Recently the topic of contemporary worship has come up in real-life conversation a few times, so I thought I’d compile these posts I wrote a year and a half ago into one, easy-to-find place. After, why talk to friends when you can just give them a URL? Wait, don’t answer that.

Upon re-reading the posts I find some of the prose to be a bit overwrought at times, but then I have a tendency to do that when I’m excited. Apologies in advance.

People Seem To Like It: a facetious suggestion to use an online auction system to decide what kind of music to play in church. But hey, if we’re just trying to find out what people want, why not do it right?

Music Doesn’t Matter Much: except it does. This is a brief response to people who would defuse the music discussion debate by calling it unimportant.

Defining Some Terms: the terms “contemporary” and “traditional” are problematic, but we might as well stick with them for now.

Form, Not Content: a foundational argument in the music debate. If the kind of music matters as much as the words being sung, then contemporary worship music starts to look like a pretty bad idea.

The Defense of Contemporary Music: a critical look at a few arguments typically advanced in defense of contemporary worship music.

P.S. If the title of this post seems inflammatory, it’s not mean to be. It’s a play on a tradition in computer science literature.

To the barricades! InfoWorld is calling for action to recruit and retain more women in information technology jobs. The piece is not as bad as it might have been, but it contains some assumptions that are as odd as they are unexamined. To begin with, data:

It may not be surprising that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women filled only 26.7 percent of computer and mathematical positions in 2006. What’s troubling is that this percentage has been declining for some time. And the descent has been nearly universal across all IT job categories. For example, women accounted for 16.6 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions in 2006, down from 23.4 percent in 2000. At the management level, the imbalance persists. Among computer and IS managers, for example, 27.2 percent were women in 2006. By contrast, women held 66 percent of all social and community service management jobs last year.

An optimist might at least observe that women seem to be better-represented in management ranks than among network and system administrators. However, the data are very spotty, and there are many peer categories to sysadmins that might dilute the outlook. Still, what is “troubling” about the numbers? Whence the assumption that the sexes ought to be equally represented in a given occupation? Can anyone adduce evidence of real oppression keeping women out of IT? I don’t deny that glass ceilings used to exist in full force and are surely present residually in the world today, but the burden is on the author to show that they are to blame in this case, or explain why anyone should care what little girls want to do when they grow up. The article’s strengths notwithstanding, these burdens are not borne.

An obvious explanation for any gender imbalance in any profession is that younger women make career sacrifices in order to raise children. Pinnacle Entertainment CIO Carol Pride comments:

In order to get to the top of the food chain, you have to own something big and ugly — an ERP implementation, for example, or a slot machine implementation at a casino….Often, the first big-and-ugly project coincides with the time one is trying to raise young children. Women often realize, rationally, that children are more important than companies, but if you don’t do the big and ugly, then it ends up hindering you later.

I’d hate to think I’m giving Carol an uncharitable reading, but I hear her saying that women need to be ready to sacrifice their children in favor of their careers. To dispel some of the gender-political confusion that might cloud our judgment, let’s reverse the roles and see how well the statement plays. Now, nobody knocks dads for being away from the children for 40 or 50 hours a week; it’s not just culturally normative, but necessary to keep food on the table. But suppose we were talking about men who have young families and still want to pursue very competitive careers in which 70 or 80 hours a week are needed to get anywhere. Suppose some executive was mentoring these young men, and he told them that sure, their kids might miss them and their wives might wilt under the stress of running the family substantially alone, and they might know what they’re doing is somehow wrong, but if they wuss out now, it will “hinder them later.”

I mean, with hypothetical mentors like this, who needs no-fault divorce laws?

Clearly I am locked into patriarchal, male-as-breadwinner thinking. This article, written for respectable company, can’t be expected to deal with troglodytes like me, can it? Apparently not:

According to a recent joint study by Catalyst, the Families and Work Institute, and the Center for Work and Family at Boston College, 74 percent of women executives have a spouse/partner who is employed full-time. By contrast, 75 percent of male executives have a spouse/partner who stays home full-time — strong evidence that, despite progress in attitudes toward domestic workloads, women still predominantly bear the brunt of striking a balance between career and home.

