BlackPhi Webitorial Ramblings

News & Comment From A Christian's Perspective

Da Vinci Code - The Film - Posted 29th June, 2006

It's very unusual for me to find a 'film of the book' that is significantly better than the book itself. This was the case with The Da Vinci Code though. A group of half a dozen of us finally got to our local Showcase cinema on Tuesday evening (we had hoped for more but several had to back out). I really enjoyed the film, and I think most of the others did too.

The biggest improvement over the book is that the film has a strong shape - it is a quest story, and a Grail Quest at that. This gives structure to the film, integrating its disparate elements: action and mystery, famous buildings and links to mythic historical events and figures. Flashbacks and discussions, even merging of past and present scenes, combine with murders, Keystone Cops police scenes, and a very strange car chase.

Characterisation is interesting: most characters are simply pencilled in, with just enough given for the watcher to flesh out the details; yet there is a clear character development in the two main roles: Audrey Tatou as Sophie Neveu and Tom Hanks as the academic Robert Langdon. These roles lie at the heart of the film, and interestingly subvert the conventions of popular movies: when they are together it is Neveu who provides the drive and action, with Langdon, as the academic everyman, almost a passenger. At the end though, the two's quests separate: Neveu becomes deeper and more settled as she finds her home, and Langdon then completes the Grail Quest on his own, taking the film full circle.

Among the supporting characters, Paul Bettany is both sinister and vulnerable as the murdering monk, Silas, although less background is given to explain why he is so willing to murder for his bishop. Ian McKellen is predictably brilliant as Sir Leigh Teabing, and Jean Reno skillfully continues a long movie tradition of brutal flics.

What about the book's dodgy, and controversial, takes on church history, medieval buildings, and art? A lot of the nonsense is trimmed, but the most important thing is that much of the disputable information is flagged as such, by the simple method of having a dispute about it:

Sir Leigh Teabing : And this is from the gospel of Mary Magdalene herself.
Sophie Neveu: She wrote a gospel?
Robert Langdon: She may have.
Sir Leigh Teabing: Robert, will you fight fair?
Robert Langdon: She *may* have.

At the heart of the story there remains a what-if : what if Jesus married and conceived a child before his death? All the evidence is that he didn't, but what if he had? Would that be the end of Christianity as we know it? Hardly! The Christian Gospel rests on what Jesus said and did, not on his marital status. All mainstream Christian churches believe that Jesus was, somehow, both God and man. And all of us have difficulty getting our heads around what that means. To very slightly misquote Robert Langdon in the film: why does it have to be divine or human? Can't a human be divine?

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Treasure of Baghdad - Posted 26th June, 2006

The Internet has its bad side, but it can also be a wonderful place. Blogs, in particular, can be an excellent way of finding out about what's going on in the world, from the point of view of those directly involved. Some blogs are well-written, others much less so. Treasure of Baghdad is very well written indeed, by: "a young reporter in a destroyed country torn between politics and violence."

The following is an excerpt from an entry posted shortly after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed:

“Prime Minister Maliki announced that the Jordanian terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed north of Baghdad,” a breaking news bar read. ... We held our breath for a second and then a loud “Mabrook” [Congratulations] was said by one of the radio stations reporters. Few minutes later, journalists started congratulating each other. Some danced in the hall, female journalists halulated, and others rushed to call their offices of the breaking news. The news of his death made up our day.

Previous posts had spoken of his feelings as his friends and neighbours were terrorised and killed. Blogs are interactive beasts and his posts generate a lot of comments: some from sympathetic and caring people, some from pond-scum. The internet sometimes seems to exaggerate human traits, painting mankind in extra-high contrast. Anyway, if you are at all interested in current affairs, or in how people live with unbearable strain, I thoroughly recommend Treasure of Baghdad.

