I find Gibson’s film quite compelling insofar as it shows us how to see the world in a new way. But this is not the same as seeing the world made new. Indeed, the world as the suffering Christ sees it is remarkably like the world as the suffering Judas sees it. For Judas, his sin has made the world appear as a demonic and miserable place. The film depicts this admirably, not by showing him as bearing inner torments, but by showing how the world itself actually looks dark, miserable, unbearable. The thick night mists are full of demonic sounds and occasional apparitions. Children are transformed into tormenting fiends, and he is ultimately driven by the appearance of death and decay all around him to take his own life and depart the world.
Unfortunately, when Gibson shows us a Christ’s-eye perspective of the world, things don’t look significantly different. Indeed, the world seems to be just as God-forsaken for Christ as it is for Judas. While appealing to God the Father in the Garden, Jesus prays, “Shelter me, O Lord. I trust you. In you I take refuge,” and looks toward the light of the moon. But the moon clouds over, darkness spreads, and Christ sinks to the ground forsaken. If even Christ himself sees the world as God-forsaken, one wonders what hope there is for the rest of us. Christ, like Judas, sees the people surrounding him as demons—a fact Gibson brings home to us by frequently placing Satan himself in the midst of the jeering, tormenting crowds. The most disturbing such scene shows Satan gliding through the crowds that are witnessing his scourging, clutching a deformed child in his arms. The child’s smile is juxtaposed with the leering soldiers, communicating the not so subtle message that most of mankind have allowed themselves to become children of Satan rather than their Father in Heaven.
Given the way the world looks even to Christ himself, it is no surprise that he “embraces his cross,” as one of the thieves crucified with him observes. Gibson’s Christ is ultimately a pessimist, and the world he shows us is, sadly, not a world made new, but a world to be abandoned as soon as possible. Even Mary comes to wish for both his, and her own, departure from the world. “My son,” she asks during his scourging, “when, where, how will you choose to be delivered of this?” And, standing before him on the cross, she pleads: “My son, let me die with you.” The viewer is left, then, with a despair at a world that seems more corrupt than ever.
A useful corrective to Gibson’s version of Christianity would be Dostoevsky’s. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky even has a character, Father Ferapont, who represents Gibson’s pessimistic version of Christian world disclosure. Ferapont, like Gibson’s Christ, sees devils among the people around him, and this vision leads him to withdraw ascetically from the world. For Dostoevsky, pessimistic Christianity misses the true import of Christ’s life, which shows us the “beauty and glory” of a world made new through Christ’s love, and impels us to connect in love to others. Dostoevsky’s Christianity is summed up by the dying Christ-like character, Markel who reprimands his mother for focusing on his suffering: “Don’t cry, mother, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won’t see it; if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day.”*
SOURCES
Albert Camus. 1991. The Plague Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage.
Allegra Donn. 2004. The Passion Shows Us All How Violent We Really Are. Interview with Monica Bellucci. Evening Standard, London (25th March).
Fyodor Dostoevsky. 1990. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. New York: Vintage.
Martin Heidegger. 1998. Phenomenology and Theology. In William McNeill, ed., Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 39–62.
Antonella Lazzeri. 2004. Making This Film Was Difficult: Watching It Is Even Harder. The Sun, London (22nd March), p. 26.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 1964. The Film and the New Psychology. In Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press).
Blaise Pascal. 1995. Pensées. Translated by Honor Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
A.O. Scott. 2004. Christ’s Passion, Told Without Grace. International Herald Tribune, Paris (26th February).
Mark Wrathall. Forthcoming. Revealed Word and World Disclosure. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 36, 2.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Pessimism is the view that nothing in this world has genuine worth or eternal significance. In what ways is Gibson’s film a pessimistic movie?
2. Is Christianity an inherently pessimistic religion? How would you justify your answer?
3. Despair is the condition of needing, but being unable, to find satisfaction for our profoundest longings in this world. Does Gibson’s Christ offer a solution to the problem of despair?
4. Can a visual depiction of a Scriptural story really contribute anything to our understanding of that story? Are there some things that can only be taught through a visual depiction?
5. What is the proper relationship between philosophical and artistic efforts to understand a phenomenon?
* I am indebted to James Faulconer, Randy Paul, Hubert Dreyfus, Benjamin Huff, and Kenneth West for their helpful and thought-provoking comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
3
Christ’s Atonement: Washing Away Human Sin
JERRY L. WALLS
There is something more than a little ironic in the fact that a movie about a Bible story, a story that is told every week to Sunday School children, could cause such an uproar in our society. Movies with far more graphic violence, movies with explicit and often tasteless sexual content, movies with controversial political messages, are released on a regular basis and hardly cause a ripple. Why all the passion about The Passion?
The answer to this question comes into focus very early in the movie when Christ is praying in the garden and Satan comes to test his resolve. Satan asks him whether he really believes one man can bear the full burden of sin, and goes on to suggest that no man can carry such a burden, and that the price of saving souls is too costly. As Jesus wrestles with these questions, he prays to his Father for strength and help. Satan then presses a further question, “Who is your Father?” and then follows this up by asking, “Who are you?”
