Two Really Scary Movies for Hallowe’en

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Hallowe'en, Horror, Margin Call, Slavoj Žižek, Sucker Punch, Take Shelter, The Changeling

In the hours leading up All Hallow’s Even, I have a few recommendations for anyone looking to curl up with a truly frightening film tomorrow night.  In no particular order, here we have two really scary recent films to keep you up all night …

Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, 2010): What is most horrifying about this film is the what it suggests about the utter bankruptcy of a postmodern imagination rooted in reference and remix rather than in telling stories.  Zack Snyder’s slickly pretty parable about a nubile young woman, Babydoll (a hyper-sexualised Emily Browning), who creates elaborate fantasy worlds to escape the appalling conditions of the 1960s-era mental hospital in which she is imprisoned is truly chilling, though it was intended to be a story of the empowering potential of the imagination.  The film unintentionally pulls back the curtain on the hollowness of genre filmmaking uncoupled from any sense of history or any awareness of the real world of flesh-and-blood human beings.

Snyder, a visual stylist of the first order, has repeatedly shown in his adaptations of other people’s work that he can unearth the dark heart of a text but lacks either the talent or the intelligence (or both) to do anything with its subtext.  In his solid, scary, but completely unnecessary remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie horror masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead, Snyder evacuates the film’s setting, a suburban shopping mall, of all of its social criticism and its larger meaning.  It becomes a backdrop for the film’s action, not part of its story.  Romero made pointed criticisms of consumer capitalist culture by comparing the drooling hordes of zombies with shoppers in a mall, a sad, poignant, and utterly damning portrayal of normality as a world of the living dead.  In his adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, Synder captures all of Miller’s unfortunate fascistic tendencies but does nothing but make them live, breath, and bleed in visceral slow-motion.  With Watchmen, adapted from Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ epoch-making alternative history comic book series (1986 -1987), Snyder faithfully captures and even amplifies the profound ugliness of Moore’s New York, but, unlike Moore (who has quite rightly disavowed the film), Snyder simply maroons us in this morass of grime and neo-noir pastiche.  Moore turned the tale of ordinary people playing at superheroes into a potent and cutting critique of 1980s excess as the flipside of 1960s idealism.  Synder just lets the ugliness speak for itself.  Robbed of its context, not surprisingly, it has nothing to say.

Sucker Punch performs a similar trick, but this time it is even worse.  Synder, working from his own script for the first time, gives us an utterly self-insulated and self-referential world; when Babydoll creates a series of elaborate fantasy worlds as a way to escape the very real horror of her situation, Synder is unable to give her anything to work with outside of noise and furious action (some of it, admittedly, staged quite beautifully).  She imagines first a burlesque club as a stable first layer of fantasy and then a sequence of other, more fantastical secondary levels of disassociation, featuring giant samurai robots, zombie soldiers, dragons, and futuristic trains guarded by faceless automatons.  In other words, the worlds that Babydoll creates in the 1960s are a pastiche of films, television shows, and comic books that she cannot have seen, given that they all appear on the cultural scene considerably later.  What can we make of this?  Is Snyder saying that all fan-boy culture is the creation of disturbed minds that create elaborate alternative worlds as a way of dealing with – or not dealing with – the cruel, senseless, and violent world outside the mind?  It would be comforting to believe this, but, given that the film is itself masturbatory genre-fan pornography, a melding of the extreme sexualisation of young women in Japanese manga with the spectacle of contemporary fantasy film and the dense visual dazzle of big-budget science fiction cinema (though without any of the ideas that make films like Blade Runner, Children of Men, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Sector 9 so memorable), it is difficult to give the film this much credit.

Synder’s world, then, is just another layer of unreality, and the audience is trapped in revolving worlds of noisy, hollow fantasy, just as Babydoll is.  This is Debord’s nightmare of the spectacle taken to its horrific logical end.  Worse than this, there is a moral hole at the very centre of Sucker Punch that is truly appalling, especially given that its director and many of its cast members have painted it as a feminist work.  Most viewers do not have to escape from anything as bad as Babydoll does.  In the film’s single scariest moment, Synder takes us into a filthy room with a solitary mattress on the floor and reveals the the hospital is witness to the serial rape of its young female inmates at the hands of a slovenly orderly.  That Synder takes the silly, superficial Sucker Punch to levels of human depravity as dark and despicable as this is truly horrifying.

