A Crucifixion of a Different Kind
I haven't seen
The Passion of The Christ yet, but I intend to.
While I haven't yet seen it, I have been reading reviews and blurbs and quotes about
The Passion of The Christ and it seems to me that the reviewers are missing the point; if I'm correct in my understanding of the point. It seems that critics noting the violence and blood shed in Gibson's film are not considering it in the context that comes directly from the Bible. It seems that those that criticize Gibson's singular focus on the last twelve hours of Christ and his ignoring of the life of Christ as teacher are not watching the movie in the context it was made to be watched in. There are also the comments about the anti-semitism.
Some quotes taken from
Rotten Tomatoes:
"The Passion of the Christ is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it."
-- A.O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES
"It's as if Gibson is measuring God's love by the amount of blood he shows on the screen."
-- Glenn Whipp, LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
"The Passion of the Christ is at once a well-crafted film, a merciless excursion into motion-picture ultraviolence, and a regrettably cramped historical account that stays doggedly on the surface of its overwhelmingly important subject."
-- David Sterritt, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
"The director claims he had no intention of making an anti-Semitic film and we tend to believe him, in much the same way we believe Larry Flynt when he says he's not misogynist."
-- Pat St. Germain, JAM! MOVIES
"Has such anti-Semitic possibilities and no upside for anyone but believers in Mel's vision that the execution of Christ is more important than his life."
-- Dennis Schwartz, OZUS' WORLD MOVIE REVIEWS
In Isaiah 52:14 we are told that the sin-bearing servant's visage was "marred more than any man, And His form more than the sons of men." What does this mean? It means he was beaten brutally. What does "mar" mean? According to Merriam-Webster it means "to detract from the perfection or wholeness of: spoil" and "to inflict serious bodily harm on: destroy." His visage was marred more than any man. His form was destroyed. His form was spoiled. He suffered serious bodily harm. In Isaiah 53:5 we are told "But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed." He was wounded, bruised, and whipped (striped). He wasn't attending a tea party, He was being tortured before and during the journey to His fate. When torture occurs blood flows. Is it violent? Yes, it is what it is. It is as it was written. Gibson, to me, is attempting to show us graphically what words cannot convey. I've thought about the death or Christ on the cross, and it has a surreal and dreamlike feeling to it. I understand intuitively what happens when someone is crucified. I have read medical accounts of what would happen hour to hour while hanging on a cross, pierced with nails. Still, I don't
feel or
know what it's like. I don't understand the sacrifice that was made on my behalf.
Another point critics have been making is that the movie is focused so narrowly on such a violent piece of the life of Christ. Gibson knows that for the message of Christ you can
read the Bible. He understands that the message is somewhat easily grasped. He is not trying to say that the death is more important than the life. We know it is all important. But the act of dying for us all is the culmination of why God became incarnate. We can read that Christ commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves and understand what that means. We cannot fathom the punishment and sacrifice that Christ endured in order to give us these messages. This movie will give us, as believers and non-believers alike, an understanding of what God did for His creation. God became fully man and took on this amount of punishment on our behalf so that we would not have to endure such suffering. We can look at crucifixion scenes and stained glass windows and paintings and get chills but these are static images that convey a glimpse of what Christ went through. Gibson's movie, though, will allow us to see in vibrant detail what Christ suffered. It will still not give us a complete understanding of what occurred on that day, but it will give us a more complete understanding than we have had up to this point.
This movie will kick us in the chest and punch us in the face. It will stomp on our fingers when we fall to our knees and put a weighty foot on our backs so we can't get up. Christ didn't die in His sleep. He died with holes in His body, with His blood flowing, gasping for air, and crowned with thorns. He died after being flogged, beaten, spit on, and laughed at. It wasn't Jews who did this to Him. It wasn't Romans. It was
us. All of us, black, white, asian, Christian, Jew, Gentile, Muslim, Satanist, Atheist, Agnostic, Buddhist, Hindu, and everyone else. Human-kind killed Christ. Gibson knows he had a part in His death and that's why it is his hands that nail him to the cross. In the crucifixion scene, the hands putting the nails on Jesus hands and holding the hammer are Mel Gibson's hands. People may use this film as fuel for anti-semitism just like the Bible has been used for atrocities. That doesn't make the film itself anti-semitic. Everything is a self-portrait. If you want to see it, you will. If you look for it, you'll find it.
We are visual beings with a need for a visual understanding of what our Savior did for us.
