To Malick’s “Wonder”

To the Wonder Malick

Terrence Malick’s latest, To the Wonder, is an apt follow-up to the enigmatic director’s 2011 classic, The Tree of Life. Both films are beautiful experiences of image and sound, deeply personal memoirs and heartfelt explorations of Christian faith.

To the Wonder has received substantially fewer enthusiastic reviews than Life, however. It’s not a film likely to show up on anyone’s “Greatest Films of all Time” list (as Life did for the late, great Roger Ebert). Why is that? I suspect it has to do with the fact that the film is not nearly as flashy and majestic as Life. There are no nebulae or dinosaurs. The world of Wonder is ho-hum by comparison. The Sonics and strip malls everywhere don’t help. And unlike all of Malick’s other films, it’s not a period piece or in any way exotic. Aside from a few dreamy sequences in France, Wonder is about American suburbia and its attendant quotidian struggles.

At least on the surface. Wonder, I think, is a far more substantial film than many assessments have pronounced it. Far from the “minor Malick” some have labeled it (or at best: “a B-side to The Tree of Life), Wonder is a characteristically ambitious, boundary-pushing film that builds upon the stylistic and thematic trajectories of its predecessors in the Malick oeuvre. I’ve now seen the film three times, and each viewing (as is the case with all of Malick’s meticulously assembled works of cinematic art) reveals new details, thoughts, emotions, epiphanies. Malick’s collaborators—especially production designer Jack Fisk—are all detail people, and it shows. Notice the extensive attention given to space, architecture, rooms, furniture, decor (yep, that’s a globe!) and appliances, for example. The geographies and materiality of everyday life are of great interest to Malick, likely in part because of his interests in Heideggerian phenomenology.

To the Wonder is challenging, to be sure. It’s not at all clear what the film is chiefly about. Love, perhaps? Marriage and parenting? Suffering? Dasein? In some areas, though, Wonder is more overt than Malick’s last few films have been. Take its treatment of Christian faith, for example. The film is imbued with it at every turn. Malick goes so far as to have a priest (Javier Bardem’s “Father Quintana”) as a central character, with his heartfelt homilies and prayers giving the film a liturgical directness that follows from but goes farther than even The Tree of Life.

Sadly, most critics have failed to adequately engage the Christian elements of the film, which are aplenty. Perhaps that’s because we have such a dearth of films like this, which earnestly—sans cynicism or irony—explore Christian faith without preaching or offering pat answers. (Though there are some out there).

In my review for Christianity Today, however, I try to engage the film on this level, making sense of Malick’s spiritual preoccupations in Wonder as well as his other five films. Below is an excerpt from my review, the entirety of which can be read here.

Though many of Malick’s characters struggle with faith and feel God to be distant (Mrs. O’Brien in The Tree of Life, Pocahontas in The New World, Sgt. Welsh in The Thin Red Line), most of them—through encounters with Love or with beauty—come back to a place of belief. Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) in To the Wonder, for example, remains thirsty for God the whole film, even in the midst of suffering. In a beautiful sequence Quintana quotes part of St. Patrick’s Lorica in a prayer that encapsulates the film’s underlying vision:

Teach us where to seek you. Christ be with me. Christ before me. Christ behind me.Christ in me. Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ on my right. Christ on my left. Christ in my heart. Thirsty. We thirst. Flood our souls with your spirit and life so completely that our lives may only be a reflection of you. Shine through us. Show us how to seek you. We were made to see you.

Immediately prior to this prayer, Malick’s curious gaze lands on a nun, fully outfitted in habit, standing at a kitchen sink alone, washing silverware. We then see that it is actually Quintana looking at her, and we see that he is moved. In one image: the sacred and the mundane; work and worship; washing away the stain; the specter of Eden in a household chore. In a way the moment echoes the final voiceover of the soldiers leaving Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line, looking out on the blood-soaked beaches and the baptismal wake of the departing boat: “Darkness and light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face?”

