When despair is realism

Lars von Trier, the Danish filmmaker, has recently been in the news for controversial comments surrounding his film Melancholia that resulted in the directors of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival declaring him persona non grata. In 2000 von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, starring Icelandic musician Bjork won the Cannes Festival’s highest prize, the Golden Palm (Palme d’Or). Melancholia had been nominated for the Palme d’Or and won the best actress award for Kirsten Dunst in her role as Justine, the troubled woman whose story is central to the plot.

Melancholia is a simple yet devastating story. Imagine that a beautiful blue planet is hurtling towards the earth at a speed so great we can watch the blue sphere grow ever larger in the sky. Imagine that a dysfunctional family gathers to celebrate the wedding of a daughter who has long struggled with bouts of clinical depression. Imagine that in this world the possibility of hope is limited to the findings of science—which mistakenly has issued assurances that no collision is likely. Imagine how this story will unfold when it is clear that despair is nothing less than the most realistic perspective possible. “The earth is evil,” Justine says. “We don’t need to grieve for it. No one will miss it. Life is only on earth, and not for long.”

It is insufficient to dismiss von Trier here as simply trying to make a provocative movie. It is true that he has not shied away from making provocative films, as Dogville (2003) and Breaking the Waves (1996) prove. Still, I think more is at stake here. From reports I have read von Trier has suffered bouts of serious depression himself and his childhood is something I would wish on no one, leaving him with phobias that haunt him in adulthood. And he is an artist with his finger posed on the pulse of a world echoing with the triumphant voices of those who claim that facing down the abyss of meaninglessness with no hope that anything lies behind death is somehow significantly courageous. On second thought, that is courageous—futile, but courageous. As the film’s tagline puts it, “It will change everything.”

Not everyone should watch this film—it is a dark story, unrelenting in making us face the reality of death in a world without meaning. Unlike so many films that show the moment of apocalypse with a cacophony of violence so extreme we must avert our eyes, von Trier invites us to watch to the end. Planets of breathtaking beauty meet in the immensity of space and dissolve in a flash of brilliant light. And the three characters we have come to care about sit together, eyes closed, hands clasped, facing the inevitable with signs of love that though real are insufficient to change the ending.

Melancholia is worth watching if you are able to watch dark films. Lars von Trier is a master at his craft, and the film is an example of cinema at its best. Von Trier touches on themes with a brutal honesty we dare not evade if we take seriously the things that matter most.

Taken on its own terms, Melancholia should drive Christians to some serious reflection. Yes, thankfully the resurrection provides us with a hope sufficient for even the threat of death and apocalypse. But how do we express our hope so that it does not seem feeble at a time when science boasts that reality can be explained without reference to God or miracles? How is it possible to appeal to the historic fact of Christ’s resurrection in a way that gives it sufficient philosophical substance as well as imaginative power? And what can we point to in the way we live, day by day, that reveals the animating force of hope to radically shape our thinking, feeling and doing?

Melancholia credits:

Starring:

            Kirsten Dunst (Justine)

            Charlotte Gainsbourg (Claire)

            Kiefer Sutherland (John)

            Cameron Spurr (Leo)

            John Hurt (Dexter)

            Charlotte Rampling (Gaby)

            Stellan Skarsgård (Jack)

Director: Lars von Trier

Writer: Lars von Trier

Producers: Peter Garde & others

Cinematography: Manuel Alberto Claro

USA, 2011; 136 minutes

Rated R (graphic nudity, sexual content and language)

The [Apostles’] Creed is a summary of the Big Story. And like the biblical drama of redemption, the story the Creed proclaims is not just about things that happened a long time ago. Part of the story still lies in front of us, in an event in the future. And this event is so crucial to the story told that Scripture characteristically refers to it as our “hope.”

Hope is such an essential aspect of human existence that it would not be too much to say that what we hope for as our ultimate destiny is really an extension of and perhaps the clearest indicator of what we most value. Hope is not simply what we expect to happen, but what we long for, what we pray the future will be. How we see the future, the ultimate future, is the key to grasping everything else about us right now. Tell me your hope and I will know your heart, how you understand yourself, and how you relate to everything else. When we get a glimpse into where God is taking his people and the world, we begin to win an appreciation of what God considers worthy and valuable, what he loves. So when we talk about the Christian hope, we are talking about what God cares about, what he considers worthy of his concern and of the redemptive work of Christ. God's promise of the future is the Christian hope.

Amazingly, the Creed declares that the historic church’s hope is “the resurrection of the body.” I say “amazingly” because the Creed does not, as many might expect, identify heaven as the believer’s hope. When Christians talk about the point and goal of salvation, what they hope for, it is almost always going to heaven. Indeed, if we were to judge by two millennia of Christian art and hymnody, popular literature and piety, we would have to conclude that the Christian faith is fundamentally about the belief that the point of salvation is going to heaven. Yet the Creed does not say that. It declares the Christian hope as the resurrection of the body. To see what is at stake here, let's review a bit of the story behind the Creed. The world in which the Apostles’ Creed was born was deeply influenced by Platonic dualism, which, by the late third century, had been informing the worldview assumptions of the Greco-Roman world for half a millennium. Quasi-Christian sects such as Gnosticism and Marcionism, and religious philosophies such as Manichaeism and Neo-Platonism, were well known. There were some different beliefs and commitments among these groups, but if you scratched any of them they bled Platonic dualism.

