What Makes a Movie Christian?

27 04 2012

What makes a piece of art or music or cinematography ‘Christian’? Sometimes the ‘Christian’ label is slapped onto all sorts of things, from cookies to car insurance, simply because the thing in question was made or sold by a professing Christian. Does Christian involvement in the production of a thing or performance of an action, make that thing/action Christian? What if the same thing/action was produced by an atheist? Is there such a thing as a Christian cookie? What makes the contents Christian? What makes a film ‘Christian’?

Film is a great divider when it comes to ‘Christian’ labelling. Some view the medium itself as inherently bad. Some point to pornographic or violent content in a film as evidence that the film in question is bad and therefore ‘unChristian.’ Some films are called ‘Christian’ because they are made by Christians, others because they contain clear biblical themes. What sort of content in a film truly qualifies it to be called Christian?

I am squeamish when it comes to violence on TV. I don’t like watching it, I don’t like remembering it, and I feel equally uncomfortable watching sexually intimate scenes in films. Nonetheless, I can’t help reflecting on the fact that all the things moralists (often Christians!) typically profess to hate in film also feature prominently in the Bible: violence and violent death, incest, adultery, suicide, heterosexual rape and the threat of homosexual rape, unresolved angst… In short, pretty much every kind of immoral, compromising and complex human behaviour out there. True, the Bible contains a strong and compelling theme of redemption, but like films which are often described as ‘gritty’ or ‘real’, Scripture speaks to the human condition not by outlining esoteric avenues for escape (not every story in the Bible ends on a spiritual ‘high’) but by going into the details of people’s real lives: rejoicing over births and weddings, describing real fear of real enemies, lamenting suffering and death, celebrating goodness and beauty, delighting in and being frustrated by God, sometimes in response to a God who has revealed himself, sometimes in response to a God who seems absent. There is a great deal of irresolution on the small scale in the Bible, if not the big. Short stories of injustice and despair are offset by a much bigger story, the central story, of love and redemption.

It would make for grim, gritty, ‘adult’ viewing if the biblical story of David was transferred to the silver screen. Does that make it any the less Christian? Maybe it’s not necessary for a film to go by the title “The Life of Christ” or to have a Shawshank Redemption finale in order to qualify as ‘Christian.’ Personally, I wonder not that the story of humanity is so depraved, but that for every historical incident of evil, there is a historical story of equal and greater redemption.

Madi Simpson


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

The Upper Hand of Evil

4 04 2012

Is goodness feasible in an evil world? Can we maintain innocence as we seek to enter and influence the tough dynamics of the marketplace, politics and society? Can we sustain love and generosity for people who disdain and even abuse us? Or, to put it in biblical language, is it possible to follow Christ through a path that does not lead to a cross? For anyone who has really attempted it, the practicalities of goodness are no small challenge.

A painting got me thinking about these things – actually, a painting based on a novel. Erich Heckel’s Two Men at the Table uses spectral colors and pointed lines to convey a tortured scene of anguish and tension. We see two men around a table in a claustrophobic little room, a piece of paper and a knife between them, a portrait which seems to haunt the encounter and a crude picture of Jesus on the cross, surrounded by a bloodied atmosphere. The older man leans forward, apparently challenging or menacing the younger man, who does not know what to do, oppressed by faces and colors alike.

Heckel drew inspiration for this scene from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and subtitled the painting, “To Dostoyevsky.” In this novel, the masterful Russian writer crafts the story of Prince Myshkin, a “completely beautiful human being,” as Dostoyevsky described in a letter: a generous, kind, loving, forgiving, innocent young man, who enters St. Petersburg’s corrupt society and seeks to love people, only to be dismissed and manipulated in return. Myshkin is like a figure of Christ in an un-Christian world, and he disputes the love of a stunning femme fatale with brutal Rogozhin, who attempts to kill Myshkin and who has at home a portrait of Christ taken down from the cross as a dead body without life, without hint of a possible resurrection. Beautiful Nastassya oscilates between the innocent goodness of Myshkin and the harsh character of Rogozhin, until she decides for the worse man, who kills her in the end. Heckel’s painting seems to portray this last encounter between the two men at Rogozhin’s house, where they spent a tense night veiling over Nastassya’s dead body.

Dostoyevsky’s experiment to place a good man in an evil world highlights Myshkin’s tragic fate. People don’t know what to do with him, and his purity is misunderstood and abused. A scholar described that Myshkin is a “more riddling and more tragic figure of lost absolutes. In a world where God is simply dead flesh, a good man becomes simply an idiot.”[1] We may question at several points how much Myshkin resembles Jesus’ actual example, and notice that he lacks the fiber and force of the Jesus he represents, for instance. But Myshkin reminds us still of the upper hand of evil which seemed to hover over Jesus’ last hours: Jesus facing false accusations silently, beaten and spit at, at the hands of traitors and hypocrites who take his life at the end, and who mock his final prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”[2]

Yet, even as we sense the upper hand of evil seemingly everywhere, and wonder if we can emulate Jesus’ graceful endurance of mistreatment, we can also remember that the painting hanging on Rogozhin’s wall is not the end of the story. Jesus was lowered from the cross crumbled and broken, and the friends who had not fled could only weep that Friday afternoon. But Sunday was still to come, with news that would change everything; that broken body, and all the tragic human fate it sums up and represents, was gone. We may believe it or be wondering about it still, but the news of resurrection carried by the beams and airs of dawn electrified people with a cosmic kind of possibility: if that body was really gone, if Jesus had come back to life, then the matrix of reality is altered; tragedy is not the final result of goodness, nor is realism synonymous with pessimism. Evil may appear to have the upper hand, and goodness may lead to a painful cross, but there is life beyond pain, and hope beyond tragedy, and the model of one whose victory over evil changes the outcomes for us all.

René Breuel

[2] Luke 23:34


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Categories : The Heart of Faith

Why it is not wrong to kill chickens

19 09 2011

Is it ever right to kill a chicken? Or a dog, or a human being? If not, who says so? God, or our conscience, or plain reason, or utilitarian consequences? The nature and origin of morality has been one of the most disputed areas in Western philosophy ever since Socrates, and the question is not only philosophical: it addresses us also every day, whenever we encounter actions which repulse our conscience, like abuse or poverty or hypocrisy. Inside or outside academic circles, I fell that this is one of the central questions of life: where do we get our deep sense of right and wrong?

In a surprisingly candid essay this month in The New York Times, called Confessions of an Ex-Moralist, Yale scholar Joel Marks reveals his unexpected and tortuous path across moral philosophy. He professes himself an atheist, who used to believe in right and wrong as independent absolute principles, within a secular framework. But here comes the punch: Marks confesses how, over time, he came to acknowledge that  independent principles can’t be absolute; there can’t be solid right or wrong without a transcendental authority to define them. For the secularist, the only option is to, ironically, make morality absolute and divine. “The day I became an atheist was the day I realized I had been a believer,” as Marks puts it.

I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted. [1]

How can we resolve this dilemma? Morality is absolute, we all feel anger whenever we hear about massacres, for example, even if they are half-way across the globe. Marks himself confesses, “And yet I knew in my soul, with all of my conviction, with a passion, that [things like discrimination of homosexuals and mass murder of chickens for human consumption] were wrong, wrong, wrong. I knew this with more certainty than I knew that the earth is round.” How can a secularist then – who dismisses a transcendental God who defines what right and wrong is, and who imparts this conscience to us – explain the human instinct for morality?

It is here that Marks’ journey is even more telling: despite his deep sense of right and wrong, in order to be consistent to his secular framework, he simply throws morality out of the window. Right and wrong do not exist objectively, as categorically as he knows certain things are wrong, wrong, wrong. He writes, “But suddenly I knew it no more. I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong. But neither are they right; nor are they permissible. The entire set of moral attributions is out the window.”

In the end, for Marks remains just sheer desire: Mother Teresa followed her desire to care for dying people in the same way Marquis de Sade followed his craving to inflict sexual pain; each is just following what their desires command them. Marks is left just with his desires, trying to educate them to be morally commendable desires, but without any framework to define what is moral and believing everything is amoral. “I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument.”

I really appreciate Marks’ honesty. His journey illustrates the contortions and intellectual acrobatics humans perform when they deny the basic fact that defines what does it mean to be human: we are good creations of a good God. We fall into secularism or relativism, into inconsistency or contradiction, trying to fend off a divine basis for our morality. But hey, we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and there is no escaping it. I’d rather acknowledge our knowledge of what good and wrong is, and our need for God, and try to live according to his blazing goodness, than deny the conscience that makes us human, and see myself grow a bit closer to Marquis de Sade than to Mother Teresa.

René Breuel

[1] Joel Marks, “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist”, The New York Times, Aug 21st, 2001. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/confessions-of-an-ex-moralist/?hp


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Categories : Making a Difference

A Clash of Worlds… and of Worldviews

14 09 2011

Have you ever watched the James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar?

If you have not seen it, well, get a life! The movie is a very fine piece of art. Besides personal preferences and opinions, I found Avatar particularly interesting because of its philosophical underpinning: Avatar is an apology of a worldview called pantheism. Never heard of it? It is the view that the Universe (or Nature) and God are identical and that humanity is to be in a religious communion with the natural world. This theme is not new in Hollywood: it is the truth discovered by Kevin Costner in Dance with the wolves, Disney’s worldview in The King Lion and Pocahantas, and also part of George Lucas’ spirituality in Star Wars. “May the Force be with you,” is the classic line Jedis say to one another.

I won’t unfold all the secrets about the movie. But before Avatar’s great final battle, the main character, Jake Sully, prays to the Mother Nature goddess called Eywa. He asks her (it) to protect the Na’vis – the blue people of Pandora. Yet Neytiri, his girlfriend, right beside him at that moment, explains to him that Eywa cannot choose a camp, either good or bad, because she has to keep Nature’s balance. In other words, Eywa is neither good nor bad, just a part of Nature.

Nonetheless, later on in the movie, Eywa chooses to fight for the Na’vis. While the beautiful graphics and compelling narrative may draw our attention, and make us not notice this philosophical change, I found this transformation of posture curious. Generally speaking, pantheism teaches that everything is One. Everything is God. It is called One-ism. There is neither good nor bad. Everything in the world is just balanced forces or energies. Still, the goddess Mother Nature decides to fight evil for goodness sake. In fact, Neytiri emphasizes that by shouting at Jake: “she has answered your prayer”. At that moment, Avatar’s pantheism is curiously meshed with another worldview named theism: God is in favor of justice, and He hates unrighteousness.

This is an interesting a clash of worldviews! As attractive as Avatar’s spirituality of nature was, even in Hollywood movies we don’t follow the logical implications of pantheism. Why? Because pantheism does not have a response to the goodness and the evil we experience. Pantheism offers an undemanding and attractive intimacy with nature, but when it comes to the small and large struggles we face in life, it stays quiet. It does not call good “good” or evil “evil.” The human exploitation of the Na’vis is just an imbalance in nature. Everything is neutral.

However, even at the price of contradiction, Avatar could avoid the moral element of a theistic worldview. There is such a thing as justice, after all, and God is on justice’s side. We can’t narrate stories of atrocities like Avatar and stay neutral; we feel the urge to affirm that atrocity is wrong. We want to see the villains in Avatar fail and be punished, rightly so, because our hearts long to see justice take place. We recognize that a deity neutral before evil is not a deity worth of our admiration.

In contrast, I find curious how Christianity’s vision of communion with nature, with God and with one another has a central moral component: Jesus dies on the cross so that evil and unrighteousness may be atoned for. He offers spirituality not in spite of justice, but precisely because justice has been satisfied. God is on the side of goodness, and he offers his life to redeem evil.

I love to watch movies, and I love a good story told. But I’m especially glad that when the moment of tension comes, when the epic battle is to be fought, I resonate with goodness’ struggle against evil, and believe in a God who does the same.

Aurelien Lang lives in Northern France and blogs at Raisons de Croire. 


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

An Atheis… oops, Religious Response

29 08 2011

Among the toughest questions I have been asked as a pastor is some variation of the following: Why is God allowing this to happen to me? The life situations that prompt this question can range from the relatively insignificant to the profoundly traumatic, but the brute existential fact about life on this planet is that things do not always—or even often—go as we want them to. If God is in control, and God is supposed to be good, why all this misery?  Why any misery for that matter?

Christopher Hitchens, the famous atheist author of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, asked similar questions in an essay written after the 2010 death of Tsutomu Yamaguchi—one of the few people to live through the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If ever there was someone who had a right to wonder about the order and goodness of the cosmos it would be Yamaguchi!

According to Hitchens, whatever else might be said about Yamaguchi’s story, it is “one of those cases that demonstrates the absolute uselessness of official piety.”  Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism—all are equally worthless in preventing or altering their adherents’ experience in a world full of chaos and pain. Yamaguchi was just the victim of dumb bad luck in world devoid of purpose. There is no God presiding over the cosmos and it is foolishly naive to think so. All religion does is pile illusion upon misery. The only proper response to the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi—or any of the horrors of history—is (pardon Hitchens’s indelicate terminology) “WTF?”

What Hitchens seems not to realize is that “WTF?” isn’t all that original a response to the problem of evil. In fact, it’s a downright religious one. It’s even a biblical one. The Psalms of lament frequently express bewilderment, frustration, and anger at the apparent triumph of evil over good.

Psalm 6:1-3, for example, says this:

How long, O LORD Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, O LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death.

Or how about Psalm 74:9-13?

We are given no miraculous signs;
no prophets are left,
and none of us knows how long this will be.

How long will the enemy mock you, O God?
Will the foe revile your name forever?

Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?

Many other examples could be cited within the Psalter alone, to say nothing of books like Job and Lamentations. Hitchens’s protest is neither new nor unique to modern atheism.

While the biblical writers may not phrase things as crudely as Hitchens, the questions they ask are the same: Why don’t the good guys win more often? Why isn’t there a more obvious connection between virtue and blessing? Why is hardship so indiscriminately distributed (a question Hitchens has, tragically, become intimately acquainted with in his ongoing battle with esophageal cancer that began mere months after the publication of this article)? Why doesn’t the state of the world make more moral sense to us? What’s wrong here?

For Hitchens, WTF? is “one of the most pressing, relevant, and ultimately humane” questions we can ask. And indeed, it is. I think the Hebrew poets would agree. I think they would move on, though, to say that it is a question that can only be coherently asked within a worldview where we have good reasons to expect things to be better than they are.

Ryan Dueck

[Note: Ryan is the newest Wondering Fair contributor; it is a pleasure to have you with us, Ryan! He runs an excellent blog called Rumblings.]


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Categories : Tough Questions

Is Life Worth It?

8 08 2011

“But don’t you think life is worth all the suffering we go through?” I was surprised by my own question, wondering myself if life was indeed worthy, compared to the pain and evil there is in the world. It was a bright afternoon, in the campus of Sapienza, Rome’s and Europe’s largest university. I had been talking for some good 20 minutes with a student, and she was sharp. We had moved through the problems of faith, religious exclusivism, stagnant Catholicism, and now she zeroed in on what seemed like the most central obstacle for her, the problem of suffering.

“You only believe this is a good world because you grew up in a good home, with parents who loved you,” said she. Her eyes had sparkled until that moment, but now she faced the floor. “Others of us were not so lucky, and I don’t think life is worth of all the pain we go through.”

“I’m sorry about that…”, was the best I could say. Then she cited statistics on sexual abuse, and the percentage of abuse cases that take place within the household. Though she talked in general terms, I read between the lines that this must have been her case too. Her father or an uncle had mistreated her as a child, and these experiences darkened her whole view of life.

We talked for some minutes more, but her remark struck me, as I walked back home. Is life worth it?

Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace laureate for his work during South Africa’s apartheid, has wrestled with the same question. He has seen more suffering and injustice than most of us, yet his response is striking. “There very well may be times when God has regretted creating us, but I am convinced that there are many more times that God feels vindicated by our kindness, our magnanimity, our nobility of spirit,” writes Tutu.

He arrives at this conclusion with two reasonings. The first is that behind our notion of evil lies the eloquent horizon of goodness which permeates our world and minds. “For every act of evil there are a dozen acts of goodness in our world that go unnoticed… It is only because we believe that people should be good that we despair when they are not.”[i] We would not call evil evil, in other words, or be angry at it, if we did not know also what goodness is. If the believer struggles to explain evil, the skeptic faces an ever tougher challenge to explain goodness.

Tutu’s second argument for the validity of our imperfect existence is, in my view, even more telling. “The texture of suffering is changed when we see it and begin to experience it as being redemptive, as not being wasteful, as not being senseless. We humans can tolerate suffering but we cannot tolerate meaninglessness.” I imagine Tutu learned this in his struggle against the apartheid, and that he saw the faces of his colleagues change from anger to purposefulness when they heard about redemption, and imagined how their pain could be used for good. “This is what I mean when I say we can transform our suffering into a spirituality of transformation by understanding that we have a role in God’s transformation of the world.” [ii]

Is this imperfect world worth it? In many cases we feel like it is not, for sure. Tragedies like the Norway and Syria massacres this month must nauseate God too. But I think that, in the end, life is worth it. It is worth seeing children playing in the playground, though they dispute each other’s toys. It is worth seeing a young couple brush one another’s hair, though they may break off the next week. It is worth seeing an honorable man die, and cherish the legacies he has left behind. There are moments when pain hits us so hard that we prefer death, or the undoing of the world. I guess the validity of the world is a question of perspective, like that girl put it. But we will only be able to judge if our existence was worth it when we see it as a whole, good things and bad things included, at the twilight of this age. And no one has articulated our hope better than Dostoevsky:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.[iii]

I hope in the end to see that Dostoevsky’s vision will indeed be true, and that I can see evil redeemed like Tutu does. And I hope that that student sees it too, sees the engulfing of her suffered past in God’s ocean of redemption, and says, “Yes, it hurt, it hurt real bad. But life is worth it.”

René Breuel

[i] Desmond Tutu, quoted in Francis Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reasons for Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 152-3.

[ii] Ibid., 156.

[iii] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, quoted in Timothy J. Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008), 33.


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Categories : Tough Questions

Why Does God Allow So Much Evil in the World?

20 04 2011

I don’t know. That’s the bottom line, so let’s just face it now. I don’t know. And, so far as my research has taken me, nobody else does, either. But here are some thoughts that help me make at least some sense of what God is up to.

I have concluded that we do in fact live in a good world, and “good” in two crucial respects: (1) it is a world that conduces to our benefit, and is meant by a good God to do so; and (2) it is pretty effective in conducing to our benefit.

What it isn’t, to be sure, is perfectly conducive to our happiness. If God’s main objective in creating and maintaining this world was the same as my own objective usually is—namely, to maximize happiness—then he is obviously doing a terrible job. So either we believe God is, in fact, doing a terrible job—either because he means well but is in some great measure incompetent (the argument of Harold Kushner’s bestselling When Bad Things Happen to Good People), or because he is not really as good as we are hoping he is (and resembles Zeus or Shiva instead)–or God doesn’t exist at all.

But happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World (a book that deserves better than its fate as a mandatory high school text), makes it clear that a drug-perpetuated happiness is not what most of us aspire to. And God aims higher than that, also.

God aims, in fact, much, much higher. God aims at shalom—which gets my vote as one of the best words I have ever encountered. Shalom doesn’t mean merely “peace,” but flourishing, and in every respect, along every axis. Shalom means that each individual becomes an excellent version of itself; every relationship blossoms; every group realizes its potential; and the whole cosmos relates lovingly and creatively to God [...].

I realize this answer isn’t complete. I don’t understand why God lets a deer die an agonizing death in the woods (even as one of my students pointed out that the deer’s cries serve the good of warning others away from the wolf pack). I don’t understand why God doesn’t terminate the life of my mother, who is dying even as I type these words in confusion and sadness and bitterness. I don’t understand why God allows AIDS/HIV to ravage Africa, or toxic waste to pour down a Hungarian hillside, or earthquakes and floods to destroy the lives and livelihoods of millions.

But I do see, if I catch my breath and look, that good does come out of these irrefutably evil situations. Sometimes, it seems, we are so resistant to doing what is right that somebody does have to die at the crosswalk for the city council to finally put in a traffic light. Sometimes, it seems, millions have to die before countries change their public health policies and drug companies change their pricing practices. And that’s not God’s fault, is it?

If God is not going to simply reach down and make us all good by sheer reprogramming, but instead wants to treat us as the freewill agents he made us to be, then he has to work with what he’s got. And I’m afraid that my own life experience shows me that I am so evil in certain respects—not all respects, of course, but some!—that if God does not resort to teaching me the hard way, I don’t learn at all.

So he does. Because he loves me. And he loves the world.

John Stackhouse (This article is part of John’s answer to why does God allow suffering in the world. For his fuller response, see here.)


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Categories : Tough Questions

Light and Darkness

1 04 2011

I admire the artist Charlie Mackesy’s ability to create lifelike images of people and places with just a piece of charcoal on paper (www.charliemackesy.com). His ‘Boy from Malawi’ is a striking example. With just a few strokes and smudges he creates life from lines. The key to brilliance in many pictures and paintings is, of course, down to use of light and dark. Mackesy uses white charcoal on black paper, or black on white, to create people, scenes and objects. But other times he merely draws in the shadows, the darkness, leaving patches of white paper exposed to create the central figures (see ‘Jacob and the Angel’).

Artists, poets, philosophers, musicians, authors, film makers and numerous others have often revealed a shared worldview by depicting the world in terms of ‘light’ and ‘dark.’ It’s impossible to identify the precise origins of such a worldview, but I have yet to come across anyone who doesn’t understand the symbolism behind the concepts or who fails to make the metaphorical connection between light and good and dark and evil. What is it about the world and human nature that makes such a worldview so clear, so compelling and so common?

It is difficult to say whether the world has become ‘darker’ or whether the human proclivity to evil has increased over time, but it seems that people intrinsically recognise the presence of evil or ‘darkness’ in the world. But it’s hard to understand it if we don’t know what is meant by ‘light’, and it’s even harder when the lines between good and bad, dark and light, have been blurred. Horror films and novels, violent computer games, and consensual sadistic sexual practice constitute legitimate forms of ‘light entertainment’ in Western society. At what point do we recognise that we have crossed from light to dark or dark to light?

In John’s gospel light is one of the major ways Jesus uses to explain himself. “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”[1] Similarly, John writes that “light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”[2]

These words of Jesus may sound as strange as a sudden beam of light invading the darkness of an underground cave. But take your time, light takes a while to adjust to, if are away from it for a long period. Like the rescued Chilean miners who had to wear dark glasses to protect their eyes from exposure to sunlight, the longer we spend in darkness, the more sensitive and cynical we can become towards light. Exposure to sudden light can leave us reeling, but when we’ve had time to adjust to it, walk in it, live in it, we can take off our shades and look both the light and the world in the face.

Madi Simpson

[1] John 8:12

[2] John 3:19


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Rob Bell’s Hell_, and God’s Goodness

14 03 2011

[Note: unfortunately the software behind WF assumes the word hell_ is a curse word, and changes it automatically to @#!*% ... Till I figure how to fix this spelling issue, I've added _ to the end of the word, so it stays readable.)

The underlying tension behind the latest theological controversy – about Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins – is our uncomfortable belief in hell_. On the one hand, the New Testament, and Jesus especially, talk often about hell_, and suggest it is a nasty reality. On the other hand, hell_ sounds a Medieval, cruel belief, the dirtiest pleasure of a sadist God, a place where eternal suffering lasts far longer than the earthly sins committed. Many of us, then, wish to explain hell_ away, understandably, and Rob Bell’s book is the latest example of this sentiment.

In my view, however, whatever content we ascribe to hell_ – definitive death, eternal suffering, some meaningless state away from God – the existence of some form of hell_ is necessary if we are to have an all-good God. To get rid of hell_ does not give us a more loving God; rather, it gives us a more cruel, more mediocre God. A perfect heaven can exist only if there is also a hell_; if there is no hell_, there won’t be a heaven either, and neither earth: everything is consumed by hell_.

Let me explain. If a good God did not want to punish evil somehow, this could mean only two things. Either true, objective evil does not exist – date rape, systematic genocide, use of mentally sick people for selfish purposes, all these are not evil - and should not be punished. I don’t think any of us would sanely advocate this option, would we? Or else God does not care about evil. He gives in, hides the dirt under the carpet, and lets evil go unpunished. He looks at the Holocaust, at the hills of corpses in concentration camps, looks Hitler in the eye, and says that it is ok, no big deal. He looks at the father who preys on his daughter every evening, and shares her with his friends, and prefers to shy away instead of naming that evil.

Can you see the God we end up with? It is not a more loving God, but a less loving God. It is a God who does not care about evil, who in the name of sentimentality calls everything all right, and who ultimately is not good. It is a God who does not care about us. It is a God who watches the nightmare of wars and abuse and exploitation and selfishness and is too weak to care, or too timid to name evil as evil, or who is does not know what goodness is. We wanted a God so good that he abolishes hell_, but we end up with a God so weak that hell_ takes over him.

Instead, God’s provision of hell_ means that he takes our reality seriously, and does not let any evil act we suffer go unseen. God’s hatred of evil is a consequence of his unflinching goodness; his wrath is the greatest demonstration of his love. Only a God who abhors evil could be any good; only a God who sadly makes space for hell_ can redeem reality truly and create a heaven out of our mess. Hell_ does not mean that God is cruel, it means just the opposite: that he is not cruel, that he opposes evil without blinking, and that he is wondrously good.

Hell_  and God’s opposition to evil are not repulsive doctrines of a cruel God. On the very contrary: they are evidence of how unspeakably good our God is. Nor are they what the Christian message is about: they are just the shadows of a very bright picture, the low echoes of a virtuoso symphony, the dirt that shows that God’s shoes do indeed walk on this world; they are just the necessary consequences of the evil of this world. God is not focused on hell_, not at all. He is rather at work in the redemption of reality, in the restoration of every living thing to the glorious peace of heaven, to his society of purity and justice and love. God does not ignore or take pleasure in evil, but he is so indescribably good that he looks evil in the eye, and so indescribably graceful as to include and redeem evil people like us in his heavenly masterpiece. He is in fact so good that he offered himself to pay for our sins, and satisfy his wrath, so that hell_  does not take over reality, but is in fact dwarfed by the majestic redeemed society of heaven. This is goodness beyond description, this is a wide-eyed redeemer of evil, this is a trustworthy architect of heaven.

René Breuel

[i] Romans 12:17-21 NIV.


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Why did God allow that rape?

24 01 2011

Now a refugee in Italy, Sayid is running away from his past. He fled his Middle-Eastern home when charged with blasphemy – a sentence which carries a death penalty in his country – after he confronted an Iman who often abused sexually a boy. As part of a religious minority, Sayid faced unnumbered little indignities and persecutions, but one looms large in his past: he witnessed his wife been raped and killed in front of his eyes. What struck me hardest when I heard Sayid’s story is how, as a Christian, he makes sense of the violence he has suffered. He believes all that took place was God’s will, and that his wife’s rape was some kind of punishment for his own sins.

One can understand how Sayid’s polarized context contributed to his strange conclusion. When part of a besieged, suffering minority, people feel the need to have quick, solid answers. In a context of insecurity and suffering, we need all our defences up – social, psychological, theological – and there can’t be room for doubt or ambiguity. There is also the social pressure to conform, or at least respond, to the outside context: if Allah’s defining characteristic is not his love, wisdom or grace, but his strength, and one sees displays of Allah’s strength in Mosques and burkas and music and uniformed police everywhere, one needs the Christian God to be just as strong and unquestionable, even if his other characteristics as a good, gracious God have to be disfigured, and one ends with a vindictive, yet still strong, God, a mirror of Allah.

To be clear, Sayid’s conclusion is obviously out of sync with the Bible. The book of Job – forty-two chapters of complex poetry – is entirely dedicated to refute the idea that the suffering we experience is a punishment for sins committed. In another instance, when a blind man was brought to Jesus, and people asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”, Jesus answer was: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”[1] And Jesus healed the guy and made him see. For Jesus the point was not the origin of his blindness, but the good that could come out if it.

But if the rape and murder of Sayid’s wife were not the result of his sin, how are we to make sense of this atrocious act? Why did God allow it? I guess one could answer Sayid in a number of ways. We could say that God did not intend that act, but that it was instead an act performed by wicked people, who need to be confronted and judged. We could encourage Sayid by saying that God brings good out of evil, pointing for example that the abused boy’s suffering was stopped thanks to Sayid’s courage to confront sexual violence. We could express that God abhors evil, to the point of almost destroying the world when he flooded it in the time of Noah, and that he subjected himself to unspeakable suffering on our behalf, when Jesus died on the cross.

But why did God allow this specific act, this rape? As weird as this would sound to Sayid’s Middle-Eastern ears, and as weak as it sounds to Western skepticism, I would say: I don’t know. The Bible is filled with examples of people ranting at God, clueless about their suffering, expressing the full breadth of their distress and rage and doubt. Jesus himself screamed just before dying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”[2]

Why did God allow this evil act? I don’t know. But if God suffers with us to forge a perfect paradise out of this mess, offering his life to save undeserving people, and we have experienced all the breadth of his care for us, and feel in our guts that he is not cruel – no, not at all – but pervasively good, I guess it is ok not to know.

René Breuel 

[1] John 9:1-3

[2] Matthew 27:46


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