Margin Call (J. C. Chandor, 2011): This one is a bit unfair, I must admit, given that I am performing the lazy, reactionary critic’s move of writing about a film I’ve not actually seen (see almost any orthodox Christian critique of Martin Scorcese’s brilliant The Last Temptation of Christ for an example).  I can only ask you to cut me some slack; I live in Dunedin, where mid-level films like this arrive rather later than for most, if we get to see them at the cinema at all.  This criticism is not so much about the film, in any event, but the larger discursive structure that surrounds it.  Judging by the beautifully-cut trailer for the financial thriller Margin Call, the true horror is that, faced with another in a long line of financial crises, we are still being sold the myth that such crises are surprising, that they are the work of a few unscrupulous people working dishonestly, that they are preventable.  As the slovenly rockstar philosopher and recent al-Jazeera correspondent Slavoj Žižek writes in his incisive First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009):

The only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was an unpredictable surprise which hit the markets out of the blue. (p. 9)

For anyone in the know, this crisis, an inevitable result of a system that is based on exploitation and the faultiest of logic, was not a surprise.  Its collapse is not the work of a few (though many of the people in charge are indeed rather despicable), but the result of attempting to create a necessary and infinite growth in a material and human field of finite resources.  In short, the system fails because it has to, because it cannot not fail.  That this mythology (and this is myth in the formal sense of the word as well as in its more commonplace pejorative sense) is still being repackaged and foisted upon as entertainment is something that will keep me up all night.

And now for two recommendations for those of you interested in actual horror films …

The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980): This film, which I first saw with my older brother when I was about twelve, still scares the pants off of me.  The infinitely sad, haunting, and edge-of-your-seat tense story of a grieving widower (played by the great George C. Scott) who moves into a giant old house to try to put his life back together after the death of his family, this is one for those of you who think that the spooky séance scene cannot be scary after being done so many times.  There are images in this film (the well, the well!) that can give me the chills just sitting here typing this.

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011): After their quietly devastating collaboration on Shotgun Stories (2007), director Nichols and lead Michael Shannon (so good as a disturbed evangelical Christian in Boardwalk Empire) reunite for this chilling and infinitely unsettling story of a man haunted by visions of a coming apocalyptic storm.  This one sets out to shake you and does it with infinite care and control rather than with jump-scares or people in silly masks.  This is the psychological thriller as existential horror film, an interrogation of the idea of sanity in a world that is seemingly spiralling ever closer to irrevocable madness that is on par with Lars von Trier’s Melanchlia, which asks similar questions, though in a far more global and economic context (see more on that here) than Take Shelter‘s intimate portrait of the disintegration of a single Midwestern American family.  The last fifteen seconds of Take Shelter are scarier and more deeply disquieting than any ten recent horror-classic remakes or anything in the thousands of pages of the Twilight Saga.

Sleep well, my friends …

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Steve Jobs Isn’t in Heaven

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buddhist, Heaven, karma, steve jobs

 

Cinema as Exorcism (six): On Soft-Selling Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

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Another Earth, Consumer Capitalism, Depression, Eschatology, Film, Hysteria, Lars von Trier, Marx, Max Weber, Melancholia, rationalisation, The Sirens of Titan, When Worlds Collide

Picking up where I left off, and continuing our exploration of cinema and/as exorcism – see also here (on Australian film), here (on District 9), here (on 2012), here (on the wretched Avatar), and here (on Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) –  I want to branch out in new territory here and discuss the ways Lars von Trier’s utterly brilliant but utterly nihilistic new film Melancholia is being sold to the American public, a collective audience notorious – but not of course universal – for its dislike of moral ambiguity or philosophical complexity.

