Tony Watkins » writing

Reinventing Jesus

Tony Watkins — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:37:39 +0000

This article was first published on Culturewatch. © Tony Watkins.

When I interviewed Philip Pullman, I found him genial, generous and engaging. He has a sharp mind, a clever wit, and he’s a brilliant writer. He has justifiably been acclaimed as one of Britain’s finest writers, having won several awards including the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the internationally prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial award, as well as receiving a CBE. Some years back, The Independent declared that Pullman is ‘capable of lighting up the dullest day or greyest spirit with the incandescence of his imagination’.

He’s also capable of making Christians incandescent with indignation at some of the things he says. His best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy was very negative about the church, which irked some. It also contained an incident in which a being claiming to be God is killed, which really raised some hackles. Pullman also made some particularly outspoken remarks in a couple of interviews. One of the most quoted is ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,’ though he admits he was out to wind up the reporter. He told Bryan Appleyard in The Times recently that ‘I’d be a complete idiot if I tried to undermine Christianity. It would mean undermining what I am as well.’

It would undermine what Pullman is in the sense that he has always insisted that he is a ‘Christian atheist and even more particularly, a Church of England atheist. And very specifically, a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist. I can’t escape these influences on my background, and I would not wish to.’

So, as Rowan Williams pointed out in an event at the National Theatre, Pullman was surprisingly quiet about Jesus in His Dark Materials. Pullman promised him that he would make this the subject of his next book. Then Canongate invited Pullman to contribute this volume to their Myths series. He went back to the Gospels and read them in three different versions (the Authorised Version, the New English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version). He also re-read Acts and Paul’s letters, and was struck by how often Paul refers to ‘Christ’ rather than to ‘Jesus’:

Christ is an addition; he comes later. I reread Paul, and I counted 30 occasions when he refers to Jesus but 150-plus when he refers to Christ. Paul wasn’t interested in Jesus, he was interested in Christ — in the God part, not the man part. Paul was an incomparable genius, literary and administrative, whose view of this entity he called Jesus Christ, strongly skewed towards the Christ part, is what the church has been founded on ever since.

So he decided to rework the story of Jesus to focus on this perceived tension by making them separate characters. In his version, Mary gives birth to twins: Jesus and a much weaker boy, who becomes known as Christ. Their lives remain intertwined, yet go on very different courses.

Once again, it appears that Pullman is out to shock. Even the title seems calculated to inflame Christians, and it’s surely no accident that it’s being published in Easter week – though that is Canongate’s decision, not his. The back cover of the book perhaps tries to defuse some of the attacks by declaring in big, bold letters, ‘This is a story.’ But perhaps even that is slightly double-edged, suggesting that the source material is also a story and not necessarily a true one. It also points to one of Pullman’s recurring themes: the process of telling stories.

Philip Pullman is, of course, a consummate storyteller. He frequently insists that all he’s doing is telling stories, not trying to preach a message – though I think he introduces a false antithesis, because he clearly does both. This story, though, is a curious thing. To my mind it’s far from Pullman at his best. Sometimes it is a respectful retelling of incidents from the Gospels, and since Pullman has written in a spare, biblical tone, it feels very much like reading a somewhat old-fashioned translation of the Bible, with some extra details. At some other times, the stories are changed considerably, and at times are a complete distortion of what the original texts say.

It is clear that Pullman has done his homework. He cleverly fills in some of the background of the stories, explaining some of the details and suggesting motivations for why people acted in particular ways. It’s also clear that he’s also been reading at least some bits of the Old Testament. But of course, he’s not a Bible scholar, so, unsurprisingly, there are things he gets wrong or doesn’t understand how they fit into the wider context of the Bible or of the culture of the day. He also occasionally draws on non-canonical gospels, particularly the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, despite the fact that this dates from around two centuries after the biblical Gospels.

From the outset, Pullman creates a great deal of ambiguity about the miraculous aspects of the story. Mary is visited by someone claiming to be an angel and told that she will conceive. She clearly believes him and Pullman never says otherwise, but the implication is that Mary is gullible and has been tricked. Nevertheless, when she gives birth in a Bethlehem stable, shepherds come to see the long-awaited Messiah in response to seeing a glowing angel telling them of his birth. Pullman makes no attempt to explain this angel away. Neither does he offer any rationalisation for astrologers arriving from the east in search of one who has been born to be king of the Jews.

As a child, Jesus is a normal, somewhat mischievous boy, while the weakly Christ is irreproachable. Interestingly, Christ performs miracles to rescue Jesus when he is in trouble. When Jesus gets lost in Jerusalem after the Passover, again Christ gets him out of trouble with the priests by giving clever answers.

Pullman has set up certain expectations in the reader about how Christ’s story is going to develop. But he begins to subvert this at Jesus’s baptism, when Jesus is inspired to focus his life on God as John had done. He goes into the wilderness to pray, where he is tempted, not by the devil, but by his brother. Christ wants Jesus to be a messiah figure, doing miracles to win disciples and building a powerful church which could spread throughout the world being a force for good. Jesus flatly rejects Christ’s pragmatism; he is an idealist who preaches the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God.

Christ is a more complex character. On the one hand, he continues to love his brother deeply, though he stays in the background and has no contact with Jesus during his ministry. But on the other hand, he is calculating and manipulative, hungry perhaps to be the power behind the throne when Jesus, as he hopes, establishes an earthly system of churches and structures.

Then he is approached by a mysterious stranger, the identity of whom we never discover. Christ eventually concludes that the stranger is an angel, and he certainly seems to know an awful lot, but Pullman never quite says enough for us to know for sure. The stranger encourages Christ to watch Jesus very carefully and to write everything down for the future. He also urges him to see the spiritual ‘truth’ beyond the sometimes inconvenient historical events.

Pullman’s point is that what we read in the Gospels is not what actually happened. The real historical Jesus – a good, inspiring man, but nothing more – has been smothered by inventions of the early church – in particular the incarnation and the resurrection. This is a well-worn attack on the Gospels – the Jesus of history versus the Christ of faith – though Pullman gives it a provocative new coat of paint. He says, ‘I think my version is much closer to what Jesus would have said. The version in the Gospels is so different from what he said usually.’ It’s a great shame that he evidently has no idea of the very impressive evidence for the reliability of the gospels.

Jesus eventually reaches Gethsemane realising that things are coming to a head and that public opinion is turning against him. And by that point he has lost his faith. He compares himself to the fool who says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’ and says, ‘When the fool prays to you and gets no answer, he decides that God’s great absence means he’s not bloody well there.’ He wonders whether Christ’s dream of a church was right, but revolts against the idea, perceiving that it will lead to abuse of power, cruelty and conquest.

Pullman told Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian,

He is really speaking for me in that section. Of course I don’t condemn speculative thinking, or organising people to help them do good, or setting up hospitals or giving hospitality to travelling strangers or educating people. But we have seen very recently how some aspects of all this can go wrong. People can abuse power.

The greatest excuse in the world is that ‘God told me to do it’: hence the Crusades. Once you are appealing to an authority that can’t be checked, you are doing something dangerous.

This is a familiar theme in Pullman’s work: there is no God; this world is all there is and it’s wonderful; organised religion is a terrible thing which leads inexorably to abuse of power. At least, in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ he is not as simplistic as he was in His Dark Materials, in that here he does acknowledge the good which the church has done, as well as pointing to its failures.

It’s easy for Christians to get defensive about such attacks on the church, but although Pullman overstates the case, it is true that there have been, and are, abuses of power and authority within church structures. It is a disgrace on the church and it brings the gospel of Jesus Christ into disrepute. But we shouldn’t be surprised, because the church is made up of fallen human beings, who are not always very good at working through the implications of their faith. On the iPhone app of the book, which has both text and audio book as well as extra features, Pullman says, ‘My beliefs are those of Jesus as I have him expressing them in the Garden of Gethsemane. If there is to be a church, it should be a poor church. It should own no property and make no laws.’ He has a point.

