To God or not to God

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?

Comments

[Whisky Prajer]

It's interesting that so many of your "theological" posts/observations generate the bulk of public commentary, while your "cultural/literary" posts don't get us much chatter. This post covers both. I think it is provocatively holistic in its perspective, and worthy of careful consideration.

As for my chatter on this post, I'll skip past the motivations of Gosling's character and probe some of the motivations of the film's writers, Henry Bean and Mark Jacobson. I can't help but wonder if B & J consider Danny Balint's (Gosling) pursuit of God the most significant part of the problem. i.e., is it possible that Balint's loathsome "acting out" is a perverse cry for God to prove his loving and just existence? From B & J's perspective, the answer (incestuous rape) is conclusive, and not far removed from Ms. Russell's (and the prophet Isaiah's) provocative proposal. The priest's concluding statement, however, says something larger still: we manufacture the God we respond to.

That, to me, is a very profound statement, with implications that explore the flip-side of "There is no God." If you believe in a god of war, then you speak, pray and behave in the manner of Pat Robertson, or the militant mullahs. That god is an unchallengeable god, even in defeat. On the other hand, if you believe in a loving, sacrificial and suffering god, your behavior reflects that.

This brings to mind an oddball piece I read in GQ last summer: John Jeremiah Sullivan, reporting from Creation. Sullivan proves to be an especially worthy commentator on this scene, because of his "youth conversion experience". He charts his gradual transformation to infidel: The defensive theodicy (that had been) drilled into me during those nights of heady exegesis developed cracks. The hell stuff: I never made peace with it. Human beings were capable of forgiving those who'd done them terrible wrongs, and we all agreed that human beings were maggots compared with God, so what was His trouble, again? I looked around and saw people who'd never have a chance to come to Jesus; they were too badly crippled. Didn't they deserve—more than the rest of us, even—to find His succor, after this life?

I think it's worth trying to "answer" these terrible questions with reciprocal artistry; even argument has its value. And while I'm happy to be among the most vocal supporters of artistry, I still don't think the most profound Rembrandt can beat the act of giving a thirsty child a glass of clean water. Or forgiving one's enemies.

[Whisky Prajer]

If you're curious about the rest of Sullivan's piece, it's been posted here.

[jvpastor]

This may be an incorrect correlation, but I have always categorized the holocaust with the stories of exile in the OT? That certainly does not provide an answer, or explain it away. But it does not seem to be inconsistent. Does this have merit? I have not done any reading on this subject so I am unfamiliar with the prevailing opinions.

[greg]

JV,

I think the exile stories in the OT function at a different level. They are stories of behavior and consequences. Even though I tend to think of the perspective as skewed--I don't really think YHWH brought about wholesale destruction as punishment--the stories are morality tales of a sort. The Holocaust seems a bit different in that the Jewish people were innocent victims of genocidal hatred. Other than some off-kilter uber-fundamentalists, I don't know anyone who seriously blames the Jews for bringing the Holocaust on themselves. Even the white supremacists who hate Jews have chosen to deny the Holocaust rather than blame the Jews themselves.

[jvpastor]

I wasn't not intending to say they brought the holocaust on themselves, just that on the surface it appeared to be consistent with their own stories of how God had dealt with them in the past.

[jvpastor]

I guess if I was a Jew reading the OT through the lens of the holocaust I wonder if I would be surprised?

[greg]

I didn't think you were intending that. I talked to a Jewish friend this morning about post-Holocaust theology. She said that prior to the Holocaust many Jewish congregations had already given up the notion of a God who intervenes in favor of a model of human freedom.

["Prof" Marty]

To the statement, "There is no one up there" - in the great film you referenced btw - perhaps Christians should bear witness to Mark's Baptism story - "There is no one up there" because God has "torn open" the heavens to come down here.

But, that might include us living up to Jesus' call to discipleship in Mark's Gospel which would, well, cost us too much.

The Centurion, also in Mark's Gospel, only "gets it" after the temple curtain is "torn open" . . . but perhaps the Centurion, like us, gets it too late . . .

Unless of course, we take the resurrection seriously.

[Travis the Okie Vegan]

Greg,

haven't seen "The Believer", but is Gosling's continuing climb, in the face of the rabbi's admonition that there is no one (implicitly, God) "up there", perhaps an allegory? - w/ no God up there to deliver justice, peace, and mercy, we, humanity, must take up the mantle of God - echoes of Feuerbach: we made God (at least in terms of her/his omnibenevolence) in our own ideal ethical image, now it's time for us to live up to that image - maybe that's what Christ is calling us to do - the Johannine Christ proclaimed his divinity, his unity w/ God, and called us to be one w/ him, one w/ God - perhaps if we tried to live up to a truly Christian, truly divine morality, we'd have no more Rwandas, no more Holocausts, no more Inquisitions, etc.

[greg]

Travis, WP, and Prof Marty,

See tomorrow's entry re: your remarks. Short answer is I agree with what you're saying, and Marty will recognize tomorrow's post from a discussion we had about the Megilloth a year ago. I was going to do it tonight, but Robertson's arrogance was finally getting under my skin.