I suspect Malick’s answer is yes. Pain, struggle, loss, strife: it’s all an opportunity to see the face of God and to grow in faith. Just as nature was created to be resilient in the midst of difficulty (see the asteroid in The Tree of Life, or the palm shoot springing up from the bombed out beach in the final shot of The Thin Red Line), humans were created to press on and grow, emboldened by the grace, forgiveness and guiding Spirit of “the Love that loves us,” come what way.

If you’re interested and have some spare minutes, read the rest of my review here, as well as this one by Richard Brody in The New Yorker, and this piece which offers great insights into Malick’s creative process on the film. Also, if you have not yet seen the film on the big screen—and I highly suggest this format for viewing any Malick film—check this list of current theaters where the film can be found.

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Evangelicals and Foreign Adoption

Editor’s Note: I’m pleased to host this reflection on adoption by Maralee Bradley. As longtime readers know, I’ve kept one eye on the evangelical adoption movement. This is a very personal and very difficult subject for many people, and worth considering carefully.

As the parent of a child who lived for a year in a Liberian orphanage, Kathryn Joyce’s article about the evangelical adoption movement disturbed me. It gave me that sinking feeling in my gut. You know the one—like seeing your cousin’s mugshot pop up unexpectedly while watching the evening news. You knew your cousin was a little troubled, but you still feel protective of his reputation and by extension, yours.

Joyce has strong words about the ethics of the agencies and families engaged in international adoption. As an example of how that movement can go astray she speaks extensively about the adoption of children from Liberia. She details the mistreatment of those kids when they arrived in the US with more problems than their families were prepared to handle and how this led to children suffering in abusive homes, kids being shipped back, and eventually the shutdown of adoptions from Liberia entirely. This all strikes entirely too close to home for me.

You see, we’re one of those “crazy” evangelical adoptive families that anxiously filled out the paperwork, cried over the pictures of our little malnourished baby, prayed fervently when we heard he was hospitalized with malaria, and when it was all completed took a flight to Liberia to meet our son. We were shocked that within a few hours of being placed in our arms he was looking into our eyes with smiles and giggles. I cried with relief when he peacefully let me give him a bottle and rock him to sleep that first night. After four years of working with older boys from troubled backgrounds through houseparenting at a group home, we felt prepared for anything and expected our son to have struggles. We were aware that orphanage life in a war-torn country could be a recipe for attachment disaster and institutionalization issues. Before boarding the plane for Liberia we read books on bonding, adoption, and Liberian culture. We wanted to be as prepared as possible for whatever his needs might be and expected he might have trouble adjusting to life with us.

Apparently that thought process wasn’t shared by many of our fellow adoptive parents.

Which is why it’s hard to read Joyce’s article. She isn’t wrong when it comes to the sad situations some Liberian children found themselves in. They entered families who were woefully unprepared to deal with their issues and were shocked that this child wasn’t grateful to have been taken from their birth culture and everything they had known. These families did not have the coping skills needed and also lacked support from their agencies to help them work through the issues they encountered. There seems to have been a feeling that a child would be better off in US foster care than in a Liberian orphanage so the agencies were prepared to match a child with a waiting family even if they had an inkling that it wouldn’t last. And if they did try to explain to a waiting family that a child had issues, there was a pervasive belief among adoptive families that once they got the child home, love and good nutrition would fix all their problems.

When “love” wasn’t able to conquer those behaviors and adoptions had to be disrupted, families were devastated. Obviously the adopted child was hurt. But so were the biological or previously adopted children who may have lived in fear or experienced abuse at the hands of a child who had learned terrible coping behaviors in the orphanage. It has broken my heart to see these adopted children slowly disappear from family pictures and hear whispers about behaviors no one could manage and the trauma these families experienced.