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World News Catchup - Posted 20th June, 2006

I've not blogged about 'proper' news for a while, not since the posting about the horrors at Haditha a month ago. It's not that there's been no interesting or comment-worthy news happening; it's just that the biggest stories seem beyond comment:-

Take the three prisoner suicides at Guantanamo Bay, for example. Three prisoners, held without charge for four years, kill themselves, and the camp commandant portrays the camp authorities as the victims: "an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us"! There is a satirical TV show on British TV called Bremner, Bird and Fortune which sometimes has sketches showing senior officials saying this sort of thing. To have reality out-satirising satire is disconcerting.

Then there was the explosion on the beach near Gaza City. An Israeli gunboat was shelling Gaza at around that time, and one of its shells went astray, yet the following week the Israeli military gave a press conference to say that the explosion could not possibly have been caused by them. Then they add the suggestion, against all available evidence, that the real cause was a Palestinian landmine! The cynicism is breathtaking, but the propaganda will probably do its job. The cause of the explosion does currently remain unproven; and it is likely to remain that way unless an independent investigation is carried out which gets full cooperation from both sides. Channel 4 news had an interview with a military expert from Human Rights Watch (a former Pentagon intelligence analyst), who has been to the site and says that the evidence points to an Israeli shell exploding above ground, but that it could have been an older unexploded shell rather than necessarily one just fired. See the Channel 4 report on video here.

Or there is the anarchy in Somalia, morphing in places into something more like a civil war between Islamists and warlords. Is civil war a step forwards or a step backwards from anarchy? Or is the misery just going around and around?

Finally there is the World Cup. At last some good news: at the time of writing this seems like the friendliest and most good-natured World Cup for donkey's years. Is that because of German hospitality - welcoming fans as guests, rather than invaders, and providing the essentials of life: food, drink, shelter and giant screens - or because of the weather, or because England haven't lost yet? Whatever the reason, long may it last!

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Not Impressed by Now - Posted 20th June, 2006

Happy bunny I most certainly am not!

A fortnight ago, we had Now Wireless Broadband installed in church. It should be a really good idea for a large Victorian church, as we could access the internet from anywhere in the church - in particular from the office and from the main worship area. A particular advantage seemed to be that we got it installed within a few days of ordering it - important as we want to do a video link with Caversham in New Zealand at breakfast time on June 24th.

Being techie I got the job of watching the installation and showing the video people how things worked a few days later, when we had a try-out of the video system. Except we didn't - the broadband link which had worked (albeit slower than advertised) on Monday, stubbornly refused to connect on Friday evening. Now's support had gone home for the day, so I rang up that Saturday. They decided it was probably a fault with their modem, so we would need an engineer's visit. The first slot they had was last Saturday, a week later, "between 3pm and 5pm". They took my contact details, as the person who originally booked the broadband was going on holiday.

So there I was, Saturday afternoon, in church at 2:45, book in hand, waiting for the engineer. There I still was, book nearly finished, at 5pm. I rang Now, receiving some grief as they reckoned they didn't have my name as a church contact, and was told they couldn't reach the engineer, but they were sure he was on his way. There I still was at 6pm, book finished. Now support still couldn't reach the engineer, but this time they left a message on his mobile to ring me. 7pm, guess where I still was. I rang Now support again. They still didn't have me as a contact, they still couldn't contact the engineer, but this time they deduced he must have gone home.

So when can they get an engineer out? Not until Sunday 25th, I'm told. "But we need the broadband for the 24th", I say. "Sorry". Great! Okay, if they can't get me an engineer with a modem, why not just send me a modem? After checking with a higher level, he tells me "Sorry, that would be against policy". So is there any way we can get broadband for the 24th? No, but we are still within our trial month, so we can cancel and get our money back. Wonderful!

Any company can have problems, and things do go wrong - that's life. I reckon the real test is how hard the company tries to put things right when there is a problem. By that criterion Now Wireless Broadband fails miserably.

One silver lining (well, small silver patch anyway) is that I did get to read a very good book: More Ready Than You Realize by Brian D McLaren. The book's recommended; Now certainly isn't!