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia

Melancholia is von Trier’s best film, and by a long chalk.  It is also the most purely entertaining science-fiction defence of a nihilistic worldview since Kurt Vonnegut’s incomparable 1959 novel, The Sirens of Titan.  While I have heard some (though not many) critics and fans pan the film for being too accessible and for lacking the blunt controversy of something like his 2009 film Antichrist, Melancholia succeeds in my book as no other von Trier film for no other reason that von Trier steps back from his usual strategy of rubbing the audience’s face in the depravity of humanity and simply allows the film to quietly and calmly make its points, letting the film’s preternatural stillness and its deliberate pacing tell the story far more effectively than the melodramatic mode of many of his previous films.  Melancholia, in the simplest terms, is the first von Trier film I have ever watched without feeling the need for a shower immediately afterwards.  The ability for a film to make the viewer feel literally, physically soiled is of course the mark of a true cinematic talent, and here von Trier, with his talent for evoking mood and tension to the point where it becomes palpable, can be counted among the ranks of such directors as Paul Schrader and John Hillcoat.  It is, however, infinitely refreshing to see someone as gifted as von Trier working in a different, less confrontational, and more formally Romantic mode.

For all its almost gentle touch, the film presents a view of the world – no, of the universe itself – that is bleaker and more final than anything in von Trier’s oeuvre.  Even films as stark and forbidding as Breaking the Waves or Antichrist are shot through with something resembling hope.  In Waves, Bess’ unshakable goodness and belief in love anchor a film suspended over an abyss, an abyss that von Trier, then a recent convert to Catholicism, chooses to ignore with his final – and in my mind, completely misguided – image attesting to the literal truth of Bess’ salvation.  Even the end of the determinedly repellent Antichrist offers a kind of redemption when the male protagonist, known only as He, leaves a metaphoric wilderness, having rejected his cold psychologist’s view of the world. (For a pdf of an intriguing scholarly article by Gitte Buch-Hansen offering a positive reading of the film from a feminist biblical studies perspective, follow this link; for two very good discussions of the film from a religious studies perspective by S. Brent Plate, see Religion Dispatches here and here.)

Melancholia first appears to be a riff on a theme that appears from time to time in science fiction, the collision of the Earth with another planet, but I think there is more to be learned in placing it next to the history of texts – again, most of them from sci-fi, which trace the impact of the discovery of previously unknown planets.  The best-known – and simply the best – of these stories is Isaac Asimov’s classic short story ‘Nightfall’, which first appeared in a 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  In Asimov’s spare and ultimately devastating tale, the greatest scientific minds of a complex society on the planet of Lagash discover on the very eve of its destruction that its society is doomed by the eclipse of one of its suns by a  previously hidden planet, an alignment of celestial bodies that happens only once every 2049 years.  Thrown into total darkness, unknown on the planet, which is lit by no less than six suns, the people of Lagash are driven to madness and to set massive fires to provide the heat and light that they simply cannot exist without, especially given that most of the population does not know that this is a temporary situation.  In the story, an intrepid band of scientists discovers the coming of the darkness, something that has been long predicted by the Cultists, Lagash’s dominant religious tradition, but are unable to convince the population to prepare for it.  Here we find not only the classic sci-fi conception of religion as bad science and poorly remembered history, but also a potent allegory for the futility of scientific knowledge when dealing with a fearful and undereducated public.  ‘Nightfall’ ends on a fittingly bleak note as Lagash’s society again, faced with the enormity of darkness and the devastating and sudden revelation of its own ignorance – the astronomers, working only in daylight, believed that the universe contained only six suns, but the darkness reveals that there are millions, quite unseating Lagash as the centre point of the observable world, a repeat of the Copernican revolution taking place in seconds rather than centuries – sets fire to itself and all that it has built over more than two millennia.

