Brilliant (HT Roger Ebert):

 

According to WordPress, this is the 500th post on this blog. So in honor of the occasion, here are some fun facts that you will not find on my PhD applications. All of these are true (in a manner of speaking):

• Three different forms of contraception were not enough to prevent my birth.
• I graduated from university while still in the womb.
• I was first published at the age of seven.
• I won a city-wide math award, then never took another math class.
• I spun my car across three lanes of the interstate, and drove away undamaged.
• I’ve jumped over an avalanche, while standing on the edge of a cliff, wearing an 80 pound pack.
• I’ve gone skinny dipping in a glacier lake.
• I’ve walked between a mother bear and her cubs.
• I’ve been to the top of Mt. McKinley.
• I’ve been to 30 states and four countries.
• I’ve ridden on the top of a Jeepney, which nearly drove off a cliff.
• I’ve tramped through a Filipino jungle to meet a chainsaw-wielding stranger.
• I’ve caught a burgler in the act.
• I’ve hosted a terrorism stakeout in my house.
• I’ve disarmed a knife-wielding man.
• I’ve been on television, in the newspaper, and on the radio.
• I’ve eaten butter-flavored ice cream and avocado-flavored Popsicles.
• I’ve seen every episode of every series of Star Trek, been to a convention, and written fan fiction.
• I’ve watched a hockey game from the owner’s suite.
• I moved to Canada to break up with a girl, then married her anyway.
• According to an ancient Mayan prophecy, the world will end on my 10th wedding anniversary.

Today I gave my first undergraduate lecture, to a RELS 101 class of about 120 students. It was 9am so it took them a while to wake up, but by the end (especially after the movie clip) they were asking some excellent questions, and I acutally had to cut them off because time was running out. After the break I’ll post my lecture notes. I didn’t read them, but this is more or less what I said, so all you Hebrew Bible scholars out there can feel free to blast me for my ignorance, and I will surely “repent in dust and ashes”:

Quoted by Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (pgs. 354-55); I read it in Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament (pg. 403 n. 6):

What is the difference between Jews and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: “Were you here before?”… And I hope that at that moment I will be close enough to whisper in his ear, “For the love of heaven, don’t answer.”

This week’s Christian Carnival is number 300–is it really possible they’ve been doing these for nearly 6 years?–and is hosted at Brain Cramps for God. It includes my post on Stargate, the Christian Story and the Role of Humanity in the Universe.

C.S. Lewis has a great deal to say on the subject of humanity’s role in the universe, especially in chapter 14 of Miracles, some of which I agree with and some of which I remain skeptical about. Here are a couple of excerpts that bear on the conversation in the comments on my last post (once again, apologies for the gendered language):

The doctrine of a universal redemption spreading outwards from the redemption of Man, mythological as it will seem to modern minds, is in reality far more philosophical than any theory which holds that God, having once entered Nature, should leave her, and leave her substantially unchanged, or that the glorification of one creature could be realized without the glorification of the whole system. God never undoes anything but evil, never does good to undo it again. The union between God and Nature in the Person of Christ admits no divorce. He will not go out of Nature again and she must be glorified in all ways which this miraculous union demands. When spring comes it ‘leaves no corner of the land untouched’; even a pebble dropped in a pond sends circles to the margin….

For this reason I do not think it at all likely that there have been (as Alice Meynell suggested in an interesting poem) many Incarnations to redeem many different kinds of creature. One’s sense of style–of the divine idiom–rejects it. The suggestion of mass-production and of waiting queues comes from a level of thought which is here hopelessly inadequate. If other natural creatures than Man have sinned we must believe that they are redeemed: but God’s Incarnation as Man will be one unique act in a drama of total redemption and other species will have witnessed wholly different acts, each equally unique, equally necessary and differently necessary to the whole process, and each (from a certain point of view) justifiably regarded as ‘the great scene’ of the play. (pgs. 199-202)

Part of the Hubble Deep Field; every speck of light here is an entire galaxy. Copyright NASA.

Space is big.  Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Bible includes many claims that are difficult to believe–talking animals, a worldwide flood, divine appearances, and of course the resurrection–but Paul’s claim that “creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the children of God” (Romans 8:18-23) must rank fairly high. Perhaps that made sense to those who believed “the heavens” were a hard dome overhanging the earth, but what about today?

People have always recognized the universe is big, but we now know that “big” does not even come close to doing it justice. In truth, the universe is so unimaginably vast that nothing in our experience can even provide a suitable analogy. You could imagine the whole earth were the size of an atom (but can you really imagine how small an atom is?) and the universe would still be bigger by comparison than anything can see.

Remember the famous image of Earth as a “pale, blue dot”? This picture was only taken from the edge of our own solar system, and our sun is just one of more than a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. How many is a hundred billion? If you started counting stars today, one per second, it would take you three thousand years to finish our one galaxy. Imagine how long it would take to visit all those, much less the uncountable multitudes of other such galaxies that we know must exist. The idea that the inhabitants of this one tiny speck could have a central role in such universe is, on the face of it, patently absurd.

Stargate Universe well illustrates the problem (watch it on Hulu). The show follows a group of people who have been transported to an ancient starship hurtling through the far reaches of the universe, “several billion light years from home.” The ship, called The Destiny, has been travelling faster than light for hundreds of thousands of years to get this far, yet even its fantastically long voyage has only brought the ship through an infinitesimal portion of the universe as a whole. You could imagine its entire journey as a single thread dropped into the Pacific, and you would barely approach the vastness of space though which it has traveled. The point should be clear: humanity could spend millions if not billions of years colonizing the stars, and we would still fall far short of visiting–much less remaking–the whole of creation.