In this brief but intense encounter, we are given in capsule form the explanation for why The Passion of the Christ could hardly avoid being controversial. While several factors are no doubt involved, the most profound reasons for the controversy go far beyond the graphic violence of the film, as well as the fact that many of the Jews portrayed in the film are shown in a negative way that makes them appear responsible for the death of Christ. The Romans are depicted even more unfavorably, with some of them cast as bloodthirsty thugs who relish the torment they exact from Christ.
To be sure, The Passion is a brutal affront to polite sensibilities and gentle manners. The cruel fashion in which Christ died, the agony of crucifixion, has perhaps never been portrayed for us in a more jarring fashion. To cite just one example, after Christ has been nailed to the cross, the soldiers callously turn it over and let it fall on top of him while they secure the nails from the back. Then they turn it over and roughly drop it again. How Christ died is the most obvious focus of the film, and that is what has understandably impressed most viewers. But the deeper root of the controversy is what the film claims about who it was that died on the cross and why he died.
One of the key scenes pertaining to these questions includes the flashbacks while Christ is on the cross. As he is dying, the film cuts back several times to “the Last Supper,” that meal Christ had with his disciples shortly before he died. In this meal, Christ identifies the bread as his body, broken for his disciples, and the wine as his blood shed for the forgiveness of sins. Moreover, he claims that he is the way, the truth and the life, and goes on to say that no one can come to the Father except through him.
Implicit here are the most basic doctrines of Christian theology, particularly the doctrine that God is a Trinity, a being who exists in
three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Here lies the Christian answer to Satan’s questions, “Who is your Father?” and “Who are you?” His Father is God the Father, the First Person of the Trinity. Jesus’s claim that no one can come to the Father except through him points up his own identity, namely, that he is the second person of the Trinity, the Son who was begotten of the Father from eternity. It also underscores the Christian account of why the eternal Son of God took on human nature and was born as Jesus of Nazareth, namely, to provide salvation for the whole human race. In doing so, he provided the only way to a right relationship with God.
These claims are the deepest roots of the controversy sparked by Gibson’s film. It is the belief that Jesus was the Son of God incarnate that makes it such a scandal that he was unjustly put to death. It is bad enough to kill any innocent person, especially in a degrading and cruel fashion, but if that person is God, the offense takes on much larger and more serious proportions. Moreover, if the Christian claims are true, they are matters of extreme importance. What is at stake is nothing less than the truth about God and how to be rightly related to him. Given the importance of these claims, no one can rationally be indifferent about them. The passionate reactions of those who have supported the film, as well as those who have opposed it, are altogether understandable in this light.
In this chapter, I want to focus on one of these controversial claims, namely, that the death of Christ provided atonement for the sins of the whole world. But as my comments have already made clear, the concept of atonement cannot be considered in isolation from other basic Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the Incarnation. These doctrines are interwoven with each other, and one cannot grasp any one of them without at least some understanding of the others as well.
Why Do We Need Atonement?
While our specific concern here is the Christian understanding of atonement, it is worth noting that the idea of atonement and its related notion of sacrifice are not exclusive to Judeo-Christian theology. Indeed, Colin Gunton has argued that the notion of sacrifice “derives from something deep in human nature, of such a kind that it appears to be rooted in a universal or near universal feature of our life on earth” (Gunton 1992, pp. 210–11). The doctrine of atonement, then, resonates with a universal sense that we are not right with ultimate reality, and some sort of sacrifice is needed to make us right.
This is suggested by the basic meaning of the English word ‘atonement,’ which can be seen by dividing it up as at-one-ment. At its most basic level, atonement has to do with reconciliation and unity. That is, it has to do with uniting, or making “one” persons who were previously separated or estranged. In Christian theology, the estranged persons involved are God and humanity, so atonement is about uniting and reconciling human beings with God. When Jesus says he is the way to the Father, and that no one can come to the Father except through him, he is saying that he is the only way for humans to be “at one” with God. He is the only way “at-one-ment” with God can be achieved.
But all of this raises a prior question. Why are we separated from God and why do we need help from Jesus or anyone else to be “at one” with him? The Christian answer is because of sin. Now ‘sin’ is a word that has lost much of its currency in contemporary culture. Indeed, the word is often used in a joking manner when people want to make light of the idea that one of their actions might be perceived as naughty, or perhaps even rude or somewhat offensive to someone. But in its original context, the idea is no joking matter, and without that context the idea of sin cannot help but seem like a quaint notion best suited for an easy laugh on Saturday Night Live.
