I loved it.  And now I desperately want to talk to people about it.

The problem is that the movie’s best kept secret (at least I didn’t know about it before I went in) is critical to the plot – which I have to talk about.

So if you’re one of those people who hates to have a movie “spoiled,” stop reading here, go see the movie, and come back.

OK.

This movie is set in a near-future apocalyptic world, in the southwestern United States.  We never find out exactly what has happened to the world.  Apparently, thirty-one years before the movie opens, there was a war that “ripped a hole in the sky,” whatever that means, unleashing a ton of deadly solar radiation on the world that burned everything and everybody who couldn’t take cover.  Many of the survivors are blinded.  Somehow, the radiation decreases until the present day, so that all people need to travel outdoors are some heavy-duty sunglasses.

Our main character is Eli, played by Denzel Washington, a grizzled middle-aged man slowly making a journey across the ruins of America, carrying with him a precious book that he reads from every day.  We quickly learn that he has almost supernatural fighting skills when he easily dispatches ten highwaymen early in the movie.

Early in the film, Eli comes to a town ruled by an oily, sadistic strongman named Carnegie, who sends out bands of illiterate bandits to bring him every book they can find, in the hope that one of them will turn out to be “the one.”

We quickly guess, of course, that the book Carnegie is searching for and the book Eli carries are one and the same.  And all this time in the theater, I was wondering, “Are they really going to do this?  I can’t believe they would do this.”

But sure enough.  When Carnegie suspects Eli is carrying a book, he tortures his blind lover to get her illiterate daughter, Solara, to tell him about the book. “All I saw was the symbol on the front!” she screams.

“What kind of symbol?” Carnegie demands.

Trembling, Solara holds up her fingers in the shape of a cross.

It turns out, Eli is on a mission from God.  After the Disaster, people blamed the war on Christianity, and burned every Bible they could find. (Does that mean a Christian fundamentalist rises to power in America and decides to nuke Russia?  Who knows.) One day, Eli hears a voice that tells him where to find the last Bible on earth.  The voice tells him to take the Bible west to find a safe place for it, and promises him protection on the way.

Carnegie does not believe in God and does not remember much about the Bible, only that it had the power to inspire people to acts of great devotion and violence.  Accordingly, he sees the Bible as a weapon, the tool he needs to consolidate his control and expand his empire beyond the single rundown town he controls, and he is obsessed with getting his hands on a copy.

Eli escapes the town, reluctantly bringing Solara along.  Carnegie gives chase.  I’ve given away the plot, but not the ending.  It’s both surprising and pitch-perfect.

As far as science fiction movie-making goes, two things make this movie great, in my opinion.  The first thing is its internal consistency.  It creates its own world, sets rules for its world, and then follows them.  When Eli comes to town, the men behind the counters in the first two establishments he visits demand that he hold out his hands to demonstrate that he is not “one of them.” Who are them?  Oh, you’ll find out.

The second thing is the visual style of the movie.  The filmmakers jump into the world they’ve created with relish.  Eli and Solara camp out in the fuel towers of abandoned nuclear reactors.  They walk through highways crowded with abandoned cars.  When they walk past the San Francisco bay, a giant freighter lies partially submerged in the distance.  Carnegie’s town is drawn like a classic Old West town.  There’s a lot of intense violence, but it’s the stylized, operatic sort found in 300 or Kill Bill. Throughout the movie, a slightly off-color lens dominates (as if we’re all looking through those radiation-proof sunglasses).  The darkened sky constantly roils with clouds, and in a key moment in the plot, a tiny, silent lightning bolt flashes in the distance.  It’s a cinematic sight to behold.

Theologically, you folks will have to tell me whether I’m way off, or pointing out the obvious, but I see this movie as a retelling of the story of Abram.  First comes the flood of destruction.   Then Carnegie and others like him try to build their own Towers of Babel – pale imitations of human civilization that highlight all the worst aspects of it.  Then the voice of God comes to one man, and entrusts him with the task of bringing his word to mankind once again.

“Yeah, except Abram didn’t have supernatural fighting abilities!” my friend argued to me after we left the theater.

Oh no?  How about the time Abram routed Kedorlaomer king of Elam, and the three kings with him, the established rulers of the Fertile Crescent, with a force of only 318 men? (Genesis 14).

Sociologically, I guess this movie shows that our culture’s appetite for end-of-the-world flicks has not abated with the end of the Cold War, or the fading of 9/11 in our collective memory.  I think this appetite stems from our awareness of trends in our world today that are both unprecedented and unsustainable.

In class the other day, I made a list of these trends:

-         Nuclear weapons and nuclear power.  We all congratulate ourselves on making it sixty-five years with only two nuclear attacks and one devastating nuclear accident.  Sixty-five years is only 1% of human history.  How much longer can we make it without catastrophe?

-         Advances in communication.  Never before in history has it been so easy for people to communicate, interpersonally and en masse.  This is unprecedented.  The side effects of it are hard to predict, but two that we’ve seen already are the erosion of authority (e.g.: “The New York Times?  Please.  Check out this article on PajamasMedia.”) and Islamist terrorists using the web to spread their ideology and inspire lone acts of terrorism (like Fort Hood).  In effect, the internet has created the ability to wage war without any central organization.

-         Climate change – who knows where that’s going?

-         We are running out of fossil fuels, with no alternatives that can sustain projected levels of use (except for the aforementioned nuclear power).

-         Our overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals, the doomsayers tell us, is bringing us steadily closer to the day when our antibiotics will no longer work at all.

-         Digital, digital, digital – more and more of our information is being stored in a medium that is inherently intangible and prone to obsolescence.  When historians look back on the digital age, what primary documents will they have to work with?

-         Computer technology is advancing exponentially.  The less sober experts tell us that, inevitably, computers will surpass the human brain in complexity and processing power, a moment they call “the singularity.” I’m skeptical, but where is computer technology going?  Where can it go?

-         The world population is approaching 7 billion people.  We didn’t even hit 1 billion people until 1800.  At the time of Christ, the world population was 200 million.  There are enough people alive today to act out whole millennia of human history.  According to one book I read last year, this surge in population is part of the reason that while empires used to walk all over other countries, today, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. can’t even manage to take down fifth-rate powers like Afghanistan and Iraq.  This, too, is unprecedented.

-         After the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama postulated that the “end of history” might be upon us, by which he meant we might be witnessing the triumph of liberal democracy as the sole political system.  Twenty years later, with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and a financial crisis that nearly brought capitalism to its knees, that’s looking more and more doubtful.  So, where will politics go now?

In general, history just seems to be moving faster all the time.  Who would be more comfortable – a person from 2,000 BC transplanted to 1 AD, or a person from 1910 transplanted to 2010?  Things are changing faster and faster.  That rate of change is not sustainable.  One way or another, it will come to an end.  How?  The possible answers, I submit, are what scare us, and make us shell out millions for movies like The Road and The Book of Eli.

So, those are my thoughts.  Thanks for wading through my existential 21st century angst.  I’d love to hear what you think.

Of course, the History Channel presents the religious perspective as straightforwardly as possible, but there is one thing that betrays their bias against religious ideas, and that is the use of narrative. When explaining what would or could happen in the dispensational armageddon, either subjunctive and conditional statements are used or the story of the armageddon is told indirectly (i.e. “Dispensationalists believe that…”), but direct, indicative narration is used–complete with CGI animations, actors, and video of natural disasters–to explain more “scientific” concerns about artificial disasters and asteroid strikes.

The use of the narrative, telling the even as if it was happening right now or will soon happen, is far more engaging than the distanced and subjunctive language utilized in the religious narratives. In effect, narrative–that is, telling the idea as a story and not merely an idea–gives validity to the idea. The narrative form makes the idea real and concrete, even though it might only be a possibility.

“… in the biblical description of creation, the vocation of God becomes definitive of the vocation of human life and of that of institutions and nations and other creatures and of all things whatever.” — William Stringfellow, Conscience and Obedience

In asking myself what the first chapters of Genesis suggest about obligation, I have one huge pitfall to avoid. I could easily turn the entire exercise into a recitation of previously encountered ideas. Naturally, the many comments by theologians, commentators, and preachers that I’ve encountered both regarding obligation and related concepts and also regarding Genesis, all conspire to hi-jack my journey into the text as I seek to naively experience its story. For this reason, I am restricting my tendency to relate the text before me to the other texts that are tied to it in particular traditions of theological reflection. Hopeless as the attempt in some ways is, I am seeking to come to the text with new eyes.

Keeping in mind that by obligation I mean to be legally, morally, or socially bound to some course of action, we ask the text of the two creation accounts who/what is bound by who/what and also how.

Immediately, the concept of obligation implodes. Clearly the “obligation” to be, the call to life which was God’s creating, isn’t socially, morally, or legally binding. The transaction that occurs, occurs entirely outside any social, moral, or legal context; indeed, one could argue that all of these contexts are themselves contextualized by Creation.

But at the same time, the Genesis account (especially the first one) represent God’s actions in a legal way. To what does this accommodating figure of speech point? To a relation of power, especially the power of authority. God’s Word goes forth; God’s Word is fulfilled. There is little doubt about the origin of the doctrine of God’s sovereignty when we consider that Genesis represents him as standing in a relation of legal authority to the very existence of things. But how does God come to be invested with this legal authority? In human imagination, in our fantasy books when we speak of a wizard “binding the forces of nature to his will,” we typically at least imply some context for his wielding such authority, whether lineage, study, persuasion, or development of force of will; but we discover that God’s authority is contextualized by nothing but his own being. Consequently, we are given to infer that God, simply by being, possesses the highest possible legal authority and the most perfect execution of his will.

But we find three other bindings in the Creation account. God not only speaks life, he also blesses with imperatives, gives for, and confers dominion.

How do these actions relate to obligation? First, in regard to God’s blessings upon fish and birds and men, that they be fruitful and multiply, we notice that unlike his speaking things to life, this imperative is not followed by the assertion “and it was so.” This difference, in the tradition with which I am most conversant, is typically described as the difference between “laws of nature” and “norms.” While not consenting to the full exposition of that distinction, I appreciate the idea of a norm: that is, the idea of an obligation that does not determine so much what will occur as create the possibility for a kind of occurrence. God’s blessings oblige his creatures to act in one of two ways: to accept or reject his blessings. Similarly, later, we will see that God’s commands oblige his creatures to act in one of two ways: to obey or disobey. It is the possibility of blessing to which fish and birds and men seem to be bound here.

God’s blessings also seem to share something with his promises. Insofar as they are open-ended (by not determining whether the blessing will be accepted) they seem to imply that God is obliging himself by his own legal authority to respond in a certain way to the choices of his creatures. Later on in Scripture, we will come across the thrilling oaths of God, in which he binds himself to a promise by staking his own being upon it—the most solemn oath possible, “by God.”

Finally, I note that God gives for and confers dominion. I fear that many, many Christians have equated the two ideas. God gives men and animals the plants for food; our conception tends to be that he “gives” creation to us for, well, whatever the hell we want—and hell is what we make of it when we take dominion to mean domination in this way. Instead, in view of the example of dominion that God himself has just presented, blessing his creation and obligating himself to it, it would seem more likely that God is giving humans for creation rather than the other way around. In any case, God’s grant of dominion establishes a legal context, a conferred authority, connecting the ultimate legal authority (God’s being) to human governing.

In all of this, to conclude by referring to my opening quotation, we witness God defining the vocation of his creation, a much larger and richer thing than merely obligating it in certain ways. Nonetheless, we understand a part of this vocation as we see God’s legal authority to oblige, his creation of a context for human legality, and his own magnificent obliging of himself to his creation.

I have been using the Meditations as an example of moral reasoning (in structure more than content). So far we have considered two pre-requisites for such reasoning: first, the self-analysis which admits the historical and communal nature of one’s own moral vision; second, the consolidation of that moral vision into a definite ideal pattern of moral behavior.

But we haven’t fully set up the appropriate context for moral reasoning yet. One thing is lacking. Motivation.

Consider the following metaphor: Imagine the moral agent to be an atom in a totally material universe. (This metaphor would have offended Marcus, who like a good Stoic opposed the materialist view of philosophers like the Epicureans by positing a totally deterministic divine providence.) So far we have considered the location of the atom (which can only be determined in relation to whatever this universe contains) and the orientation of the atom (the direction it will travel in when it moves). Our goal is to get the atom moving. What we lack is a motivation for our atom, a push or pull that will set it moving.

For Marcus, that motivation is death.

The following two passages occur in books 2 and 4, respectively, of the Meditations:

(1. Now is it high time to perceive the kind of Universe whereof you are a part and the nature of the governor of the Universe from whom you subsist as an effluence, and that the term of your time is circumscribed, and that unless you use it to attain calm of mind, time will be gone and you will be gone and the opportunity to use it will not be yours again.

(2. Don’t live as though you were going to live a myriad years. Fate is hanging over your head; while you have life, while you may, become good.

These passages are representative of numerous instances in which Marcus urges himself to actually move along the path he has charted out for himself. In a deathless world, Marcus might say, knowing the genealogy of your moral vision and passionately upholding a moral pattern won’t necessarily ever result in moral behavior.

For Marcus, because now is all there is, and because the hereafter offers no definite possibility for the process of becoming good, goodness is to be sought in the present.

While I would disagree with Marcus regarding the nature of the present, the promise of the hereafter, and what it means to become good, I find his motivation to live toward dying wholesome for the activity of moral reasoning.

As an aside directed specifically at certain religious perversions, note that the motivation to live toward dying is not the following: motivation to live a certain way out of fear for judgment hereafter; motivation to live a certain way in order to cause the present to become the hereafter.

Instead, to live toward dying is to live a certain way because the time in which that way of life is possible is circumscribed—to embody the principle in two cliches, the window of opportunity demands that we seize the day. To live toward dying is to live, one might say, with the grain of the universe.

Clearly I summon a whole constellation of ethical concepts with that last paragraph, but I urge my readers not to be distracted from my main point. I will re-summarize: from Marcus Aurelius we can learn to locate ourselves within an historical and communal moral context, to orient ourselves toward a definite moral pattern, and to galvanize ourselves by conceiving of goodness as a process tied to mortality.

But first, a preliminary aside regarding whether Christians should repent of such unresolved discussions altogether and what they have to hope for from such agonies.

The problem of “fruitless” discussions naturally stands in the gate of this entire series. I will be dealing with several of them. One is tempted to write off the history of ideas as mere wrangling—no less in the realm of “Christian” thinking. In answer to this attitude, I would begin by pointing to the word agony. I use agony, in this essay, in a technical sense. It derives from the Greek agonia, and in the Greek culture it stood as a pillar of their moral world. Agonia was the struggle for victory in public games, and as such it served a deeply eschatological purpose. To win in the public games was to become a hero, to achieve the most significant kind of immortality—the kind of immortality for which Achilles, for example, gave up physical immortality—the immortality of becoming an heroic memory. Greek communities were structured to encourage agon, the assembly for such contests, at many levels. In other words, communities were morally formed in order to create the platform for the eschatological hero, and one’s individual eschatological hope was to mount this pedestal oneself by excelling through agonia.

When I speak of the history of ideas as a history of agonies, I refer to a dimension of that history of which we ought to repent. The Christian community is decidedly not founded to allow for agonia. Instead, it is founded to allow for agape, the highest form of self-sacrificing love. Yet various aspects of the history of thinking, and not less of Christian thinking, suggest that it does not always occur within this Christian community. For example, too often intellectual discussions become political contests in which disciples of various dead thinkers pit the works and legacies of their masters against one another, as if they had come to form intellectual nation-states struggling for dominance over a psychic continent. Of this, and many other agonistic tendencies within our intellectual traditions, we should repent.

But to write off the history of ideas because of its agonistic features would be a mistake. That would be intellectual suicide. The ambiguities which form the context of discussion throughout history are the pretexts for thought itself. We do not think about unconsidered certainties or difficulties we deem irrelevant. We think about mysteries, about problems. The question before us should not be whether to participate in the transtemporal conversation about ideas, but how to do so. The inevitable life of thought is one scene where the prescribed and Christ-modeled human role of repentance and hope can be assumed. The hope of our wrangling is that through our fear and trembling, salvation may be worked out.

Returning to the subject at hand, the significance of mankind becomes a problem because of the theo-centric distinction of Christianity. Prof. Kagan, from Yale, in a series of lectures I’ve been listening to on my ipod about the history of Ancient Greece, presents the problem in its acutest (albeit one-sided, as we shall see) form. He takes the time to distinguish between what he calls the two main influences on western culture: the judaeo-christian and the Greek. Prof. Kagan points out that both the Iliad and the Oddyssey begin with words about particular human things—the one, about Achilles’ particular rage, the other, about the particular man Oddyseus. The Bible, on the other hand, begins with God. Moreover, Kagan continues, the Bible shows the original paradise of Eden to have been a place where man was created alone, and then eventually with just one woman, where he didn’t have to work but got his food easily and lived in peaceful recreation, where politics and society did not exist but God himself was the purpose of man’s existence.

To certain strands of Christian thought, that would seem to be a very accurate description. The theo-centrism of Scripture can be taken to imply an anti-humanism. Human government and culture can be viewed as the result of precautions against evil and the results of individual abberration. But this view isn’t particularly wholesome, biblical, or useful to the Christian community.

We find instead a much more complex prescription for valuing ourselves, our neighbours, and the world around us than Prof. Kagan’s remarks would lead us to expect. He was wrong, of course, in his depiction of the Bible’s Eden and of man’s solitude. Eden is described as a place where man is entrusted with a very large and important work; and the first family is depicted as originating from God’s perception that “it is not good for man to be alone.” In short, both human work (what has been somewhat excessively called the “cultural mandate”) and human political life (in an Arendtian sense of the word) may be found in the paradise of Eden. A number of strands of Christian thinking have embraced and expounded on this element within Scripture. The most healthful modern engagement with the subject that I can think of (without wholly joining the party of their disciples for agonistic purposes) comes in the wake of the neo-calvinist tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd.

But these corrections of Prof. Kagan’s perception of a Christian valuation of human significance does not entirely erase the problem. It just removes the possiblity of resolving it in one direction. Following Christ does not give rise to a “religious” view of things, where “all that matters” is the glory of God viewed as an acosmic and ahistorical goal.

Instead, we are presented with a baffling conundrum in which, yes, the presence of God is the condition and prize of paradise, but the matrix for that presence is human culture. The conundrum is, of course, encapsulated in God’s final word on the subject: the incarnation of Christ. The glory of God becomes most evident and magnified in the darkest moment of human governing justice, when Christ is given the death penalty.

It seems, consequently, that continuing participation in the conversation about the significance of man and his works could benefit from two lines of repentance and two lines of hope.

First, we ought to repent of two idolatries. The best metaphor for these two idolatries that I can think of is perspective. On the one hand we find isolated anthropocentrism: man rendered god-size by the removal of the transcendant horizon of the true God; on the other hand we find isolated theocentrism: God rendered cosmos-consuming and -negating by the removal of the anthropic foreground. Isolated theocentrism is as idolatrous as isolated anthropocentrism, because while honoring a word, God, it has lost the actual self-revealed God who does not present himself as cosmos-consuming and -negating, but as continually acting only within the cosmos. Paradise cannot be either a perfected human society, or a “religious” trance. It can only be the City of the Lamb—unquestionably a city, unquestionably lamb-centered.

Second, we ought to hope for two things from the discussion. On the one hand, we can hope for an increased sense and understanding of the divine commisioning of humanity. We compete, but against ourselves, for a crown of righteousness, to be achieved in the concrete realm of human intercourse and culture. On the other hand, we can hope for an increased sense that the significance of humanity is a matter of grace in the deepest way. Man has no significance except as a participant in the Divine life.

The reflections the film prompted in me were chiefly eschatological. That is to say, they had to do with the ending of things in both a temporal and teleological sense. The film explores the ends (temporally) of an old man’s marriage, a boy’s relationship to his father, a faded hero’s dream, and a pack of dogs’ loyalties. But it also explores the ends (teleologically) of marriage itself and dreaming itself.

In the opening montage of the youth and married life of Carl Fredricksen, we are given a portrait of happiness that shows the inter-twining of dreaming and community in a successful marriage. Appropriately, the happiness of Carl and (his wife) Ellie is shown as a product of their friendship and partnership. But the friendship and partnership  itself is (at least consciously) a by-product of their dream—the dream of transplanting an old club-house to a south-american paradise. They fail to achieve their dream in Ellie’s life-time. Ellie proves to have been aware of the true source of their happiness—their adventure, as she calls it—but Carl still feels that their relationship, the central thing in his life, is tied to the dream they shared. So he sets out for South America by tying hundreds of balloons to the top of his house and floating away. Much later in the movie, when he feels that he has accomplished their dream—at the expense of the dreams and possibly even lives of some new friends—Carl opens a little book Ellie wrote about their dream. He discovers, instead of the childhood memories of a south-american paradise, a collage of pictures from their marriage, together with a note thanking for him for the adventure and encouraging him to have a new one.

This is one of the best dealings with death that I have seen in a children’s movie. First time in years no one has been told that the person will “live on” whenever they remember them.

At any rate, Carl realizes from the revelation of Ellie’s last comment that the point of their adventuring and their dreams had been their community. He further realizes that to abandon the new community he has joined to pursue an old dream no longer attached to a community would be a kind of defeat. Which brings up the darker side of the film.

Another character in the film has a dream—the old popular explorer, Charles Muntz. Muntz was the original movie-inspiration for Carl and Ellie’s south-american dreams. But when Carl does actually end up in South America he discovers the older man there too. And he has been changed, twisted by the years. Endlessly pursuing a colorful bird that no one at home would believe really existed, Muntz has placed his entire worth in a dream that has overtones of psychological vengeance and has definitely become an obsession. Muntz is an example of dreaming without community—that is to say, dreaming detached and absolutized from the fabric of life as a whole. He is the rugged individualist in extremity. Even his crew and minions are not people, not a community—they’re a bunch of dogs he’s fitted with collars to make them talk.

I have heard Pixar accused of being a “communist” film company. Presumably this has to do with the themes of repentance and hope that run through many of their movies, and the very un-american emphasis on communal visions and on subjecting one’s own private interests to the interests of the group. If that’s communism, bring it on.