Edges of the Lord

Of the movies I watched this weekend, Role Models was easily the most fun, not to mention sinful, but Edges of the Lord was by far the most edifying. If you want to know how to grow up undercover in the midst of persecution and war, Edges of the Lord is the movie to watch. Surprisingly I had never heard of this movie before, but it was released in 2001 and stars Haley Joel Osment. Bad Polish accent (admittedly, not that bad) included, he's every bit as good in this movie as he was in The Sixth Sense and then later in Secondhand Lions.

In this movie, Osment stars as 11-year-old Romek, the young Jewish protagonist. It opens in Kraków, Poland in 1942. Romek is being taught Catholic prayers by his father in preparation for his escape to the Polish countryside, where the blond-haired and blue-eyed Romek will hide from the Nazis in plain sight by pretending to be a local farmer's cousin from the city. In order to make the charade work, Romek must be able to fit in with the devoutly Catholic Polish peasants he will be living among. Fortunately, one of Romek's saviors in the Polish countryside is the local priest, played by Willem Dafoe. He helps teach his young charge the ins and outs of Catholicism while paying careful attention to respect the boy's Jewish heritage.

Romek's other chief protectors are the farmer Gniecio, his wife Manka, and their two sons, Vladek and Tolo. Once Romek arrives in his haven, he tries to go about the business of being a typical adolescent, but the circumstances he finds himself in are anything but typical. Poland is under the tyrannical heel of Hitler's Germany, whose fury extends not only to Jews but to the Polish people as well, whom the Nazis also view as inferior. Romek, in particular, must deal quietly with his fears and hopes regarding the fate of his parents, who have gone into hiding elsewhere. The most visible challenge with which Romek must deal, however, and the one with which the movie's plot deals most extensively, is that of fitting in with and gaining the friendship of his peers.

Initially, Vladek, who is closest to Romek in age, makes things extremely hard for him, playing the tyrant with the smaller and frailer boy. Of Gniecio's sons, however, the junior Tolo is most accommodating and welcoming to their guest, soon forming a close bond with Romek. Of those village youngsters not of Gniecio's family, Romek becomes most enamored of Maria, an inquisitive, pretty, and rather fierce girl who is the lone female playmate of the group and Vladek's girlfriend. That she is also kindly disposed to Romek only serves to intensify Vladek's animosity toward Romek. Even less kindly disposed to Romek than Vladek are the sons, Robal and Pyra, of the oafish neighbor Kluba. This family will later prove to bring great grief to Romek and to Gniecio's family.

At times, it seems as if the most important concerns of the youngsters are typical ones, like swimming in the quarry, eating strawberries, the battle between the sexes, and catechism class, but the devastation of the war and the brutal Nazi occupation is ever-present to mar the otherwise idyllic setting of the film.

This becomes shockingly apparent when the neighbor Batylin is caught possessing pigs after the Germans have seized all of the Poles' livestock and forbidden them from possessing any on the pain of death. The children run to Batylin's field, looking on from the trees as the priest begs the German officer for Batylin and his wife's lives. The sadistic Nazi officer makes a bargain with the priest, agreeing to spare one life if the priest can catch a pig in one minute. If he can catch two pigs in two minutes, he can save both lives. The other soldiers on hand laugh hysterically as the priest scrambles through hay and dirt, trying desperately and vainly to catch the slippery, squealing pigs running wildly through the field. He fails and the elderly couple is executed. From her place in the trees, Maria flees the scene, leaving the boys behind. Romek is not alone in having lost his parents; Tolo later explains to him that Maria had seen her parents murdered by the Nazis in a fashion similar to that which they have just witnessed at Batylin's field.

After this tragedy, life returns to "normal" in the village. The young group of friends and the priest return to the concerns of the catechism class, with the father asking the children to draw sticks on which the names of the apostles are written. He instructs them to learn all they can about the apostle they have chosen. Maria, who is an incipient feminist, inquires of the priest if Jesus played with girls too. He tells her she must learn all that she can of Mary Magdalene and emulate it.

