God’s Not Dead! part 1: Review of the Film

You may be asking yourself, “Why in the world would the Calvinist Nerd be reviewing God’s Not Dead when that was so last year.  He should be live tweeting Do You Believe like the cool people!”

And if you are thinking that, you have forgotten one of the rules of this blog – I ain’t spending money to do this stuff.  I don’t have a ton of readers, and so to leave my family for an evening, spend $12 on a movie ticket, to watch a bad movie, just so I can mock it here – that’s a really bad idea.

So God’s Not Dead hit Netflix, which meant that I don’t have to pay for it, and I didn’t have to leave the kids to see it.

When this movie first came out, I was intrigued.  It was a film that took apologetics seriously.  You know, most Christian movies just have someone who comes to a crisis in their lives so they turn to God to make it better.  But this is one that actually put a character in a situation where he needed to defend the Christian faith.

And then I saw the reviews, so I decided to wait for it to hit Netflix.  But now that I’ve seen it, let’s take a look.

As a note, I'm going to do this in two parts.  In the first one (this one), I will review the movie itself.  In the second, I'm going to write out the speech that I would give if I were in this kid's situation and was asked to prove God in a class.  Hoping to finish that next week.

The movie itself

You know, this really isn’t that bad.  It’s not great, certainly.  There are a lot of problems, in fact.  The characters are paper-thin.  They are really pathetically written.  And while the primary actors do a good job, there are some people who come in and are terrible.  These are primarily the cameos, but the reporter character (besides only being there to allow for the All Important Cameo Appearances, because that is what is Most Important) was really bad.  And she’s supposed to be the tragic figure here, the real tear-jerker character, and she’s not at all that.  I think someone told her that to do drama, what you do is just recite your lines very slowly, but all it did was make the movie longer.

(As a side-note, we’re supposed to believe she’s this up-and-coming journalist superstar or something, so why is she wasting her time doing ambush interviews with Duck Dynasty stars?  I think this is a case where Christians think their celebrities are much more important than they actually are.)

So the acting is hit-or-miss, but mostly hit.  The characters are a definite miss.  But the production is really pretty good, and the pacing of the script keeps the plot moving even when the characters are being unrealistic.  The plot, while frustrating because of its theology, is nicely done.

It’s probably a bit long (you could have just removed the reporter completely, with the cameos, and come up with a much better film), but it’s an entertaining two hours, so I don’t have a huge complaint on the movie itself.

A quick note on the music though.  The movie starts off with a song called “Hold You Up” by Shane Harper (who is also the star of the movie), and as is typical in Christian film, they focus on the song way too long, and it’s very bad.  And more than that, it’s really borderline pagan.  The song really only has two theological lines, and they are:

The demons will haunt you and try to steal what you know.
But the angels, they brought you, and they're gonna hold you up.

The angels brought you and are going to hold you up?  Really?  That’s seriously unbiblical, and for a song with a merely two theological lines to mess it up that badly, and to start a Christian film that way, are indications that this is going to get rough.

The Newboys close the movie with another too-long song, one that is simply boring and uninspired.  It actually made me glad I stopped following the Newsboys years ago.  Sorry guys, but that train should have stopped at the latest when Peter Furler left, and probably a bit before that.

Arguing for Christianity by denying it first

So the main plot of the movie is that, for the purposes of discussion in a philosophy class, a professor asks his students to write the line “God is dead” and sign it so that they can get on with talking philosophy.  One student refuses to do it, and so the professor gives him three 20-minute segments to convince the class that God is very much alive.  Not a bad premise to do a movie that is serious about apologetics.

So the first two of these segments are dedicated to a wholesale denial of the Bible as the Word of God.  Basically, he is trying desperately to fit the Creation account into modern “science” to say (reading between the lines), “See?  See?  It’s not totally stupid that we believe in a Creator!  It’s just that we can’t believe that He knows what He’s talking about when He set down His Word.  God didn’t understand evolution apparently, but we can forgive Him that!  We’re enlightened!”

The professor does well in refuting this student’s denial of the faith on day one, but not so much on day two, but surprisingly, the professor does not answer like this, “So, in order to prove that there is a God, you are taking the position that the Bible, which you claim to be the primary source to understand God, is wrong and cannot be trusted?  How again are you still a Christian, since you obviously don’t believe the things that Christians are called by God to believe and the things Jesus Himself believed?”

Which is exactly what I would have said.

Obviously, the professor is not going to say this since the writers of the movie are under the misguided notion that what the kid is doing is a good idea!  But here’s the thing – God has told us that His Word is true and that it will last forever.  In fact, without the Bible as the revelation of the true God, we cannot know anything else (more on that when I give my own speech at a later date on why we can prove that there is a God).

