Odyssey Interview

Exclusive interview with

Robert Farrar Capon,
author of Genesis: the Movie

Robert Farrar Capon

In 2004, Tim Brassell, pastor of New Creation Community Church, a WCG congregation in Portsmouth, Virginia, interviewed Christian author Robert Farrar Capon in the Capons’ home in Shelter Island, New York.

“I was truly overwhelmed by Robert’s and Valerie’s graciousness,” Tim told me. “The morning just flew by. We had lunch together, and then they invited me to return for dinner. They made me feel like we’d been friends for years.”

Tim’s friendship with the Capons began when he responded to a personal note of thanks that Valerie Capon had included in an autographed copy of one of Robert’s books. Tim had purchased the book from the Capons through their Amazon.com Internet store.

When Tim called me to say that Robert Capon had agreed to give him an interview for Christian Odys-sey, I was elated. I was at that moment reading Capon’s latest book, Genesis: the Movie.

I was first introduced to Capon’s work three years earlier, when Terry Akers, our book review editor, gave me a few photocopied pages from The Parables of Judgment. At the time I had never read Robert Capon (I may not have even heard of him), but on Terry’s recommendation, I gave the book a try.

After reading the copied pages, I immediately went out and bought the book and couldn’t put it down. Since that day I have found Capon’s works to be on a par with those of C.S. Lewis for sheer clarity, inspiration and encouragement in my Christian journey.

Tim Brassell is one of the most energetic and enthusiastic pastors I have known. When I hear the phrase, “on fire for the Lord,” I think of him. When Pastor Tim is down in the dumps, he still seems higher than I am when I’m up.

We are delighted to run part one of this six-part interview here in our inaugural issue of Christian Odyssey. We hope you find it as rewarding as we have.

Mike Feazell

An interview with
Robert Farrar Capon
Part One

Shh! Don’t interrupt

Tim Brassell

Tim Brassell: Good morning, Dr. Capon. One of the topics in your new book, Genesis: the Movie, is what you referred to as biblical literalism. What is biblical literalism?

Robert Capon: Well, of course the book has a long, careful answer to that question. A short answer might be that biblical literalism is simply a mistake in the way people read the Bible. The object of Genesis: the Movie is to help people stop reading the Bible as if it were a manual of instruction in religion or spirituality or morality or anything else and to start watching it as a film, presented to you by the Holy Spirit, who is the director.

TB: What is the difference?

RC: When you watch a movie, you don’t stop 10 minutes into the film and try to decide what it means. You cannot fairly say anything about the movie until you have seen the whole movie and hold it in your mind as an entirety—as a whole piece. And that is what needs to be done with the Bible. It has to be seen as one thing. So I’d like people to see biblical inspiration, not as a matter of word-by-word inspiration, but as scenes in the movie the way the director wants to show it to you, that is, scene-by-scene.

TB: What are the pitfalls of not seeing it that way?

RC: The pitfalls are that you start teasing meanings out of things without seeing the whole picture. A simple example is that you cannot decide what the very first words in the Bible, “In the beginning,” mean until you see all the other occurrences of the image of “beginning” in the rest of the film.

In other words, you can’t properly understand that word beginning until you see Jesus, in John, say, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” And finally, at the end, where you have in Revelation, “I am the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega,” and so on.

So as the movie progresses, we find that in the beginning was Christ, the incarnate Word. You have clues woven into the movie such as, “He chose us in him before the foundations of the world.” When we see the whole picture, we can see what the director was doing with the film, what he was getting across to us, from the beginning.Before anything was made, it was all already done within the Trinity.The whole thing was accomplished before it started.

TB: Just as in Revelation 13 where it says, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

RC: Yes, yes, yes!

TB: Is there an opposite ditch from biblical literalism?

RC: Yes. I call biblical literalism the literalism of the right. Now there is also a liberal literalism of the left. And that would be all the Bible critics who decided that you can’t take everything seriously. They see the problem with literalism, but go to the opposite ditch, as you put it. In their view you need to try to find things you think are really true and say those should be taken seriously, but the rest can be tossed away.

TB: So really, the liberal ditch is bad for the same reason.

RC: Yes, because they still don’t escape literalism. They’re still saying there is a sacred, literal original in there somewhere and they have found it by taking out stuff.But in the imagery of a movie you don’t have that—you don’t take out nothin’—you accept the film just as it is delivered. And, as with all the rules of film watching—don’t interrupt!

Robert Capon Books

Autographed copies of Robert Farrar Capon’s books are available from the author by clicking on the Amazon.com “used and new” button and going to seller “quietchina” for your purchase.

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