I have been on vacation for a couple of weeks and today is my first full day home. I wanted to watch a movie for a little while just to lay low. Out of 5 DVDs randomly on top of the player...these three were found. The others were some of Meredith's marathon documentaries.
Most of my friends laugh at my collection, because I have a thing for post-apocalyptic movies. Funny thing is, most of our culture (especially the younger folk) do as well. In a secular culture that has no narrative of a beginning... a narrative regarding the end has to be made up. Consider it the joy of living in a postmodern matrix. Our reaction of some random scientific situation beginning our world means that some other random moment will end this world.
These movies provide a secular prophetic narrative, hopefully showing the woes of societal disintegration and causing the viewer to beware of what led to it. Whether it is the war machine, a random zombie virus, or the aftermath of a culture barely functioning and feeding off itself, these three movies provide just a hint of the story that folks and trying to write. By pointing out what could happen....the hope is that we now will change to avoid it.
The genre is one of my favorite (trust me...Zombieland is very entertaining) because it is sometimes humorous, but more in how it tells the story a world without the Triune God is hoping to avoid. It is our culture trying to imagine how a world that was never created can implode.
Most of my friends laugh at my collection, because I have a thing for post-apocalyptic movies. Funny thing is, most of our culture (especially the younger folk) do as well. In a secular culture that has no narrative of a beginning... a narrative regarding the end has to be made up. Consider it the joy of living in a postmodern matrix. Our reaction of some random scientific situation beginning our world means that some other random moment will end this world.
These movies provide a secular prophetic narrative, hopefully showing the woes of societal disintegration and causing the viewer to beware of what led to it. Whether it is the war machine, a random zombie virus, or the aftermath of a culture barely functioning and feeding off itself, these three movies provide just a hint of the story that folks and trying to write. By pointing out what could happen....the hope is that we now will change to avoid it.
The genre is one of my favorite (trust me...Zombieland is very entertaining) because it is sometimes humorous, but more in how it tells the story a world without the Triune God is hoping to avoid. It is our culture trying to imagine how a world that was never created can implode.
This is why I think about these things so much. As a church, we should be telling our story...from creation to end.
Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be
It comes down to 'telling the story and telling it well' and once again you remind us that our story has a beginning, middle, and end. I appreciate this insight a lot, "In a secular culture that has no narrative of a beginning... a narrative regarding the end has to be made up." Secular culture is also good at "borrowing" or "adapting" the eschatology of other cultures (not only Christian culture, but also the Mayan "2012" movie).
But thanks be to God that our story is even more epic than John Cusack fleeing the 2012 meltdown, the wolverine's stand in Red Dawn or... ahem, more cathartic than Kurt Cameron and his pack of super hero christians taking on the army of the anti-christ in the hoaky Left Behind Series.... Yeah, thanks be to God for that last one especially...
Posted by: Ryan M. Kocak | 08/10/2010 at 02:21 PM