Eventually, the stranger seduces Christ into betraying Jesus (Judas is not mentioned), believing that like Abraham, he has to be willing sacrifice the one he loves. He is distraught when he realises what he has done, but for the sake of the bigger story, he agrees to deceiving the disciples into thinking that Jesus has risen from the dead. Once again, Pullman is suggesting that the miraculous is an invention, a deliberate deception combined with gullibility, or at least suggestibility, but not something that could possibly be true.

Much of this is inevitable, given Pullman’s atheism. He comes to the stories already convinced that miracles cannot happen and believing, like the philosopher David Hume, that there cannot ever be enough evidence to establish their truth. However, it is curious that Pullman seems unable to tell the story without occasionally bringing in some very mysterious goings-on, which do appear to be miraculous or angelic, even though he tries to deny or redefine such things. The angel appearing to the shepherds, for instance. He dismisses these elements as aspects of a fairy-tale, but he wasn’t able to do without them altogether.

He sometimes portrays the miracles as simply a matter of someone’s mental state, as with the paralysed man who ‘was so strengthened and inspired by the atmosphere Jesus had created that he found himself able to move.’ But there are other times when a healing is much more ambiguous, allowing for the possibility of something mysterious having taken place.

Pullman is clearly fascinated with the person of Jesus. He recognises that the Gospels don’t read like novels or fairytales, though – because of his scepticism about the miraculous – he doesn’t think they’re history either. Pullman’s Jesus is an extraordinary man, but he’s nothing more than that. He does no miracles, makes no claims to divinity and remains irrevocably dead after his crucifixion. Yet in much of the book, he remains a profoundly compelling character.

The story of Jesus as told in the Gospels is extraordinary. Its impact on human history has been incalculable, and people keep coming back to it even when they disbelieve its message. As Richard Baukham argued in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, the Gospel accounts bear all the marks of having been written by, or at least closely based on the accounts of, people who were there at the time. These records, with their mind-boggling claims about Jesus being both God and man, and rising from death to prove it, cannot easily be dismissed as merely faith-based accretions on top of the story of a good man. There is good evidence for their reliability; the claims of Jesus are astonishingly far-reaching – they deserve to be listened to on their own terms, with an open mind. Charlotte Higgins’s response is the right one: on her Guardian blog she writes that the book has ‘sent me rushing back to the Gospels. I read Matthew over my lunchtime soup, ready to see with new eyes these fascinating and often startling documents.’

Posted via web from Tony Watkins

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Charlotte Higgins’s response to The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Tony Watkins — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:17:21 +0000

Charlotte Higgins wrote this in her blog on the Guardian website yesterday. What a great response to Philip Pullman’s new book:

The Good Man Jesus is a fascinating story, told in the same kind of spare, lapidary prose as the Gospels themselves or a Grimm brothers fairytale. Pullman’s gift for storytelling is in evidence on every page. For what it’s worth, in case any Christians are out there pulsating with rage already, in the same way that His Dark Materials made me pick up Blake and Milton (two of his poetic sources), The Good Man Christ has sent me rushing back to the Gospels. I read Matthew over my lunchtime soup, ready to see with new eyes these fascinating and often startling documents.

via guardian.co.uk

Posted via web from Tony Watkins

Philip Pullman’s next book is a reworking of the story of Jesus. And a denial of the truth of Jesus. Children’s author Philip Pullman says Jesus wasn’t the Son...
Another article on Pullman’s next book Canongate to publish Pullman on God 07.09.09 Catherine Neilan...
The failure of His Dark Materials film trilogy I stumbled across this yesterday, having missed it when...

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

Tony Watkins — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:32:22 +0000

I talked to Paul Hammond on UCB UK radio this morning about Philip Pullman’s controversial new books. The conversation was put out as a podcast on Culturewatch:

Click to listen

Posted via email from Tony Watkins

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Interview with Philip Pullman (from 2004) I interviewed Philip Pullman back in 2009, before I started...
Philip Pullman and his atheist fiction Philip Pullman CBE is the acclaimed author of around...

