Gravity: a review and brief reflections on earthbound existence

(Numerous spoiler alerts.)

"Life is impossible in space."

So begins the critically-acclaimed and blockbusting new film Gravity - the most humble, human and hopeful sci-fi film I've ever seen.

How can a sci-fi flick be humble? This was no "to infinity and beyond" celebration of hubristic human intergalactic imperialism. This was an extended study in our inability to survive a mere few hundred kilometres above the surface of the only habitable piece of rock in the known universe, a precarious existence in orbit (i.e. perpetually falling back to earth and missing, which is what orbit is) threatened not by aliens, not by an absent God, not by international tensions and conflicts, but simply and depressingly by the unforeseen consequences of our shortcuts and fundamentally by the inability to deal with our own junk.

Even amidst death and destruction, the Earth itself was the star of the show, the jewel in space, the pale blue dot on which all human hopes depended. The sheer beauty of the planet was the backdrop against which the crises and tragedies of the tiny cast played out. Indeed, the last line from the one human who felt somewhat at home in space was an appreciation of the beauty of the earth, praising the wonder of sunlight reflected on the Ganges.

When it all comes crashing back to earth, we are thrown again onto the ground, finding in the mud between our fingers the basis of our only hope. The sense of being "home" at the end was overwhelming. We are creatures of the dirt. It is no coincidence that the only survivor is named Stone.

The film was redolent with images of gestation and birth, symbolism that even became a little heavy handed at one point as Stone floated in the fetal position trailing a breathing tube. Numerous rapid dangerous movements through narrow spaces and a final desperate breaking into and out of water completed the natal symbolism. Stone, having found in space the ultimate womb in which to hide her maternal grief, the ultimate car ride to delay the full recognition of her loss, is reborn back into the world of pain and loss, the world of gravity, the word of dirt and mud. Her final embrace of the mud was a return to roots, an acceptance of her existence on a finite planet, a rediscovery of being fundamentally a pedestrian rather than celestial species.

We are humans from the humus, 'adam from 'adamah, and our destiny is tied intimately to the planet that is our only home, a home threatened by our inability to deal with our own junk.

The Cove: would you eat a dolphin?

Continuing my recent run of excellent documentaries (see Food Inc and Inside Job), I also recently saw The Cove. For what it's worth, all three were nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, and two won. All three currently receive over 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Unlike the other two, however, The Cove has a more local focus. Focussing on a small cove on the Japanese coast, the film is paced as an mystery thriller in which the dark secrets of a place are gradually brought to light. The film's heart and central voice is Ric O'Barry, a former dolphin trainer turned activist. O'Barry was responsible for catching and training the five dolphins who played the title character in the popular 1960's TV series Flipper. Yes, you now have the music stuck in your head. It was catchy. Yet when his favourite individual committed suicide (this is how O'Barry describes it), he was forced to reconsider the ethics of keeping wild dolphins in captivity. By the next day he was being arrested for attempting to liberate other dolphins from the marine park where he worked. O'Barry's years of marine animal activism led him to Japan, the premier supplier of dolphins for the multi-billion dollar marine amusement park industry. And from there to a single small cove where most of the wild dolphins for sale are caught. However, apart from the cruelty and stress experienced in captivity by these intelligent creatures, the darker secret of the place, initially only hinted at and deliberately concealed by local fishermen and police, is slowly revealed to the viewer as the film crew risk arrest to get footage. Hidden cameras placed under cover of darkness record the grisly fate of the ten thousands of dolphins who are rounded up annually and yet are not suitable for exploitation as marine entertainers. The film's denouement is not for the queasy or faint of heart.

This is a film that deliberately seeks a significant emotional engagement with the viewer. Our sympathy for the dolphins is carefully cultivated and righteous outrage stoked. The perspective of the fishermen is noted, yet there is no attempt at impartiality here. We are called upon to take sides. The role of villain is left to the Japanese, and there is significant danger of being invited into an all too easy condemnation from a distance. The violence and cruelty done to animals in our name closer to home is only passingly noted. Nonetheless, this film is worth seeing as another step in developing a deeper affinity for creatures beyond the human, and for thinking again about how we treat other members of the community of creation.

For those in Australia, it is freely available on ABC's iView for the next two weeks.

Inside Job: what's the deal with the credit crisis?

Yesterday we finally got around to watching Inside Job (despite having recommended it all the way back here). If you, like me, often feel out of your depth in discussions of banking, finance, stock markets and the global economic instability of the last few years, then this is the film for you. Bringing dry and complex details into vivid comprehensibility, this film cuts through the bafflement factor and, via a series of fascinating and jaw-dropping interviews with key players, lays out many of the key threads that that led to the headline-grabbing events of 2008 and its aftermath (which continues to play out today).

The film won best documentary at the 2010 Academy Awards and currently sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is easy to see why. Tackling an important subject with insight, emotion and sensitivity, this film is pure outrage mixed with damning evidence of systemic problems in the US financial industry from traders to CEOs, from regulators to investors, from president to ratings agencies, from academic economists to congress. There is plenty of blame to go around. And yet, somehow, no one is in gaol for the greatest inside job in history.

And very little has changed.

Are all foods clean? A review of Food Inc.

"The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous ten thousand."

- Food Inc., opening line.

"'Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?' (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, 'It is what comes out of a person that defiles.'"

- Mark 7.18b-20 (NRSV).

Jesus' words were a radical challenge to the Jewish practice of his day, overturning the Old Testament food laws and the traditions that had grown around them. Jesus' redefinition of purity as a matter of the heart and what comes out of it rather than the mouth and what goes into it has left an important mark on our eating habits; we don't think twice about tucking into a crab soup or creamy bacon pasta.

