
If Sony pictures wanted to stir up a buzz over a film, they could hardly have orchestrated a better series of events than the geo-political drama that played out ahead of The Interview: a mysterious cyberattack on Sony reportedly originating out of North Korea, followed by threats of violence against any theater that dared to show the film, followed by an abrupt Sony decision to pull the film, followed by a tweetfest escalating all the way up to the White House, followed by, finally, a Sony reversal and release of the film online and to independent theaters.
On the face of it, The Interview serves up about two hours of slapstick buffoonery – something on the order of a Three Stooges flick with some gratuitous cheap sex and Rambo-like combat to round out the R-rated mix. But precisely because of geo-political realities, there’s more to The Interview than your typical Hollywood comedy. Here’s the story in sum:
Dave Skylark and Aaron Rappaport are the dynamic duo of a popular TV talk show, Skylark Tonight. Dave is the face, and Aaron is the off-camera brains and (speaking generously) conscience. When Skylark Tonight gets preempted by breaking news about nuclear threats from North Korea, Aaron finds himself struck with a crisis of journalistic insignificance. He grabs Dave and makes him promise that they will aim for better content in the future.
The next day, Dave discovers that Kim Jong-Un is a fan of the show and storms into Aaron’s office with their key to journalistic significance. We should totally interview him! This would be big! And so, against Aaron’s better judgment, the adventure begins.
The CIA gets wind of it and shows up at Dave’s door with a proposal: “Take him out,” the hot Agent Lacy mouths until the dense duo gets her drift, and soon the two dudes are off to Pyongyang armed with nothing but their wits and a single ricin strip with which to poison the dictator.
[Spoiler Alert!] Though it doesn’t go the way the CIA or the duo planned, after a lot of antics, they do eventually eliminate Kim, along with a good portion of his personal guard. And that’s end of it. Cue up “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.”
Then again, don’t. Given the real world events, there’s a lot to chew on here, and quick answers may be shallow and injudicious. Should we cheer Sony’s gutsy decision to make a film about a pressing geopolitical issue and the subsequent resolution to release it, even in the face of threats? Or should we decry the film’s cheap sex, sophomoric scatological humor, and superficial treatment of a political situation that is the source of untold real suffering and death?
I lean toward yes, and yes. There’s much that’s both right and wrong about The Interview, so responding to it requires setting the various issues in context and treating them accordingly. I’ll look at it from a few angles and then offer some points to ponder.
The Good, the Bad, and the Perilous
Political theory: The Interview unequivocally puts two nations, America and North Korea, which operate according to two different theories of social organization, on clear, unambiguous display. America was founded on the principle that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and therefore of right ought to be free and independent from government tyranny. North Korea acknowledges no God, and is a totalitarian dictatorship in which the Supreme Leader is the closest thing presented to the people as a god.
According to American liberty, the state exists to serve the citizenry, to which it is accountable. It is for this reason that we call state employees public servants. In Communism, the citizenry is expected to live for the collective, which inevitably becomes synonymous with the state, which in turn recognizes accountability to no one. The two systems are mutually exclusive, and I think Sony is to be commended for using the real-world example of North Korea, rather than a fictional nation, to draw world attention to the evil still extant in our midst.
The Interview also shows, both in the internal plot and through the public brouhaha that took place around it, the importance of freedom of the press and freedom of expression. In America, for good or for ill, we poke fun at our leaders regularly. In The Interview, we see what can happen when doing so is disallowed. In the film, literal combat breaks out in the control room to keep the cameras rolling when the interview isn’t going according to the dictator’s prearranged script. Then, in real life, the leadership of North Korea threw a public hissy fit, but not just for show. Real threats of violence and death were issued.
From a political point of view, The Interview is primarily inane spoof. As Alistair Nicholas argues over at MercatorNet, it doesn’t even rise to the level of political satire. Still, no one, least of all a pompous narcissist, likes to be ridiculed. Who can say what kind of effects for the oppressed people of North Korea may proceed from this kind of “emperor has no clothes” tale? This is where The Interview gets its highest kudos from me.
Life: Life is cheap in North Korea. The reality of prison camps and a starving populace, though not shown, is at least mentioned and put on the table to be dealt with. That is good. But when Kim’s turncoat assistant Sook gets her hands on an automatic rifle, she mows her countrymen down like she’s competing in a video game. Yes, there are times and places for taking up arms, but the way she does it is, well, cheap. Sadly, Dave and Aaron, though they don’t go on a shooting rampage, aren’t much better in this respect. We see that in the way they go about their sex lives.
Sexuality: Sex drives all three of the male lead characters. To Dave, getting sex is reason enough to lie and even kill. He’s hesitant to sign onto the assassination plot … until he realizes it will give him access to Agent Lacy. Aaron’s not much better. When Sook throws herself at him, he doesn’t think twice about risking her life to have sex with her on the spot, even though he has a live ricin strip stuck to his palm.
Sex is also the way insecure men validate their manhood. Kim Jong-Un says he has lots of it – with women – to suppress any suspicion he might be homosexual. (You’d think the LGBT lobby would be all over this, but I haven’t heard a peep.) The only character that’s genuinely loved for who he is is the dog, Digby. Dave and Aaron risk their lives to take Digby home with them. “Protect that puppy with your life,” Dave says to Aaron, as they’re making their escape. In The Interview, dogs are for loving and protecting. Women are for having sex with.
What’s good about The Interview is that the Supreme Leader of North Korea is shown to be a corrupt, hollow man – an insecure, empty soul leading people astray. What disappointing about it is that leadership in America – in this case media celebrities – are also corrupt and somewhat hollow and insecure, but it’s not so obvious unless you’re thinking according to a clear, coherent moral philosophy.
Dave is just as addicted to the worship of the masses as Kim, but he’s so morally blind, he doesn’t see Kim as he is until it’s almost too late. (In real life, he’d have never left North Korea alive.) He and Kim are quick pals, reveling in some drugs, sex, and a joy ride in a nuclear tank one day, and arch enemies to the death the next.
Given the kind of leadership we see in America, both onscreen here and to a lesser extent in real life, it’s questionable whether America possesses either the moral clarity or courage to identify, let alone face down and defeat, a tyrant such as Kim. Or Putin, or ISIS. It’s obvious that the makers of the film think we have it; it’s not obvious that we actually do have it. Arrogance and moral blindness are a perilous combination.
Reading Between the Pixels
Still, I think even this complicated mess called The Interview shows how the truth claims of Christianity are not completely lost on America at large. The underpinnings are there. We just need to learn to identify them and help people reconnect the dots, if they will. Consider the following:
Political theory: According to postmodern multiculturalism, all cultures are equally good, and no particular political arrangement for society is to be preferred over another. To suggest that your own is better in any way is considered arrogant. But The Interview never even thinks about equivocating. Freedom is better than tyranny. This position can only be maintained in a theistic worldview. In a nontheistic paradigm, tyranny is just another word for Darwinian survival of the fittest. There is no reason to prefer one over the other.
Human nature: According to secular humanism, people are basically good. The reason people do bad things is either because they make mistakes or because they were thrust into a difficult situation. Dave even makes this excuse for Kim at first. Then he sees that Kim can be a murderous deceiver, ready to blow up millions of people to salve his bruised ego. Neither this Kim nor Dave’s reaction to him comport with the secular humanist view. But they’re perfectly consistent with the biblical understanding of human nature.
Sexuality: According to postmodern secularism, there is no particular order for sexual expression. Really anything goes, though most secularists still add that it should at least be consensual. Since all the lead characters in The Interview seem to be driven by sex, there’s not as much to draw out here except for one brief line in the closing scene. Aaron was attracted to Sook from the start, and eventually got in a quickie with her. Then, when he leaves North Korea, she opts to stay behind, and he feels dejected. “She was your true love,” said Dave, attempting to console him.
Whether or not she was, whence cometh this idea that sex should be tied to love and permanence? It’s rooted in Judeo-Christianity, not secularism. But that’s what Aaron, the character with a conscience, really wanted. He didn’t want just cheap sex; he wanted a relationship. Sex is kind of like icing. In the right time and place it’s nice. Separated from its context and pursued as an end in itself, it makes you sick. All the sex in The Interview is animalistic, cheap, and kind of sickening. But Aaron’s wistfulness as he leaves Sook betrays a disillusionment with it that is inexplicable in the purely secular view of sex.
Ethics and Morality: According to postmodern moral relativism, there is no objective standard for right and wrong. Right and wrong are matters of personal opinion, and no one’s particular opinion has any more merit than another. But The Interview is clear about a few moral absolutes. Dave is infuriated when he discovers that Kim had a fake grocery store, complete with painted food-laden shelves, erected for Aaron and him to see on their drive from the airport to the Kim compound. And he’s also appalled when he sees that Kim could go on a murderous rampage at the drop of a hat. But if morality is relative, there’s really no grounds for these reactions. According to the Judeo-Christian worldview, however, his reactions are perfectly legitimate. In fact there would be something wrong with him if he reacted otherwise.
Life: The same logic applies to the film’s overall view of human life. According to Darwinian naturalism, the reigning origins metanarrative, humans are highly evolved animals, nothing more. If this were actually true, there would be no reason to object to one man rising to prominence at the expense of the masses. In fact to do so would be supremely Darwinian of him. We should admire it and aspire to do likewise. But Kim and his regime are rightly, soundly condemned as ruthless oppressors. This censure only makes sense in a Judeo-Christian context.
There’s actually more that could be said along these lines, but I’m going to move on now, assuming you get the picture.
Even The Stones Cry Out
When Jesus entered Jerusalem before his final Passover and crucifixion, the crowds rightly hailed him as their coming King and Messiah. But the reigning temple elite would brook no competition. “Teacher, rebuke your disciples,” some demanded. But Jesus answered, “I tell you, if these become silent, the stones will cry out!”
What I see Christ saying here, at the risk of overgeneralizing it, is that all creation bears witness to its Maker. I think in a similar way, even a ridiculous R-rated flick – one that has no intention or even knowledge of doing so – can bear witness that the Judeo-Christian worldview gives us the most accurate, compelling, and true vision of realty going. The stones cry out, indeed.
Or, in the case of Dave, Aaron, and Kim, the stoned cry out.
Related:
- State Purposes: Utopian Creep and the Struggle for Human Rights & Freedom -“Liberty, based on God-given inalienable rights secured by legitimate government structures, is the heritage of the American people. But liberty in America today is under perilous threat from a utopian creep.”
- Statist Analysis: A Review of Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, by Mark Levin
- Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West – the story of Shin dong-Hyuk, born and raised in a prison camp, escaped to America.
I cannot recommend this post from WK more highly, including all the links at the bottom. It will take some time to read through it all, but it will be worth it.
How do you present theism as a rational belief to a person who thinks that the progress of science has removed the need for God?
Canadian science writer Denyse O’Leary writes about the history of cosmology at Evolution News.
Excerpt:
What help has materialism been in understanding the universe’s beginnings?
Many in cosmology have never made any secret of their dislike of the Big Bang, the generally accepted start to our universe first suggested by Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (1894-1966).
On the face of it, that is odd. The theory accounts well enough for the evidence. Nothing ever completely accounts for all the evidence, of course, because evidence is always changing a bit. But the Big Bang has enabled accurate prediction.
In which case, its hostile reception might surprise you. British astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) gave the theory its name in one of his papers — as a joke…
View original post 1,262 more words

A Review of The Principle
Shortly before his death in 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) in which he proposed that the motion of the planets could be better explained by assuming that the sun, rather than the earth, sits at the center of the universe (the Solar System being the extent of the known universe of his day). Up until this point, Western scientists had visualized the universe in accordance with Ptolemy’s geocentric model, which in turn traced its roots back to Aristotle.
Later, Enlightenment thinkers extrapolated the Copernican model into what is now known as the Copernican principle. The Copernican principle states that the earth is not in any specially favored or spatially central location in the universe. And although it has never been proven, and in fact is unprovable with current technology, the Copernican principle has become entrenched into an axiomatic presupposition of modern thought, as astrophysicist Michael Rowan-Robinson wrote in 1996, “It is evident that in the post-Copernican era of human history, no well-informed and rational person can imagine that Earth occupies a unique position in the universe.” Baby boomers may remember Carl Sagan pontificating, “Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”
What the Copernican principle has been generalized into is a philosophy which says human beings are nothing, and human life is ultimately meaningless. If Copernicus disabused us of the geocentric view, the thinking goes, then why should earth or its occupants be considered as anything special?
Leaving aside the obvious non-sequitur in that question, the Copernican principle became something of a godsend for nontheists. Because before Copernicus, the general assumption of all natural philosophy (the forerunner to modern science) had been that the earth and mankind were the product of some kind of creator, and therefore were objects of special focus in the cosmos. Once earth got “demoted,” as some put it, the Copernican principle became the tool by which nontheists would kick God out of their universe. It was “theological dynamite” in the words of atheist theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. “There’s nothing special about humans,” he continued. “We are nothing, absolute nothing.”
In What Way Is the Earth Moving?
The Principle, an expertly produced film narrated by Kate Mulgrew and featuring physicists Kaku, Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing), MIT’s Max Tegmark, and many others, reexamines the Copernican principle in light of recent cosmological discoveries. At the risk of oversimplification, The Principle makes the following points:
- According to Isaac Newton, neither the sun nor the earth sits at the center of the solar system (or universe). The smaller body doesn’t revolve around the larger, but rather, both bodies revolve around whatever point is the center of mass. “So even in the heliocentric system, it’s not the earth going around the sun. Scientifically and technically, we would say that the earth and the sun are going around one point called the center of mass,” said Robert Sungenis, producer of the film.
- Physicist Ernst Mach proposed considering the earth as the pivot point of the universe and said that if the universe were orbiting around the earth, it would create the exact same forces that we today ascribe to the motion of the earth. In other words, Mach’s principle said that we would see the same effects whether the earth was rotating in the universe or the universe were rotating around the earth. Mach’s ideas would influence and give way to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
- Einstein’s special theory of relativity said that the length, time, and mass of objects changed as those objects move through empty space. Echoing Mach, Einstein wrote, “The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either [coordinate system] could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, ‘the sun is at rest and the earth moves’, or ‘the sun moves and the earth is at rest’, would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different [coordinate systems]” (The Evolution of Physics, 1938).
From these and other points, the makers of The Principle suggest that we cannot definitively ascertain that the earth is in fact moving.
Is Earth the Center?
From that basis, The Principle moves on to relate two aspects of Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discoveries. First, the universe is far more vast than had been previously believed – what astronomers had heretofore thought were stars were actually galaxies. And second, the universe is expanding – all those galaxies are moving away from the earth. In every direction, galaxies appear to be flying away from us, and the farther away they are, the faster they’re moving.
Could this discovery of galaxies moving away from earth in all directions argue in favor of a geocentric universe? Hubble found the thought most abhorrent. “Such a condition would imply that we occupy a unique position in the universe, analogous, in a sense, to the ancient conception of a central Earth,” he wrote. “This hypothesis cannot be disproved, but it is unwelcome and would only be accepted as a last resort in order to save the phenomena. Therefore we disregard this possibility … the unwelcome position of a favored location must be avoided at all costs … such a favored position is intolerable.”
Krauss was a lot more flippant about it, but he holds the same view. “Of course, that makes us look like we’re the center of the universe, but it’s not true. It just means the universe is expanding uniformly.” Perhaps it is. Or perhaps that conclusion is required in order to maintain the new maxim of, “We’re nothing special.” In any event, The Principle and Einstein fairly well establish that motions are relative and must be spoken of in reference to some arbitrary fixed point.
The “Axis of Evil”
And then there’s something else – large-scale temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation (very faint light detectable throughout the universe, sometimes called the “echo” or “afterglow” of the Big Bang) that appear to be aligned with each other to a remarkably high degree. The strange alignment, which still has cosmologists stumped, was jokingly dubbed “the axis of evil” in a 2005 paper by the same name because they define an axis, a preferred direction spanning the entire universe. These alignments correlate to two planes relevant to earth: the equinox and ecliptic planes. The equinox plane is the plane along the line between the two equinoxes, and the ecliptic is the plane in which the planets in the Solar System orbit the sun.
“Some people have actually suggested that there’s structure in the cosmic microwave background radiation that’s related to where the earth is and how it’s going around the sun — which is crazy. Because we’re nothing special,” Krauss insisted. (There’s that principle again.) But the anomalies did provoke some kind of double-take. “Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us?” he asked. “That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun – the plane of the earth around the sun – the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.” It’s a considerable concession from a man who’s a global evangelist for atheism.
The Principle touches on other concepts – dark matter, dark energy, quantum foam, the multiverse, and baby universes popping in and out of existence, hypothesized but thus far undetected entities put forth to explain observational data – and suggests that the need for some of these proposed entities could be eliminated by dispensing with the Copernican principle. A geocentric model, with the earth at the center of a spherically symmetrical universe, is a possible alternative, the filmmakers say. This, at the very least, is an intriguing thought.
Is Geocentrism the Central Question?
But is it a hill worth planting your flag on? I lean toward no, but not out of any attachment to the Copernican principle. The Copernican principle is a bad idea. It’s also a pet materialist concept, especially in its more generalized form implying that earth and human life are nothing unique. So it’s refreshing to see it reexamined in fresh light. Science advances by doggedly following data this way and asking tough questions.
But The Principle ventures needlessly into nuclear-reactive territory by positing a geocentric universe. Not only does this invite extreme derision from the scientific community (a snarkfest already underway), but a literal geocentric paradigm is not necessary to establish that the earth and human life are uniquely special.
Look again at the quotes by Kaku, Krauss, and Hubble. Even in their denials of earth-exceptionalism, they give something away. Notice that they don’t argue against geocentrism in any physical sense, but against the view of earth and humanity as “unique,” “special,” or “favored” in a qualitative sense. This is a different kind of assertion. If earth and human life are uniquely special, there are certain theological implications that, for some, are “intolerable.” And therein lies the divide.
The real divide isn’t between those who hold a geocentric view of the universe and those who hold some other non-geocentric view. The real divide is between those who adhere to philosophical naturalism – or materialism, the view that matter and energy are all that exists, and those who allow for the possibility of non-material causes. In simpler terms, the real divide is between atheism and non-atheism.
The Principle raises good questions, but simpler answers exist. The earth is already clearly special in that it has so many rare and unique properties that make it suitable for life. See The Privileged Planet. And life is special because it’s made by God. See also The Privileged Species. For the atheist that might be a revolutionary thought, but isn’t atheism long overdue for a revolution anyway?
Related:

On the evening of January 1st, 2008, at approximately 7:30pm, a call came in to the Irving, TX, 911 emergency response line. A female voice came screaming onto the line, “Help me … my dad shot me and now I’m dying!”
The caller was 17-year-old Sarah Said. She and her sister Amina, 18, had been shot multiple times in a taxi cab which had been abandoned at the service entrance of the nearby Omni Mandalay hotel. Amina was incapacitated instantly, but Sarah had been able to make this one call before the ninth shot unloaded into her body silenced her voice for good. It is believed with good evidence that the girls’ father, Yaser Abdel Said, an Egyptian-born Muslim who was working as a taxi-driver at the time, is the perpetrator. The girls, both of whom had American boyfriends, had previously fled home with their mother and had been resisting his plans to “sell” them as wives to men of his choosing in Egypt. Said has not been seen since, and is wanted by the FBI.
The Price of Honor, produced by Iranian-American journalists Neena Nejad and Sogol Tehranizadeh, takes an in-depth look at this crime through the eyes of people who knew the girls: close friends, their American mother Patricia Said, and other family members on their mother’s side. (Said family members were contacted but declined to comment.) The film is partly a tribute to the two beautiful and otherwise normal, American teenagers who were murdered in cold blood. But more primarily, it was made to draw attention to the practice of honor killing, which, according to the producers, is on the rise in the United States.
Human Rights Watch defines “honor killings” as:
… acts of vengeance, usually death, committed by male family members against female family members, who are held to have brought dishonor upon the family. A woman can be targeted by (individuals within) her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce—even from an abusive husband—or (allegedly) committing adultery. The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that “dishonors” her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life.
Honor killings are carried out, ostensibly, to restore family honor, which has been tarnished by the actions of the accused woman. “These crimes are often collective and premeditated,” the filmmakers continue, but the perpetrators often escape justice because of differing practices of law enforcement. “Rather than ruling on cases with gender equality in mind, the judicial systems seem to reinforce inequality and, in some cases, sanction the murder of women who are considered dishonorable. Often, a suspected ‘honor killing’ never even reaches court. In cases where they do, the alleged killer is often not convicted or is given a reduced sentence of three to four years in jail.” Estimates of women so murdered annually range from five to twenty thousand worldwide. Clearly this is a grievous injustice.
Moral Clashes
Or is it?
Nabeel Qureshi, who grew up a devout Muslim but later converted to Christianity is very helpful here. In his exquisite autobiography, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity, he explains some underlying differences between Eastern and Western cultures that influence moral reasoning.
Islamic cultures tend to establish people of high status as authorities, whereas the authority in Western culture is reason itself. These alternative seats of authority permeate the mind, determining the moral outlook of whole societies.
When authority is derived from position rather than reason, the act of questioning leadership is dangerous because it has the potential to upset the system. Dissension is reprimanded, and obedience is rewarded. Correct and incorrect courses of action are assessed socially, not individually. A person’s virtue is thus determined by how well he meets social expectations, not by an individual determination of right and wrong.
Thus, positional authority yields a society that determines right and wrong based on honor and shame.
On the other hand, when authority is derived from reason, questions are welcome because critical examination sharpens the very basis of authority. Each person is expected to critically examine his own course of action. Correct and incorrect courses of action are assessed individually. A person’s virtue is determined by whether he does what he knows to be right or wrong.
Rational authority creates a society that determines right and wrong based on innocence and guilt.
Much of the West’s inability to understand the East stems from the paradigmatic schism between honor-shame cultures and innocence-guilt cultures.
He goes on to explain how reliance on positional authority enables certain Eastern practices such as honor killings and blood feuds to continue unabated. “No amount of sheer reason is going to change these practices, nor will externally imposed prohibitions. The change will have to be social, internal, and organic.” I would add that expressions of moral outrage concerning violence against women and appeals to gender equality will pretty much fall on deaf ears in the East.