During this session of catechesis, the priest also has another lesson to teach the children. In light of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews and the fact that they are unknowingly associating with a Jew in Romek, the priest inquires of the children which people group Jesus was from. Pyra suggests that Jesus was from the Vatican. Only Romek is unsurprised when the priest tells the children that Jesus was Jewish.

The theme of redemption, which begins to reveal itself even prior to this moment (Romek sees the priest beating himself in the barn after he fails to save Batylin and his wife, which Romek interprets as the priest's arguing with God), begins to come into sharp relief as Tolo insists that there can be no apostles without Jesus. He takes it upon himself to play the part of Jesus, vowing to undertake "Jesus exercises" to prepare. Romek, a quick study about the Christian faith, suggests that if Tolo plays the part of Jesus, he must hang on a tree all through the cold and dark night. Tolo is unfazed; if that is what it takes to become like Jesus, that is exactly what he will do, not to mention wearing a crown made from a rosebush and, oddly, running naked in the rain.

The children take to the "Jesus games," though perhaps in ways the priest had not intended. For instance, highlighting the theme of growing up and discovering love, Maria imitates Mary Magdalene, telling the boys that she is going to take her beloved into the barn for an hour, after which they are to pretend to pick up stones to throw at her. To Vladek's chagrin, Maria chooses to take Romek into the barn with her instead of him. What ensues in the barn is an expression of innocence and naïveté when it comes to matters of love and sexuality, which Romek and the older Maria both display. It deals with the matter in a touching, modest, and appropriately awkward way.

In the wake of Batylin's death, Gniecio decides it is time to sell his own family's pig. He ventures off into the night with Kluba to sell the pig in town. In a pouring rain, Kluba returns the next afternoon, hauling Gniecio's bloodied, lifeless body in his cart. A heart-rending scene ensues as an inconsolable Manka beats her husband's lifeless body, pleading for him to wake up. Kluba says that Gniecio had left him the previous night with the man to whom he was selling the pig but did not return. Kluba had found him later, shot in a ditch. Some neighbors had reported that the Germans had done it. Young Tolo comforts his anguished mother, but, as Romek relates in his narration, Tolo does not cry for his father.

With the tragedies in the village and in all of Europe closing in around them and finally coming to rest in his own family, Tolo comes to understand in an ever deeper way the need for redemption from human brutality and suffering. He expresses this in his continuing and escalating "Jesus exercises." The night after his father's funeral, for instance, he runs naked in the rain. Lying sick in bed the next day, Tolo summons his friends to his bedside and has them make a solemn vow.

Tolo: I have a plan, and all of you are in it. On that special night, I'm going to hang on the tree all night, and I am going to make them all come back.
Vladek: Who, Tolo?
Tolo: Papa. . . . And yours (pointing at Maria). And yours, too, Romek. . . . And we all have to take a bath together.
Romek: Get baptized?
Tolo: Get baptized together to get ready. . . . You all must say yes.

They all do. In the next scene, Tolo has his friends dip their heads into a bucket full of water and he kisses each one as they rise from their "baptism." After removing his "priestly vestments," Tolo gives one of the best baptismal sermons I have ever heard. Imagine that he is Jesus: "Because you shiver . . . (coughs) in this holy river and you might get cold, listen to me and remember that you all put your heads in the bucket, and now you have to follow me. I'm going to suffer for you. But I'm going to make things better."

The final significant conversation I want to lift out from the movie is between Romek and the priest. It has significance not only for its statement about humanity but also for Eucharistic theology and ecclesiology, but I won't get into that here. In this, Romek's most important catechism session, the priest is preparing hosts for Communion. He asks Romek if he would like one. Romek, perhaps not understanding transubstantiation fully, declines with a look of horror on his face. The priest laughs, assuring him that they are not holy hosts just yet and that he can freely eat them. Besides, he assures Romek, these are only the edges, which he never blesses. Recognizing the cosmic significance that Catholics attach to the bread, Romek asks a profound question about humanity.

Romek: Are we blessed, or are we just the edges?
Priest: We are all scraps, Romek. We are all blessed the same.
Romek: But not all the people. Right?

