Review of the Movie “Noah”

Here’s a review of the movie “Noah” written by a pastor and old college friend of mine. He has some good insights. He writes:

It is to be expected that any “Bible” movie produced by Hollywood, from a classic like the 1956 production of “The Ten Commandments” starring Charlton Heston as Moses, to “The Passion of the Christ” released in 2004, will take artistic license. Yet what “Noah” does to the Biblical text is worse than what the botched 1988 Bill Murray comedy “Scrooged” does to the original Charles Dickens.

Here’s the link: Noah Review, by John Hanna

Interesting Experiment on How Culture Impacts What We Notice in Scripture

Here’s a blog post about an interesting experiment:  Notice the Famine? How Your Location Impacts Your Bible Interpretation

100 Americans and 50 Russians were asked to read the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-31), and then recount what the parable said.

The experiment found that when the Americans recalled the parable, nearly all of them mentioned that the son had squandered his money (verse 13), but very few of them remembered that there was a severe famine afterwards (verse 14). The opposite was true of the Russians. Most of them remembered the famine, but many didn’t notice that the son squandered his money.

The Americans read the parable like this:

Not many days later, the younger son gathered together all he had and traveled to a distant country, where he squandered his estate in foolish living. After he had spent everything, a severe famine struck that country, and he had nothing.

The Russians read the parable like this:

Not many days later, the younger son gathered together all he had and traveled to a distant country, where he squandered his estate in foolish living. After he had spent everything, a severe famine struck that country, and he had nothing.

The blog post suggests that our culture can change what parts of scripture we emphasize, and blind us to other important parts.  Interesting to me, I did a post about the Prodigal Son a while back (in relation to Arminian theology) and I was guilty of the same thing (I noticed the squandering, but not the famine).

HT: NazNet