Letter #112: The Jesus Cinematic Universe

It's the one we're living in.

All right, wise guy,

Perfect. You’ve sold your screenplay. But it’s 2024. All the money’s in franchises. To really crush it at the box office, we’ll have to flesh out the Jesus Cinematic Universe.

I mentioned earlier that human wisdom traditions tend to reach a limit where they peter out into quietism. Pagan philosophies generally lead at last to a place at the edge of life, where human consciousness sinks back into acceptance of the whole from which it arose like a bubble in a stream.

I think this is because the things that matter most to us—good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly—are also the things that we bring with us into the world. If we’re the only ones who care about them, then they vanish when we do.

We want to believe otherwise—that justice and reason stretch out beyond our little human sphere into the whole universe. But since the universe so often confronts us with injustice and paradox, the best we can do is hope that what looks random and meaningless from our perspective would appear as part of a larger pattern if we could see the whole thing from beyond the limits of time and death.

The good news is news because it claims to be a report from that untraveled country. This is why, unless the resurrection is literally real, Christianity has no elevator pitch we haven’t heard before and nothing to add that the pagans hadn’t already figured out.

The Christian promise is that life and joy not only endure forever but endure for us, as we know them. This, by the way, is what inspired men like Galileo and Newton to press their understanding out into regions of space where humans had never yet set foot. They were persuaded by their faith that reason could stretch out across the whole created universe and meet everywhere with the products of a mind like ours.

We could be wrong about this. It may be we are huddling in the only corner of the universe where concepts like justice and truth have any application, where they were evolved as coping mechanisms to deal with our immediate surroundings. That’s what Nietzsche argued, hearkening back to the pagan days when the cosmos was described as a battleground for contentious and uncaring gods: “the noble and gifted man…sees to his dismay how logic coils round itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail.”

Maybe. We could in principle find the limit where our logic breaks down and our morals are exposed as illusion. We’ve certainly been through moments where that seems to be on the verge of happening. We’re going through one now.

But the strange thing is that every time we press on as if the resurrection were true, the world answers our most improbable demands and becomes ever-more intelligible, yielding up rocket ships and renaissances. Which would suggest the resurrection was always pitched to be a franchise, and there are already sequels in the works.

Love,
Spencer

Image: Pablo Carlos Budassi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons