Imagination and Supermodernity

Someone once said that chance is the word we use for processes too complex for us to understand. While this quip is hardly helpful in a practical sense, in a very important way to be a Theist means to believe just this - that the universe is essentially ordered according to the nature and will of a supreme being, and that all events, no matter how seemingly chaotic, are in some sense governed by the will of the one that brought all things into being. On the micro-level, of course, this seemingly simple idea can spawn rather interesting and tricky thoughts!

I just watched The Science of Sleep last night, and I must say that I had a delightfully thoughtful viewing experience. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have a weakness for "artsy" and somewhat melancholy indi films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (another Gondry film) and Garden State. But perhaps the most striking thing to me about this particular film was the tension raised by the very theme that I mentioned above... a theme that has become an increasingly common one in modern film (Gondry can't seem to get away from it).

At one of the key moments in "The Science of Sleep", the female antagonist (?) muses that "randomness is so difficult to achieve... things are always falling back into pattern and order". This sentiment serves as an essential tension in the film, as Gondry's characteristic interplay between imagination and reality works itself out in the story through the struggle of the main character (Stephane) - who is continually confusing the rather vivid imaginary events of his dreams with events in real life - to wade through his own imaginative commentary and arrive at a true understanding of the woman he loves. The filmmaker, of course, seems to indicate that chaos is the essential nature of reality, and that our difficulty in achieving understanding in our life is due to the fact that we, as creative beings, are always going about sorting these truly random details into structures and trying to make sense of the world. On the downside, of course, this stance must necessarily paint a bleak outlook of our chances for forming coherent "beliefs" about the world we live in. The cosmological confusion, however, is hardly the most interesting part of Gondry's project. In painting the struggle of Stephan, the movie rather brilliantly portrays the very real danger that we face as subcreative, organizing beings when we set out to make sense of the world around us.

Stephane's dreams, like many of our own, are epic amplifiers of feelings and events in his day to day existence , and are always "sorting" the elements of waking life into strange, sometimes hopeful, sometimes depressing, and often fantastic renderings. The difficulty that Gondry highlights here is the very real sense in which our life as limited human beings is a product of our own creative filtering, organization and commentary. While we may be certain of the existence of absolute order in the cosmos, we are not always objectively privy to an understanding of the true meaning or significance of the events that occur in every day life. Many details we simply ignore, and many interactions we choose to view, like Stephane, through the tinted lens of our own presuppositions.

This difficulty often gets us into trouble. Our prejudices can blind us to the good intentions of others. Our fears can keep us stubbornly trapped inside of a small construction of reality and can lead us to "villainize" and avoid true and beautiful elements that simply do not fit into the picture that we have made. We are constantly facing the danger in our lives of willingly letting our creative impulse overwhelm or confuse our perception.

So what does the film suggest as a antidote to this dilemma? What else, but an open eye and a moderation of the impulse to draw unwarranted conclusions. The universe is a remarkably complex thing, and it is fascinating to note the way in which our imagination can so brilliantly boil things down to delightfully tidy packages. It is important, however, that we remember to separate these simplifications of reality (these stories, if you will) from an ultimate understanding of the universe. No merely human story is an exhaustive retelling of reality. No ideology can capture the fullness of the God-created cosmos. When Stephane collapses in frustration at the end of the movie, he notices that his would-be-love has actually fulfilled every promise that he, in fear, did not believe she had fulfilled.

It is important that we remember, as much as possible, to trust in the wisdom of our all-powerful God, to doubt as much as possible our sinful and deceptive hearts, and to learn to keep an open mind about how the world is ultimately ordered.

Neo-Gnosticism and Easy Theology

The truly remarkable thing about Christianity is the fact that it refuses to be nailed down by simple philosophical or doctrinal presuppositions. Try as some have over the ages, they simply have not been able to fit this faith of ours into any tidy categories or comfortable social gospels... the true witness of the Apostles in Scripture and church tradition has soundly resisted all attempts to do so.

