Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Joe at Evangelical Outpost does a great job of responding (let’s call it a mini-fisking) to the one negative response to The Passion from amongst Christian clergy (that I’m aware of). An Episcopalian minister was at the screening at Willow Creek last week and Salon.com picked this guy for an interview.

The whole interview is a little weird and the minister’s theology is suspect. My favorite parts (bold is Salon’s question, brackets are Joe’s fisk, the normal text is the minister’s answer):

(ed. note, referring to Willow Creek.) Somebody told you it was a real red-neck, weirdo community, right?

[Well, of course. These are, after all, evangelical churches.]

This guy I know said he wouldn’t set foot in there—not without shots, at least.

[It’s true. We fundies are infectious.]

These places are highly successful. [Willow Creek] is like a modern hotel conference center, with a food court ... the worship space is a huge auditorium, with multi-screens, that seats 4,500 people. As someone from a fairly sensible church, I really felt uneasy in the crowd. I could really see how church freaks some people out. I couldn’t put my finger to it, but there was this atmosphere of giddiness and anticipation…

[I suppose “mainstream Episcopalians” have a sense of dread when they step into their churches.]

[...]

So, Mel Gibson seems to be arguing that the gospels are factual documents.

Exactly.

[Damn you, Mel. What were you thinking?]

And that all of the references to the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, were proof of fulfillment of prophesy, whereas it’s most likely that in order to make sense of the events surrounding Jesus’ death, the gospel writers searched the Hebrew scriptures to find things.

[Because, of course, if the they were proof that might imply that Jesus really was God. And of course that’s just too silly for a good San Francisco Episcopalian to believe.]

Go read the whole thing - Joe’s fisking of this guy’s interpretation of anti-Semitic language is hilarious.

So when Mel Gibson said in the interview that the reason for the other languages was to highlight the brutality, that kind of freaked me out. I could see how it would work on an unsophisticated audience.

[We fundies are so unsophisticated that we can’t understand English much less
some Arabesque-Jewy sounding language.]

It’s probably the same feeling that people in Guantánamo Bay have, having had soldiers barking at them in English for two years.

[Living at Camp X-Ray is like sitting through a Mel Gibson movie? Have you no mercy, Mr. Ashcroft? Are you not human?!]