The Return Of Franky Schaeffer
Sham Pearls for Real Swine: Beyond the Cultural Dark Age—A Quest for Renaissance, by Franky Schaeffer (Wolgemuth and Hyatt, 291 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Mark Galli, associate editor of LEADERSHIP Journal.
In the last 20 years there have been increasing calls for evangelicals to make their presence known in the arts, to present Christian values in this culture’s highest forms of expression. This book is the account of one evangelical’s unhappy venture into that arena.
Five years ago, documentary filmmaker and author Franky Schaeffer began devoting himself full time to feature-film directing and screen writing. Besides describing some of the not-uncommon struggles of a budding filmmaker (for example, meager lifestyle, constant hustling, repeated disappointments), Schaeffer, the evangelical artist, relates close and unpleasant encounters with two movements that stifle artists: fundamentalism and modern culture.
Fundamentalism and certain stripes of evangelicalism, says Schaeffer, tend to judge films (including his) by middle-class, rather than Christian, values: the more profanity, violence, and nudity they contain, the more “evil” the film. The filmmaking culture (a product of the larger culture) views films with an eye to their ideological content: the more they subscribe to the culture’s liberal values (such as radical feminism, secularism), the better the film.
Schaeffer, however, is scandalized by such “censorship.” So he vigorously outlines a theology of the arts that champions the freedom of artists and prods Christian artists to devote themselves not to producing Christian or social propaganda but to revealing truth about the life into which God places us—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Schaeffer tends to wander off into sweeping cultural analysis, and his artistic frustration does wear on the reader. Nonetheless, this combination autobiography (including fascinating glimpses of life with father Francis), apology for the arts, and cultural critique should give many of us a little more understanding and sympathy for those Christian artists we, sometimes too glibly, want to thrust upon the world.
BALLOT for the Readers’-choice Book Awards
CHRISTIANITY TODAY Talks to Franky Schaeffer
Whatever happened to Franky Schaeffer? What have you been doing for the last five years since the release of your movie Wired to Kill?
I was talking about the need for artistic involvement while being involved only in a backward way myself—through making documentaries and books for the evangelical community. I decided I should put my money where my mouth was. Since I was a filmmaker, that meant I needed to move into feature filmmaking.
One thing I did was move out of the country: I was in Africa for a little under a year making two feature films. Now I’m spending most of my time in the film business, but also trying to communicate some of the things I’ve learned to other individuals who are trying to make a living in the arts.
I noticed two words in your book that a few years ago I would never have expected from the lips of Franky Schaeffer: humility and compromise.
Before, everything was a mission in which I started with the assumption that we, the Francis Schaeffer clan, had the answers. And, to be frank, there’s a tremendous arrogance that came with that, as the result of being involved in some valid quests, one of which was the prolife movement.
But a little bit of truth can be dangerous and corrupting—especially if you’re involved with something like the prolife movement that genuinely is about life-and-death issues—because you begin to see everything as a life-and-death issue. And so you discuss with the same vigor and the same uncompromising attitude all sorts of questions over which there ought to be more room for disagreement.
I was getting embroiled in the evangelical community and making my life’s work trying to be part of a reform of evangelicalism through things like The Great Evangelical Disaster, which I engineered with my father, but which was turning me into exactly the same kind of sanctimonious, pompous stone thrower that I was criticizing.
Having to get out and take my licks with people who couldn’t care less who I was has been a good, humbling experience. So, if nothing else, it’s been helpful spiritually.
You talked about going to Africa for a while to produce some feature films following Wired to Kill. What were those?
A small horror film called Heaven on Earth, which was made for video and cable release. And another one called Rebel Storm, which was recently released on cable pay-for-view.
What attracts you to the horror genre?
Nothing at all. I don’t like horror films particularly, and I never watch them other than preparing to make mine. But as a filmmaker with few credentials and no track record, you take what you can get or you don’t make any movies at all. My hope is that, given five or ten years, I will get a shot at making the kind of movies I would pay to see.
You have a great deal of frustration with the movie-making business because there are so many disparate elements that are not under the control of any one person. Why stick with it?
