Tress and I couldn’t decide what to do for dinner on Friday so we ended up buying some food from Safeway (cooked chicken and some cheese!) and going home. It was a very relaxing (and cheap) Friday night thing. It was however, the last serene session for the weekend for me, and for the next week for Tress.

Early Sat morning we went to Tullamarine (Auntie Hooi came along) and waited a little bit for the group to arrive. They eventually came out, nearly 2 hours later. Tress’ parents, 2 aunts and an uncle are all here to spend some time with Uncle Jin. We picked them up in 2 cars (Tress drove one and I, the other) and went to Uncle Jin’s home in Point Cook, out in the west.

Uncle Jin is still in the Royal Melbourne, and Auntie Pin is in the city with Sherry and Yin Wei, where she’d be closer to the hospital. The house in Point Cook is left wholly to the Malaysian visitors. When we got to the house, Adam was there waiting and the rooms have been gorgeously prepped. We unloaded the luggage, and made them morning tea. Every time I see Tress’ father, he appears to have aged even more but he looked well and other than being cold, was in good health. They saw Uncle Jin later in the arvo. Tress and I drove back to Blackburn late in the evening, and I walked the little fellow, we fed him and packed some more stuff (mainly warm clothing) for them and then drove back into the city to meet with them for dinner at Adam’s restaurant.

We got home late that night and I managed to catch United’s penultimate home game. Sunderland has been in good form and Giggsy’s second game in charge didn’t end well, with United losing 0-1 and any hope of European football effectively gone. Somehow, a loss like that is no longer too hard to take and I went to bed (around 2am) relatively unscathed.

We left home around 9am the next morning to head towards Point Cook, picked up the precious cargo and headed to the hospital again. It was Uncle Jin’s birthday (4-5-54) and it was the reason the Malaysian folks came. The dinner the previous night was meant to be the birthday dinner party, before he fell a week or so before.

We celebrated anyway, in the visitors’ lounge at the 4th Floor South Wing of the Royal Melbourne. There was a cake and other foods, cards, gifts, etc. We sang him a birthday song, took pictures and listened to his touching speeches. He looked better each time we saw him so in spite of the setback, he is making good progress.

The biggest progress was his salvation. Soon after coming out of his sedation early last week, Auntie Hooi spoke to him and he had made the decision to respond to God’s saving grace. He acknowledged that in his speech and it brought a lot of joy to many, if not all of us, He went back to his bed to rest soon after the celebrations, and we returned to the house in Point Cook. Adam and his wife Fay bought some takeaway lunches, so we ate, some folks played mah-jong and the other just talked. We then went to the Point Cook town centre for some grocery shopping and 4-ee, (Dr Mak’s wife) cooked a delicious pumpkin rice, which I packed for lunch to work today. Tress and I made some veg soup, and helped with the cutting and washing.

I left to go back alone, around 6pm. Tress has taken the week off and would spend most of the week with them. I had wanted to walk the little fellow but it was bucketing down when I reached our part of town. It was then just me and that furry ball, with a few glasses of red. It was a busy but really good weekend.

When I was 18 I had a massive back problem which required extended hospital stay. In the end – after maybe 6 months of being in and out of hospital – I had surgery which fixed the problem. The whole process took some 9-10 months.

Other than the pain and boredom of being in the hospital, the sentiment I experienced was one of depression. I felt depressed. I was enrolled in Taylors’ College in KL, getting ready to come to Australia for my education. The back problem meant that plan was thrown into chaos.

The prolonged process made me wonder if I was going to get well, and what the outlook was going to be like. I wasn’t even sure if I would be able to come to Australia for uni and if I couldn’t, what would be my option? My brother and a cousin had left for the US but I never wanted to go that way. I saw the US as an expensive alternative with no corresponding quality. I didn’t want to head there unless I could make an Ivy League institution which would be far too expensive and I wasn’t sure I was good enough to secure a place anyway.

That sense of “what now”, or “what next” entails hopelessness which was the cause of despair. A prolonged illness and hospital stay often caused that sort of sentiment. I had forgotten that effect, until last night.

Tress came to my office just before 5pm and we both walked up Spring Street towards St Vincent’s where we caught a bus to Royal Melbourne Hospital. Uncle Jin is in the ICU there, after a fall last week which caused a head injury. He has an emergency surgery over the weekend and had been in ICU since.