But perhaps sometimes, as a result of this very passage teaching us to see food as a non-issue, Christians can miss the ways in which our hearts may be deceived even as we eat food that Christ declared clean. In particular, there are ways of eating that fail to love our neighbour and fail to adopt a properly human, humane and humble attitude towards the rest of the created order. Our hearts may be defiled, even as we consume delicious feasts.

For anyone who is largely ignorant of contemporary industrial agriculture and its practices, Food Inc. is a good place to start to investigate where our food comes from. It is primarily a US perspective, and some of the details do differ elsewhere in the industrialised world, but not always by a great deal. Most urban dwellers are unaware of the social, ecological, animal and economic realities that get our typical diet into the supermarket. And most are surprised to find just how far we have departed from the stereotypical pictures of rural life still found in children's books and on food packaging. As in all kinds of other ways, the last fifty years or so have been truly revolutionary in this regard. I will not attempt here to summarise the various threads followed by the film, tracing the damage done to workers, animals, soil, waterways, other nations and farmers themselves by contemporary methods of industrial food production, though I was a little surprised to note that there were significant points still left unsaid, even after a string of unpalatable revelations.

But the film is not all ugliness and disgust. Having lifted the lid on the true cost of our cheap food, it moves on to explore two somewhat contradictory approaches to an alternative. On the one hand is an attempt to fight fire with fire, to build an organic and ethical food industry that can compete with factory farming by building a market for organic products in mainstream distributors at a competitive price. On the other is the pursuit of regenerative farming that moves beyond merely being organic to question the broader economic and political structures that govern the whole business. One asks us merely to change our consumption patterns and has faith in the market to deliver the goods that we demand; the other questions the very forces that help to (de)form those demands. The former, more pragmatic, approach is making significant inroads when measured by market share, but does it represent a form of greenwash, a slight improvement that actually serves to dull the necessary critique of a deeply flawed economic and political system? Or is the latter too idealistic and risks missing out on making small but real gains that are actually available for the sake of goals too radical to ever gain widespread acceptance?

This tension is a frequent one in ethical thought, where compromise needn't always be a dirty word, but where the possibility of self-deception via superficial changes is also ever present. This documentary is worth seeing, whether you are blissfully unaware of the origin of your next meal or already struggling with the ethical questions raised by contemporary food practices.

Jesus, who taught us that all foods are clean, also taught us to pray "give us this day our daily bread", and identified his body and blood with elements we take into our mouths. He was not seeking to remove food from the realm of faithful living before God, but to deepen our perception of what joyfully wholesome food might look like. It cannot be identified merely by its flavour or appearance, but depends on the relationships with our neighbours (human and otherwise) that it represents.

Can you give thanks for what will be put in front of you today?

The theology of Harry Potter #7: book vs film

Brad Littlejohn has an excellent exposition of the theology of the final Harry Potter book in comparison to the final film (which doesn't stack up so well). If you ever wanted someone to demonstrate that there was much more going on christologically in Rowling than the all too common and wearily superficial assumption that her depiction of magic equalled a nefarious seduction of young minds into Satanic arts, then read his piece.

Warning: film plot spoilers.

Joined-up Life: A Christian account of how ethics works

"[Jesus] wreaked the best kind of havoc wherever he went. He upset everyone’s moral categories all the time. To the law-stickler he said, go and discover some compassion (Luke 14.3-5). To the equal-rights activist he said, challenge your inner greed (Luke 12.13-15). To those who valued self-fulfillment he said, learn some faithfulness (Matthew 19.3-6); and to the seeker after self-improvement he said, learn from kindness (Matthew 19.16-21). To the goal-oriented security-seeker he said, lose yourself in Gods abundant creation (Luke 12. 22-34). To those wanting righteous judgement on others he said, stop it (Luke 9.52-55). To evaders of righteous judgement he said, wake up (Luke 13.1-4). For those deserving righteous judgement he prayed, forgive them (Luke 23.34).

"He upset moral categories everywhere, yet he inhabited the most joined-up life imaginable. So Christians orient themselves to he cosmos ‘in him’. Anything less – any adherence to some other code, set of values, consequences, principle or philosophy – would relegate Jesus merely to becoming a fellow traveller within that code or philosophy. That would be a horrendous error, because we would then miss all the signals that he’s the human who knew how to be human. We would miss the opportunity for him to induct us into true humanity."

- Andrew Cameron, Joined-up Life: A Christian account of how ethics works
(Nottingham: IVP, 2011), 315.

Having recently got my hands on a copy of Andrew Cameron’s new book, I have rediscovered in its pages many of the reasons why I found him to be an insightful, careful, refreshing and stimulating teacher at college.

This text is a very useful and readable introduction to what is usually called ethics (though perhaps can simply be called "navigating life"): what it is, how it works, how it has been approached in the past and what Jesus has to do with it. The book is divided in forty-seven bite-sized chapters that can stand alone for those who wish to dip in, or which can also be read consecutively in a picture that gradually comes together.

These chapters are grouped into seven sections. In the first, Cameron walks us through basic ethical approaches, which he summarises as rules, rights, values and results. Each has something to contribute, but each fails to provide a comprehensive framework for finding our way in life.

The second section explores a number of ways in which our moral map is more complex than it may at first appear; our social context, our own desires, human frailty and the complexity of a world filled with myriad good things combine to refuse easy answers. Ethics is not obvious and we need help if we are not to get lost amidst it all.

The third section turns to the centre that holds together and surpasses rules, rights, values and results: the human life of Jesus. Tracing his story, Cameron argues that here we find a life that hangs together, a cohesive and compelling life, a joined-up life amidst the complexity and fragmentation of our world. This doesn't mean easy answers, but it does give a central point of reference to all our ethical thinking and practice.

