Bible Nerd Movie Reviews: God’s Not Dead (2014): Part 1 — Why Challenge Professor Radisson?
In this series I’m calling Bible Nerd Movie Reviews, I’m looking at bad Christian films from my perspective as an ex-evangelical trans woman who is also a bit of a Bible nerd, evaluating how they use the Bible.
For the first four of these, I’ll be looking at the God’s Not Dead film franchise (as of this review, only four have been released) and how they function in evangelical thought and rhetoric, particularly as it pertains to how each film uses the Bible to communicate its messages.
But because there is a lot to discuss in this first film, I’ll break it down into parts. This first one will analyze key passages used in the film that propel the main storyline forward.
The Background: Rice Broocks’ God’s Not Dead
God’s Not Dead as a film is a fictionalized adaptation of a bestselling nonfiction apologetics book of the same name by Rice Broocks, published in 2013 by Thomas Nelson. Turning a nonfiction “argument for the truth of Christianity” book into a fictional story is no small task, and it’s a rather strange one too. Broocks didn’t write a story — he wrote a series of arguments.
Nothing in Broocks’ book is particularly “new” for an apologist to say. It’s a standard Christian apologetics book. Like countless other authors who have written countless other books in this genre, Broocks repeats several “Christian apologetics book” tropes, such as when he appeals to 1 Peter 3:15 as an imperative to defend one’s Christian faith and cites that the cover of Time magazine back in 1966 once asked “Is God Dead?,” which was an allusion to a quote from German atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that “God is dead.”
Piggybacking off this book’s success, the filmmakers behind the movie version of God’s Not Dead decided to craft a fictional story in their movie in which the main character is a Christian faced with having to deal with someone telling them that God is “dead.” At the time the movie came out, the common observation among the movie’s critics was that it sounded like its plot was based a common email forward from your Christian grandma, one about a brave Christian student who bests an atheist philosophy professor who challenges their faith. The story was written by Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman, screenwriters from a conservative Catholic background. It should be noted here how often white evangelicals and Catholics in the U.S. often unite to dunk on what they call “the secular world.” Rice Broocks, an evangelical himself, is even credited by the film as conducting the “apologetics research” for the story (in subsequent parts, we’ll take a look at how he did).
Though it came out back in 2014 — distributed then by Pure Flix Entertainment (now known as Pinnacle Peak Pictures) — it remains popular. There is already a fifth film in the immensely successful franchise it spawned in the works.
Plot Synopsis
Here’s a synopsis of its central plot:
Our white cis-het male Christian hero, Josh Wheaton (all the reviewers of this film talk about how his name is too similar to famous director “Joss Whedon,” but I notice how it’s such a generic white cis-het Christian male name), is a Christian student attending a public university in Louisiana in the present day, and he goes to sign up for classes outdoors for some reason instead of online. While he is doing so, the student helping him asks which elective he would like to take. He replies that he’d like to take Philosophy 150 with Professor Radisson. The student helping him is concerned, noticing Wheaton’s cross necklace hanging around his neck, and he encourages Wheaton to take a different course, implying that Professor Radisson is so anti-Christian that Wheaton would do better to choose a course with a different professor. But Wheaton insists on sticking with this course (it’s the only one that works with his schedule, after all).
And what do you know? The concerned student was right. On the first day of class, Professor Radisson, played by Kevin Sorbo (known for his role on Hercules), sings the praises of atheism and hands out small pieces of paper on which he wants his students to write “God is dead” and sign their names. Like confessional statements that many Christian colleges in real life require their students and/or faculty to sign. Projection, much?
Obviously, this does not happen in real life. But this is what happens in the film. And sure enough, Josh protests that he can’t do what Professor Radisson wants because he’s a Christian. So the alternative that Professor Radisson gives to him is that Josh will present his own arguments for his position to the class for the last twenty minutes of each subsequent three class periods. They both end up agreeing that the students will be the final judges of whether Josh succeeds or fails to make a compelling case for the “antithesis, that God is not dead.”
Josh wrestles with what he had gotten himself into. Can he prove that God’s not dead? Or will he fail? Or should he even keep trying and just do what it takes to get an A in this class at all costs, even if it means not standing up for his faith and being true to his beliefs?