The Gospel of Christ is always expanding itself beyond comfortable norms and smug simplifications, convicting the slothfully content and preaching humility to the proud and the arrogant.

This is why debates about things such as predestination are so frustrating and even ultimately dangerous. While it may be important to be able to articulate (in some sense) the nature both of God's true and real sovereignty over His creation and our troublingly apparent ability to set our will against our Creator, it is ridiculous to settle for any position that makes no practical sense of either the nature of God or our own human experience! Both strict determinism and Armenian free will are drastically simplistic philosophical positions that fail to articulate either the fullness of the revealed nature of God or the aim of the Christian life in a way that is helpful to mere humans that are struggling through daily life and apparent freedom. When we settle for such articulations, we do not merely expose ourselves to pride and error, we also run the risk of letting everything that our simple philosophical positions ignore actually dominate our lives and our thinking behind our backs.

A perfect (and more dangerous) example of this phenomenon is the apparent neo-gnosticism of much of our own popular Christian culture. Most Christians will say that they believe in the incarnation of Christ and the bodily resurrection of the dead... but how many of us truly understand the implications of this reality? How often do you find in the church a reasonable understanding of the significance of physical and material presence in the reality of our spiritual life?

In the righteous ardour of our "sola fide" thinking, it seems that a subtle error has crept into our theology (though once again, not into our daily living). We say that in Christ the fullness of the Deity dwelt bodily (Col. 2:9), and we acknowledge that it is through Christ's physical death and resurrection that we have obtained life... but somehow we are unable even to hear a strong statement about the effective power of baptism or holy communion without falling into a panic. My point here is not so much a theological one - that baptism , for instance, is actually necessary or not necessary for salvation. My point is that our immediate suspicion of the power of physical processes may be more suspect than the power of those physical processes themselves. Do we believe that the bodily aspect of Christ's salvific actions were irrelevant to our salvation? Do we really think that "grace through faith" means that faith entails mere cognitive acceptance of theological propositions? I think that this whole train of belief smells of gnosticism.

The belief that body is bad and spirit is good may be far from the living practice of modern-day Christians, but our denial of any physical instrumentality in spiritual processes indicates that something is rotten with our theological presuppositions. The fact that no one actually lives as though gnosticism is true can be seen clearly by the great care that we take to keep our bodies fed and clothed and content. The great majority of our time is spent looking after bodily needs, and we fully acknowledge the spiritual aspect of physical actions such as addiction and adultery. How then in our thinking have we come to deny the power of bodily action for the good of our souls! How have we left off of fasting and kneeling and verbal confession... of denying ourselves and taking for our salvation the true body and blood of Christ?

What I am not saying is that we can build a tower up to heaven... No one in their right mind really believes that we creatures possess saving power inherent to ourselves, and that we are able to thus "work" our way to heaven by our own physical strength. The issue here is not an issue of "works vs. faith" in salvation. The issue is whether or not we allow our understanding to acknowledge that the grace of Christ uses physical processes to accomplish spiritual ends.

The inherent danger in denying this principle is great. I have Christian friends who pray and meditate and think nothing of their addiction to pornography or their damaging relational isolation. They are convinced that their cognitive assent to theological principles has been credited to them as righteousness, and they wait patiently for the free gift of sanctification, trying desperately to ignore their spiritual loneliness and deep inner turmoil. The true Gospel of Christ is radically against such false notions of grace and the power of God. We are physical beings as well as spiritual beings, and there is no salvation of our souls that does not include an element of salvation for our bodies as well. To say that God "declares" us righteous - as though our fall had only to do with an arbitrary penalty imposed by abstract legal considerations - is to completely ignore the true and dire ramifications of both the fall and of salvation, and serves ultimately only to numb the mind of the modern Christian with vague notions of metaphysical transactions that make no sense of the present and actual guilt, error and brokenness of our fallen humanity.