The priest does not answer. Romek begins to break the edges into pieces representing all the people who have been lost: Batylin, his wife, Vladek's father, Maria's parents.

Romek then informs the priest that he has been to the trains that pass through the village and asks him point blank if his parents are going to come back for him. The priest tells him that they probably will not, so Romek breaks off two more edges to represent them.

Edges of the Lord is a poignant and powerful story but a melancholy one. It treats with depth and sincerity the various ways in which war warps the young, bringing out the worst in some but also bringing out the best in others. In the process, Edges of the Lord calls on all of us to answer humanity's highest calling regardless of the circumstances—the calling to love our neighbor. It is exhortation for us to sacrifice for the edges of the Lord just as we would for Jesus himself, to love and to seek an end to all the terrible things that people do to one another. The ending to this film, as much and more than anything I have described so far, is a great statement of redemption and sacrifice—a terrible, sad, and unforgettable one but a great one nonetheless. Can we recognize Jesus in the despised and persecuted other? Can we identify with the condemned like he did?

Fast and Feast, Flesh and Spirit

For someone who just joined a congregation in a mainline denomination three weeks ago, I was awfully hard on that segment of American Protestant Christianity in my last post. All criticisms aside, the orthodox majority of mainline Protestants have done some things better over the last century than most evangelicals have. They have done particularly well with two areas I am keenly interested in—the Sacraments and the social aspect of the Gospel, both emphases that have prevented them from falling into the Gnostic scheme of spiritualizing all the trappings of religion away, at least not to the extent that most evangelicals have.

When it comes to its official statements in its Book of Common Worship, the Presbyterian Church USA is one of the most solid of the mainline churches when it comes to its sacramental theology and its sacramental liturgies. Its baptismal liturgies incorporate the beauty of the best Reformed language about the Sacrament and handle with nuance and subtlety the dialectic theological concerns in play in Reformed thought on the Sacrament. Its Eucharistic liturgies incorporate elements of patristic liturgies, giving them an awesome sense of history and mystery and a catholicity that resonates with believers from the Christian traditions of Wittenberg, Geneva, Rome, and of Constantinople and points north and east. The PCUSA has also done a fantastic job in its work with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in bridging the centuries-old rift that developed between the Reformed and the Lutherans due to their differences on the Sacraments. Needless to say, I am thrilled to officially be a member of this denomination.

In her sermon last Lord's Day, our pastor, Reverend Nancy Carle, did not address the Sacraments but did deal nicely with the issue of fasting as a discipline we are called to practice especially during the season of Lent but also as an ordinary practice of our spirituality. She took the anti-Gnostic track of defending the practice by discussing the importance God places on the actions we perform in and with our bodies. We are not to think of ourselves as having competing and dichotomous fragments of ourselves labeled spirit and matter, with spirit being good and mighty and flesh being somehow lesser or weaker. She pointed to the fact that God called materiality and flesh good and very good when he created it in the beginning and that God assumed flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, who physically died and bodily rose from the grave. Likewise, she noted the Christian belief in the general resurrection of the dead as stated in the Apostles' Creed. It is in the context of such an embodied spirituality that fasting is an appropriate and necessary activity for Christians. In the season of Christ's suffering and death, we are to show our thanksgiving and joy by bringing our bodies into subjection and offering them as a sacrifice to he who was and is our all-sufficient sacrifice.

With the embodied nature of our spirituality under discussion last Lord's Day, it was appropriate that the contrasting theme of feast also appeared in the service. The idea of fasting as a means of feasting on Jesus Christ came up during the sermon, and, during the children's feature, Nancy discussed with the youngsters the ample material for feasting our worship together provides. She pulled out a hymnal and intimated to the children that a great feast for our ears was set in the music of the church. She pulled out a Bible and pointed to the great feast for our hearts that God's Word is. She also pointed to the congregation and the choir assembled behind her and noted what a feast of wisdom is set before inquiring minds in all the lessons God's people can teach us.

