I’m going to see Noah this week. In preparation, I’ve been reading reviews. If you do the same what you’ll likely find is a mixture of cautious endorsement (“Hey, it’s got crappy Bible content, but it starts a spiritual conversation”) and condemnation. Most of the latter is from young earth creationists objecting to the movie’s depiction of evolution in Noah’s retelling of the creation story. Some don’t like the Watcher element (which itself is altered, with specific theological intent in turns out) that picks up on the flood story from 1 Enoch, which was (if you’ve read that book or my work) in the heads of the apostles of Peter and Jude in their writing (there’s content in 2 Peter 2 and Jude 5-6 you won’t find in Gen 6 or anywhere else in the OT).
What you won’t find unless you’re reading this blog — or Dr. Brian Mattson’s — is the real truth behind the content of the film. Dr. Mattson deftly navigates the details of the movie in his post, “Sympathy for the Devil,” showing quite clearly that Daron Aronofsky is giving viewers a heaping plate of Jewish Kabbalistic mysticism and, worse, the Gnostic worldview that the God of the Bible is an evil entity. This isn’t conspiratorial thinking. It’s what pops out at anyone who has read Gnostic material. Only someone who doesn’t know Gnosticism (which is 99.9% of the evangelical church, and probably just as much of the wider Church) would fail to see this.
Readers of my material (particularly PaleoBabble and UFO Religions) know my eye is trained for this sort of thing, too. I’ve been harping about Gnosticism and pop culture for a long time.1 It’s exciting to run into another Christian scholar who blogs to serve the believing church pick up on this so well. I can’t say enough about how important Mattson’s review is. I can’t wait to get the visual experience in view of what he describes.
Mattson gives evangelicals the punch in the nose they deserve:
So let me tell you what the real scandal in all of this is.
It isn’t that he made a film that departed from the biblical story. It isn’t that disappointed and overheated Christian critics had expectations set too high.
The scandal is this: of all the Christian leaders who went to great lengths to endorse this movie (for whatever reasons: “it’s a conversation starter,” “at least Hollywood is doing something on the Bible,” etc.), and all of the Christian leaders who panned it for “not following the Bible”…
Not one of them could identify a blatantly Gnostic subversion of the biblical story when it was right in front of their faces.
I believe Aronofsky did it as an experiment to make fools of us: “You are so ignorant that I can put Noah (granted, it’s Russell Crowe!) up on the big screen and portray him literally as the ‘seed of the Serpent’ and you all will watch my studio’s screening and endorse it.”
He’s having quite the laugh. And shame on everyone who bought it.
I’m sure glad we don’t preach content, aren’t you? Biblical theology is just sooo impractical.
Shame on pastors for being so ignorant. Our pulpits are simply intellectually vacuous. Mattson offers a simple solution:
In response, I have one simple suggestion:
Henceforth, not a single seminary degree is granted unless the student demonstrates that he has read, digested, and understood Irenaeus of Lyon’s Against Heresies.
Because it’s the 2nd century all over again.
Agreed. I’d only add that (firm grasp on the obvious moment here) pastors ought to preach the text on Sunday. Not happy thoughts that use one verse as a launching point. That isn’t taking your people into the text. And if you do read Irenaeus, his content isn’t just for you, either. Teach it to your people. We substitute toothy grins and happy-clappy music for informing people and prompting them to think theologically in their world (which in our case, is permeated by pop culture). Want to lament the biblical and theological illiteracy in evangelical churches? You’re reaping what you’ve sown, pastor. Your pulpit is either part of the solution, or part of the problem.
Thanks for the info Mike. If you have any different takes than Dr Mattson I hope you’ll post after seeing it!
Bless you!
seeing it tonight.
A very important review, but it ignores much and jams Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’ into the/a gnostic narrative in order to claim it’s a perfect fit. It isn’t.
We have no obvious or even plausible reason to believe that ‘the Creator’ in ‘Noah’ is a malevolent God. This opinion is only represented by weak and wretched characters (Tubal-Cain, Ham). The gnostic overtones and motifs are certainly present, as in ‘Pi’, but this review does not accurately describe the more nuanced/hodge-podge film ‘Noah’.
In this film, there is beauty in the created world, and things worth defending and being good stewards over. This doesn’t fit with how Mattson is trying to force this completely into the/a gnostic narrative.
The serpent is clearly depicted as what precedes and instigates the evil (murder, rape, pillaging, devouring animals, etc) that has entered into the world, and the futility it to which it has been subjected. Repeatedly. We are ultimately led to believe that the judgment of ‘the Creator’ is just. Even upon Noah and his family. Total Depravity.