This is after all the trauma of being diagnosed with cancer and undergoing chemotherapy in recent weeks.

He was responding well to the cancer treatment and we learned last night, that he and Auntie Pin had been traipsing around town to markets, restaurants etc., in anticipation of a birthday party to celebrate his 60th this weekend. It was during a trip to the markets when he fell. It’s a massive setback.

He looked surprisingly well for one who has gone through (and is going through) so much but clearly he was extremely saddened. He wore a gravely saddened look and tears flowed as we talked to him. I asked if he wanted me to pray for him and I did.

Hope and knowledge of where we’re heading, of where salvation lies, are such tonics in life. Other than medical care, Uncle Jin needs both in spades. I’m glad he now has the Holy Spirit in him who can now provide these.

We used to watch the Australian version of the master chef cook show on Channel 10. One of those episodes some time back, was filmed at the Victorian high country. It looked so pretty and attractive. Conversations with friends confirmed we had to check it out and so on Friday morning Tress and I drove to Bright for the long Anzac Day weekend. Jason and Mel came along with us but drove separately in their own car as we had the little furry ball with us and I wasn’t sure they were up to being cooped up in the same car with him for 4 hours.

The distance was about 320-330 km away, north east of Melbourne. It took nearly 4 hours however – partly because once we turned off the Hume at Wangaratta, it was country road and partly also we (I in particular) have become accustomed to driving with much less passion and fervour speed wise. I have come to enjoy a drive without needing to floor the pedal. Maybe it is down to the simple vehicle I could afford – a Nissan X-trail cant gallop like a thoroughbred no matter how lead footed I become. Or it could be an age thing – the days of charging up and down a Malaysian highway doing speeds of up to 180km per hour are truly things of the past. Or maybe it’s the law. Hefty fines aside, the demerit point system is a great encourager of law abiding behaviour on the road.

We left home on Friday morning, just before 10am, and made our way to the Hume. Jason and Mel followed behind. We got to Myrtleford just after lunch, and made a pit stop of sorts. Myrtleford is only about 30km from Bright but we couldn’t check into our little cottage before 2pm anyway so we walked around in Myrtleford, had lunch, and basically took in the beautiful autumn colours of the high country. Towards 2pm we completed the remainder 30km of the drive and got to the cottage.

We had a pleasant surprise. Kaye’s cottage is only minutes away on foot to the town centre, and it was light, clean and airy. It has a beautiful little deck and backyard and a neat little sunroom which Scruffi could wander in. The kitchen too was clean, light and well kitted out.

The only snag was it was a 2 bedroom property and only one room had a double bed with an ensuite. The other room was a 2-single and had to use the property’s other – main – bathroom. I had written an email to Jason and Mel about a week before the trip reminding them of this and giving them the choice of room. They were either too busy or too polite but they never responded to the email on that point.

Notwithstanding this, once we got there they quietly – almost by stealth – opted for the double room with ensuite, without a whisper to us. Ah well, it wasn’t a big deal but for someone who regularly prided himself as “simple, straight forward” this (and other behaviours during the trip) suggests otherwise. It really was and is only a very small matter and it didn’t affect the trip in any way but I cannot deny it confirms for me, that no matter what we profess, reality in the form of actual conduct/behaviour always speaks louder than what we say over dinner tables or write on emails. I would have gladly acceded to their request to use the room had they raised it – like I said I even emailed them a week earlier stating this but they didn’t so much as whisper a word on the matter…

Well we got into Bright town after dropping off our stuff, walked to the town square with a pretty monument where wreaths were placed in memoriam of Anzac Day. The oak/maple trees around the monument were starting to turn shades of gold and red and it was a very pretty sight. We walked by the river, had a beer in the Bright Brewery, and checked out every pretty street. After a little while we started to look for a place for dinner but every decent looking place was booked out. We went back to the cottage and started looking at brochures to ring for reservations but it looked like other than pubs, all other establishments had been fully booked. So we ended up in a pub and had some pizzas, which were also pretty decent.