The paternalism of that paragraph is jarring. The point is well-taken that most women executives are the “second income” in the household, and most male executives are the only income. But to turn this into “strong evidence” that women are bearing the “brunt” of anything requires us to assume that all women want and ought to pursue a career path that leads to executive management. Could the data not as easily tell us that women from wealthy households frequently make the decision to be homemakers? It’s not like these wealthy families couldn’t break loose a few bucks for a maid and an au pair. If these numbers suggest anything, it is that the women most able to decide how to structure their lives, decide in large numbers to stay home and raise families. They need not be scolded for making what is in the final analysis a much freer choice than most are able to make.

And as for a bad attitude toward housework, my wife would need to comment here to acquit me finally of that charge. However, I am confident that in the end I will be found innocent.

Eventually the article drops complaints about strict gender inequities and instead attempts to give an account of why it matters. Here we find a mixed bag of silliness and sobriety:

“Because most companies are based on a male model and have been for many decades, the men don’t get the kinds of business contribution women can give,” [Women in Technology International Carolyn] Leighton says. “They often [institute diversity metrics] just to meet requirement codes.”

But, Leighton adds, the current nature of IT actually calls for what are considered stereotypical female characteristics. No longer an island within the company, IT is integral to other departments and requires employees who communicate well. “Now IT goes across all departments globally,” she says. “And women by nature are collaborative consensus builders.”

It’s too bad Leighton didn’t elaborate on what a “male model” might be. I mean, I saw a picture of my company’s president from when he was in high school, and he honestly looked a lot like Fabio—no, for real, he did—but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she meant.

Given that, imagine my honest relief that strict gender equivalence is not being assumed here. One might construct a species of feminism around the proposition that the classes “male” and “female” are functionally identical as they relate to the institutions of commerce and family, but the author avoids that path. If we’re talking about corporations based on a “male model” which might be improved by the presence of naturally collaborative and consensus-building women, then we are obviously all comfortable with the fact that men and women differ in important ways which might actually matter in the real world. Continuing along these lines is IBM V.P. of SOA and WebSphere strategy Sandy Carter, who says that “Women are good at accepting change and creating change, which is important in the marketplace,” and “The skills that [women] have — being able to juggle things, multitasking — reflect the [business] environment we’re in now.”

And these are valid points. It seems fairly uncontroversial that collaboration, consensus-building, and “multitasking” are typically more natural for women than men. (Take me, for example. The “consensus” I like best is when everybody agrees that my way is the right one.) But let us not overstate our case: saying that women are more natural consensus-builders is a little bit like saying men are more natural sysadmins because they have the upper-body strength needed to lift the occasional server into the rack. No one will deny that men do, in fact, have this physical advantage, but it’s not like women are all so weak that asking them to heft a 1U box 40″ off the ground is going to make them wilt like delicate garden flowers in the sun. The difference is real and important, but somehow each sex learns to develop some aptitudes that come naturally for the other—even outside of a diverse environment like a 50/50 workplace or a family.

Ultimately we can agree that no man or woman should be hindered from making free vocational choices within the scope of the knowledge professions. Far from this modest goal, though, the InfoWorld piece agitates for strictly proportional representation of women in IT. Even if all the resulting collaboration and consensus and multitasking would make IT departments hum, it seems unlikely that it’s actually good for women to set this goal, or even to care much how many of them choose technology professions at all. Let it be enough to present free choices to women and allow them to structure their lives as they see fit.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that I have a place in my heart for the career choice of homemaker and homeschooler, and I am not shy about extolling the benefits of that path. Nor, more to the point, is my wife. But I would only want a woman to make a free and informed choice of this lifestyle—never a coerced or a manipulated one. If many women choose otherwise, I will not assume they are either enslaved or unfeminine or unconcerned about their families. The reciprocal charity would be most welcomed.

I know a woman who left IT a couple of years ago. (This is of course anecdotal, but not much more so than the comments of the of ten prominent women in IT interviewed in the InfoWorld piece.) She was a Java developer, and is now a homeschooler and stay-at-home mother of three. She was a single mother of one for most of her career, and while her problem wasn’t precisely one of balancing work and motherhood, she has admitted that her heart was just never really in her work. Her desire was simply more for her son than for Enterprise Java. Maybe she could have championed a massive ERP implementation (if massive ERP implementations were not already passé by the time her career would have allowed her the risk), but she never wanted to. Now she stays at home with an infant and a special-needs preschooler and an eleven-year-old. She tells me she loves it. If we want to carp about women leaving IT, why not tell her story too?

