Bible

God Against the gods: Storytelling, Imagination & Apologetics in the Bible

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JUST RELEASED!

How God Captures the Imagination

Brian Godawa, Hollywood screenwriter and best-selling novelist, explores the nature of imagination in the Bible. He explains how God subverts pagan religions by appropriating their imagery and creativity, and redeeming them within a Biblical worldview. The sea dragon Leviathan, the Storm God and others are examined within their Biblical context to draw out the spiritual meaning. Improve your imagination in glorifying God and defending the faith.

Here are the Chapters Titles:

Demonizing the Pagan Gods

Old Testament Storytelling Apologetics

Biblical Creation and Storytelling

The Universe in Ancient Imagination

New Testament Storytelling Apologetics

Imagination in Prophecy and Apocalypse

An Apologetic of Biblical Horror

 

For more information…

CLICK HERE to buy it at Amazon.

CLICK HERE to see the website.

 

Hollywood Worldviews: The Seminar • 5 Powerful Lectures by Brian Godawa

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I have been dying to get these videos done for you!

This is the most recent, most developed and most powerful version of this seminar ever.

All the videos are also sold separately. Discount if you buy all 5.

As a Hollywood screenwriter and best-selling novelist, I explore the power of storytelling in movies and in the Bible. I reveal the elements of worldview, and how storytelling incarnates meaning and worldview. I explain the nature of subversion, and how narratives compete and win in the culture wars of both movies and the Bible. I examine the Bible as a model for analyzing how sex, violence and profanity may be used in movies and storytelling. I look at four differences between exposing sin and exploiting sin. I describe the 9 basic elements of story structure used in movies and the Bible to communicate redemption. I describe the genre of horror and explain the 4 ways that horror is used redemptively in the Bible and in movies.

I think you will love these Powerpoint presentations with film clips!

5 Videos include:

  1. Incarnation in the Movies
  2. Subversion in the Movies
  3. Sex and Violence in the Bible
  4. Redemption in the Movies
  5. Horror: A Biblical Genre

High resolution MP4 downloads or MP3 audio only.

All the videos are also sold separately. Discount if you buy all 5.

Check it out the Godawa.com Store here.

Of Myth and the Bible – Part 3: Ba’al, the Storm God

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The pantheon of gods assembles to battle the chaos monster to protect their territory and kingdom. When the waters of the heavens part, the sea dragon of chaos breaks through and leaves destruction in its wake. The pantheon fights the sea dragon and its monster allies until it is stopped in its tracks by the mighty storm god.

Those who are educated in ancient Near Eastern mythopoeia will recognize this storyline as the Canaanite epic of Baal and Leviathan or the Babylonian epic of Marduk and Tiamat the sea dragon. But what they may not know is that it is also the storyline of the 2012 Marvel blockbuster movie, The Avengers. The purpose of bringing up this point is to call attention to the modern relevancy of this ancient narrative before we descend into the turbulent sea of ancient mythological memes and motifs that are too quickly written off as petty scholarly obsession with obscure archaic minutia that fail to connect to our lives in the modern world. Leviathan vs. the Storm God is still a tale we are retelling today in cultures both religious and secular.

The purpose of this post will be to take a closer look at that ancient Near Eastern narrative of divine combat as it was both appropriated and subverted by the Hebrew authors of the Bible as a polemic for their worldview. Continue reading →

Of Myth and the Bible – Part 2: Modern Cultural Imperialism

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In the last post, I looked at the most famous Biblical genealogy of Jesus Christ to prove that the Biblical notion of history is always very literary, but not always very literal. We must understand the Bible in its own ancient Near Eastern context, in the perspective of the original writers and readers to whom the text was given.

I believe that the Bible is God’s Word and as such, it is breathed out of God through the writings of men inspired by the Holy Spirit. So, while the Biblical writers are very human and therefore very much creatures of their time and culture, there is also another author who is operating providentially behind the writing of the text to communicate transcendent truth, and that is the author and finisher of our faith, God Himself.

How He actually does this, I am not sure, but the divine authorship does not reduce the human authorship to dictation or automatic writing. God uses the genre conventions and mindset of the ancient time period within which to communicate His transcendent truth. Continue reading →

Of Myth and the Bible – Part 1: The Lie of Modern History

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Whenever I consider that I have something important to say about faith, imagination, and/or apologetics, I usually discover that C.S. Lewis has already said it long before I could, and he has said it better than I will. True to form, the title of my book Myth Became Fact, is actually the title of a famous essay by the late Lewis that describes the heart of Christianity as a myth that is also a fact. He comforts the fearful modernist Christian whose faith in the Bible as a book of doctrine and abstract propositions is suddenly upset by the frightful reality of the interaction of holy writ with legend, pagan parallels, and mythology.

Rather than deny the ancient mythopoeic nature of God’s Word as modern Evangelicals tend to do, Lewis embraced it as a reflection of God’s preferred choice of concrete communication over abstraction (the worshipped discourse of the modernist). He understood myth to be the truth embedded into the creation by the Creator in such a way that even pagans would reflect some elements of that truth. Thus, when God Himself incarnates truth into history in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, it is no surprise that it takes on mythopoeic dimensions reflected in previous pagan notions of dying and rising gods. Continue reading →