Fourth comes five fundamental poles of reference to guide us amidst the intricacy and confusion: the character of God, created order, divine commands, Christian hope and community shaped by Jesus. None are sufficient, but each contributes to our navigation through life's twists and turns.

The final three sections turn again to the specifics of our lives, illustrating and applying the theological orientation developed in sections three and four to the complex situations outlined in section two. Since I have only dipped into these sections so far, I won't attempt to say much more about them here.

The great strength of this book is precisely its refusal to discover or establish a single unifying framework or concept by which to live our lives other than the person of Jesus and his life. The irreducible complexity of the moral challenges we face (and this doesn't just mean the familiar "hard cases" trotted out in every introductory ethics course but also them variegated patterns and texture of daily life) elude analysis based on a single interpretive key. Jesus is what holds it together, but this doesn't require the reduction of every problem, question or opportunity for action to a predetermined framework.

Readers may find points of disagreement with Cameron's suggested applications and expeditions into the jungle of life, though also hidden treasures. And disagreement itself becomes less threatening when we acknowledge the sheer breadth of goods we are trying to keep our eyes on.

Honest and humble in tone, this book invites us to face the reality of our inability to find a perfect path through our days. We are not given a map with a birds-eye view, simply a companion to share the journey.

Review of Tim Flannery's Here on Earth

Hope is a key theme of this blog: how it is possible to have Christian hope amidst a world groaning all the more under novel levels of ecological degradation and what difference such hope makes in our Christian discipleship. My longest series (summarised in this recent post) was an extended reflection upon hope and last year when I tried to re-frame the purpose of this blog, hope featured prominently.

So I was very interested when asked recently by the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX) to review a book by Tim Flannery with the title Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope. Flannery is well-known in Australia as a public science communicator and has written a range of books and other pieces on biodiversity, sustainability and climate change (The Weather Makers is one of his best known books). For his work, he was named Australian of the Year in 2007. Flannery is not a Christian, so I was very interested to see what kind of account of hope he would offer in the face of our dire situation.

My review of his book is now published over on the CPX site.

Dogville: Grace as a test?

My wife and I saw Lars von Trier's Dogville recently. Our opinions of the controversial Danish director had been diametrically opposed. I loved both Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves. Jess had heard their plots and refused to see them because they sounded awful. So convincing her to watch Dogville was a bit of a coup, helped by a friendly neighbour who dropped in the DVD without our requesting it and my pointing out that it would be rude to return it unwatched.

We loved it. The minimalist set creatively captured the panopticon experience of small town life. The acting was strong. But the most interesting thing was that Dogville is a very insightful picture of what so many people (including more Christians than we might realise) think the Christian message says. Without mentioning God (the town has no church and the mission house perpetually lacks a preacher), the film is deeply theological. Life is a test: will we accept Grace into our lives freely and discover a gift we didn't seek and didn't deserve? Or will we try to pay for Grace, or worse, constrain and even coerce Grace? And if we fail the test, then comes merciless judgement... but I don't want to give away the ending.

Highly recommended. Distressing scenes, but then you already knew that because it's Lars von Trier.

The Age of Stupid

Today I went to a screening of The Age of Stupid, which was being shown as part of the Cineco Film Festival, a series of free ecological films showing around Edinburgh between September and November.


The Age of Stupid investigates the contradictions and myopia of our present age from the viewpoint of an archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) living in a remote Arctic refuge storing what could be salvaged of the world's cultural treasures, looking back from the year 2055 at decades of catastrophic climate change and using a glorified iPad to create a documentary warning for extraterrestrials. It doesn't sound like a format that will fly, and the film opens with apocalyptic images of London underwater, the Swiss Alps without snow, Las Vegas being covered by sand dunes and Sydney's CBD consumed in a towering inferno, further confirming my expectations that the film would consist largely of terrifying crystal ball gazing, showing an unfolding series of disasters that would lead to Postlethwaite's archivist on his lonely refuge. Instead, the 2055 viewpoint is a mere framing device to allow a pastiche of archival documentary and news footage from prior to 2009, along with original interviews following six or seven figures from around the world. The period between 2009 and 2055 is left largely blank and we are confronted directly with the stupidity of our own age.

The archivist narrator begins with this question:

"The amazing thing is we had a chance to avert this. The conditions we are experiencing now were actually caused by our behaviour in the period leading up to 2015. In other words, we could have saved ourselves. We could have saved ourselves, but we didn't. What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?"

And that is the focus of the film: the inability of our present society to join the dots between fighting climate change and wanting cheap flights, or hating wind farms. It is a moving and at times darkly amusing film, but the apocalyptic framing which grabs your attention also proves somewhat distracting, since the full devastating effects of climate change are left largely unstated. There is a brief discussion with Mark Lynas (author of the widely-read Six Degrees) and a couple of other hints (passing references to food riots, for instance), but the shape of the threat that could conceivably lead to the archivist's world is largely unspoken. Perhaps this was for the sake of time, or perhaps to avoid the charge of fear-mongering, though I think that a rational discussion of the genuine threats identified in the scientific literature is far more responsible (even if initially more terrifying) than a few apocalyptic images and a heavy dose of post-apocalyptic regret.

Once again, the film was stronger on the diagnosis of the problem than on offering plausible paths to how we might indeed "save ourselves", or (what might now be more realistic) offering healthy ways of salvaging what we can from a disaster that is now unavoidable, but whose effects can still be significantly reduced.