P.S. Certain other women technologists might take the trouble to weigh in on this. Am I completely off base here?

Now that Christmas Day has gone and the Holiday Season is coming to a close, I would like to send out a call to all the pop musicians of the world as they contemplate their projects for 2007. If you are the sort of artist who likes your new releases to be bound by some unifying conceptual theme, then good on you. Better to be packaging songs together on the basis of some grand idea your heart yearns to express than just to knock out a bunch of disconnected, crass, three-and-a-half-minute attempts to monetize your personal brand. You’ve got all these deep ideas welling up in your soul, and you have to get them out somehow, right? We know how it is. Go to town! Put out those topical projects like the heavy, deeply affected artist that you are.

Just let me make one request of you: please don’t make a Christmas CD. I know you believe at the bottom of your heart—you just know it to be true—that what some of those dusty old carols need is a hip new treatment by your favorite musician. The real problem, you catch yourself thinking, is that Hark! The Herald Angels Sing lacks syncopation and an awesome clarinet solo. Or you wonder aloud whether what O Little Town of Bethlehem has been waiting for all these years is your deep, lusty vocals and a disco beat in the bridge.

Oh, and a bridge. It never did have much of a bridge, did it?

I urge you not to do it. I know you, and possibly the market with you, are very impressed with your talents. Maybe you sell a lot of music. Maybe, if you’re a Christian musician (a group for whom the Christmas CD temptation must be particularly difficult to withstand), people tell you how significant your Music Ministry is through all of the conversions, re-dedications, and heartfelt moments of authentic worship it fosters. But think for a moment what you’re up against. I really don’t mean to be all Dickensian about this, but Christmas is a pretty big holiday. Do you really think you, even in your most pensive Piano Solo mood, can possibly capture the significance the day holds to most of us?

Forget the theological import of the season. Your chosen musical form is more or less unable to meet the demands asked of it by serious meditation on the doctrine of the incarnation, which is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that even mere family gatherings, decorations, gifts, cookies-like-mom-used-to-make, parties, memories, and ubiquitous good cheer will probably price you out of the market. You are simply bound to sound cheesy.

And whatever you do, please don’t write anything original. If overdriven guitars are bad for Good Christian Men, Rejoice, then whatever ditty you were contemplating about How Much Christmas Means To You is pretty much guaranteed to be worse. Nothing personal.

Are you discouraged yet? Good. But don’t give up hope! Keep on planning your next project, and be sure to make it something to which you can do some justice. There are lots of topics. Just pick one, as long as it’s not Christmas. Maybe how you felt about your last boyfriend or girlfriend. Anything.

Of course there are a few of you who are actually talented enough to pull it off. Some of you actually can shepherd a classic Christmas carol into the contemporary context with true freshness, sensitivity to tradition, and a hint of transcendence, or maybe even write a new song that hits the mark as well as the existing ones have. But then, if you’re one of those people, it never would have occurred to you to take my advice anyway.

Yesterday afternoon we had the distinct pleasure of having lunch with some friends from The Netherlands. It’s always a treat for me to talk to people from other countries—a double treat, in the case of the warm hospitality of this particular family—if for no other reason than to have direct access to an outsider’s perspective on the affairs of my own people. Fortunately the man of that house is fairly astute in matters of public policy, so we had a good talk about politics.

The topic turned to the American system of public education. They expressed some surprise at the lack of stratification in our system: everybody is labeled a winner no matter what, and distinctions between high achievers and low achievers are considered embarrassing and improper to admit in polite company. You need outsiders to point this out to you? you’re wondering. Isn’t that a rather obvious pathology of American society? Well, no and yes, respectively. But point being that it’s painfully obvious to other parts of the world that in this department we’re not quite right in the head.

Then they went on to talk about their school experience in the 1980s. They said something about a “Reformed school” (meaning a parochial school of the Reformed theological tradition, not a Reform school), which led me to believe they meant a private school.

