The Theolo-Gee of Wall-E

So, if you don’t want me to ruin the ending of Wall-E for you, stop reading right here.

Are you still with me? 

O.K.  I warned you.

First off, the movie is amazing.  Tons of food for thought.

I’m not sure if all of it was intentional, But there’s some incredibly relevant wisdom in the film.  I know I’ll tick off a lot of people if I go and make a claim like “This movie was more Christian than the passion.”  So I think I will. 

This movie was more Christian than the passion.

In broad outlines, the movie shares some really interesting commonalities with the story that scripture tells.

In both “stories” mankind starts off with a wonderful land.   Mankind fouls it up through his own greed.  Mankind has to leave it.  There is a promise of a return to the lost land, but this return is not through any actions of humanity itself.

In the movie, we’ve ruined the Earth through consumerism.  A corporation which is a not very subtely vieled knock-off of Wal-Mart not only took over the whole world but also created the star ship which “saved” humanity.  Humanity spends seven hundred years on this ship because the Earth never gets better. 

The space ship is pretty much like you’d imagine a space ship run by Wal-Mart would be.  Consumerism, sloth, and the status quo rule.  People spend all day in floating chairs.  They are hooked up to computer screens and have forgotten the pleasures of holding hands or really looking around them.  It’s a big, dramatic (and hillarious!) moment in the movie when the first human– ridiculously lazy and over wieght figures out how to get out of his chair and stand up.

This whole idea was highly consistent with some of the writings of my favorite Christian writers.  Don Miller, for example, compares the fall of mankind to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.  Humanity is a broken, cancerous mockery of what it was meant to be.  Vincent Antonucci specifically takes on the dangers of trying to live life from our easy chair… the life lived in it  is hardly worth experiencing.  John Eldridge tells us over and over again that we have been duped into the road most traveled, and that we are called to something bigger than and more significant than a life of comfort and ease.

I think an argument can be made for Wall-E as a Jesus figure.  He is both fully human and not fully human.  He is involved in this extraordinary labor to redeem humanity’s foolishness.  He is allied with a robot which sometimes seems wrathful (i.e. God the father) and a tiny little critter that can permeate everywhere (i.e. the Holy Spirit.)

Wall-E ends up uniting a gaggle of “defective” robots.  The “good” robots and the humans believe that the robots are simply there to serve the humans.  Similarly, society treats us and tries to convince us that our only value is based on what we earn, what we do (as a career) how much we earn.  Wall-E first fights his own directive.  Then he helps the robot “Eve” to fight off hers; and then the other robots.  There is a message in this: we are not only here to be part of the capitalist system.  We’re meant for something greater.

Furthermore, I was reminded of competing conceptions of the afterlife.  There are people who ignore the gospel’s message about the redemption of the Earth.  People who say heaven is “out there”.  Who apply consumerism to Christianity and come out with a formula for how to escape.

This view of heaven is like the star ship.  Going above the clouds to a place where you can indulge laziness and sloth.  In the end of the movie, though, the humans fight to return home.  To work at reclaiming the Earth itself. 

I know that there is a danger in assuming that the Earth will be reclaimed through our own efforts and will.  But there is also a danger in the idea that the Earth is just a prop, and there is danger in pretending that Jesus won’t be working through the entity that is called his body and his bride in the redemption and reclamation of the Earth.

 This post was submitted to Watercooler Wednesdays, a blog carnival at Randy Elrod’s post, Ethos.

 

Feed me!

There is this debate.  On one hand, there are millions of people who sit in pews.  On the other, are figures as large as Elevation church’s Steve Furtrick, and I became a Christian and all I got was this Lousy T-shirt‘s Vincent Antonucci.  What the debate is about is this: Should the church feed it’s members.

Many, many people in the pews say “yes.”  Perhaps there are famous folks who use this language to.  I’ll invite my readers to drop me a comment if they want to let me know.  The above-mentioned hot shots say “No.”

Me?  I say it depends.

The obvious place to turn at a time like this is scripture.  Scripture is bursting at the seems with imagery and discussions of eating and food.  But I couldn’t find much about the issue of feeding and a church’s obligation.  The closest I come is Hebrews 5:

Hebrews 5

Warning Against Falling Away

 11We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. 12In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. 