That said, I would still recommend the film as worth seeing. One particular highlight was the brief and clear explanation of contraction and convergence, which is a serious suggestion for how it is possible to slash global emissions while allowing developing nations to get out of stupid poverty. Of course, this means developing nations cutting their emissions even faster in order to leave some room for the global poor to meet their basic needs. This option is not politically viable, especially in the places where per capita emissions would need to fall the fastest (US, Australia, Canada and parts of the Middle East), but it is the most equitable of all the options on the table and has received support from a number of nations, including the UK.

Also coming up as part of the Cineco film festival are two more films that look very interesting. The first is called Our Daily Bread and consists almost purely of footage of contemporary industrial agricultural processes with commentary or soundtrack beyond environmental noises recorded with the footage, allowing the viewer to form her own opinions. It is screening at 6pm on the 12th November.

The second is called Dirt! and traces one of the major ecological challenges that doesn't receive much attention: the soil beneath our feet (and all too often, beneath our concrete too). In the last one hundred years, in different ways we have squandered about a third of all fertile topsoil on the planet. It is screening at 6pm on 17th November (Martin Hall, New College) and will include a panel discussion with local religious leaders. Here is the trailer.

Link love

Milan hits the mark on another punctuation pet peeve and asks "how cynical should Obama make us?". There is also a good conversation (with plenty of links) happening on his blog about police and black bloc activity in Toronto during the recent G20 meeting.

Sam reminds us that we have one defender, so don't need to defend ourselves.

Matt quotes Williams on the need for science to be human. Very timely.

The jellyfish are coming: "All around the world, jellyfish are behaving badly—reproducing in astonishing numbers and congregating where they’ve supposedly never been seen before."

PhD on calling for papers.

Prof Eleonore Stump on the problem of suffering and divinely sanctioned violence in the OT.

Jason has a Stringfellow quote on nationalism and patriotism.

And Halden links to the best review ever.

Into the Wild: a review

When I first saw previews for Into the Wild, I must admit I was quite skeptical. I thought it looked like a Kathmandu ad, promoting adventure holidays and the rugged romantic individualism that seeks to find in nature either a beast to be conquered, or a god to be worshipped (both goals requiring suitably sensible hiking equipment at a reasonable price).

However, having watched it last night on the recommendation of my personal film critic (isn't it great when you come to trust the judgement of certain friends and so are willing to give apparently unlikely flicks a go on their so say?), I stand corrected. Managing to criticise both the shallowness of consumerism and the destructiveness of individualism, what it offers as an alternative is grace - forgiveness, covenant and the slow healing of memory and desire through the sharing of life with others.

Based on a true story from the early 90s, the film traces the journey of a young man who renounces society and comfort and ends up living in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. Family and finances, career and college degree are all left behind for a battered copy of Thoreau and pair of sturdy walking boots. "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth." On his exodus appear many potential surrogate family members, who offer companionship, understanding and love, but these are all rejected in the pursuit of purity.

Predictably, enlightenment takes a tragedy: "happiness [is] only real when shared". In this, Into the Wild echoes the best impulses of early monasticism, where flight to the desert was not to abandon one's neighbour, but to learn how to love him better.

The explicit theology of the film is good: "When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God's light shines on you." The implicit theology of the narrative is better: "When God's light shines on you, you are loved and learn to love. And when you are loved and learn to love, you are forgiven and can forgive."

Four out of five.

As it is in heaven

Having recently seen Så som i himmelen (As it is in heaven), I've had two thoughts:

• Swedish sounds easier to learn than I expected; there were many links to both German and Old English (not that I can speak either of those, but even the smattering of each was enough to pick up a few lines in the film).

• More importantly, the enduring popularity of the film* demonstrates our society's deep yearning for genuine community.

The story explores the development of a small Swedish village church choir under the guidance of a brilliant international conductor who unexpectedly retires in order to return to his roots. The choir are drawn together by a shared object of desire into a community that is creative, healing, honest, non-judgemental, transformative, sexuality-celebrating, fear-overcoming, a refuge and has space for difference and imperfection - in fact, all the things church is meant to be. No wonder the village pastor is driven into obsolescence.

This is a film that draws deeply upon Christian language and symbolism, not least in having a Christ-figure around whom the community formed, whose ‘crucifixion’ (first through being rejection, then symbolically in his own death) reconciled and established the community. Moreover, in this community angels can be glimpsed and life starts happening on earth as it is in heaven. In contrast, the village church, particularly through the figure of the repressed and repressive priest, is revealed as a sham community of control, conformity, fear, gossip and envy. The community claiming to be Christian is thus critiqued using many of its own standards.

Its alternative was a "church" with no prayer, no sin, no sacrament, no word. Just music. Although the slow growth into honesty amongst the choir led to many dramatic acknowledgements of long-buried tensions, and in (almost) every case this lead to new levels of love and acceptance and unity, the film would portray the dramatic outburst of hidden emotions, but not the long and sometimes slow process of working it through to reconciliation. Perhaps we have to assume this occurred off-camera, but it is of such stuff that real community is made.

Unfortunately, the film was more interesting theologically and musically than dramatically: wounded genius retires early and returns to his home village where he has to confront his past yet finds acceptance and love through learning to offer them to others.

Four out of five stars.
*I think it is still showing at the Orpheum in Cremorne, more than a year after it opened, making it the longest-running film in Australia. It's been showing continuously for the last two and a half years in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Images from here, which also suggested that the film is "a classic Western. Mysterious stranger rides into town, arousing the womenfolk and upsetting the menfolk. Although a man of peace, his presence excites violence. In the end, he must die for his beliefs, releasing the town from its troubles (it's kinda difficult to ride off into the sunset when the next one might not come for another 9 months)."