“No,” the man of the house explained. “In The Netherlands, there are all kinds of different schools, all paid for by tax dollars. Some are religious, some are not.”

“Ah,” I said, assuming he meant a school run by the state church. “We could never do that here because of the First Amendment.”

“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “It has nothing to do with freedom of religion.” He went on to explain that all you need to start a Dutch school is a certain number of students willing to attend the new institution, and you’ll get public funding for it. In his brief account, there was no single authority or central bureaucracy for administering education. Sure, the government imposes minimum requirements on what schools must do, but other than that there is substantial diversity. He was talking about this the way one would talk about having free elections or a publicly funded police force: like it was just the sensible way to organize this particular part of a free society.

This in a country where the left and center-left combined just won 62.4% of the popular vote and 96 of 150 seats in Parliament. And mind you, when I advocate vouchers here, I’m a Friedmanite zealot, probably a theocrat, and maybe even a racist.

So you’ll pardon me if I’m feeling just a bit off today.

Chris Anderson bows the knee to homeschooled Christian kids in “I, for one, welcome our new Christian homeschooled Lego robotics overlords:”

This is a bit off topic, but my fondness for Lego robotics cannot be suppressed. Check out this video of a team of Christian home-schooled 9-14 year olds winning the New Hampshire FIRST Lego League Nano-Quest Challenge in a single autonomous outing. There are so many impressive things going one here that it’s hard to highlight just one, but the fact that the robot changes its own tools is unbelievable.

Ah, that video brings me back to the awkward days of eighth grade Olympics of the Mind (now called something that sounds dumb due to the objections of the International Olympic Committee) and our “Treasure Hunters” problem. It involved no robots, but it did require us to write a program that would automatically plot a path through a large 8×8 grid for two human actors to pick up three treasures each while avoiding three randomly-place hazards. And not walking on the same square twice. Way too hard for 13-year-olds using the programming tools of the day, but good memories were made my Dad, who provided copious programming help.

Seventh grade OM is where I met the girl who would later become my wife. There was no programming that year, although I did manage to get some electronics involved by making some little LED flashers for one of the space circus animals we constructed out of papier maché, chicken wire, wood, and canvas. But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Chris Anderson and Mindstorms. If you’re not familiar with Chris (he’s the editor-in-chief of Wired) and his recent book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, you’d be well served to read his brief introduction to the idea under the heading The Long Tail, In a Nutshell. It’s a compelling economic model that, while not without its critics, seems to do a good job explaining certain distribution models that have arisen in the Internet age.

As for Mindstorms, I’m more and more convinced that I need to part with $250 and get this product into my house. Programmable robots with sensors, for the kids? As I’m fond of saying (not entirely without irony): it’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Happy Feet (2006), directed by George Miller, starring Elijah Wood, Brittany Murphy, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman.

“Footloose with penguins, plus environmentalism.”

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Apologies (and really credit, because I don’t have an original bone in my body) to Jeff Goldstein.

Say, it’s looking like a fun summer for movies. Check it out:

• I, Robot, starring Wil Smith. I watched the trailer about five times. Rating: Extremely Awesome. Having never read the novel, I’m not sure how close the movie sticks to the story, although I’m guessing not very close. Still, this looks like the kewlest addition to the Smith corpus in a while.
• Troy. This is probably a movie to see with the wife rather than the brother. No particular reason why.
• The Day After Tomorrow. So what if MoveOn.org and Al Gore are frothing at the mouth and using it as a propaganda piece to support their environmental policies? It looks like an awesome disaster flick, okay? Although I think when climatologists speak of “rapid” climate change, though, they mean decades, not days. Even so, they seem to be able to live with the bad science if it means people will think climatology is cool for a few weeks.
• Spider Man 2. Like I even need to mention this. Please.
• The Manchurian Candidate. Yet Another Summer Remake, but it will be reason enough for me to see the original, even if I never catch the new version on the big screen. And cognizance of 40-year-old pop culture makes you look as smart as any high culture does anymore, so this is totally win-win.
• Thunderbirds. What was I saying about pop culture from 40 years ago? How about pop culture from 40 years ago that I can share with my kids? I’ll buy some subset of the original series (which HBO never showed enough of when I was a boy), show my kids what marionettes can really be, then take the boy to see this one. What a wonderful time to be alive.
• Man On Fire. Another fun-looking Denzel Washington remake of a remake (of a remake). Probably a rental, but I wouldn’t complain if I found myself watching it in a theater.
• Around The World In 80 Days. Another period Jackie Chan flick. Probably a rental, but sign me and my wife up. Looks like huge fun.
• Van Helsing. This is already making its splash, and I must confess that it looked like gobs of undead-creature-killing fun. I may still catch it, but I am cautioned by local critic Robert Dennerstein, who wasn’t feeling it. And this is a guy who is not above having fun at the movies.
• Alien vs. Predator. Well, the can’t all look good. Eighteen summers ago, when Sean, Paul, Mike and I regularly walked across the field behind my house, crossed Chambers, and paid $3.50 (just $0.15 more than an hour’s work at minimum wage!) to see movies at the Cooper 5, we would have been all over this. Since I’m not 14 any more, I’ll probably skip it.