We went home that night and watched a DVD. “Beyond the Hills”, a Romanian story about abuse of a young lady in an orthodox monastery which killed her. Yet again, it showed how good intention alone can often lead to disastrous results. No one was patently malefide and yet a tragic ending was the result. The ending scene was poignant for me. As the monastery dwellers sat in the van looking into modern civilisation running – simultaneously as a “business as usual” basis as well as rebuilding/reconstruction – the background remains cold and wintery. As they stared into this scene, mud splashed across the windscreen, with the wiper not doing quite enough to clean things away. Great movie, although I doubt my companions enjoyed it.

What they clearly enjoyed were the other two movies we watched – one with Christian Bale in the Nanking massacre setting (Flowers of War) and the other is a Czech holocaust setting with a comedy of sorts thrown in, very cleverly. So a non-conventional foreign language movies weekend it was for us, away in Victorian high country. How very interesting, how very pleasant and memorable.

We got home late on Sunday arvo – just in time for us to watch the final quarter of Hawthorn thrashing the Tigers. It turned out my boss who is a big Tigers fan, was at the match with a few mates all of whom are Hawks fans. Poor him.

The coming weekend, Tress’ family will be visiting from Malaysia. I’m kind of looking forward to that, and sincerely wish Uncle Jin a great 60th birthday celebration.

I was a little bit excited this morning, as I looked forward to watching the champions’ league semi-final match between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. We used to have battle royals with these teams in Europe but alas, post Fergie we are now likely to not even be in Europe, let alone play in the ECL. Moyes’ departure has generated many column inches too and whoever comes in to replace him has a huge rebuilding task – something Fergie could not do in his final years, probably due to a restrained budget.

I was going to watch the second half of the game on the cross trainer in the gym this morning, and as I waited for the train, I stole glances at the live report on the BBC app.

And then… the train stalled at Laburnum, a little station just before Box Hill. A couple of minutes later the driver made an announcement that there has been yet another intrusion into the tracks. A lady was threatening self harm and police were on the scene. The train ended up delayed, and it changed plans to head into Flinders directly and bypassed the city loop. I had to get off at Richmond and wait for another train – all in a 20 minute delay.

To top it off, for one reason or another, the tv on the cardio machines couldn’t get SBS this morning so I ended up watching a grand total of maybe 10 seconds of highlight on the ABC news.

So I was a little annoyed. What stayed in my mind though, were thoughts about that woman on the tracks, and the apparent increased occurrence of such events. It must have been the third time this year, where someone got onto the train tracks and train schedules and operations were messed up as a result. I said a prayer for that woman this morning. Life must have become so confused, so tangled and so difficult generally, for someone to contemplate that. What events could have triggered that outcome? Did she have no one to turn to? To be sure, thoughts about being under the influence of alcohol or drugs crossed my mind. But those could be the symptoms and not the cause. Even if drugs and alcohol brought this on, one probably still has to work out what those triggers might have been. Or could drugs and alcohol actually be the cause?

I wondered how many lives were affected other than that lady’s. On the platform at Richmond station, two men donning Australia Post tradies’ garbs made calls saying they would be late. Several other people were on the phone. Me missing that Real Madrid game really should pale into complete insignificance. Almost certainly however, none of the resultant inconveniences would have stacked up against that lady’s challenges. I also wondered if life in the suburbs of Melbourne has generally become more challenging for some. Why is there an escalation of such incidents? Or is there? It may just be my perception. I may be growing old and grumpy and taking more notice of such disruptions to my commuting. But then again there really could be an escalation of such incidents. If indeed there has been an escalation, why? How can I, how can the church, make a difference?

Tress and I both left work early on Thursday before Good Friday. It was just 20 minutes or so early for me to pick up the dry cleaning before they close for the 4-day weekend. We then met up with Jason and Mel for dinner at a new place on Middleborough Road. A Singaporean food joint (Newton Circus) had replaced another Singaporean one (Tang’s Family Restaurant) and we used to visit the old one fairly frequently. The new one was ok – not too bad but nothing to shout about anyway. We probably won’t be going back anytime soon anyway.

