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92 | 4 Reformed and Dissenting Images During the 16th-century Reformation, a radical group of iconoclasts exploded out of the Reformed Church, denouncing what they saw as the blind veneration of images preserved by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1566, in the northern, Calvinist provinces of the Netherlands, riots broke out against “idols in paint,” altar paintings, crucifixes, and statuary of saints. Seeking to obey the Decalogue’s prohibition of making or worshipping any “graven image,” the radicals “cleansed” the churches of any potential blasphemous art. The German reformer Martin Luther, however, had no sympathy for the image smashers, and he even sought to have his translation of the Bible illustrated. But before spending money on art, Luther commanded, one must take care of the poor. This mandate would shape the Christian film industry of the Lutheran denomination, even as other Reformed and dissenting churches, such as the Presbyterians and Baptists, would emphasize the words of Scripture in their use of film. These denominations would explore and experiment with films as historical documents, instructional lessons , evangelistic tracts, and, surprisingly, even as parables in paint. Lutheran Images In the 1920s, many Lutherans viewed movies, as much as the steamship and the piano, as “instruments of service to the Gospel.” An amateur filmmaker and Lutheran pastor, Rev. O. Hagedorn, not too far from Lake Wobegon country in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, produced church films in the early 1920s like Little Jimmy’s Prayer and After the Fall (in which he imaginatively incorporated Midrash details in the story of Cain and Abel). For Hagedorn, the dramatic presentation was more important than “absolute historical truth in the details,” in that film stories could “stir the emotions and teach needed lessons.”1 Lutheran involvement in silent filmmaking culminated in road shows of an eight-reel German biography of Martin Luther, simply titled Martin Luther: His Life and Times (1923). The film chronicled Luther’s reforms and drew Reformed and Dissenting Images | 93 enthusiastic reviews from critics like Rev. Frank Jensen of Educational Screen magazine, opining that “art inculcates valuable lessons in a visual form.”2 The success of Martin Luther induced other Lutherans to sponsor a second German film on the life of Christ in 1926, entitled INRI, distributed in the United States as Crown of Thorns, despite earlier protests of the German writer Dr. H. Petri. On the cinematic portrayal of Christ, Petri complained that “efforts to depict the life of Jesus must always fail, as the movies cannot convey religious conviction or edify the soul.”3 Nevertheless, even as the Lutherans splintered into conservative and liberal groups (Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod [LCMS], American Lutheran Church, Lutheran Church of America, respectively ), these two films inaugurated the Lutheran Church’s foray into film.4 By the 1930s, Paul Kiehl, a young Lutheran pastor in St. Louis, envisioned films for children. Rooted in the LCMS, Kiehl pioneered the Lutheran Laymen ’s League and under its auspices produced a film titled This Is the Life (ca. 1935).5 In 1938, the LCMS invested $50,000 in The Power of God, seeking to advance personal evangelism and to entertainingly instruct its audiences on how prayer could help people “meet and feel the Power of God.” As one reviewer put it, in finding what is important for life, “prayer wins.”6 Praised as being remarkably orthodox and evangelical, the film was a bold venture by a conservative church, compounded by the fact that the endeavor actually made money.7 With their Protestant work ethic, Lutherans, it seemed, knew how to invest their hard-earned cash. Yet Lutherans undertook only sporadic film work. In 1943, the ABS’s aforementioned celluloid story of the Bible emphasized the Lutheran tradition on how the Bible came to us by focusing on the persistence and inventiveness of the fifteenth-century German printer Johannes Gutenberg. Beginning with Saint Jerome writing his Vulgate and the odd reception of the Scriptures by the Goths, the ABS communicated the story of the Bible canon and its translation onto 16mm film in The Book of the World, asking only for freewill offerings from the churches to offset its cost.8 The Evangelical Lutheran’s Visual Education Service produced another stimulating, and lucrative, drama, Reaching from Heaven (1948), which incorporated romance and pathos in exposing self-complacency. Using lesser Hollywood luminaries (e.g., Regis Toomey), the film highlighted how God utilizes ordinary people to accomplish His purposes. It presented contemporary moral lessons, demonstrating how self-absorbed people could be transformed by tending...

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