P.S. Did I really put this entry in the “Culture” category? It seems that I did. Thus is pop culture included in the definition…

A few weeks ago a friend emailed me to ask my opinion on his use of movie clips in a series of Bible lessons to young adults. He was privy to certain recent discussions of Christian postmodernism (including some more vigorous ones that went outside this blog), and wanted to know how I felt about using video in Christian education. (Christian Education: that term ought to irk the emergent bloggers.) Here, roughly, is what I said:

You may or may not ever find me doing a multimedia lesson including actual movie clips, but I don’t condemn the practice outright. That is, I’m not nuts about it, but everybody does it, and I don’t think it’s fatal or anything.

Technology, particularly technology used for entertainment purposes, is almost literally ubiquitous in our lives. It is far too pervasive for most of us to have much perspective on it. (As they say, if you want to know what water is, don’t ask a fish–and baby, we’re technological fish.) I can’t say I’ve thought enough about this to be able to prove coercively all of the hidden assumptions and ideas that using PowerPoint to project our lesson outline or Media Player to watch a movie clip brings into a teaching environment, but I fear the unexamined assumptions that entertainment technology probably brings along for the ride when we try to harness it for our purposes. My judgment is that they will usually do some kind of harm–a kind most people are ignoring–so I personally try to avoid them most of the time.

And this from a technology professional!

My bent against the user of movie clips in teaching doesn’t have much to do with Postmodernism qua Postmodernism, although the general postmodern (and postmodernist) preference of Image over Word certainly comes into play. It’s more a matter of setting my goal to be engaging souls with ideas, and being cautious (perhaps overly so) of forcing people back into Entertainment Consumption mode instead. Certainly there are large advantages to using movie clips that should be weighed against this concern, and even more certainly, quality teaching shouldn’t be afraid to make appropriate cultural allusions. The sad fact of our lives is that movies and pop music are going to be pretty much the only cultural artifacts we are going to be able to draw on for almost all of the people to whom we minister. If I don’t like that, I might as well get mad at the wind for blowing, or the NEA for existing. Still, at the end of the day, I try to avoid the use of multimedia in teaching unless it matches the subject matter uniquely. (Like if we were studying film depictions of Christ, as in Philip Yancey’s Sunday School-productized The Jesus I Never Knew.)

I know and respect other people who have considered this question and deliberately decided against my approach and in favor of yours. I don’t do it myself, but it doesn’t bother me all that much when other people do. It is no big deal.

On the heels of this (and this was all in that hazy season of my life the few weeks before I left for Spain), I had the exciting opportunity to adapt an enterprise software architecture diagram to PowerPoint use. Now, you may be thinking that’s a simple matter of selecting the whole diagram in Visio, copying it to the clipboard, and pasting it in PowerPoint, but you’re only thinking that because you’re wrong. It has much more to do with figuring out how to present information PowerPoint-style, which consists chiefly in limiting your minimum text size to 18 points.

If you weren’t wondering why I thought it was so hard to get a block diagram into PowerPoint, you may be wondering what this has to do with using movie clips in Bible lessons. Answer: more than you might think. I’m going to try to give you more on this in the next week. Coming soon: Why PowerPoint Is The Devil.

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.