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What then is a Christian movie? In my experience of reading and talking with people about movies, I've discovered three ways in which this question could be answered.

The first, and most unfussy, way to define a Christian movie is to say that it is a movie made by a Christian. In the same way that we might refer to Dorothy Sayers as a Christian novelist or Peter Paul Rubens as a Christian painter—though none worked exclusively with religious subject matter—so also we might call Scott Derrickson (Hellraiser V: Inferno), David Cunningham (To End All Wars), James Collier (The Hiding Place) and Eric Hannah (Extreme Days) Christian filmmakers. Simple and simplistic.

The second way to define a Christian movie is to say that it is a movie that deals with Christian material. This movie we might call the religious movie. It explores religious figures, historical events or other themes related to Christian faith and practice. The registry would include films such as The Mission, Road to Redemption, The Apostle, The Omega Code, Luther, Jesus of Nazareth and, of course, The Passion of The Christ. A lot of Christians sadly get stuck here and cannot move beyond the thin confines of a religious story. They wish to tell their story and indeed they wish for others to be convinced, definitively and unambiguously. The problem though with so many "religious" movies isn't so much that they're bad movies, but, to paraphrase Madeleine L'Engle, they're bad religion, which brings me to the final category.

The third way to define the question is to say that a Christian movie is one that bears witness to a Christian imagination. What is that? It is an imagination that's been shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by a Christian storyworld: that metanarrative that makes sense of our cosmos. This idea of a Christian movie could be called "deeply Christian," though not superficially so. Let me point out only two features of the Christian storyworld: the Christian mythos and its anthropology.

The basic Christian mythos, or grand plot, goes something like this: in the beginning it was good, then it was bad, but God is making it good again. In theological terms we call it creation, fall, redemption. As Believer artists, we're invited by God to bear witness to this cosmic pattern—of home, away, home—in contradistinction, for example, to Hindu ideas of Brahman, reincarnation and the cyclicity of life. In movie terms a Christian mythos manifests itself in films like The Lord of the Rings or Jaws.

A Christian anthropology answers the question, what does it mean to be human? Our answer is that we're made in the image of God and thus endowed with inestimable dignity. We rebelled, however, and thereby introduced brokenness into the world. Yet redemption is possible in Christ, and it is in him that humanity shall be perfectly renewed. Humans are responsible for their actions. Evil is real. Goodness is a gift from God. Movies such as The English Patient and Chicago betray the Christian vision of humanity by allowing its characters to indulge and then falsely escape the consequences of their misdeeds.

This brings us now to our final question, which was also the original question: What makes for a good, Christian movie? In brief, a good, Christian movie is one that is well-crafted and true. A film that does not strive for artistic and aesthetic excellence cannot be a good film. It will be a shoddy or uneven film, making whatever story or message is being told almost impossible to digest, no matter how biblically sound it is. Likewise, a film that does not bear allusive witness to the truth cannot be a good film. This phrase "allusive witness" is intentional, for we are not suggesting the evangelistic film. We're suggesting rather the film that witnesses allusively, obliquely, to the splendor of goodness, the shabbiness of sin, the hunger to be forgiven, the yearning for the divine, the playfulness of creation—all things true—in films such as Dead Man Walking, Glory, To Kill a Mockingbird, Blade Runner, Babette's Feast, Henry V, and Chariots of Fire.

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