And these behaviors shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone with an understanding of the events of Liberia’s recent past. Continue reading →

How to Think About American Politics (by a British Observer)

Editor’s Note: I am thrilled to introduce Alastair Roberts to readers of Mere-O. Since I have started reading him a few months back, he has proved himself to be one of the most thoughtful and charitable interlocutors online. I highly commend the below to you as an astute analysis of our American political environment. You should follow his blog here and follow him on Twitter. –MLA

In a post in response to the US election results, Steve Holmes shares some reflections upon the ‘mutual incomprehension’ among Christians that can be witnessed in many of the reactions and interactions that have followed the news of Obama’s re-election. He remarks on the overwhelmingly positive response to the news among non-American observers and the stark contrast between this and the vituperations, jeremiads, and philippics that have been elicited from some American Christians online.

Holmes invites us to take the incomprehension that exists between various Christians’ political positions in this context as ‘a gift that challenges us to discover the extent to which our opinions are shaped by the gospel, rather than by the culture we inhabit – and that challenges us to understand the breadth of opinions that might be consonant with the gospel.’ Rather than reacting to each other in anger or incredulity, we are invited to the sort of imaginative engagement with a different political perspective that might yield a more irenic spirit and a deeper self-awareness.

Within this piece, I – a moderately left-leaning Englishman – will attempt to work to some degree of understanding of the political imaginations of many American Christians, especially those on the right of the American political spectrum (admittedly, to many of us foreign observers, all leading American politicians can appear to be situated somewhere on the right of our political spectrum). As I am about as far from an authority as you can get on this subject, I would welcome any critical and constructive responses that would further the ends of mutual understanding.

The Unique Character of the American Political Situation

With the connectivity created by the Internet, the geographical and cultural difference between the UK and the US can easily be forgotten, lulling the observer into a false sense of familiarity with a social and political landscape that may be beyond his or her ken. Deceptive commonalities of language and overlapping discourses can also lead to the elision of distinct cultural phenomena. For instance, while the concept of ‘secularism’ plays a prominent role in theological discourse on both sides of the Atlantic, we should be cognizant of the significantly different forms that it takes.

In a similar manner, such expressions as the ‘separation of Church and State’ can have the effect of flattening out the many complex ways in which religious discourse can shape, be present within, and inform the deliberations and conversations of the public square. While England has an established church, the English visitor to America can be taken aback by such things as the greater visibility and assertiveness of Christianity in public discourse, the prevalence and power of American civil religion, and the deep politicization of American Christians. Continue reading →

The Contest Between Evolution and Christianity is a Duel to the Death

Editor’s note: Peter Blair is editor of Fare Forward, one of the best new sites to hit the interwebs in a while. I’m on record saying that it’s like us at Mere-O, only better. I’m thrilled to steal him away for the day. Subscribe to Fare Forward and support the excellent work they are doing. – MLA

I have a theory that much of the modern evolution battle stems from the fact that of the two possible anti-evolutionary narratives the church could have adopted—the scientific and the moral—the scientific critique eventually and unfortunately triumphed.

I first developed this theory while studying the famous Scopes/Monkey trial as an undergraduate. The narrative about the trial I had previously absorbed from the culture and Inherit the Wind proved highly tendentious. People often think of the Scopes trial as one of those classic moments of science/religion conflict, in which the forces of ignorance, cruelty, and superstition squared off against the enlightened, progressive force of science. William Jennings Bryan and his fundamentalist allies sought to squash Scopes’ heroic efforts in the cause of scientific advancement.

Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial: Outdoor proceedings on July 20, 1925, showing William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. [2 of 4 photos] (Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution)

Yet the facts are much more complicated, even bizarre. The trial was deliberately staged in order to test the constitutionality of the Butler Act, which forbid the teaching of evolution. Scopes was unsure whether he had even ever taught evolution in class, but he was willing to claim he did to give the planned trial a defendant.

Even more interesting, however, was Bryan’s role in the proceedings. The Scopes trial pitted Bryan against the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow, and Darrow’s questioning of Bryan about evolution and Biblical literalism during the trial has been immortalized as a glorious moment of triumph for science. It’s widely held that Darrow made Bryan’s fundamentalist position look silly and absurd.

