God On Trial

Jason: Wow, man – that’s huge.  Congratulations!  I’ll pray for that monumental transition in your lives.

And welcome back, PWinn!  It’ll be good to see what you have to say beyond your Facebook updates!

Has anyone in the bar seen a movie called “God On Trial“?   I had to immediately commend it to all of you after experiencing it.  The entire movie takes place in one of the dilapidated stalls of Auschwitz that housed a collection of Jews from all different walks of life.  When one of the prisoners invokes the name of God a conflagration is ignited between those who would persist in defending the character of their God and those who are outraged at His abandonment of His people.  The result of the conflict is a trial in the venue of a formal Jewish court.  The conversation is a heart-rending embodiment of what theodicy looks like on the ground; the problem of evil in flesh and bone as opposed to the safe, satellite view that often characterizes both Christian apologetics and atheistic bluster.   Here’s why everyone should see it immediately:

1) It deals with the problem of evil from INSIDE a particular tradition instead of treating it in the usual abstractions. The accusation against God doesn’t revolve around some bland syllogism about the existence of “a good God” and its incompatibility with the reality of evil – it is an impeachment of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the “god of the philosophers”.  It takes the particular conception of God articulated by the Bible on its own terms, working within the language and logic of Scripture – and this movie is in constant dialog with Scripture.  The protagonists (or antagonists, as the case may be) regard the covenant seriously enough at ask whether God has really been faithful to it  and to prosecute Him according to what He’s revealed about Himself in the Law.  This movie raises the kinds of questions that believers must face about the Biblical story; questions that aren’t so easily dismissed as those posed by the usual atheist (lobbed from outside the story).

2) It shows how doubt is built into faith, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition. At the beginning of the movie there’s an almost casual exposition of a profound observation: namely that struggle is a central concept in the election of Israel and the Jewish conception of a relationship with God.  It’s said that the very word “Israel” means “to wrestle with God” as typified by Jacob’s encounter with the angel that resulted in his namesake.  At one point the trial is violently interrupted by guards bursting in to abuse the prisoners and as they stand in silence, shaken by the incident, one of the prisoners urges the trial to continue.  It comforts him because he feels that it’s “a kind of prayer” that makes God seem more immediate to him – a remarkable thing to say, given the heated exchange we’ve seen thus far.  The language of the Psalms resonate throughout the movie and destroy the caricatures erected by recent debates on this subject (the Hitchens and Wilson debate sprung to mind).  Believers are neither depicted as naive in their attempts to defend the reality of God nor “above it all” in their spiritual wisdom; the atheists were neither heroic in their confrontation of the meaningless abyss nor evil in their rejection of religious explanations of the tragedy they faced.

3)  It provides a much neglected angle from which to think about Christianity. One of the most surprising and provocative aspects of the film was the way in which it forced me to think about the continuities and discontinuities of the Jewish view of God from the Christian one.  At the suggestion that perhaps God is with them, suffering alongside them in the camp, one of the prisoners poignantly snarls, “And what use is a God who suffers?”  During another point in the trial a Parisian university professor gives a sort of prototype of an evolutionary account of religion, talking about how Christianity built on the tribal monotheistic innovation of Judaism and took it one step further to posit a universal monotheism – emphasizing the inherent deficiencies of Judaism along the way.  In monologues like these Christians are encouraged to think about the tensions between Old and New Testament, as the points of divergence are purposefully stressed by God’s prosecutors.  Sometimes Christian attempts to display the continuity between Old and New Testaments can come off as pretty hamfisted, and this movie reminded me of how much harder it is to hold them together than I tend to hear in a lot of popular preaching.

Did I mention that it was also entertaining?  If you have Netflix search for it on streaming video.  You won’t regret it.