Moral Clarity
So what is a clear-thinking Christian to do? This is where the absolute claims of the Bible shine beautiful, much-needed light by giving us clearly defined moral boundaries. The murder of Amina and Sarah Said is a grievous injustice, and the filmmakers are to be commended for taking it up as a cause. But gender inequality and domestic violence are pitifully inadequate moral categories for a deed as monstrous as a man shooting his only two daughters at point-blank range and leaving them to die.
We can do better than that. Here is moral clarity: Honor killing is murder, and murder is wrong. For all people, at all times, pure and simple. Intuitively, we know this – in fact everyone with a working conscience has this moral sense with respect to murder. But in our public discourse we’ve all but lost the foundational principle undergirding it. Only the Judeo-Christian tradition writes it out for us as the moral absolute that is actually is: You shall not murder.
There is no room for cultural relativism when it comes to moral absolutes. We need to resurrect the absolutes and unapologetically state them where applicable, and You shall not murder clearly applies to the Said case. Applying it catapults the discussion onto a whole new plane, implying that every honor killing is not merely an offense against a woman. It’s an offense against God. Framing the discussion this way doesn’t diminish the value of the lives we’re talking about. It elevates them.
Given world events, with ISIS threatening death to anyone standing in their way, if good people intend to face down evil and overcome it, we will have to muster the cahones to call evil evil. Any moral reasoning that falls short of that fails to honor human life, regardless of gender, as it should be honored.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a contented, tenured English professor at Syracuse University specializing in Queer Theory and Gay and Lesbian Studies when she set out to write a book on the Religious Right. Why did they hate her and her gay and lesbian community? she wanted to know. An intelligent, thirty-six year old lesbian who considered herself a fine, moral human being, she set out to refute them once and for all. It was part of her ongoing “War against Stupid.”
So she began reading the Bible and meeting with a local pastor as part of her research. The first time through the Bible, she thought it was just a bunch of hogwash. As a postmodernist, it was a given to her way of thinking that any truth claim is as valid as any other. The Bible’s moral prohibitions and unapologetic concept of totalizing truth didn’t even qualify as legitimate ideas worthy of intellectual engagement. They were completely foreign categories of thought for her.
But she was also an exactingly honest intellectual. She knew that even though she was going to write her book from a lesbian, feminist perspective, it was important that she first adequately capture her adversaries’ point of view. Why, then, did Christians believe their understanding of this peculiar book was accurate?
She redoubled her efforts, reading the Bible “the way a glutton eats cookies, not leaving any crumbs,” which, she says, “is kind of normal for an English professor.” An unexpected thing happened:
As I was reading and rereading the Bible, [I noticed] there are many questions in the Bible that are very personal. And I think it’s important, as an outsider as you’re reading it, to take those personal questions to heart. And so I did start to think about those. And it was really in that context that I started to question my own sense that … I had it all right.
Ultimately, the crux for her became the question of God’s authority:
Because it did strike me that I had been wanting to interrogate the Bible, I was a literary critic by training, and what literary critics do is they interrogate things. And so it struck me that I was in the posture of the interrogator. It did make me wonder though. The whole premise of an inerrant and inspired Bible – the premise of it is that the Bible then interrogates you. You don’t interrogate it. And the justification for that is that the Bible is written by a holy God. And I had to stop and think for a moment because, you know, if God did create the heavens and the earth and everything, and if God did set apart a people for himself before he made the stars and the sand, you know every little leaf on a tree, then nothing is higher than God. And therefore, God does have the authority to interrogate me.
That thought began turning her whole epistemological orientation on its head, and through a series of psychological and spiritual twists and turns she likened both to a train wreck and an alien abduction, Rosaria became a born again Christian. Or as the Apostle Paul put it, she became “a new creature in Christ.” It was lengthy, painful process, but a very liberating one, as she details in her 2012 book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith.
The Law
New Testament Christians – and by that I mean every believer on the backside of the cross – live in a time some call the “Age of Grace,” the concept of grace being set in distinction to the pre-cross era when God’s people were under Mosaic Law.
But saving grace notwithstanding, the moral law has not been nullified. Right and wrong are as absolute and active today as ever because morality and ethics proceed from God’s nature which does not change. Rosaria rightly observed that God’s claim to authority, including the imperatives of morality and ethics, is exactingly totalizing. Authority is claimed, and it is non- negotiable. And, as she discovered, being confronted with this reality can be devastating.
Delivered by Stone
It’s supposed to be. Theology student Haydn Sennitt gave some intriguing insight lately on the etymology of the word behind ‘the Law’ (תוֹרָה) or ‘Torah’:
It turns out that Torah derives from the Hebrew verb ‘throw’ (ירה, oryarah). It is the 3rd person feminine singular Hif’il imperfect of the verb. … The Hif’il form of verbs is reflexive, which means that a person receives the action, kind of like (not exactly) a passive construct. With yarah in this form (becoming torah, תוֹרה) It indicates a person receiving something thrown at them, like a blunt object. In an ancient culture like Israel’s, that would indicate someone being hit by something like a shot-put or discus. The emphasis of a Hif’il verb is not who does the action, but who receives it.
Sennitt finds this interesting, he continues, because “it seems to be that the role of God’s word is that it is meant to kick a punch, like a discus or a shot put.”
Yes the Law has been fulfilled in Christ on the cross, and yes, the cross cancelled the debt that consigned us to eternal separation from God (what we call hell). Informed Christians know we are not under law but under grace. But still, the Law remains. And to come under its judgment is crushing. To say it kicks a punch is a gross understatement. I think it’s more accurate to say it kills.
