Anti-Christian "Passion of Christ"
Saturday March 27, 2004
A common complaint raised by defenders of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion" is that critics of the movie are actually motivated by anti-Christian and anti-Jesus bias. They so hate and/or fear real Christianity, is it argued, that they will do anything to smear Mel Gibson and his holy movie. But what if the anti-Christian element is actually in the film, not in the film's critics?
Tom Beaudoin, assistant professor of theology at Boston College, writes for the National Catholic Reporter:
Depictions of Jesus that claim to represent the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but that minimize his Jewishness by an exaggerated separation from his ethnic-religious context cannot be called Christian. Christian faith holds that Jesus as Christian Messiah was born, raised, lived and died a Jewish man. Depictions of Jesus that treat his suffering as the singular triumph of a spiritual hero cannot be called Christian. Christian faith holds that Jesus experienced the same banality of evil and terror that many political prisoners of his day underwent, and that in this way God shared humanly in the unjust sufferings experienced in everyday human life.
“The Passion” cannot be called a Christian film. Moreover, if these depictions of Jesus are taken by viewers to be accurate representations of the meaning and message of Jesus, then the movie is functionally anti-Christian. It is anti-Christian insofar as the overfixation on violence against Jesus provides a dramatic and persuasive escape hatch from the more complicated and demanding witness of the Gospels: that a man whose intimacy with God reverberated through changed relationships that threatened the religious and political powers of his day, and that our own intimacy with God may demand no less.
It all depends upon how one defines "Christianity" what one identifies as the essential elements of Christian doctrine. Defenders of "The Passion" have certain ideas on that and thus dismiss the possibility that a "real" Christian could possibly object to or disagree with movie. Christian critics, however, have just as strong of a claim on the "Christian" label and their arguments against the film are no less persuasive. Beaudoin here makes a fair case in his article that there are significant aspects of Mel Gibson's movie which contradict basic Christian teachings.
Read More:
Comments
That is why it is called the passion of the christ. It is about his death not his life. That is the point of the whole movie. The reason it is a Christian movie and not a Jewish movie is that Hewish people don not beleive he died for their sins, whereas Christians do.