A Pivotal Scene: Josh and Reverend Dave
Much has been written already about how badly this film caricatures atheists. I’m not interested in talking about that. What I’m more fascinated with here is how the Bible is used by the filmmakers in communicating their message.
There’s a scene I want to talk about that is pivotal for the plot. Despondent and unsure of whether to take up Professor Radisson’s challenge, Josh enters a church and talks to Reverend Dave (played by Pinnacle Peak Pictures co-founder and veteran Christian movie actor David A.R. White), who persuades him to go ahead and do it.
Reverend Dave asks Josh if he thinks any of the students in his class would ever enter any church building, and Josh says no. (Um, this takes place in Louisiana…hello?) In response to this, Reverend Dave says, “So, your acceptance of this challenge, if you decide to accept it, may be the only meaningful exposure to God and Jesus they’ll ever have.”
Curious that Reverend Dave says “God and Jesus” here, separating the two, despite the well-known linchpin of Christian orthodoxy that is the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity, that Jesus is God Incarnate, specifically the Second Person of the Trinity.
It’s an interesting writing choice from filmmakers who undoubtedly nevertheless would likely tell you (I’m willing to bet) that they believe that Jesus is God.
What’s also interesting is the stress on it being the “only meaningful exposure” that every other student in Josh’s class will have to “God and Jesus” (i.e., “Christianity”), despite the fact that this takes place in Louisiana. Of course that is ridiculous from a real-world perspective, but that isn’t the lens the filmmakers are using. They’re operating with a lens that assumes a mostly hostile world to their faith, despite Louisina being right in the middle of the Bible Belt.
Unpacking the Proof-texts: Matthew 10:32 and Luke 12:48
So Josh is now obligated, which is where the film’s use of key Bible passages come in:
Reverend Dave asks Josh to check out two scriptural texts:
- Matthew 10:32–33
- Luke 12:48
In a later scene, we see Josh in his dorm room, looking up the verses Reverend Dave told him about. The poor editing shows him turning to Luke when reads from what is supposed to be Matthew 10:32–33, which the film presents to us in the English Standard Version (the ESV), which, for consistency’s sake, is the translation we will use throughout this review unless otherwise indicated:
So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.
The speaker here is Jesus.
This is part of the lengthy set of instructions in Matthew 10 that he gives to the twelve disciples he sends out, to whom he commands, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (verse 5), though the passage as a whole suggests that eventually the message of Jesus through his disciples will eventually get to the Gentiles anyway (see verse 18). But the filmmakers don’t care about this setting for this passage. The function here isn’t to pay attention to the context but to cajole Josh into taking Professor Radisson’s challenge. The implication is that if he doesn’t, then he is effectively denying Jesus “before men” (more on that in a bit), which will then cause Jesus to deny Josh before God the Father.
Josh then turns to Luke 12:48, where he reads the following from the words of Jesus according to the writer of the Gospel of Luke:
Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.
But that’s only the second half of Luke 12:48. Josh doesn’t read the whole verse. There’s a reason why the filmmakers don’t have Josh do this, of course, as should be evident when you read the entirety of Luke 12:48:
But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.
If the filmmakers had Josh read the whole verse, as any normal person would do when asked to turn to Luke 12:48 and read from it, he would have probably had more questions, and it would have distracted from the story the filmmakers wanted to tell.
It’s only when you back up and read the entirety of the parable Jesus is telling his disciples in Luke 12 that you get the point. Jesus is telling a parable about slavery, which makes sense in the ancient world but not to the modern one. His parable is about an unfaithful slave — specifically, an unfaithful “household manager,” an οἰκονόμος (oikonomos, one who manages his master’s property in the ancient Greco-Roman world). Jesus contrasts a slave who knew his master’s will but didn’t do as he was told and therefore gets a “severe beating” (verse 47) with a slave who was ignorant of his master’s will but who gets a “light beating” (verse 48). The ESV attempts to soften the word the passage uses for the rank this household manager holds in society (δοῦλος, doulos) by translating it as “servant,” but δοῦλος means “slave.”
