Idiot With A Tripod: a short film by Jamie Stuart

Shot in NYC on 26 December 2010. . .



via Roger Ebert

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (dir. Scott Derrickson, 2005)

The German theologian Rudolf Bultmann famously intoned, "It's impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.” Bultmann was at the forefront of the modernist attempt to demythologize the New Testament, an attempt that was all too successful among the mainline Protestant churches and seminaries of the West. Defenders of the orthodox faith, chief among them J. Gresham Machen in America and Karl Barth in Europe, responded that a Christianity stripped of its supernatural aspects was another religion entirely. Go ahead and disbelieve in a literal resurrection; and the literal existence of angels and demons, but please don't call that Christianity.

Even those of us who reject the liberalism of Bultmann and his followers vis-a-vis the divinity of Christ and the historicity of the resurrection may find it hard to completely embrace the New Testament's abundant teaching about the spiritual realm, particularly it's forthright depiction of Satan and his demons. Nobody could credibly have accused the Apostle Paul of being a gullible superstitious rube, yet he had much to say about spiritual warfare and the demonic realm. And, of course, the gospel writers uniformly present an account of Jesus' public ministry in which confrontations with demons were commonplace. Though the average believer in the pews doesn't give much thought to the existence of demons, missionaries who've come back from places like Haiti or certain parts of Africa and Eastern Europe have no doubt that demonic oppression is still a clear and present reality. Perhaps those of us in technologically advanced societies have been so lulled to sleep that the devils don't have to show themselves openly?

These thoughts and more were provoked by watching Scott Derrickson's hair-raising film The Exorcism of Emily Rose, starring Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott & Jennifer Carpenter. The movie is very loosely based on the actual case of Anneliese Michel, a German girl who was allegedly possessed by demons, and later died of malnutrition after undergoing repeated exorcisms. The priests in the case were brought up on charges of negligent homicide. Derrickson and his writing partner Paul Harris Boardman were intrigued enough by the case to spend several years researching the subject of possession. The result was this script. Anneliese Michel became Emily Rose, and the Bavarian setting was changed to somewhere in rural America.

At least since William Friedkin's 1973 cult classic The Exorcist the "exorcism film" has been a subgenre of horror. Emily Rose plays on some of the tropes of the genre, but does so in a way that presents an utterly realistic depiction of supernatural evil. No rotating heads or projectile vomiting here. No winks in our direction as if to say, "this is good fodder for a scary movie but we don't actually believe this could happen in real life." Derrickson mostly avoids going for the cheap gestures that make an audience jump in their seats, opting instead for a creeping sense of dread punctuated by moments of genuine terror. The scene where Emily's demonization begins is an effective example of using the basic tools of cinema (sound, light and cutting) to create pyschological terror. Scenes like this owe more to Hitchcock than Wes Craven. When special EFX are utilized they're seamlessly integrated with the astounding physicality of Jennifer Carpenter's performance as the afflicted young woman. Yes, there's plenty here to satisfy fans of horror, but this film has higher aims than merely scaring you.

Those aims become apparent in the setting of a court of law, for Emily Rose is more than a horror film, it's also a fine example of another venerable genre: the courtroom drama. In fact, Emily has already died when the film begins. It's through the trial of Father Richard Moore (Wilkinson) that her story emerges; and it's in the back and forth of direct and cross-examination that thorny questions of faith vs. reason and religion vs. science are framed. Father Moore is represented by ambitious defense lawyer Erin Bruner, played by a "dolled-up" Laura Linney. Representing the people is prosecutor Ethan Thomas -- a moustachiod Campbell Scott (film buffs may recall Scott's daddy George C. playing a prosecutor in a classic courtroom drama of the 50s). In a nice dramatic twist Thomas is a self-described "man of faith" who sings in his church choir, while Bruner is a "woman of doubt" who one guesses wouldn't darken the door of a church unless it helped her land a coveted partnership at her firm.

Ironically, it's the agnostic who becomes an advocate for considering the possibility of a supernatural explanation for Emily's fate and Father Moore's actions. Meanwhile Prosecutor Thomas relentlessly (and some times mockingly) hammers away at the defense's faith-based explanation of events with the rationalistic claims of science and modern medicine. Derrickson and Boardman's script leaves open the possibility of a medical explanation for Emily's condition, but it also subtly challenges the modern assumption that science deals in the public realm of facts, while faith deals only in the private realm of beliefs. Thoughtful viewers might find themselves questioning the high wall that's been erected between faith and reason, religion and science.

Beyond the thematic elements The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a well-crafted picture. The visual look of the film was inspired by the horror films of Italian director Dario Argento. What this means is that scenes of terror are often counterintuitively bathed in bright primary colors. Oranges, purples and greens are prominent in the possession and exorcism scenes, but in the courtroom the palette is dialed back. On the DVD commentary Derrickson says he was inspired by Sidney Lumet (The Verdict) to keep camera movement in the trial scenes to a minimum and let his great trio of actors carry the action. It's also worth noting that the film was shot by DP Tom Stern, making this one of the few times he's worked with any director other than Clint Eastwood.

Back to Bultmann -- is it possible to believe in the "New Testament world of spirits and miracles" in the 21st century? I believe it is. Not because of conjecture, but because of the credible eyewitness testimony presented by the apostolic writers. I've checked out the evidence and found it compelling beyond a reasonable doubt. I have faith, but it's not blind. My faith isn't (solely) based on reason, but it's not unreasonable. Ultimately though these are questions that can't be decided in a court of law -- and this film doesn't pretend that they can -- but the faith of Emily Rose and Father Moore confronts us with the possibility that there are publicly accessible answers to the truth claims of religion. "Angels and demons/God and the devil/These things either exist or they don't," says Erin Bruner in her closing argument to the jury. Truth is at stake in those questions just as it is in the question of whether 2 + 2 = 4. Lesslie Newbigin put it this way:

In the school textbook these agreed-upon conclusions [furnished by science] will be simply stated as facts without the use of the prefix 'I believe' or "We believe.' Thus every student will be expected to know that the development of the human person is governed by the program encoded in the DNA molecules. This is a fact. But that every human person is made to glorify God and enjoy him forever is not a fact — it is a belief, one among many possible beliefs. It is not part of the school curricula. And yet, clearly the question of truth is at stake as much in the second matter as in the first. It either is or is not true that every human being must finally appear before the judgment seat of Christ. If it is true, it is universally true, just as the statement about the DNA molecule is true; if it is true at all, it is true for everyone. It belongs to the public sector as much as to the private.*

Father Moore would agree. As he declares to Erin in a key line from the film: "Demons exist whether you believe in them or not."


*Newbigin quote from The Cultural Captivity of Western Christianity as a Challenge to a Missionary Church (1994)

The collect for December 26 (Saint Stephen's Day)

From The Book of Common Prayer:

Grant, O Lord, that, in all our sufferings here upon earth for the testimony of thy truth, we may stedfastly look up to heaven, and by faith behold the glory that shall be revealed; and, being filled with the Holy Ghost, may learn to love and bless our persecutors by the example of thy first Martyr Saint Stephen, who prayed for his murderers to thee, O blessed Jesus, who standest at the right hand of God to succour all those who suffer for thee, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

Pray this prayer for the persecuted church in Iraq.

Shalom

Here's something I originally posted on Christmas Eve 2008. What's funny is that it could have been written today. Once again I'm finishing up the year by reading the minor prophets, we have a baby on the way, and this evening I'll be helping to serve Holy Communion at our church. He is faithful!


It's been a rich feast to finish up my year-long journey through the Bible with the minor prophets. If I stay on schedule I'll finish Malachi and Revelation tomorrow. With a baby on the way I don't know if I'll be able to keep up the same reading pace next year, but I wouldn't want to go an entire year without studying these sometimes neglected parts of scripture. If you never have done so, I'd urge you to get a good study Bible and dig in to Hosea, Joel, Amos, etc. The prophet Zechariah provides a marvelous picture of shalom (perfect peace, total well-being) in chapter 8. In Zechariah 8:8 are the familiar, comforting words "they shall be my people, and I will be their God..." This is the culmination of the covenant and of history, where it's all heading, both for them and for us as new covenant believers (Revelation 21:3-4).