But is that all bad? James Kushiner, Director of the Fellowship of St. James, wrote recently of John Chrysostom, who died in exile around 400AD. Chrysostom wrote:
There is only one thing … which is really terrible, only one real trial, that is sin; and I have never ceased continually harping on this theme. But as for all other things, plots, enmities, frauds, calumnies, insults, accusations, confiscation, exile, the keen sword of the enemy, the peril of the deep, warfare of the whole world, or anything else you like to name, they are but idle tales. For whatever the nature of these things may be, they are transitory and perishable, and operate in the mortal body without doing any injury to the vigilant soul.
Chrysostom reminds us of one of the central truths of the Bible: our real enemy is sin. The Bible also tells us that all of us have, to one degree or another, made peace with it. At the risk of putting it too loosely, we’re sleeping with the enemy. We may even think the enemy is our lover when in reality it’s a traitor and a killer.
If sin is the real enemy but we have made peace with it, then we need to know that, right? And if this is true, then the kick, the punch, the crushing blow is a very real mercy because it gets our attention. It’s like a fire alarm that disturbs a blissful slumber. Or the sharp pain that prompts a visit to the ER.
Most of us can understand the benefit of those kinds of alerts, painful though they may be. But why is the crushing weight of the Law so psychologically disorienting? So psychically painful? Chew on this: Because it’s true. And we know it.
The Interrogatory Moment of Truth
The question for every one of us, then, when (not if) we find ourselves on the receiving end of the blow becomes, What am I going to do now?
Consider three options:
- One can look away from the Law, avoid the blow, saying, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy.” This is the Scarlett O’Hara response.
- One can deny the Law, evade the blow, saying, “Did God really say …?” This is the Serpent in the Garden response.
- Or one can take the blow and allow the interrogation to do its work, and say, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” And this, the moment it proceeds from the heart, becomes the salvation response.
We can acquiesce to the truth that we hate but know is true. Or we can, as St. Paul put it, “suppress the truth in unrighteousness,” which can take a variety of forms, including #1 and #2 above and blowbacks that are far worse than those.
The good queer theorist English professor discovered, as has every regenerated Christian since the cross, that acquiescing kills those inner voices that say, “I am okay,” and, “I have it all right.” It destroys the peace we’ve made with our own sin.
The Interrogatory Moment of Truth
It feels like death, but paradoxically, it’s the way to life. Because it is in that moment that we discover the great liberating reality of redemption. The real crushing blow has been intercepted. The final blow that would have finished us off for good fell on the cross, and we’ve “crossed over,” so to speak, to the backside of it. We’ve been acquitted.
The Acquittal
And we go free.
Related:
- God’s Word: discus hit not sleepy solace, by Haydn Sennitt
- My Train Wreck Conversion – “As a leftist lesbian professor, I despised Christians. Then I somehow became one.”
- A Divine Derailment: A Conversation with Rosaria Butterfield

In June, 2002, in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attack, 25-year-old Pat Tillman abruptly left a multi-million dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals and enlisted in the US Army. He declined all interview requests, asking to be looked upon as any other soldier. Nevertheless, the news turned him into a national phenom overnight.
Two years later, he was shot and killed in the mountains of Afghanistan. At his memorial service in San Jose, CA, carried live by major media outlets, a US Navy Seal, a friend of the family, gave a moving eulogy. He told how Pat had died in a heroic attempt to rescue his platoon brothers from an enemy ambush. “Pat sacrificed himself so his brothers could live.” He was awarded the Silver Star, the nation’s third highest honor awarded for valor in battle with enemies of the United States. The public memorials were ceremonies befitting a hero.
But Pat’s family soon began to suspect there was more to the story than what they had been told. Pat’s mother, Mary “Dannie” Tillman, started poking around, and over time the story changed. Meanwhile, as investigations unfolded, the media outlets would cut, paste, and package the story to suit their editorial objectives. Pat Tillman became even more of a news phenom, exactly what he did not want to be. His wife Marie began to wonder, Where was Pat the person in all this?
Fratricide
Eventually, it came out that Pat Tillman had been killed by friendly fire. It hadn’t even been in an enemy attack. His death had been the result of (at best) a string of poor decisions on the part of military personnel.
Death by friendly fire, while always tragic, is a known risk of deployment. But, “Why, then, award him the Silver Star?” Pat’s father, Patrick Tillman, Sr., wanted to know. What was going on, and why had the family and the public been lied to? A wartime death was one thing, but administrative obfuscation and deception was a whole different matter. Eventually, family pressure resulted in a Congressional hearing which included testimony from top brass all the way up to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. All denied knowledge and culpability, and with that, the “case” was closed.
The Death of Understanding
Well, “closed” for everyone but Pat’s family. They’re now convinced that Pat’s death was used as a propaganda tool – by the administration and military to promote the war effort and by the media to sell news. The family’s story is told in the 2010 film, The Tillman Story, directed by Berkeley producer Amir Bar-Lev. It’s a sad and troubling account, but not just because of the war, the death of Pat Tillman, or the propaganda angle. Those are troubling, of course, but there’s a deeper, wider, and more lamentable loss on display over the course of the film. It’s the death of understanding.
The Tillmans have eliminated God from their thinking. Pat’s youngest brother Richard made this clear at the memorial service. “Make no mistake, he’d want me to say this: He’s not with God, he’s f***ing dead. He’s not religious. So thanks for your thoughts, but he’s f***ing dead,” he repeated it for emphasis. This leaves them with no transcendent context from which to understand death or injustice. Yes, they know something about death and injustice, but beyond feeling anger and then taking the story to the public, they have no framework from which to understand it, to understand how it can be made right, or to even understand that it can be made right.
Naturally, they’re grieved over the loss of Pat. But they have no way to process their grief. Naturally, they are angry over the indignity of his death being deceitfully used for war PR and then being lied to. But they have no way to process that anger. Yes, life goes on and they seem to be coping, but still they evince the anguish of unresolved and (worse) unresolvable grief and anger.
