Why I Do Not Choose “The Chosen”
I have never watched an episode of The Chosen. Because of this, I cannot give you a succinct review of the show. I have no knowledge of what artistic liberties have been taken, what texts have been consulted, or what scholars have been enlisted to ensure that what is being portrayed in the series is sound.
But I do know many Christians who like the show. This is not an attempt to condemn such people. You may very well be one of those Christians who love Jesus and your conscience allows you to watch the show. I simply want to explain in some detail why I have chosen not to watch the show, and perhaps ask the readers to consider some of the questions.
Here are five reasons why I choose not to watch The Chosen. These reasons have nothing to do with the content of any of the episodes. Rather, they are reasons that object to watching the show theologically, artistically, and philosophically.
I cannot comment on the actual content of the show because I have not watched the show and don’t intend to.
These reasons are ranked in order of what I think is the least important to what I think is the most important.
Why don’t I watch The Chosen?
I Don’t Need to watch the Chosen.
This might seem like a silly point to make, but it is important.
There is no reason I need to watch the Chosen. God does not require it of me as a Christian. It is not a sin to decline to do something the Bible does not require. Unlike husbands loving their wives, attending church, and loving your enemies, there is no requirement in Scripture to engage in this kind of activity or support its use. Before the last century or so, no Christian had ever watched a Christian movie because movies did not exist. Their Christian life depended upon the ordinary means of grace, not an artistic portrayal of Jesus.
I am free to not watch the Chosen. There is no obligation on me to do so. Watching it will not necessarily make me holier, more righteous, or more informed about the person and work of Jesus Christ.
I get the fact that the presentation is supposed to enamor us with the story of Jesus, but I am already enamored with the story of Jesus! As I read Matthew 27 this morning in my devotions. I was awestruck again that sinful men treated the Savior in such a way. And for him to endure this to save me? A sinful man? The story of Jesus is more compelling to me now than it ever has been in my life.
The Bible presents a remarkably compelling story about Jesus and has for thousands of years. The invention of the movie screen introduced new technology into the world, but it did not introduce any new spiritual discipline into the Christian life.
2 Peter 1:3 (ESV)
3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence,
This is related to the idea of the Sufficiency of Scripture, which I will talk about below. But if you feel like you NEED to watch The Chosen, you don’t.
Most of the people in heaven will have never seen The Chosen.
Moving on, a second reason why I do not watch The Chosen:
2) Jesus is to be worshipped by us. He is not to entertain us.
What is the purpose of the show? Not having a good answer to that question, I went to their website. I don’t think they are trying to replace the church or promote heresy. I think the folks involved are actually well-intentioned. Nevertheless, we must ask the question about the show’s purpose.
I cannot find a statement of faith or an about us page. However, there is a good bit of merchandise easily located. In fact, you can find a shirt that says “Binge Jesus.” (For $30!)
“Bingeing” does not have positive connotations. Bingeing is what you do with a Netflix show when you are sick in bed. Google a definition of the term and you will find the following:
Binge: a period of excessive indulgence in an activity, especially eating, drinking, or taking drugs.
Now, I am sure the producers don’t necessarily intend a negative connotation by using the term “binge,” but words do have meaning. Perhaps this seemed like a catchy phrase for advertising. But bingeing has to do with consuming. Entertaining, if you will.
The story is presented in such a way as to provide us with a form of entertainment centered around Jesus. The goal of the show does not appear that we would fall before our TVs in the worship of Jesus. Nobody I know who watches the show uses it in this way, and I do not think this is the way the show is intended to be used. That is, the show is not meant to facilitate worship.
So if the show is not a form of worship, what is it?
I think we must say it is a form of entertainment.
More than a critique of the show, this is a critique of the church at large in America. So much of the church is fueled by the entertainment factor.
We cannot preach a long sermon because people might get bored.
We cannot sing the old songs, because people want new songs.
Or, we cannot sing new songs, because the folks who have been in the church longest like the old songs.
We all have our tendencies to guard against and should carefully search our hearts. However, all of these things have at their root the same problem.
Each of these is a form of entertainment, and slowly but surely entertainment has integrated itself into the American Church. We want what we want, and if our church does not supply us with it, well, we can relocate our Christianity. Consumeristic Christianity has wreaked havoc on spiritual growth.