Boring lies

On Saturday night I saw Forbidden Lie$ with some friends. An investigation of the disgraced author Norma Khouri, whose book Forbidden Love (US title: Honor Lost) sold hundreds of thousands of copies and claimed to tell the true story of a shocking honour killing of a close friend, a Jordanian Muslim woman murdered by her family for falling in love with a Christian. Khouri actively campaigned from self-imposed exile for the liberalisation of Jordanian laws regarding such crimes.

However, a year after its release, Khouri's story was discredited by Malcolm Knox, a SMH journalist, who discovered that the author had grown up in the US, and was married with two children (after implying otherwise in interviews). Khouri refused to concede that her book was essentially fiction, claiming that names, dates and locations were changed to protect reprisals against family and friends.

The documentary (written and directed by Anna Broinowski) quickly covers this familiar territory through dramatic re-enactments and a wide variety of interviews. But as the interviews continue, Broinowski allows the various subjects to watch recordings of other figures in the controversy and tapes their reactions. Layer upon layer of subterfuge develops and the audience is left wondering where the truth lies. The film's tagline is "Con or artist? You decide" and the official website allows you to vote on your impression of Norma. The poll shows that audiences are quite divided in their reaction to the author, with some impressed at how the book drew international attention to honour crimes and others less than impressed at her deceptions and alleged financial swindling.

Personally, although the phenomenon of the book and its aftermath is fascinating, I found Norma Khouri herself to be less and less interesting as the documentary progressed. Her lies end up simply being boring. In the end, sin is always boring.
Image from femail.com.au.

Myers on Spong

Speaking of Bishop Spong, the indefatigable Ben Myers has managed to produce a short review of his new book Jesus for the Non-Religious, in which he argues that Spong's Jesus is, well, boring.

Ben and his wife have also managed to produce a new baby. Since Dr Myers seems to gain most of his theological insights from his children, I expect his prolific output to only increase in the coming months.

Sicko

Last night I went to see Michael Moore's new(-ish) doco Sicko on the US Health system (amongst other things). As usual for Moore, there were more stories and stunts than statistics, more emotion than evidence, more amusement than analysis. Nonetheless, this film is worth seeing and talking about. Not only is it less bitter and nasty than his other work that I've seen, it also raises issues more directly relevant to Australia than Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11. With a health system more privatised than the UK, but far more public than the US, debates about the direction of Australian health care continue.

Since being diagnosed with cancer in December, I have received thousands of dollars worth of consultation, treatment and drugs, at almost no cost (a few dollars for the drugs). I give thanks for the public health system and taxation that has enabled this. Yet thoughout the process, I noticed many encouragements towards private health cover, with some messages advising that to do so would help the public hospitals by giving them more funds.

While this may be true in the short term, I am very hesitant about doing my little bit to encourage us closer to the US system. The more patients on private cover, the easier it is for the government to justify health cuts, thus downgrading the public system and giving more incentive for people to switch to private cover. And the losers are those who can't afford it. Though as Moore points out, this means we all lose.

I realise this is a very complicate issue and that I only have a very basic grasp of it, but I'd love to understand more.

Do you have private insurance? If so, why? Do you think this makes any difference to the system as a whole for you to 'vote' this way? Any opinions from those who work in the health system?
Dr Perseus performs a tricky piece of surgery. Twelve points for the first to guess the city in which this work is found.

Transformers: substantially less than meets the eye

Speaking of films, on Friday night I saw Transformers. A mistake, I confess.

I was all ready to find references to the energy crisis in the Allspark (powerful forces pursuing a huge energy source to a distant land and turning it into a battle ground), or perhaps a Christ-figure in Optimus Prime (one of the cooler names from my childhood spent watching animations). But instead we had the usual advertisement for the military (Hollywood directors get to use expensive toys if they they let the US military turn the script into a recruitment drive) and yet another make-your-enemies-pay account of redemptive violence.

A friend with whom I saw the film (who shall retain his anonymitiy until I need a chance to name and shame) dared me to write a blog post titled "Transformers: fact or fiction?" and pose the question whether there might not actually be robots in disguise amongst us. But there's no need for discussion. The Allspark is not buried in Hoover Dam; he walks amongst us (or, more usually, flies above us). More commonly known as Steven Spielberg, his touch can instantly turn two hours of slush into a millions of dollars.
Fifteen points for the first to correctly name all three locations in the linked pictures.

Amazing Grace: now I see

On Thursday night, I went with a group from church to see Amazing Grace, the new-ish film about William Wilberforce and the abolition of the British slave trade around the turn of the 19th century. I'd read a number of lukewarm reviews and so my expectations were suitably dimmed. But it was good. Twenty years of parliamentary debate may not be everyone's idea of a thrilling plot, but the figure of Wilberforce holds it together. At age 21, he was the youngest ever MP and until his retirement 45 years later he never lost an election. During that time, he was involved in penal reform, helped secure better working better conditions for child labourers in England’s mills and factories, was active in setting up orphanages and worked for the welfare of single mothers, sailors, and soldiers. He helped found (what later became) the RSPCA, the Bible Society, National Gallery, Royal Institution for the Pursuit of Science and the Church Missionary Society. He helped abolish the religious test keeping Roman Catholics, nonconformists and Jews out of parliament and universities. He intervened to ensure there was a chaplain, Richard Johnson, on the First Fleet to Australia in 1788 (see Meredith's blog for much more discussion of Richard Johnson). And he regularly gave away an estimated one quarter of his considerable annual income to around 69 philanthropic causes.