Most naturally, then, my mind made the progression to something else that is as central to our life and worship together as the spoken and written Word of God. Also, with the matters of the mental, emotional, and spiritual feasts set before God's people in worship being dealt with, it was only natural that I should think of the physical feast of the Church. My eyes went from the pastor and the children gathered on the other side of the sanctuary back to the centrally-located altar, hoping against hope that I was mistaken that no feast of Christ's body and blood lay there ready and waiting for us to consume, but, alas, I was not mistaken. No bread. No wine. No literal feast was to be had this day. In good Presbyterian fashion, our fare today was destined only to be words.

Well, my time for complaining is over. Presbyterians have not historically celebrated the Lord's Supper often. Many are now doing so weekly, but many more still are not. The fact is that Presbyterianism is centered on the Word. Well, the entire Church is centered on the Word of God—both the testimony about him and his Father we call Scripture and the God-Man himself, Jesus Christ. The Word of God is speech by and about God as well as the flesh and blood human being that was and is God. Just as Jesus did not come in words alone but also in the flesh when he walked the earth, so too does he not, or, at least should not have to, come by words alone today. In this sense, it is perfectly Presbyterian to make the Sacraments as central to our worship as the Bible is. Since Christ has gone to be present in heaven at the right hand of the Father, through the power the Holy Spirit the Sacraments are the means, in addition to the speech of Holy Writ, by which we continue to commune with him in a fleshly way.

Do I overstate the need for God to engage us at every level of our being, or, conversely that we need to engage God at every level of our being? Doesn't Scripture say, "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all" (John 6:63). This is the verse that the Swiss Reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, used to support his position on the Lord's Supper at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529.

At this fateful meeting, the Protestant princes and theologians of Germany and their counterparts from Switzerland were assembled to bolster the Protestant movement and unify it in the face of the threat from the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Zwingli and the Swiss Reformed camp agreed on virtually all major points of doctrine with Luther and his followers. However, Luther and Zwingli quarreled bitterly on the question of the Lord's Supper.

Luther took quite literally Christ's words at the Last Supper, "This is my body. This is my blood." He was quite unwilling to budge on this point. He felt that the statement was just too strongly put in Scripture to spiritualize it away. He did not quite accept the Roman Catholic view either, but this was primarily because it was expressed in terms more associated with Aristotelian philosophy than the Bible.

Zwingli found Luther's view to be outright idolatry. He found repugnant the idea that God is present "in, with, and under" the physical elements of bread and wine. On this point, John Calvin would later agree with Zwingli, but his reason for rejecting the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist was thoroughly biblical. As for Zwingli, the basis of his reasoning was philosophical.

Calvin could not reconcile the idea of Jesus Christ the human being sitting at the right hand of the Father in heaven while simultaneously being present on a thousand altars. He was worried about inadvertently endorsing the "Monophysite" heresy (which is the elimination of the distinction between Christ's humanity and divinity, namely that "the humanity of Christ is absorbed into his divinity just as a drop of rain is into the sea"), but he nevertheless still affirmed that Christ is spiritually present in the Sacrament and that it contains a divine blessing for believers and a curse for unbelievers.

Zwingli, on the other hand, could not reconcile Christ's physical presence in Communion with his Platonic understanding of the relationship between spirit and matter. For Zwingli, matter was inherently inferior to spirit and could not carry the weight of spiritual reality. As a result, Zwingli's interpretation of that great Eucharistic chapter, John 6, hinged upon verse 63: "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all." (I find it remarkable that a theologian who was as otherwise skilled as Zwingli was could fail to recognize that following his exegetical reasoning on the Lord's Supper to its most obvious conclusion would be to empty the Incarnation of any significance as well!)

At any rate, Luther thought Zwingli had performed a rational emptying of the Lord's Supper and thus uttered, "We are not of the same spirit." (Yay Luther! Even though these words were disastrous for Protestant prospects for church unity and I have some points of departure from Lutheran views of the Lord's Supper, I still have to admire Luther's stand for historic Christianity here.) It was at this point in history that we can mark the definitive split between the Reformed and the Lutherans. Though Calvin took a view of the Sacrament somewhat closer to Luther's view, he helped deepen the split between his followers and Luther's by signing a statement of agreement with Zwingli's followers in the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549. The Reformed have been trying to figure out whether they follow Calvin or Zwingli on the Lord's Supper ever since. (Can you guess which I follow on this doctrine?)

