Via James McGrath, the Tragedy of Darth Pelagius the Wise:
Of course, Pelagianism is much with us to this day, though it seems no one can agree on who is Pelagian, pseudo-Pelagian, crypto-Pelagian, etc. It always seems to be one of those accusations you make against someone you disagree with theologically, when you can't think of anything else to disagree with them about.
Last night I had the opportunity to see The Hateful Eight (in its much vaunted 70mm, roadshow format, with a souvenir program and everything!). Tarantino's movies are, of course, always controversial, and this movie is no different. But as I discussed it afterwards with my companions, I realized that, despite the complaint that his movies revel in violence and nihilism, there is actually a moral core to Tarantino's work that is often overlooked.
There will be spoilers in what I am about to write, so consider yourself forewarned.
The Hateful Eight is Tarantino's homage to the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, but it's equally indebted to the drawing room mysteries of Agatha Christie. It tells the story of seven bad men and one bad woman trapped together in an isolated way station in the old west, waiting out a blizzard. Two of the men are bounty hunters. John "The Hangman" Ruth, always brings his bounties in alive to be tried and hanged. Major Marquis Warren is an African American Civil War veteran, who claims to be in possession of a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln. The woman, Daisy Domergue, is Ruth's bounty. Along the way, they also pick up a man who claims to be the town's new sheriff, but who also turns out to be an unrecalcitrant racist, who once belonged to a unit of Confederate soldiers who terrorized black towns in the name of "honor in defeat." Before we even arrive at the way station, tensions are running high among these four.
Once they arrive at the way station, they meet four more men. A Mexican named Bob who claims to be running the place, a cowboy on his way to spend Christmas with his mother (did I mention this is a Christmas movie?), the local hangman, and a former Confederate general. As the snow traps them, the central question driving the action is who is there to betray whom, and who will make it out alive.
It's no spoiler to say that not everyone does. Nor is it a spoiler to note that, along the way, enormous amounts of blood will be spilled. This is after all a Quentin Tarantino movie. If he really wanted to surprise us on this score, he'd make a movie with no violence at all.
However, that having been said, the level of violence is relatively muted for the first two hours of the movie. From the early panoramic scenes of a stagecoach traversing a mountain pass to the bulk of the time our cast of characters spends trapped together in the way house, most of the movie passes with relatively little violence (however, unfortunately most of the violence that does take place in those first segments is inflicted on the one woman in the cast). The third hour more than makes up for the slow burn, however, once the masks come off and the participants in the setup are revealed.
Here is your last warning about spoilers. After this point I will be revealing elements of the movie's plot that you might rather not know.
In the last act, it's revealed that Daisy's brother, along with the Mexican, the Brit, and the Cowboy, have staged an ambush at the way station in order to rescue her. After killing everyone there except the Confederate general, they set up the scene to appear innocent and then wait for Ruth to drop his guard. Eventually he does and gets himself poisoned to death along with their stage coach driver. At this point, Marquis and the Sheriff, who have every reason to hate one another, team up to figure out who the murderers are. They quickly establish that everyone except the two of them is now in on it (Marquis had killed the general right before the intermission, after a long scene where he described his humiliation and murder of the General's son, an act of revenge for the General's misdeeds during the war -- again, these are all bad people).
As violence, murder, and chaos descend on the cabin, everyone finds themselves dead except for Marquis, the Sheriff, and Daisy. Marquis is fatally wounded, and the Sheriff is not much better off. Daisy offers him a deal: If he will kill Marquis and let her go, he can cash in the bounties on the men her brother had brought to help rescue her.
Before I talk about what happens next, it's worth talking a bit about the connection between the western tropes that Tarantino is accessing (such as those in Sam Pekinpah and Sergio Leone) and naturalistic fiction. Naturalism stressed the struggle of human beings against their environment and their nature. It tended to be morally pessimistic, and leaned toward a degree of nihilism, in that it portrayed human beings as ultimately slaves to their own natures, and to the whims of fate. Watching the movie, I could see Tarantino dipping into that well, presenting us with eight characters who were not bound by any rules of morality of any sense of transcendent value, looking only to their own survival and sacrificing whoever and whatever was necessary in order to do so. At best, perhaps, they were bound by notions of kin and blood, whether Daisy's brother's attempt at bloody rescue, the Sheriff's lingering loyalty to the values of the Old South, or Marquis's desire to see justice done for the years of slavery and repression heaped on black Americans. But even there, one could argue that those bonds of blood and kin are tenuous at best, and can break under the right stressors. If this were a work of naturalistic fiction, then when those bonds were finally dissolved for the surviving characters, all that would be left would be the desire for survival and gain.
