging the racial divide. And we’re also doing Casa de Luz, which is a Spanish-speaking service in our chapel. Our feeling is we want to be a laboratory where we can practice this stuff, because I don’t know how you learn unless you just dive in the pool and start swimming around.

What about smaller churches located in predominantly white, middle-class communities? How do they begin to bring more diversity to their churches?

Rah: I would imagine that most of ct’s readers live in 99.9 percent white communities, and have to travel to meet black folks and Asian folks and Hispanic folks. They would probably say, “It’s not realistic for my church.” But when you think of this in prophetic terms, as a biblical mandate, it brings more urgency.

The fact is, it’s extremely difficult. In the past eight years since launching our church, we’ve seen numerous conflicts. There are moments when I say to myself, It would be so much easier to go to a Korean church and pastor second-generation Koreans. But it really comes back to the fact that this is God’s calling. And I think churches have to be secure in that. If it is not your calling, then you’re going to burn out very quickly.

Reid: I’m still trying to discover the principles for making it work. I’m trying to figure out principles that I can take back to Bethel, sit down with our leaders and say, “This is what God is calling us to.” And I know it’s going to be hell, because the other side of having Asians and Hispanics and whites and African Americans and various ethnic groups worshiping together is sharing power in leadership. As long as you’re sitting in the pew, it’s fine. But as soon as you begin to grow and seek to use your gifts in positions of leadership and power, that’s when the real challenge of the multiracial congregation begins.

Is such a vision so hard that we’re never going to see anything but mere glimpses of true multiculturalism?

Hybels: I like C. S. Lewis’s thinking in Mere Christianity. You have to weigh the progress of our sanctification against how miserable and cantankerous, funky, and depraved people were before they met Christ. I believe what the authors have finally crystallized is something that the average pastor can wrap his or her brain around, and I think it’s way too early to declare victory or defeat on this.

Castellanos: We can talk about this and write books about it until we’re blue in the face, but ultimately the churches have to accept the challenge. We must create a movement of multiracial churches that is so compelling that people are going to say, “We cannot ignore this.” The challenge for the church is this: Do you teach people the principles, or do you teach them to long for the reality of what God wants to see happen? Talking about it all the time can make the process methodical and taxing and burdensome. But when people are able to discover the biblical truth of multiracial churches for themselves, it becomes this contagious and liberating passion.

Rah: My 3-year-old daughter is just at that age where she’s starting to recognize different ethnicities, and I’m so excited because she now thinks it’s normal to have a Haitian auntie, a Jamaican uncle, a Caucasian big sister, to have half of her friends be biracial. That is the kind of environment that I want for my kids, and this is a part of what the church is all about. That vision keeps me going.

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Roaches occasionally crawl along the tile floor of the 80,000-square-foot space. The flags of 21 nations, representing the different nationalities of attendees, are all about the room. Sitting in the chairs are about 400 people, including a U.S. senator (Mark Pryor), a homeless man, a former nba star, an undocumented alien, a local tv anchorwoman, a Middle Eastern convert from Islam, an attorney, a disabled teenager, a physician, an alcoholic, and a blind man. It is a mosaic of a church. In fact it is Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas.

By his third year at a predominantly white megachurch in Little Rock, Mark DeYmaz had settled comfortably into his youth pastor position. But in 1997, the 40th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock schools, DeYmaz still felt some attitudes had changed little in the Arkansas capital, which is 55 percent white and 40 percent black. He sensed God calling him to be a catalyst for change in this historic battleground for civil rights. By 2001, the church had held its first service.

Mosaic’s growing congregation meets in a building abandoned by Wal-Mart. DeYmaz preaches only half the services. Early on, DeYmaz recognized that “one size fits all” doesn’t work in worship. So there is no dominant style. Seven different worship teams take turns leading Sunday services.

“If the worship style is the same from week to week, it will appeal only to a certain segment of the population, which puts up an unintended barrier,” DeYmaz says.

DeYmaz likens worship at Mosaic to a family dinner. The teenage son might not like liver on Tuesday night. Grandma might not like pizza on Friday. But they endure it for the sake of unity. And so, while non-Hispanics may not care for Latino worship at first, it helps break down racial barriers. Words to the songs at every service are projected on the wall in both English and Spanish.

Today it’s the 15-voice gospel choir’s turn. Five different people take turns directing the choir, and five more switch off singing the lead.

