Atonement and Biblical Criticism

A couple nights ago my wife and I finally watched a movie that has been on our "must see" list for a long time -- Atonement. Please don't read this entry if you plan to watch it and don't want the ending spoiled. First, I have to say that I loved the movie because it made me think. In short, it is a simple story about two young passionate lovers who are driven apart by an injustice perpetrated by an envious young sister who bears false testimony against Robbie, the young man, which results in his imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. As time goes on, the younger sister, Briony, realizes the evil she has done and tries to atone for her own sin by repudiating her previous testimony. The finale of the movie fast forwards to the end of Briony's life as an old woman in which she has become a famous novelist. On a television interview, she explains that the final novel of her career is an autobiographical tale about her own guilt at having split apart her sister and lover. The surprise at the end to viewers of the movie is that much of what they have just seen (a happy reunion of the lover and Briony's repentance) is a fiction (we watched the way that Briony told her story in her novel), but that what happened in reality is that both Robbie and his lover, Cecilia, died during the war years without ever having been reunited.

The agenda of the movie is clearly this: a beautiful lie is better than the ugly truth. This is not a new agenda for Hollywood. Another classic example is the Italian film Life is Beautiful, which happens to be another of my favorite movies. Rather than face the harsh reality of the real world, we create fictions that help us cope with reality. We willingly embrace "the matrix" rather than take the pill that enables us to see things as we are. Whereas The Matrix extols the virtues of truth-seeking, Atonement and Life is Beautiful disagree -- they extol the virtue of lying. It is lying with a cause, the very noble cause of human happiness.

It occurred to me as I watched the film that many liberal Biblical scholars such as Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong (if you can call him a scholar) actually believe that the Jesus story is nothing more than a beautiful fiction -- a fiction that has caused a great deal of good in this world, but a fiction nonetheless. The real story goes like this: a young Jewish girl gets gang raped, has a bastard son, the boy grows up and teaches people how to love one another, instructs his followers to call God their "father," and then gets killed for his radical teachings about the beauty of the human heart. It is a beautiful story -- dare I say a compelling story. But the story found in the Bible -- the one about the virgin birth, the atonement, and the resurrection -- is a really nice fiction. It didn't actually happen that way.

I disagree with those who produced Atonement. I don't want a fiction even if it does make me feel good. I want the truth. If the man we call Jesus of Nazareth is dead and his bones are rotting in a grave somewhere, I want to know it -- even if it hurts me. And if Jesus' bones are in the grave and the story is just what the liberals say it is -- just a beautiful account of human love, then I say, "Forget it." Either God raised Jesus from the dead or He didn't. And if he didn't, then this whole mess we call Christianity is just that -- a mess, a farce, a fraud, and (as Nietzsche would say) actually an evil.

I do not believe that I am committed to a beautiful lie. I believe that is just so happens that truth, beauty, and goodness actually do meet in one person, in one grand reality. I believe that ultimate power actually was revealed in the cross and then in the empty tomb. I believe that the meek really will inherit the earth. That's not just some cute, poetic, sentimental ideal. Briony's fiction is an evil. Robbie and Cecilia are dead and she should have told the world that fact. If the gospel writers turn out to be a bunch of Brionys, I have no hope.

But I don't think they are.

The Great Question

As one who sometimes barely holds on to the Christian faith at times, I am haunted by the recent disasters in Burma and China. In my opinion, the single greatest argument for atheism is what philosophers of religion call "the problem of evil." Briefly stated, the argument goes like this: 1) God is all powerful, 2) God is good, 3) Evil exists. One of these three things, they argue, cannot be true for if God is all powerful and all good, then he could prevent evil from taking place. While I subscribe to a free will theodicy which accounts for much of the evils in this world (such as the Holocaust), I have less to say in the face of cyclones and earthquakes -- those events that many call "acts of God." While I have wrestled with this question for years (I took a course on it in college and another in seminary), the force of evil still hits me when I see pictures like this taken in China's Sichuan province by the BBC:


Who cannot cry out to God "Where are you!?!" in the face of such horrendous evil? I sit in silence and ask "why" and oftentimes do not come up with an answer.

