Ridley Scott, a self-identified agnostic, offered up his grand Exodus: Gods and Kings movie a week before Christmas. Nothing planned about that, right? Well, that's okay. 'Tis the season and all that. So, here we have a man who doesn't actually believe there is a God putting on a movie with "God" in the title about a story from a book breathed by said God about one of the most stunning series of God-interventions in all history. What would you expect his approach to be? Well, to explain it away, of course.
PRI complained that all the characters were white. (Seriously, Ridley, a white Moses, white Pharaoh, and white African queen?) Pastors complain that "it's downright blasphemous the way this film portrays God." Christian Bale says Moses was a terrorist, as well as "likely schizophrenic and was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life. He's a very troubled and tumultuous man who fought greatly against God, against his calling." Nice. And I love this quote from Scott: "I wanted everything to be reality based." You see, that's the idea. So God at the burning bush was represented as a child because "I didn't like the idea of an angel associated with wings" because that wouldn't be reality based. "Any liberties I may have taken in terms of how I show this stuff was, I think, pretty safe ground because I’m always going always from what is the basis of reality, never fantasy ... So the film had to be as real as I could make it."
Frankly, how a self-professed unbeliever depicts a story from the Bible isn't of particular concern to me because he's an unbeliever. What I find fascinating, however, is the attempt at "reality". Darren Aronofsky depicted the story of Noah as an environmentalist God angry at humanity for destroying His creation. Aronofsky's "reality". Ridley Scott has depicted the startling events of the story of the Exodus as partly natural phenomenon and partly the outlandish beliefs of a nut job. Scott's "reality". The whole idea is "How do we explain the supernatural? How do we make it understandable, believable, relatable?" (Making it "relatable" was a specific aim of both Bale and Scott.)
This is what interests me. It's the idea of the skeptic who tries to explain away the supernatural to make it fit with the skeptic's rules of reality. It's the notion of the liberal theologian who attempts to explain away the hand of God to make it fit with his own rules of reality. It's the scientist who complains that we can't measure God (which is a scientist's rule of reality--to be able to measure things) so He doesn't exist. Indeed, at this time of the Nativity, we see this a lot. Jesus could not have been born of a virgin because that doesn't happen in the real world. Angels they did not hear on high because every scientist knows that angels don't happen in a real world. Jesus's entire arrival was not a fulfillment of prophecy because that would imply the miraculous and we start our definition of "reality" with "not miraculous". I once asked a fellow worker if he included God in his considerations to the answers of origins and he boldly and surely denied the possibility. Can't happen. So starting from "We cannot explain the miraculous by the Divine," they will go through a variety of dances, evasions, or just plain denials to explain the supernatural by the natural.
Why? If there is a God--an actual Divine Being who speaks and it exists and who holds all things together and in whom all things consist--why wouldn't there be the miraculous? Conversely, why would we be able to use natural means to "measure God"? He would be supernatural, so why would "natural" be of any use in the question? Indeed, if there is a God who created all that is, isn't nature itself contained in the Supernatural and, therefore, wouldn't it be considered natural for there to be the miraculous?
Now, in truth, the heavens declare the glory of God. In his book, Miracles, C.S. Lewis wrote, "Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator." God is found in the natural, not because the natural contains Him, but because He is the container in which it exists. But when we decide that the product of the Creator rules out the Creator, we've lapsed into lunacy. When we decide to make the Bible "relatable" and "real" by changing it, we've stepped up to an arrogance that should frighten each of us. Because, in the end, there is no complete explanation of the Supernatural. The finite cannot fully grasp the infinite.
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