Douglas M. Beaumont > Quotes

“It is a shame when a Christian gives an unqualified approval to the positive messages in The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Little Miss Sunshine, but doesn’t even stop to wonder if the crassness in the storytelling method in both those films undermines them. It’s a bigger shame when Christians pan a movie like In the Bedroom because it is about a revenge murder, and miss the profound theme in the piece about the need to forgive.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“When sharing the Good News of Christ with non-believers, we have a number of misunderstandings to overcome. In order to make true disciples, then, we must first testify to the true gospel message. Then we should clarify any misconceptions or explain anything that our hearer finds confusing. Finally, we must be prepared to justify our belief in the truth of the gospel.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“Unless immoral in the extreme, we should not automatically judge a movie as inappropriate based solely on its method of communication. Nor should we judge a movie as being good simply because we approve of its presentation. Rather, movies should always be evaluated on their treatment of a given subject and whether or not a film’s style is appropriate.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“Whenever we see design, we assume from experience that it came from a designer. We can tell the difference between sand dunes and sand castles, for instance, because we see purposeful design in the castles. None of us would happen upon a sandcastle and believe that it arrived there by chance. Furthermore, when we speak of design we mean a specific, complex design—not simply a pattern of some sort. It is the difference between “BDHIGE-HGDVNB,” which is complex but has no design, “BBBBBBBB,” which has design but is not complex, and “Be back at 8 p.m.,” which is both designed and complex. When we see complex, specific design, we recognize it as the result of an intelligent being.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“While some of the earliest copies of non-biblical writings date to thousands of years later than their originals (Homer’s Odyssey is unusually good; only five hundred years separate the copies from the original), we have fragments of the New Testament that date to within decades of the events they record. This does not allow enough time for distortion or myth making.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“God gave all the light that people need to see, but He also left enough darkness for those who don’t want to see.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“When it comes to the New Testament, we can be confident we are reading from accurate sources, because we have so many ancient copies to compare. For many ancient texts there are only a handful of manuscripts in existence. We have only nine or ten good copies of Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars. The best-preserved, non-biblical ancient writing we have is Homer’s Iliad, of which there are only 643 copies. Compare these numbers to the New Testament, which is based on nearly six thousand Greek manuscripts plus over nine thousand ancient copies in other languages. If that were not enough, even if all of these copies were lost, we could reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament from ancient quotations of the Bible.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“But if we have learned anything in the cinema-making efforts of Christians in recent years, it is that you can’t make beautiful movies unless you understand and love the medium. You can’t love and understand something you fear, or disdain, or dismiss.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“Stories are the preferred way human beings learn and define our values. In our stories we find heroes whose larger than life examples make heroism possible in our own small struggles. A society without stories has no dreams, no nobility, no challenge, no depth.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“It is the gritty portrayal of the darker side of life that often causes Hollywood’s unpopularity among Christian viewers, but it is the idyllic and unrealistic portrayal of life in some Christian movies that can make them ineffective in reaching unbelievers with a positive message.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“In a cultural moment defined by screen media, it is remarkable how ignorant most people—particularly people of faith—are about how screen stories work. We believers are supposed to have our eyes trained on “the signs of the times” as open doors for evangelism. The movies are the “signs” of our times. We aren’t supposed to be shutting out the world, or losing ourselves in it. It is bad for the world that Christians are bad at making and reading movies. It is bad for Christians that they are missing the depth and beauty of the art and stories that are being made all around them.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“That is, while many people prefer a happy ending (a classic comedy), sometimes a message can be communicated more powerfully by a classic tragedy.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“Nudity in art was rarely contested by the church until recently. It was not explicitly condemned until the anti-Protestant Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, and even after the Reformation, the Protestant church continued to support artistic uses of nudity, especially when depicting biblical scenes that might demand it for accuracy.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“A student once asked me if I would let a two-year-old watch The Passion of the Christ (2004). I answered in the negative; but I added that I also would not feed a two-month-old infant a steak. Because she doesn’t have any teeth, a two-month-old would probably choke on the steak. This is not because steak is deadly, but simply because a two-month-old is not developmentally ready to ingest it. It is often the same with movies.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“Proof for the existence of God cannot come directly from the physical sciences. It’s not that scientists aren’t intelligent people. It’s simply that their knowledge, like everyone else’s, is limited to the areas in which they have been trained. Such issues simply lie beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, which cannot address the existence of an immaterial God. This does not mean we cannot use scientific facts as evidence to support theological conclusions; it simply means that science has no ultimate authority in matters that are properly investigated by theology.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“In other words, magic in both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia is not equivalent to the occult practices in which people in the real world can be involved. When the Bible commands against the use of sorcery and divination, it is not referring to the magical things that magical creatures can do in fantasy worlds.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith

“Universal principles are communicated through characteristics or actions that are common to all people. If these are absent from a film it will fail. Why? Because our connection to the characters, particularly the protagonist, is what makes stories work. The only way, then, to make a popular film is to choose stories that feature characters who are dealing with universal issues.”
― Douglas M. Beaumont, The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith