Everyone knows the type of theological criticism that consists in finding “Christ figures.” A high-school aged friend of mine uses this kind of theological criticism to convince his parents to let him go to R-rated movies. All he’s got to do is find an appropriate Christ figure in the story somewhere. If someone dies for someone else (or even just suffers a bit for ‘em), or really if anyone vaguely protagonistic dies at all, or better yet appears to die and then shows up later — we have a Christ figure! I for one am just a bit sick of Christ figures. Not because I deny the human need for saviors and examples but because I feel there is more to be said about films than whether this or that character is a Christ figure — though part of what I will propose involves a method extending the methodology behind this kind of thematic comparison.

Another common kind of theological criticism involves noting all Christian paraphanelia and “symbolism.” Did you notice the pigeons (which are kind of like doves) around the church in Mary Poppins? Doesn’t Tatooine remind you of Galilee (from a review in Christianity Today, which combined both this stunning insight and the revolutionary idea that maybe Luke Skywalker is a Christ-figure). When Ricky Bobby runs around in his underwear slapping imaginary flames, were you reminded of Christ’s nakedness and agony on the cross? OK, strike the last example. You know what I’m talking about.

Finally, a particularly objectionable kind of theological criticism attempts to discover the “underlying worldview” of a film — which would be a good insight, if such critiquers could only recognize that narrative is prior to the theoretical system they take “worldview” to mean. That’s one of the reasons Ross Douthat’s recent critique of Avatar was so lame. For him, the real meaning of Avatar was that it was an exposition of Cameron’s “Hollywood pantheism.” It seemed like a review based on previews rather than on an actual watching of the film. (Query: did Douthat in fact see the film? Or did he just watch previews and read a wikipedia summary? Show us the ticket! This is at least as important as Obama’s birth certificate.) Everything is oh-so-cleverly squared away according to a pre-existing typology of religious perspectives, and the pigeon-holed objects can then be deployed polemically as ammunition in the “culture war.” Surely theologians have better things to do.

If I were to speculate on which kind of common theological criticism is most valuable, I would probably go with Christ-figure-hunting. This kind of comparison at least implies the belief that theology can speak to popular narratives, because it originally has to do with a narrative itself. It seems to me that what is “theological” about stories is the way they function in faith and then, accordingly, their content; consequently, these two aspects of stories are what theologians as theologians can most directly talk about. Let me flesh this out with some help from Hauerwas and Bruegemann.

Hauerwas’s essay, “A Story Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down,” involves one of his most entertaining arguments for the centrality of narrative to moral and political life. (By the way, he’s talking about the book Watership Down rather than the movie; but I think his example is still applicable because theological criticism of films is usually theological criticism of stories.) He argues that the differing rabbit societies involved in the story — Sandleford, an unnamed warren, Efrafa, and Watership Down — are distinguished and formed by their approach to the stories they tell of El-ahrairah, the first rabbit. Watership Down emerges as the best, and most successful, community because it successfully appropriates the traditional stories of El-ahrairah, using them in a way open to innovation yet definitive for its experience of the world. Ultimately, Hauerwas’s reflections use Watership Down as an excuse to discuss his theories about the formative nature of stories. The theological criticism employed tests the narrative of Watership Down within the story-framework he has learned to see from his acquaintance with Christian theology.

I think this essay is a good example of the first aspect of good theological criticism — criticism which takes the life-defining dynamics that the practice of theology has brought to their attention in order to see similar dynamics at work in the stories it examines.

Bruegemann’s unique approach to Old Testament theology is relevant in a different way. Certainly it doesn’t function as an example of theological criticism of films, but what it does do is offer a largely expanded view of what theological criticism could deal with in its second aspect.

If we take it to be true that besides examining the dynamics of story-shaped worlds, theologians are also uniquely fitted to compare stories because their original subject is itself a story, then suddenly Christ-figure-hunting comes into perspective. Essentially this overly employed comparison seeks to take one (albeit central) aspect of the Christian mythology and argue that this aspect is borrowed, stolen, or unwittingly employed in a popular story. The ensuing critique — insofar as it manages to be a critique rather than a teenage excuse to see an otherwise forbidden movie, or a disgusting attempt to allegorize a film such that one can experience it “sanctifyingly” or some such rot — is essentially a comparison of stories. This practice could be hugely expanded in two important ways.

First, why does theological criticism have to seek only to “find Christian themes,” essentially to baptize whatever elements of popular life the critiquer in question wants to consume? The motivation behind such baptisms are dubious at best. Are Christians afraid that unless they wrench a story out of its own context to make it a lesson that could have come from their own tradition they will be corrupting themselves? Perhaps they are not confident or committed enough to the Christian story to face the possibility of competing stories. At any rate, I would argue for more legitimate, careful, and detailed comparison, and not just the identification of Christ figures for general baptismal purposes.

Second — and here Bruegemann comes in — is the Christ event the only aspect of the Christian story worth comparing? One of Bruegemann’s central (and most valuable) purposes in his Old Testament Theology, is to search out what kind of rhetorical assertions Israel makes at various times about Yahweh. In the excellent historical preface to this work, he examines the arguments of those who would rescue the Old Testament as the Jewish Bible, those who would deconstruct the text with regard to its dealing with women, those who would understand the text against the conservative and power-maintaining tradition as descriptive of a liberating God, etc. He doesn’t reject the insight of any of these perspectives, thereby creating an extraordinarily multi-faceted and deep account of Israel’s witness regarding Yahweh. According to Bruegemann, the “grammar” of this witness is characterized by “strong verbs dominated by the subject of the verbs who is an active agent [Yahweh], effecting changes in various direct object” — in other words, Israel witnesses in stories about what she claims that God has done. What Bruegemann — and serious theology in general — can contribute to theological criticism of films is the fact that the stories which define the Christian tradition have many more potential points of comparison than Christ figures.

How about the liberation? How about commandment, which provides a new way of life in the aftermath of liberation? ( — many contemporary films would fall short in this comparison, tending to focus on a plot of liberation in some form or other without giving sufficient indication of the supplanting new life, new creation, post-liberation order.) How about chaos and order, as witnessed to in the Christian tradition by Creation? I could go on, but you get my point. There are many more figures, aspects, and major plot moves to the Christian story than those which are typically utilized in theological criticism.

And so this is my provisional conclusion regarding the task of theological criticism of films: it needs to understand itself as analysis of the world-forming dynamics of story as the theologian has been educated in these dynamics by the study of theology, and it needs to engage itself comparing a much fuller view of the stories with which Christian theology has to do to a much more attentive view of the stories of the films it critiques.

• I successfully proposed to Rachel, thereby demonstrating that there is hope for us all.
• I read over 300 books.
• I broadened my mind in countless ways, some of the most important of which included: perceiving the difference between really reading and merely appropriating the text of the Bible; achieving a much firmer and more systematic grasp of various parts of the history of ideas including contemporary philosophy, protestant theology, and Christian mysticism; discovering whole worlds of theological and philosophical thought which I never dreamed of and which, surprisingly, I am finding relatively easy access to.
• I was published five times in respectable places: 1 story, 1 poem, and 3 essays.
• I presented for the first time at an academic conference, on the subject “The Politics of Pilgrimage.”
• I began my latest and most successful web-venture — this blog — which has proven to be a source of unending helpful interaction and a valuable forum to develop the habit of writing and the seeds of ideas otherwise cast on the infertile soil of a bad memory.
• I learned how to cook (passably, not yet competently).

Having a firm antipathy to resolutions — for the all too cliche reason that nothing seems to ensure that I will fail at something so well as when I resolve to do it — I have compiled my most hopeful expectations for the year 2010.

• On July 31 I will marry Rachel. Ideally I will not before that time have driven her to break off our engagement by reading too much or arguing too much about everything with everyone.
• I will apply to my nine top graduate schools and wait to hear back from them with the confidence that arises in the aftermath of best effort.
• I will read and think to new depths about my currently predominating subjects of interest, Marxism, Mysticism, and Mythology (translated: liberation, the mysteries of faith, and the stories which frame Christianity); and I will write good expressions of my currently percolating insights regarding self-subversion, pluralism, genesis, solidarity, and dialectic.
• I will publish at least three philosophy or theology related essays or book reviews in respectable journals, and I will present a paper at at least two academic conferences (not including the “Calvinism for the 21st Century” conference at Dordt College).
• I will read through the Bible at least twice. (The first time following the theme of “solidarity” — which regular readers will perceive to be a thematic decision made in the very nick of time.)
• I will become worthy, via regular and thoughtful posting and commenting, of blogroll recognition from at least a few of my favorite theoblogs, and will also at least triple the current number of daily unique visitors to this blog and the number of feed subscribers.
• I will become a more competent cook, especially of meats.

Of course my terms are already improper. “Astronomy” is properly the (bracketed) scientific study of celestial bodies, whereas the trajectory of human life that I am thinking of involves things like astrology, mythology, alchemy, navigation, etc. But in another sense nothing demonstrates my (pre-research-)thesis better than the word itself. Precisely the fact that astronomy is now a bracketed scientific study of celestial bodies—as if they were cells, invisible without microscopes—highlights our alienation from the world in which the celestial bodies were wrapped up in so much more of life and believed to be involved so much more closely in the affairs of men.

Formerly, the stars served as night clocks (replaced with the digital clock that glows in the corner), as navigational instruments (replaced with the gps, the precise map, the satellite overview), as changeless surfaces to inscribe world-shaping stories upon for the instruction of future generations (replaced with history books, and with the world-shaping liturgies of the sit-com), and even as omens for the events of individual lives (replaced with pop-psychological self-mastery). But—just as the clock has alienated us from light—these replacements have alienated us from the sky. We are fundamentally changed from animals who stop, rendering ourselves vulnerable by our fascinated staring upward, to animals who always look down: down at the watch, down at the map, down at the book, down into the psyche.

There is something good about the vulnerability of a Thales, for example, who reputedly injured his philosophic dignity by falling into a ditch because he was gazing too fixedly at the sky.

Thus my opening notes toward a phenomenology of the star-gazer. Expect more on this theme later…