But what do we make of the essential biblical distinction between Spirit and flesh? Paul, for example, uses the dichotomy between Spirit and flesh repeatedly in his letters to mark a sharp distinction between the life of regenerate and unregenerate humanity. Those of the Spirit are rescued from sin and death, given everlasting life, and set on a trajectory toward glory, but those of the flesh are altogether ruined, wrecked, and doomed.

The Gnostics read their anti-materialist prejudices onto Paul's letters, inferring that spirit is inherently good and that matter is inherently evil. I do not mean to question Paul or the Holy Spirit for their mutual decision to use these terms, but it seems as if the distinction inherently smacks of Gnosticism or some species of Platonism.

Well, I think we can defend Paul's and also John's use of this dichotomy while affirming that there is nothing intrinsic to mere spirit or to mere flesh that makes one superior to the other. I want to note a couple of things.

1. "Spirit" in the Pauline Epistles and in John 6:63 is, of course, the Holy Spirit.
2. "Flesh," as used in the New Testament, often means sinful human nature. That is what is in play in most Pauline usage of the word. Neither does it refer exclusively to our bodies and their sinful nature but it includes our sinful minds, sinful hearts, and sinful spirits as well. This is all "flesh" for Paul.
3. "Flesh" in John 6:63 is not synonymous with "sinful human nature" or bare materiality but with pure natural reason. The flesh here that is of no help is that of the human mind unenlightened by faith, not the flesh and blood that Christ bids us to eat and drink as our regular "spiritual" food earlier in the chapter. Christ's literal flesh and blood offered up for us at Calvary, and consequently signified for and delivered tangibly to us in the Eucharist (not by transformation but by the presence of the Holy Spirit in and with the bread and wine, according to my Reformed perspective), is everything in John 6. The flesh and blood Christ offered up for us at Calvary is the root of our Life as regenerated persons.
   
   (The best Protestant commentary I could find on John 6:63 is solid but contains a heresy. The Geneva Study Bible notes of this verse: "The flesh of Christ therefore quickens us, because he that is man is God: and this mystery is only comprehended by faith, which is the gift of God, found only in the elect."
   
   Good so far and still good on its lexical note on Spirit, except for the heresy it contains: "Spirit, that is, that power which flows from the Godhead causes the flesh of Christ (which is otherwise nothing but flesh) both to live in itself and to give life to us."
   
   That which is in parentheses is technically heretical because there is no humanity of Christ without the divine nature joined to it in hypostatic union. The ancient ecumenical Council of Chalcedon describes Christ as being "in two natures, inconfusedly,unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.")
   
   I digress; the point is that Christ's discourse on his flesh and blood in John 6 must be apprehended by faith, not according to human reason. Human reason finds it preposterous that Jesus can be both fully God and fully human and consequently a human sacrifice for us, but faith recognizes that these are the central realities of the Christian faith.
4. The Spirit is eternal, but the flesh is temporary. This doesn't necessarily imply hierarchy of mere spirit over mere matter. The Spirit/flesh dichotomy is most appropriate for its inference about duration and influence. Flesh (matter) as we currently know it is perishable. Sinful flesh in particular is dying a slow death in the Church and in the individual Christian, but it will inevitably and completely die, though bare matter will not disappear because we will have perfect and incorruptible physical bodies in the Kingdom.
   
   The Spirit, on the other hand, which is God's agent (not to mention very God of very God) of cosmic and individual regeneration, is already powerful in the Church, the world, and in individual believers. The Spirit's influence is eternal and is only getting stronger in the Church, the world, and in individual believers. It will triumph over all when the Kingdom arrives in all its fullness.

Okay, here's how I'm going to bring this sprawling train wreck to an end. We fast during Lent, not because matter is bad, but because matter is good, inasmuch as it is a means of communion with God. We fast so we can bring our bodies and souls into subjection to the will of God and thus offer our whole selves as sacrifices to the one who sacrificed his whole self for us.