But he is best remembered for his long campaign against British transatlantic slavery, a struggle in which he fought against the economic prosperity and military security of the empire, and which pioneered many tactics now familiar to contemporary political campaigners for swaying public opinion. During it all, and facing powerful opponents, death threats, chronic ill-health and accusations of sedition (advocating for the downtrodden was dangerous when revolution was in the air in France and elsewhere), he was inspired and sustained by his faith in Christ.

Wilberforce was an evangelical, a term much used and abused today. But traditional doctrines such as the corruption of humanity, the atoning work of Jesus and the transforming power of the Spirit were crucial in his motivation and goals.

I suspect that were he around today he would be told to keep his faith out of politics.
For those who want a good lecture on Wilberforce, try Sandy Grant's recent talk.
Points hint: this is the same Sydney suburb as this picture. I'm sure that will be very helpful.

The play's the thing: Vanhoozer's Divine Comedy

The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005)
What is the place of doctrine in following Jesus? Is it a human construction that distorts the Bible? Or a luxury of decadent, introspective Christianity substituting for practical action? Neither, claims Vanhoozer in The Drama of Doctrine; doctrine is precisely what relates the Scriptures to our individual and corporate obedience. In doing so, he aims to reclaim doctrine as energetic, energising and ecumenical in an age that sees it as dull, distracting and divisive.

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Taking his cue from the world of theatre, he proceeds at some length to develop the metaphor of drama in four directions: drama, script, dramaturge and performance.

First, adopting and adapting von Balthasar's Theo-drama, Vanhoozer recasts salvation history as a divine comedy, a ‘theo-drama’ in which God is protagonist and Jesus the pivotal climax. Of course, like all good plays, this one has five acts: Creation, Israel, Jesus, Church, and Eschaton (which came first, the metaphor or the biblical theology, remains unspecified).*
*Indeed, it is difficult to either prove or disprove the effect of the theatrical allegory in providing an unacknowledged (even unconscious) ‘confirmation’ of certain details of his approach.

The triune hero performs a fully rounded part; the destructive dichotomy between divine actions and words is healed with the help of speech-act theory. God’s mighty actions communicate, and his words get things done.

Second, having oriented us to the (theo-)drama, we meet the authoritative script: the Bible. In constant dialogue with Lindbeck’s influential The Nature of Doctrine, Vanhoozer agrees with Lindbeck’s desire to move beyond a narrow pre-critical cognitive theology of fundamentalism and an equally reductionist liberal experiential-expressivism. For Lindbeck, the cultural-linguistic turn in twentieth century western thought means that biblical hermeneutics (and thus theology) must be grounded in the practices of the ecclesial interpretive community. Yet there is a dangerous circularity in which the Bible read through the lens of contemporary church life can only affirm that very life; the church becomes unreformable and the externality, the potentially critical otherness of God’s voice in Scripture, is silenced. Therefore, while loath to lose the hermeneutical insight linking reading to community praxis, Vanhoozer argues for authorised canonical practices that guide our reading and help avoid the solipsism of fundamentalism.* Thus, he retrieves the possibility and actuality of error in and by the church (p. 233), yet without thereby cutting loose hermeneutics from tradition. And so, instead of Lindbeck’s postliberal cultural-linguistic theology, Vanhoozer introduces a postconservative canonical-linguistic one.
*Two examples of such canonical, even dominical, practices are figurative readings of Scripture (pp. 220-24) and prayer to the Father (pp. 224-26).

Third: enter playwright, stage left. Just as in the larger theo-drama, the climactic third act of the book sees the author join the action. Unlike the primary performance, however, this is no divine hero-saviour come to set all things right, but merely a theologian. The function of the theologian is instead that of the little-known dramaturge, mediator between script and director.* The theologian as dramaturge is a resource for the company, helping the director in ensuring the script is understood and applied with creative faithfulness, neither parroting nor forgetting previous acts and scenes of the theo-drama.** Performing this task requires both scientia (to read the script with disciplined understanding) and sapientia (to relate it practically to the mundane dramas of quotidian experience); each scores a full chapter.
*The director (or at least assistant director to the Holy Spirit) is the local pastor, mediating the script(ures) to his company of players.
**Faithfulness is thus dramatic fittingness: both to the primary theo-dramatic performance and to the contemporary context of a local production (pp. 256-63).

One example of theology’s sciential function is seeing the doctrine of Trinity as a dramatis personae, a crucial abbreviated guide for an understanding of the canonical script, yet itself arising authentically from a careful scriptural reading.

A key sapiential concept is ‘improvisation’, which, when undertaken by serious actors, is no arbitrary ad-libbing of lines for quick laughs, but a discipline of focussed memory and creative attention that seeks what new thing must be said or done in order to drive forward the action while remaining consistent with the drama thus far. Understood in this way, even God is an improviser: ‘The theo-drama itself develops largely through divine improvisation on a covenant theme…. God overaccepts even human blocking by incorporating it into the broader covenantal comedy.’ (pp. 340-41)

Fourth, the contemporary performance itself takes the spotlight. Again, he shares Lindbeck’s concern for the regulative function of doctrine but wants to based this primarily on canon, not church. More than a collection of true statements about God, doctrine orients performers towards apt action. Here, his ubiquitous (and by this stage more than slightly stretched) metaphor comes into its own in foregrounding the instrumental rather than intrinsic value of the Bible and theology. The goal of both script and direction is to serve the drama: ‘script and performance are equally necessary, though not equally authoritative. Biblical script without ecclesial performance is empty; ecclesial performance without biblical script is blind’ (p. 362). The authority lies with script (Bible); the teleology with performance (praxis); the mediation with direction (theology). Indeed, in yet another self-reflexive moment, Vanhoozer’s theological metaphor-making is at this point executing precisely the task of theology in his allegory: helping us see how the Bible can and must be lived out with creative faithfulness. To illustrate theology in service of praxis, he stages some scenes with the motifs of martyrdom and forgiveness under the direction of atonement.

