pilgrim in progress

The other week our friends Abraham & Molly spent the night as they were flying out of Charlotte the next morning for Minneapolis. We had a good time catching up and talking about life and children and good movies. They recommended The Four Feathers and we watched it this past weekend.

The Four Feathers captures beautifully many elements that for me make a good film. Love, war, friendship, fear, courage, great obstacles, triumph, and redemption. The viewer follows the main character, a British officer in the late 1890’s, who resigns from the army when he hears that they are being sent to war in the Sudan and is deemed a coward by his closest friends and fiance (the symbol of cowardness being a feather). For the rest of the film he seeks to redeem himself by travelling on his own to the Sudan.

In our care group meeting the other night we talked about Colossians and holiness. One of the young women in the group talked about how encouraging it is to know that God is sovereign even over our sin and knowing that he has a purpose in our sin to teach us and grow us brings great hope. Four Feathers is a beautiful picture of this. Though faced with great fear and cowardess, by facing it and not letting it paralyze him, the main character grows in ways he might not have otherwise. And even though there was an element of pride in his quest to redeem himself the film shows him coming to a place of great humility that provides the context for one of the most moving scenes.

All that said, I found this review online that sheds some very interesting light onto the movie’s historical setting. The “fatal flaw” the reviewer finds is that the movie leaves out the real reason the British forces went to Sudan which was to eradicate the slave trade and the evangelical influence in this matter. The movie leaves you thinking that the British went to the Sudan solely to colonize a heathen nation. Read ‘Fatal Flaws in the Four Feathers.’

Far from being “God-forsaken”, Sudan has the oldest community of Christians in Africa, dating all the way back to AD37 and Acts chapter 8. For a thousand years, Christianity was the majority religion of Northern Sudan. For nine centuries these Christians of the Kingdoms of Nubia, Alwa and Dotawa resisted the Southward expansion of Islam, defeating the Muslim armies and sending them retreating back to Egypt. There are numerous Scriptures (Isaiah 18, Psalm 68:31, Zephaniah 3:10, etc.) which confirm that God has a plan for Sudan. It is most certainly not “God-forsaken”! General Charles Gordon, the Governor-General of Sudan, was a dedicated evangelical Christian who had gone to Sudan to eradicate the slave trade. After succeeding in setting many slaves free and eradicating the slave trade, he was faced with a great rebellion by Muslim slave traders, led by the Mahdi.