BUT that ‘the Creator is also merciful.’ Noah in his zealous desire to be obedient to ‘the Creator’ as he understood things, misses or overinterprets this until the very end. This message is put into the mouth of Noah’s adopted daughter (somebody Noah mercifully saves), a moment no one can (or should) mistake as being a highly insightful moment into ‘message’ of the film, and it’s take on the events (for better or worse). It will upset Calvinists (I myself am a member of Bethlehem Baptist in MPLS), but it cannot be said to be gnostic in the sense of rejecting ‘the Creator’ god as a false, inferior, malevolent, lesser archon deity. For Mattson to ignore this highly significant moment in the film is just irresponsible (but necessary to make his case as strongly and uni-dimensionally as he is trying to make it.)
The same reason that God gives FOR flooding the world is precisely the same reason he gives for promising to NOT to ever curse the ground again and destroy all flesh again in such a manner. (Gen 6:5 and Gen 8:21-22). This is the SAME God, and in line with the justice and mercy of God, and the film ‘Noah’ does not depart from this. He is never dismissed as false, inferior, or other than the one who wanted Noah to choose mercy for his daughters, and by extension through their reproduction, mankind.
And precisely because the serpent itself is never made out to be anything but that which is associated with the evil (which is clearly EVIL), the ‘snakeskin talisman’ is not the smoking gun he wants it to be. Even Moses lifted a bronze serpent in the wilderness in order to SAVE the people (Num 21:4-9) And even Christ himself is compared to this serpent in John 3:14. (He should consider James Charlesworth’s ‘The Good and Evil Serpent’).
This review is important for drawing out the gnostic elements. (How the use of The Watchers in the film was apparently lost on most Christians critiquing the film is beyond me.) Obviously in many ways the film is not faithful to Genesis. And by Aronofsky’s own admission it wasn’t intended to be. Clearly it was influenced by many other extra-biblical, gnostic material. But this review misses too much, and forces this film to fit to neatly into some of its source materials. Aronofsky is pulling from all of it, and doing his own Midrash.
(But I would like to see it again, so that I can better reconsider my thoughts, and maybe pick on some things that I may have missed).
I’m seeing it tonight. For the moment, I’m doubting the creator is going to be portrayed as merciful. But I realize that’s not exactly what you’re saying here. We can hope Noah was misinterpreting to “redeem” the film, but even if your description is more accurate, that actually doesn’t settle the question of what impression Aronofsky had in mind with respect to Noah. He may have simply intended the put the question forth (“which character read God correctly?”) without answering it clearly. Lastly, I don’t agree at all with the analogy to Moses and the serpent. Striking that analogy requires ignoring the context of the textual material on both sides (Gnostic v. biblical). They simply aren’t the same thing at all.
Thank you not only for your insight but for also point out Dr. Mattson’s location as well.
J
^*”This message is put into the mouth of Noah’s adopted daughter (somebody Noah mercifully saves), a moment no one can (or should) SEE AS ANYTHING OTHER THAN a highly insightful moment into ‘message’ of the film, and it’s take on the events (for better or worse)….”
SPOILER ALERT: first off, this is my first comment on your blog, and before i begin i just want to make a side comment. your blog was and continues to be a refreshing answer to prayer for God to give me eyes to see his word as he delivered it to its original audiences. aside from so much respect i have for you, i want to share something: i am a little disappointed to see commentary on a movie you have yet to see.