I say this as a pastor, but also as a musician. Artistic folks are a unique bunch. We write songs to evoke some kind of response. This is a characteristic of all art forms, whether verbal, musical, or visual. The creation of art attempts to evoke a response.
At the end of the day, the director of the show is creating a product that he desires people to consume so that they will come back and watch it again next week. Right or wrong, it is primarily about entertainment, not necessarily discipleship.
At the end of the day, the show must keep you coming back to be successful.
I say this as someone who, at one time in my life, would have disagreed with every single point made so far. I once played the role of Jesus in an Easter musical, complete with Roman Armor, blood painted all over my body, a stirring solo in the Garden of Gethsemane, and all that goes along with it. I’ve run in this lane before, and I stopped. Consider this article part of my repentance from that activity.
Why?
Because the story of Christ is not meant to be for our entertainment. It is meant to lead us to worship. Upon seeing Jesus, Thomas cried out, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).
The church has an entertainment problem. We think worship is supposed to be entertaining for us. So when we don’t like the songs our church sings, we leave and go to the church down the road. Mixing worship and entertainment has not been a good thing for the church. Ask Willow Creek.
If Jesus is our entertainment, when he preaches a difficult message, we might find something else to entertain us. If Jesus is our Lord, we will fall on our faces and repent so that we might be saved.
By its very nature, the show blends the text and the director so tightly together that it is difficult to determine where the text ends and the director’s imagination begins.
This leads to a third reason why I don’t watch The Chosen.
3) The Bible belongs to the Church.
Putting the Bible into the hands of people outside the church as the rightful interpreters of its truth is a process that rarely ends well. We see this from the German Higher Critical movement in the 18th century, the “Jesus Seminar’ of the last century, and today in all kinds of organizations that want to do something with the Bible, just not what the church does with the Bible. Bart Ehrman’s famous attack on the historicity and reliability of the Bible is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the kinds of things the world will do with the Bible when it is untethered from the Church.
In my short life, I have come to admire Puritanism’s radical devotion to the Word of God, practical Christian living, and heartfelt zeal for Christ. Puritans were doctrinally precise and pastorally warm. I aspire to similar ideals and fall short every day.
However, we must note that the scholarship Puritans produced was not simply because of their rigorous training (though they were learned men). The reason the Puritans wrote so many works about the Bible during the 17th and 18th centuries is that they were convinced that the Bible is the Word of God and the people of God needed to know what God’s Word said if they were to honor him with their life. The Puritans did this by preaching day in and day out, all within the context of the local church, not necessarily within the academy.
This illustrates the point I am trying to make that the Bible belongs to the Church. The Bible is not meant to be interpreted as any other book but as the Word of God, given for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness (2 Tim 3:16). The Chosen, whether intentional or not, has stripped the Bible of its rightful place in the church and attempted to interpret it outside the oversight of the Church and its rightful authority, to make it appealing culturally.
One of the downsides of The Chosen is it takes the narratives of Jesus in the gospel and turns them into a novel. That is, artistic liberties are taken in order to ensure that the script sells.
Many people in our world may want to be influenced by the general ideas of the Bible (love your enemies) but they don’t want to believe the message of the Bible (Christ has come to save that which was lost). These are two radically different things.
The truth about Jesus is too polarizing and too offensive to modern man to be treated like any other commodity. When a show loses popularity, it gets canceled. Dare I ask, what happens if the Chosen loses popularity? Would we cancel a show about the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of the Universe?
The Chosen will come and go, and Churches will still be preaching the same Bible, with all its timeless truths, to a world that needs nothing more than the truth of the Gospel. In the course of writing this article, I ran across the website of a local church in town conducting a small group study on the Chosen.
This is troubling to me. What will a group of believers get from a Bible study based on the Chosen that they won’t get from a Bible study based upon the Bible? Are we so bored with the Bible we need to help it out a little bit with some fresh content? I certainly hope not.
Rather than seeking to accommodate the church to our current cultural moment, a better use of time would be to let the church keep the Bible, for only she knows how it is to be rightly used.
This leads me to the next point:
4) The Word of God is Sufficient.
This could have been tied up with point 1, but I wanted to make this distinct.
We do not need to know what Jesus looked like to worship him. Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen yet believe.” (John 20:29).
