From Gods of Advertising, May 11, 2009:
"
Why I had to abandon the Bible and pick up a book about puppies."
In The Happy Soul Industry, God reasons the Bible too old fashioned and violent, which inspires Her (in my novel God is a She) to seek out an advertising agency ostensibly for new copy. That, more or less, is the premise of The Happy Soul Industry. It was odd, then, to experience my own children recoiling from the Bible. The God in my novel is right! The Old Testament is archaic. If God and Heaven are to be considered by new generations then a new campaign is in order.My response:
A sage CD [creative director] will tell you that advertising and marketing have concerned themselves with discovering new ways to tell the same stories, so that “nothing is new under the sun.” The same is true of the 66-book compilation we call the Bible.
The bloody narratives, the rape and incest and everything else point towards authenticity– after all, could a historian ever write “secular” history without a certain serving of evil? But who is evil– God or us?
J.B. Phillips wrote, after translating and paraphrasing the Gospels, “I have read, in Greek and Latin, scores of myths, but I did not find the slightest flavour of myth here…. No man could have set down such artless and vulnerable accounts as these unless some real Event lay behind them.”
Increasingly, people put more pressure on the Christians to change their message, to “tone it down,” but we cannot, because the Law and the Prophets were good enough for Jesus. So they must work for us as well.
He responds: Wonderful and insightful comments. I love the argument that only the truth could be so blunt and bloody. I’d never thought of it that way.
Of course, I'm only parroting any number of critical historians and emerging leaders. Most recently, CT Today expounded the story of Billy Graham's grandson,
Tullian Tchividjian. I highly recommend this story.
Just another angle in the fight to "KEEP IT REAL"!
All
the
best
to you,
Andy