i was a religious studies major and jewish studies minor, and we explored kabbalah quite a bit (particularly its historical development and subsequent expression(s) in Hasidic communities). to be sure kabbalah and gnosticism share so many SIMILAR ideas. but this is because they both presuppose a platonic cosmology and ontology. too much to tease out in a post, but wanted to say the following; the demiurge is a gnostic way (i say “a” because there is no such thing as “Gnosticism” proper, but was always gnosticisms) of describing the watered down hypostasis of the One. while there were jewish and christian gnostics, we tend to equate gnosticism with the christian expressions, so let’s just posit that and narrow the scope of the term in my writing. gnosticism tended to subvert yahweh (they called him Yaldabaoth) with the Father of all spirits. they therefore subversively read the hebrew creation texts and employed the term “the Creator” pejoratively. this is a far cry from the ayin sof who emanated the sfeirot that ultimately results in the Creator being equated to the Shekinah/Metatron. i scanned through the article you referenced and while i agree with much of his critiques (when they were more observational and less polemical), but overall, i have to disagree with pushing the content too far in the direction of Gnosticism. i appreciated the savvy concern for the (what i call) ‘possibility’ that arnofsky is pushing a hidden agenda to “dethrone” the biblical view of God (the strongest evidence i see here is the use of the snake skin as tefillin; as i have not spent a whole lot of time thinking on this i will leave that untouched for now). but there are stronger arguments to be made that he is actually painting a picture of God through a mystical Orthodox lens (alas, i am sorry that there is not currently anyone as committed to redeeming the ancient semitic and BIBLICALLY INFORMED view of Yahweh as you are in hollywood). while arnofsky leaves the Creator as an often mysterious figure, i believe the aforementioned article hijacks some of that mystery and injects his conjectures. to mitigate against that i want to cite the insistence on the Creator giving what is needed just as it is needed through the birth of the twin girls. while the Creator is APPARENTLY aloof to both tubal-cain and noah, he answers them both by orchestrating the events that follow, but his answer proves that he is in fact committed to humanity, to noah, and to a future of hope. noah, in raw humility, is made to see the evil of mankind, and it is his love of God and faithfulness to a vision that motivates him to adopt and idea that was not God’s own (albeit a mistake, but no one that reveals the intentions of the Creator).The Creator’s intentions for noah are revealed when in spite of Noah’s foolish oath to kill the child (singular) if it is a girl, the Creator sends what he thinks is needed with TWO girls. The creator’s intention for tubal-cain is revealed when at the second when noah has no ability to fend for himself (he is pinned), the Creator crushes tubal-cain and his plans. while this creator is at times seeming aloof, his heart is revealed in the events he sovereignly orchestrates. i also want to cite the appropriation of environmental themes, which i happen to believe, is arnofsky’s modernist attempt at integrating tikkun olam with his own environmentalist agendas. btw, tikkun olam, a theme woven throughout the movie, is totally inconsistent with the gnostic solution to the platonic problem of the current state of material creation. the gnostics desired to escape creation to get to the soulfount. kabbalah stresses strict torah observance in an effort to release the sparks of the sfeirot by mitzvoth, which actually EXALTS creation, as opposed to simply abandoning it. (this is btw the chief job of Israel. i will also add, sadly, this coincides with the paradoxical idea that the Shekinah is in exile with Israel, and dependent on the people of Israel to bring about tikkun olam). gnosticism is in NO WAY concerned with repairing the creation. it is antithetical, but this vision fits arnofsky’s noah like a glove. i am writing this because although the movie is not (i believe) as concerned with gnosticism as it is concerned with kabbalah (and this has enough of its own pitfalls), i was DEFINITELY able to see past this and find raw beauty in the exploration of themes that dear to my heart and my understanding of the bible: we are grossly rotten in our sin, and we have together become corrupt. i weep at the thought of God doing in Genesis 6 what psalm 14 says he continues to do to this day, surveying humanity to see if there is any one who seeks God, to find only khamas, (violence). he is wrenched in heart for the destruction of the good Creation at the hands of men; this is true in the movie as well (and again, makes little sense when compared to the demiurge who is jealous of mankind’s ability to ascend higher even than him, thanks to sophia). I was broken when i saw the exploration of the themes of citydwellers consumption and destruction of the creation, a theme that Torah touches on by framing the nomad Abraham as the solution to the problem of man’s organized and industrious evil. great stuff there to redeem from whatever misgivings surround the kabbalistic elements. either way, may the Lord Jesus bless you and guard you and cause your words to be effective as you serve to lead others in understanding his word.
I posted someone else’s review and said pretty plainly I was going to see it. Am I not allowed to direct readers’ attention to these sorts of things? It’s just starting up the discussion. The comment was so long (and didn’t allow for paragraphing – at least in the view I have – that I got lost in the personal pronouns. I’m not sure who you were talking to when.
Ouch, I have to agree you are quite right. My post seems more like a long-winded, failed stream-of-consciousness thought experiment than a blog comment that made an actual point. Total fail on my part. Here is a point I definitely want to make: thank you for your hard work in maintaining this blog. It is an oasis in the desert for me, and I truly pray for you to be blessed and protected by our Lord as you continue to serve him.
I also just read your post after you watched the movie yourself. I appreciate your synopsis. It did however bring up another thought I would like to share (this time i will try not to suck). I think you and others are mistaken when you cite Gnosticism as a primary source material. Indeed, I believe this is why it appears to be such a bizarre ideological amalgamation from your perspective. Instead, I think you should more carefully consider Kabbalah as a lens for analyzing the theological motifs in the movie( specifically the Kabbalah of Modern-day Ultra-Orthodox Jews).