Confused
And there’s something beyond that. They have no explanation for grief itself. After all, if human beings, including Pat, are nothing more than collocations of matter and energy – no soul, no spirit – there’s really no loss to speak of. The matter decomposes and the energy gets spent some other way, and that’s that. I’m not saying the Tillmans don’t feel legitimate pain. I’m sure they do. I’m pointing out that they have no explanation for their pain. Their pain sits at odds with their worldview.
It’s the same with their feelings of injustice. The Tillmans are angry, and rightfully so, assuming the story as told is accurate. Anger is a legitimate emotion because lying and using people – for any reason – are wrong. Again, I’m not saying their emotional reactions are illegitimate. I’m saying that they have no explanation for them. Their anger and sense of injustice also sit at odds with their worldview.
Because, according to the Darwinian paradigm, which is still the going metanarrative for all non-theistic worldviews, natural selection knows nothing of ethics or morals. It is perfectly consistent with Darwinian evolution, then, for the powerful to use the weak and then dispense with them. What happened to Pat is to be expected, really.
What’s my point in all this? The Tillmans’ very souls cry out in painful testimony to them that something is wrong, very wrong. Their emotions are pointers to God. C.S. Lewis wrote about this in Mere Christianity. He carefully explained how his arguments for atheism broke down because of, not in spite of, his sense of injustice:
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too – for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”
The grief over death proves the value of life. The sense of injustice proves the reality of justice. The darkness proves the light. Or, as you may have heard it more recently from Switchfoot, The Shadow Proves the Sunshine.
But the materialist worldview does not allow its adherents to see through to any of this. So materialists get stuck in anguish, unable to make sense of their emotions. They cannot understand. Isaiah the prophet wrote of those who’ve turned away from God. They “hope for light, but behold, darkness; For brightness, but we walk in gloom. … We stumble at midday as in the twilight, … We hope for justice, but there is none, For salvation, but it is far from us.” (Isaiah 59: 9-11)
The Beginning of Wisdom
There is much injustice in the world today and many, many anguished cries about what must be “done” to fix it.
But none of them will “fix” anything, if they do not begin from the right foundation, which is God, the fear of whom “is the beginning of wisdom” and the knowledge of whom “is understanding.” (Proverbs 9:10)
[Somebody’s] Truth about the Universe and How You Fit into It
In the 1980s, David Christian, a 40-ish year-old professor of Russian history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, became discontent teaching “just the history of one country.” “[N]ot really sure … in a sense, who I am,” he wanted to know about the history of humanity as a whole. “That question forced me back,” he said. “If you want to know about humanity, you have to ask about how humans evolved from primates.” His inquiry continued pressing backward until he was asking about the origins of the earth and then finally of the whole universe. He read widely, synthesized what he found into a course, and began teaching it as “Big History” in 1989.
Bill Gates later saw the DVD series and wanted to make it available to more people. He tracked down Christian and the two founded the Big History Project to disseminate Big History globally, beginning with high schools. The resulting 10-unit, 50-lesson course spanning 13.7 billion years of “universe history” went online in late 2013. The project is funded by Gates’s LLC, bgC3 (Bill Gates Catalyst 3), which is described as a think tank, incubator and venture capitalist firm.
Big History is billed as “a true history course … with a goal of helping students understand a historical narrative and ultimately human civilization’s past, present and future.” Christian and Gates speak of it with infectious enthusiasm. “This is my favorite course of all time,” says Gates. It’s very special because “it creates a framework for so many of the things [students] will learn in other courses.” How was the universe created? Why does it work the way it does? Why do we find ourselves on this tiny planet, buzzing with life? What does it mean to be human? These are the question Big History purports to answer. They fascinated Christian from the beginning and motivated him “because they made me feel I was a part of something absolutely huge and quite wondrous.” “By the end of this course,” he says, ”you’ll have surveyed the whole history of the universe. And you’ll know how you fit into it.”
What History?
The question that needs to be asked, though, is, In what sense is this history? When Gates concedes that it “blurs the boundaries between science and geography and history,” he doesn’t go far enough. Take another look at the questions Big History aims to answer:
- How was the universe created?
- Why does it work the way it does?
- Why are we here?
- What does it mean to be human?
These aren’t the questions of science, geography, or history, but of philosophy and religion. Big History purports to be “Universe History,” “Universe History” being the grammatical equivalent of “Russian History” or “Film History.” But that’s not what it is. Big History is a story of the universe, according to a particular metaphysical worldview – the materialist naturalistic, or atheistic one – to be specific.
Big Religion: Now Showing at a School Near You
A broad range of schools are already implementing Big History in the United States and internationally. The project provides all materials and teacher training and offers subsidies to cover additional direct expenses incurred by schools. Given the funding and big names behind it, Big History is sure to be expertly produced, engaging for students, and widely propagated,
But if we take the first definition listed for ‘religion’ on Dictionary.com, “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe,” there is no way to take Big History as anything but an alternative religion. A slickly presented, secular religion, now showing at a school near you.
This article first appeared in Salvo 27, Winter 2013

Greg Spencer of Roseburg, OR, was a police officer in narcotics enforcement in the 1990s. His work kept him immersed in a world of violence, death, and depravity on a regular basis. In addition he was a deputy medical examiner, which meant he had to view autopsies, often on bodies whose life had ended in a horrible death. He was dedicated to his work, but it turned him into a hardened and calloused man, and his first marriage ended because of it.
He left the police force after fifteen years of service and became a cross-country truck driver, but about six months into that, macular degeneration in both eyes rendered him effectively blind. He went on disability, and, with the expectation of being blind and disabled for the rest of his life, got help through the Oregon Commission of the Blind in functional blind living, including white cane and guide dog training.
