Tried With Fire

Apocalyptic romance, that is. I had never heard of the phrase "apocalyptic romance" until Tim Keller mentioned it in this interview . The term comes from The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker who proposed that "When you take God out of the culture, you have got to put something in His place. Apocalyptic romance was one of the ways people aspire to transcendence. So instead of salvation, romance is going to solve everything." Although I would never have owned that romance was going to solve everything, I believed and practiced it. It's easy to do if you over-romanticize the analogy between Christ's relationship with the church and marriage. Omitting the whole counsel of God on subjects like human depravity and progressive sanctification also helps to foster this pie-in-the-sky view. I would have continued in this vein, until my marriage exploded as a result of this self-fueled time bomb. Initially, it's intoxicating to believe you've found the o...

My daughter and I were discussing Beth Spraul's article, You've Got Lies , over lunch. Given that it's the norm to throw in some sort of romance, she asked me if either of us had seen any movies without some element of romance. We had a hard time coming up with any non-romantic movies. In Milo & Otis , they each find mates and have offspring at the end of the movie. In Chicken Run , there's romance. Even in Curse of the Wer Rabbit , Wallace nearly succumbs to romance. WALL-E is a love story between robots. At first we thought that Babe had no romance, but Ferdinand the duck is sad because his lady duck friend became Christmas dinner. However after much thought, my daughter came up with Bolt and Ice Age 1 . The only movie I could think of with no romance is Expelled . But here is one "movie" that I can guarantee is 100% romance free.

Beth Spraul of Capitol Hill Baptist Church has written this article titled You've Got Lies: Chick Flicks and the World's Approach to Men and Marriage. I recommend this article. I don't think we realize how much we are influenced by the whole notion of romance in our culture, particularly the way it is portrayed in movies and books. I also think, for the majority of women, there is something in us that is drawn to the dream of an ideal romantic relationship. The author draws a possible parallel between pornography for men and romance for women. For men, it is explicit images. For women, it is feeding the thoughts and imaginations of an unreal ideal relationship. She also gives three powerful lies that are propagated by romance that have no Biblical foundation. I actually threw out You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle , and some other chick flicks. In Sleepless , the main female character is living with her fiance and going behind his back in search of the one person...