For an encore, he places creeds, confessions and pastors as, respectively, masterpiece and regional theatre, and assistant directors (under the Holy Spirit): pp. 445-58.

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Vanhoozer admits at the outset that the relationship between theologian and thespian has long been frosty, and many readers may feel uneasy about the trapdoors hidden in the floorboards of his metaphor. Before walking out too quickly, however, it’s worth taking a seat and perusing the benefits of admission.

All but the most unreformed modernists recognise the great explanatory power (and canonical basis) of narrative in theological reflection. Drama is a species of narrative, and so retains all its conceptual benefits (e.g. sequence, configuration, characterisation), while adding fruitful modifications, such as a synergy with speech-act theory and a greater potential to get ‘caught up in the action’ through a more permeable barrier between ‘text’ and responder (pp.48-49).

The concept of ‘speech-acts’ helps to disentangle knotty disputes about the relationship of Scripture and tradition through the distinction between locutions (the words used) and illocutions (the actions performed by those words: promising, warning, inviting, asserting). Merely replicating canonical locutions can (and in shifting cultural-linguistic contexts will) result in distorting God’s scriptural illocutions (pp. 126-28). It is the illocutions that tradition seeks to preserve and translate, though it is only these locutions that are authoritative guides to the illocutions (p. 74). The concept of illocution also reveals the limitations of locating our doctrine of Scripture simply under the heading of ‘revelation’, since God does more through it than merely reveal himself (pp. 45, 277).*
*While appreciating the intellectual yield of speech-act theory, some basic narratology would have sharpened his claim that the illocutions of Scripture are God’s (p. 67) by specifying which illocutions are the relevant ones (viz. those of the implied author, though not necessarily of the narrator or every character). Similarly, infelicitous claims about the addressees of Scripture (p. 67) could have also been avoided.

These dramatic (in both senses) benefits notwithstanding, apprehension remains concerning his almost allegorical application of a single metaphor to explain a whole company of concepts. Has theatre become the master key to all theology? He vigorously criticises directors who use a ‘production concept’ to usurp the communicative intent of the authorial script (p. 250); is he, to invoke the Bard, ‘hoist with his own petar[d]’?

Before we jeer this show with cries of ‘hypocrisy’, it is important to note four mitigating factors: (a) the frequency of non-theatrical metaphors and the pivotal roles they play in his cast of images;* (b) the acknowledgement of the necessity of other voices in the theological dialogue (p. 275); (c) the recognisably orthodox account of doctrinal touchstones it yields; and (d) his en route corrections and criticisms of the limitations of his selected metaphor. This final one is worth further comment. Sometimes he corrects one piece of the analogy with another: using ‘improvisation’ to supplement and correct potentially misleading aspects of treating Bible as script. At other times, he debunks commonly misunderstood theatrical realities: improvisation as arbitrary ad-libbing (pp.340-41). Occasionally, he even simply abandons implications of the metaphor: ‘Like other analogies, this one can be pressed too far. To insist that everything in drama must have a theological counterpart runs the risk of turning a simple analogy into a complex allegory.’ (p. 243)
*To spotlight a few: trial (pp. 21-24), epic/lyric (pp. 84-93), fittingness (pp. 108-10), ‘transposition’ (pp. 254), map (pp. 294-99), habits (pp. 374-77), and dieting to be spiritually ‘fit’ (pp. 374-80).

Perhaps it is pressing too far to criticise the implicit activism of the church, whose raison d’être as company of performers is construed in instrumental fashion to the detriment of its intrinsic value as redeemed community (p. 71). Perhaps not.

There is nonetheless a certain messiness to the metaphor as it is pushed and expanded in multiple directions. Like a Shakespearean company with more roles than players, the same faces appear in different guises. God is the playwright, the executive director, and the protagonist (pp. 64, 243). While a robust Trinitarian theology may take this in its three-legged stride, the Bible also (somewhat disconcertingly) makes three appearances: as the authorised memory of the original theo-drama, as an actor in the ongoing performance (p. 35, 48), and as script for that performance (p. 115-241). Christians are alternatively audience then actors, mirroring God’s move from actor to audience (p. 37). Part of the confusion is comprehensible when one keeps in mind there are two performances: the primary theo-drama in five Acts, and a multiplicity of secondary local shows that comprise Act Four (p. 252).

Even so, the characterisation of the Bible remains somewhat unresolved. The Bible as ‘script’ works well in discussions of authority in Part Two, yet becomes cumbersome and is virtually denied by the idea of ‘improvisation’ in Part Three (pp. 307, 335). The ‘script’ doesn’t have all the lines for Act Four (the life of the church) and so its authority is of a particular kind: setting the dramatis personae, plot line, and ultimate resolution in Act Five,* as well as exemplifying previous faithful improvisations (p. 344). The Bible as actor also seems to be a category error (p. 48), unless it is always understood as a shorthand for God’s agency through Scripture as instrument.
*Indeed, much more could have been made of eschatology’s role in bringing a dead performance to life. The weight of the volume was retrospective.
**On this point, N. T. Wright is both Vanhoozer’s source and is clearer: “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?”, Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 7-32.

The slight ambiguity raised by the frequent personification of Scripture as agentive is compounded by some undifferentiated linguistic parallelism between Christ and the Bible (p. 31, 35, 295). Of course, Scripture as a fourth hypostasis is denied (p. 227),* but John Webster’s careful account of Scripture as a sanctified divine servant is less prone to confusion on this matter (p. 293).
*Does anyone own up to that?

