Calvin without Hobbes

In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, there's an article entitled "Who Would Jesus Smack Down?" about Mark Driscoll and an apparently surging movement of neo-Calvinism in the Pacific Northwest.

Yep, Calvinism. As in John Calvin. As in the Puritans. As in predestination. As in every man, woman, boy, and girl, is predestined, preselected for heaven or hell. As in beyond a rather fuzzy notion that those chosen for paradise are likely to engage in the sort of good works we would associate with being heaven-bound, nothing that you do during your relatively short life makes any difference vis-a-vis the eternal results -- not even, presumably, whether you, say, actually believe in God.

Now, that may, in fact, be a endpoint of logical necessity given a few other tenets of traditional Christian theology (namely, God knows everything and nothing that you do could ever, ever, ever make you worthy of such a gift as God's grace), but, you know, come on.

The article, in any case, is fun. As it should be. There's a great quote from Driscoll claiming the modern conception of Jesus to be "a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ... a limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture."

Nice.

But what struck me, really struck me, what made me actually want to write about the thing for a few minutes, to use this online journal to make some thoughts relatively permanent, was this paraphrased claim from a member of Driscoll's church: Reducing God to a projection of our own wishes trivializes divine sovereignty.

Right. And then, of course, you have to make a choice, a choice that any honest person should make: believe wholeheartedly (and, again, honestly) in a God that is truly omnipotent, that truly acts in the world in all things, that truly has a plan-with-a-capital-P, that not only grants you the life that you have but also takes it away, that not only grants some people freedom from pancreatic cancer but also gives it to others, that not only made the acorn but also the Huntington's disease; or wholeheartedly (and, again, honestly) reject the very premise of the existence of such a sovereign being.

No fuzzy middle-ground. Take your beliefs all the way to their logical ends. No subscribing to ultimately contradictory notions like "everyone chooses his own fate" or "everything is a part of a grand plan and I choose to be a part of that plan."

But, then, even the theoretically non-fuzzy Calvinism has, at its heart, fundamental fuzz, as the article's author points out: "God has predestined every human being's actions, yet we are still to blame for our sins; we are totally depraved, yet held to the impossible standard of divine law."

(No need, even, to point out the fuzz in the point at which John Calvin's beliefs and his life meet, the point that allows him to order heretics burned to death).

By chance, we just finished reading The Stranger in AP English.

And, in another pleasant dovetailing, the "Uber-Jesus" article is followed by Steven Pinker thoughtpiece exploring our genes' influence on our behavior.

Mo' Movies

And I finally saw Pan's Labyrinth last week.

And I reacted to it essentially as I reacted to Children of Men, which is to say that I liked it, found a few sequences to be brilliant, but could not understand, in the end, what all the fuss was about, really.

Children of Men had an amazing sense of itself visually. And it was wonderful to see something that understood, for the most part, the power of a single image. But the writing? Awful. I loved the fast car chase, the slow car chase, the broken David, the Pink Floyd pig, the long, long tracking shot in the climactic sequence, the distance that we're forced to keep from the death of Michael Caine's character, and the terrifying madness of the refugee camp, but the dialogue killed me at almost every turn.

Plus, someone seriously needed to scale back the Jesus imagery.

In any case, Pan's Labyrinth has, like Children of Men, a couple of amazing components (the close miking of everything, the eyeball guy, the ambiguity of the treatment of the resistence, the performance of the lead), but lost me with its insistence that El Capitan be completely and worthlessly evil, and, in a mind-boggling reversal of so much that the film seems to espouse in the conclusion when our hero finds paradise to be, in essence, a monarchy.

That's the opposite of fascism? Rule by a king and queen?

Please.

Sure, in fairy tales, the kings and queens (when not wicked) tend to take the interests, the hopes, the dreams of their subjects to heart -- but, those subjects, those people, those individuals, are still subjects.