On Friday I woke early – this despite going to bed only near midnight the night before. We attended the Good Friday service which was very good. The focus was on the cross, and of course, the events leading to the crucifixion – all told from the Bible and songs focused on that theme. On the stage in front was a cross draped with long red satin cloth which flowed down the stage. We were each given a black stone on the way in, and towards the end, we wrapped the stone in red crepe paper and placed it on the satin cloth. Our sins, cold and hard, wrapped in Jesus blood and washed and no longer visible when placed at the foot of the cross, said Jordan Hitchcock one of the ministers in St Alf’s. We had sung Graham Kendrick’s “Come and see” as the first song, where the line Worship at His feet, where wrath and mercy meet” stuck in my mind for the entire weekend.

Sat we slept in, went to Madam K’s for an early lunch, and then went to that home centre place in Springvale (where Ikea is) and looked around for a couch/lounge set. We weren’t successful… we stopped by Strawberry Point to mainly get some flowers which we wanted to bring to church on Easter Sunday. Tress got some roses and on Sunday morning we each placed a rose on the cross at the foyer. After church it was Madam K’s again and then we went home and we took advantage of the better weather (it had been raining for days before that) to clear up the garden. We had wanted to have a go at the inaugural “Sunday@4” service but the gardening sucked me in and by the time we were done it was nearly 5pm.

On Monday Tress and I trekked into the city and window shopped in the newly minted Emporium. As school kids back in Klang, Emporium Makan was affectionately known as “EM” and it is often a rendezvous for groups. I said to Tress Melbourne has finally caught up and has its own “EM” (Emporium Melbourne). We milled around the large crowds, and then trained into MCG for the big game between Geelong and the Hawks. We had the cheap tickets way up nearly at the top where it was windy… The Hawks lost (Tom Hawkins mauled us in the last quarter), we came home and started to reframe our minds for the new working week, after a very relaxing 4 days off. That isn’t all – there’s another long weekend coming up and we’d be heading to Bright in the Victorian highlands (Mt Hotham etc) this time.

When I turned 20, I was in Australia. My parents were in Malaysia.

Kiddo turned 20 yesterday. She is in Singapore. Her parents are in Australia.

Strange turns are a given in life, perhaps more so today than before.

When I turned 20 in Sydney, I had started work in the fish markets in Pyrmont for maybe 4 months. It was a totally unexpected turn for me. Kiddo turned 20 and would probably get a taste of working life before too long, albeit in the form of traineeship or something like that.

Whatever turns life offers, I hope none of us in the family ever turn away from God.

We missed out on a nice weekend away at a B&B in Daylesford but had it replaced by a bus-in and bus-out “day trip” instead, which had its nice bits.

Tress and I went to that lovely part of hippie country on Saturday for a wedding. Uncle Seng organised that bus and about 20 people got onto that rickety vehicle around lunch time, arriving about under an hour before the event. The Lake House spa and restaurant is a beautiful spot, with a fantastic reputation as a great restaurant too. We milled around a spot on lakeside from about 3pm, and although the wedding didn’t start till well over an hour later, people were generally in high spirits while waiting.

The wedding was simple and most of the guests were touched mainly by the fact that Uncle Jin, the father of the bride, had been diagnosed with cancer just about a couple of months earlier and had been undergoing chemotherapy. The illness and treatment bedraggled him and to see him dark and gaunt, barely able to walk but obviously so happy, caused many tears. After the simple service, the party moved towards the reception venue and while we waited for dinner, sat on the patio with drinks and witnessed the tea ceremony. This ceremony is easy to hold on to, because it offers obvious advantages which comparable practices of other cultures lack in terms a well-defined structure and clarity of expectations. The opportunity to be formally introduced to family members seals the creation of a sub-unit within the larger whole and allows it to relate to that wider fabric in a clear way.

So a touching service, followed by a meaningful ceremony. All that is needed now is a big party and the dinner reception did it too in spades. The food was great, the speeches were good, and the dances beautiful. It looked like a very good wedding all up.

If life is about the here and now, then who needs religion? Who needs God? Who needs the church? A wedding can be beautiful without God, His church and His people. But life isn’t about the here and now. It isn’t about how we feel, how good things and people are to each other. In spite of all the good things of the day, every single person who were there, who didn’t have a relationship with God through the saving grace of Jesus, would perish and face eternal death. It is always about God, His word, His people. If only we can help those we care for come to that life where God, His word and His people matter.