But what’s been left out of our historical memory is the fact that Bryan’s primarily opposition to evolution was moral, not scientific. In Bryan’s time, the scientific theory of evolution was mixed up with all sorts of social Darwinist ideologies that favored eugenics and sterilization, advocated racism, and held that the poor deserved to be poor and should not be helped out of their poverty. The textbook Scopes was accused of teaching from itself advocated for the removal of “feeble-mindedness” from the population through eugenics.

Bryan was a politician who spent his life campaigning for the poor, the weak, the disenfranchised, for the “common man.”* He was horrified by the ideological and moral uses to which evolution was being put in his time. He was disgusted, in general, by the way the scientific technology refused to be constrained by proper moral boundaries. He wrote up some closing remarks for the Scopes trial, but he was never allowed to deliver them. They contain this remarkable passage: Continue reading →

The Dim Future for Liberal Protestantism: Douthat and O’Donovan Together

I haven’t said much about Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion, in part because I’ve found it hard to think straight about a book that commends “mere orthodoxy” as a form of Christian public engagement.

But unlike Chesterton, who gets there through imaginative means, or Lewis’s more properly philosophical approach (in Mere Christianity), the strength of Ross’s apologetic force lies in his cultural analysis. He offers a good dose of that sort of thing in this week’s column, where he suggests that the future of liberal Christianity is not a bright one:

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God … the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.

Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

I was going to set out, believe it or not, to offer a word of gratitude for liberal Protestantism–a word not commonly heard around these parts, but one that I think needs to be mentioned–as I’ve offered my own thoughts on whether Christianity should change (or die) at points in the past. Stagnation sets in precisely when we begin to forget the original reason and meanings of those first principles that are handed down to us, and by forcing us to consistently return to those first principles and seek to understand them anew liberal Christianity has opened a space for a renewed and reinvigorated theological conservatism.

But then I realized that lingering somewhere in the background of these hastily formed thoughts was a bit from O’Donovan that I had read some time back from his brilliant book on homosexuality:

When qualifying a religious posture, “liberal” suggests independence in relation to spiritual authorities, scriptural, hierarchical or congregational. This distance may be no more than a questioning habit of mind, an independence of judgment that may lead back to a new and clarified recognition of authority. It may, on the other hand, be a deep alienation that fosters resentments that never quite proceed to an open breach. There is no way of telling apriori where on the spectrum of distance any “liberal” proposal will turn out to lie. It may be renewing; it may be subversive. The tree will be known by its fruits, and by nothing else. Yet in the lowering gloom of the Liberal Christian evening, we ought to begin by acknowledging the good that has been wrought in its day. No major theological voice of our age has failed to have its intonations deepened by what the Archbishop of Canterbury describes as its “habit of cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility that does not seek to close down unexpected questions too quickly.” For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful!

O’Donovan isn’t done, of course, and he proceeds to analyze liberal Christianity with an eye toward its failure to critique the moral intuitions of our day (at least within the British context, I should note, and add the qualification that O’Donovan’s is a “thumbnail sketch” and an intentional caricature). As he puts it:

In the interests of finding the modern world God-enchanted, [liberal Christianity] closed down on the serious deliberation with which Christians ought to weigh their stance of witness in the world. Potentially world-critical questions were suppressed. Liberal moral commitments, though sometimes urged with a passion verging on outright moralism, were not steered from the helm of discursive enquiry, but set adrift on the moral currents of the day….The tragic fault of liberal Christianity was to have no critical purchase on moral intuitions comparable to that which it had on doctrinal judgments. Precisely for that reason liberalism proved vulnerable when twentieth-century society began to be riven through with deep moral fissures. In affirming the world, liberal theology condemned itself to shipwreck on the same rocks where a unified modern civilisation broke up.

