Gonna Lose That Cabin Fever!

I'm off to the World Fishing and Outdoor Exposition for a much needed fix after this cold and snowy winter.

File under The Great Outdoors.

1:35:45 PM    Go ahead, make my day  []  trackback []  

The Passion of the Christ

I've been thinking about what I want to say about this movie since I saw it on Ash Wednesday. It's gripping, powerful, disturbing and moving. That goes without saying. I didn't find the film to be anti-semitic, but then, I'm not Jewish. I've also thought about how important it was for this film to show the true brutality of Jesus' death. If you want to know the clinical medical details, you can read this. Anyway, I found this post over at Walloworld which says it way better than I ever could:

The Passion of the Christ isn't a "pretty" film. It eschews what Hollywood typically looks for in a blockbuster hit - namely, enough of various components (action, humor, romance, maybe a little skin) to appeal to as broad a cross-section of the population as possible. One need look no further than last year's Pirates of the Caribbean to see what I mean in terms of Hollywood's favored paradigm.

But Gibson ignored all that: he told his movie his way, which was to emphasize not the goody-two-shoes Gospel of group hugs and inside voices but rather the bloody sacrifice of one man laying down his life not only for his "friends," but for all humanity. Liberals find no meaning in this, and so the violence and gore seems completely unnecessary - unlike, I assume, all the decapitations in Kill Bill.

However, I'm not sure that Coulter has it right when she says Christianity is a "blank slate" for liberals. Rather, they've creatd a sort of zero-sum vision of what Christianity should be, a vision founded upon a vague notion of behavior instead of faith. In the liberal vision of Christianity, nobody believes in the divinity of this guy, any more than they believe he actually sacrificed himself for anybody; that's just silly and gross. Instead, Christians are determined by how "nice" they are, how much they "love" one another.

The problem with this is that Christianity is not a stand-in for basic morality; all societies hold certain standards of behavior as fundamental, as is reflected by laws and principles that far pre-date Christianity. While the moral aspects of Christianity aren't incidental to the faith, they are there only as part of a larger whole: namely, faith in God and his son.

It's rather like the whole "great divide" thing: you can put all sorts of emphasis on Christians who stress that we must "love one another" and those who focus on "reaching the lost." But when Christ was asked what is the "great commandment," he replied:

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commendment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 22: 47-40."

The idea that we can "love our neighbor" apart from the obligation to love the Lord is completely foreign to scripture. It is certainly possible to be a wonderful person in behavioral terms and not be a Christian. The problem liberals have is the suggestion that there might be a reason to be a Christian apart from being nice; they object to the notion that there's anything more than good manners involved in how we should live.

Amen brother. Amen.

File under Faith.

12:22:35 AM    Go ahead, make my day  []  trackback []