Noah, Field of Dreams and the Bible

Spirituality column #84
June 17, 2008
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current! In Westfield (IN) newspaper

Noah, Field of Dreams and the Bible
By Bob Walters

Our intellectual experience as Americans is, I think, not only diminished but crippled if we are not aware and conversant of what’s in the Bible.

By “intellectual experience” I mean the entire spectrum of thinking, from our childhood education, to our philosophical development, to our faith (or non-faith), and ultimately to our adult actions and beliefs as free human persons, both individually and as a community.

Most literature and art in the Western world has something to do with the Biblical/Christian conversation. It is too bad that so much of our society over the last century and half, and especially over the past 50 years or so, has tried to reinterpret and redefine the Western experience of freedom and individual personhood away from Biblical principles.

We often wind up missing the richness of what is being said in our artistic conversation.

I’m going to use a sports movie and a Bible story to try to explain what I mean.

Field of Dreams, a wonderful baseball movie from 1988, is a terrific morality play about faith, redemption, family, freedom, community, heaven, and God’s permanence and involvement in each of our lives.

If you think the movie is only about a guy dumb enough to plow under a couple acres of corn on the advice of an unknown voice, risks losing his farm, and gets lucky in the end … well, you miss the depth of the movie.

In Genesis chapters 6 to 9, Noah building a boat – where he built it – would have seemed even crazier than Ray Kinsella building a baseball field where he built it. It took Noah 124 years to build the ark in an area that was miles from the sea in a place where rain had never fallen.

Watch Field of Dreams for common Christian symbolism – including the New Testament truth that Heaven will one day be on earth (which obviously includes Iowa) – and it becomes a story about the affirmation of God’s promises, not just a baseball movie.
This is one small example of why it is such a big deal that such a large slice of America is becoming systematically Biblically illiterate. We understand so much less of the gifts we have … not from Hollywood, but from God.

The gifts are wonderful; that so many of us don’t recognize where they come from is a shame.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) loves baseball. He’ll discuss Narnia next week.