Six Days = 16 Billion Years
Note: you can find all of this information in Gerald L. Schroeder's book The Science of God
I am not arguing from the text alone, because I am arguing a reconciliation between science and the Bible. I am trying to show how the six days of Creation can be 24 hour periods and billions of years at the same time. In order to reconcile the two, I must look at scientific findings, the Bible, and commentaries on the Bible that may be way ahead of their time scientifically speaking. When I say I must look at, I mean I must relay what someone who has done this concludes. I'm not a physicist or a theologian, but Gerald Schroeder is both.
We have six days to get from the Big Bang to the advent of humanity beginning with Adam. But science tells us that the universe is roughly 10 to 20 billion years old. How can we fit the billions of years into the six days the Bible tells us is the case?
Point One: Separation
The biblical calendar reached the year 5757 in the fall of the secular year 1996. The beginning of the biblical calendar is the creation of the souls of humankind (Genesis 1:27). The six days prior to that are not included in the calendar by Leviticus Rabba (300 C.E.), the Jerusalem Talmud Avodah Zarah (350 C.E.), and the Babylonian Talmud Hagigah (500 C.E.), among other scholars and theologians. So what, you may ask. Who cares what they said?
Note also the juxtaposition of time in the six days of creation and all time thereafter. The events are described and then the time that has passed is categorized by "there was evening and there was morning" constituting a "day." There are no mentions of when, during each day, the events of that day occur. Once Adam is created events become more dependent upon a time-line or chronicity. Generations are described -- Adam and Eve live 130 years and are the parents of Seth. Seth lives 105 years and sires Enosh. The six days aren't a part of our current time line biblically because, while they are indeed 24 hour periods, they are not 24 Earth hours.
Point Two: Understanding Time
Gravity and velocity affect the passage of time. Time passes more slowly at locations of higher gravity and higher velocity when compared with locations of lower gravity and lower velocity. This means that if Xon and I are both 25 years old (exactly) on Earth and Xon transports instantaneously to the massive planet Calvino, where gravity slows time by a factor of 350,000 relative to Earth's rate of time, then I will be 27 years old when Xon is 25 years and three minutes old. Two years will pass for me on Earth while only three minutes pass for Xon on Calvino. If I could watch Xon on Calvino from Earth, it would appear as though he was moving
very slowly. If he watched me from his high gravity location, it would appear to him as though I was moving incredibly
fast. His heart would beat twice, mine would beat 350,000 times. This is relativistic time dilation.
Point Three: Ages of our Universej
Everywhere in the universe, time passes more slowly or more quickly relative to somewhere else in the universe. The moon, sun, stars, etc all differ in their relative time. If watches were placed at various places, we could find many such places where six days would tick away on the clock, while on Earth 15 billion years ticked by. However, this isn't enough because we need to know how to measure the universal perspective of the Bible's space-time reference frame. The perspective needs to be for the entire universe, for all of creation. We need to find a universal clock not just a relative time method.
Point Four: A Universal Clock
Three facts:
1. The biblical calendar is divided into two sections -- the first six days of Genesis and all the time thereafter. Those six days are not, and never have been, included in the calendar of the years which follow Adam.
2. Time after Adam must be Earth based. The radioactive dates of archaeological discoveries related to the post-Adam period, such as the early Bronze Age, the beginning of writing, the battle of Jericho, closely match the dates derived from the biblical calendar for those same events. That radioactive decay occurred here on Earth in Earth time. Since the dates are a good match, the corresponding dates of the Bible must also use an earth-based calendar. There are no effects of biblical relativistic time dilation after Adam.
3. There is no way for those first six days to have had an Earth-based perspective because for the first two of those six days
there was no Earth. No Earth means no Earth based time dilation, no Earth relative time, no time perspective of Earth.
Thus, the only perspective available for the entire Six Day period is the perspective of the
total universe.
How can we view the passage of time from this perspective? We can accomplish this goal by looking at the cosmic timer of our universe - the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR). CBR is the “echo” of the big bang. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the CBR in 1965. It is the only radiation in our universe that is unrelated to any particular source and it fills the entire universe. CBR frequency forms the basis of cosmic time and it is the timer used in the biblical clock of Genesis.
Point Five: Small Universe
The wavelength of radiation is increased when positive differences in gravity, velocity, and the stretching of space occur as the universe expands. The first two, gravity and velocity, relate to differences in the flow of conventional time (biological) between specific locations (as in the example of Xon on Calvino). The third, expanding universe or stretching of space, equally alter the perception of time's flow as reckoned by the universal cosmic clock.