Furthermore, the first chapters of Genesis provide the foundation of the whole of Scripture.  Without it, we do not have an understanding of sin, of the Gospel (since the Gospel was first promises here as a response to what happened).  In addition, without Adam, we do not have a Gospel, since the federal headship of Adam provides the foundation in which Paul explains how we are saved in Christ.  If Adam is a metaphor or symbol, then the imputation of Christ’s righteousness cannot be any more real.

The character has, unthinkingly, denied God here, right off the bat.

On day three, he does better, but he starts by glossing over the problem of evil by just answering, “Er, free will, maybe?”  Welcome back to paganism, son.  When are you going to argue for the Christian God in all of this?

The Bible does not answer “free will” to the question of evil.  Its answer is that God is sovereign, that He is guiding all things, that He is using pain and evil for a greater purpose, and that He will be glorified in it.  Futhermore, He will use it for the good of His people.  God is not a helpless being trying to do His best but is constantly thwarted by the will of his creatures.  That’s an idea foreign to Scripture.

This god described here has no purpose in evil.  He knew that there would be rape, murder, destruction, and pain on this earth, but he created it all anyway.  He knew that Hitler would gas millions, but he shrugs and says, “Free will!” and created Hitler so that millions would die.  Oh, well, at least the will of man is intact, I guess it’s okay that people are tortured and murdered.  He has no reason to do that, he has not meaning behind it, he has no greater glory coming from it.  He has no answers.   Thankfully, he’s not real.

Also thankfully, the kid runs away from that argument in about a half second and they get to something actually good!  At last, he starts thinking like a Christian!  He points to morality, and a morality that is universal, and explains that this can only exist in a Christian context.  The professor believes in a relative morality – it’s right for some, wrong for others – but does not live this way.  The professor would fail someone for cheating, for example.

And he’s absolutely right.  The professor lives like a Christian.  The Christian can explain why murder, rape, and genocide are wrong, but the atheist cannot.  For the consistent atheist, it’s just a matter of preferences.  One person likes to rape, another does not.  Why is one wrong and another right?

I will get into this more when I write my own response to the professor at a later time.

And the Gospel is . . .

So there are two parts where I expected the Gospel to show up, and it never did.  Which is a problem, since this movie is supposed to be an evangelistic film.

In the first one, the main student is asked by another student why he is doing all of this.  Hello, young Christian – someone has just said, “Hey, preach the Gospel to me, kind sir!”  Take him up on it.  That is what is known as a Golden Opportunity.

But no.  He tries to brush the guy off first, but then finally answers with “Jesus is a friend of mine.”  And I thought of this:

In the second place, a preacher is sitting with a dying man.  Again, a perfect opportunity to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins.  Again, no.  The pastor mutters something about accepting Jesus in your heart, blah, blah, blah.  Insert a bunch of words never mentioned in Scripture.

Seriously, the Gospel does not make an appearance in this movie at all.  Is that a problem for anyone else?

Sundry matters

A couple of other parts that are troublesome to me:

The Bible is described at one point as an “instruction manual.”  That’s a huge problem, but I wish it was at least used that much.  In reality, the Christian characters are guided not by the word, but by that “still, small voice.”  Well, considering that the “Christians” in the movie react in very different ways to the situation, that may be an indication that the still, small voice isn’t God.  Maybe it was dorm food that didn’t digest well.  Maybe you should read the Bible to find out what God says.

One of the cameo appearances included the line, “Those words are in red, so you know they’re important.”  That’s a really unchristian understanding of Scripture.  The red letters are not more important than the black ones.  The whole thing is the Word of God.  The read ones were uttered directly from the mouth of God, but the other ones are no less the Word of God.

Lastly, in what is supposed to be the comedy relief of the movie, the pastor character keeps trying to leave town, but the vehicle won’t start.  The last time they try to leave, another character has him pray over the vehicle first, and then, in a sign of faith, put the bags in the trunk before starting the car.  If he doesn’t do that, apparently he doesn’t trust God.

What kind of weird standard of faith do these filmmakers have?  The vehicle hasn’t started for three days.  It is not a sign of unbelief in God to try it out before packing.  Nowhere in Scripture does it say that you are supposed to believe that a car is going to start and that if you don’t pack your bags before trying it, then you aren’t Christian enough.

This is the sort of weird extra-biblical standards of faith that the Prosperity Pimps are always throwing out there, and it’s not Christianity.  Goodness, if you’re having car trouble, go ahead and try to ignition before wasting your time putting bags in the car.  That is totally okay and encouraged in Christianity, and it doesn’t make you less of a Christian.

What’s next?  If you look both ways before cross the street, you don’t believe that God will keep you safe!  If you look at the expiration date on the milk, you have no faith!  If you get sick, you don’t have enough faith.

Oops.  They really do say that last one.

Conclusion

The movie was pretty decent as a film, but the theology in it is toxic.  I wouldn’t mind showing this to another Christian as a learning exercise in spotting and correcting error, but I would never show this to anyone if I didn’t have some time afterward to fix the mistakes it makes.