Philip Pullman and his atheist fiction

Tony Watkins — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:45:30 +0000

Philip Pullman CBE is the acclaimed author of around thirty books, mostly aimed at older children. He is best known for His Dark Materials, a brilliantly written, ambitious trilogy (Northern Lights/The Golden Compass (1995); The Subtle Knife (1997); The Amber Spyglass (2000)). He has received many awards, including the highly prestigious Astrid Lindgren Award.

His Dark Materials centres on two children, Lyra and Will, from different universes who get caught up in the most ambitious plan ever conceived by a human being. Lyra’s world is governed by a manipulative, totalitarian and ruthless church. One character comments that throughout the church’s history, ‘it’s tried to suppress and control every natural impulse . . . every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.’[1] But a war is indeed coming. Lyra’s uncle, Lord Asriel, wants to destroy God, replacing his kingdom with the Republic of Heaven. God, known as the Authority, is merely the first angel, who duped other angels into believing that he is the creator. Now he is old and worn out, and eventually he dissolves into thin air with ‘a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief . . . a mystery dissolving into mystery’.[2]

This is all within Pullman’s fiction, of course, rather than our real world. But he repeatedly says similar things in interviews. In one he remarked, ‘the God who dies is the God of the burners of heretics, the hangers of witches, the persecutors of Jews, the officials who recently flogged that poor girl in Nigeria . . . all these people claim to know with absolute certainty that their God wants them to do these things. Well, I take them at their word, and I say in response that that God deserves to die.’[3]

This atheistic stance (which is seldom explicit in his other books) has brought Pullman plenty of criticism. Peter Hitchens (Catholic brother of the outspoken atheist Christopher) described him as, ‘The most dangerous man in Britain’. Pullman took this as a compliment and sent him ‘a warm card of appreciation and thanks’.[4] He was also pleased by the Catholic Herald’s claim that his books are, ‘far more worthy of the bonfire than Harry Potter . . . and a million times more sinister,’[5]

Pullman maintains that he became an atheist for purely intellectual reasons. His grandfather, a Church of England minister, was a major influence on his life. Following the death of his father in an air crash, the young Pullman spent a great deal of time with his grandparents. He never questioned their beliefs until, as a teenager confronted with competing worldviews, he abandoned the idea that Christianity is true.

Although he is frequently outspoken as an atheist, he says:

I’m caught between the words ‘atheistic’ and ‘agnostic’. I’ve got no evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don’t know. So maybe there is a God out there. All I know is that if there is, he hasn’t shown himself on earth.

Such comments seem to display intellectual humility, and he also maintains that he has no atheist agenda as a writer: ‘I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.’[6] This doesn’t ring true for many people, since there are times in The Amber Spyglass in particular when he becomes very preachy. Then there are his much-quoted remarks that ‘my books are about killing God’[7] and, ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief’.[8] We must be careful, however, since inferring others’ motivations is always problematic. Even statements, such as these – which apparently announce motivation – may be misleading, especially when the statements are inconsistent with other statements. Both of these notorious comments come from around the time when The Amber Spyglass, was being promoted internationally. I suspect that he chose, deliberately or subconsciously, to express himself in very provocative ways in order to create a stir and boost sales. Interestingly, he has not subsequently made quite such blunt public statements of his intent.

On the other hand, Pullman has frequently stated that he wants to explore the questions he considers to be the ‘most important of all’: Is there a God? What does it mean to be human? What is our purpose? He comes at those questions from a particular angle, and he clearly has very strong views on the answers. But Pullman is right that such questions are absolutely fundamental.

Pullman’s view of reality

The most problematic aspect of His Dark Materials for many Christians is that God is killed. However, Pullman is only able to do this because of something more fundamental: the way he defines reality. He is a materialist, rejecting belief in the supernatural (frequently insisting that there is ‘no elsewhere’). His Dark Materials is consequently a celebration of physicality. In Pullman’s world, angels (and ghosts) are made of matter like everything else, though insubstantial. They are made of Dust – particles of consciousness that permeate all reality. The Authority (God) is the first of these angels and is therefore a physical being. When Lyra and Will meet him, he is immensely old and decrepit. He is a fraud, an imposter, a delusion whose time, according to Pullman, is long since past.

