{"id":17713,"date":"2014-10-04T17:00:36","date_gmt":"2014-10-04T21:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=17713"},"modified":"2014-10-04T07:48:17","modified_gmt":"2014-10-04T11:48:17","slug":"yet-another-film-about-christianity-that-should-be-left-behind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2014\/10\/04\/yet-another-film-about-christianity-that-should-be-left-behind\/","title":{"rendered":"Yet another film about Christianity that should be left behind"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Did<\/a>

Did these folks really deserve to be left behind?<\/p><\/div>\n

This week a new Hollywood film is being released that purports to tell of the opening stages of the Christian apocalypse.\u00a0 According to the account of the end-times popularized by the \u201cLeft Behind\u201d series of books, the final days begin with an event known as the rapture.<\/p>\n

It is a kind of global culling of humanity, with some percentage of us taken up to heaven before things down here on earth start to get nasty.\u00a0 Picture a lot of chaos, planes dropping out of the sky.\u00a0 Then cue the Anti-Christ and the ominous Darth Vader music.<\/p>\n

The problem with these pop-culture treatments of Biblical scripture \u2013 as I\u2019ve written before \u2013 is they tend to offer big-bang special effects and lots of ominous mythologizing, without attempting to grapple with the profound and sometimes deeply troubling theology that lies behind the story.<\/p>\n

The actual story in the Bible goes something like this.<\/p>\n

Some period of time ago, God created man in his image.\u00a0 He quickly became disappointed with us, not because we did something evil, but because we challenged his primacy.\u00a0 We disobeyed, ate a piece of fruit from the tree of knowledge, learned to distinguish between good and evil, and God hastily decided we were just a little too much in his own image.<\/p>\n

So he kicked us out of the Garden of Eden and from that time onward we’ve been — according to the Christian scripture — undergoing a kind of weird field test.\u00a0 The world is a moral and physical obstacle course, a cosmic SAT exam, the result of which will produce our salvation or eternal damnation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to understand that in the Christian faith, both outcomes are in God\u2019s hands, or in the hands of his son Jesus Christ.\u00a0 They created earth, they created heaven, they created hell.\u00a0 Christ is the judge, the jury and (yes, even though it makes us uncomfortable) the executioner.<\/p>\n

The niggly part for modern audiences is that the moral equation underlying this story doesn\u2019t make much sense any more.\u00a0 We still love the idea of Jesus and heaven.\u00a0 But we really dislike big parts of core Christian doctrine, including the idea that Christianity is the only path to salvation. All those billions of Hindus and Buddhists?\u00a0 No rapture for you.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Bible is explicit about the fact that winning salvation is really hard even for Christians.\u00a0 Even some people who try their best won\u2019t make the cut.\u00a0 When asked by his disciples why the path is being made so hard, Jesus responds that a lot of people just aren\u2019t meant to be saved.<\/p>\n

In fact, Jesus explains, he teaches in slightly muddley parables expressly so that the wrong sort of human won\u2019t grasp the truth about proper faith.\u00a0 \u201cThe secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you,\u201d he tells his immediate followers.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut to those on the outside everything is said in parables \u00a0<\/sup>so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven.\u201d<\/p>\n

This idea about Christianity, that it is a religion of the select, of the chosen few, used to be quite popular among believers.\u00a0 The Puritans who helped settle North America were convinced that they were among the very small handful likely to make the final cut.<\/p>\n

But these days, watching a movie like \u201cLeft Behind,\u201d we find our modern sensibilities offended.<\/p>\n

Why are these flawed but essentially good people, the ones not saved by God, judged unworthy?\u00a0 Why are the children left to suffer?\u00a0 Why doesn\u2019t God stop messing around and save everyone, or call it quits on this whole weird moral experiment?\u00a0 At the very least, why doesn\u2019t he send us a clearer sign that he\u2019s the right god and all the other gods are the wrong gods?<\/p>\n

I mean, seriously, those of us who spend a lot of time reading the Bible think it’s one of the greatest books ever created.\u00a0 But as a life-or-death instruction manual meant to keep your feet out of the fire?\u00a0 Let’s be honest, it’s worse than those foreign-language pictograms that are supposed to help you assemble an Ikea bed.<\/p>\n

Serious theologians \u2013 and serious Christians \u2013 grapple honestly and ethically with these questions.\u00a0 This is why Christianity is such a fascinating faith.\u00a0 It is a religion that balances comfort and terror, certainty and unknowability, in almost equal measures.<\/p>\n

But I suspect that unthinking, Cliff\u2019s Notes versions of the Bible, like this movie and the books it was based on, will actually be a turn-off for most Americans, especially young ones, who are getting their first taste of Christianity’s worldview.<\/p>\n

They will see God cavalierly dropping planes out of the sky and causing widespread havoc and fear — just as they saw God drowning the entire world’s population in last year’s film “Noah” — and find that it looks less like a good and moral faith and more like a scene from the Middle East on the nightly news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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