Editor’s Note: Faith in 24 Frames was the cover story for the October-December issue of Good Faith Magazine, GFM’s print publication. Good Faith Magazine is a complementary resource for all Good Faith Advocates.
“We come to this place for magic…to laugh, to cry, to care.”
A few times a week, at my local AMC theatre, I hear these words as Nicole Kidman strides across the street and into her local AMC Theatre, to be seated all alone on a plush velvet seat, and I know the time has come. We are about to screen a movie.
As Kidman purrs, “Stories feel perfect and powerful, because here they are,” we are doing more than watching an ad for the very theatre we are already in. We are participating in a kind of cinematic liturgy. The silver screen flickers to life, and within moments, we are transported – not merely to another world, but into the very soul of our contemporary moment.
Cinema as Cultural Liturgy
Film, perhaps more than any other art form of our time, serves as both mirror and lamp: reflecting who we are as a culture while simultaneously illuminating the deeper spiritual currents, emotional upheavals, and political and cultural questions that move beneath the surface of our collective consciousness.
Karl Barth allegedly said that Christians should “do theology with the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other.” In our image-saturated age, we might expand this wisdom: Christians must learn to do theology with Scripture in one hand and film, television, and TikTok in the other. This is not merely an intellectual exercise but a missional imperative. As the apostle Paul demonstrated on Mars Hill, effective gospel proclamation requires deep cultural literacy – the ability to discern times and speak prophetically into the worldviews that shape our neighbors’ understanding of reality.
Entertainment has always been more than entertainment. Filmmakers are storytellers who desire to proclaim a reality or ask questions. They are doing more than “lights, camera, action.”
For the past three years, as I coach preachers, I have been sharing one of my favorite pieces of film lore from Die Hard. The film’s screenwriter, Jeb Stuart, was allegedly reluctant to take on the job of adapting the book, Nothing Lasts Forever, about a father who rescues his daughter from a skyscraper. Late one night, Stuart had a fight with his wife and angrily left their home to go on a drive. While on the freeway, a refrigerator box fell off a truck just ahead of him. Stuart swerved to miss the box, but crashed his car into a ditch. His thoughts immediately turned to how he nearly died and how petty the fight with his wife had been. Stuart then knew how to adapt the book into a screenplay: A man has a fight with his wife and becomes determined that it can’t end that way.
While Die Hard hides behind bravado and bullets, the key scene is much softer. Wounded and bleeding, Bruce Willis’ character, John McClane, tells Al Powell to convey a message to Holly, McClane’s wife, with whom he’d had a fight: “She’s heard me say ‘I love you’ a thousand times, but she’s never heard me say ‘I’m sorry.’”
It’s when I share this little story that people who had previously not been interested in Die Hard become fascinated. Because now, they are invited into a universal experience and given space to talk about the role of regret and apology. Obviously, there are plenty of summer popcorn movies that exist simply to thrill us. And there are more than enough Hallmark films designed to offer simple, predictable pleasers. While there is nothing wrong with that, films like Lars and the Real Girl demonstrate the power of communal love and acceptance while asking viewers about the borders of their own capacity to love. In a similar way, movies like Inside Out invite us to examine how we deal with our own interior lives. Christians, with the Bible in one hand and movie tickets in the other, can become disciples who do what theologian Kevin Vanhoozer calls “cultural exegesis,” the careful reading and interpretation of cultural texts to discern the eternal significance of our current historical moment.
Our culture is talking to us about the human experience, and we might be wise to listen. Just as we carefully exegete biblical texts to understand their meaning and significance, we must also exegete the cultural texts that surround us – including films –to comprehend how they form, inform, or malform the spiritual imagination of ourselves and our contemporaries. This practice is not optional for those who would engage with culture meaningfully. In fact, it is essential for the sake of the gospel.
Cultural Illiteracy
The failure to develop cultural literacy among Christians has created what Vanhoozer describes as a dangerous gap: “Many Christians are seemingly illiterate in both of these aspects of Christian living. They don’t have the Biblical framework to understand the world around them; and to add to the problem, they consume culture exponentially with little to no understanding of what it is saying or how it is forming them. This cultural illiteracy leaves believers vulnerable to unconscious formation by secular narratives while simultaneously rendering them ineffective as cultural ambassadors for the gospel.
Film presents a particularly compelling case study for cultural exegesis because of its unique capacity to capture and communicate the zeitgeist. Even though the book it was based on was written years earlier, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report communicated something ominous in the post-9/11, Patriot Act world, just as movies like The Conversation and The Parallax View highlighted America’s paranoia in the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate years.
The relationship between film and culture is fundamentally symbiotic. Cinema serves as what Robert K. Johnston calls a “vital partner in fostering Christian thought,” not despite its secular origins but precisely because of its capacity to mirror the spiritual struggles and aspirations of our age. In a paper titled, Film as medium for meaning making: A practical theological reflection, Anita L. Cloete notes that films “reflect the values, dreams and hopes of societies” while simultaneously possessing “a remarkable ability to influence public opinion and culture across all social and political frontiers.”
This mirroring function operates at multiple levels. On the surface, films reflect obvious cultural trends – fashion, language, technology, and social norms. But at deeper levels, cinema captures what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls the “world hypothesis” or “root metaphor” that underlies a culture’s understanding of reality. Consider how the proliferation of superhero films in the early 21st century reflects not merely our fascination with spectacle, but our deeper longing for transcendence and moral clarity in a fragmented postmodern world. Or observe how the rise of dystopian narratives reveals our collective anxieties about technology, environmental collapse, and social fragmentation.
The theological significance of this mirroring function cannot be overstated. As Bryan Stone argues in Faith And Film: Theological Themes at the Cinema, “Film is, therefore, entertainment and simultaneously a source for interpreting the world and meaning-making.” When we recognize films as cultural artifacts that both emerge from and contribute to the spiritual imagination of our time, we begin to understand why cultural exegesis is not merely an academic exercise but a form of pastoral care – a way of understanding the hearts and minds of those to whom we are called to proclaim the gospel.
Jesus’ use of parables provides a helpful model for understanding how secular films can serve theological purposes. Just as Christ drew upon familiar cultural elements – farming, fishing, domestic life – to communicate spiritual truth, contemporary filmmakers often embed profound theological insights within narratives that initially appear purely secular. Consider films like The Tree of Life, which Terrence Malick structures as “one long prayer” exploring themes of grace, nature, suffering, and divine providence. Or examine the work of Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Ivan’s Childhood), whose “spiritual cinema” explores what he calls the “miracle” of faith,not as public declarations of belief but as patient waiting for divine breakthrough. Even Martin Scorsese’s much-protested The Last Temptation of Christ can be viewed, not as sacrilegious, but as a meditation on the profound cost Christ paid, denying himself a “normal” life. Even though many viewers thought Scorsese went too far, the film, at the very least, invited questions about the singularity and uniqueness of Jesus, which wise and thoughtful Christians did and still do use to open conversations about the Jesus we find in the scriptures.
The parable-like function of film extends beyond explicitly spiritual narratives. Even seemingly secular films can illuminate theological truth when viewed through the lens of cultural exegesis. Many films explore Christ-figure narratives, themes of incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection in ways that speak to contemporary spiritual longings. Though an arrogant playboy, Iron Man’s Tony Stark ultimately sacrifices himself for the salvation of the planet. The Fantastic Four: First Steps asks us if we are willing to sacrifice a supernaturally powered baby boy to save humanity. Similarly, films addressing social justice can serve as modern prophetic voices, calling audiences to consider how the gospel addresses systemic sin and structural brokenness. Add to that that films have the power to rescue people from becoming slaves to the moment. We are recaptivated by the Civil Rights movement in Selma, for instance.
The key insight here is that cultural exegesis allows us to recognize how the gospel story continues to echo through secular narratives, often in ways that reveal both the persistence of spiritual longing and the inadequacy of purely secular solutions. As Stone argues, this creates opportunities for “vigorous and sustained thinking about both the gospel and the world, about scripture and human existence, about text and context.”
From Cultural Exegesis to Cultural Discipleship
The integration of Christian faith and film has significant practical implications for ministry and discipleship. Pastors, church leaders, and all thoughtful disciples of Jesus should develop skills in cultural exegesis to better understand the spiritual formation occurring in their congregations through media consumption. This might involve incorporating film references into sermons, sermon series based on film and television, creating small group curricula around significant films, or hosting community screenings followed by theological discussion.
During her first semester at The University of Texas, my oldest daughter, who is pursuing a religious studies minor, took a course on American Literature through the lens of the Taylor Swift songbook. I preached a series called The Gospel According to Taylor Swift, and in her last semester in high school, my youngest daughter took a course titled God and Film. These excurses into cultural exegesis make us not only better readers of the Bible, but also attune our hearts to how the Holy Spirit is alive and working among us.