Instead of wrestling with this obviously problematic language (to do so would be to flirt with denying inerrancy, and you can’t do that in evangelicalism), Josh hones in on the final summary statement of the point of Jesus’ parable. A lot is expected of him, the filmmakers want us to know, because he was given a lot of responsibility as the sole Christian in his philosophy class of heathens. He shouldn’t squander his opportunity…or else.
A Male-Centered Intellectual Hero Story
So taken together, both of these texts as used by the filmmakers here fulfill the function that 1 Peter 3:15 normally does in a Christian apologetics book: They require Josh to stand up for his faith.
They confirm what Reverend Dave tells him is the “still small voice” inside him — a reference to a Hebrew phrase in 1 Kings 19:12, קוֹל דְּמָמָה דַקָּה, qôl d’māmâ daqqâ, that the ESV translates as “a low whisper” but that the KJV translates as “a still small voice” — has been telling him all along:
“Don’t listen to your girlfriend. Don’t drop the class to save your academic career. Take the challenge. Stand up for your faith! Argue for it. Acknowledge Jesus ‘before men,’ as Matthew 10:32–33 says. Much is required of you, as Luke 12:48 says.”
The fact that the ESV is the translation Josh uses here underscores the male-centered nature of the film (note the phrase “everyone who acknowledges me before men” in the ESV’s rendering of Matthew 10:32–33, emphasis mine), which is further bolstered by the fact that Josh’s girlfriend is the one who insists that he drop the class.
In the preface to The ESV Study Bible, the ESV Translation Oversight Committee explain that the translators insist on reflecting in their renderings the grammatically masculine language that biblical writers often use whenever they think that meaning is meant:
In the area of gender language, the goal of the ESV is to render literally what is in the original. For example, “anyone” replaces “any man” where there is no word corresponding to “man” in the original languages, and “people” rather than “men” is regularly used where the original languages refer to both men and women. But the words “man” and “men” are retained where a male-meaning component is part of the original Greek or Hebrew. [See The ESV Study Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), p. 20.]
Evidently, the ESV translators consider the use of the noun ἄνθρωποι (anthrōpoi) in Matthew 10:32–33 to be deserving of the rendering “men” and would insist that there is “a male-meaning component” as part of that original Greek in this context. They may argue for their decision here because the phrase ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων (emprosthen tōn anthrōpōn, “before men” in their rendering) could be primarily suggesting being before people with any kind of position of political power, who in the ancient world were more likely (but not inevitably) to be male. But Jesus sends his disciples in this passage out to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and then eventually to the nations, who would have populations more than just men, and it’s not demanded by the context that we see the “men” before whom Jesus is being acknowledged as a bunch of different rulers (verse 18 describes rulers, but see verse 27, for example). It could simply be a crowd, which could make up both men and women. It’s well known that the Greek word ἄνθρωποι (anthrōpoi), though grammatically masculine, is frequently used in Ancient Greek literature to mean “human beings regardless of gender,” as I think it means here. So I think the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is nearer the mark by rendering ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων (emprosthen tōn anthrōpōn) as “before others.” If being literal is your goal, “before people” is a better translation, but the point here is that the text in its original language is not trying to make anything about gender in this instance, contrary to how the ESV understands it.
If you look into it, it’s actually quite frequent throughout its renderings of biblical passages that the ESV considers grammatically masculine language as having a “male-meaning component.”
So in that regard, because the story’s male hero, Josh, uses an ESV, it fits with the male-centered main narrative thread of the film. And so Josh’s quest is to acknowledge Jesus “before men” no matter the academic risk to his career, despite the fact that Josh’s class clearly has more than just men in it. Perhaps in this case, then, it is Professor Radisson who represents one of the “men” before whom Christians like Josh are meant to acknowledge Jesus, if the filmmakers understand the word “men” in the passage to refer to men in powerful positions.
Preview of Part 2: The Women of God’s Not Dead
The major female characters of God’s Not Dead are portrayed as either wrongheaded, like Josh’s “temptress” girlfriend Kara, or as in need of guidance or correction from male characters. Even the heroines of the film’s minor side plots — Ayisha the Mulsim-turned-evangelical-Christian character and Professor Radisson’s Christian girlfriend Mina — all seek at some point the input of Reverend Dave, one of the film’s core Christian male authority figures, in order to resolve their respective predicaments. Amy, a female atheist blogger who winds up with a cancer diagnosis and a breakup with a comically despicable man she was dating, finds herself in an impromptu therapy session with the Newsboys just before their big concert at the end of the film, where they convince her to convert and then lead her in a prayer to become a Christian. Again, she is “fixed” by Christian male authority figures — in this case, members of a Christian rock band.
