Somehow Present & Beyond

There lies in our understanding of One, Creator, Personal God a fundamental tension for us between the Creator and Personal faces of God.  How can this One God be both creator of the whole of the cosmos and all that is in it and yet also a presence that we can somehow sense in a personal way?  Our conception of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ mirrors that tension.  How could a man be at once human and divine?  How can God be somehow like us and yet completely and incomprehensibly unlike us?  And in our understanding of the Bible we are faced again with this fundamental tension.  How can a clearly fallible, human collection of words still somehow reveal to us the Word that connects us to the divine Beyond?  We call the church, the "body of Christ," and yet again how is it that this depressingly human institution can be a vessel somehow of the Spirit?

This tension between realities lies within us as well.  We discover it most painfully in the question of evil and good.  In our experience, these are not two separate categories that can be neatly divided from each other.  Out of one so often emerges the other.  Even in the darkest storm, we say, there is a silver lining.  We are at one and the same time good and not, evil and not.

How can God be both Beyond and Personal is a question that resonates across our human experience.  Maybe someday we will have an answer.  In the meantime, we live in faith.

Thoughts on Noah, the Movie

So, Friday afternoon we went to see the movie, Noah, at a movie complex in Watertown, NY.  There is a ton of reviews of the movie, many of which can be read at Rotten Tomatoes, so let me simply share some thoughts rather than do a full critical analysis.

However the critics may feel about the various aspects of Noah, from a theological perspective the movie embodies a fascinating contemporary dialogue between the biblical story found in Genesis 6-9 and modern culture.  Both the original tale and the modern remake are mythic descriptions of God's struggle with destructive, prideful humanity, the modern movie version being a remythologizing of the story in a contemporary context. There are both similarities and differences, but it is the differences that are most interesting and instructive.

 In the original, God is very clearly present, while in the movie "the Creator" is hidden and speaks through visions that are open to interpretation.  In Genesis, Noah is the very prototype of the faithful man, but in the movie he is constantly conflicted and apparently misinterprets God's will concerning the survival of the human race.  He also comes across as something of a more up to date zealot.  And where the emphasis in Genesis is on the destruction of wicked humanity, a key theme in the movie is the environmental salvation of Planet Earth and its non-human life.  In the movie's version of the epic, Earth was undergoing a massive environmental crisis that was impoverishing humanity as well as destroying the rest of life on the planet.

While reviewers note a number of striking parallels with The Lord of the Rings trilogy (the rock encrusted, over-sized "Watchers" of this movie, for example, look suspiciously like stony versions of Peter Jackson's visualization of Tolkien's Ents), there is an important difference.  The boundaries between good and evil are generally clearly drawn in Tolkien's trilogy; good guys are good and bad guys are bad.  That is less the case in Noah; Noah himself acts unwisely at times and comes across as only relatively good.  His son, Ham, is a flawed figure who for a time allies himself with the evil protagonist of the film, Tubal-cain (who is rotten to the core).  Noah himself feels the inherent evil in himself and those he loves, which is why he believed that they must not become the seed of a renewed human race—a fear not shared by the Creator, apparently.  This is to say that the biblical story is highly dualistic while this contemporary rendering is much less so.  Just as the movie's optics tend to be darkish grays, so does Noah and his family live in a world that is more gray than black or white.

In a moment of theological boldness, the move contains a rendering of Genesis 1 and the seven days of creation that clearly leaves room for evolution.  That too brings the story of Noah into the 21st century and aptly illustrates the manner in which the movie is a remythologizing of the biblical original.  Our larger society is trending haphazardly away from absolutist dualism with its hard and fast boundaries to a more realist, less dualistic postmodern worldview that is also less bounded by the agendas of organized, institutional Christianity.  This movie version of the biblical story is a fascinating rendering of the old, old stories for our time.  It is not scripture.  It is a comment and even a meditation on scripture that puts the story in a contemporary idiom for our reflection.  It invites us to engage in our own dialogue with the story of the flood, and in fact encourages us to actually go back and open our Bibles and read the original script again.

There are a couple of nice touches in the movie.  It solves the problem of how to feed and care for all the animals in the ark by having Noah's family mix a potion that when burned as incense puts them all to sleep for the duration (a kind of sci-fi suspended animation apparently).  The movie also conveniently has Noah plant a magic seed that grows a huge forest, which solves the problem of where he got all the lumber for the ark; and it has the Watchers assist in building it, which solves the problem of how Noah and his family could build such a huge craft.  In short, if there is science  fiction, which provides imaginative, even playful commentary on science, then Noah is might be considered as biblical fiction in an almost sci-fi mode: an imaginative, even playful commentary on the Bible.

Reviewers pan some of the acting in the movie; they criticize it from an artistic, cinematic perspective.  But, I found it interesting and instructive from a theological and biblical point of view.  If you haven't seen it and are concerned for such things as faith, scripture, and theological reflection, I highly recommend it.  It is fun.

Warfare & the Rise of Civilization

In a research paper entitled, "War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies," a team of researchers led by Dr. Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, reports the findings of its research into the causes of the spread of ancient complex societies.  It employed a computer model, which predicted with 65% accuracy where ancient civilizations actually arose.  While climate, geography, and the presence of agriculture are important contributing factors in the model, the team found that the primary factor for the emergence and growth of complex societies was warfare.    The report states, "We have argued here that this pattern was due to the emergence and spread of technologies enabling more intense forms of warfare that, in turn, created selection pressures for the cultural evolution of norms and institutions, making possible cooperating groups numbering in the millions."

If correct, people of faith have to ask some hard, unsettling questions about "the way God works" in the world.  It is one thing to see in war an example of human brokenness, but it is quite another to claim that warfare is a primary carrier of civilization.  That claim is counterintuitive in a seriously uncomfortable way.  How is it that a God of love built the hurt and horror of war into our creation?  This question is, of course, but a variation of the whole question of the relationship of God to evil.

For those of us who are people of faith, then, we stand somewhere between two realities.  One is evil.  The other one is the equally or still more compelling realities of love, beauty, and the way in which the universe is constructed to be hospitable to life on Earth.  We have witnessed and felt the power of a deeper spiritual reality, and without pretending that there are any easy answers to the other reality of evil our intuition as Christians is that God's will as we see it in Christ is ultimately not crucifixion but Resurrection.

It is a statement of faith when one says, "The reality of evil is so compelling I cannot believe in God."  There is no proving that a-theism is correct.  The same is true when one says, "The reality of love is so compelling that I must believe in God."  There is no proving that a theistic faith in God is correct.  That's why it is faith.  And any person of a theistic faith who is not uncomfortable with the provisional nature of faith is not paying attention to the real world that is the arena of our faith.  Once we get comfortable with our faith in God it turns into an idolatrous ideology.