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Sequel to The Passion? - Posted 20th June, 2006

According to Reuters, Sony are planning a sequel to last Easter's Passion of the Christ - tentatively entitled The Resurrection.

"'The Passion' ends with Jesus being taken from the cross, and 'The Resurrection' opens with the empty cross," a person familiar with the script said.

This all seems logical enough - every successful Hollywood film, it seems, has to have a sequel, and it's hard to see what other sequel The Passion could have. What has raised a few eyebrows though, as GetReligion have noted, is the producer: Tim LaHaye. He is co-author of the Left Behind series, which does for Christian end-times theology roughly what Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code does for Christian history.

Oh well, I didn't much like The Passion anyway, so it won't be so different if I don't like Passion II either. Except that I do admire Mel Gibson for his courage in following his vision; am I being cynical in thinking that the main vision of Passion II will be making money?

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Da Vinci Code Website - Posted 20th June, 2006

I'm well behind the curve here. I hoped to see the DV Code film shortly after it came out, but holidays and various other things got in the way. Anyway, there's a group of us planning to go together next week, so I can finally see whether they have done anything interesting with it (although the reviews don't sound hopeful).

In the meantime I came across a very clever piece of marketing by Sony: the website: Davinci Code: The Dialogue. A nice bit of controversy is always good for a film's box-office, but apparently the success of Mel Gibson's version of The Passion last year got them worried about the effects of a boycott by Christian groups. Meanwhile many Christian groups are worried about the impression often given that Christians (particularly evangelicals) are always negative - always against things. So the two sides got together in a website sponsored by Sony giving a Christian take on questions raised by the film. A 'win-win' situation, or 'supping with the devil'? Who can tell, but I reckon it's worth a try.

I also heard that the Opus Dei website is getting a huge number of hits, prompting them to include their own DVC page. Indeed the organisation as a whole is apparently experiencing a massive surge of interest from potential recruits - the problem is filtering out those more interested in self-harm than in worshipping God.

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Blog-City Blog - Posted 14th June, 2006

These Webitorial Ramblings are written in HTML, rather than a specialist blogging language, and they run on my own server, which has had reliability problems recently. Therefore I have started a parallel blog on Blog City, to see if that works better for interactivity and reliability. For the time being I'll blog to both - not necessarily the same posts in each - and see how they evolve.

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Biblical Truth I - Posted 14th June, 2006

There are a number of Christian groups, particularly on what is known as the 'fundamentalist' wing of the church (I reckon that term begs the question of which 'fundamentals' you are talking about), who say they believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. Some say that this applies to the original documents, which raises one set of issues; others apparently believe that it is the King James version of the Bible - published in English in 1611 - which is literally true, even 'dictated' (or 'breathed') by God.

Inevitably, particularly given the political activities often associated with such views in the US, this has led to a plethora of websites debunking this by highlighting apparent inconsistencies in the Bible, for example here. Equally inevitably, you then get more websites whose purpose is to resolve or explain such apparent inconsistencies, for example here. This whole game is really too nitpicky for my taste, and neither side's arguments end up at all convincing.

The (evangelical) theologian NT Wright has written an interesting paper on the authority of the Bible, which addresses, among other things, literal approaches to scripture.

Usual views of the Bible — including usual evangelical views of the Bible — are actually too low, and do not give it the sufficient weight that it ought to have ... Basically they imply — and this is what I mean when I say that they offer too low a view of scripture — that God has, after all, given us the wrong sort of book and it is our job to turn it into the right sort of book ... And such views, I suggest, rely very heavily on either tradition (including evangelical tradition) or reason, often playing off one against the other, and lurching away from scripture into something else.

We read scripture not in order to avoid life and growth. God forgive us that we have done that in some of our traditions. Nor do we read scripture in order to avoid thought and action, or to be crushed, or squeezed, or confined into a de-humanizing shape, but in order to die and rise again in our minds. Because, again and again, we find that, as we submit to scripture, as we wrestle with the bits that don’t make sense, and as we hand through to a new sense that we haven’t thought of or seen before, God breathes into our nostrils his own breath—the breath of life. And we become living beings—a church recreated in his image, more fully human, thinking, alive beings.