There are considerable overtones of Kabbalah throughout the span of the film. Here are three notable ones:
1. Tikkun Olam (mitzvah releasing the divine spark and hence EXALTING creation through RELEASE; material creation is therefore not a prison that we escape, so much as trapped divinity(the sfeirot) that humans, but especially Jews, HELP escape through mitzvah)
2. the tzimtzum of the ayin sof to create the kosmos (antithetical to the Gnostic tradition of the demiurge as creator, and hence totally unrelated to the work of the On/Soul Fount)
3. the creational significance of the gematria
All I was really wanting to say, was that I think we should adopt mystical Kabbalah as a matrix for analysis of the film. I think it yields more sensible conclusions of Arnofsky’s work than Gnosticism does. And I think the point where this is clearest is the tenuous attempts to synthesize Arnofsky’s portrayal of the Creator with the demiurge of Gnosticism. This leads to bizarre contradictions, where adopting Kabbalah makes the God of Arnofsky’s film at least more cohesive as a character/concept.
Truly, blessings on you in Christ, and again, my apologies for littering your blog with my earlier post. I will try to do better next time 🙂
Wait…so, you’re saying that…that there’s supposed to be something more in church than…but I like happy, toothy-grinning pastors who preach feel-good sermons and don’t bother with the impossible-to-understand, many-interpretations of the Bible. So no, there’s nothing more that’s supposed to happen in church than what we already have. It’s all good. Now, let’s all smile and say, “God Loves You”… (I did, however, hear someone in church the other day did say something about dying, Self, the cross or something, but it didn’t make any sense—that stuff never does. I wish they’d all stop with that clap-trap.)
Yeah. Okay. So, with that out of the way… You know, I could care less what (secular) Hollywood produces with regard to so-called biblical themed movies. I expect nothing more than what it is itself to come through in those movies. So, what’s all the fuss about. Who cares how they portrayed Noah. Is Hollywood the messenger of the gospel? It’s always going to be that people, and maybe many of them, are going to be brained washed by Hollywood. What’s new. In the meantime, we each ought to just be asking God for wisdom as to how He might use us in the square footage we occupy and let Hollywood do its thing. It ain’t gonna change!
As usual, the views expressed on this blog provide more insightful commentary than I’ve seen anywhere else.
I wish I had time to study kabbalah and gnosticism. The book of Genesis is already a handful.
What strikes me is that in either case, when given the context of an evolutionary origin, the account of Noah’s flood really doesn’t make much sense. Does it?
Do you believe that it is likely that civilization emerged in the ANE only five or six thousand years ago as an evolutionary development? Or is it more likely that a literal flood left Noah and sons in the region of Ararat, and since that time, well, here we are, still trying to build Babel.
Evolution just doesn’t cut it.
Anyway, smiling preachers make good TV personalities.
Thanks Michael, for your efforts here.
PS. Yes. I prefer a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. Context counts.
Did you see the movie? What did you think?
yes; see the blog.
Dr. Heiser, thanks for this post. I was especially struck by this part:
“. . . pastors ought to preach the text on Sunday. Not happy thoughts that use one verse as a launching point. That isn’t taking your people into the text. And if you do read Irenaeus, his content isn’t just for you, either. Teach it to your people. We substitute toothy grins and happy-clappy music for informing people and prompting them to think theologically in their world (which in our case, is permeated by pop culture). Want to lament the biblical and theological illiteracy in evangelical churches? You’re reaping what you’ve sown, pastor. Your pulpit is either part of the solution, or part of the problem.”
How can we persuade our pastors to do more of this??? What writings of your own would you recommend, and what writings of others, on precisely this subject…? THANK YOU.
Hard to say; I don’t want to say that shaming (calling them out) might work, but after years of getting this question, I’m just about there. It’s true that many pastors are overwhelmed with administration and people problems. But too many are just lazy and not stimulated by the idea of teaching Scripture. I’d encourage the people of a church to take some practical steps to take some things off the pastor’s plate so that a little more time can be devoted to study, and then the same people ought to insist on hearing the results. I’d further encourage pastors to teach SOMETHING that is actual content to their people — start somewhere — and don’t be discouraged if most aren’t interested. We have church ministries for just about every problem or victim group (and that’s good), so why can’t we have a ministry to the 4-5 people (hopefully more) that actually come to church to learn something? It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request.