Once again, Pullman says similar things in the real world. ‘God died a long time ago,’ he exclaims. What he means is, ‘It’s as if God has died. That’s the feeling I have.’[9] The idea of God is redundant: ‘the old assumptions have withered away . . . the idea of God with which I was brought up is now perfectly incredible.’ [10] He claims that ‘the most important subject I know . . . is the death of God and its consequences,’[11] but also insists that:

‘God’ is nothing more than a metaphor: ‘I don’t expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that’s what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all – savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection – for David, for example. But he’s not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won’t find them in the phone book.[12]

He also brings the idea of the ‘Republic of Heaven’ into interviews because it encapsulates both his materialism and his strong sense of morality: ‘I think it’s time we thought about a republic of heaven instead of the kingdom of heaven. The king is dead. That’s to say I believe that the king is dead. I’m an atheist. But we need heaven nonetheless, we need all the things that heaven meant, we need joy, we need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need a connection with the universe, we need all the things that the kingdom of heaven used to promise us but failed to deliver. And, furthermore, we need it in this world where we do exist – not elsewhere, because there ain’t no elsewhere.’[13]

Pullman’s view of morality

Pullman’s vision of a materialist republic of heaven is very moral. He stresses mutual responsibility because, ‘In the republic we’re connected in a moral way to one another, to other human beings. We have responsibilities to them, and they to us. We’re not isolated units of self-interest in a world where there is no such thing as society; we cannot live so.’[14] The moral dimension of His Dark Materials is one of its strengths. In one television interview, Pullman commented, ‘An honest reading of the story would have to admit that the qualities that the stories celebrates and praises are those of love, kindness, tolerance, courage, open-heartedness, and the qualities that the stories condemns are: cruelty, intolerance, zealotry, fanaticism . . . well, who could quarrel with that?’[15] These values are very consistent with Christian values, but Pullman vehemently rejects the suggestion that they derive from a Judeo-Christian worldview:

You think that nobody can possibly be decent unless they’ve got the idea from God or something. Absolute bloody rubbish! Isn’t it your experience that there are plenty of people in the world who don’t believe who are very good, decent people? . . . It comes from ordinary human decency. It comes from accumulated human wisdom – which includes the wisdom of such figures as Jesus Christ. Jesus, like many of the founders of great religions, was a moral genius, and he set out a number of things very clearly in the Gospels which if we all lived by them we’d all do much better. What a pity the Church doesn’t listen to him![16]

Pullman’s panpsychism

Pullman rightly sees morality as intimately related to wisdom. In both his fiction and reality he sees wisdom as something that accumulates independently of any individual beings. In His Dark Materials he expresses this as Dust, the most fundamental reality in the universe: particles of consciousness which multiply within sentient beings and which coalesces into beings like angels. But Dust also exists independently of these beings, and possesses a collective consciousness. It is a brilliant idea which provides the central narrative tension to His Dark Materials and propels the story forward by guiding Lyra through an ‘alethiometer’ (from the Greek word for truth, alethea) and in other ways.

It’s ironic that Pullman’s story features a cosmic, superhuman intelligence that communicates, guides and directs in a remarkably god-like way. It certainly reintroduces some aspects of God back into the picture (though Pullman identifies Dust as being on the side of the rebellion against God). Freitas and King argue, therefore, that Pullman is really telling a profoundly spiritual story.[17] However, Pullman rejects the idea that the word ‘spiritual’ has any meaning. He says:

As for ‘spirit’, ‘spiritual’, ‘spirituality’ – these are words I never use, because I can see nothing real that seems to correspond with them: they have no meaning. I would never begin to talk of a person’s spiritual life, or refer to someone’s profound spirituality, or anything of that sort, because it doesn’t make sense to me. When other people talk about spirituality I can see nothing in it, in reality, except a sense of vague uplift combined at one end with genuine goodness and modesty, and at the other with self-righteousness and pride. . . . the word ‘spiritual’, for me, has overtones that are entirely negative. It seems to me that whenever anyone uses the word, it’s a sign that either they’re deluding themselves, or they’re pulling the wool over the eyes of others. And when I hear it, or see it in print, my reaction is one of immediate scepticism.[18]

Dust is thus thoroughly physical, not spiritual. It allowed Pullman to deal with religious issues while affirming a materialist view of reality. It is his ‘metaphor for . . . human wisdom, science and art, all the accumulated and transmissible achievements of the human mind.’[19] Once again, in the real world, Pullman expresses some similar ideas. He says:

Those who are committed materialists (as I claim to be myself) have to account for the existence of consciousness . . . There are various ways of explaining consciousness, many of which seem to take the line that it’s an emergent phenomenon that only begins to exist when a sufficient degree of complexity is achieved. Another way of dealing with the question is to assume that consciousness, like mass, is a normal and universal property of matter (this is known as panpsychism), so that human beings, dogs, carrots, stones, and atoms are all conscious, though in different degrees. This is the line I take myself, in the company of poets such as Wordsworth and Blake.[20]

This comes close to suggesting that Dust is more than a metaphor. Invoking the idea of panpsychism as a materialist explanation for the problem of human consciousness seems only to intensify the sense that Pullman is stretching to find a way around the problem of where such things as consciousness come from. Faced with the need to account for attributes of human beings that have traditionally been identified, at least to an extent, with the spiritual, he is forced to reach for the assumption (he acknowledges that it is one) that all consciousness is a universal property of matter, though there is no evidential basis for it. It is a faith-based perspective on reality which introduces additional complexity to understanding reality, yet without gaining very much in terms of explanatory power, especially with respect to the moral imperatives to which Pullman is committed.

The irony remains that Philip Pullman the materialist intuitively reached for models which encapsulate features of the very worldview he denies so strongly. He rejects the kingdom of heaven but says, ‘what I’m looking for is a way of thinking of heaven that restores these senses of rightness and goodness and connectedness and meaning and gives us a place in it. But because there ain’t no elsewhere, that has got to exist in the only place we know about for sure which is this earth, and we’ve got to make our world as good as we possibly can for one another and for our descendants. That’s what I mean by a republic of heaven. And we won’t ever finally get there . . . because of entropy.’[21] My contention is that rightness, goodness, connectedness and meaning are inherently spiritual and require the existence of a God beyond the physical realm. Pullman objects to this idea and yet unwittingly, it seems, stumbles into tying them up with something that is at least reminiscent of God. Perhaps it’s harder to jettison such concepts – such realities – than Philip Pullman realises.

[1] The Subtle Knife p. 52

[2] The Amber Spyglass, p. 432

[3] Philip Pullman: Discussion on Readerville.com (no longer available online)

[4] Deborah Ross, ‘Philip Pullman: Soap and the Serious Writer’, The Independent, 4 February 2002.

[5] This comment was, in fact, taken completely out of context by Pullman. The article by Leonie Caldecott was tongue-in-cheek, and was clearly not in favour of book-burning at all.

[6] Ref

[7] Steve Meacham, ‘The shed where God died’, Sidney Morning Herald, 13 December 2003.

[8] Alona Wartofsky, ‘The Last Word’, The Washington Post, 19 February 2001.

[9] Tony Watkins, ‘Interview with Pullman’, 2004 – http://www.tonywatkins.co.uk/media/literature/interview-with-philip-pullman-from-2004/

[10] Philip Pullman, ‘The Republic of Heaven’ in The Horn Book Magazine, November/December 2001, p.655.

[11] ’The Republic of Heaven’, p. 655

[12] Peter T. Chattaway, ‘Philip Pullman — the extended e-mail interview‘, 28 November 2007, http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/philip-pullman-extended-e-mail.html

[13] Charles N. Brown, ‘An Interview with Philip Pullman’, no longer available online but quoted in Tony Watkins, Dark Matter: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Philip Pullman, (Damaris, 2004) p. 242–243.