I’ve invested so much time now in this crazy thing that it’s something I really have to see through. And it isn’t so much a matter of principle, but there has been enough blood, sweat, and tears in the field that I really feel driven. I have to be honest, I feel driven—I’m not saying led. That’s two different things.
You talk in the book about being frustrated at Christian critics who took your work too seriously.
It was basically my own fault. If you spend ten years criticizing everyone else, going after people who you disagree with, you’d better not stumble in front of your own train or it’s going to roll right over you. And that’s what happened.
In that sense, I had it coming, but in terms of artistic criticism, I don’t think it was fair. It’s rare that you’ll see a review of a film by a first-time filmmaker in a low-budget genre that won’t ask whether the filmmaker had control of his own project. For instance, I had to cut 13 minutes out of my picture for the distributor, and that made nonsense of a big chunk of it.
Christian critics treated it as if it were my tenth picture and I had $10 million to spend, and that everything on the screen was absolutely nailed to my door as my definitive cinematic statement.
Sure I’m ticked off that people throw stones at me. But I’m also ticked off because I keep running into Christian artists who have been wounded to the core: people who have given up careers in painting because somebody told them that it was evil to do human figure drawing; people who are at a loss about what sort of songs to write because somebody told them that they couldn’t be serving the Lord unless they were writing gospel songs. This kind of iconoclastic attitude is doing damage.
What we need is a community of believers that will encourage people to go into the arts without demanding that they observe all kinds of fundamentalist taboos. If the Christian community would be as encouraging to talented people in the area of the arts as they are, say, to people who want to be missionaries, there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a question of attitude. It’s not a program.
Several years ago there was a rumor that you were going to become a Roman Catholic.
I’m not becoming a Roman Catholic. However, I have a great interest in Catholicism, which did not begin theologically but practically.
Being involved in the prolife movement and feeling embattled, you look for allies, and every time you turn around you’re tripping over a nun or a priest. My interest in Catholicism came through contact in the prolife movement and through the arts. You can’t walk into one magnificent church after another without starting to wonder what produced all this.
Interviewed by David Neff.
Living Before Dying
If You Do Love Old Men, by Virginia Stem Owens (Eerdmans, 221 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Wayne Brouwer, pastor of First Christian Reformed Church in London, Ontario, Canada.
If You Do Love Old Men is a storybook for all ages. Yet at the same time it is a psychological study that would make excellent collateral reading for a university course. Inspiring and informative without ever sounding bookish or learned, Virginia Stem Owens’s book tells the story about her grandfather—his character, his strengths and weaknesses, his manner of coping, his elderly years. It is a series of word pictures, often strung together with dialogue of specific conversations, which open up a single aspect of those things that make him tick. And with that, of course, come the reaction of others around him: family and friends, associates, hucksters and charlatans.
If that were the sum total of it, the book would be a success. But there is more. On a deeper level, Owens manages to draw us into her reflections on meaning in life. What is family all about? How do we deal with the changing values of the world, which is running faster than we are able to keep up? What happens to us as we grow old? How do we prepare for death? Who is responsible for the care of the elderly? What does my own aging process mean to me? And what is my significance in the long lines of blood relations that precede and follow me?
The first chapter, “The House,” introduces a setting that becomes the inner world of the book. In returning to the house that her grandfather built years earlier, Owens reflects on things that last and things that don’t. Along the way she opens up a kind of “memory lane photo album” about her grandfather, giving us a preliminary sketch of the historical events that brought him into the present, which provides us a context for approaching the issues of aging and dying.
There are 26 more chapters to the book, coupled in pairs. First in each pair comes a short “intrados,” usually one page, never more than two. The intradoses give scientific and factual data describing particular characteristics of human development, focusing on the elderly years. A storytelling chapter follows, as Owens takes us into the world of her grandfather. His feelings, his actions, his perceptions help us understand how the facts and figures of the intradoses come alive in the people around us. We begin to understand better our elderly neighbors and relatives. And in spending time with them, we begin also to face our own inner selves.
