This post contains spoilers. If you’ve not read The Sparrow or not seen The Believer and you don’t want to know how they end, don’t read. This will be longer than usual, so hang with me.
Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow is a science fiction novel that is as much theological investigation as story. A party of explorers travels across space to meet with a race of “singers” whose signal has been detected on earth. The party is funded and manned by the Jesuits, although some non-Christians are in the party. The planet is populated by two races; one is social, communitarian, peaceful, and agrarian; the other is predatory, capitalist, exploitative, hierarchical, and violent. The predatory race rules the planet.
The main character, Father Emilio Sandoz, is a linguist and Jesuit priest. He feels called by God to lead the party, and things initially bear out his faith. Ultimately, after encountering the predatory race, things go horribly awry. The entire party, those who haven’t died from more natural causes on the planet, are massacred by the predators. Sandoz is first treated well but eventually sold as a concubine for the planet’s aristocracy. The novel moves between events on the planet and Sandoz’s tribunal on earth after his rescue. Throughout the novel the reader doesn’t know if Sandoz behaved inconsistently with his faith or was a victim of circumstance.
The key to the novel is an interview with Russell published as an appendix. After two decades of atheism, and with experience writing hard science for journals, Russell converted to Judaism after the birth of her first child. The interviewer asks Russell what it means to be Jewish in a contemporary context. Paraphrased answer: it means accepting that God will not rescue you.
In an interesting move, Russell chooses Jesuits to illustrate her post-Holocaust theological point. This is certainly Sandoz’s experience. Sandoz moves with absolute faith in the divine purpose of the mission. His faith is not rewarded. Indeed, he is crushed, maimed, humiliated, and the one vow that works as a lodestone for him, chastity, is left in doubt throughout the novel. Eventually we learn he was raped, but his chastity is ruined in body, if not in spirit.
In The Sparrow the existence of God is not in question; the goodness of God is. In the 2001 film “The Believer,” the existence of God is in question. “The Believer” is another post-Holocaust theological reflection. It is based on a true story about a young Jewish man who chooses to deny his race and become a neo-Nazi skinhead. Ryan Gosling, who plays the main character, is so self-loathing that he tells no one of his actual ethnicity and actively engages in hate crimes against Jews. Two events shake him out of his denial: an attempted desecration of the Torah and the rape of his girlfriend at the hands of her father. Gosling will not allow his friends to go through with the desecration of the Torah despite his denial of Judaism. At some visceral level he still believes in the God of Israel. When he climbs the trellis outside his girlfriend’s window and witnesses the incestuous rape, the movie moves toward its inevitable conclusion: if there is a God, he has acted as a rapist, as a father who abuses his own children. Gosling realizes his own culpability in the rape of his people and begins to ask the big questions, only to learn that in the opinion of his rabbi there is no God. Had there been a God, he would have rescued his people from the Holocaust. The God of the Exodus would not have suffered his covenant people to endure the Holocaust. After his death, Gosling is shown ascending a staircase, obviously a reference to Jacob’s ladder. He is moving up the staircase toward God. On one landing he encounters the rabbi again. The film ends with the rabbi saying, “There is no one up there.” Gosling keeps climbing anyway.
Christian theology, especially theodicy, has side-stepped the issue of the Holocaust in ways that are all too convenient. Russell’s novel challenges us to examine the object of our faith in light of contemporary realities. We might write both the book and movie off as too pessimistic, but the questions raised do not go away by claiming some tenuous relationship with Jesus by virtue of saying a prayer. In a world that has experienced a Holocaust, the use of atomic weapons by self-proclaimed Christians, a predominantly Christianized country indulging tribal hatred to the point of genocidal slaughter (Rwanda), and an ongoing global conflict with terrorism, theodic questions loom large. How will the community of Christ answer them?
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