“Mosaic is not a church focusing on racial reconciliation,” DeYmaz insists. “Rather, we’re reconciling men and women to Christ. Racial reconciliation is a byproduct. We didn’t start this church to bring blacks and whites together.”

Still, the leadership is deliberately multiethnic: Harold Nash, an African American, heads Mosaic’s inner-city mentoring and discipleship ministry for youth. Honduran César Ortega leads the nondenominational church’s Latino outreach. Ramón Chaparro, of African American and Puerto Rican descent, runs the youth ministry. And Harry Li, a second-generation Chinese American, coordinates Mosaic’s small groups.

Those small groups, which meet monthly, intentionally blend races. DeYmaz believes singing and studying together is the best method of becoming acquainted.

Lately, much of Mosaic’s outreach has been to Latinos. Although Hispanics accounted for less than 3 percent of Little Rock’s population according to the 2000 U.S. Census, their numbers have mushroomed since. Ortega and his wife, Elisabeth, reach out to recently arrived immigrants with clothing, food, and furniture, as well as English language classes and marriage counseling.

Nearly one in five Mosaic attendees is Latino, and most don’t speak English. Bimonthly a sermon is preached in Spanish. There the majority of English speakers must wait and listen for the translation (at other services, Hispanics listen with headphones for simultaneous translation). At the conclusion of the service people gather for a barbecue beef fellowship meal. The Sunday afternoon lunch, held monthly, shows that the multiethnic tapestry is natural: There are no all-white, all-black, or all-Hispanic tables.

The grace is offered in Arabic (it might have easily been in Spanish or Yoruba) and not translated. “It teaches that God is bigger than America,” DeYmaz explains. After the meal, half a dozen people take turns being baptized in a horse trough.

John W. Kennedy is news editor of Today’s Pentecostal Evangel and a former CT editor. Find out more about Mosaic Church at www.mosaic church.net.

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

More about Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas is available from their website.

Harder than Anyone Can Imagine | Four working pastors—Latino, Asian, black, and white—respond to the bracing thesis of United by Faith. A CT forum with Noel Castellanos, Bill Hybels, Soong-Chan Rah, and Rank Reid

United by Faith is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

More information is available from the publisher.

Our October, 2000, coverage of Divided by Faith includes:

Divided by Faith? | A recent study argues that American evangelicals cannot foster genuine racial reconciliation. Is our theology to blame? (Sept. 22, 2000)

Color-Blinded | Why 11 o’clock Sunday morning is still a mostly segregated hour. An excerpt from Divided by Faith. (Sept. 22, 2000)

We Can Overcome | A CT forum examines the subtle nature of the church’s racial division—and offers hope. (Sept. 29, 2000)

Shoulder to Shoulder in the Sanctuary | A profile in racial unity. (Sept. 28, 2000)

Common Ground in the Supermarket Line | A profile in racial unity. (Sept. 27, 2000)

The Lord in Black Skin | As a white pastor of a black church, I found the main reason prejudice and racism hurt so much: because we are so much alike. (Sept. 25, 2000)

More Christianity Today coverage of racial reconciliation includes:

Growing Up at Koinonia | The focus of a PBS documentary, Koinonia Farm was the target of segregationists, a radical Christian community, and where Jim Jordan grew up. (March 09, 2005)

The Work of Faith | How the torch of racial reconciliation, once carried by Christian civil-rights workers, is now being held by faith-based organizations. (Feb. 23, 2005)

Hope Deferred | Christians are uniquely positioned to further racial equality. (June 29, 2004)

CT Classic: Confessions of a Racist | It wasn’t until after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death that I was struck by the truth of what he lived and preached. (January 17, 2000)

Martin Luther King, Jr.: A History | No Christian played a more prominent role in the century’s most significant social justice movement than Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 17, 2000)

CT Classic: The March to Montgomery | Christianity Today‘s coverage of King’s historic voting rights march, from our April 9, 1965 issue (January 17, 2000)

Catching Up with a Dream | Evangelicals and Race 30 Years After the Death of Martin Luther King, Jr. (March 2, 1998)

She Has a Dream, Too | Bernice King talks about her father’s death, her call to ministry, and what the church still needs to do about racism. (June 16, 1997)

Billy Graham Had a Dream | American revivalist preachers have been evangelical Christianity’s most visible spokesmen over the centuries. What does their record on race relations show? (Jan. 12, 1998)