Seminary education, likewise, should include training in cultural hermeneutics alongside biblical hermeneutics, preparing future ministers to engage culture with both appreciation and discernment. Christian educators at all levels can develop media literacy curricula that help students read cultural texts theologically rather than merely consuming them passively.
Parents can practice cultural exegesis as a form of discipleship, engaging with their children about the films and shows they watch rather than simply monitoring content for objectionable material. This requires developing comfort with complexity and ambiguity: learning to appreciate artistic merit while maintaining theological clarity about worldview differences.
Christian artists and filmmakers bear particular responsibility in this area. Rather than simply creating alternative content for Christian audiences, they might engage in what Pope John Paul II called “authentic vehicles of culture,” or works that demonstrate artistic excellence while reflecting distinctly Christian perspectives on human experience. This requires mastering both craft and theological reflection, creating works that can compete in the marketplace of ideas while faithfully representing Christian truth. Which means, of course, being brave enough to create content that opens up discussions while dealing with the large number of Christian evangelicals who want to shut them down. Christian artists, and the Christian faith, cannot afford to appease the easily bruised and underdeveloped spiritual formation of our most reactive brothers and sisters.
So, maybe you’re thinking, “This all sounds great in theory, but where do I actually start?” The integration of Christian faith and film isn’t just an academic exercise – it’s a practical skill that can transform how you engage with your neighbors, your family, and your own spiritual formation.
Step 1: Start Where You Are
You don’t need a film degree to begin practicing cultural exegesis. Start with the movies you’re already watching or the ones your kids are talking about. The next time you sit down to watch something, ask yourself a few simple questions: What worldview is this film promoting? What does it say about human nature, suffering, or hope? How might the gospel speak to the longings or fears this story expresses?
Step 2: Develop Your Theological Radar
Like learning to recognize different bird calls, developing cultural discernment takes practice. Every story touches on creation, brokenness, love, redemption, and other biblical themes, even when it doesn’t use explicitly Christian language. Train yourself to spot these themes, and you’ll begin seeing the gospel’s relevance everywhere.
Step 3: Find Your Community
Cultural exegesis works best within community. Consider starting a film discussion group at your church, or simply make it a practice to debrief movies with your family or friends. During Lent 2023, we guided a small group through “Sacred Frames” groups, exploring the intersection of the films we watched together and their faith. We asked questions like: “What did this film get right about the human condition?” or “Where did you see glimpses of grace in this story?” These conversations can become unexpected opportunities for discipleship and evangelism.
Step 4: Engage, Don’t Just Consume
Move from passive entertainment consumption to active cultural engagement. This doesn’t mean you need to analyze every Marvel movie to death, but it does mean approaching film with intentionality.
Step 5: Practice Faithful Presence
Remember that the goal isn’t to become a film critic or cultural commentator – it’s to become a more effective disciple and witness. As you develop skills in cultural exegesis, look for opportunities to bridge conversations from cultural touchstones to gospel truth. Like Paul on Mars Hill, use the stories your culture already knows as doorways to the story that can save.
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Every film that flickers across your screen is part of a larger conversation about what it means to be human, what’s wrong with the world, and whether there’s any hope for redemption. As Christians, we don’t just have a seat at this table – we have the most compelling story ever told. It’s about how we came to be human, what’s wrong with the world, and whether there’s any hope for redemption. But we can only contribute meaningfully to the conversation if we first learn to listen well.
“Cultural exegesis” is really just a fancy term for missionary work in your own cultural context. When you learn to read films theologically, you’re developing the skills necessary to understand how your neighbors see the world. When you practice discernment about the messages embedded in popular culture, you’re preparing yourself to offer better alternatives rooted in the gospel.
This isn’t about becoming a culture warrior or feeling like you need to analyze every piece of entertainment through a microscope. It’s about developing the wisdom to see your cultural moment clearly – to recognize both the beauty and the brokenness reflected in our collective stories – so that you can speak the gospel with both relevance and power.
We do go to the movies “for magic.” The credits may roll and the lights may come up, but the real work begins when you walk back out into the world. Every conversation about that film, every moment when someone references a movie you’ve thoughtfully engaged, every opportunity to connect a cultural touchstone to gospel truth – these are the moments when cultural exegesis becomes cultural discipleship.
So grab some popcorn, settle in for the next film on your list, and remember: you’re not just being entertained. You’re doing reconnaissance work in the mission field of contemporary culture. And who knows? The next movie you watch might be what you need to help someone understand the greatest story ever told.
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Speaker, Enneagram theorist, author and coach. Sean is the Teaching Pastor at Ecclesia Houston.