In addition to this, I was struck by the multi-generational picture of this shalom. Zechariah 8:4-5 pictures the streets of Jerusalem full of children playing as parents and grandparents look on. This is a picture of true community, a neighborhood if you will. Shouldn't our churches reflect that? I think we go wrong by copying Madison Avenue and segmenting everything according to age. Shannon and I attend (and I occasionally teach) a Sunday school class at our church that's known as the "young adult" class. I put it in quotes because we have everyone from college students to grandparents in there. I love it. I'd get tired of going to Sunday school or church with people just like us and hearing only about subjects that our age group is supposedly interested in. Don't get me wrong. There's a place for that kind of ministry. We also have a weeknight group for young married couples. But the main focus, Lord's Day worship and Sunday school, is kept intentionally as multi-generational as possible.

There's another aspect to shalom that we aren't doing as well as I'd like us to. That's the multi-ethnic aspect. We should better reflect the fact that we're in a community that's becoming more diverse by the day. In Zechariah 8:20-23 the prophet gives what would have been a surprising message to his hearers. "The inhabitants of many cities" and "many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem." What? We've just been delivered from the shackles of Gentile oppression and now you're telling us that those people are going to be coming here to seek our God. Segue to Christmas as we celebrate the coming of the light of the world, the hope of the nations.

Tonight in my role as an elder I'll have the privilege of helping to serve the bread and the wine as we celebrate communion during our Christmas Eve service. It will be a reminder that the warm glow of "Silent Night" gave way to "that old rugged cross, so despised by the world, the emblem of suffering and shame." "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich." (2 Corinthians 8:9) This is the gospel in a nutshell. Note that Paul puts it in the middle of a letter about giving gifts. Wishing you all the peace and joy of Christmas, and looking forward to that day when our Messiah returns to bring lasting shalom to this troubled world.

Photo above of present-day Bethlehem, West Bank

More on the incredible shrinking middle class

A new report from The Working Poor Families Project illustrates how the unemployment numbers don't tell the full story of the impact of the Great Recession. Many folks with a steady job (even jobs that would be considered "good jobs") are sinking steadily into the ground. The recession may be officially over, but things aren't getting any better for low to moderate income families. In fact, they're getting worse. I joked (sorta) to my wife that 2011 is going to be the year of avoiding the bill collectors. Maybe I'll need to learn tap dancing from this guy!

Timothy Lange hits the nail on the head at Daily Kos:

It's almost tiresome to have to repeat that the acute problems pointed out in this report are firmly grounded in three decades of government policies that have promoted stagnant wages, off-shored jobs, union-busting, soaring income-and-wealth inequality, a weakened safety net, all of it combined with a relentless drive to keep going in the same direction. Most of our leaders fail to respond. Thus, this demolition juggernaut continues apace despite the impact it has and will continue to have on our economic well-being and, as Roberts and Povich say, "potentially even our cohesiveness as a nation."

It's not that there are no workable solutions. But deploying them will require far more than simple persuasion. Because these solutions are inimical to the interests of the beneficiaries of the policies that have brought us to this state of affairs. Like the powerful throughout human history, they will not release their grip willingly. It will take a sturdy, unified and relentless progressive movement to wrest power from those who have run roughshod over the majority of Americans for their own ends, using all the tools at their command.

More commentary @ The Atlantic Wire

The wild rituals of Christmas (Chesterton)

G.K. Chesterton has a chapter in his collection of wildly entertaining essays published as Heretics called "Christmas and the Aesthetes". In it he chides the rationalist "aesthetes" who dismiss religious ritual as so much barbaric and vulgar nonsense, especially the rituals of Christmas. Ironically, in replacing the worship of God with the worship of humanity they killed what is truly human, and in killing God they killed joy. For as GKC states elsewhere: joy "is the gigantic secret of the Christian." (Orthodoxy)

Here are a couple of quotes from that chapter to get your juices flowing in anticipation of our great holiday "holy-day" festival on December 25.

Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man was a ritualist before he could speak.

Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to. They have not given a name or a new occasion of gaiety. Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people's doors in the snow. In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth. Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

Whatever form your Christmas rituals take, I hope they are full of merriment. Merry Christmas!

Taps for Jose Hernandez

@ PalmBeachPost.com

The Wesleyan movement and social reform

As something of a follow-up to this post here's a lengthy quote from Richard Lovelace. This may be of special interest to Wesleyan and Methodist readers.

The phase of the Great Awakening most often connected with social reform by English-speaking Christians is the Wesleyan revival, although the Wesleys and Whitefield derived much of their social momentum from the example of German pietism. In addition to the standard Pietist concerns, however, John Wesley introduced several new emphases which were of critical significance.

In the most crucial of these, his attack upon slavery, Wesley had nevertheless been anticipated by another Christian group. The Quakers. . . .

Wesley again echoed the Quakers in his opposition to war, although he was not a doctrinaire pacifist. This concern was picked up by the evangelical peace societies in the next century. Similarly, Wesley led the way for later evangelicals in attacking the use of distilled spirits except for medical purposes, attempting to curb the problem of alcoloholism among the poor, which was one of the major social evils attending the onset of the Industrial Revolution. In his concern to help prisoners Wesley for once anticipated the Quaker reformers led by Elizabeth Fry.

But one of the greatest contributions of the Wesleyan movement to evangelical social consciousness was simply the ingathering of large numbers of lower-class people into the church. Whitefield and the Wesleys were forced into the fields and streets by the closing of church pulpits. The result was the recapture for the church of great numbers of the alienated poor. The evangelical leadership of Methodism and other dissenting churches during the early nineteenth century reflected the pastoral concerns rising out of lower-class flocks. Thus it is no surprise that the British Labor movement in its beginnings was heavily leavened by the evangelical influence of leaders like Keir Hardy.

This championing of the poor man's viewpoint was utterly characteristic of John Wesley himself. J. Wesley Bready comments that

Wesley supported fair prices, a living wage and honest, healthy employment for all. . . . Certain doctrinaire aspects of laissez faire. . . would have made his blood boil; as for . . . the Malthusian and Ricardian theories regarding food, disease, poverty, population and wages, he would have declared them diabolical. [England, Before and After Wesley]

I wonder if Wesley's views would have made him too radical for some conservative evangelical churches today?

Quote from Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979) pp. 367-9

Immortal weakness and the death of the Supermen (Chesterton)

Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for this reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.

Quote from Heretics "IV. Mr. Bernard Shaw"

The only marriage survey that counts

There's been a lot of talk lately that traditional marriage is on its way out. A lot of the talk has been in reaction to the recently released State of our Unions study from the National Marriage Project. One of the eyebrow-raising findings is that marriage is most on the rocks in ostensibly socially conservative Middle America. It's there that divorce is steeply on the rise and unwed parenthood is becoming the new norm. If you're interested -- Ross Douthat had an interesting column on this last week.

Contra the predictions of traditional (Christian) marriage's imminent demise -- here's John Mark Reynolds writing in First Things on the only marriage survey that counts:

There is no real marriage outside the Church of Jesus Christ for this reason: God is the end of marriage, for only an eternal and infinite God can contain the explosive fecundity that can come when the two halves of the Image of God are united and made one. A great reason to become a Christian is that only in Christ’s Church can the male and the female find completion in each other.

Whatever the moral status of other forms of love may be (God alone knows for sure), nothing but a man and a woman can make a marriage, because only a man and a woman are so different and yet so human. This is not just a matter of biology, but of the spirit. Women and men have different voices and the blending of these differences creates a harmony that is like nothing else. Even when biological reproduction is impossible, there is a spiritual production that comes from joining two complementary goods in union that is so powerful it must be fecund or destructive.

The only survey that counts in marriage is between one man and one woman. In the beginning it was so and it will be until the end.

Read the whole thing.