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David: I wish you'd said that to the seminar I led at the Urbana Missions conference. Its title: "A Theology of Art: Or Why It's OK to Paint a Nude." A young man quoted to me Genesis 9:22-25, where Noah curses Ham for looking on his nakedness. Therefore, the young man argued, we should never look at naked bodies, not in movies, not in books. I suggested gently that perhaps that might make the job of the Christian gynecologist difficult; that perhaps he'd wrongly turned a descriptive into a normative.

Then a female student cited Philippians 4:8 as a proscription against anything impure. Naked bodies romping around on a 20-foot screen, she felt, violated Paul's injunction to think on "whatever is pure." Over the din of "That's right!" and "No way!" I pointed out that Paul also commanded us to think on "whatever is true," and the truth was—within the larger context of Scripture—that the Bible pronounces the physical body very good, and that nowhere does it state, "Thou shalt not depict the naked human body in art."

Jeffrey: I also think the degree of realism affects our perception of nudity in film. It's one thing to see an 18th-century impressionist painting of Ruben's pink naked lady; quite another to see a perfect reproduction of that lady on 35-millimeter film. Painting and sculpture generally are more allusive to the form, while a film shows, well, exactly what our naked parts really look like. The image suddenly becomes far more powerful.

David: The context for the art makes a difference too. It's curious that Christians will allow themselves to take anatomy class and study the naked human form with the goal of becoming a good doctor, but will disallow the artist to study the nude as a way to discover the contours and beauty of the imago Dei. To the artists of the Renaissance and the Reformation periods, it was absurd to think you could become a good artist without studying the unclad body. In fact, to depict Jesus as breast-feeding, with Mary's unveiled breast, was a way for Believer artists to assert against Gnosticism the orthodox theological teaching that Jesus was "very man."

Jeffrey: So can a Christian filmmaker ever portray nudity in a movie, with integrity, the way Michelangelo did in a sculpture? I venture to say yes—while recognizing that in film, nudity is far more difficult and has far more power to be used for wrong purposes than for good.

David: St. Paul once talked about something that doesn't seem that far removed from our discussion, the eating of food sacrificed to idols. For some Christians, profanity or nudity of all sorts, written or viewed, is wrong. For others, equally zealous for the Kingdom of God, equally desirous to be poor in spirit, it is not. Not all things provoke the same reaction—incite to sin, if you will—in all Christians alike. So it's one thing to want to help a brother from falling into sin, but it's another to presume that our temptations are the temptations of others.

Jeffrey: We need to be careful not to judge another man's conscience according to our own. And yet …

David: blah blah blah

Jeffrey: fading into the horizon

David: running out of space

Jeffrey: no easy answers

David: no simple answers.

Jeffrey: I'm off to make a movie about Adam & Eve.

Previously:
Part 1:What Is a Good Christian Movie, Anyway?
Part 2:The Honest-to-God Truth About Movies
Part 3:In Defense of Mere Entertainment

David Taylor is the Arts Minister at Hope Chapel in Austin, Texas, and director of The Ragamuffin Film Festival, held August 6-8 in Austin. Together, Taylor and Jeffrey Travis form Dos Gringos Productions.

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Related Elsewhere:

What Is a Good Christian Movie, Anyway? (Part 1)	Printer view
Is it a sermon in disguise? Is it honest? Is it "family-friendly"? Defining it is no easy task—but here's a good start.

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The Honest-to-God Truth About Movies (Part 2)	Printer view
The best films don't shy away from truthfully depicting the human condition—even when it's ugly and sinful.

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In Defense of Mere Entertainment (Part 3)	Printer view
Would Mother Teresa have thrown her head back and laughed aloud at The Pink Panther? Likely so, says the author in this apologetic for films that are simply "fun for the sake of fun."