In fact, what’s even more, we cannot know what Jesus looked like. There are a million little details the authors of the gospels do not give to us and we absolutely do not need to know in order to live a fruitful and faithful Christian life.
We do not need Sarah Young’s Jesus Calling to live the Christian life. You do not need a Beth Moore Bible study. You do not need Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics or John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. Multitudes of Christians are in heaven right now and have never read a single one of these works. Scripture is sufficient.
Scripture is sufficient to inform our life together and it is sufficient to instruct us in what duties we should perform to love our God and neighbor. Meaning, all we need to live the Christian life are the truths laid out for us in the Scripture.
One of the difficulties with a form of art like the Chosen is that it requires extra-biblical influence. There is no way to make the story compelling without artistic influence. Again, I haven’t seen a show, but the director says as much in one interview which says,
“The Chosen is ‘not a verse-by-verse reenactment of the Biblical narrative,’ but instead a ‘historical, character drama’ that is inspired by the Bible.”
How does one believe that the Bible is enough for all things pertaining to life and godliness while simultaneously allowing for insertions and artistic license when depicting the life of Jesus?
So the Chosen is not biblical in a strict sense, it is mixed. It is part human creativity and part Biblical revelation. It is based on the Bible but does not have any of the authority that the Bible does. Hopefully, all Christians who believe the Bible is authoritative will agree on this point.
Here is my conundrum:
Sinful people cannot artistically recreate the life of a sinless person. Only God can reveal these truths to us, and he does it exclusively in the Scripture. The only reason we can honestly tell someone what Jesus was like is because of the Scripture’s witness. Our ideas of what Jesus might be like are uninspired, and need not be given any higher place of authority in our minds than that of speculation.
Consider what a Dutch theologian once said:
“If Holy Scripture is neglected, then nothing in the Christian religion can be established with certainty, for from outside of it no criterion or guidance could be given to distinguish the divine truth from false influences and erroneous forces.”
- Antonius Walaeus (1573-1639)
What qualifies as a false influence or erroneous force?
The director and producer’s thoughts are blended with Biblical data so as to make one, cohesive story. I am not claiming that Dallas Jenkins has added to the Word of God, but it is hard to discern where the mind of God ends and the mind of Jenkins begins.
Here’s a question to contemplate honestly. Does the chosen inform your reading of Scripture? Or does scripture inform your watching of the Chosen?
If you can watch Jesus feed the 5,000 on your TV, and then go and read the account of Jesus feeding the 5,000 in Scripture, and not picture in your mind what you’ve just seen on the TV, then your mental capacities far outweigh my own.
If, as I imagine it to be the case, you cannot remove the images of The Chosen from your reading of the Word, should this not give you pause? Is there not a slight chance some dross has been added to the pure gold that is God’s Word?
This leads me to my last point.
5) Scripture is not silent about images of God.
Let me be honest for a moment. When I began writing this article, this was the only thing I had on my mind. I do think this is the most important thing. And I do think it is worth considering.
What was the first great sin the people of Israel committed after leaving Egypt? They crafted a golden calf and worship it. Aaron even says to the people, “Behold your gods who brought you up out of Egypt! (Ex. 32:4). We tremble to read these words. Why did Aaron do such a wicked thing?
One reason is that all of the gods of Egypt were represented by idols, so the people of God wanted to be like them. Additionally, the image of a calf is to portray a symbol of power, not a sign of weakness. Consider a bull preparing to charge. This is not a farm animal we’re depicting, but a recognized symbol of strength. All in all, it seems as if the Israelites thought they were doing something that was acceptable to honor God.
Just one little problem:
“You shall not make for yourself any graven images.”
Benjamin Keach wrote in the Baptist Catechism:
“Q 57: What is forbidden in the second commandment?
A: The second commandment forbids the worshipping of God by images, or any other way not appointed in His Word.”
This is an age-old debate. Should Jesus be depicted visually?
There has sometimes been a distinction made between sacred art that is used for worship and sacred art that is not used for worship. So, if we are to consistently apply the catechism’s teaching, sacred art is forbidden in worship. Therefore, something like showing a video clip of The Chosen in your Sunday morning worship service would be forbidden. This would be the worship of God by images.
(For those disagreeing with me, I would point you to Gavin Ortlund’s excellent video here).
