Controversial Movie
Good Evening. A Puritan’s Mind brings you the old time radio program The Wild Boar News Podcast from Sunny South Florida. Welcome, I’m Dr. Matthew McMahon.
This just in –
In the June 16th issue of Entertainment Weekly Magazine, they list their picks on the secular market and the most controversial movies ever made.
If you were to choose number one, THE most controversial film ever produced and sent to the theater, what would you choose?
They chose the Passion of the Christ, by Mel Gibson. The plot – well, if you read the newspaper or an article concerning coming attractions, you know that this movie claims to portray the biblical passages concerning Christ’s last week, the passion week, into his crucifixion, death and burial. This 2004 monstrosity was directed by Mel Gibson to focus upon the betrayal, torture and crucifixion.
The controversy – Gibson’s intention (which is born of a hearty, warped and twisted understanding of the Bible) quote, “was to produce an unflinching depiction of Christ’s suffering on behalf of mankind.”
I have never seen Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ. I have no need to misplace my faith from the biblical text, which is God’s Word, to the Romanized reinterpretation of Gibson’s film.
There have been many evangelical leaders that have complimented Mr. Gibson on making this movie, and hearing from God to portray Christ in a visual manner. Hearing from God? Not really. No, not at all. This movie is simply another abomination in the sight of God in violating not only Holy Scripture (since the movie was not taken from a biblical account alone, but also in part from the 19th century diaries of St. Anne Catherine Emmerich, and her work "The Mystical City of God" by St. Mary of Agreda) but also the first half of the second commandment which reads, “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth…” (Exodus 20:4)
It is no doubt that modern 21st century Christians went to see the movie. It grossed $370 million dollars for Mel Gibson. However, with such an abominable film and its blatant disregard for God’s moral law, you would think professing Christians would send $370 million dollars to the third world, or desperately poor instead of being entertained.
Not only are evangelicals not keen enough to determine the importance behind changing the Scriptures, or violating the second commandment which is reiterated all through the Old and the New Testaments, but they also seem to have a grave problem with their Christology (i.e. their conceptions of the Biblical doctrines that answer the question - “Who is Jesus?”). Is ignorance bliss? Not in God’s eyes. The only way they can self-justify breaking the commandments of God in visually depicting Christ in any way whatsoever is to become part-time Nestorians. It’s the “Jesus was a man too” phenomena. That is exactly what well-meaning Christians are when they succumb to this kind of sly devilish twist in their Christological ideas. They need to repent, seek the forgiveness of God, and reject such things in the future as abominable sins. Evangelicals are not simply trampling on the historical orthodoxy of the Protestant Church when they see a movie like this that attempts to portray, in visual form, the man Christ, but they are precisely trampling on the last two-thousand years of Christology. They have, in fact, become Nestorians without even realizing it.
This is Dr. Matthew McMahon signing off.