[14] ’The Republic of Heaven’, p. 664

[15] Philip Pullman, The South Bank Show, ITV, 9 March 2003.

[16] Huw Spanner, ‘Heat and Dust’ in Third Way, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2002, pp. 22–26.

[17] Donna Freitas and Jason King, Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman’s Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials (Jossey Bass, 2007).

[18] Peter T. Chattaway, ‘Philip Pullman – the extended e-mail interview‘

[19] Peter T. Chattaway, ‘Philip Pullman – the extended e-mail interview‘

[20] Peter T. Chattaway, ‘Philip Pullman – the extended e-mail interview‘

[21] Tony Watkins, ‘Interview with Pullman’

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Some recommended books on film and faith

Tony Watkins — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:01:41 +0000

At the risk of being seen as a shameless self-promoter, I would suggest that my own book, Focus: The Art and Soul of Cinema, is a key read for any Christian who wants to think about film and worldviews, largely because I wrote it to deal with this specific issue in a way no other books did (the closest being Brian Godawa’s Hollywood Worldviews).

Some other books I recommend highly (in alphabetical order, by author, not in terms of merit):

Peter Fraser and Vernon Edwin Neal, ReViewing the Movies: A Christian Response to Contemporary Film (Focal Point) (Crossway, 2000).
Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom & Discernment second edition (IVP, 2009)
Jeffrey Overstreet, Through a Screen Darkly: Looking Closer at Beauty, Truth and Evil in the Movies (Regal, 2007)
Nick Pollard, Evangelism Made Slightly Less Difficult: With Study Guide (IVP, 1997)
William D. Romanowski, Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture, second edition (Brazos Press, 2007)
James W Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalogue (InterVarsity, 2004)

I will update this page with further recommendations and some comments when I get chance.

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Anthony Head on Blue Peter reading my article on justice in Idea magazine

Tony Watkins — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:25:17 +0000

This is very weird. On yesterday’s Blue Peter (available on BBC iPlayer until 9 June 2009), the team were making a film in 24 hours for this year’s ‘Me and my movie’. They had Anthony Head, of Buffy and Merlin fame, involved. At one point (8 min 20 sec in) he’s shown looking for inspiration in Idea magazine, from Evangelical Alliance. And there’s a very brief shot of him looking at my article on justice:

Anthony Head on Blue Peter

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The hidden foundations of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia

Tony Watkins — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:04:29 +0000

I wasn’t able to see The Narnia Code on BBC One yesterday, but I watched and enjoyed it this evening. Directed by Norman Stone, it profiles the discovery of Michael Ward who, while working on his PhD on Lewis, stumbled onto a secret no one had ever seen before. He was reading Lewis’s poem about the planets (expressing a Medieval cosmology, of course, because he was a Medievalist and because it’s full of symbolism, not because he thought it was scientifically true) when he spotted a line which had an unmistakable connection to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It talked about Jupiter bringing an end to winter and forgiveness for guilt – central themes in LWW. He began to wonder whether the other books might also be connected with the one of the seven planets in the Medieval view (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter) and in a very short space of time realised that he had discovered what is probably the most important interpretive key to the series. His work was finally published as Planet Narnia, though I seem to remember hearing a more accessible version of the ideas is coming out this year under the title The Narnia Code.. If you’re at all interested in The Chronicles of Narnia, it’s well worth watching, and it includes some great observations from Brian Sibley, Eric Metaxas, Alan Jacobs, Jerry Root (not enough of him) and others. It loses focus a little when discussing the compatibility of modern science and faith, but there are some good comments from John Polkinghorne and Owen Gingrich so it’s not wasted.

The Narnia Code is available on BBC iPlayer until 11:34pm (UK time) Thursday 23rd April 2009. Buy Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis from Amazon.co.uk (and help support my work!).