There are other, simpler entries into this rather obscure sub-category of sci-fi, including Philp Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s classic 1932 novel When Worlds Collide, made into a space opera-style film of the same name by Rudolph Maté in 1951.  In both, the Earth encounters not one but two rogue bodies in space, one of which destroys the Earth, though a small band of intrepid scientists and travellers manage to escape destruction and take up life on one of the new worlds, Bronson Beta, which shows clear signs of previous inhabitants.  While Wylie and Balmer’s slim pot-boiler of a novel has become largely neglected, Maté’s film is better-remembered both for its Oscar-winning special effects – including a still-stunning vision of the flooding of New York City – and for its wildly uneven tone, veering from melodrama to cheesy whimsy from one scene to the next with little rhyme or reason.  This is probably most obvious in the closing scene, played to rapturous, triumphant music and with blissful happiness from our intrepid astronauts, who are overcome with an uncomplicated joy when safely landed on the Technicolor wonder of Beta, despite the fact that billions of people have been obliterated and they are the only human survivors (this being the 1950s, they are apple-cheeked, white, healthy, and Christian survivors).  The final image says it all, really.

Interestingly enough, there is another film this year, Another Earth, which grapples with the existential questions raised by the discovery of an unknown world, this time an exact duplicate of Earth which may or may not have duplicate versions of each every person living, though this need not detain us here for long.  Where Another Earth ends on a New Age-tinged moment of self-realisation, and thus a note of hope, though not one so strident as that which concludes When Worlds Collide, von Trier’s Melancholia ends on an even bleaker note than Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’.  In ‘Nightfall’, at least, the reader is free to assume that the people of Lagash will rebuild, though this is tinged with the near-certainly that all of that newly built world will turn to ashes on that fateful night some 2000 years in the future.  Melancholia ends with the irrevocable and inescapable end of the Earth, smashed into rubble by the far larger planet Melancholia.

What is most interesting – in this reporter’s opinion, at least – is how thorough, and ultimately how brutal, Melancholia‘s social critique really is.  The film is essentially a character study of two sisters, the melancholic Justine (very nicely played by Kirsten Dunst) and the resolutely ordinary Claire (a surprising turn from Antichrist‘s Her, Charlotte Gainsbourg).  Each of the sisters gets a half of the film named after her, though, really, this is Justine’s story, and her perspective is the one the film champions in the end.  After a stunning Prologue of ultra-slow-motion images that comprise a series of vignettes of the end of the world, set very appropriately to Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, the film’s narrative begins with the lavish and increasingly uncomfortable spectacle of Justine’s wedding reception, celebrating her marriage to the increasingly baffled Michael.  Von Trier stages this sequence, much of which is riotously if uncomfortably funny, as a piece of social-realist cinema, not unlike many of his other films.  Shot on an isolated but extremely luxurious golf resort in Sweden but set in an unidentified Anglo-American no-place, the first half of the film shows us Justine’s increasingly futile attempts to play the part of the happy bride that everyone around her (with the exception of the sisters’ acidic mother) expects her to play.  Justine commits the unpardonable sin of failing to pretend to be happy and satisfied and instead ends up rejecting not only Michael but her family and her smarmy boss, who has come to the wedding to offer her a promotion.

Claire’s section of the film is set months later as she struggles to care for the borderline catatonic Justine, who has come to live with her at the resort, and to prepare for the arrival of the rogue planet Melancholia, which experts tell everyone will miss the Earth and cause minimal damage.  As it becomes ever clearer that the planets will collide and that everyone and everything on Earth is doomed to a violent death, Justine emerges as the sanest of the characters.  Her reaction to the news of the destruction of the Earth is as much indifference as it is anything else.  While Claire fears for her son Leo and begins to fall apart psychologically, Justine has the one truly rational reaction in the film, that of resignation.  For Justine, the end of a world which is facile, inauthentic and meaningless is nothing to mourn.

Michael, Justine, and Claire in Melancholia

That the film takes Justine’s side is, of course, debatable, but I will lay out my case here: Justine works in advertising and is thus implicated in selling the world of wealth and privilege that she despises to a public that cannot afford it.  In this role, she becomes a representative of a consumer society that defines itself through a lie that it does not ultimately believe is possible.  Justine is the only one the film (again, aside from her mother) who is not buying what she herself is selling.  Everyone at the wedding is clearly invested in the mythos of comfort and happiness that such events of conspicuous consumption both celebrate and make normative, but Justine, try as she might, is unable to invest herself in the role that she and others have laid out for her.  Claire’s husband, John, the owner of the resort, is angry and bitterly disappointed in Justine, not because she is in genuine distress, but because she is a failed consumer, because she does not participate in the wedding passively, but questions its meaning at every turn, perverting the gathering with her unpredictability and her lateness, profaning such familiar ritual elements as the cutting of the cake and the reception dinner.

