Edwards and contemporary evangelicalism

In December, I’ll be presenting a paper at MLA on reappropriations of Jonathan Edwards in contemporary evangelical thought, with a particular focus on a strain of crisis theology running through evangelicalism’s revival of Edwards (one of my main primary texts will be the volume of essays, A God Entranced Vision of all Things). Some of you have already offered insightful suggestions and provided helpful citations for further reading in other discussions I’ve had with you about my larger interest in the half-life of Edwardseanism. But I thought I’d beat the BibleAnd bushes just to be thorough. I’m particularly interested in any studies of contemporary revivals or other attempts to recover colonial Puritan or other early American thinkers or theology for presentist purposes. That said, we’re all eclecticists now, so anything you might think worth passing along, please do.

All the best in your fall term.

The Fountain

Last year's The Fountain (2006), by Darren Aronofsky — director of at least two other notable films, Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Pi (1998) — is blogworthy for its easy syncretism of putatively Mayan mythology, a Biblical theme, and Yogic imagery.

The first frames of the film quote Genesis 3:24, concerning the flaming sword that severs humanity's connection to the tree of life. Throughout the story, Aronofsky plays with the idea of pushing back against that sword, telling stories of humans who attempt to defeat death, who, like the man and the woman in the garden, might live together forever in the presence of God if they weren't prevented from doing so (Gen. 3:22).

In this picture, Aronofsky himself pushes against narrative conventions – a much different kind of flaming sword – telling a refracted story about the marriage of a dying woman (Rachel Weisz) and about the story of her hand-written novel manuscript. The mundane "historical" context of this fantastic novel's story is its author's relationship to her husband, a research doctor (played by Hugh Jackman) trying to cure his wife's brain tumor by testing out drugs on monkeys. He discovers the medical key to reverse the aging process and cure all disease, but is just too late to save his beloved. His reading of her novel unfolds the full story of the film. The novel, also called "The Fountain," provides a parallel story involving the tree of life. The tree of life is discovered and captured in a Mayan temple by 15th century Spanish conquistador (also Hugh Jackman).
The sword referred to in the opening frame reappears in the hands of a Mayan warrior-priest guarding the halls of a secret, hidden temple which contains the tree of life. The conquistador, although he loses his beloved queen of Spain (also Rachel Weisz), gains access to immortality. Perhaps a thousand years later or more, the same man brings the tree into distant space. He is no longer a conquistador, but is now a cosmic explorer surviving by slowly eating at the flesh of the tree. The sword also comes back as the distant nebulae of swirling, fire-colored clouds to which, across the vastness of space, the cosmic explorer brings the aging and dying tree. He travels in a bubble of air, a new garden of eden, meditating his way through the light-years in full-lotus position, floating in the microgravity of the tree's capsule. At the end, he appears to be reunited with God, or sacrificed for God, in a kind ekpurosis or self-dismemberment. Then, like the Vedic being Purusha or like the putative Mayan "first father" he is identified with in the film, his death becomes a cosmogony, renewing the tree of life, recreating the world, and also bringing reunion with the beloved, discovered now at last in the divine bosom.

The second shot of the movie dwells on a gold replica of the shekinah of God, part of the altar tabernacle before which the conquistador worships, vowing to succeed in his quest for the tree. Its radiant beams of gold, surrounding a mirror-like polished silver globe, represent the burning light of purification that simultaneously reveals God and annihilates all flesh which approaches, suggesting that humanity and God remain forever severed, that our union with the divine comes only in the dissolution of life.

Thus, in the other story line, the "real" one perhaps, the novel remains a novel, and the bereaved doctor who lost his wife, the book's author, remains cut off from the beloved, separated by death, left with only a token golden ring.

At times reminiscent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and at others of Tarkovsky's Solaris or even of Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, this movie seems to be consistent with a narrative pattern that imagines a divine human connection mediated by a journey into the distant reaches of space, and overcoming the problem of mortality, death, and meaning through solitary searching into the beyond.

I was surprised because I liked this complex film less than I thought I might — perhaps this is because the mundane romance at the film's heart is slow paced and not particularly moving. I wonder how others responded to the movie, and I wonder where Aronofsky will take his unique filmmaking from here.

Catherine Keller

I taught Catherine Keller's God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys in my seminar (entitled 'Revelation(s) in Theory') the other day, and was surprised at my students' responses. They found it rhetorically confusing and logically weak. While I sympathize to some extent (Keller's metaphors are sometimes unnecessarily bizarre), the project as a whole is consonant with other work we've read -- by Marcella Althaus-Reid and Stephen Moore, Derrida and Benjamin. Have any of you taught Keller before? My sense is that, because we were reading the whole book, the students felt they had more purchase on Keller's project than they did on the other, shorter, pieces we've studied (including one by our friend and ally David Hall), and so they could respond to its argument more fully. It seemed to me, though, that this only means they were able to express a desire they've been hinting at all term: namely, they want claims about religious or biblical or indeed generally hermeneutical issues to be universally coherent, both in their logic and in their evidentiary bases. These students are bright and savvy, and enjoy engaging with difficult material, so I don't mean at all to disparage their concerns. It's just that I found this attitude a bit perplexing. I wonder whether or not I'm just blinded to serious problems in Keller's book because I'm so sympathetic to her argument. If any of you have read or taught God and Power, I'd be curious to know what you think.

In the news

I might be wrong about this, but I think the Lesleigh Cushing quoted in a recent NYT story on faith and religion on college campuses may be the same Lesleigh some of us know from various conferences. And even if I'm confused, the article is worth a glance anyway.

Fishing for Truth

In today's New York Times, Stanley Fish says (subscription required) that teaching religion or teaching the Bible, without endorsing the truth claims of either, is pure foolishness. The Bible, religious doctrines, theological texts . . . everything we generally do teach in generally secular ways is just so much cartoonish trivia unless the truth claims of this material and these traditions are valid. It's "like studying the justice system and bracketing the question of justice" he fairly spits at Steve Prothero's bracketing of religious truth in the neutral zone of the religious studies classroom. Fish has gotten pretty good in his old age at fighting straw men. In this case few of us are really such aesthetes as to study religious texts without both recognizing and engaging seriously with the truth issues gleaned from these texts by any number of theologically, politically, philosophically-interested readers. But isn't it also intellectual sleight-of-hand to insist that the religious traditions and texts we study are themselves always committed to, or clearly endorse, Fish's simplistic standard: Truth? When did fundamentalist literalism, to put it polemically, become the arbiter of meaning across entire traditions, or in such complex and conflicted anthologies as the Bible? This kind of Fishy thinking, along with some territorial anxieties, led the faculty senate at my institution to vote against the creation of a religious studies certificate program a few years ago. It's disheartening to realize that the students in my classes, many of them religious people, are much more responsive to complex treatments of complex issues than the professors (like Fish) tasked with deciding upon their educational options.