However, that's not what happens in the bloody aftermath, once everyone is dead except for Daisy, Marquis, and the Sheriff. After listening to Daisy's offer, and perhaps even seriously considering it for a moment, he instead rejects it, on the grounds that, as the Sheriff of Red Rock, he has a duty to perform, and furthermore, he doesn't believe Daisy's threat that, if he kills her, fifteen additional men are waiting in town to kill everyone. He is about to shoot her when Marquis insists that, for the sake of John Ruth, they enact a rough form of frontier justice and hang her themselves. Thus, as both men lay dying, and despite the fact that they each have good reason to hate one another, they overcome their mutual hatred in order to see some form of justice done.
Now, perhaps I'm stretching more than a bit in seeking to skim some form of moral redemption from this grand guignol, and there is certainly much to criticize in the way that Tarantino brings this drama to a conclusion. Certainly the violence is excessive. Certainly Tarantino seems to take far too much glee in acts of casual misogyny (directed mostly toward Daisy, though she is as thoroughly despicable as every other character), and in allowing the characters to express and explore their own depravity. And certainly the light of redemption at the end of this very deep and dark tunnel that Tarantino has led us down is very dim, yet I would still argue that it is there, and that, in spite of the racism, in spite of the misogyny, and in spite of the violence, Tarantino's message in this movie is about the possibility that, even under the most brutal circumstances, we can overcome even the most entrenched differences between us in the name of some transcendent reference point. Naturalism does not rule the day. In the end, our lives exist for the sake of something more than mere survival. John Ruth may not have been much of a moral guidepost for The Hateful Eight, but he did believe in the need for justice, and his example ultimately inspired the two remaining representatives of social order in that cabin to seek to bring about what justice they could, given the limited means at their disposal.
So, it turns out that "Fight Church" is a thing:
The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. But Bryan Storkel and Academy Award-winning director Daniel Junge are spreading the gospel about a fascinating new wave of Christianity in which pastors and followers are practicing faith by participating in MMA fights.
The article includes a number of great quotes from the documentary, of which my favorite is definitely:
“We’ll just be a couple of God-fearing men punching each other in the head.”
Here's the trailer. This one will definitely go on my "Must watch (when it eventually finds its way onto Netflix) list."
Illustration: "Undefeated" by Stephen Sawyer.
Moving up the ladder of the cinematic artform, I suppose it's time to turn my attention to Lars von Trier. I actually hadn't been planning to write about his new movie, Nymphomaniac, since it really didn't sound like my cup of tea, and having chosen to skip Anti-Christ and Melancholia (which is, however, on my Netflix cue), I figured this was a movie I could let pass without too much difficulty.
But then I read this fascinating article in Tablet, arguing that Nymphomaniac is, far from being pornography (despite the graphic sex), actually a defense of Jewish theology. Here's what the article states:
That the only path Joe knows to her soul passes between her legs has everything to do with her religious ideas. As he had in the past—most notably in Antichrist and Melancholia, his two previous films—von Trier is arguing here that our thirst for transcendence, our desire to rise above the brutishness of the human condition, can only lead to disaster. We may yearn for love, but we can’t handle love. It’s too wild, too mad, too incandescent for us to contain. As is faith. As is guilt. As is any other human emotion worth experiencing—we can never forsake them, and yet we must never attempt them in too great a dose. Only Christ can climb the mountain and radiate with divine light; if we mere mortals tried the same trick, we’d likely burn away.
The alternative to Christ is Seligman. A perfect embodiment of Jewish eschatology, he believes, like the sages of old, that there aren’t any fundamental differences between our own time and the days of the Messiah to come and that all attempts at redemption must focus not on some desperate thrust heavenward but on a series of small and incremental earthly steps. If you believe this—if you believe that everything you do is an important step toward salvation—interpretation becomes your steeliest sword. If you are your own savior, and if every one of your acts facilitates the saving, you are likely to read a lot into everything. That’s how we got the Talmud, the ultimate book of ordering the world, and that’s how we got a grinning Seligman, alone in his apartment with his books, trying to do the same.