We were at the home group meeting of our church last night and someone talked about a recent conference in Sydney, which was jointly organised by World Vision and Centre for Public Christianity. The main speaker in that conference was Miroslav Volf. I remember coming across his work when researching essays in MST days. As usual, I read what fancied me instead of what the work required and although the research lead to Miroslav Volf, I only needed maybe a couple of hours of reading on something he wrote. I ended up reading article after article, extract after extract – all way off the topic I had started my research on. So last night when Tress and I got home after the home group meeting, I looked up ABC’s iView on the ipad and streamed the Q&A program of maybe 3 weeks earlier, when Miroslav appeared on that wretched program.

MV was certainly an interesting character. Interesting enough for me to jump on amazon to search for his book. I got the forgiveness one because that happens to be topical now. I’m sure I’d learn heaps from it. As I would from this home group.

My recent dental work gave me some grief towards the end of last week and so on Friday night when I got home I was bush whacked, completely so. Tress and I had made a prior appointment with the Hipos to collect some winter stuff for asylum seekers and refugees our church were helping so we went over, had a glass of very nice red with Gerry, played with the kids, chatted with Jesslyn and her mum and came back with the winter stuff about an hour or so later.

We stayed home then, and enjoyed Hawks’ close victory against the Bombers (2 goals in last 3-4 minutes for a 4 point margin). On Saturday after a few errand runs we took the train into the city for the flower and garden show in Carlton Gardens. Not before however, experiencing another idiocy involving Melbourne trains. Someone had “trespassed” onto the tracks a couple of stations before ours in Blackburn and so trains couldn’t run between affected stations. The other train on the next platform which was heading in the opposite direction towards Lilydale got changed and became the city bound train. We hopped on to that one and after a few minutes of chaos with those passengers wanting to head to Lilydale and still on that train, we were on our way.
We got into the city, walked towards Carlton Gardens and Tress hadn’t been to my office before so we stopped en route and I gave her a little tour.

We spent the whole day there, and didn’t get back till close to 6pm. It was a good event, with lots of amazing displays. Different themes all re outdoor/garden matters with lots of booths introducing and selling tools, flower seeds and bulbs, ideas etc. Tress took tons of photos and we also took in the magnificent Exhibition Building which we hadn’t been insider before.

We got home close to 6pm, took the little fellow for a walk and then came back home for nothing in particular. We had wanted to watch Russell Crowe’s Noah but decided to just rest at home. I started watching you tube videos of Bourdain and Ramsey in Malaysia (Penang in particular) and then went to bed early – around 11pm.

Sunday was the usual and after church and then lunch at Madam K’s we went home and I worked on the hedge, trimmed the lemon trips some more and cleaned up the lawn at the end of it all. I had the hedge trimmer catch a handsaw right at the end and so the trimmer is sort of gone… Ryan the neighbour had wanted to trim his side of the fence after I finished but couldn’t use it. I guess I need to get it fixed or replaced for next time.

The weather is surprisingly warm for late March and it was humid too – I was soaked in sweat and according to Tress, smelled… towards the end of the garden work. I enjoyed it however – being out in the sun with relatively fresh air and warm conditions was a treat. I only came into the house close to 5pm, washed, took the little guy out for his walk with Tress and was ready to settle down for another week at work by around 7pm.

This morning I was reading my usual columnist about “Noah” – wasn’t too sure about his take that this movie was more from the perspective of the greens. I looked up what some Christians might have thought of the movie and found the below piece, which I think is coherent.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2014/03/26/darren-aronofksys-noah/

Gregory Alan Thornbury|10:31 AM CT

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah

Disclaimer: A few weeks ago, I was invited to attend a screening of Darren’s Aronofksy’s highly anticipated and purportedly controversial new film on Noah. Our small group spent a considerable amount of time both before and after film hearing from Aronofsky himself and co-writer Ari Handel. Both were interested in listening to and responding to our theological and critical reactions. My immediate response was that this was a film with profound moral and theological imagination. My thoughts below are my conclusions after several weeks of reflection.
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In his 2012 memoir Supergods, Grant Morrison, arguably the greatest comics writer of this generation, explained the mass appeal of superheroes to the world in which we live: “In a secular, scientific rational culture lacking in any convincing spiritual leadership, superhero stories speak loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations. They’re not afraid to be hopeful, not embarrassed to be optimistic, and utterly fearless in the dark.” Isn’t that what Western society used to think about the prophets, apostles, and martyrs?
Morrison goes on, explaining the paralyzing fear he felt as a child living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust in Scotland. “Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea. It’s not that I needed Superman to be ‘real,’ I just needed him to be more real than the Idea of the Bomb that ravaged my dreams.”

