Everyone knows the type of theological criticism that consists in finding “Christ figures.” A high-school aged friend of mine uses this kind of theological criticism to convince his parents to let him go to R-rated movies. All he’s got to do is find an appropriate Christ figure in the story somewhere. If someone dies for someone else (or even just suffers a bit for ‘em), or really if anyone vaguely protagonistic dies at all, or better yet appears to die and then shows up later — we have a Christ figure! I for one am just a bit sick of Christ figures. Not because I deny the human need for saviors and examples but because I feel there is more to be said about films than whether this or that character is a Christ figure — though part of what I will propose involves a method extending the methodology behind this kind of thematic comparison.

Another common kind of theological criticism involves noting all Christian paraphanelia and “symbolism.” Did you notice the pigeons (which are kind of like doves) around the church in Mary Poppins? Doesn’t Tatooine remind you of Galilee (from a review in Christianity Today, which combined both this stunning insight and the revolutionary idea that maybe Luke Skywalker is a Christ-figure). When Ricky Bobby runs around in his underwear slapping imaginary flames, were you reminded of Christ’s nakedness and agony on the cross? OK, strike the last example. You know what I’m talking about.

Finally, a particularly objectionable kind of theological criticism attempts to discover the “underlying worldview” of a film — which would be a good insight, if such critiquers could only recognize that narrative is prior to the theoretical system they take “worldview” to mean. That’s one of the reasons Ross Douthat’s recent critique of Avatar was so lame. For him, the real meaning of Avatar was that it was an exposition of Cameron’s “Hollywood pantheism.” It seemed like a review based on previews rather than on an actual watching of the film. (Query: did Douthat in fact see the film? Or did he just watch previews and read a wikipedia summary? Show us the ticket! This is at least as important as Obama’s birth certificate.) Everything is oh-so-cleverly squared away according to a pre-existing typology of religious perspectives, and the pigeon-holed objects can then be deployed polemically as ammunition in the “culture war.” Surely theologians have better things to do.

If I were to speculate on which kind of common theological criticism is most valuable, I would probably go with Christ-figure-hunting. This kind of comparison at least implies the belief that theology can speak to popular narratives, because it originally has to do with a narrative itself. It seems to me that what is “theological” about stories is the way they function in faith and then, accordingly, their content; consequently, these two aspects of stories are what theologians as theologians can most directly talk about. Let me flesh this out with some help from Hauerwas and Bruegemann.

Hauerwas’s essay, “A Story Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down,” involves one of his most entertaining arguments for the centrality of narrative to moral and political life. (By the way, he’s talking about the book Watership Down rather than the movie; but I think his example is still applicable because theological criticism of films is usually theological criticism of stories.) He argues that the differing rabbit societies involved in the story — Sandleford, an unnamed warren, Efrafa, and Watership Down — are distinguished and formed by their approach to the stories they tell of El-ahrairah, the first rabbit. Watership Down emerges as the best, and most successful, community because it successfully appropriates the traditional stories of El-ahrairah, using them in a way open to innovation yet definitive for its experience of the world. Ultimately, Hauerwas’s reflections use Watership Down as an excuse to discuss his theories about the formative nature of stories. The theological criticism employed tests the narrative of Watership Down within the story-framework he has learned to see from his acquaintance with Christian theology.

I think this essay is a good example of the first aspect of good theological criticism — criticism which takes the life-defining dynamics that the practice of theology has brought to their attention in order to see similar dynamics at work in the stories it examines.

Bruegemann’s unique approach to Old Testament theology is relevant in a different way. Certainly it doesn’t function as an example of theological criticism of films, but what it does do is offer a largely expanded view of what theological criticism could deal with in its second aspect.

If we take it to be true that besides examining the dynamics of story-shaped worlds, theologians are also uniquely fitted to compare stories because their original subject is itself a story, then suddenly Christ-figure-hunting comes into perspective. Essentially this overly employed comparison seeks to take one (albeit central) aspect of the Christian mythology and argue that this aspect is borrowed, stolen, or unwittingly employed in a popular story. The ensuing critique — insofar as it manages to be a critique rather than a teenage excuse to see an otherwise forbidden movie, or a disgusting attempt to allegorize a film such that one can experience it “sanctifyingly” or some such rot — is essentially a comparison of stories. This practice could be hugely expanded in two important ways.