What our modern age needs to see is that what we do (or do not do) affects our spiritual condition. If we are to trust God to make us righteous, this work of grace must change our bodies if it is to change our souls, and the bodily change requires the same active obedience that we take for granted in our mental progress. All of the well-meaning and theoretical assent in the world would not have worked for our salvation if Christ had not consented to undergo the physical trial of death and resurrection. This spiritual end was obtained by a physical means because there is not a tidy separation between the two. Any dichotomy that we work to create in this regard does not change this fundamental truth of reality... it serves only to hamper our ability to truly discern our own spiritual condition, and as we hinted at earlier, this very denial of reality makes us blind to the ways in which our souls are truly being affected, and lets our spiritual sickness spread through neglect. So why aren't we thinking about what our bodies are doing? And why don't we want our Scriptures, our holy men or our church to be telling us what the Gospel has to say about what we ought to be doing with our bodies to be saved?

The Passions and Mere Humanity

I think it is safe to say that I have always been troubled to understand the role of "earthly" activity in the Christian life. In my early years, the tension was between playing games with my brother (the earthly activity) and praying or sharing my faith with others (the "spiritual" activity). Now it is between seeking after spiritual discipline, pursuing pure prayer, practicing quiet contemplation of God, or giving alms to the needy and watching movies, writing poetry, listening to music and riding my motorcycle. Some of the spiritual growth achieved at the Torrey Honors Institute has helped me come to more fully understand the sense in which God's redemption, beauty, goodness and truth can be present in these "merely human" activities... but at the end of the day there is still a difficult tension there.

Perhaps I have been reading too much Philokalia, but I am truly confused as to the worth of human amusements and earthly pleasures. Certainly there is nothing inherently sinful about enjoying a scoop of ice-cream or a well-composed song... but what about this "race" and "fight" terminology that keeps creeping into Paul's epistles. There is a strong sense in the teachings of Christ (and the early monastics who sought to take His words quite literally) that all earthly pursuits are vain and dangerous - at best a waste of time and at worst the tyrannical workings of the devil that seek to mire you down and bring you into bondage. There is a clear danger in any "merely human" enjoyment of becoming a slave to that enjoyment... of letting it rule you and being content to serve it with your body while confessing Christ with your lips. So how do we, as Christians, avoid this danger if we are to continue living in the world? How do we keep ourselves from confessing Christ in word but seeking earthly pleasure and entertainment in our thoughts and actions. How do we kill the selfish monster inside of us? Do we swear off of music, backyard discussions, potato chips and football games, devoting ourselves instead to continual prayer and acts of love?

What spawns these worries, of course, is the fact that we actually want these things. On any given Sunday there comes a time when I have had enough of praying and focusing my mind on God and I want to go play some catch. My heart becomes weary of giving its attention to God and others and begins to think of itself and its own desires. Stated this way, such pursuits seem rather unacceptable! Our faith is one of self-sacrifice after the example of Christ, and one wonders if a heart that wants comfortable, lowly pleasures will really fit in very well with the saints and martyrs that sit in adoration around the throne of God in heaven!

Is God ok with my love of lower things? Am I free to feel comfortable before God as I muse my time away exploring poetic metaphor and literary theme? Some Christian authors have valiantly posited that human beings are made to enjoy the little world that God has made for them, and that our natural activity (though tainted by the fall) is to purely enjoy the things on earth, giving glory and praise to God always for their creation. The monastics, on the other hand, would say that the fall destroyed all hope of earthly happiness, and that we cannot properly enjoy anything on earth without letting our hearts turn from God to our passions.

At the core of this issue is the concept of a pure soul. Whether a pure soul desires to contemplate God only, or to encounter God in a meaningful way through the daily activities of "merely human" life, it is necessary that it first learn to abandon its hope of self-satisfaction. What the rigor of the monastics and the ardor of the Evangelicals both put forth as the greatest enemy to the human soul is the kind of self-love that leads a person to feel comfortable and content as their own god. If I must endure a little fasting and a little less dragon ball z to see this end realized in my life by the power of Christ's sanctification, then so be it...