Although it may seem masochistic to accuse such a voluminous volume of sins of omission, the treatment of Scripture’s relationship to Christ also lacked much recognition of the theo-dramatically relative role of Scripture: ‘The only Christ we have is the Christ of the Scriptures.’ (p. 46, emphasis added) Although it is true that even the apostles had ‘the Christ of the [OT] Scriptures’, they also had the Christ of the flesh.* Vanhoozer’s reluctance to get his hands too dirty in the history of canonical formation (pp. 142-43) is echoed in the lack of a detailed theo-dramatic account of how God communicated prior to the completion of the canon.
*And what of the Christ of the pre-(proto?)-scriptural oral traditions?

Those criticisms aside, his theological treatment of Scripture remains a highlight of his approach. Central to his project in Part Two is the claim that sola scriptura is not so much principle as practice (pp. 115, 141, 153). Crucially, this Reformation battle cry was not answering ‘How many sources should one use in doing theology?’ but ‘where can we find the supreme norm by which to measure Christian deeds and Christian doctrine?’ (p. 232). The sufficiency of Scripture is material, rather than formal (p. 156). Vanhoozer’s rich and nuanced account is thus able to acknowledge that tradition and church are valuable, even indispensable aids in the interpretive process, without compromising the irreplaceable and unaugmentable centrality of the Bible in our knowledge of and obedience towards God. The ‘logic of justification’ needn’t follow the ‘logic of discovery’ (p. 165).

Similarly, his recognition of the dangers of generic reductionism is refreshing (pp. 139, 215. 285). Each genre has its own voice (p. 270), its own factual precisions, ways of life and higher order illocutions (pp. 283-87), its own irreducible input to the diverse unity of God’s scriptural communicative act. The canon has ‘an eschatological completeness, differentiated wholeness and plural unity’ (p. 275). As with canon, so with theology: what no single genre can assert (a unique and exclusive possession of the entire truth), no tradition can demand; what each genre can enjoy (a unique and necessary contribution to the apprehension of God’s being and acts), each truly Christian tradition must be granted (p. 275, 422).

This insight promotes his vision of a catholic-evangelical orthodoxy: keeping a definite theo-dramatic centre without denying the genuine and legitimate catholic diversity of contemporary and historic performance (p. 30). In this vision, doctrine divides the right things, rather than Christ’s body, and this, not because theological truth isn’t important, but precisely because it is (pp. 421-26).

Of course, Vanhoozer is not the first theorist to earn an intellectual living making a spectacle of this metaphor in our mise en scène. Even theologians, traditionally slowest off the mark in realising the backdrop has changed, have started rehearsing their lines in preparation for this ‘brave new world that has such people in’t’. Vanhoozer’s novelty lies in attiring the task of doctrine in this fashionable analogy. And not only dramatologists, but also a number of influential voices in contemporary thought make significant cameos: Bakhtin, Derrida, Gadamer, Nussbaum, Wittgenstein. Divers alarums: has he sold out to philosophical trends? Has his great learning driven his orthodoxy mad? This very dynamic is (in line with postmodern orthopraxis) reflected upon in the text. His response is that plundering this particular Egyptian trinket is justified as part of theology’s task of translation, or transposition, of the canonical melody into a contextual key. And of course, as one voice in a dialogue, his contribution suffers critical appreciation and correction.

His eclectic and multi-disciplinary interlocutors enrich his contribution to each of the many academic conversations he joins. However, as already noted, this breadth can occasionally leave him looking sloppy or naïve. In his epistemological discussion (pp. 265-305), he mistakenly assumes foundationalism entails infallibilism (pp. 292, 295), misapprehends the purpose of the web metaphor and so commits a category error in comparing it to his map metaphor (p. 297).* Similarly, his brief reference to photography shows little awareness that the ‘objective’ reputation of photos is as ripe for deconstruction as that of maps (p. 296). His discussion of ‘propositionalism’, presumes an atomistic semantics (pp. 266-78).
*These two metaphors illustrate answers to different questions. The map is an attempt to say something about how knowledge relates to ‘reality’; the web is a picture of how different parts of a worldview relate to each other. Thus, web should be contrasted to foundation, while map should be pitted against the early Wittgenstein’s (indeed Aristotle’s) idea of language ‘picturing’ reality.

Unfortunately, even his specifically theological epistemology confuses the effects of sin with (good) creaturely limitations on our knowledge, and in doing so, obscures the hermeneutics of suspicion behind the hermeneutics of finitude. Human fallenness does not lead to fallibilism as he claims (p. 303),* but to a healthy suspicion of our ability to hide selfish motives, even from our own consciousness.**
*Fallibilism is instead another epistemic implication of being created in embodied socio-cultural particularity. See James K. A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, Il.: IVP, 2000).
**For an excellent discussion of this theme, see Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham, 1998).

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When all’s said and done, Vanhoozer’s (over)long performance is sometimes sloppy, often inspiring, always stimulating. The stars that shine most brightly are the indispensability of canonical authority (or rather Christ's authority through the canon), the urgency of contemporary obedience, the responsibility of conceptual creativity and the possibility of dogmatic relevancy. Four stars.

Look Both Ways: seeing death everywhere

I recently saw a delightful little Aussie film called ‘Look Both Ways’: a weekend in a serious of intersecting lives, with a redemptive downpour towards the end. Sounds like Magnolia? Bingo – it is. Except, instead of exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of forgiveness and redeeming the past (as Magnolia did so beautifully and profoundly), this time it’s death. I’ve rarely seen a po/mo non-linear film so focussed on a single topic, and can think of few films at all that tackle death so relentlessly without become bogged in angst. Finally, an admission that for many people life means ‘seeing death everywhere’.