August 23, 2004

IT’S AN INTERVIEW WITH TELFORD WORK! excerpts: “…I don’t know whether [‘The Passion of the Christ’] will have helped or hindered knowledge of Christ in the wider culture. I have no idea what unchurched Christians’ long-term reactions will be. However, within evangelicalism I am a little worried about it. After the film I spent a good deal of time explaining Catholic soteriology to some very confused and distressed Protestant students. Evangelical theology is a poor theological grid for interpreting passion plays, because passion plays presuppose a participatory rather than substitutionary doctrine of atonement. Evangelical students were liable to take the hypersuffering in the film (e.g., the traditional three falls of the Fourteen Stations of the Cross rather than the single fall in the gospels) as underlining their own guilt at making Jesus suffer instead of them.

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whole thing (which includes a lot of intra-Protestant talk that I, frankly, don’t understand). I probably found this via Camassia.


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