Ultimately, Justine is the film’s voice of reason and, oddly enough, its conscience.  Her rejection of the trappings of bourgeois respectability – and what is more bourgeois that golf? – is the film’s rejection of these trappings, especially the ever-more-pervasive discourse on ‘happiness’.  Indeed, the film is a coherent argument on the futility of the dream of happiness as an ineffective and ultimately hopeless strategy for keeping the problems of the world at bay.  In von Trier’s nihilistic universe, Justine’s choice to simply reject her role in a system of value and morality is the most rational choice and would be the most ethical one if the film had any real interest in right or wrong.  It is Justine who understands the world and the place of people within it and her heroism lies in the simple, honest, straightforward rejection of all of it.

As the film draws to its inevitable conclusion (the Prologue leaves no doubt as to what is going to happen), Justine is also the only one to show any true selflessness, distracting and comforting Leo with the task of finding and carving a set of ‘magic’ tree branches that she says will protect them from Melancholia.  Claire, who has bought into the fantasies that Justine makes her living selling, struggles against her fate and rails against the absolute meaninglessness that it reveals.  She is also unable to offer any comfort to her son and thus abdicates her final responsibility to the sister she has been unable to convince of the value of the life of luxury which she has built and in which she is has invested so much of herself.

In the end, then, given the utter finality of its situation, Melancholia is as damning a critique of contemporary Anglo-American-European values as can be imagined and as thorough a skewering of the consumer mythos of a never-defined ‘happiness’ lying just around the corner as has been committed to celluloid for years.  It is an articulate, clear-eyed, historically and culturally astute fable for a world and a closed system of value that is in the process of perhaps inevitable and irreversible decay.  A world as hollow and as lacking in conviction as this, the film intimates, is better destroyed, echoing again von Trier’s fondness for Nietzsche, to whom Antichrist is also deeply indebted.  To this world, literally nothing is preferable.

Melancholia‘s marketing, on the other hand, does everything it can to soft-sell the film, to exorcise it of its very real demons.  The marketing scheme chosen for the film is ingenious, consistent, and systematic.  In short, it runs something like this: Melancholia is a metaphorical film about depression.  Though this is a perfectly defensible interpretation, this is also the safest and most palatable way possible to read the film and its allegorical structure.  In the press kit issued for the film, both the studio’s voice and that of von Trier emphasise that Justine has the measure of the world only in a state of crisis, something the film nullifies by setting the first half of the film at a time when much of the world is unaware of the coming of Melancholia.  In a short promotional video released via the Apple Trailers site, Dunst underlines this, saying: ‘Justine is a very sensitive, creative human being that felt things maybe sometimes more than other people.  To me, her relationship with the planet turns into almost her being a representation of the planet’.

This gesture, to dull the edge of genuine (and almost always systematic) social criticisms by accusing the critic of insanity, is, of course, a common strategy in the mainstream media when dealing with acts of violence – often labelled selectively as ‘terrorism’, though rarely when such acts are committed by anyone other than a Muslim – whose political or economic subtext is uncomfortable.

While it is easy enough to understand why the film’s distributors would be interested in reading the film’s allegorical construction in the narrowest, most private, and thus least threatening manner, we, as viewers and critics, need not feel the same compulsion, given that we have no financial stake in the film itself.

For, lurking not far outside of this metaphorical reading of the film is a far more radical critique of contemporary Western societies.  As the film draws to its conclusion, it becomes apparent that it is not only the ludicrously elaborate and costly wedding reception that is hollow and ultimately empty; it is the whole of Claire’s bourgeois world.  When Claire invites Justine to wait out the end on the patio overlooking the golf course with a glass of good wine and some classical music, Justine’s refusal of this idea as ‘shit’ is more than a simple symptom of her state of mind, it is rather something more, an admission of the futility of Claire’s entire life and the entire world of privilege and taste that it represents.