In short, the essential context necessary for making sense of sin is the conviction that the ultimate reality that we must come to terms with is a holy God, a God of supreme power who is perfectly righteous and just. Without this conviction, the idea of sin is a trivial notion. It is like a word from a foreign language and culture for which we have only vague associations, and those associations seem mildly amusing to us. Part of what Gibson’s film has done for us is to help us recover the notion of sin as a concept with serious content. The very fact that the terrible ordeal Christ suffers is presented as the consequence of his choosing to bear our sins makes it ever more clear as the story unfolds that sin is not merely a matter of harmless pranks or charming mischief. As he absorbs our sin and evil, sin is shown in its true colors. His broken and bleeding body is a vivid image of what sin looks like when it has its way.
But still, the question persists, what is it that makes sin so terrible? Well, the basic idea is that sin is an offense against a holy God. To sin is to fail to acknowledge God, to act against him and his will. The Genesis story of the fall brings this into focus. Some theologians take this story quite literally, while others take it metaphorically. But what is more generally agreed is that the story conveys for us the nature and dynamics of sin. The heart of the story is that Adam and Eve were forbidden by God, on pain of death, to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The story implies that their needs could be fully met in eating from the other trees, this tree alone was forbidden to them.
Their famous disobedience came at the inducement of the serpent, who suggested to them that God’s motives for not allowing them to eat from the one forbidden tree were less than honorable.
“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4–5)
In other words, the serpent suggests that God is holding out on Adam and Eve, that what he forbids is really good for them, and that their true happiness and well being is to be found in disobedience to God. In short, God is not really good and cannot really be trusted to promote their true happiness and flourishing.
This means that the heart of sin is a wrong attitude toward God, an attitude of suspicion and mistrust. The failure to obey God is not simply a matter of breaking an impersonal law or code of behavior. It is more a matter of failing to trust and return the love of a God who not only knows what is best for us, but also passionately desires it. Sin is most crucially a breach in a relationship.
But perhaps most interesting for our purposes in the Genesis story is that God was not content to leave this breach in his relationship with his creatures. Before this episode in the story ends, we see the first clue that God will find a way to cross the breach and restore us to himself. Although Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden, and must now face the world without the close relationship with God they previously enjoyed, there is a ray of hope in the somewhat enigmatic words God spoke to the serpent: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15). Many Biblical scholars see in this text the first promise of atonement, a promise that would find its fulfillment in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Giving the Devil His Due?
If our problem is that we have caused a breach in our relationship with God, how is it that the death of Christ on the cross can save us from our sins and reunite us with God? That Christ died for our sins and that his death and resurrection provide our salvation is a matter of broad consensus among Christians. But just how his death saves us has been a matter of considerable disagreement among theologians. It is also a point of general agreement that we are saved through faith, that we must believe in Christ and accept his gift of atonement. But this only raises further questions. How can faith or belief save us if our problem is a problem of moral and relational failure?
It seems obvious to some people that it cannot, and that the whole idea of atonement is therefore absurd. Indeed, some see the idea that Christ’s death on a cross could save us as barbaric or superstitious. For those inclined to this notion, Gibson’s film, with its gory depiction of Christ’s death, may be cited as one more piece of evidence that such criticisms are deserved.
One pro
minent philosopher who was critical of traditional Christian views of atonement was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). He saw the God of traditional belief as a God who was easy to please, a God who would accept various religious observances and professions of faith as a substitute for genuine moral transformation. As Kant saw it, traditional religious faith is deeply misguided: “It is a superstitious illusion to wish to become well-pleasing to God through actions which anyone can perform without even needing to be a good man (for example, through profession of statutory articles of faith, through conformity to churchly observance and discipline, etc.)” (Kant 1968, p. 162).
Let us turn now to the pertinent questions: How does the death of Christ save us? And is faith really a superstitious thing, an illusory substitute for moral transformation? In short, how should the atonement be understood?
There are several theories of the atonement, but three have been especially prominent in the history of theology. Each of these is reflected in Gibson’s film. Indeed, it is clear that Gibson has done his homework in this regard and that he has succeeded in portraying a view of atonement that is a creative synthesis of the three views. As such, the film makes an interesting theological statement as well as an artistic one. Let us consider the three theories in turn.
The first theory, sometimes recognized as the classic view because it was popular with many Church Fathers, construes the atonement as a great conquest that Christ won over the forces of sin, death, and the devil. Let us call this the Christ as Victor View. This view emphasizes that humanity has been captive to Satan since the fall, and consequently subject to death and sin. Christ, as the “second Adam,” overcame all this by succeeding precisely where the first Adam failed. Whereas the first Adam yielded to the temptations of Satan, and fell into disobedience, Christ lived a perfect life, resisting every temptation. In the Garden of Eden, the first Adam mistrusted God, but in the Garden of Gethsemane Christ maintained total trust in God, despite the trial of a much more severe temptation. Even in the face of great suffering and death he prays for the Father’s will to be done, not his own. Satan’s every attempt to break him, to cause a breach in his relationship with his Father, failed miserably. In so defeating Satan, Christ broke his power over humanity and released us from his bondage.
Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy Page 4