Today, we live in age in which the Bomb is both atomic and metaphysical. Deep moral cynicism, physicalism, brutalism, and yes, even nihilism (an overused word which I deploy carefully here) are all very real, all very deadly Bombs. What is the idea that is better than the Bomb?

We say, “the gospel.” But before we congratulate ourselves, how confident are we really, outside of our ecclesial safe places? Does orthodoxy really strike the people we meet on the street as wild, dangerous, and romantic in that enigmatic Chestertonian way that we’ve all come to know and love? Maybe. But if I don’t miss my guess, a great number of professional clerics and parishioners these days are pretty much not the droids the Empire is looking for.

You can go about your business. Move along.

As Peter Thiel told The Financial Times, “from the average liberal in San Francisco to the average church lady in Alabama, I never know how much people believe any of the stuff that they say.”

Really That Bad

And that’s why I am intrigued by Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. It’s not because it’s a straight-up-the-middle-New-York-Giants-football Bible movie. In this film, we see an antediluvian world in which human depravity is really “that bad.” As in, “way worse than you think.” As in Genesis 6:5: “So the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” It’s a world so gone wrong that you could imagine a good and kind God wanting to have nothing to do with it, drown it to death, and start over. As in, really that bad. Aronofsky gets all of this. I mean, we’re dealing with the director of The Wrestler and The Black Swan, for Pete’s sake.

Only with the juxtaposition against radical depravity can mercy actually make sense. Failing this understanding, you cannot sustain Christian theism. Otherwise, mercy becomes weak, expected, and even demanded. Seeing Russell Crowe-as-Noah grit his teeth and war against real flesh-and-blood evil makes sin, a notion seemingly incredible to Hollywood, to be real. As a viewer, locked into the gaze of the film, you’re thinking, I’m with God, and this Noah guy. It makes the redemption and mercy theme of the film compelling, even if Aronofsky takes a slightly perverse (and admittedly extra-biblical) route to make the point. We grew up in a world that makes Noah nice. Noah is not nice.
About that extra-biblical material. There’s a ton of it in Noah. If you go into it, saying “That stuff is not in the Bible!” you are going to be a very grumpy camper when you leave the theater. But of course we all realize that Genesis 6-10 actually underdetermines much granularity in terms of the precise details of a story. I remember as a child, my mother used to read me Bible stories from a book with black and white Gustave Doré illustrations. They were terrifying, especially right before bed. My imagination ran wild. Apparently, so was Aronoksky and Handel’s in the writing of this film.

Dangerous World

There is a legitimate argument about whether or not the biblical world can and even should be depicted on film. My Orthodox and Presbyterian friends would not see The Passion of the Christ for precisely these reasons. I respect their theological convictions. But after talking to Aronofsky and Handel, they not only impressed me with their deep seriousness and research in the history of biblical interpretation, but they also had a theory behind their script. They see their Noah as midrash, plain and simple. For the uninitiated, midrash aggada is a form of rabbinic literature that provides expansive commentary and discourse analysis on why certain things happened in Scripture. It was a homiletic technique whose origin lies deep within the history of Judaism, going all the way back to the return from the Babylonian exile. It is certainly not a interpretive device evangelicals are encouraged to practice in seminary, although let’s face it: who among us hasn’t heard preachers do this accidentally (and poorly) all too often? Yes, Aronofsky and Handel cast the Nephilim in a central and fantastic role. But Genesis 6:4 is cryptic. Said Aronosfky in our meeting with him: some interpreters see the “sons of God” through a very sexualized lens; we took it in a more metaphorical way so it wouldn’t be too graphic for families.

