Warning: If you haven’t seen this movie, this post will contain spoilers.
SWalters suggested Frailty to me after a conversation where we were discussing how anyone could ever be certain whether or not God was speaking to them. This movie delivered on that question in a big way.
Frailty and Philosophy
The father in the movie is visited by angels one night, and he is told that he must fulfill God’s will by killing “demons,” which look just like humans. He shares this message with his two sons. The younger son immediately buys into this mission, and is supportive and helpful in carrying it out. The older son is a little more thoughtful, but concludes that his father has gone insane, and actively works against his mission. The movie is crafted in such a way that the audience is clearly meant to side with the older son.
Yet, the end offers a surprising twist. The younger son grows up to takeover the mission of his father, eventually killing his own brother and the FBI agent who was investigating murders related to the brother. The FBI agent had actually killed his own mother, and was himself a “demon.” Even though the younger brother walked into FBI headquarters, the video tape went fuzzy where his head was and so no one could identify him. This leaves us with the conclusion that the father and younger brother truly were doing God’s work all along.
Frailty and Existentialism
When I teach introduction to philosophy, I usually include a day on Soren Kierkegaard, a Christian existentialist. In developing his ethics, Kierkegaard discusses the case of Abraham being ordered by God to kill son Isaac, though God ultimately rescinds the order. This inevitably leads to the students discussing how we can really be sure it’s God who is communicating with us and not the Devil, or even some form of mental illness.
Usually, there is a lot of silence as they realize how difficult this question is to answer, but very quickly an angry minority begins to speak up. The answer that always gets brought up is that you can know whether or not this message is from God based on the content. In the case of Abraham God doesn’t follow through with this command, and this shows how God is loving and compassionate and kind. God would never command anyone to kill other human “demons.”
Old Testament vs. New Testament
However, this is where I struggle with some of the tenets of Christianity. There are images of two very different Gods, one as love and compassion, and another as an angry God dangling sinners over the fires of Hell.
The story of Noah’s Ark in particular seems disturbing along these lines. Not only did God choose to destroy many humans (who were fallen and wicked) but also almost every animal on the earth. And he did it through storms. I remember being very angry when, after Hurricane Katrina, some people suggested that the storm was the wrath of God sent down on the sinful city of New Orleans (despite the fact that it actually directly struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where I lived at the time). However, an interpretation such as this actually lines up quite well with the moral of Noah’s Ark. If God would send floods to destroy almost every human and animal on the earth, why not send a hurricane to New Orleans?
And I suppose this is what I find unsatisfying with the response that we can tell whether or not it is God talking to us through the content of the message. One of the very first religious stories I became familiar with as a child showed God committing massive genocide because he no longer liked the very beings he created. I’m not sure how to reconcile that with the currently more popular image of God as love.
Divine Command Theory
I know many people choose to simply ignore the Old Testament, but my understanding is that in the New Testament, Jesus pretty explicitly accepts the Old Testament. I’m very interested in any insight on how to reconcile these two very different conceptions of God.
My students who suggest the content of the message is what matters are contradicting what is known as Divine Command Theory – which states that whatever God commands one to do just is the “good” or the “right.” If God commands love, that is good. If God were to command hate, that would be good. The Divine Command Theory, in a way, then, does offer a solution to the contrast between the Old Testament and the New Testament – God simply demanded different things at different times.
But if that’s the solution, then we are still left with the troubling question – how do we ever know whether or not it’s God speaking to us or some other force? If God can love and God can smite, how do we rule out recent superstorm Hurricane Sandy as divine punishment?
Please share your thoughts with me in the comments!
Buy Frailty:
This is medical materialism. William James.
🙂
I also spend a day on similar questions in my MGS Major Course…typically the 3rd week with a spirituality emphasis.
I’m interested to hear what Father Jim has to say about this post!
I think of the distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament not as a distinction of two different Gods but more as two understandings of who God is at two different epochs in humanity. It is not God who changes from the Old to the New testament but rather our understanding of who God is becomes more complete through the New Testament. In the Old Testament, God begins to reveal himself to his chosen people, Israel. They struggle to understand who He is; yet, the Old Testament is a record of Israel beginning to understand who God is. The fullness of who God is, is revealed by his becoming incarnate in Jesus. Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God and who He is. As such, the New Testament is a written account of the actions of Jesus and the early Church’s testament to who Jesus is.
Think outside of religious terms on purely materialistic terms and how the laws of nature have not changed but our ways of describing these laws have certainly changed. I would say that in the Old Testament we have a limited understanding of who God is and through his revelation by becoming man we have a complete revelation of who God is in Jesus. Our current challenge is to continue to draw upon who God is and what God has revealed about Himself and what that says to the age in which we live.
To answer your question about how can we know for sure that God is speaking to us is a question that has many layers. On the first layer, I would say that we would have to determine that what God is “speaking” to us is congruent with the deposit of faith(all that God has revealed about himself). Obviously a short answer to a much longer question.
A good document which speaks about Divine Revelation is Dei Verbum (The Word of God). Here is a link to the document:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html
Here is a what it says in particular about the Old Testament:
CHAPTER IV
THE OLD TESTAMENT
14. In carefully planning and preparing the salvation of the whole human race the God of infinite love, by a special dispensation, chose for Himself a people to whom He would entrust His promises. First He entered into a covenant with Abraham (see Gen. 15:18) and, through Moses, with the people of Israel (see Ex. 24:8). To this people which He had acquired for Himself, He so manifested Himself through words and deeds as the one true and living God that Israel came to know by experience the ways of God with men. Then too, when God Himself spoke to them through the mouth of the prophets, Israel daily gained a deeper and clearer understanding of His ways and made them more widely known among the nations (see Ps. 21:29; 95:1-3; Is. 2:1-5; Jer. 3:17). The plan of salvation foretold by the sacred authors, recounted and explained by them, is found as the true word of God in the books of the Old Testament: these books, therefore, written under divine inspiration, remain permanently valuable. “For all that was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15:4).
15. The principal purpose to which the plan of the old covenant was directed was to prepare for the coming of Christ, the redeemer of all and of the messianic kingdom, to announce this coming by prophecy (see Luke 24:44; John 5:39; 1 Peter 1:10), and to indicate its meaning through various types (see 1 Cor. 10:12). Now the books of the Old Testament, in accordance with the state of mankind before the time of salvation established by Christ, reveal to all men the knowledge of God and of man and the ways in which God, just and merciful, deals with men. These books, though they also contain some things which are incomplete and temporary, nevertheless show us true divine pedagogy. (1) These same books, then, give expression to a lively sense of God, contain a store of sublime teachings about God, sound wisdom about human life, and a wonderful treasury of prayers, and in them the mystery of our salvation is present in a hidden way. Christians should receive them with reverence.
16. God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New. (2) For, though Christ established the new covenant in His blood (see Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25), still the books of the Old Testament with all their parts, caught up into the proclamation of the Gospel, (3) acquire and show forth their full meaning in the New Testament (see Matt. 5:17; Luke 24:27; Rom. 16:25-26; 2 Cor. 14:16) and in turn shed light on it and explain it.