A 'golden rule' response to The Golden Compass

Recently there has been much dialog among Christians regarding the recently released movie, 'The Golden Compass.' Most of the conversations I have been exposed to have been encouraging a very fearful approach for Christians to this movie. This is not surprising nor is it a new approach.

However, these issues are much more complex than the manner we generally handle them suggests. That we have a tendency toward this approach is evidenced by how, when we begin to read someone’s opinion on a topic, we are quickly wanting to ascertain on which ‘side’ of the issue they fall. For this reason, it is generally very difficult to persuade someone who is passionately in disagreement with your position to even entertain your argument.

Nevertheless, I have decided to engage. And in spite of the risk, I am doing so for two primary reasons:

1. I have young children who no doubt will bump up against others who have read these works and to whom I have a responsibility to bring up in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Anytime a claim is made that by engaging in something (such as seeing a particular movie) that responsibility would be compromised, my ears perk up, especially when it comes from my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. In other words, when they speak, I listen!

2. I once entered a secular university where my faith was continuously challenged both by atheistic and agnostic professors as well as hedonistic roommates and acquaintances. Due to my deeply sheltered upbringing, I was ill-equipped to survive in such an environment, much less to faithfully proclaim a prepared defense of the knowledge of the truth that was in me and display an engaging and attractive life that I was called to in order to be a salt and light to those around me. I now mourn for those unbelievers who knew me whose embers of indifference and even scorn for Christianity were only fanned by the timid life I led.

Instead of defending a position, I want instead to focus on what I believe to be the much more important and fundamental issue. When Jesus was pouring his heart out to his Father in the garden prior to his betrayal and death, his dying ‘wish’ was for his people to know true unity as he enjoyed with his Father. This is Paul’s concern for the early churches when he challenged those who attempted to bind other’s consciences about partaking or not partaking, celebrating or not celebrating, circumcising or not circumcising, etc (Colossians 2:16-23). At the heart of our Savior and of the first church planter, Paul, was the longing for the body to look like an organic body. Will we be free of conflict and differences? Of course not. This is not what Jesus is calling us to. What he is calling us to is that in spite of our internal quarrels, the world sees an organism which is able to cling to its foundational source of unity in order to display true, intimate love and self-sacrificial service.

I believe that the evil one uses such issues that we are presently engaging in less to weaken our intellectual understanding of Biblical, Christian Theism, and more to weaken our fellowship. In the end, in matters that are of less than orthodox significance, a strengthened fellowship does far more to promote the Kingdom cause than a corporate statement, stance, or attack against a challenge to the Biblical revelation. That this is such a vital concern for the church, is manifested in what Paul tells us occurs when the church divides itself into poor and rich, influential and insignificant, especially at the Lord’s Supper. After rebuking the Corinthians for the divisions that exist when they come together, he says that judgment is pronounced upon the man that hasn’t examined himself (I Cor. 11:17-33). He finishes his warning by exhorting them to ‘wait for one another,’ as a visible display and reflection of their unity. Taking the teaching of God’s revelation as a whole, especially in the NT, we are taught that a divided body is an impotent one.

Furthermore, regardless of whether we deem it appropriate or not for us and our families to view, we must at least engage Pullman’s charges that he levels against the church. There is a degree of legitimacy in these charges. We would be very disingenuous and predictably hypocritical to not own up to the reality that the church has engaged is some of the most heinous crimes in the history of mankind—the crusades, the inquisitions, the promotion and excuse of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In addition, to resist an engagement of his charges would support his most essential charge—that we are among the most thought-oppressive organizations in the history of mankind. Perhaps that is unfair and an overstatement to his charge, but nevertheless, it is close to the target.

Instead of oppressing opposition to the truth, the best apologetic to Christianity is one which engages the opposition. The fact that we believe and claim that Jesus is the only way to Truth and to God, himself, is not the same as being thought-intolerant. Because we have access to the very revelation of the Creator of all things, himself, we should not fear untruth. Instead we should eagerly invite the conversation. This is what it means to always be prepared to give an answer to those who ask for a reason of the hope that is in us. But not only that, unfortunately the Kingdom rules that we as believers are called to play by are not the same tools that our opposition will utilize. For in defending that hope within us, we are further called to do so in gentleness and respect (I Peter 3:15-16). The bar is just set much higher for those of us who follow Jesus Christ. The use of slander, for instance, is therefore banned from our engagement. Certainly the Golden Compass is a promotion of a competing world view, but when properly and gracefully held up to the straight edge of the truth of historical Christianity, its incomplete and jagged edges will be revealed.

In the end, the decision of whether the most appropriate manner in which to raise our covenant children in the fear and admonition of the Lord is to avoid the movie and the books or not, is the decision that each of us parents must individually decide based on our consciences and our duty before the Lord. Before we decide to attend or avoid, however, let us thoughtfully and prayerfully determine the most effective missiological approach to a darkened world.