But midrash is Aronofsky and Handel’s hermeneutical device going in, and they stated that up front. The result is a bizarre, supernatural, pre-flood world. It’s a world in which principalities and powers of the heavenly realms actually exist. And recalling Grant Morrison, it is so fantastic that there may just be some (probably young) moviegoers who might think that this biblical hyper-reality is far more interesting than the grim, brutal, “red in tooth and claw” world of Darwin. It’s a dangerous world. A world in which there is a sovereign God bent on justice (and redemption). That’s a horror story for the wicked. It’s also a world in which there are no righteous “heroes,” only recipients of grace in the wake of being human, all too human.

Theological Objections

With this said, I did have theological objections to this film, just for the record. I can boil them down to two.
First, God is actually a character in the biblical Noah narrative. In the text, God speaks in intelligent sentences and paragraphs. You actually can see the world through the LORD’s point of view. You can feel his grieving over the tragedy of creation. For Aronofksy, “God who speaks and shows” (to use Carl Henry’s phrase) was simply not possible for artistic reasons. And let’s be honest: does anyone really want to hear Liam Neeson-as-the-voice-of-God again? No, thank you. I’ll read the book. Still, because Noah is seized by the Lord through dreams in the film, we never really develop an imaginative sympathy with the Creator. I thought that Terrence Malick achieved this sympathy in The Tree of Life during those beautiful and cryptic cosmic scenes. What might it have felt like to be God witnessing the birth of the universe? Like a mother giving birth to a child, being received into the arms of a father? Potentially. But in Noah, we are forced to experience God only through his servant.

Second, the film entirely misses the covenantal structure of the Noah story. In the text, God clearly sets his love upon Noah as an expression of grace. Through Noah, a righteous man, the entire family is saved. Never is there any hint in the Bible that Noah or those he loved were ever in jeopardy. Surely this is a picture of the good news. Even in the harsh, hyper-realized biblical world Aronofsky depicts, through a miracle, those upon whom God set his love were never meant any harm. This is a message we need to hear too. The Genesis text begins and ends with God’s covenantal promises to Noah. Through Noah then, all of the earth was to be blessed (Gen. 9:12). This point is further underscored by the author of Hebrews: “In reverent fear, he constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Heb. 11:7). Exploring the theme of God’s justice and mercy, if pursued apart form the notion of covenant, is a risky proposition with unreliable theological results.

Strange New World

In sum, Noah contains numerous plot points, devices, and characters that film critics can and will judge and critique. Over the years, I have taught philosophy of film in a number of educational and institutional settings. I have always had my students study Aronofksy, and I believe that this film, which he has said he wanted to be among his first, is a worthy addition to the body of his work. It is strikingly different, in important ways, from his previous films. For me, I found nothing more arresting and hopeless than the final scene of The Wrestler. In Noah, Aronofsky and Handel are wrestling with a different subject matter: theology. Their film will, I think, provoke heated biblical and theological conversations in restaurants and coffee shops after patrons see it. Christians might find it helpful to go see the film with people they know who have a lot of questions.

In 1916, in a tiny church in Lentwil, Switzerland, Karl Barth, in the midst of recovering from his background in theological liberalism, delivered an astonishing address entitled, “The Strange New World in the Bible.” He posed an elementary but bold question for modern Continental theology: “What is there within the Bible?”

He answered:

It is a dangerous question. We might do better not to come too near this burning bush. For we are sure to betray what is—behind us! The Bible gives to every man and every era such answers to your questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more: high and divine content if it is high and divine content that we seek; transitory and “historical” content, if transitory and “historical” content that we seek. Nothing whatever, if it is nothing whatever that we seek. The hungry are satisfied by it, and to the satisfied it is surfeiting before they have opened it. The question, “What is in the Bible?” has a mortifying way of converting itself into the opposing question, “Well, what are you looking for, and who are you, pray, who make bold to look?”

Aronofksy’s Noah is a way of putting ourselves before the Bible’s “dangerous question” as Barth put it. The grim, gritty, and supernatural antediluvian biblical world takes us back into ancient history, of origins. Who are we? What has gone wrong with the world? Where is justice? Is God there? What does he have to say? That ancient world sets us back on our heels and forces us to take stock in this strange new world inside the Bible.

Gregory Alan Thornbury, PhD, is the president of The King’s College in New York City and the author of Recovering Classic Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry.