“In your light we see light.”–Psalm 36:9
I walked out of the theater impressed after seeing the movie Inception recently. It was highly entertaining, with good effects, and cleverly written, I thought. (Really, who thinks this stuff up?) But what I liked most is that it left me thinking. I love it when movies do that.
Remember the final scene? Everyone has resurfaced from the crazy dream-within-a-dream world. It’s sort of a sigh-of-relief moment—a comfort to have regained reality. But then the final shot is Cobb’s little weighted top spinning, wobbling like it’s about to fall (which it will do in reality but not within dreams)…and then the screen goes black before you see whether it does fall.
Well done, Movie! Way to keep us guessing. The characters have been grappling with this question of “How do you know your ‘reality’ actually is reality?” And then at the very end, just when you feel you’ve regained your footing, that final scene leaves you with a grain of doubt. Is reality real? How do you know?
I came away from the movie, like I said, thinking—and with one main lingering thought: What does a person do without a sure reference point for determining reality?
It’s disturbing, isn’t it? The answer seems to be “fall apart.” Come unhinged. That’s what the movie portrayed, at least; the idea of losing a reference point really messed with the characters’ minds. And Cobb’s wife was the extreme example. Losing the ability to know the real from the dream made her come unraveled; in the end, she took her own life.
Mere movie drama? I don’t think so. Even off the big screen, it’s a haunting question: What does a person do without a sure reference point for reality?
Because God Himself is the Ultimate Reality—everything else having existence and meaning only in relation to Him—He is the only reference point. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” We’re His creatures, and without Him, we have no way to truly understand or delineate reality. To try to do so is…well, absurd. But sin makes us prefer the absurd over submission to God, doesn’t it? We’re born rejecting and rebelling against Him, and so we try to understand reality (or define our own) apart from Him.
But do we realize what we’re doing? Do we realize that in rejecting God, we’re rejecting the only sure reference we have for reality?
Some do. Some people recognize the absurdity and meaninglessness of reality without God…and actually embrace it. Do you call that crazy? Philosophers call it nihilism. I call it at least consistent. Because if you cast off God, the only really viable alternative is meaninglessness and absurdity. No Creator means no purpose, no order, no point to it all. Existence is haphazard and irrational; there is no way to gauge “truth” or, in the end, to even know whether what we observe and experience by our senses is legitimate or illusion. To nihilistic thinking, it could be, as Poe wrote (and Inception presented), that “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
Can’t imagine any “normal” person-next-door embracing that kind of philosophy? Well, let me tell you a story. It’s something that happened during my sophomore year of college:
It was the spring of 2003, a gray afternoon in downtown Chicago. Janet, a sleek-suited businesswoman whom I’d met moments before, sat with me on the rough carpet of Borders, sandwiched between shelves of glossy children’s paperbacks. I remember the fluorescent lighting casting an unnatural tinge on her brown hair; I also remember feeling that the entire scene was slightly unnatural—me, the jeans-clad Bible college student and Janet, the middle-aged urban executive, complete strangers, discussing philosophy in between copies of The Velveteen Rabbit and Where the Sidewalk Ends.
My interview with Janet was part of a “worldview project” for Christian Life & Ethics class. The assignment was to find someone I’d never met and interview that person about his or her worldview. The interview questions were significant: “What do you think is ultimate reality, the ‘really real’?” “What is a human being?” “What happens at death?” “How is it possible to know things, to have consciousness?”
We’d been studying these questions in class, along with various worldviews: pantheism, panentheism, finite godism, deism, etc. Honestly, I saw most of these as just esoteric labels for theories that only philosophy professors (and, of course, their students) would ever deliberately muck around in. (Really, who even knew what the heck panentheism was?) But Janet was the third person I had interviewed in the bookstore that afternoon, and like the two interviewees before her, she was giving me shocking answers.
When I asked, “What is reality? How is it possible to know?” she sighed and said, “I don’t know… I really don’t believe that we can know.” I was incredulous. “Not anything?” She shook her head, “No, nothing at all. Who’s to say it isn’t all just an illusion?”
I was astounded. Janet was no philosopher, and she used no polished, academic language. She was overwhelmingly normal—and an atheist and nihilist (though I don’t know whether she would have know/used that terminology).
It saddens me to remember this. But Janet is just one of so very many, and it reminds me that the question spawned by Inception—what do you do without a sure reference point for determining reality?—is overwhelmingly practical. People without Christ are without that reference point. They are lost in the truest sense of the word.
You can acknowledge/embrace meaninglessness, like Janet, or (like most people), you can futilely grasp for meaning outside of God, latching on to any number of empty philosophies. But in the end it’s all the same, isn’t it? Without God, all is “vanity,” as Ecclesiastes says.
Oh, how people need rescue.
But the beautiful thing is that there is hope for rescue, isn’t there?
The same night that I saw Inception, I came home and was reading in Hebrews (which I’d been studying that week). The author says, “This hope [in Christ] we have as an anchor for the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast” (6:19). It’s just such a contrast—this firm confidence, as opposed to the despair of uncertainty and never knowing. The words brought such a wave of assurance and gratitude. Jesus Christ is our certainty, our anchor. Without Him defining reality for us—without Him as our Reality, our reference point—we’re hopeless. But with Him everything makes sense, and we have hope that is sure and certain because He Himself is our hope. I am SO glad.
What incredible compassion we should have for those around us—a lost world without a reference point, without an anchor, without hope. Because we once were there, too. Every one of us was born in sin, alienated from God. But He graciously shone in our hearts, regenerating us, granting us repentance and faith, opening our blind eyes and enlivening our dead hearts.
I’m just reminded all over again of what a miraculous salvation we’ve been given. Have we forgotten the meaninglessness from which we were rescued? Forgotten what a hope we’ve been given? Our Savior truly is the Solid Rock we stand on.
And this also spurs me on to more fervent prayer for God to work in the hearts of the unbelievers I know and meet, and to renewed compassion for them. My prayer is that I—that we—will be motivated to intercede passionately for the lost, and to take every opportunity to proclaim to them the unfathomable riches of Christ.
I’m so thankful for reality, so thankful not just that I have a grasp on reality, but that Reality graciously took hold of me.
I walked out of the theater impressed after seeing the movie Inception recently. It was highly entertaining, with good effects, and cleverly written, I thought. (Really, who thinks this stuff up?) But what I liked most is that it left me thinking. I love it when movies do that.
Remember the final scene? Everyone has resurfaced from the crazy dream-within-a-dream world. It’s sort of a sigh-of-relief moment—a comfort to have regained reality. But then the final shot is Cobb’s little weighted top spinning, wobbling like it’s about to fall (which it will do in reality but not within dreams)…and then the screen goes black before you see whether it does fall.
Well done, Movie! Way to keep us guessing. The characters have been grappling with this question of “How do you know your ‘reality’ actually is reality?” And then at the very end, just when you feel you’ve regained your footing, that final scene leaves you with a grain of doubt. Is reality real? How do you know?
I came away from the movie, like I said, thinking—and with one main lingering thought: What does a person do without a sure reference point for determining reality?
It’s disturbing, isn’t it? The answer seems to be “fall apart.” Come unhinged. That’s what the movie portrayed, at least; the idea of losing a reference point really messed with the characters’ minds. And Cobb’s wife was the extreme example. Losing the ability to know the real from the dream made her come unraveled; in the end, she took her own life.
Mere movie drama? I don’t think so. Even off the big screen, it’s a haunting question: What does a person do without a sure reference point for reality?
Because God Himself is the Ultimate Reality—everything else having existence and meaning only in relation to Him—He is the only reference point. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” We’re His creatures, and without Him, we have no way to truly understand or delineate reality. To try to do so is…well, absurd. But sin makes us prefer the absurd over submission to God, doesn’t it? We’re born rejecting and rebelling against Him, and so we try to understand reality (or define our own) apart from Him.
But do we realize what we’re doing? Do we realize that in rejecting God, we’re rejecting the only sure reference we have for reality?