Claire’s husband John, a stock von Trier character, the resolutely rational man who is utterly unable to make any sort of the sense of the world around him, which makes him something of a personification of Max Weber’s ‘iron cage of rationalisation’, takes the only route that his character could possibly take: he commits a sad and sordid suicide in the stables, even robbing his wife and child of the painless poison that Claire was relying on as a last resort.

John, Melancholia‘s Weberian Fool

In the end, all that Claire, Justine, and Leo are left with are the sort of simple, intuitive magical lies that people tell their children.  In the indelible final image, as Melancholia looms ever larger in the background and begins to quite literally devour the Earth, we are left with the image of three lonely people sheltering under a tripod of dead tree branches, helpless in the face of the meaningless destruction of a meaningless existence.

It is in this final moment – and in the diegetic world of Melancholia, this is an absolutely final moment, the end of life in the universe – that von Trier makes his kindest gesture to date, that he allows the three last people on Earth to hold hands, to face the end together, even if it means less than nothing for them to do so.

New Binding of Isaac Game: Akedah for Mac and PC

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Abraham, Akedah, bekorot, Binding of Isaac, Chad Sapieha, child sacrifice, Edmund McMillen, firstborn, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Genesis 22, Globe and Mail, Indie Game, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice, Sarah, Seder Olam Rabbah

The Binding of Isaac: The Akedah crossed with The Legend of Zelda

As I was perusing The Globe and Mail, this game review sort of leapt out at me:

In playing The Binding of Isaac, the latest effort from Super Meat Boy mastermind Edmund McMillen, one can’t help but wonder whether the award-winning game designer wasn’t somehow using his creation to cathartically deal with some serious mommy and religion issues.

This inexpensive downloadable game, which is currently available for $5 for Macs and PCs through Steam, begins with a boy named Isaac and his mother enjoying their lives together in their home. Then the mom, a fan of “Christian broadcasts,” begins hearing the voice of God, who commands her to strip Isaac of his possessions (including his GameBoy and pants), lock him in his room, and, eventually, to kill him. Isaac discovers his mom is coming to murder him and flees through a hatch into the cellar. This is where players take control.

… The Binding of Isaac is a creepy, gory, and challenging play that’s as much an homage to games of years past as it is a distinctly modern experience. It’s also an overt indictment of mindless religious zealotry (see: the story in the Hebrew Bible from which the game takes its name) and the impact it may have on children raised by those who practice it. Indeed, poor little Isaac turns one of the most sympathetic video game characters in recent years.

It is, in short, an essential play for fans of avant-garde interactive entertainment, and perhaps the best downloadable indie game of 2011.

– Chad Sapieha, “Review: Avant-garde indie game The Binding of Isaac inspired by Zelda, the Bible”, Globe and Mail Blog, 14 October 2011

The version of the Akedah (“Binding” of Isaac) in Genesis 22, of course has Isaac’s father Abraham hearing divine voices, whereas Isaac’s mother (Sarah) doesn’t have a very prominent role. The to-be-Israelite god, Yahweh commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, which he obediently proceeds to do, until Yahweh stops him on the grounds it was just a test. Sarah has more of a role in Seder Olam Rabbah, where Satan tells her that Isaac had actually been sacrificed by Abraham, and the news of it kills her. But, Sarah doesn’t take an active part in trying to sacrifice Isaac, as in Edmund McMillen’s game version of the Akedah.

As Francesca Stavrakopoulou explores in her book, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical distortions of historical realities (2004), child sacrifice was once a regular part of the worship of Yahweh in Judah, and is still a “live issue” in the writing of the biblical texts in the Persian period. After all, if your god guarantees you will produce many children, only for the sacrifice of a single firstborn child, then it’s a good deal, right? And yet, child sacrifice gets such a bad rap.