And yet I cling to faith. It is all I have. I cling to the hope that God will somehow, someday make all things new and set these evils aright. I cling to the hope that this child buried under the rubble is either now or soon will be riotously celebrated in the kingdom of God to such an extent that her suffering on earth will seem small and trivial.

Of all the books I have read on the subject, David Bentley Hart's short piece of poetry-philosophy is the best. In his book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? he writes the following:

"As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy. Such faith might never seem credible to someone like Ivan Karamozov, or still the disquiet of his conscience, or give him peace in place of rebellion, but neither is it a faith that his arguments can defeat: for it is a faith that set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead. Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history's many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe all tears away from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, 'Behold, I make all things new.'"

That is an answer! That is the hope I cling to.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.

A Remarkable Life

This semester I have been able to sit at the feet of a truly remarkable woman, Meesaeng Lee Choi, a Korean Christian who now teaches the History of the Holiness Movement here at Asbury. Dr. Choi testifies to having experienced entire sanctification in August of 1981 while kneeling beside her bed one evening after several hours of prayer. Through the death of her father at a young age and a very painful childhood, Dr. Choi eventually came to Christianity in college and experienced the "baptism of the Holy Spirit" a few years later. To my knowledge, she is the one person I have come across who will look me in the eye and say, "I have been entirely sanctified."

This fascinates me. Why is it that an experience so central to the fabric of the historic American holiness movement of the 19th century is so rare? Why does this Korean woman alone testify to having had the experience of full salvation, inner cleansing, and Christian perfection? I must admit that the culture gap between Dr. Choi and myself is huge. Many things she says and testifies to do not fit well with my Western, modernistic framework. And yet, even from a Western scientific perspective, I must admit her testimony as evidence and weigh it carefully. Here are some of the more radical claims that she makes:

1) She claims to only sleep about 4-5 hours/night because she is so excited to spend time in prayer. This was not the case before her 1981 experience.

2) She has witnessed multiple miraculous healings and believes that the American church has forgotten the fact that divine physical healing was the primary method for spreading the gospel during the first three centuries of the church. She regularly participated in meetings in Korea on Friday nights which would last for 6-7 hours each -- a room filled with loud prayer and miraculous healings of those with even terminal diseases. She attributes the radical growth of the church in Korea to this fact.

3) She claims that most miraculous healings take place after 3-7 days of communal fasting.

4) When I asked her why the Korean church seems so vibrant and the American church seems so apathetic, she answered with one word: prayer. Korean Christians pray like mad (usually in large groups for 2-3 hours early each morning before breakfast).

5) Dr. Choi claims to be almost insanely happy. She admits that she is often troubled in her spirit and that she still suffers a great deal (from spiritual forces), but she radiates with a joy and vibrancy I have not seen before. For Dr. Choi, holiness and happiness are the same. And she is perfectly happy.

6) She likes to say that "death is the final healing." She does not fear death in the least.

Sitting at the feet of this woman for the past 12 weeks has challenged me in many ways. I have realized that my own view of Christianity is far too small. God is doing things in cultures that I barely even understand. My modernist, Western culture predisposes me to look askance at the supernatural. And yet I cannot deny the testimony of this woman any more than I can deny the testimonies of hundreds of thousands of Christians in Asia, Africa, and South America. In my search for Truth (aka God), I must listen to her voice.

Love

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds;
O no, it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempers and is never shaken;
... Love's not time's fool, though rosy cheeks and lips
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

- William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

Ali Hussein

This two-year old boy named Ali was killed in an explosion in Iraq on April 29th. I ask you to look into his face for at least 30 seconds and then ask: "Does any principle, no matter how lofty, justify this?"

I'm pissed right now at my own nation which began this conflict and at my own church which has largely supported it. The church kept silent as our country marched to war and, in fact, condoned this brutality by blindly supporting a so-called "Christian" presidential administration.

I feel the need to allow some vitriolic sarcasm to escape my lips. I pray the prayer of Mark Twain: "O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale form of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolate land in rags and hunger and thirst."

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.