First, why does theological criticism have to seek only to “find Christian themes,” essentially to baptize whatever elements of popular life the critiquer in question wants to consume? The motivation behind such baptisms are dubious at best. Are Christians afraid that unless they wrench a story out of its own context to make it a lesson that could have come from their own tradition they will be corrupting themselves? Perhaps they are not confident or committed enough to the Christian story to face the possibility of competing stories. At any rate, I would argue for more legitimate, careful, and detailed comparison, and not just the identification of Christ figures for general baptismal purposes.

Second — and here Bruegemann comes in — is the Christ event the only aspect of the Christian story worth comparing? One of Bruegemann’s central (and most valuable) purposes in his Old Testament Theology, is to search out what kind of rhetorical assertions Israel makes at various times about Yahweh. In the excellent historical preface to this work, he examines the arguments of those who would rescue the Old Testament as the Jewish Bible, those who would deconstruct the text with regard to its dealing with women, those who would understand the text against the conservative and power-maintaining tradition as descriptive of a liberating God, etc. He doesn’t reject the insight of any of these perspectives, thereby creating an extraordinarily multi-faceted and deep account of Israel’s witness regarding Yahweh. According to Bruegemann, the “grammar” of this witness is characterized by “strong verbs dominated by the subject of the verbs who is an active agent [Yahweh], effecting changes in various direct object” — in other words, Israel witnesses in stories about what she claims that God has done. What Bruegemann — and serious theology in general — can contribute to theological criticism of films is the fact that the stories which define the Christian tradition have many more potential points of comparison than Christ figures.

How about the liberation? How about commandment, which provides a new way of life in the aftermath of liberation? ( — many contemporary films would fall short in this comparison, tending to focus on a plot of liberation in some form or other without giving sufficient indication of the supplanting new life, new creation, post-liberation order.) How about chaos and order, as witnessed to in the Christian tradition by Creation? I could go on, but you get my point. There are many more figures, aspects, and major plot moves to the Christian story than those which are typically utilized in theological criticism.

And so this is my provisional conclusion regarding the task of theological criticism of films: it needs to understand itself as analysis of the world-forming dynamics of story as the theologian has been educated in these dynamics by the study of theology, and it needs to engage itself comparing a much fuller view of the stories with which Christian theology has to do to a much more attentive view of the stories of the films it critiques.

My objections arise out of what I perceive to be the movement’s lack of clarity regarding the identity of the Word. On one hand, they affirm that the Word is the eternal second person of the Godhead, by whose power the world was created and is upheld, who was incarnated as Jesus the Christ. On the other hand, they identify the word, or gospel, as the message about the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Word. Sometimes they make the important point (Chapell does, p. 28) that Jesus and the message about him are a unity. Chapell even goes on to make the further important point that, “Scriptural truth is not a passive object for examination and presentation. The word examines us.” But he ruins, I think, the effect, in a sentence or two with this modification of his position, “Christ remains active in his Word, performing divine tasks that one presenting the Word has neither right nor ability personally to assume.” [Italics mine.] Here the gap appears, which gradually widens until we reach the actual practice of “expository preaching” that is supposed to have come out of this previous, robust theology of the Word.

Here is the practice, in Chapell’s own words [italics his]: “An expository sermon may be defined as a message whose structure and thought are derived from a biblical text, that covers the scope of the text, and that explains the features and context of the text in order to disclose the enduring principles for faithful thinking, living, and worship intended by the Spirit, who inspired the text.” (p. 30) A message that “covers,” “explains,” and “discloses.” Really? I suspect that Chapell may have committed an unintentional pun in that first verb “covers.”

I would like to cast my objections to this idea of preaching as a contrast between two preachers.

The first preacher is John the Baptist, bearing witness (or as Barth would say, pointing with his prodigious finger) to the arrival of the lamb of God.

The second preacher is Jesus, explaining the Jewish scriptures on the road to Emmaus, showing that all those words were about him.

Expository preachers would probably identify more with Jesus, explaining the whole Scriptures. But this is a problem. Remember, the message about Jesus and Jesus the Word are tightly bound. That’s what gives the events along Emmaus their irony: the Word is explaining that the Word is about the Word in his own Words. But this was not the gospel.  The gospel came in its full force when they realized who this mysterious learned stranger was, showing the men that this whole history and Jesus the Christ to whom it pointed was among them. Suddenly they, themselves, were put in relation to God by the living presence of Jesus—suddenly, it was as if all the revealing Jesus had performed upon the road was made relevant to them, because the object of that history stood among them.