Sean the Baptist on Anthony Thiselton on Reception Theory

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Anthony Thiselton, Antoinette Wire, Elizabeth Castelli, Sean Winter, Thessalonians

Sean the Baptist, aka Sean Winter, provides a restrained review of Anthony Thiselton’s recent forays into what the latter purports is “reception history”.

I say restrained, because after reading Thiselton’s recent commentary on 1-2 Thessalonians, my own response is that it is little more than an uncritical catalogue of pre-critical interpretation, and a perfect example of all that should be avoided in reception history. The commentary is in large part an abuse of the study of reception history, a field which has done much to highlight the quite contingent nature of the impact and interpretation of authoritative texts, and which when applied judiciously exposes the power interests which lie behind their interpretation and reinterpretation.  Perversely, Thiselton’s commentary appears content to amass quotations from orthodox Christian commentaries, few of them dating any later than the nineteenth century (and thus, largely excluding modern critical commentaries), all of which serve as a great cloud of witnesses against any critical interpretations which have since appeared.

In Thiselton’s hands, reception history becomes a blunt instrument to marginalise perceptive criticisms of biblical texts. One of the most flagrant examples from Thiselton’s commentary on Thessalonians is his response to Antoinette Wire and Elizabeth Castelli, who argue, in different ways, that Paul’s language about imitation imposes an authoritarian and manipulative rhetoric upon Pauline communities, something which undermines any simplistic reading of Paul’s stated intentions that “our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery” (1 Thess. 2:3).  Thiselton’s thoroughly uncritical – even unintentionally ironic – response is to insist that we all simply take Paul at his word. And he buttresses Paul’s word with the weight of the history of pre-critical reception, thereby reinscribing the authority of 1 Thessalonians itself. In a dereliction of one’s responsibilities as critic, Thiselton not only fails to demystify the ideological-critical strategies of power but cloaks them with a gobsmackingly simplistic reading of the text.

But do have a read of Sean Winters’ more moderate, more British, comments here.

h/t: W. John Lyons

Theology and the Pursuit of Truth: Murray Rae’s Inaugural Professorial Lecture this Thursday

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Inaugural Professorial Lecture, Murray Rae, Theology and the Pursuit of Truth, University of Otago

If you’re in Dunedin this Thursday, and wonder what lies at the intersection of theology and truth, do come along to this public lecture by Professor Murray Rae:

Murray Rae: Theology and the Pursuit of Truth

Is the Common English Bible influenced by Biblical Minimalism?

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a strong and meaningful relationship with God, biblical minimalism, CEB, Common English Bible, John Van Seters, minimalism

The Common English Bible (CEB) markets itself as a Bible for Christians, and by this they mean proper Christians, like the kind you find in the Southern United States. According to its website, the Common English Bible “is a bold new translation designed to meet the needs of Christians as they work to build a strong and meaningful relationship with God through Jesus Christ.”

But is it really?

The Dunedin School has uncovered a link between the Common English Bible and biblical minimalism – that shadowy cartel of biblical scholars who deny that the Patriarchs ever existed, dispute that David was king of everything from Egypt to Mesopotamia, and date the writing of most of the Bible to the Persian Period if not the Hellenistic era! One of these minimalists is John Van Seters, author of such works as Abraham in History and Tradition, In Search of History, The Life of Moses, and The Edited Bible.

What does the Common English Bible have to do with John Van Seters and biblical minimalism? The evidence speaks for itself:

John Van Seters - The Biblical Saga of King David (2009)

The Common English Bible (2011)

And that’s only as far as the cover of the Common English Bible! What else does this minimalist-copying Bible translation hide within its pages? If we look at the Table of Contents in the Common English Bible, will we find that Deuteronomy comes before Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers? Are the first five books in the Common English Bible attributed to Moses or to “J”? Well, no – but it is all very suspicious.

J.C. – More Jew Than You

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a little bit Jewish, James Crossley, Jeffrey Hunter, Jesus, supercessionism, totally Jewish, ueber Jewish, very Jesus

James Crossley provides an excellent rundown of recent critiques of scholarship’s ambiguous portrayal of Jesus Christ as a Jew.

the contemporary manifestations of ‘pro-Jewish’ rhetoric in NT scholarship is superficial in that it perpetuates the old notions of superiority seemingly more typical of the now so regularly denounced pre-Sanders scholarship. Or, put another way, if we cut through the scholarly rhetoric … have things really changed so much since prior to the 1970s?