Plato taught that reality is made up of two kinds of substances, two kinds of stuff—material stuff and spiritual stuff—which are always in opposition because they come from two different sources. The spiritual comes from God, the material from some lesser being. The spiritual, being from God, is good. Matter, being of more questionable origin, is less good, perhaps even evil. Human beings are caught right in the middle of this conflict between spirit and matter, between God and what is opposed to God. The tension is built right into our very beings, for we are made of the admixture of the two. The body is material, the soul spiritual. The soul, our true or highest self, is imprisoned in the lowly body, a corrupting bag of flesh. Platonists found something of a pun in the similarity of the word “body” to the word “grave” in Greek: soma, sema. The body (soma) is made for the grave (sema). The body is a tomb. Under such a philosophical regime, redemption is nothing less than the liberation of the soul from the body, the movement from the material realm of earth to the spiritual realm of heaven. That, in a nutshell, is the Platonic story. And under its influence, Christians of the post-New Testament era came to think of the created world as at best irrelevant to the life of the soul—the really real self—and at worst as that from which we must be saved.

The Creed tells a quite different story, one that was intentionally subversive of all dualistic conceptions of human beings and the world. “I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” No spiritual stuff versus material stuff there, just God and stuff made by God, God and God’s stuff. There is no stuff that isn’t God’s. It’s all his stuff. And all the stuff is good…

The gospel is good news for the world. It is, after all a gospel, glad tidings, and it is good for all things. Paul punctuates this in Colossians 1:15-20. The redemptive work of Christ is for “all things,” “things on earth,” and “things in heaven.” As Anthony Hoekema notes, the promise of the resurrection in Romans 8 means that “God will not be satisfied until the entire universe has been purged of all the effects of man’s fall.” [The Bible and the Future, p. 275.]

We read this same gospel promise in the Old Testament.

     Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;

          let the sea roar, and all that fills it;

          let the field exult and everything in it!

     Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy

          before the LORD, for he comes,

          for he comes to judge the earth. (Ps. 96:11-13)

Resurrection is not just for human beings, it is for creation as well. It will not do for us to make the gospel small, just for human souls. To do that is to say more about what we value than to act as fair brokers of the biblical story. Virtually every biblical term for redemption that we apply to human beings Scripture also applies to the creation. In his commentary on Romans 8, Calvin was not in the least reticent to use the language of resurrection for the entire created order. On verses 19-20 he said: “I understand the passage to have this meaning… No part of the universe is untouched by the longing with which everything in this world aspires to the hope of resurrection.”

The story told by the Creed and the drama of redemption preached by Paul are quite the same. The Messiah will come from heaven to earth, to rescue his people not by snatching them away from the earth but by transforming them and the world by way of resurrection. One way to summarize the entire story is this: God made it, Adam broke it, Jesus fixes it. What is “it?” All things. God’s stuff. The Creed tells that story in its declaration of the resurrection of the body. Paul tells that very same story in Romans 8.

Resurrection is the baseline for our thinking about the future. What came bursting into the first-century world was not a philosophy of world-escape—there were already plenty of those—but the proclamation that Jesus Christ has bodily risen from the grave, that his people will be raised so that they will be like him, and that the Creator promises to rid his world of all that harms and frustrates his works. Whatever we believe about life and death, if it is to be biblical belief, it must be begin with and make sense in terms of the resurrection of the body.

From a sermon preached on Romans 8:18-25 in June 2009 by the Rev Dr Michael Williams, theology professor at Covenant Seminary (St Louis, MO), “I believe… The Resurrection of the Body,” the transcript of which appeared in Presbyterion (#36/1; Spring 2010) p. 1-8.

Christians around the world recently celebrated Easter, the time in the church year when we remember in a special way that Christ is risen from the dead. Sadly, though the resurrection of Christ is widely believed in evangelical Protestant circles, the biblical implications of this belief are often missed. Here John Stott comes to our aid in two quotes:

“The Christian hope is not the immortality of the soul (a shadowy, disembodied existence), but the resurrection of the body (a perfect instrument for the expression of our new life).”  [John Stott]

“Paul teaches in Romans 8 that creation will be ‘liberated from its bondage to decay’ (verse 21b). ‘Phthora’ (decay) seems to denote not only that the universe is running down (as we would say), but that nature is also enslaved, locked into an unending cycle, so that conception, birth and growth are relentlessly followed by decline, decay, death and decomposition. In addition, where may be a passing reference to predation and pain, especially the latter which is mentioned in the next verse. So futility, bondage, decay and pain are the words the apostle uses to indicate that creation is out of joint because under judgment. It still works, for the mechanisms of nature are fine-tuned and delicately balanced. And much of it is breathtakingly beautiful, revealing the Creator’s hand. But it is also in bondage to disintegration and frustration. In the end, however, it will be ‘freed from the shackles of mortality’ (REB), ‘rescued from the tyranny of change and decay’ (JBP) ... The creation’s subjection to frustration was ‘in hope’ (20). The bondage to decay will give place to the freedom of glory (21). The pains of labour will be followed by the joys of birth (22). There is therefore going to be both continuity and discontinuity in the regeneration of the world, as in the resurrection of the body. The universe is not going to be destroyed, but rather liberated, transformed and suffused with the glory of God.”  [John Stott]

If Christians believed these things and acted upon them, living as if they truly believed them to be true, the faith would look very different to a watching world.

[Both these gems from Stott’s published work came to me as “Daily Thought” via email from Langham Partnership, which you can visit here.]