If O’Donovan is right that liberalism “treats the moral questions of the age as moral certainties,” then it means Ross’s suggestion that liberal Christians should pause amidst their renovations to consider “what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world” will not have an audience that could consider it and still hold on to the core principles of liberalism as such. As Stephen Holmes puts it, “Giving priority to personal experience will inevitably lead to the embracing of an ethic that reflects the general ethic of the culture to which (the majority of) the denomination’s members belong.”

Yes, it does. But it also makes self-critique problematic, for to do so is simply to call our experience into question and judge it according to a standard beyond it. The strong self-congratulatory streak among younger evangelicals is as good a sign as any that we are fast down the liberal trail.

Of course, O’Donovan’s theological analysis should be offset with Ross’s social observations about the decline of mainline Protestantism’s prestige. After all, the moral intutions to which the mainline Protestants have sought to appeal are not any moral intuitions. They have saved plenty of scorn for conservative ones, after all, some of which doubtlessly count as those included within “the world” that O’Donovan says is at the heart of the liberal theological affirmation. The broad theological point needs to be more narrowly circumscribed so that it takes into account the institutional influence that mainline Protestants once enjoyed, an influence that the “change or die” narrative must perpetually remind the world of for its transformational force.

Desiderius Erasmus and “It wasn’t me, it was God”

For Erasmus, grace is active in our acting, in the beauty of virtue displayed that engages and transforms our affections, allowing us to play a part that becomes our own as we play it. […] Erasmus subverts the distinction between acting and being acted upon, fiction and reality, hypocrisy and honesty. Accepting the essential theatricality of virtue involves embracing a paradoxical convergence of outer and inner, ideal and real, grace and nature, other and self. It gives up the preoccupation with control betrayed by the need to draw clear distinctions between self and not-self, acting and being acted upon, giving and receiving.

– Jennifer Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices¹

It’s time to reconsider the phrase, “It wasn’t me. It was God.” This phrase, often used by individuals who have accomplished things they consider impressive, has two purposes: 1) to deny credit to the self and 2) to give credit to God.

Yet it’s problematic because it draws too strict a bifurcation between divine and human agency. What’s more, the phrase carries within it an inadequate account of humility.

As Herdt writes in the above, “For Erasmus, grace is active in our acting[.]” Setting aside his semi-Pelagian tendencies for a moment, we can join Erasmus in recognizing that God works through human agency without overwhelming it. There is no reason to be ashamed of our agency, least of all when we have done something praiseworthy. Grace is active in our acting.

Consider Paul’s claim, “I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor 9:27).² It is Paul who disciplines his body and keeps it under control. Is it also God, through Paul? Of course, but Paul does not think it necessary to deny his own agency in order to affirm God’s.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69–1536) in a 1523 portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Affirming that God works through our agency helps us to be alert to the development of character over time. God not only is active in our acting, he is active through the ongoing transformation of our dispositions. Herdt completes the sentence quoted above by saying, “For Erasmus, grace is active in our acting, in the beauty of virtue displayed that engages and transforms our affections, allowing us to play a part that becomes our own as we play it.”³

That is to say, God changes us as we act, so that repeated virtuous actions become habits as we fall in love with the image of Christ that we begin to see in ourselves. “It wasn’t me; it was God,” suggests that I do not need to take seriously the fact that I am (gradually, in fits and starts) becoming more like God.⁴ Whatever I have accomplished, I have done it because God has created me in his image and is refining me by his Spirit to be more like his Son.⁵

The lurking issue beneath the phrase is how to conceive the relationship between divine and human agency with regard to the good deeds of Christians. Herdt invites us to join Erasmus in “giv[ing] up the preoccupation with control betrayed by the need to draw clear distinctions between self and not-self, acting and being acted upon, giving and receiving.” Was it I, or was it God? It was both. In Christ, the Holy Spirit in some sense unites the self with God. As Paul says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).⁶

Yet if the phrase is meant to connote humility, then we need an account of the virtue that allows us to recognize our own praiseworthy actions. Augustine provides just such an account by defining humility as the acknowledgment of dependence on God. This simple definition clears away any confusion between humility and self-deprecation. It is not humble for me to deny my own goodness or ability. It is humble for me to recognize what God has done in me and to be awed by it, because I am simultaneously aware of all my wickedness and corruption that—were grace not active in my acting—would surely prevent me from doing anything that could bring glory to my Lord.

