At least a dozen people since Thursday night have asked me if I liked The Passion Of The Christ. Now, I liked Rush Hour. I liked The Return Of The King. I didn’t like Bulletproof Monk. But The Passion is not a movie one likes or dislikes.

The movie was brutal. The ten other people I saw it with could barely speak when it was over. Several women within earshot of me wept disconsolately for fully half of the movie. When it was over, we sat numbly through the credits without even seeming to consider whether we should get up (I haven’t done that since I was fifteen), then we meandered out into the lobby and stood in a circle, staring at the ground. Eventually we migrated out to the sidewalk in front of the theater: more standing and staring. None of this was planned or considered at the time. We were just raw.

The movie is every bit as violent and gory as the hype makes it out to be, but I am left wanting to differentiate the blood in The Passion from that of a slasher or snuff film, as it has been accused of being. Unlike the dehumanizing sport of horror flicks, the entire narrative is intensely personal. It seems were are never more than three feet away from Jesus, even when sitting under the judgment of the Sanhedrin, standing in the effeminate court of Herod Antipas, or seeing the blood splattered on the faces of his Roman torturers. The camera never leaves him as he suffers. This is not Sam Peckinpah’s blood fountains for dramatic effect or the sexualized gore of the Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth traditions. It is not blood for fun or blood because blood is cheap. It is blood because a weak man is in the grip of a wicked human system. It is blood because an all-powerful man is willingly laying down his life for a divinely ordained redemptive purpose. Criticisms of the shallow theology of the film notwithstanding, the dialog was sufficient to establish this proposition. The whipped and crucified Jesus is not some shadowy anthropomorphic outline aping the effects of physical violence for teenybopper shock factor; he is a man dying for the world, and we are standing next to him for 90 minutes as he dies in slow motion.

The question still must be asked and answered: Should we be watching this? My own pastor has said:

Some are arguing that the violence is necessary to accurately depict the event. I question that thinking when I look at what the Gospel writers, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, felt was necessary to say about the physical suffering of Jesus. When Luke describes the physical suffering of Jesus arrest, trials and death he does so with very few words: Luke 22:63 “The men who were guarding Jesus began mocking and beating him” and Luke 23:32 “When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him…” Luke uses a sum total of two words to describe the physical assault on Jesus. The other Gospel writers are nearly as brief. Even the prophetic passages in the Psalms (22) and Isaiah (52,53) are surprisingly brief compared to the liberties taken in the movie. I must at least ask if the Holy Spirit was intentionally taciturn on the subject so that we would not get distracted by the minor issues and miss the major one. To be certain, Jesus’ suffering was intense, but that is not the major point. The suffering is not the point; what he accomplished with his death and resurrection is the point. The major point is Romans 4:25: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”

This is a weighty accusation. In response a friend has suggested that the original readers of the Gospels would have been familiar with the process of Roman beating and crucifixion, and would have had a ready mental referent for the frugally-worded text: they would have been able to remember the last crucifixion they saw. Viewed in this light, Gibson’s film then becomes a vehicle to give 21st-century readers better knowledge of the cultural context of the New Testament, a problem contemporary readers of the Bible are always trying to solve.

But the question will not go away so easily. We are not merely watching a scourging and crucifixion firsthand as the first-century residents of Palestine or Asia Minor might have. We are watching a dramatized, expertly photographed and edited, slow-motion depiction of a Roman-style scourging and crucifixion with many assumptions and potential inaccuracies included. The Roman citizen’s ready mental referent becomes our polished movie. Film is not a record of reality; it is moving picture art. Even candidly videotaped live events are altered when played in slow motion. Reality is altered much more when live events are photographed and edited to some intentional effect. Add to this a script that, while generally faithful to the Gospels, is clearly influenced by medieval Catholic tradition and the director’s artistic proclivities, and you have a series of images that may be very different from the personal experiences of the original readers of the New Testament.

The relative inaccessibility of the culture that produced the Gospels is normally not an excuse for not trying, so I don’t mean to turn these qualifications into a blanket condemnation of the film as an attempt to recount historical events. However, the burden of proof ought to rest on the film for justifying its tremendously graphic violence, and these considerations recommend against its approach.

