Robert Duvall, Movie Preacher Extraordinaire
One of the best Christian pastor movies ever made stars Robert Duvall, who died this week at age 95. Here’s the story of Euliss F. “Sonny” Dewey, the pastor he plays in the 1997 movie The Apostle (spoilers ahead). (RELATED: When the Legends Die: Robert Duvall)
Sonny shepherds a large Pentecostal church in Texas. He himself has been known to chase a skirt or two, but he discovers that his wife is doing it with the youth pastor, after which he learns the two have schemed to shut him out of his own church. He is livid and shows up at a church social and makes a scene. Then he gets hammered and attends his son’s Little League baseball game, where, in a fit of drunken fury, he takes a baseball bat to the head of the youth pastor, who is the boy’s coach. He did not intentionally try to kill the man, but, alas, the youth pastor goes into a coma and dies.
Sonny is facing serious criminal charges and flees. He ditches his car in a river and otherwise destroys all existing identification, before receiving counsel from the Lord that he should rebaptize himself (literally) and rechristen himself “The Apostle E. F.” He ends up in Louisiana, where he befriends a local retired black minister and, with him, starts his own church, a multiracial, Pentecostal congregation called The One Way Road to Heaven Holiness Temple.
He fixes up an old bus and picks up parishioners on Sunday mornings. He anonymously drops bags of groceries on the stoops of needy families. He resolves interpersonal disputes. He is a force for good in the life of this small town. But, of course, beneath the saintly behavior still resides the sinner, in a condition Luther terms simul justis et peccator; he still must deal with that ornery, irrepressible peccator side of humanity — during his time in Louisiana, he pursues a local married woman and even gets in a fistfight.
And he preaches. Passionately, animatedly, loudly, joyfully, sincerely, regularly. Every day and twice on Sunday. He gets a radio gig, and his voice, as the Apostle E. F., goes out to the bayou and environs. One day, his wife, hundreds of miles away, hears that voice on the radio and, pseudonym notwithstanding, recognizes it as belonging to Sonny Dewey.
Soon, troopers show up at his church while he is preaching a sermon. They courteously allow him to finish a full, evangelistic, come-to-Jesus homily — a 20-minute message, shown in its entirety in the movie — before slapping the cuffs on him and leading him away.
The movie ends with him on a prison work crew, proclaiming Jesus and leading the other convicts in Jesus chants.
The Apostle did not meet with universal Christian approval when it hit the theaters. It commits its share of evangelical peccadilloes, taking a light view of sin (Sonny never repents of his sin), and of church discipline, and seems to condone preachers who are a little full of themselves. Plus, the wounds of too many real-life pastoral scandals have precluded some from appreciating so flawed a messenger of the gospel as Sonny Dewey. Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and their ilk provide a cautionary history of men of the cloth besmirching the faith.
And to say that the film’s main character, the proclaimer of the gospel, the bearer of the Christian message, is flawed, is to profoundly understate the matter. But God uses the imperfect, the sinful, even the egregiously iniquitous in the real world.
Duvall himself said this about Sonny in an interview:
Some religious people might ask why I would make such a movie and emphasize that this evangelical preacher has weaknesses. And my answer is that we either accept weaknesses in good people or we have to tear pages out of the Bible. I would have to rip the Psalms out of the Bible and never read them again. Because no one less than the greatest king of Israel, King David, the author of the Psalms, sent a man out to die in battle so that he could sleep with his wife. And that was a far more evil thing than anything Sonny would ever, ever do.
Sonny Dewey is a good man who has done bad things. While struggling with his humanity, Sonny was in constant communication with the Lord, seeking continual guidance, and never flagging in evangelistic enthusiasm.
He is a sincere preacher who loves God and lives life to proclaim his gospel, but is, as are we all, inclined toward evil.
He is no phony, no hypocritical con man, no Elmer Gantry. He isn’t in it for money, or self-aggrandizement, or popularity, or publicity. He is a sincere preacher who loves God and lives life to proclaim his gospel, but is, as are we all, inclined toward evil. And he ultimately faces the justice of the world for his sins – he goes to prison.
God has historically been more interested in the message than in the messenger. The apostle Paul could overlook those preachers who spoke out of envy and rivalry. What matters, he told the church at Philippi, is “that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is proclaimed.” He goes on, “And because of this I rejoice” (Philippians 1:18 NIV).
And Christ is definitely proclaimed by this flawed messenger. It’s the real thing Sonny preaches — the believe-on-Jesus-and-be-saved gospel message of historic, conservative Christianity, not some anodyne good-people-go-to-heaven spiel we’re so accustomed to hearing.
Duvall gets high marks for his realistic and serious treatment of the Christian ministry and the Christian gospel, devoid of any of the customary snark of which Hollywood is so famous.
If one wants to criticize, one might wonder about the theological warrant for someone baptizing himself; or one might look askance at somebody having loud, vocal, one-on-one conversations with God; or one might find a lack of theological depth in Sonny’s sermons. And of course, one might ask whether Sonny’s behavior disqualifies him outright from being a minister. That position holds that he’s still forgiven and he can still serve God, but he can’t do it as an ordained minister of the Word.
Duvall, who directs the movie as well as stars in it, had to finance a large part of it. The studios weren’t interested in his tale, inspired by his own exposure to Holiness preaching in Arkansas earlier in his life.
Duvall wanted to make a movie that was true to a niche of Christianity so frequently mocked and belittled by the elite. He succeeded in that; he lovingly and realistically captured a faith characterized by shouting, dancing, loud singing, and call-and-response preaching, where God is an immediate and forceful presence in believers’ lives.
The Apostle is not usually ranked with the greatest hits of this great actor, but it should be.
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