Peter Kreeft tells a story about how in heaven I will be exactly as pleased when someone else paints a masterpiece as I am when I paint a masterpiece. Freed from insecurity and envy, I will rejoice freely when God is glorified, whether through my abilities or through another’s.

Perhaps, then, we can feel free to acknowledge our dependence on and gratitude to God without finding it necessary to deny our own involvement in our accomplishments.

¹ Jennifer Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008), p. 119.
² All Biblical quotations are taken from the English Standard Version (ESV).
³ Is Herdt providing an Edwardsian reading of Erasmus? The precise arrangement here of beauty, virtue, and the transformation of affections is reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards’ language.
⁴ See 2 Cor 3:18; Rom 8:29; Eph 5:1; Lev 20:26.
⁵ We might argue, along the same lines, that there is not enough emphasis on sanctification of the whole person over time in the WWJD brand of popular ethical reflection.
⁶ The deepest account of the relation between divine and human agency that I am aware of is Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of the Will. Readers interested in a more detailed delineation of the type of compatibilism suggested by the present discussion cannot do better than to look to Edwards.

Dwight Moody, Heaven, and the Resurrection of the Body

N.T. Wright’s works have had many good effects. Inspiring eager readers to police people’s use of heaven is not one of them. ”Heaven” in much of evangelical discourse functions as shorthand for a whole nexus of ideas that are, well, pretty Biblical and not nearly as opposed to the body as Wright made it seem. The difference is one of emphasis, which is important but not everything.

To underscore the point, I decided to excerpt a little from Earthen Vessels about D.L. Moody’s understanding of the body.

English: Dwight Lyman Moody, founder of the Northfield Seminary, Mount Hermon School, and the Moody Bible Institute, circa 1900. Edited image from the Library of Congress (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

D.L. Moody was one of America’s most famous preachers in the early 1900s and a central figure in one of evangelicalism’s dominant strands: the revivalist movement. The revivalists have been (often justly) criticized for developing a theology that was inwardly focused and a piety that is wrapped up in spiritual experiences; all the sorts of things that generally accompany distaste for the physical body.

Moody, however, has a more nuanced view of the body than we might expect. Consider what he wrote before dying, a passage that his son would use to open his biography:

Someday you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody of East Northfield is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal—a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint; a body fashioned like unto His glorious body.[39] It is as clear a statement about the hope of the resurrection as one could possibly hope for.

When it comes to the afterlife, N. T. Wright is correct that Moody’s focus is on “heaven,” which Moody thinks is “up there,” and that it is a place where we will someday “go.”

But even though Moody reads John’s description of “streets of gold” rather literally, heaven is not a glorious place because of the stones or the physical splendor but because of the presence of the triune God. Throughout his sermons, Moody is always focused on the center of theology—God. But the center doesn’t consume everything else, and Moody never rejects the resurrection of the body. In fact, in his sermon on the resurrection of Jesus, he suggests that it and the cross are the “chief cornerstones of the religion of Jesus Christ.” And that has serious implications for us as believers:

We shall come up from the grave, by and by, with a shout. “He is the first fruits;” he has gone into the vale, and will call us by and by. The voice of the Son of God shall wake up the slumbering dead! Jacob will leave his lameness, and Paul will leave his thorn in the flesh; and we shall come up resurrected bodies, and be forever with the Lord.

Moody clearly isn’t bashful speaking about the resurrection of the body, even though he emphasizes the presence of God in the afterlife rather than the resurrection of our physical bodies.

Culture, politics, and religion for those who love words.

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