So the question remains: is it permissible to look at images of Jesus when it is not in the context of worship?
Some Christians say yes. I think most Christians who watch the Chosen find themselves in this category. They would find images of Christ in a worship service unacceptable and yet, find no problem with sacred art in other contexts.
Others say no. They claim that any visible representations of Jesus are unacceptable. They see it is a violation of the second commandment. I find myself in this category.
Why?
Consider an illustration.
I recall when I was a young child, my parents took me and my brother to Disney World. At one point, she placed us in front of a cartoonist who drew a caricature cartoon of both me and my brother. I don’t know how much money my mother paid for the cartoon, but it was not a small sum.
That cartoon drawing made it home with us. My mother set it on her mirror where she would get ready in the morning. One day, I was in her room, and I saw that picture. My young self was disgusted by the image because it didn’t look anything like me! I proceeded to find the image and rip it to shreds. My mother was upset with my actions because she had paid quite a bit of money for that cartoon drawing of me. But she was not nearly as upset as I was, because the image made me look so unlike myself.
Do we think we’ve portrayed Jesus accurately? Do we really imagine we know what he looked like? His mannerisms? I grew up walking by a specific picture of Jesus hanging on the side hallway in the church. If you grew up in church, you probably know what picture I am talking about. Long brown hair and soft eyes looking intently up towards heaven. Today I wonder, are we sure Jesus looked like this? Is it wise to share a photograph of someone, in an attempt to honor him, that we aren’t certain looks like him? I do not think so.
Let me give another example from pop culture. Do we think Christiano Ronaldo, the greatest soccer player of a generation, is thrilled with this “artist’s interpretation” of him?
I know I wouldn’t be! Do we think Jesus is satisfied with an artistic reconstruction of his life and work? This is doubly concerning whenever we consider that Jesus himself has given us an authoritative guide to his life and work in Scripture.
There are no commands to utilize images of Jesus in the New Testament. There are so many commands to honor Jesus in various other ways. It is my opinion that images of Jesus do not help us to accomplish this task, whether through the medium of painting, sculpture, video, or drama.
Here is the question I find myself asking at the end of this conversation:
When someone presents Christ, are they presenting him as he was during his humiliation, or as he is now in heaven during his exaltation?
While Christ was walking on the earth, he had not yet ascended to the Father (John 20:17). He had not accomplished his task. He was living, walking, breathing, sleeping, and eating with a human nature that had not yet been glorified. Some have called this his “humiliation".”
If this is how we are depicting Christ, (which is how the Chosen depicts him), then we are not depicting Christ as he currently is. Like the cartoonist giving a visible representation of me as a little boy, or that less-than-flattering image of Ronaldo, the image we are seeing is an inaccurate depiction of what actually is.
So let’s imagine we attempt to portray Christ as He now is. Imagine we portray him glorified with a resurrected body in heaven. Imagine we are attempting to portray him as he appears on the Mount of Transfiguration. How could we capture the glory of the Firstborn of All Creation with the media of this fallen world?
I love art. I love beautiful structures, songs, and paintings. But the artistic concept of Jesus presented to me visibly is always less than the vision of Jesus I conceive in my mind when I read Philippians 2. We will not have the beatific vision in this life, nor should we expect to. But we should long to see him face to face, glorified, and behold him for all eternity.
You can’t depict an accurate, glorified version of Jesus in a movie, because if you could, all of heaven and earth would be showing up at the movie theatre. This is because the only rightful response to the risen Christ is worship.
Because of the biblical data, and my heartfelt answers to these questions. I choose not to watch The Chosen. I think it is a good decision for me.
I do not think people who watch the show are condemned, nor are they bad people, or even bad church members! Far from it. I simply wanted to express why I have made this decision, attempt to answer some anticipated objections and ask you to consider your own thinking about the subject.
Many of you may have many disagreements with me after all I’ve said. As I said above, that is ok. We can still be friends. This is where my conscience has led me after prayer, study, and contemplation. If your conscience leads you to a different place, I can certainly respect that.
Please, if you disagree with me, receive these words as a caution, not a condemnation.
But if I haven’t angered you, or perhaps I have convinced you, there is no need for a tirade against those who disagree. Simply pick up your Bible on Sunday, pray for your pastor, and worship the true and living God as his word is rightly proclaimed. You’ll be glad you did.