In part 2 of this review, we’ll talk about how Scripture is used in the storylines of these female characters.
Conclusion: Is Defending God Necessary?
As I mentioned earlier, Matthew 10:32–33 and Luke 12:48 are presented in this film as fortune-cookie aphorisms. They’re not meant to take into account the context. That’s not the goal. The goal is for them to be the verses that propel Josh into standing up for his faith.
Is that a legitimate use of these texts?
I don’t really know how to answer that question. Even the New Testament writers divorce various passages in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the “Old Testament”) from their respective contexts when they cite them, appropriating them for their own purposes. If those count as legitimate uses of biblical passages, then maybe this film’s use of these New Testament texts are just fine and dandy. It doesn’t have to account for the fact that Matthew 10:32–33 contain instructions primarily intended for Jesus’ twelve main disciples or that the ESV’s translation “men” doesn’t necessarily reflect what is meant by the Greek, and neither does it have to contend with the problematic “slavery” language of Luke 12 if ignoring that context is convenient for the filmmakers’ intentions.
Matthew 10:32–33 and Luke 12:48 are used by the filmmakers to get Josh to defend his faith intellectually, something apologists usually use 1 Peter 3:15 to argue for. That is, to argue for the necessity of the enterprise of Christian apologetics. Josh is convinced by these passages that he must argue the “antithesis” of Professor Radisson’s position, “that God is not dead,” that God is relevant.
I do think one must carefully weigh one’s reasons for believing what they do. But Josh says at one point in the film to his girlfriend Kara, “I feel like God wants someone to defend him.” Why? From what or whom does God need “defending”? I understand that this line is foreshadowing Josh’s later conversation with Reverend Dave and the passages Dave asks him to look at, but did Jesus say in Matthew 10:32–33, “So everyone who defends me before people, I will defend before my Father who is in heaven”? The verb is ὁμολογέω (homologeō), which doesn’t mean “defend” but “acknowledge,” often in public. Hasn’t Wheaton already acknowledged Jesus before others at this point in the story by refusing to sign Professor Radisson’s “God is dead” confessional statement? What more does he have to prove?
After Kara tells him that the idea of God wanting someone to defend him is “ridiculous” (and I think she’s right), Wheaton replies, “I don’t know. I just keep thinking of that C.S. Lewis line: ‘Only a real risk can test the reality of a belief.’” As he says this, Ayisha the Muslim girl, who is working in the background, overhears him (we’ll discuss the biblical texts that come into play with her story next time). It’s a good quote. It’s taken from A Grief Observed, a collection of Lewis’s writings in which Lewis processes the death of his late wife and his own grief over it. See C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Singapore: C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd, 1996), pp. 32–35, Kindle edition. This isn’t a biblical text, of course, but evangelicals often treat Lewis as though he himself is an author inspired by God (even though they likely wouldn’t consider him officially to be so). In context, Lewis is wrestling with his beliefs about the postmortem existence of Helen Joy Davidman, his departed wife he had lost to cancer. He writes this line after bringing up examples of risks that test whether something you believe or trust really is worth it, such as asking someone to keep a secret or checking to make sure a rope is secure before climbing it over a precipice. He compares these examples to his belief that when he is praying for the dead, they still “exist” in some sense. When he tries to pray for “H.” (Helen), he can’t. His act of praying for her is the “risk” that “tests the reality” of his belief about her postmortem existence.
Perhaps it isn’t God who wants Josh to defend him. Perhaps it’s Josh who who wants to test if his own faith in God is real.
This, to me, is what Christian apologetics actually is. When I was a Christian apologist, my motivations were to find good intellectual arguments to support the truth of the traditions I had been raised with. I thought that I was trying to convince others that Christianity was true or at least reasonable, but what I was really doing was trying to convince myself.
Anyway, stay tuned next time for some discussion of how biblical passages are used within the storylines involving the women of God’s Not Dead.