I think that a lot of the reason we get in such intense fights about this issue is partially because the word itself is a bit slippery.  Notice that the word “feed” has two distinct but related meanings.  If I asked you to feed my toddler, notice that the image is quite different (hopefully!) than if I say “if I come over will you feed me?”

If you fed a toddler I hope that you would cut the food carefully.  I hope that you would place it in her mouth.  I hope that you would cheer if she swallows something nasty like beets.

If you fed me, all I’m asking is that you throw some stuff on the table.  Cutting, placing food in mouth, and cheering are unnecessary, and frankly, probably a bit wierd.

It is absolutely right for pastors to raise the bar.  It is perfectally appropriate for them not to cut up the spiritual food of the spiritually mature and make train noises on the food’s way in.

It is furthermore appropriate for spiritually mature believers to expect that spiritual food will be placed on the spiritual table.

This is all metaphorical, of course.  Unpacking what the metaphor means will take some discussion and debate and maybe even arguing: just how easy the church makes it to get our nourishment, how much of a burden is on us as the priesthood of believers, that’s still an open question.

But the thing is that we’re not even going to get to that real question if we’re hung up on whether or not the church ought to be feeding believers.  And I think that if most reasonable people are operating on the same definition of the word “feed” most people will be in general agreement: the church should not treat us like toddlers, but it does have a feast which it ought to put out on the table.

Theology and Sith

There are all these Christian themes running through the Star Wars movies.  People have written bazillions of books.  I didn’t think any were all that impressive.   I’m feeling kind-of nerdy (and arrogant) tonight.  I think I’ll blog about them.

I think that these become more obvious in the more recent movies.  The most obvious connections are cosmetic ones. There are these little explicit nods to Christianity that are hard to miss.  For example, Anakin is a product of an immaculate conception.  The number for the plan that will destroy the jedi is order 66– only, of course, pretty close to the number made famous in revelations as the number of the beast.  In the most recent movies, the force is even sometimes referred to as “the living force”– reminiscent of Christians referring to the “living God.”

Slightly deeper is ideas that run a little deeper than mere nods.   The favoring of the spiritual over the material for example.  The Star Wars movies paved the way for The Matrix in their declaration that the physical world is much less important than the spiritual reality which lies beneath it.   Consider, for example, Yoda’s chiding of Luke when his lack of faith leads to his failure to rise the X-Wing fighter out of the muck.  Or consider Ben Kenobi’s victory through surrender.  (More on this in the next post about this topic.)

(Just for the record, I have some misgivings about the understanding of the physical world vs the spiritual world.  Nonetheless, the orthodox Christian position has usually taken this route.)

A second paralell, also on this deeper level, occured to me recently.  One of my favorite scenes in all six movies is the one in “Revenge of the Sith” where Palpatine is talking to Anakin in that bizzare opera house.  He’s laying the ground work for his eventual corruption of Anakin, planting some seeds of doubt about the Jedi, some seeds of faith in the Sith.

I don’t know if this is why I liked the scene before I consciously realized it.   Here’s what I do know about that scene, and really, the whole series of movies.

It’s really about the fall from the Garden of Eden.

Like Adam, Anakin is tempted.  (Interestingly,two of the first three letters are the same of both names.)  Clear parameters have been lain out for him.  (In Anakin’s case, by the Jedi.  In Adam’s case, by God.)  The temptations of both Anakin and Adam are closely related to the God-like power of immortality.  (Remember the tree of life in the Garden of Eden?)  Both Adam and Anakin are tempted by a figure that takes advantage of greed, pride, and fear.

Like Adam, Anakin loses what he most sought.  Vincent Antonucci, in his excellent “I became a Christian and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” observes that Adam’s crushed community with God is the obvious ramification of the fall.  But his crushed relationship with Eve is also worth noticing.  Anakin, of course, loses his Amidala just as Adam loses the community he once had with Eve.  (We see this in Genesis by the way he tries to throw Eve under the bus as soon as God comes ’round.)  The God- Jedi paralell is here, too: Anakin loses the Jedi just as Adam lost his close connection with God.

I think there’s all sorts of interesting paralells between Luke and Jesus just as there are between Anakin and Adam.  I’ll probably “go there” in my next post.