I cannot write with the depth or rigour of NT Wright, but it does seem obvious to me that the Bible is just not the kind of bureaucratic book of rules that some Christian groups pretend it is. It is too long, it has too many different types of writing: narrative, stories, instructions, poetry, drama, plus other types of writing that we just don't see in modern English. There are even apparently deliberate inconsistencies, some involving sentences within a few paragraphs of each other (eg whether Moses can see God's face in Exodus 33, or the two versions of the creation story at the very beginning of the Bible).

In my view, the Bible is true - but it is a larger and more complex truth then can be described in simple text. It is a truth that needs to be presented from different angles otherwise it is incomplete; it needs to be felt viscerally - through poetry and drama - as well as intellectually; and it is a truth I can never fully understand, and nor can any other human being. Scripture has a truth that can be explored for a lifetime but never exhausted, yet the basics can be grasped by anyone.

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Cats - Posted 14th June, 2006

Cats are amazing creatures: beautiful, affectionate, independent & clean. They are also fearsome killers with an unpleasant way of playing with their food ... while it is still alive. I reckon William Blake's words apply to smaller cats as well as the big ones:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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How To Make Church Brilliant - Posted 11th June, 2006

Cartoon by Dave Walker - see www.CartoonChurch.com

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A Lively Cemetery - Posted 10th June, 2006

Caversham Cemetery is just up the road from where I live (it is right next to Caversham Primary School). The local council only cut the grass there a couple of times a year, which sometimes generates complaints but, in my opinion, creates a wonderful place to walk and reflect on life. At this time of year, in particular, it is teeming with life - trees, grasses, flowers, insects, and so on. Not so many butterflies yet, they should be along a bit later in the year.

I know that some bereaved relatives have said they have found it upsetting that they cannot easily tidy graves, and one has to have sympathy with them. All I can say is that, if I had to choose, I would much rather be buried in the life-full, if untidy, vigour of this cemetery than the sterile uniformity of the bigger, more regimented, town cemeteries. As a Christian I believe in life, in all its fullness: now, through death, and to eternity.

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World Cup Opener - Posted 9th June, 2006

Congratulations to Germany & Costa Rica for a brilliantly entertaining opening match to the 2006 World Cup. The commentators were moaning about defensive failings, but I think it is much more important to have an open and exciting first game to set the tone for the tournament. It was certainly that!

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Thanks

... are due to 500 Cars taxi service for helping me out this morning (7th), when I had to return a PC to the other side of town with my car off the road.

Note:

I have rewritten the Introduction to these Ramblings to reflect their change of status.

Holidays - Are They Worth It? - Posted 6th June, 2006

You work like a Trojan to clear your desk/workshop before you go; but you know that you'll have to do the same to clear the backlog when you return. Travelling there and back combines both tedium and exhaustion. Meanwhile, unexpected and unplanned expenses smash the budget, and the "quality family time" you get includes enough bickering and whingeing to try the patience of a saint. Are holidays really worth the effort?

Well, before I went away I was feeling exhausted and drained; now I just feel wrecked - a big improvement - so my answer is yes, it was worth it. Some eleven years ago I had a period of very long working hours, too much business travel, and high levels of stress, with far too long between holidays. When we eventually got away, I reached the end of the week having just unwound enough to realise how bone-weary I was, but not enough to do anything about it. A few weeks later I went down with the 'flu bug that, in due course, turned into CFS/ME. So, I reckon holidays are important.

Oddly enough, so does the Old Testament. If you look through, you'll find it recommends loads of holidays. Some are for celebration, some for reflection, and some just for having a party with your friends and neighbours. Plus the day's holiday specified every week. It is all to do with human beings being made in the image of God, and not being slaves. There is more to life than work (paid or otherwise), and people are so much more than just labourers and consumers. Leaving home isn't mandatory; leaving your daily labours behind you, just occasionally, is.

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