This article was originally published in the Summer ’06 issue of Revisions, Has American Culture Killed Christ?
We all have a different method to the madness of study but our search and pursuit of the “know” seems to find a universal manifestation. In our room with books out, I-Pod churning, and coffee cup steaming or in the library with slight alterations, this is what it’s all about. What’s our apex? Success? Happiness? Do our means have an end? Corporate? Consumer? If it’s supremely for self, then I sense elements of ailment at root: capitalistic flair with hints of visceral prostitution. Yet, I will say a bit of selfishness in mind-tramping is ambitious and refreshing. But where is the structural balance and what grip do we have on our pursuits? For it seems we modern gnostics are convinced our knowledge is summit: salvation, nirvana, guru, Mecca, self-actualization.
Why the subject? Consider: Batman (from Burton to Schumacher to Nolan’s Begins), Catwoman, Spider Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Blade, Men in Black, the Crow, Hellboy, Van Helsing, A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Daredevil, Punisher, Constantine, Aeon-Flux, Alien vs. Predator, Elektra, Dick Tracy, Road to Perdition, History of Violence, V for Vendetta, Sin City…shall I keep going…on the horizon…Iron Man, Ghost Rider, Wonder Woman, Silver Surfer, Nick Fury, and Superman, to name just a few. With a new deal between Paramount and Marvel Comics, the stage state is set for more adaptations.
At this point, you, like Franz Brentano, are wondering about my intentionality. Let’s unravel. It is my goal to challenge the inner workings of my own mind and to humbly step up to the microphone and ask the Church some questions. Perhaps my phraseology and words will at times seem biting and accusatory, but I intend that my wounds be trusted as a friend. If we’re honest, we’ll acknowledge that we often give our culture vastly insensitive gestures of disdain–suggestive coughs behind the hand–resulting in a cold cloud hovering just outside our mouth cannon and, like Mr. Zero, cultivating a frostbitten culture. A culture bubbling over with acrimonious resentment. So, I reflectively hope to have my thoughts be edifying, perhaps challenging.
A disclaimer: at times–for it is my claim that all knowledge should have an interwoven esoteric element, for it implies at the table of thought that we come not without need–there will be obscurity. Regardless, in my purest of intentions is simply thought and dialogue regardless of the ground upon which you stand, not loaded verbal weaponry. I deem not Michael Buffer to begin this interaction, but let us ‘rumble’ with intentional curiosity.
Intending no disrespect to effected individuals of the actual connotative term, lynching is something we do every day in terms of knowledge. I’m speaking to saintly sinner. We’ve also classified such, socio economic visual implied, and second and third class citizens of comics and like are rejected by the great Christian demagogues. In cultural terms, we’ve declared ourselves Sheriff Buford T. Justice, in high speed pursuit of the Smoky and the Bandit media. Does our knowledge have a social barometer? Do we show contempt for some knowledge as if it were a bum on the street? Do we flirt with others like a lonely Saturday night? Here ye. “It is very important for us as Christians to appreciate the value of knowledge in all domains. We must not assume that there are some branches of knowledge not relevant to Christian concerns and others that are.”1 Our walkabout for knowledge is certainly selective and at times necessary. What knowledge should beset us that wouldn’t warrant some intrigue? For the Christian and the Church, i.e. for myself, I certainly ask these questions. For the overwhelming reality is that we have denied that our Jekyll has a Hyde. In other words, we’re naively negligent of secular content based on the premise that something external is permeating our internal like a cancer, and threatens our moral aptitude and crown.
We need a truth serum. Reality, our theology, often lives above its means. The likes of having a ten-thousand dollar hard drive and a ten-dollar printer. The fundamental challenge, in my estimation, is our grave misunderstanding of biblical anthropology and misconceptions about the distinctive nuances of the wrath and justice of a holy, holy, holy God. It’s what the front page pictures and the scrolling news ticker justifiably uphold: we’re not a ‘happy ending’ people and we’re conveniently atheistic and agnostic in our success and volitionally deistic and stoic in our tragedies.
In complicated fashion, here’s common grace: we at once must declare that “Some men excel in keenness; others are superior in judgment; still others have a readier wit to learn this or that art. In this variety God commends his grace to us, lest anyone should claim as his own what flowed from the sheer bounty of God,”2 and embrace such with explorative wonder. In the same breath, “in consideration of the inherent nature of sinful rebellion,” we must be bound to the reality that the spout of unbelief is: “epistemological reaction will invariably be negative, and negative along the whole line of interpretative endeavor.”3 ‚4
Punch line. Secular media has the potential to open up and lay bare vast descriptive elements of the human condition and more, and we’ve yet to plunder this with ambitious faith and yet no ownership and understanding of such fortuitous expounding can resonate for the unbeliever with volition. Again, there isn’t time to note details of common grace theology, but let us say for sake of discussion, that it’s the line which separates us from brute beasts and also from the efficacy of saving grace.
Nevertheless, the academic jukebox is playing our songs. Just listen to those quarters drop down that metal canal. A5. Quentin Tarantino. Take in the stylized violence and encyclopedic cinema nuggets. D12. Albert Camus. Experience the existential quips. C7. Stan Lee. Get lost in the colors and word boxes.
Don’t perfunctory. Open your eyes. Our pride won’t consent. If it could itself speak personified, it would bellow the resonation of Franz Kafka’s Bucket Rider, “My bucket has all the virtues of a good steed except powers of resistance.” Namely, it wants, or more so contextually fair and full, needs. We cannot resist ourselves and this reality of inescapable vortex has us discombobulated.
The root and backdrop? Comics, Scene 1,Take 1. Action Comics #1, 1938: the emergence of Superman, created by sons of Jewish immigrants, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. The contextual assumption of Nazism should be sufficient. The term ‘graphic novel’ was popularized on a platform of various figures including but not limited to: Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories. Looking over the shoulder, we find the woodcut works of Lynd Ward, the pulp pages of H.L. Mencken’s Blackmask magazine, and urbanization amongst factors. A full turn would warrant recognition of Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de police de sûreté jusqu’en 1827 by Eugene Francois Vidocq. “Vidocq’s factual successes inspired world-class authors who borrowed his brilliance to embody their fictional heroes. Doyles’ Sherlock Holmes character is much based on Vidocq, so are both Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in Hugo’s Les Miserables. Dickens mentions Vidocq in Great Expectations; Melville cites him in Moby Dick; and Poe refers to Vidocq’s methods in Murders in the Rue Morgue…”5 The time portal of discovery is seemingly endless.
So, why are we opposed to this content that isn’t strictly bent on intentions of Christian mind? Are we so blind and engulfed in the riptide of modern separatism and legalism that our epistemological bedrock neither considers our anthropological heritage nor has hope for it? Our heritage precipitates and presupposes the very need for Christ as Redeemer. Consider the apostle Paul and his affluent awareness of pagan poetry and culturally relevant Stoicism as a point of interaction with the Athenians.6 An intercultural juxtaposition comparison is imperative, if for no other reason than the sanctification of scraping dross and reprogramming our fundamentalist modern mind of “stop, drop, and roll” acquaintance with secularism towards a billowing common grace embrace. Where are we at? In terms of those things which we must adhere and avoid, our obsession with the moral imperative, as though God’s grace is contingent upon such, attempting to numb the all inclusive accomplished work of Christ, we’re in reality, blind and swinging in an empty field, miles from truthful precision. Fiscally speaking, in terms of our naïve interaction with cultural mediums, we’re in the red and now offering a consolidation and liquidation sale with truths at 50–75% off and the abusive demands of do without assurance that once created joyous gestation of thought and conviction have ended in miscarriage.
I realize, on one hand, that if you don’t like the content, then you don’t and no harangue or Patrick Henry will get you there. The other, it takes willingness, a lucrative romantic prospect, a best bud, or the most daunting of tasks to procrastinate from, to get you to an unwanted locale. Come on. You and I both know that at the very utterance of graphic, we’ve got a stockpile of poster board, sticks, and markers with a free afternoon schedule, chanting “Hell no, we won’t go.” Translation: we’ve got a medicinal soul pill inside of an iron fist grip. At once, a great contradiction and a poignant proof of redemption’s reach. But who are these second-class citizens who speak of redemption and justice and truth? Intrigues of hopeful understanding that have plagued us for all existence. Is it as David Denby notes, “Pop cannibalizes and regurgitates everything, including history, and in normal circumstances only a literal-minded prig would treat graphic novelists or big-screen fantasists as if they had any responsibility to truth.”7 Or do they have anything to offer? Nothing? Bollocks!
May we reflect a bit on the government of our mind; full of limp constituents in the slums of our fleeting thoughts with no place to lay a head, scoffing and throwing passive pennies of reflection, ironically, amidst a mind pocket of dollars. In our scorn for secularism, we’ve inaugurated our own ‘zoot suit riots’ and should our actions be described in a color, we’d be wearing more black than the grim reaper shopping with Johnny Cash the day after Thanksgiving. I hear a resounding mumble of our graphically comic culture as musician Ben Harper has poignantly shaped it, “Please bleed. So I know that you are real.”8 So, in conclusion beloved, I recall “I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is–an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.”9
The author, Raymond Blanton, received a B.S. in Speech Communication and Human Relations from Texas Christian University in ’99 and earned a Master’s of Divinity with an emphasis in Counseling from Westminster Theological Seminary in ‘04.
- Revisions, “An Interview with Professor Robert George” (2:1, Winter 2006), 10–11. See here [↩]
- Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, MCMLX) 2.2.17. [↩]
- Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic (New Jersey: P & R Publishing, 1998) 412. [↩]
- Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel (New Jersey: P & R Publishing, 1972) 57. [↩]
- Joseph Geringer, Master Criminologist (Vidocq: Convict Turned Detective Magnifique; 2005). [↩]
- Acts 17:16–34 [↩]
- David Denby, “Blowup: V for Vendetta”, The New Yorker (March 20, 2006). [↩]
- Ben Harper, Please Bleed (Burn to Shine: Virgin, 2003). [↩]
- Edward R. Murrow, RTNDA Convention (Chicago: October, 15 1958). [↩]
