[*] The business end of the spear (3)

I think this is my final installment on this topic directly; the organ grinder post at PyroManiacs will be my leaping-off place for the broader discussions associated with this topic. I want to finish up on the question of why a provocatively-gay actor was a bad casting choice for this movie and then move on further in to the stack of stuff.

For those reading, thanks to Sharper Iron for its link to this discussion in the last installment.

Now, here's what I'm thinking: There's a kind of Pascal's Wager at-play in the basic permutations of this discussion, and I'd map them out like this:

And for the purists, please simply accept my quadrant numbering scheme, OK? As I look at this table, quadrant 1 and quadrant 4 are "gimmes": they're what you'd expect, right? In Q1, if the artist/messenger is Christian, the creative content would be the Gospel, and there's no controversy. In Q4, if the artist is not Christian, the content is not the Gospel, and there's no controversy. Is that fair?

The questions start to pop when we get to Q2 and Q3, and for the sake of this post we're going to stay focused on Q3. What exactly should we expect in the situation where the content of some creative thing is supposed to be "the Gospel" but the artist or messenger is not a Christian – that is to say, not someone who accepts the Gospel or is, as Paul called himself, a slave to the Gospel?

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You know what the answer is, right? Did you have to think about it very hard? Listen: for those who did have to think about it, the Gospel is a stumbling block to those who think they believe in God and foolishness to those who think that they don't. The Gospel is a stench of death to the unbeliever. How would you deliver a message that you think leads to death, and infamy, and a reputation of stupidity?

If your boss at work asked you to go into a meeting with his boss and tell him, "listen: I don't want to be an alarmist, but our company is going bell-up under your leadership. There's nothing good about what you are doing right now except that you go home once in a while and that lets us try to fix the problems you have caused. The right thing to do – if you really valued this company – would be to resign and apologize to all the people who work here for the things you have done to them in your tenure. So whaddaya say?"

That's a message that certainly leads to (professional) death, and the reputation you'd get – even if all those things were true – would be a pretty bad one, most of all because of the obvious stupidity of delivering a message like that. Yet, to the unbeliever, that's exactly what the Gospel is saying: admit you're a failure on a grand scale and give up whatever it is you think you have in favor of, by all accounts, amounts to shame. Do you think any unbeliever is going to deliver that message – even for the sake of "art"?

Now, that's if the Gospel message is clearly stated and proclaimed. What if there's a place on that diagram that's between Q3 and Q4 where the Gospel is frankly indeterminate? What if we come up with an decent fable which represents the Gospel in some way – for example, what if Stephen King's the Green Mile could be read meaningfully as a kind of retelling of the Gospel? King's not a believer, so don't get hung up on whether the example is very good. Think of it as a placeholder.

But if we come up with a decent fable which re-presents the Gospel artistically if not factually – which is to say, as literary truth and not as historical truth (Santa, you dirty little …) – do you think that a non-Christian would bother to make sure that the implicit Gospel would be delivered if we are pretty sure he wouldn’t bother to deliver the explicit Gospel in other circumstances?

Why would he bother? It seems like too much work to me – too much work for a bad cause. It seems to me that the unbeliever would do everything in his power to bury the Gospel truth of Christian art rather than represent the Christian aspect of that art.

Axwell Tiberius, former vaudevillian sibo... shivo... shim... oh forget it!

And most importantly: if we are dealing with implicit truths in an artistic expression, and we live in an age where the press junket is the manner by which we "get out the word" about our new Christian movie or Christian tennis shoes or Christian blah blah blah, in what way could we think that a non-Christian will rightly demonstrate the Gospel in those artifacts?

The essential problem of the End of the Spear from the perspective of ETE is that they are not even sure they want to put the silvered plastic fish on their enterprise – even thought they want (and need) acceptance from the Christian demographic. They have made a story about the results of the martyrdom of 5 men who ended strong for the Gospel, but they don't want people to be upset by the name of Jesus Christ. And in the end, they have placed their trust in delivering that message to (among others) a man who is deceived about what the Gospel says and is frankly an enemy of repentance from sexual sin.

As a final note, I really could care less if gay actors work in Hollywood. Gay actors are going to find work in Hollywood. The question that allegedly Christian film-makers have to ask themselves is whether they are going to proclaim the Gospel or not. Because it goes back to the idea that one can be an organ grinder like all the other organ grinders and still be a "Christian" organ grinder. How? In what way? By what means? For what purpose?

See: when the organ grinder is in Q2 and the monkey is in Q3, the closer to the line between left and right in my diagram they both get, the more likely it is that the monkey is in practical charge. When the artistic content is dependent of the behavior of the monkey, you're going to get monkey-business.

And anyone who's an organ-grinder is clearly peddling monkey business, regardless of the tune he's cranking out of his box. There has to be more than a tin-plated music box and a performer who is more than a fuzzy primate in a clever suit for the organ grinder to be more than a huckster who is trading on sentiment.