Some do. Some people recognize the absurdity and meaninglessness of reality without God…and actually embrace it. Do you call that crazy? Philosophers call it nihilism. I call it at least consistent. Because if you cast off God, the only really viable alternative is meaninglessness and absurdity. No Creator means no purpose, no order, no point to it all. Existence is haphazard and irrational; there is no way to gauge “truth” or, in the end, to even know whether what we observe and experience by our senses is legitimate or illusion. To nihilistic thinking, it could be, as Poe wrote (and Inception presented), that “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
Can’t imagine any “normal” person-next-door embracing that kind of philosophy? Well, let me tell you a story. It’s something that happened during my sophomore year of college:
It was the spring of 2003, a gray afternoon in downtown Chicago. Janet, a sleek-suited businesswoman whom I’d met moments before, sat with me on the rough carpet of Borders, sandwiched between shelves of glossy children’s paperbacks. I remember the fluorescent lighting casting an unnatural tinge on her brown hair; I also remember feeling that the entire scene was slightly unnatural—me, the jeans-clad Bible college student and Janet, the middle-aged urban executive, complete strangers, discussing philosophy in between copies of The Velveteen Rabbit and Where the Sidewalk Ends.
My interview with Janet was part of a “worldview project” for Christian Life & Ethics class. The assignment was to find someone I’d never met and interview that person about his or her worldview. The interview questions were significant: “What do you think is ultimate reality, the ‘really real’?” “What is a human being?” “What happens at death?” “How is it possible to know things, to have consciousness?”
We’d been studying these questions in class, along with various worldviews: pantheism, panentheism, finite godism, deism, etc. Honestly, I saw most of these as just esoteric labels for theories that only philosophy professors (and, of course, their students) would ever deliberately muck around in. (Really, who even knew what the heck panentheism was?) But Janet was the third person I had interviewed in the bookstore that afternoon, and like the two interviewees before her, she was giving me shocking answers.
When I asked, “What is reality? How is it possible to know?” she sighed and said, “I don’t know… I really don’t believe that we can know.” I was incredulous. “Not anything?” She shook her head, “No, nothing at all. Who’s to say it isn’t all just an illusion?”
I was astounded. Janet was no philosopher, and she used no polished, academic language. She was overwhelmingly normal—and an atheist and nihilist (though I don’t know whether she would have know/used that terminology).
It saddens me to remember this. But Janet is just one of so very many, and it reminds me that the question spawned by Inception—what do you do without a sure reference point for determining reality?—is overwhelmingly practical. People without Christ are without that reference point. They are lost in the truest sense of the word.
You can acknowledge/embrace meaninglessness, like Janet, or (like most people), you can futilely grasp for meaning outside of God, latching on to any number of empty philosophies. But in the end it’s all the same, isn’t it? Without God, all is “vanity,” as Ecclesiastes says.
Oh, how people need rescue.
But the beautiful thing is that there is hope for rescue, isn’t there?
The same night that I saw Inception, I came home and was reading in Hebrews (which I’d been studying that week). The author says, “This hope [in Christ] we have as an anchor for the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast” (6:19). It’s just such a contrast—this firm confidence, as opposed to the despair of uncertainty and never knowing. The words brought such a wave of assurance and gratitude. Jesus Christ is our certainty, our anchor. Without Him defining reality for us—without Him as our Reality, our reference point—we’re hopeless. But with Him everything makes sense, and we have hope that is sure and certain because He Himself is our hope. I am SO glad.
What incredible compassion we should have for those around us—a lost world without a reference point, without an anchor, without hope. Because we once were there, too. Every one of us was born in sin, alienated from God. But He graciously shone in our hearts, regenerating us, granting us repentance and faith, opening our blind eyes and enlivening our dead hearts.
I’m just reminded all over again of what a miraculous salvation we’ve been given. Have we forgotten the meaninglessness from which we were rescued? Forgotten what a hope we’ve been given? Our Savior truly is the Solid Rock we stand on.
And this also spurs me on to more fervent prayer for God to work in the hearts of the unbelievers I know and meet, and to renewed compassion for them. My prayer is that I—that we—will be motivated to intercede passionately for the lost, and to take every opportunity to proclaim to them the unfathomable riches of Christ.
I’m so thankful for reality, so thankful not just that I have a grasp on reality, but that Reality graciously took hold of me.
2 comments:
Nice... thought provoking. Will was just telling me how funny it is that our family always brings spiritual topics out of movies. I kind of laughed and said I applauded those who didn't, leaving entertainment as entertainment. But, hey, this was good. And very true. I've seen it in every single topics I've studied (Creation/Evolution is recent interest, for example). If you have not reference point (just as if you have no Creator/Designer/Law-Maker), you have only chaos and confusion. The movie did a good job of showing that.
Nice post. :)
Oh, and nice job of "dream within a dream." Workin' two movies in one post, are we? ;)
Post a Comment