When we feast as the Church on the Lord's Supper, we are anticipating that time when matter is returned to the purpose for which it was created—to be a means of union between God and his creatures. The purpose of the Eucharist is thus, according to my friend Dustin Lyon, "the fundamental proclamation of the gospel where all creation is redeemed and the world becomes what it was meant to be: a means of communion with God and transparent to Him." That's why the Word of God, as embodied in Jesus himself, Scripture, and Sacrament, are central to Christian worship. Let us not feast on words alone but on the Word, flesh and Spirit, in all of his fullness.

American Religious Identification Survey: What It Means for Evangelicalism?

The latest American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College of Hartford, Connecticut should be no cause for alarm to American Christians, but, neither can we regard its results as a cause for celebration. The most notable features of the 2008 survey are:

• The percentage of Americans claiming no religion has jumped from 8.2 in 1990 and 14.2 in 2001 to the current figure of 15 percent.
• The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian has fallen from 86 in 1990 to the current figure of 76 percent.
• The percentage of Catholics in the United States has remained steady at one in four since 1990, but the percentage of non-Catholic Christians has fallen from 60 to 50 percent over the past two decades.
• Ninety percent of the decline in non-Catholic Christianity over this period has come from mainline Protestant denominations, which have seen their numbers drop from 18.7 percent of Americans in 1990 and 17.2 percent in 2001 to just 12.9 percent of today's population.
• The percentage of evangelicals in the United States continues on the rise, with one-third of the population identifying themselves as such, including 38.6 percent of those in mainline Protestant traditions.
• The largest percentage of increase in the evangelical camp has come from those attached to mega-churches, a number that has skyrocketed from less than 200,000 Americans in 1990 and 2.5 million in 2001 to the current figure of 8 million.

Well, the sky most certainly isn't falling, but, in my opinion, several of the trends noted above bode ill for the future of the Body of Christ in our country. It is no surprise that secularity continues to grow. That's a bummer for sure. Religion is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the lives of most Americans. Also, the decline within mainline Protestantism is surely distressing for a segment of American Christianity that has deep historic roots but which has in too many cases drifted from those roots in order to accommodate the culture.

For most theologically-conservative Christians, however, the numbers do not look that bad. Evangelicalism continues to grow, liberal Christianity is continuing to decline, and the Catholic Church has largely retained its numbers. Evangelicals must feel some sense of vindication in the continued growth in their camp and the continued collapse of mainline Protestantism because it represents to many of them an indictment of lukewarm, compromising Christian faith and a strong affirmation of that which sticks to its guns in spite of the culture.

Appearances can be deceiving. For instance, Mark Silk of Trinity College told CNN.com that the rise in evangelicalism is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans. He points to the prominence of the "religious right" in politics as having turned many people the other way. That is undoubtedly true, but I think the connection relates more to the very issues many evangelicals see as problematic with mainline Protestantism, namely, that of compromising too much to the culture.

Though the areas where the influential liberal camp in mainline Protestantism has led the mainline denominations to compromise are different from the areas where particularly evangelism-driven evangelicals have led their fellow theologically-conservative Protestants to compromise, I think the results are ultimately going to be similar.

Even if conservative evangelicals are correct that liberal compromises in doctrine, worship, mission, and Christian morality within mainline Protestantism are related to matters of central concern to the Christian faith (in many cases they are), it is a mistake to assume that the compromises evangelicals have made in the name of winning and keeping converts are not also matters of fundamental integrity to the Christian faith. Just because evangelicals have doggedly retained essential points of Christian doctrine, stayed true to the mission of winning souls for Christ, and insisted on biblical standards of morality, that is no assurance that all remains well within the Church.

What happens if evangelicals continue to insist on individual head and heart matters but continue to neglect the love for one another that characterizes real Christian community, refrain from making disciples, and refuse to carry out the mission of establishing Christ's Kingdom in the Church and in the world? How does 12.9 percent of the American population sound? That's where we're headed if the "Let's have a religious entertainment service instead of public worship, and let's build mega-churches so nobody gets to know one another" movement continues. Private Christianity will inevitably dry the well up! Individualistic American Christians need real community and love, not Sunday rock concerts and a purely private relationship with Jesus.