Of course, von Trier has trod this path before. In Breaking the Waves, which I regularly use when I teach courses on religion and film, the protagonist uses sex as a means to express her faithfulness to God, and to demonstrate her desire to heal her husband. Clearly, for von Trier, there is a strong, though ambiguous connection, between sexual and religious fulfillment.
I can't imagine I'll be showing Nymphomaniac in my classes any time soon (nor Anti-Christ), but I would certainly suggest it as another exploration by von Trier of that mysterious and elusive connection between our physical and spiritual desires.
At Camels With Hammers, Dan Fincke offers what I think is a powerful critique of the movie God Is Not Dead, pointing out that, in the way that it approaches faith, it winds up working against its own interests and makes the Christians look worse than the atheists that it's intending to characature and mock:
The image of Christians being people who descend on the weak, the sick, the dying, to spiritually manipulate them on their deathbeds is extremely offensive to many non-Christians. The Christians who routinely spread lies about deathbed conversions because they don’t care about the consciences of non-believers. They care about whatever propaganda tool they can get. They care about claiming souls. They care about dominating you however you can. All the pretenses about concern for your free will aside, they want to capture your soul. The idea that someone in their dying moments needs to be harangued by people to change their religion is sick. It’s this sort of comprehensive Christian mindset that makes them so invasive, which makes them prowl hospitals trying to convert vulnerable people. It’s this exploitation of weakness–this exploitation of anything they can figure out to wring a conversion out of someone that is so fanatical and disgusting. I get it, they really think eternal souls are at stake. That’s why spreading the false beliefs of Christianity is harmful. Because people can act ghoulishly, manipulatively, and disrespectfully from a sincere concern for others’ souls.
And of course, he's right -- to portray Christians acting in this way is goulish, and it ought to be offensive to non-Christians. But of course, I think it ought to be offensive to Christians to be portrayed as acting in this way as well. I have worked in chaplaincy, and I've known other Christians who do it and have done it. I know many pastors and ministers, and to a person, I know that their primary motivation in dealing with people on their death bed is not to make them utter some magical incantation, but to comfort them in the moment of their death. For some, that may indeed involve praying, but not for all. And the job of the pastor ought to be to convey the presence and love of God to those with whom they come into contact, not to get them to repeat a formula out of the fear of eternal damnation. All of which is to say, I agree with Dan's critique as far as it goes.
But I also note in reading Dan's blog something that has grown familiar to me, namely that what both Dan and the producers of God Is Not Dead seem to think constitutes faith is something that is frankly unrecognizable to me. That is simply not what I think of when I think of faith. What I seem to be witnessing is an internal conversation among evangelicals (in Dan's case, a former evangelical) about the problems of a particular species of evangelical Christianity. But it doesn't look in the slightest to me like what Christian faith is or ought to be. Here's how Dan describes his experience of Christian faith from before his "deconversion":
What I was ultimately yearning for was some way to not just believe in Jesus and in all the beliefs involved in being a Christian only in some abstract way but as truly and fully as I believed more practical things. I was already living by my faith in a whole number of ways–it dictated my ethics, my (lack of) sex life, my choice of school, my course of study, my social circles, my commitment to prayer, to Christian fellowship, to spending my summers evangelizing as a camp counselor, etc., etc. Everything you could do to live Christianly and seek Jesus I was game for.
But no matter how much I truly believed and lived by faith, inevitably I could grasp that much of what we believed that was not graspable from the sensible world was still abstract and elusive. Sure, I could have intense spiritual experiences worshipping and feel God’s presence that way. Or when I would intimate experience community with my brothers and sisters in Christ, the oxytocin would be flowing through my brain and I would feel the love of Christ coursing through me, and us collectively. And I would look around and find signs of God’s hand in my life everywhere and feel spontaneous gratitude to God for all his blessings.
For Dan, a lot of this is rooted in a very rationalist conception of what constitutes faith, namely a correspondance of belief to evidence. Dan subscribes to the perspective that the only justified beliefs are those for which we have sufficient evidence (of the rationalist kind), and argues that religious faith lacks sufficient evidence to justify belief. And, on his own terms, he's no doubt right. But these are not the only terms according to which faith can be understood. There are actually a great many rational beliefs for which one may not have the kind of evidence that would constitute sufficient proof to warrant belief on Dan's description (e.g., that Piccasso's Guernica is his greatest work of art, that my friends really like me and aren't just pretending, or that other human beings are actual people rather than simply robots or automatons).
