SHOULD THE BIBLE BE X-RATED?

When I was a young teenager, my mother had a habit of monitoring the books I checked out of the library while I was at school. She became so upset when she read a John Steinbeck novel I was reading, that she “turned me in” to our pastor and asked him to have a man-to-man talk with me. So at a lull in one of our youth group get-togethers, he took me aside and conveyed my mother's concern. Fortunately, the pastor at the time was only in his late 20's or early 30's, and so he was rather bemused, and not at all worried, about the situation.

If I had only been better acquainted with the biblical narratives at the time, I am afraid that I would have been sorely tempted to point out to my mother certain passages in the Bible and to tell her that I was concerned about her choice in reading material.

The point is that it is not really the specific events themselves which are being narrated in a story that make it prurient literature; it is more dependent on (1) the context in which they are presented and (2) what is in the eye and mind of the beholder.

Concerning that latter point, I am reminded of two quite different movie scenes. The first appears in “The Music Man” where Hermione Gingold sings about all the “dirty books” in the town library by Rabelais, Chaucer and Balzac. She takes special relish over the last word, pronouncing it as if it in itself were a dirty word.

The second example comes from “A Clockwork Orange,” a movie denounced equally by conservative Christian groups and the atheistic Russian press. In one scene, the teenage anti-hero who has no socially redeeming qualities is in jail and given only the Bible to read. He immediately gravitates to the Old Testament where he practically salivates over the gory battle scenes he finds there. It has absolutely no redeeming effect on him. This movie was widely denounced in pulpits across the United States who became fixated on the scenes of sex and violence in it. At the same time, the atheistic press in the USSR equally lambasted it as an example of blatant Christian propaganda. I am afraid that I must give credit to the Russians for having the intelligence and perception to see beyond the surface and realize what the theme, rather than just the content, of Stanley Kubrick's movie (based on the book by Anthony Burgess) was all about. And that overarching theme was that salvation from our sinful condition cannot be found in punitive laws or psychological conditioning; It can only come from a voluntary turning of ourselves over to God.

There are some valuable insights in Leland Ryken's book Culture in Christian Perspective which address this general subject. He begins by stating, “When we talk about immorality at the level of subject matter we usually mean realism. Realism is the explicit portrayal of human depravity in all its sordid forms...Thinking Christianly about realism begins with an awareness that the Bible affirms the necessity and legitimacy of realism as an artistic technique.The Bible depicts the full range of human depravity and as such adopts the basic strategy of realism.”

As biblical examples, he offers, just in the field of sexuality, the following:

    Attempted homosexual rape (Genesis 19)

    The rape of Dinah (Genesis 34)

    Description of Onan's birth control method (Genesis 38)

    Samson's sexual relations with the harlot of Gaza (Judges 16)

    A priest's concubine thrown to a mob who rape and abuse her, causing her death (Judges 19)

    David and Bathsheba's adultery (II Samuel 11)

    The incestuous rape of Tamar by her half-brother (II Samuel 13)

To these we might add a drunken Lot having sex with both his daughters (Genesis 19); Tamar disguising herself as a prostitute so that she could have sex with her father-in-law (Genesis 38); Absalom publicly having sex with all his father's concubines (II Samuel 16); the graphic story of the prophet Hosea's wife many sexual dalliances; and the x-rated fantasies in Song of Solomon.

Without trying to capture all that Ryken has to say in his book regarding this issue, here are some especially useful points to keep in mind:

“The presence of realism in the Bible refutes a common misconception that works of art automatically encourage approval of everything they portray. This is a totally untenable position. Art has two main themes – life as it should be and life as it fails to match that ideal.”

“In appropriating what is legitimate in modern realism, Christians may have to put up with some objectionable subject matter in order to gain whatever positive benefits a work has to offer in terms of insight and the enlargement of our sense of compassion.”

“We should make a distinction between subject matter and theme in art...The subject matter is the outward or obvious content of the work – the setting, objects, characters, and actions. The theme is the perspective that the work offers toward that content. My claim is that a Christian may find it useful, some of the time, to overlook offensive subject matter – profanity, explicit portrayal of sex, violence – in order to benefit from significant perspective or insight.”

“The question that a Christian must therefore answer is, Does the moral or intellectual significance of a work exceed in value the possible offensiveness of any of its parts? The answer will vary for individual Christians with individual works, and it will even vary for the same person from one occasion to another.”

As an example of that last statement, I once took the time to read entirely through two long novels by the Marquis deSade. I would certainly not recommend that author to just anyone, but for me it served as a powerful reminder of how low a person can sink into sin and justify it to himself once he has rejected all notions of God. By that I am not saying that all atheists live such evil lives as the Marquis did. In fact, some of the most upright and “moral” people I have known were avowed atheists or didn't really think about theology at all.

As a final example of the power of good writing to influence others (even inadvertently), there is the story of the atheist director John Huston choosing the novel Wise Blood to film because he thought it was intended as a parody of Christianity. It was only after he had finished the movie and viewed it himself that he realized, in his own words, “I had been had.

In fact, the author, Flannery O'Connor, was a committed Christian, and the underlying theme of her book strongly reflected that faith position even though the actual characters in the novel and their actions were rather bizarre and extreme.

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