Unfortunately for the expository preacher, congregations will never wake to see that their pastor is the one regarding whom he speaks. The gospel never comes if all the preacher does is explain that the whole Scripture is about Jesus.

John the Baptist, however, pointed. He bore witness with his words and baptism to the coming of Christ. He is different from Jesus, as a preacher, in that his response to the listening ear was not give himself but to point to Christ.

What’s the point of all this? Simply this: when Jesus preached, he gave himself, he was the Word, but when John preached he was not the Word—instead, he bore witness to the Word. This can also be seen in Peter’s sermon, in the teaching of Paul, etc.

What role does the preacher have in the work of the Word? A tradition as preaching-centered as the Reformed tradition (which most embraces expository preaching) should critically ask itself this question from time to time. Wrong answers can lead to practices that seem to support an identification of the preacher with the Word. When this falsehood is commonly believed, suddenly one of the great themes of the Reformation (to bring individual Christians back into contact with the Word of God) has been lost. People come to think and act as if the Word required a preacher to “activate” it.

On the other hand, expository preaching can carefully distinguish the authority of the preacher and the power of the Word such that preaching becomes chiefly a weekly exercise in public exegesis. I think this is common. To me this seems a massive fail because it completely neglects the necessity of the Witness, to whom the activity of preaching is essential for its finger-pointing power, and it treats the Word to all intents and purposes as if it were dead.

Take Chapell’s three verbs. He urges preachers to “cover” the scope of their text. He could not have implied the deadness of the Word better if he had tried. The very idea that any men, however holy, of whatever vast education and acute skills, could come to perceive (much less reformulate) the “scope” of any portion of Scripture defies its power to come with contemporary force as the present word of God to the church in any age. The scope of the text increases like the capacity of gmail: the scope of the meaning of the text is extended every instant because every instant it possesses the power to place the people of God who hear it into relation with the Grace and Judgment of God. He also urges preachers to “explain” their texts. With this verb I have less issue, except when, as so often, it is understood to mean that the role of the preacher is actually to relieve his listeners of any relation to the text. What comes in Scripture as the burning words of an inspired writer from God, can be turned into the historical curiosity of one historical party addressing another historical party, from which we can only learn by drawing moral lessons or searching for deeper principles. Finally, he urges preachers to “disclose” the “principles” that are, let’s be honest, hidden (as far as he is concerned) in the text. Why are they hidden? For the same reason that they need to be explained. Because they are assumed to be chiefly historical curiosities to be investigated (albeit well-chosen, even “inspired” historical curiosities).

What such an “expository” preacher very frequently ends up doing is wresting verses to fit a theology nowhere found in Scripture because it has been devised with the procrustean intent of “explaining” the otherwise uncomfortably jagged and powerful words of Scripture.

It should be noted that I am not objecting to exegesis, to historical understanding and criticism of the text of Scripture, or anything as anti-intellectual and un-literary as that. Instead, I am suggesting that these techniques simply do not achieve the purpose of preaching when they, by themselves, are put on display every Sunday. They should occur in every preacher’s study—and in every lay-person’s bedroom—in the study of Scripture. But when the witness stands to point his prodigious finger in the direction of the Word, something other than study is occurring. At that time, the people of God should be called to hear the Word as spoken to them, not as an historical discourse between now dead parties. In study, portions of Scripture must be read and interrogated as, for instance, a national epic written by Moses for the preservation and national self-consciousness of the nation of Israel. But in preaching, every portion of Scripture must come as from God to the people in the pews. This, and only this, bears witness to the living person of the Word, Jesus Christ, putting listeners into relation with that reality.

I respect expository preaching in terms of the enemies by which it defines itself. I, too, hate preachers who feel as if their purpose is to share their feelings about this or that passage of Scripture, or preachers who take as the theme of their sermons pop-psychology and political ideologies (like conservatism, for example). On this front, expository preaching wonderfully represents itself as rooted in Scripture, expository preachers as “servants of the Word.” But when such preaching becomes a vain-glorious “covering,” “explaining,” and—horror of horrors—”disclosing,” rather than a witnessing, a pointing, a tearing away of the veil that hides us from the face of God, then I add my voice to Kierkegaard’s cry, “kill the commentators!”—and, I add, “the weekly public commentators who pretend to be preachers!”