Of course, Paul was certainly not thinking of converting aliens in distant galaxies when he wrote of creation awaiting “the revealing of the children of God,” but that doesn’t really solve the problem of the incarnation in such an unimaginably vast universe. Paul’s point was that God’s coming in Christ–and the gift of God’s spirit–had fundamentally changed the game–the universe as a whole is different this side of the incarnation. That Paul didn’t realize how small a part of the universe the Earth actually occupies doesn’t make his claim any easier to swallow. Whether he realized it or not, there is simply no way we have the ability–in ourselves–to play such a central role in the cosmos.

Then again, the biblical authors were hardly unaware of the absurdity of humanity’s place in the universe, even if they would not have described it in the same terms we do. After all, it wasn’t as though we needed to learn about distant galaxies to realize that, in the grand scheme of things, humanity is a small thing. As the Psalmist put it:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

In other words, the significance of humanity relative to the rest of the cosmos–if we have one–rests not on humanity’s inherent prominence or abilities, but solely on the grace of God. Nor is it so absurd that a small or rare thing could have such significance. Children are common but invaluable; diamonds are valued precisely because they are rare.

On the one hand, if intelligent life is unique to earth after all, then our small size relative to the whole is totally inconsequential. If, on the other hand, humanity is but one among many races of thinking beings spread across the universe, then things are more complicated, but until we actually go out and see for ourselves what those others are like–or if they even exist–we cannot really know whether our religious conceptions will stand up to the encounter, or only be revealed as wild hubris. But we can speculate, and perhaps no mainstream science fiction has gone further with such speculation than the Stargate franchise.

Stargate, admittedly, has not always been friendly to religion. The basic premise is that the ancient gods were actually highly advanced aliens who transplanted humanity across the galaxy (if not the universe). A major theme of the first Stargate series (SG1) was the attempt to free the galaxy from slavery to these “false gods” and their armies of brainwashed followers. Still, the idea that humanity might not be restricted to Earth does suggest a broader significance that is explored in a variety of ways in the first two series. As the story progresses, humans from Earth are indeed instrumental in saving the peoples of several galaxies, human and non-human alike.

As far as Christianity itself is concerned, the previous series have been notably ambivalent, as seen especially in season 3 episode Demons and in the transparent caricatures of fundamentalist Christianity in the season 8 episode Icon and the Origin story-line in the final two seasons. Stargate Universe, however, has so far taken a much more positive approach.

For instance, the two most recent episodes, titled Darkness and Light, include characters praying the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer at key points in the narrative and embody a fairly clear, if symbolic, death and resurrection story-arc. Like Battlestar Galactica (to which it owes a great deal), SGU clearly recognizes that religion will not simply disappear as technology advances and new frontiers are opened, and its effects need not be negative. Also like BSG–and rather unlike previous incarnations of Stargate–our heroes here are broken people, variously prideful, needy or both, and as much in need of enlightenment as they are likely to bring it to the superstitious masses. In other words, they are just like us: clinging to their religious heritage, and interpreting their experiences in its light, no matter how far from home they get, not because they have it all figured out, but because it is the best they know.

The more interesting question is whether their religious conceptions have any merit beyond psychological comfort, and here again SGU is more like BSG than previous incarnations of Stargate. This was particularly seen in the third part of the Pilot, titled Air (spoilers follow). When the ancient ship’s life support system begins to fail, the crew is forced to travel to a desert planet in search of materials necessary to fix it. The episode is positively dripping with Christian imagery, highlighted by several flashbacks of one character’s own history with the Christian church.

First, there is the fact that they must go into the desert–a symbol of death–to seek life, and while there they repeatedly test the sand with a red chemical that looks like blood, each time pouring it out onto the ground. The symbolism later becomes literal as a few of the team give up hope and decide to try a different planet that The Destiny had warned them against. Two people go through, and are never heard from again, but a third is prevented from going when the others shoot him–spilling his blood but ultimately saving his life. At the climax of the episode, another man is on the verge of death when he sees a vision of a crucifix standing over the very spot he had been searching for, then collapses into a dream. He is a teenager, confessing his sin to a priest, who assures him: “We have redemption through his blood.”

If this symbolism were not enough, the episode supplements it with a second set of imagery involving water. They travel to this planet through a portal that looks like a pool of water, and at the end of the episode one character holds the portal open by sticking part of his body into it, knowing it could close at any moment and kill him. He does this to buy his friends enough time to escape themselves, before all three pass through the waters to life. Nor was this act of self-sacrifice the first instance of baptismal imagery in the episode. Dehydrated and dying, the same man who saw the crucifix also meets an apparently sentient whirlwind, which offers him water in the desert, reviving him and revealing the material they need to fix their life support system. Here again is biblical imagery: The whirlwind symbolizes the Spirit of God, which is associated with revelation and new life in a variety of biblical texts. Isaiah speaks of the Spirit bringing forth springs in the desert; John says “the spirit blows where it wills”; God addressed Job from the whirlwind.

In the end, like the rag-tag crew of The Destiny we do not know what sort of beings might live in the far reaches of the universe–was that intelligent whirlwind truly God’s Spirit, or a previously unknown form of embodied life, or perhaps even God working though such an alien being?–but it appears that even out there God’s presence can still be felt, redemption is still on offer, humanity still has a grander Destiny, even if we do not yet know where it is taking us.

This week’s Christian Carnival is hosted at The Bible Archive and include my tongue-in-cheek source critical analysis of The Lord of the Rings.

From Bizarro Comic (HT Chris Brady):

If you don’t follow Charlie Lehardy at AnotherThink, you’re missing out. He may be the most thoughtful writer on my blogroll, and his latest post on the injustice of our culture’s approach to sexual crime is a must-read.