The ultimate problem is that Dan and his evangelical opponants agree about what faith is, but disagree about whether or not religion warrants it. I, on the other hand, disagree with both of them, while at the same time insisting that there are many rational ideas, including religious ones, that are justified while not being provable. Ultimately, I'm more inclined toward a definition akin to Paul Tillich's in Dynamics of Faith, in which he understands faith, not in terms of belief and evidence, but in terms of concern. Faith is Ultimate Concern, and the object of faith is that with which we are ultimately concern. Another way of saying it is that faith is ultimately about trust rather than evidence. We may choose to trust even in the absence of what might constitute sufficient evidence, in the recognition that our trust is always in some sense provisional and may be disappointed (as in Basil Mitchell's parable of the stranger).
Dan, and many other atheist philosophers, work from the presumption that religous belief is irrational becuase it depends on that kind of trust, but I would argue that this is because they've got an impoverished sense of what falls within the realm of the rationally defensible (as I noted, and as I think Alvin Plantinga did a good job of demonstrating, we have no better evidence of the existence of other minds than we do of the existence of God, yet it is not irrational to believe in other minds).
As I think Mikael Stenmark argues in his book Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life, there are different modes of rationality that we employ in different contexts. The mistake that evientialist philosophers like Dan and others make is assuming that the only genuinely rational standards are those employed by science. In applying those standards to the rest of life, they severely and mistakenly limit the realm of rationally justifiable statements.
Apparently flying beneath my radar for the past several months has been an advance campaign for a new evangelical movie called God is Not Dead, which did quite well this past weekend at the box office. The plot in brief:
Josh Wheaton (Shane Harper), a naive freshman college student, enrolls in a philosophy class taught by an infamous and dictatorial professor. Professor Radisson (Kevin Sorbo) demands that all of his students must sign a declaration that "God is dead" in order to get a passing grade. Josh refuses and will go to any lengths to defend his belief in God, but he needs to take this class to meet his academic requirements. And so the professor strikes a bargain: Josh must defend his position that "God is Alive" in a series of debates with him in order to stay in the class. If he loses, he flunks. When Josh accepts the challenge, he gets more than he bargained for—jeopardizing his faith, his relationships, and even his future.
So, the first thing to say about this movie is that the premise is completely absurd. It is almost literally based on an urban legend. The second thing to say is that, outside of maybe the Soviet Union or Maoist China, there simply has never existed a philosophy professor who would make his students sign a pledge asserting that "God is Dead" without even making an attempt to argue for the point! Honestly, I cannot reasonably envision a philosophy professor requiring such a pledge even after making his best case for atheism. It's rather antithetical to everything philosophy as a discipline is supposed to be about. And if a professor really didn't want to talk about it, the last thing he'd do is provoke a confrontation by making his students sign a pledge. Sheesh!
The philosophy professor in this case, I should mention, is played by Kevin Sorbo, which is almost enough to make me forgive this movie anything. I used to love the cheesy goodness of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys when it was obligatory Saturday afternoon viewing for me in the 1990s. The idea of Hercules teaching philosophy is both hilarious and awesome. And what's more, apparently he offers some of the movie's best moments:
The most worthwhile moments of God’s Not Dead come from Kevin Sorbo, of all people, who plays the film’s mustache-twirler of a villain, professor Jeffrey Radisson. Professor Radisson teaches an introduction to philosophical thought course that asks students, on the first day, to write on a sheet of paper that God is dead, then sign it for credit, so that he can move past the early stuff and get to the things he finds more fulfilling. As Radisson, Sorbo is playing a transparently awful person, but he has fun with his most villainous moments and even locates a few notes of sorrow and regret in Radisson’s backstory.
Back to the pledge the professor makes his students sign. It serves to set up the basic tension of the film, between the dictatorial and anti-Christian professor and his recalcitrantly believing student. Anyone who thinks they don't know how this whole thing will end has clearly never read one of those aforementioned urban legends. They all cover the same basic ground. Professor holds Christian student in contempt. Christian student challenges professor. Professor is ultimately humiliated and sent running from the room, after which triumphant student evangelizes the class. It's a story that flatters American Christian persecution mythology, and allows Christians to believe, quite contrary to evidence, that the deck is stacked against them in society. What's more, it allows them to believe that universities are universally hostile places, threats to their beliefs, while also at the same time insisting that, with enough faith, they can best even the toughest opponent.
One of the many problems with this view is well stated by Dan Fincke:
It’s fascinating to see the Christian persecution complex project onto the screen a bizarro world of inverted reality. The philosophy classroom, which, outside of religious fearmongering, represents intellectual awakening, open-ended speculation, and personal liberation for so many is feared like the Roman coliseum. It represents tyranny and death to people like them. Why? Because for depressingly many Christians anyone who dares to apply the same standards of rigorous analysis to Christian beliefs that they would apply to any other truth claims about the world is trying to hurt them personally as Christians. Because it is so hard for them to separate their beliefs from their identity, anyone challenging their beliefs is challenging them as a person. They are their beliefs. There is no separation between heart and mind and person possible.
And, being bad at critical distance, they project their own personality onto others. The philosophy professor who challenges me must be doing so from his heart too. And did I say “challenges me”. Whoops. I meant challenges “God”. You know, close enough. Questioning the validity of my beliefs equals questioning me as a person. Since how one relates to ideas is inextricably an expression of a person’s heart, this professor must have his heart turned against me. Since God is basically my own inner voice and sense of self, this professor hates me and God together.
But again it must be stressed, this kind of thing just. doesn't. happen. Professors, by and large, don't spend their time trying to humiliate their students, even ones with which they vehemently disagree. And when professors do challenge their students, more often than not the goal is to get them to clarify and better defend their own ideas, not to unthinkingly adopt the perspectives of their professors.
Having not seen this movie, I can't speak to the specific arguments made by the student over the course of the movie. At least according to the AV Club review, the student apparently accepts evolution and the Big Bang into his worldview, which makes me wonder how well the movie will ultimately fare in the evangelical apologetic department. Whatever it is that he ends up arguing, however, I'm sure that I've heard it before. Best case scenario, the movie will recognize the inherent ambiguity of both the student's belief and the professor's atheism, and allow the audience to make up it's own mind. But I think I can say with confidence that this is not how the movie will be structured, or how it will treat these arguments.
It's not, I should note, that one can't make a rational case for belief in God. Rather it's that making that case requires recognizing that Christian faith is not ultimately about demonstrating a theorem, but trusting in a person. Whether one chooses to give that trust is not a matter that can be dictated by philosophical argument, but relies on the development of a relationship that is neither irrational nor fully describable in the language of analytic reason. It is ultimately a question of love.
There have, in fact, been many movies that demonstrate that idea far more effectively than God is Not Dead is likely to do. Some of them have even been made by atheists. One of my favorites, which as Todd van der Werf notes, God is Not Dead seems to owe some debt to, is Magnolia. But in Magnolia, the question is not ultimately about whether or not God exists (God's name is barely uttered throughout the movie), but in the words of one of the characters "what can we forgive?" Forgiveness is ultimately, like love, not something that one can simply describe in wholly rational terms. It's an act of one's whole self, that often can't be fully articulated in the language of science or philosophy, but is real nonetheless.
Update: Dan at Camels With Hammers writes a review (one of several) in which he examines the particular arguments that the films religious protagonist presents. There is a lot I disagree with about Dan's whole analysis of religion, but he does a good job enumerating the arguments in the movie and pointing out their flaws. As I suspected, they aren't particularly philosophically illuminating, and neither are the professor's attempts at rebuttal. It is genuinely a shame that there wasn't a cinematic forum in which these kinds of issues could have been honestly hashed out. But apparently the arguments (which as Dan points out, aren't really even rooted in philosophical reason) are one version or another of design or cosmological arguments, implying the universe requires a first cause and that it's design and order imply the necessity of a God. Neither of these arguments is very convincing, at least not in the incredibly simplified form presented in the movie, though there are versions of the arguments that are at least philosophically interesting. I was also intrigued by Dan's suggestion that he finds the Ontological argument philosophically provocative. I feel much the same way about it.
Wave of Mutilation: Best of Pixies
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Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol.1
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Theatre Is Evil
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Transcendental Youth
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