We need to understand how cosmic radiation is altered by the stretching of the universe since the big bang. We need to map cosmic/Genesis time onto time as we perceive it on Earth. At the big bang, our entire visible universe was packed into a tiny speck of space all at once. The universe expanded outward from the point of the big bang making the "edge" of the universe billions of light years away from the original position of that speck. Cosmic background radiation is the stretched radiation left from the immense heat of the big bang.
The cosmic radiation has been stretched at the same proportion as the universe. As the universe doubled in size, the distance between radiation wave crests (and the time between "ticks" of the CBR clock) also doubled as the wave was stretched by the expanding space. Time would pass at half its original rate. Light waves (radiation) that we can observe from distant galaxies is stretched much like the sound waves of an ambulance that travels away from us are stretched. Thus, we know that the universe is expanding ever outward. This stretching is referred to as "redshift" because the stars that move away from us appear "redder" than they actually are.
The big bang produced no matter directly. It produced a pure, super hot ball of radiant energy (the E in Einstein's formula). Matter was able to form out of this energy as indicated by the E=mc^2. Thus, matter has within it, even very tiny amounts of matter, huge amounts of energy. Matter, too, requires a huge amount of energy to form. Think of an atomic bomb. Something so small as an atom has within it the power to decimate large swaths of cities and people when split apart. Small matter, huge energy within.
As the universe expands it cools and so the energy that was highly concentrated becomes more dilute within the greater area. Once the temperature fell below the needed heat to convert energy into matter, matter stopped forming. This is the threshold temperature of protons and neutrons, or the moment of quark confinement. After quark confinement, the building blocks of matter could no longer form. All matter that ever will be was present at quark confinement.
The beginning of all time begins with the appearance of matter. Before matter, there was nothing to experience time. What about the energy, the light and radiant energy created by the big bang? Radiant energy does not experience the flow of time. It exists in what could be called "eternal now," a state in which time does not pass. More precisely, visible light rays, invisible microwaves, X rays, and gamma rays are all radiant energy known as electromagnetic radiation. Science has found that this radiation does not experience the flow of time. We cannot really conceive of how this can be, since we experience time and know time so automatically. Time is related to the material world. Time is the movement of matter.
The transition from energy to stable matter occurred 0.00001 seconds after the big bang (Weinberg, "Life in the Universe,"
Scientific American, October 1994). At this point, the universe was about a million million times hotter than it is today.
Point Six: The Ages of Our Universe
"And the earth was tohu and bohu..." (Gen. 1:2)
Tohu and bohu. What does that mean? Tohu is translated correctly as "unformed" or "chaotic." Bohu is usually translated as "void." However, the Talmud and Nahmanides state that bohu means filled with the building blocks of matter. As Charles pointed out on Xon's blog, the earth was not yet made. The earth was created, though. The earth was created but not yet made.
Bohu is the beginning of the biblical clock. It is when quark confinement occurred. The age of all matter in the universe dates back to bohu, the moment of quark confinement. Matter appeared at this point and time begins and is dependent upon matter.
The temperature and the frequency of radiation energy in the universe at quark confinement is known. It is measured, not estimated, on Earth in the most advanced physics labs and corresponds to a temperature a million million times hotter than the current 3 degree Kelvin black of space. The radiation had a frequency a million million times greater than the radiation of today's cosmic background radiation.
The radiation from quark confinement has been stretched a million millionfold. Its redshift today is 10^12. The stretching of light waves has slowed the cosmic clock -- expanded the perceived time between ticks of that clock -- by a million million. To measure the age of the universe, we look back in time from the perspective of Earth (since that's where we are). We measure a fifteen billion year age. That is correct for our local view. It is correct for our perspective. This perspective is the same one used after Adam. Before Adam, however, the clock used was tied to no perspective or view-point. It is not dependent upon location. It looks forward in time from creation, including the entire universe, a universal clock tuned to the radiation at the moment matter was first formed. This universal clock, observed today, ticks a million million times more slowly than at its inception. The million millionfold stretching since bohu causes the million million to one ratio in this perception of time.
Thus, the cosmic clock records the passage of one minute while we on Earth experience a million million minutes. The dinosaurs were on Earth for 120 million years, as measured by our perception of time. To know the cosmic time we must divide Earth time by a million million. At this million million to one ratio we see that the 120 million Earth year period lasted only an hour cosmic time.
What does this all mean? It means that the division of fifteen billion years by a million million reduces those fifteen billion years to six days.
When someone asks if six days or fifteen billion years passed before the appearance of humankind, the correct answer is "yes."
