A Veggie Tale fan, four year-old David saw the ogre Shrek on a TV advertisement and asked his momma, “
What kind a vegetable is that?” This sounds like a reasonable case of misidentification to me. I’ve asked myself similar questions when encountering false teachers in the church.
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Gail;
-----Shrek was an entertaining movie. But, personally, I consider its message to be somewhat flawed. God does not create ugliness nor will it exist after Jesus has cleaned all sin from of His everything. With God there is only beauty. He wants everything to be beautiful. However, we live in a system so deeply tainted by the effects of sin that we are unable to lessen the pervasive ugliness natural to it. Most of that ugliness is in the way people treat each other. Some simply comes along with birth in the form of physical appearance.
-----The message I perceived in Shrek was that it is ok to be ugly. I don’t buy that. It is certainly not ok to give others ugly treatment, for we can and should work hard to make our treatment of others beautiful. Nor should we accept all of the physical ugliness with which we are born. I was quite manic-depressive in my early twenties. I learned from my emotional imbalance the remarkable degree of effect emotions have on physical appearance. When I was in my depressed states, I saw in the mirror a bland face produced by limpidness of some muscle systems and stressful strains in others. I rarely thought enough of myself to keep my hair well primped; my posture was slouched; it all summed to a miserable dimness in my appearance instead of a radiant glow. I was quite ugly during my depressed spells. But in the other times, when I was feeling good, even elated, my appearance was reversed. There was a radiance in it that did not merely mask my physical flaws. Instead, it brought them into a package which the flaws even benefited. A piece of the solution I needed to defeat my manic-depressive prison was found in the realization that much of physical beauty or ugliness is a reflection of the fitness of the soul. Therefore when I saw ugliness in the mirror I knew there was ugliness to be addressed in the heart.
-----I admire the beauty God creates in people. But it is obvious that not all people are blessed with striking, physical beauty. Having experienced it, I can see the malformations of the face, posture, and dress caused by the discomforts of the soul. I like to change the way people look with my imagination to postulate how they might appear through the radiating joy of a comfortable soul. I can see most everyone as beautiful, because most everyone can be beautiful when their humble position with God is maintained. But Shrek’s wife discarded beauty to participate in Shrek’s appearance, so she could relate to his present condition. Maybe Shrek could have been quite strong and stately in appearance with the right posture and the right set of threads. But rather than reaching out to elevate Shrek’s beauty, the princess lowered hers by morphing into an ogre for Shrek. I took this to be a condemnation of beauty and any need for it. A condemnation which forgets that God created beauty, while man creates ugliness.
-----Like the princess, the pop teaching in our churches today is that the church has to divest itself of its holy beauty to go for the look to which the world relates. It is almost like she has to put on camouflage and black her face to go into the darkness and reach the world without it being noticed what she really is. She is being taught that Shrek would not be able to relate to her unless she became Shrek. What these teachers are keeping quiet is that God knows the few in the world who are to come into the church and become what the church is. It is her reflection of Christ that will draw them, not a trap laid in the trimmings of the world.
-----With a very small reservation that maybe I am wrong about this, I humbly believe that God looks for the church to radiate all of the holy beauty she possibly can, both in the soul of her actions and the art of her decor. I believe the church had a classical beauty in the carefully crafted and thoughtfully produced art, sounds, and culture that have been tested for decades and centuries by the acceptance of God’s people. For the contemporary teachers to whimsically through out that beauty for the untested, pop art of the moment being embraced by the world of now is to force the princess to become an ogre. Of course her beauty can be augmented by the tastes of current and future generations. But to entirely discard its classical beauty for the artistic backdrop of the world is not augmentation. It is self-serving and vain, a dishonor to our brethren before us, a dismissal of many of our brethren with us, and a dilution of holiness.
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