Just watched the movie Gattaca again (with daughter Olivia). It begins with a couple of quotes, one of them being:
“Consider the work of God; For who can make straight what He has made crooked?” Ecclesiastes 7:13
This is one of those movies that delivers more upon repeated viewings.
God took on a body, from the dust, in Adam. A trillion particles of inanimate, dead stuff pulled together and organised into the most complex system in the cosmos, an organic machine capable of feats we are yet to discover.
Adam, as Covenant head, also took on a “body.” A Divine Handful of flesh and bone, dead or dying by any human measure, organised into a being more palatial and lavish than any male eye is worthy to behold.
“When I began to edit the film, something happened. I found I was being educated. And not just with arguments. I was watching a Christian life. I was seeing a Christian man.” —Darren Doane
Just watched The History Boys, a film based on an entertaining but self-indulgent West End play by Alan Bennett. Despite the fact that under Course Language and Sexual References it should also have a “gay theme” warning (but I guess that’s not politically correct), the film is hysterical is places and unwittingly highlights a fatal flaw in our culture.
“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Matthew 3:11
I remember a scene from X Files where they printed out a binary code and laid the pages out on the floor. When viewed from a distance the ones and zeros made the image of a face. There was a similar scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies, where there was a search for a secret passage and it turned out to be a large X on the floor when viewed from above. This is just my view, but it seems a lot of theologians spend a great deal of time walking in circles in the jungle, lost in the details of prooftexts when we have Old Testament “Google maps” at our fingertips.
Just saw Avatar with the kids and thought I’d post some thoughts.
[WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.]
Just watched The Nativity Story with our seven-year-old son (the girls have seen it). Bawled my eyes out at many points, particularly now that I have a better understanding of the typological significance of many of the events since I last saw it.
“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful
than you can possibly imagine.” —Ben Kenobi
Herod and Vader are maggot-filled men. They are the living dead. Christ and Kenobi are willing to die. They become the dead living.
One factor the Bible matrix continually brings out in its various occurrences throughout Scripture is the transformation of knowledge into wisdom — through death. In some profound way, knowledge is singular but wisdom is plural.
The Lord gives Adam the knowledge of the Law, and Adam is expected to obey and become wise. We can see, in his failure to confess his sin, that he was no wiser than before.
A review of the movie of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book observed that the absence of a quest, something to be overcome or achieved, makes the film bland. It has everything else: family issues, fantastic characters and first-rate special effects. But at the end of the day, without a “holy quest” all that is left is a lot of bumming around discovering how cool the world is. Or, worse, like much modern infants’ education, how cool we are.
NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.
I listened to a White Horse Inn podcast recently, titled Boredom and Entertainment.
Compared with an action-packed movie, most people would probably characterise the ministry of the word and sacrament as “boring.” So in order to reach out, should churches make their services more entertaining? Joining the panel for this discussion is Richard Winter, author of Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment…
Martha Moore-Keish on Communion and Hope for Heaven
“Action adventure films like The Rapture and Left Behind get people talking about the end times. But the final scene from the 1984 film Places in the Heart offers a more biblically complete picture of what God intends for us in the new heaven and new earth.
Bible Matrix blog