You may be scratching you head at this point and saying, "Huh?!" What the heck? I know I did a really crappy job at explaining this. I tried to condense various parts of a book and more specifically a chapter into a blog post. If you are really interested, check out
The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder. It's an easy read and does a much better job than my sorry cut and paste attempt. Much of this was quoted directly out of his book, but some of the context and set up has been lost in an attempt at brevity. Schroeder cites only peer-reviewed science journals for the physics parts. He cites only the Bible and commentators on the Bible (Jewish scholars and such) for the Bible parts such as the translations.
There is much more to this -- such as the correspondence between what occurs on each day during the first six days and the universal cosmic clock. There is also an explanation as to how it is that Adam came after other hominids on Earth. Basically, Adam was indeed created 6000 years ago which is what we get by tracing the generations in the Bible. But Neanderthals and Cro-magnons existed prior to 6000 years ago. It all has to do with
neshama. That's all I'll say for now.
I find this not only interesting, but really compelling. So far, it is the most complete explanation of Genesis I have ever read. It includes the Bible and allows that it is literal while at the same time using science to show
in what way it is literal. God knew that the methods to figure this out would one day be discovered -- He gave them to us. It seems to me that because we can know these things about the age of the universe, God obviously selected the qualities of the universe to work in this way. The appearance of age argument works, but at what cost? The cosmic clock argument, however, does not detract from Genesis at all and only proves even more so the power and wonder that defines creation. God didn't simply create things to look a certain age or a certain way, He used a process that we can observe scientifically without confusion. The argument is elegant, just like God's creation itself.
Outrage?!
While I wasn't going to comment on this at all something struck me as I contemplated staying out of it. Janet Jackson's breast was exposed during the Super Bowl's halftime show this past Sunday night. People are outraged at the "obscene" and "indecent" act and there is currently a cacophony surrounding this event. People are mad, to me, for the wrong reasons.
Song of Solomon 4:5
"5 Your two breasts are like two fawns,
like twin fawns of a gazelle
that browse among the lilies."
And
Song of Solomon 7:1-9
The Beloved
1 How beautiful are your feet in sandals,
O prince's daughter!
The curves of your thighs are like jewels,
The work of the hands of a skillful workman.
2Your navel is a rounded goblet;
It lacks no blended beverage.
Your waist is a heap of wheat
Set about with lilies.
3Your two breasts are like two fawns,
Twins of a gazelle.
4Your neck is like an ivory tower,
Your eyes like the pools in Heshbon
By the gate of Bath Rabbim.
Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon
Which looks toward Damascus.
5Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel,
And the hair of your head is like purple;
A king is held captive by your tresses.
6How fair and how pleasant you are,
O love, with your delights!
7This stature of yours is like a palm tree,
And your breasts like its clusters.
8I said, "I will go up to the palm tree,
I will take hold of its branches."
Let now your breasts be like clusters of the vine,
The fragrance of your breath like apples,
9And the roof of your mouth like the best wine.
The wine goes down smoothly for my beloved,
Moving gently the lips of sleepers.
Here are two examples of the glory that is a woman's body. Here are two examples, specifically, of the beauty of a woman's breasts. Here are two examples of why the certain outrage of many people, all of the outrage I've seen thus far, is slightly misguided.
The outrage that I've seen is directed simply at the presence of a breast on television. The power given to such a revealing act is, in my opinion, ludicrous. Children could have seen it, parents had no warning, the revealing of a breast is indecent -- these are complaints I've seen. Investigations are now taking place to try and figure out if the act was intentional. How could it not be? I'm sure Janet Jackson's wardrobe budget includes enough money to buy bras that don't rip so readily and neatly. The other cup was not out of place at all. I won't post the pictures of the event -- I leave that up to folks to search out themselves to see what I'm talking about. So, if I'm saying that we shouldn't be outraged for the aforementioned reasons, then what problem do I have with the event?
I do not like the purposeful explotation of one of God's most beautiful creations in order to sell more records or to create buzz for an artist. However, this hasn't been brought up from what I've seen. It's one thing to say this and quite another to remark how horrible and awful and indecent and disgusting seeing a breast is. Those impressionable children everyone is so worried about -- what message are you sending them when they see you angered over something that is supposed to be enjoyed and pleasing to the eye? Surely you are sending them the message that the particular instance is wrong, but are you going back and letting them know why it is wrong? Are you going to tell them
why that particular instance called for anger or are you going to let them think that breast = naughty, dirty, and shameful?
Sex sells, but not all sex is explotative and dirty. Sex and the human body are God's most wonderful art. If we teach our children these things early on while teaching them the contexts and situations that God intended them to exist in, then there would be little cause for such outrage over events such as those that transpired on Sunday night.