During this time, he met Wendy – his face softens into a smile when he mentions Wendy – a “born again, on fire believer in Jesus Christ,” who “drug me with her to church.” He met Jesus Christ there. And he married Wendy.
If Greg Spencer’s story were to end there, most of us would consider it a rather happy ending. A man loses his sight but gains salvation, a beautiful wife, and the means to live out a reasonably comfortable life on earth. But his story didn’t end there.
Healed
In 2001, he attended a men’s retreat, the topic of which was, “Cleansing of the Mind.” He needed that. He’d not been able to sleep nights because of the horrid, graphic images of bodies, violence, and pornography still haunting his psyche. Sometimes he would wake up screaming from the nightmares. So at the retreat he prayed, Lord, cleanse my mind. Take this junk away. Set me free. Right away, he felt the Lord respond directly, You’re clean.
He opened his eyes. And the next thing he knew, he was reading the little red “Exit” sign behind the speaker in the chapel. Not only had his mind been cleansed of the residue of years among such evil, but his eyes had been healed of their blindness. His vision was totally restored. Even the scar tissue was gone.
A subsequent investigation opened by the state of Oregon resulted in comprehensive documentation, both of his visual impairment and the restoration of his sight, and cleared him of any fraud charges in relation to the temporary collection of disability. His is a current-day, thoroughly documented healing, or in the words on the diagnosis submitted by Dr. Brad Seeley of the Dept. of Ophthalmology, Oregon Health Sciences University, “Unexplained Decreased Visual Acuity.”
The Testimony of Data
Greg Spencer’s story is only one small component of the documentary, Jesus of Testimony, produced by Nesch Productions, but it offers our scientifically “enlightened” age some powerful evidence of the supernatural to chew on.
Though this story is dramatic, most of the two-plus hour long documentary is more of an intellectual discussion with an array of New Testament scholars. Here’s a brief summary:
Part One: Lord or Legend looks at references to Jesus from sources outside the Bible – for example the Roman historian Tacitus and Josephus, an ancient Jewish scholar – that confirm details in the gospel accounts. For example, many non-Christian sources didn’t shy away from calling Jesus “God” or “Son of God.” Some mention that he was known for miracles, even by those who didn’t believe in him. Thallus, a Greek historian, wrote of the darkness on Good Friday, and Josephus tells about the resurrection.
Part Two: Are the Gospels Reliable? gives data on the numbers of extant manuscripts, full and partial, to address the question, Are the gospel texts we have today reliable copies of the originals? It also looks at ancient customs concerning oral traditions and the dating of the writings.
Part Three: Miracles, which is the segment containing the story of Greg Spencer, deconstructs David Hume’s circular argument against the possibility of miracles, on which most arguments against miracles are based today and explains how the empirical sciences, historiography, and forensics go about (or at least should go about) evaluating claims concerning the miraculous.
Part Four: The Testimony of Prophecy. The Old Testament contains more than three hundred prophecies about the coming Messiah. All were fulfilled in Jesus Christ. This segment draws out a few of them, establishing the supernatural credentials both of the ancient prophets and of Jesus himself.
Part Five: The Resurrection – Fact or Fiction? looks at the practice of crucifixion (a highly reliable means of killing, which the Romans both invented and perfected), the evidence for the empty tomb, and the various theories posited to explain the resurrection away.
Part Six: The Good News gives us the basic New Testament gospel message, and then we hear from two men. Dr. Michael Brown, who says his own story is “from LSD to Ph.D.,” shot heroin and played drums in a rock band with the intention of becoming a rock star until the day he realized how much God loved him and that Jesus had died for him. On that day, he says, God set him free, and he never put a needle in his arm again. Dr. Brown went on to earn a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. He is the author of numerous books including Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus: Messianic Prophecy Objections.
Dr. Craig Keener was an atheist when some people shared the gospel with him. He said, “I’m an atheist; I don’t believe that. Why should I believe that?” and then walked away.
But although they couldn’t give him a good argument for it, they did give him the right content, and after that, God gave him a different kind of evidence. “God gave me the evidence of his own presence,” he says, knowing that some people may not be able to understand that. It was “a certainty that went beyond any other kind of evidence that I could have had because it came directly into my heart.” He didn’t understand the language of salvation that the people had used, and he struggled with God over the implications of it. But eventually his knees buckled underneath him and he surrendered. That was the beginning of his Christian life.
The Testimonies of the Living
Jesus of Testimony is packed with data about this one central figure of human history, Jesus of Nazareth. The information could have been put into book form, but there’s something more human about hearing the scholars speak to it, especially the ones whose lives have undergone such drastic transformations. Greg Spencer didn’t ask God to restore his sight. Dr. Michael Brown didn’t ask for help getting off drugs, and Dr. Craig Keener never asked to be “cured” of his atheism.
The data is compelling on its own. The evidence in human lives, the testimonies of men whose lives have been restored, changed, retooled, if you will, for good rather than for naught, is soul-nourishing. If the historical Jesus of testimony is who he told us he was, this should come as no surprise whatsoever.
Craig Keener, who now teaches at at Asbury Theological Seminary and is the author of numerous books including, Miracles: The credibility of the New Testament Accounts, has a message for anyone who’ll listen: “If God would take me, … who had blasphemed God’s name, who had spoken against him, if God would take me, God will take anybody who’s just willing to accept the testimony of the Spirit. Jesus rose from the dead, and now Jesus is alive and is Lord of the universe and is ready to transform the life of whoever comes to him.”
Related:
The full film is available online. Click here.
- Healed from Blindness: The Testimony of Greg Spencer
- Jesus of Testimony Trailer