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Focus: The Art and Soul of Cinema

Tony Watkins — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 21:34:00 +0000

Once more good intentions of keeping up with blogging have gone the way of most good intentions. Anyway, the book, Focus: The Art and Soul of Cinema was officially published last Friday. My copies arrived on Monday – always an exciting moment to see the results of so much hard work nicely printed (11 pt Palatino on a very crisp white paper if, like me, you care about such things – and I realise most don’t) with a lovely cover.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

Films have never been more popular or, with the increase in television channels and home rentals, so readily available. But how much of what we watch do we really understand? Focus: The Art and Soul of Cinema explains how films communicate the worldview of the film-maker, helping us to engage more fully with the films we watch – and so to enjoy them more. With a passion for film and a deep concern to develop a robust Christian understanding of our culture, Tony Watkins equips us to recognise and respond to the messages in today’s movies. Essential reading for anyone who enjoys films and who wants to get more out of their viewing experience.

There is a little more blurb, but since it’s people saying nice things about the book, modesty prevents me from putting it here. You can get more information from the Focus microsite. You can even read all the nice things there, as well as see what’s in the book, read a sample extract and get additional resources.

If you feel inclined to buy a copy – at the bargain price of £8.99 – you can do so in a number of ways. Here’s three, all with different advantages: order it through a bookshop (the ISBN is 978-1-904753-15-5), buy it through the Damaris shop or buy it from Amazon.co.uk via the books page on my website (which has the small advantage of a little commission from Amazon helping towards our support, as well as encouraging more sales on Amazon). Wherever you buy from, it really helps when people leave reviews on the Amazon website(s) – it has a huge influence on what people buy.

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Mini interview on Publishers Weekly

Tony Watkins — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:37:00 +0000

As well as reviewing Dark Matter, Publishers Weekly also conducted a short email interview with me which was published in Religion BookLine. Here’s an extract:

. . . rather than a screed against Pullman’s books—which portray the Church as a corrupt corporation and God as a sick old man whose place has been taken by an evil usurper—Watkins, a British Christian cultural critic, offers what he hopes will be an aid for Christians and non-Christians in understanding Pullman’s criticism of organized religion and faith.

“I primarily wrote it for fans of Pullman’s work who are not Christians,” Watkins told RBL in an e-mail interview from England. “His Dark Materials is full of theological and philosophical themes, and Pullman is vociferous in his opposition to religion and the idea of God. So I think that fans who want to really understand Pullman’s writings should understand a Christian perspective on them. I think that also makes it valuable for Christians who want to know how to respond to it. I don’t believe that we should be scared of books which say things we disagree with, but that we should enter into constructive dialogue.”

Kimberly Winston, Religion BookLine, 12 April 2006

For the full interview, follow the Read More link below.

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Review of Dark Matter: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Philip Pullman

Tony Watkins — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:27:00 +0000

My Review of Dark Matter: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Philip Pullman has now been published in the USA by IVP. Publishers Weekly, a major trade publication for the book world, has published a favourable review:

‘Philip Pullman’s acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy, a sweeping retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost and The Fall , has caused great controversy among Christian readers. Watkins, a self-proclaimed Christian and managing editor for Damaris’s CultureWatch Web site, offers a perspective on Pullman’s work that is anything but dark and is sure to enlighten the debate among Christians. Watkins explains that while his intention is to provide readers the opportunity to appreciate Pullman in general, he also believes fervently that “it’s helpful for all fans of Pullman’s work-Christian or otherwise-to understand a Christian perspective on it.” The book is divided into three parts, the first a walk through Pullman’s life and background and the second an overview of the major dimensions of each book in the trilogy. It is not until the third section that readers will find what they are really looking for: a critical evaluation of major themes and story dimensions such as dæmons, sin and the infamous “death of God” – an assessment that is smart and wisely restrained. Watkins’s critical appreciation of Pullman’s trilogy will surely appeal to a Christian audience, but will reach well beyond this market to a general readership looking for a solid, substantially sourced, and well-written analysis of this beloved work of literature.’

Publishers Weekly, 3 April 2006

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