– J.C. (James Crossley)

Jeffrey Hunter plays a not-very-Jewish-at-all Jesus in "King of Kings"

Rugby and Moral Relativism

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1987, 2011, Brian Malley, Constantine, divine command theory, ethical relativism, Ethics, Massey Presbyterian Church, Matthew Flannagan, Michael Jones, rugby, Rugby World Cup, Sabbath, Sunday, Theodosius, West Auckland

Michael Jones and Michael Jones

At the very first Rugby World Cup tournament, in 1987, the first person to score a try was New Zealander, Michael Jones. In the 1980s and 1990s, the boy from West Auckland was not only famous for his canny abilities at flanker, but for his refusal to play rugby on Sundays. From the days of the early Christians, Sunday was commemorated as the day on which they believed that Jesus resurrected from the dead. By the fourth century, the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, placed restrictions on the activities able to be carried out on Sundays. These restrictions were extended later that century, under the Emperor Theodosius, making it illegal to conduct business, attend sports, or attend the theatre on every seventh day. In essence, Christians applied the Jewish laws concerning rest on the Sabbath to the new “Christian Sabbath”. Generations of Christians, including All Black Michael Jones, believed that rest on “The Lord’s Day” was the proper ethical stance for Christians to take.

Roll on 2011 and there is another Rugby World Cup. But things have changed in West Auckland churches. Within a couple of decades or so, the Christian attitude to Sunday which reigned in Christian parts of the world for a millennium and half has dramatically changed. If you attend Massey Presbyterian Church, for example, once the evening sermon by Matthew Flannagan is complete, you can remain in your pew and then watch the rugby match between New Zealand and Argentina.

As with all societies, cultures, and subcultures, the churches are continually changing and adapting their moral stances. They might not think that they do, and some might even claim to follow “objective divine commands”. Yet, on examination, churches are just as subject to the winds of moral change as any. No doubt Christians had good reasons in 1987 to stand up for not playing rugby on Sundays and equally good reasons in 2011 for showing rugby in church on Sundays. Ethical reasoning is often like that. There is no “fundamental” or “objective” reason for any set of ethics which a community adopts. Any set of ethics is completely subjective, merely the result of a community’s adoption of certain rules of behaviour. But once ethics are adopted, humans do tend to produce no end of rationalisations for doing what they currently do.

Much the same is the case for Christian communities. One difference, of course, is that Christian communities claim that they take ethical stances – e.g. on sex, war, global warming, stem-cell research, single mothers, etc – based on divine authority. However, “divine authority” is frequently a placeholder for whatever is the latest ethical trend. As Brian Malley says:

In my lifetime I have seen, among evangelical Christians, a new emphasis on environmental awareness, on physical fitness, on community formation, and changes in gender ideology. All of these changes reflected trends in the larger cultural environment, but all were incorporated into evangelical Christians’ authoritative discourse by being expounded from the Bible, as what the Bible had always said.

– Brian Malley, “Understanding the Bible’s Influence,” pages 194-204 in James S. Bielo, ed., The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism (Rutgers, 2009), 202-203.

And what is the topic of the sermon at Massey Presbyterian Church, before they take down the sermon powerpoints and show the rugby game? The sermon is railing against … “ethical relativism“.

They couldn’t possibly be more ironic if they had tried!

The Dunedin School Blog is Back!

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You can stop sending  us your requests! 
The world’s southernmost centre of religious and biblical studies is back in business!

Update: Expressions of excitement are beginning to pour in from all over the world. This TwitPic is from Orientalist scholar, Roland Boer, on a Central Committee-sponsored outing on the majestic Yangtze River:

“Woohoo – great to hear the Dunedin School blog is back!” – Chairman Boer on the Yangtze

Further Update: Gavin Rumney of Otagosh mentions The Dunedin School and Karl Barth in the same post. The bastard.