That being said, Christians believe that Christ endured true physical suffering during his passion, but that his spiritual anguish was immeasurably worse. When he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” on the cross, he is affirmed to have been experiencing fully the wrath of his Father, becoming a curse for God’s redeemed in their place. Many have pointed out that the experience of this anguish is truly inaccessible to us, even to those who have vivid experiences of their former estrangement from God turning into close fellowship subsequent to conversion. This point must be granted: we have no idea what it is like for the eternal fellowship of the Son and the Father to be broken, and we cannot know. In attempting to appreciate the suffering Christ endured for his people–surely a worthwhile devotional exercise in anyone’s view–even overstated images of his physical torment will not lead the viewer to an exaggerated understanding of his overall torment as the wrath of God toward us was imputed to him in that moment on the cross. The error of the overdone scourging, if error it be, probably will not lead to a particularly faulty view of what Christ endured for his people.

Continuing in this vein, Denver Seminary’s Craig Blomberg looks towards the development of an American theology of suffering:

…it is probably fair to say that contemporary American culture, perhaps more than any other culture in the history of the world, does not adequately appreciate the immensity of suffering that most of humanity has experienced throughout time. Not surprisingly, American Christianity is therefore infrequently faulted for having an inadequate theology of suffering. If this film helps Christians to better understanding something of what it means to “carry the cross” that their master shoulders, it will have been worthwhile.

Without adding to his words, I can say that I share this hope.

I found the defeat of Satan to be understated. As Jesus died, the genderless Satan figure kneeled in the middle of a barren hellscape, writhing energetically and growling some unspecific superlative. One reviewer read this as the agony of Satan’s defeat, but for my viewing it could as easily have been delight in his presumed final victory. It was simply unclear. The resurrection was likewise muted, a mere fifteen seconds of near-symbolism poorly reflecting the once-for-all defeat of death described in the New Testament.

Considering the anti-anti-Semitic bedlam starting a full year before the movie’s public release and the response of some critics afterward, I was surprised that I left the theater in anything but a murderous rage, wanting to avenge the senseless death of Christ which wouldn’t have happened but for the perfidy of all world Jewry, ever. The reality: the temple guards certainly would have earned U.N. censure for their mistreatment of their prisoner, Caiaphas was portrayed as conniving and murderous, and the mob demanding that Jesus be crucified would cause no one’s heart to well up with ethnic pride. But throngs of Jewish women wept as Jesus walked the Via Dolorosa, Simon of Cyrene was a manifestly heroic and tenderly human character, and dissenting Jewish voices did speak up in the Sanhedrin in defense of Jesus. Jewish religious and political leadership comes out of the movie looking bad, but Jewish people at large are untainted. It is highly unlikely that “when non-Jews around the world now see the Jewish prayer shawl, the tallis, on the heads of praying Jews, they will think, ‘Oh yeah, those were worn by the angry crowds in The Passion‘” as Fox’s Roger Friedman supposes. I am frankly more likely to think about Islamic terrorism or the question of West Bank settlements than what “Jews” did to Jesus–things substantially unrelated to Christ’s passion or Gibson’s Passion.

Italians? That’s a different story. Pilate and his wife get the benefit (as the Gospels all but afford them) of some moral ambivalence, but the Roman guards are unremittingly sadistic monsters. They cane, scourge, beat and kick Jesus, crown him with thorns, whip him even as he carries his cross, dislocate his shoulder as they crucify him for the mere subhuman efficiency of fitting the nail into the same hole used by the cross’ last victim. A judicial scribe seems to take offense at the excesses of the torture almost because it stretches the boundaries of his bureaucratic station: blood gets on his log book, one of the guards damages his table demonstrating the scourge, and there are more prisoners to be whipped, so move it along, boys. Pilate’s lieutenant disapproves of the torture and may show some compassion towards the victim, but is chiefly concerned with enforcing the governor’s politically-motivated diktat that the prisoner not be killed. In short, the Romans are weak and compromising at their best and subhuman at their worst.

Rabbi Stanley Wagner has observed that the “nice” Jews in the film are in fact not really Jews: they are followers of Christ. To satisfy him that the movie is not fundamentally anti-Semitic, Gibson would have had to invent characters who clearly rejected Jesus as the Messiah but fought to prevent his torture and unjust execution out of principle. It is worth noting that the two members of the Sanhedrin who were shown to object to the kangaroo court proceedings were not clearly identified as followers of Christ, but they were not clearly identified as his detractors either. While Gibson might have had to push too far the boundaries of artistic license by inventing important new characters and themes to satisfy this requirement, I do hear the objection with some sympathy. Ultimately I think it fails to commend the film’s alleged anti-Semitism, but I do recognize that Rabbi Wagner’s definition of “Jew” does allow for a rational framework in which to make the accusation, even if it is almost tautological.

I have yet to answer the question of whether I “liked” the movie, or whether its graphic depiction of the execution of Jesus is justified. And I don’t mean yet in this review; I mean yet in my mind. I don’t know that I can answer these questions. Applying my quintessentially American utilitarian criteria to the experience, I am tempted to say that I approve of it inasmuch as it furthers some concrete goal of Christian evangelism or discipleship, and certainly it is difficult for me to object to the true expansion of God’s Kingdom in the hearts of men. Three days after seeing it, that’s the best I can do: I don’t know how I feel about what I saw, but I trust God to move forward the boundaries of His Kingdom either through the movie or in spite of it.

Nothing quite like a cup of coffee, an English muffin, some whole grain cereal, and this:

John Kerry and John Edwards, who are not speaking under oath and who know that economic illiteracy has never been a disqualification for high office, have led the scrum against the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, who said the arguments for free trade apply to trade in services as well as manufactured goods. But the prize for the pithiest nonsense went to [House Speaker Dennis] Hastert: “An economy suffers when jobs disappear.”

So the economy suffered when automobiles caused the disappearance of the jobs of most blacksmiths, buggy makers, operators of livery stables, etc.? The economy did not seem to be suffering in 1999, when 33 million jobs were wiped out - by an economic dynamism that created 35.7 million jobs. How many of the 4,500 U.S jobs that IBM is planning to create this year will be made possible by sending 3,000 jobs overseas?

Hastert’s ideal economy, where jobs do not disappear, existed almost everywhere for almost everyone through almost all of human history. In, say, 12th-century France, the ox behind which a man plowed a field changed, but otherwise the plowman was doing what generations of his ancestors had done and what generations of his descendants would do. Those were the good old days, before economic growth.

As I’ve said before, I am potentially putting my money where my mouth is on this. This isn’t some abstraction like “the textile industry” that conjures up Dickensian images of ten-year-olds scurring under huge looms to pick pennies’ worth of lint off the floor, that couldn’t possibly be connected to my life. It’s, like, my job.

Read it all.

UPDATE: a friend IMed me this morning to tell me, among other things, that I was less than clear in this post. I was assuming knowledge on the part of the reader of my previous endorsements of the general idea of offshoring of U.S. tech jobs. There is an ironic constrast here with the fact that I happen to hold a U.S. tech job myself (when I’m not blogging). My brief comments in the original post were probably overly hasty and insufficiently clear.

My friend went on to tell me that he is seeing other essentially conservative IT professionals getting angry at Bush over this issue, possibly to the point of not voting for him in November. Now I tend to put this in the same bin as the rest of the conservative bellyaching over Bush–yeah, fine, there are things to complain about, but come on: are you really going to put Kerry in the Whitehouse because of it? Well, on this issue, maybe they will. These guys are afraid for their jobs, and the Democrat is much more likely to give them the protection they seek.

But let’s look at the real options here. Suppose for a moment that falling communication costs and rising education levels in third-world countries open up authentically lower-cost labor markets to compete with American IT professionals. We can:

1. Elect politicians who will use the force of law to prevent American industry from following cheaper labor resources.
2. Unionize and try to use the power of collective bargaining to achieve the same end as (1).
3. Let stewards of capital make free decisions about how to trade goods and services, recognizing that some technological developments (e.g., communication) may be disruptive to the present order from time to time to the point that I, personally, might even have to make a career change.

Call me Austrian, but I think you see where I’m going. Options (1) and (2) cannot succeed in the long term, despite whatever short-term gain I might personally realize under protectionist regimes. If the laws or labor unions (which operate under the protection of the laws) of the United States deny businesses the ability to operate efficiently, the businesses will be at a competitive disadvantage globally. At best, this means Americans shareholders earn smaller dividends. At worst, it means technological innovation ceases to be a defining American idiom. Entrepreneurial smart people will set up their whole shops elsewhere, instead of just sending some of their coding there.

And besides that, do you really want to have a job just because the guys with the guns are forcing your boss to keep you on the payroll? Wouldn’t you rather be carving out your own little sphere of value in an entropic creation? You can sign me up for the latter.

Note that this assumes that offshoring is actually going to produce cost savings in the long haul. Personally, I believe the jury is still out on this, but I am willing to accept the practice as an economic, social, and moral good if the jury comes back and says it does. There is a fertile debate to be had among IT professionals about the details of running cross-cultural, trans-global development teams, and I wouldn’t mind talking about that if anyone is interested. If you have relevant experience, or just want to cuss me out, the comments are open.

Look, I’m not saying modernism is our unqualified friend. Did only good things happen in theology in the nineteenth century, the very historical epicenter of modernism? No. Was it perhaps a bit naive to think we could develop antiseptic evangelistic methods that would cut perfectly through cultural bias and conditioning to deliver utterly pure, God-pleasing belief and practice? Was that maybe a little bit influenced by the modernist zeitgeist? Were you thinking yes? I was too.

So let’s say goodbye to all of that, and thank-you to any cultural movement and its Christian exponents who are helping the church away from Fundamentalism (our own paradoxical adaptation of modernism), crusade evangelism, meticulously programmed church ministry, and other relics of the past. I am not hanging on to them. They are not mine, not of my people, and I have no zeal to defend them. Good riddance.

But you know, finding all this modernist soot on our hands, we are probably not well-served to dive into a life of fully-orbed postmodernism. Who among all my fellow disowners of modernism thinks the cultural changes in the past 30 years have been of sufficient magnitude to warrant a change in traditional church worship services–no really, pick anything in the last 30 years from Episcopalianism to the Vineyard–to this? Anyone? Anyone see the proportionality there? [tumbleweed blows across stage, sound of crickets]

(Darn it, I said stage! Clearly this is because of my patriarchal, colonialist, imperialist, phallocratic urge to oppress marginalized voices by being the Big Man standing up in front of the masses telling my Big Story in order to keep them pliant and working diligently for the capitalist oppressor whom I enable. I am Wal-Mart Shareholder, hear me roar!)

This blog’s deconstruction notwithstanding, I am having a hard time taking the Emergent Church seriously. The movement tends to discredit itself by being breathlessly radical. It’s impossible to see it as anything other than the current age’s instance of the time-honored tradition of young people doing foolish and short-lived things in their zeal of just having awakened to adult life. They roll out of the bed of their teen years, get a cup of coffee by age 20 or 22, and are shocked to see the horrible state of their parents’ house. The velvet Elvis, the green shag carpet, the olive appliances! They never noticed all these things before. Time to replace all these dated things with the right decor: white carpet, low-voltage halogen lighting, and stainless steel appliances. See how old and busted you were, Mom and Dad? Stainless and halogen, that’s the right paradigm. We get it. You didn’t. The sins of the past have been redressed!

And the saddest part is always the few aging hipsters who are willing to jump in for the ride, giving faux intellectual heft and organized leadership to youthful folly. Now there is not a thing in the world wrong with being an aging hipster: take if from me, being a hipster is better than being a nerd, and I like the idea of aging better every year. These folk ought to be able to connect with especially foolish youth, identify with them, and share their hard-won lessons. This does not seem comprehensively to be the case with the leaders of the Emerging church. Despite being old enough to know better, they seem to be embracing a certain amount of folly themselves.

Running with the parents’ decor metaphor a bit, I have noticed that grandchildren are seldom so horrified by their grandparents’ faults as are first-generation offspring. Grandma and Grandpa’s bickering is kind of funny, after all. Grandchildren didn’t grow up hearing it, didn’t feel the shame and self-loathing at long fights touched off by their own misbehavior, didn’t sit alone in their rooms wondering if this was finally the fight that would end in divorce just like the parents of all their friends at school. Absent the pain of close contact, Grandma and Grandpa’s faults faults become endearing.

Applying this to the question of the ongoing modernism debate–and that is what this really is, still–we can look back now with some fondness on the Medieval European classical synthesis. It’s not as bad as Modernism told us it was; maybe a little tip o’ the hat to some kind of tradition every now and again isn’t so bad. It’s easy when no one has ever held a sword to your throat for questioning received authority. Sure that Francis Bacon was a cut-up, but premodernism can’t have been as bad as all of that, can it?

Of course the real world is more complicated than this. Sweeping historical movements (which so dominate history that their immediate neighbors are defined using the suffixes pre- and post-) are not monolithically good or evil. My generation is well past any kind of uncritical embrace of modernism, but does that mean we should reject it like Dad’s velvet Elvis and run into the waiting arms of postmodernism? I doubt it. A more mature appraisal of our situation might go a long way.

Just because we can do a thing, does it follow that we should do a thing?

I didn’t think so either.

See, this is why I don’t trust my initial gravity readings:

This had a roughly equivalent amount of extract as the light lager, to which it added a pound and a half of adjuncts. You’d think the gravity would make it up there, but we only see about 1.032. Something seems fishy here.

Not that I mind, really. I give away around 40% of what I brew, and 90% of what remains I drink with dinner. Low alcohol content in a dinner beverage is a good thing; I’d just like to have control over the measurements.

In any event, two batches down, and only bedtime in front of me. Enjoy the pictures, and my apologies in advance if load times are slow tomorrow. We are self-hosting here at TimBerglund.com, which means bandwidth is miserly.

The second beer of the evening will be an amber lager. Darker and maltier than its light cousin, it is suitable for all-weather drinking, but will defer to lighter brews on the hottest of summer days.

The recipe:

• 6 lbs. amber malt extract (plastic tub on right). This is a pre-processed sugar mixture extracted from malted barley
• 3/4 oz. Saaz aroma hops (bag, right front)
• 1 oz. German Hallertau M.F. bittering hops (static-safe bag, left front; it is little known by homebrewers that hops are static sensitive)
• 3/4 lb. Crystal 40 malted barley (glass bowl, rear left)
• 3/8 lb. German Light Crystal malted barley (glass bowl, rear left)
• 3/8 lb. Honey malted barley (glass bowl, rear left)
• White Labs German lager yeast (not shown)

Note that this batch has whole malted barley in it (the contents of the glass bowl). These grains are called the adjuncts. Adjuncts add more sugars (hence higher alcohol content) and not surpisingly, a heavier, maltier body. Adjuncts are added to the water before the heat is applied and allowed to steep as the wort reaches a boil. Just before it starts to boil, the wort is taken off the heat and the adjuncts are strained out and thrown away.

Hops have a wonderfully strong smell, but for overall odorific goodness, adjuncts may be the winner across the entire enterprise of homebrewing. The best way I can describe the feeling I get from smelling fresh adjuncts is happy to be alive.

They nevertheless taste like Grape Nuts.

Taking the initial gravity marks the end of the process. The wort has been mixed, the yeast has been pitched, and we’ve poured off half a cup to measure the specific gravity. This batch reads at about 1.033 without temperature compensation. I never really compensate for temperature (you can get a dramatic demonstration of how the density of a liquid changes with temperature just using hot and cold tap water), and I’m never that confident that I get a sufficiently homogeneous mixture at this point, but this reading looks pretty good.

Percentage alcohol by volume is a function of initial and final specific gravity, so this is a good metric to have.

Here I (guy in the striped shirt on the left–have we not been over this?) am pouring about a gallon and a half of recently boiling wort into the carboy. It has about two gallons of cold tap water in it, and I’ll top it off with cold water when I’m done.

After it’s topped off, I’ll cap it and shake it vigorously for a few minutes. This helps oxygenate the wort (helpful since primary fementation is aerobic in nature), and helps mix us the hotter, sugar-laden part of the mixure with the cooler tap water. Interestingly, the hot, sugary wort is still denser than the cold water. Regardless of this everything will work out fine after the yeast is pitched, but I prefer a good, homogeneous mixture before that, so I can get a good hydrometer reading.

Whole hops accumulate some sugars during boil, and we covet sugar. We have to strain the hops out of the wort before transferring it to the carboy, so we first pour boiling water over the hops petals to “sparge” the sugars back into the wort. Then the tasty hops go into the trash.

Note that I did add the second ounce of Saaz about two minutes before I took the pot off the heat. Ahhhh, the smell…

Here my nine-year-old is using my innovating technique of filling the carboy (the five-gallon glass jug at bottom) with water without the need for a sterilized jug. The carboy and the funnel have both recently had a bleach bath. The boy will get one tomorrow (well, without the bleach).

The carboy needs some water in it before we add the hot wort; otherwise the glass will crack.

It was hard to get a good picture of the boiling “wort,” but this was as close as I could come:

By the way, we achieved boil at approximately 7:00pm. We should be sparging the hops in a half an hour.

Officer, it’s not what you think. Normally I use pelletized hops, but Adeodatus’ recipe calls for whole hops. Hops are actually the pedals of the flower of the hops vine. These are Saaz hops, and if I could blog the smell, believe me, I would.

To the right is Irish Moss, typically an additive only to lagers (not ales). According to legend, it helps proteins congeal more efficiently, leading to a clearer finished product. Ever since glassware replaced stoneware and pewter here at the Berglund household, we take pride in trying to get a certain clarity out of our lagers.

No shot of me adding these to the pot; not even brewing can withstand such tedium.

I don’t normally brew with dry malt extract, but without resorting to the more complex whole grain process, this is what you have to do to get a really light beer. Mind you, it’s not going to be Bud Light–just crisp, refreshing, and slightly hoppy. Add three pounds of this stuff to the three pounds of wildflower honey, and you’ve got enough fermentable sugar for the naturally occuring alcohol conversion nanobots to eat and be filled.

Here we have me (stiped shirt) pouring the amazingly delicious wildflower honey (light brown gooey stuff I’m pouring) into the stock pot (stainless steel stock pot). The pot contains warm water, but the heat is not on yet. After I add both containers of honey, I’ll stir the pot thoroughly to keep undissolved honey from carmelizing.

All recipies tonight are courtesy of Adeodatus, who was going to be here brewing tonight too, but was detained by the exigences of bad weather two days ago (see his blog).

Here we have the ingredients for the first batch: two cases of a crisp, light lager, suitable for summertime quaffing.

The recipe calls for:

• 3 lbs of dry extra light malt extract (bag in center)
• 3 lbs. delicious prairie wildflower honey (plastic containers on either side)
• Two ounces whole Saaz hops, one ounce bittering and one ounce aroma (bag at left)
• White Labs German lager yeast (16-oz. bottle at right with plastic wrap around top)
• Zero overripe bananas. (Those will become banana bread tomorrow, I’m told)

I overcompressed that JPEG, didn’t I? And I didn’t keep a copy of the original. Better luck next time.

It is my pleasure to announce a first in the history of TimBerglund.com: I will be live blogging the brewing of two 5-gallon batches of lager tonight. You’ll be getting real-time progress updates on both batches, including pictures. More or less, anyway; Mrs. Berglund is going to be out of the house tonight, and it’s bath night. I’ll do the best I can. Keep hitting refresh…

Is today Benoit Mandelbrot’s birthday or something? Google seems to be honoring his work.

You know, in a tip of the hat to the retro 80s ethos that Disco likes so much, I have a fractal calendar this year. Alright, that’s it. Cue the 80s music. Break out the VT320 terminal emulator. Fire up the VAX.

UPDATE: Duh, the image’s ALT tag says “Gaston Julia.” Mouse over the graphic (if you visit Google proper today) and you’ll see it. Here is a graphically intensive biography page on Julia that is probably getting 100x the traffic it normally does.