We live in a media charged culture.
I don't lament this fact. Mostly because the movies, TV, music, even news relies on concepts that only make sense within the Christian Narrative. And thus the pain caused by the perversion of these concepts only are converted, saved, and redeemed by the same Christian Narrative.
The fact that both Christians and non-Christians might believe culture can be conceived without the person of Christ is staggering. Furthermore, If it were possible, with some sort of super-magnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of His name, how much would be left? (Pelikan)
Thus, this blog will be an introduction to a series of blogs I hope to do on explaining the Nicene Creed through popular media. This is in order not to say that we need media to understand the Creed, but that the media needs the faith in order to explain its own display of these concepts.
I believe this is important because when we don't receive that text we have been waiting what feels like a life time for, when you lose that job that is the only thing you know how to do, and when that person dies that you loved with all your heart...when that happens that broken heart, thirst for justice, etc it is the lamentation of the fullness of Christian theological understandings. Culture tries to save itself by recycling these symbols and concepts but it never fully saves itself only prolongs the inevitable.
Then the task of this new blog set then will show how we have trusted the wrong things in light of trying to achieve happiness (beatitude). We have trusted, for example, love for love's sake, peace for peace's sake, justice for justice's sake, etc rather than the peace, love, justice that exists as a gift of God alone and within God alone. These concepts are largely unachievable without the Triune God especially in today's contemporary world.
Not saying that those non-Christians cannot love someone, but that there exists a fullness in the Triune God which simultaneously is its source and fullness.
So what will follow, hopefully, is an engagement with pop-culture in the theological framework of the Creed. And, I hope to show where trust belongs.
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