When we finally come to Grandfather’s death in the last chapter, we are more than a little emotionally involved. But Owens does not leave us with a heart-in-the-throat sobbing that makes us wish for another time and an earlier era. Instead, she helps us deal with death: her grandfather’s, our own family members’, and even the death that we each will endure.
If You Do Love Old Men is not really about death and dying, when you come down to it. Rather, it is about life. It is about living in a way that is meaningful. It is about relationships that give life substance, and taking time to make those relationships a conscious part of our experiences while there is still opportunity. If you have not yet completed your holiday reading list, put this book on it.
Book Briefs
Books For The Joyful Season
As we enter the season of feasting and joy, the season dominated by The Story, we turn to books: books to read and savor, to give and receive. Browsing in bookstores to discover the gems is part of the fun. Herewith, the fruits of my explorations.
• What do writers read? What enriches their souls’ imagination? In Reality and the Vision, edited by Philip Yancey (Word, $15.99), 18 contemporary Christian writers answer these questions. Poet John Leax reads Thomas Merton, who struggled with tension between his religious and poetic selves. Leax found a similar struggle in his own life. Resolution came for Merton when he realized that “nothing that we consider evil can be offered to God in sacrifice. We give him the best that we have in order to declare that he is infinitely better.” He resumed writing poetry as an offering to God. Far from being reluctant, Merton pursued doing to the glory of God; for him, poetry was the “way of affirmation.” Leax was able to translate Merton’s insights and become a person who ministers by being a poet; by seeing God in the ordinary.
Other match-ups in this collection include Eugene Peterson on Feodor Dostoevski, Stephen Lawhead on J. R. R. Tolkien, Harold Fickett on Flannery O’Connor, Madeleine L’Engle on George MacDonald, and many other intriguing and provocative pairings.
• The Christmas Story: Told Through Paintings, with commentary by Richard Mühlberger (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $16.95), presents a fresh selection of paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to colorfully illustrate the birth narratives from Matthew and Luke. Mühlberger’s commentary provides background about the paintings. Families who read and ponder this book together will not only enrich their sense of art, they will see into the biblical narrative in a new way.
Tools For Discovery
• In Discoveries from the Time of Jesus, by Alan Millard (Lion, $22.95), we are transported back almost two millennia. In the ruins of a Jerusalem house excavated in 1970 rests the tale of Roman destruction 1,900 years earlier. Millard describes the find: “Great quantities of ash and burnt wood, … everything covered with soot … a vivid demonstration of the work of the Roman Army.… Scattered on the floor were coins issued by the Roman governors of Judea, mixed with others issued by the Jewish rebels in the years [A.D.] 67, 68, 69, and none later.… Across the doorway of one room were the bones of a human arm, the hand spread out to grasp the step, no more of the skeleton remained, but later destruction had carried away everything outside the entrance. The bones belonged to a woman in her early twenties.”
Such verbal pictures are accompanied by a photo of the excavation and another of objects found in a cave where fleeing rebels hid: bronze jugs, iron knives, and keys with a basket, all in perfect condition. From the marriage of text and picture the reader catches the feel of life in the time of Jesus.
• The Gospel of Mark Illuminated, by Rex Nicholla, with notes by Patrick Vaughn (Lion, $49.95), is a gracious invasion from the past. This hand-lettered and illustrated Gospel (NIV) recalls the days when copies of any part of the Bible were scarce, painstakingly copied and decorated, and highly valued. An even deeper source of value was the nature of the text as the good news of God’s work. It was this that attracted the highest skills and loving attention.
Modeled partly on the Lindisfarne Gospels (which were copied and illustrated in the late seventh century by Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne), the text of Mark is printed from hand calligraphy and every page has appropriate illustrations in full color. The opening spread, Mark 1:1–8, has illustrations from an Egyptian tomb painting and Assyrian reliefs suggesting the long history of Israelite captivity and release, exile and return, that preceded John the Baptist’s ministry. In one corner are realistic drawings of locusts and honey bees, and in the margins are the texts from Malachi and Isaiah quoted by Mark, and from Kings and Malachi, promising a new Elijah.
• Profusely illustrated, The Revell Bible Dictionary, edited by Lawrence O. Richards et al. (Revell, $29.95), will keep families entranced and the next generation instructed. Every page opening has a balance of color and black-and-white illustration. High art from several eras accompanies simple drawings, in-text maps, charts, color photos, and new paintings prepared for this volume. Richards’s text is concise, in the layperson’s language, and covers all the essential events, characters, and concepts. There are 6,750 entries in the 1,150-page volume.
We learn about “phylactery,” for instance, in a little over 20 lines of text, plus a photo of a contemporary Jewish man at prayer, a line drawing showing how phylacteries are attached to head and arms, and a photo of a first-century head phylactery found at Qumran.
Study and reading guides for each biblical book summarize content by chapter and suggest related articles to read. An “Identiquick” section lists all the people and places, with dates and Bible references. Major characters and locations also receive fuller treatment in the dictionary. A final set of 13 maps includes brief articles to link history and geography.
• A hundred years ago James Strong published his life’s work, his Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, which had been compiled by hand. This fall a ten-year effort using computers enhances his tool and applies it to the New International Version of the Bible. In The NIV Exhaustive Concordance (Zondervan, $49.95), Edward W. Goodrick and John R. Kohlenberger III have overcome many of the limitations of Strong’s for users of the NIV.
Indexing every word in the NIV with all the biblical references, the concordance introduces a new numerical system (cross-referenced to Strong’s) keyed to the Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek dictionaries at the back of the volume. The NIV Exhaustive Concordance also uses bold and italic typefaces to show how the English words relate to the original languages in the texts used for the NIV.
The first entry in the IVP New Testament Commentary series, 1 Peter, by I. Howard Marshall (InterVarsity, $14.95), combines a succinct summary of a competent scholar’s work with suggestions for contemporary application. The main commentary is in readable prose, and tough exegetical details are covered in notes at the bottom of the page, a format that will suit devotional use. The lay student, Sunday-school teacher, or Bible-study leader, as well as most preachers, will find this not too thin and not too stiff for everyday use.
Poems And The Story
We sometimes search for symbols of grace, wondering how God might be detected in our world. What we forget, however, is that lambs and bread and wine were once mundane, only later acquiring a religious patina by divine use. So we need poets to show us God in the ordinary, in the particulars where incarnation echoes.
• With a fine sense of the particular and the invasion of grace, Jeanne Murray Walker sees angels where others see only dogs or babies or sofas in Coming into History (Cleveland State University Press, $12.00, hardcover; $8.00, paper). On the day an Irish Setter stops traffic, “… cars kneel before him, headlights / flicking on here and there like an audience / putting opera glasses up.” A woman waltzes with the dog; “this is the hour of the dog in Philadelphia. / This is the day Chrysler and Toyota and Ford / canceled their business to save a fleeting heart and Walnut Street is the place of cherubim.”
She writes with a sure hand, like a master carpenter crafting poems from “words … worried into lines.” Her poems, like a good house, can be visited often.
• Luci Shaw begins her new collection, Polishing the Petoskey Stone (Shaw, $14.95), with icons from the water’s edge: a frog, a shell, a few stones, a dune, a whale. What she does with these common things, which evoke the shore and its sounds, smells, and sights, is to bathe our struggles and pain in the mercy, found in the pearling shells and warm stones of these shores.
In “Subliminal Messages,” a silent phone and letters with “no forwarding address” image an absconding God. Yet a half-hour of sun is “a message, subliminal,” like the first of “two voices / in conversation, / or the way the wind strokes the roof / at night / or the rain tracks down the window glass, / intimate as tears.”
Polishing also contains the bulk of Shaw’s previously published work. In revising her earlier poems, Shaw demonstrates the same skill in probing apples, crickets, leaves, ponds, and snakeskins for clues of the Almighty. As her poetry has grown over the years, complexity and depth have appeared. The thoughts are longer, the colors richer, such as the mature Renoir surpassed the young impressionist.
By Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
