The Banality of Goodness: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (IV)

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In 1961, a court reporter named Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann, of course, was the Nazi official who organized the Final Solution—the state-sponsored, systematic genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Decades after the war, the Israeli intelligence agency tracked him down in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial for his crimes.

In her essay “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt wrestles deeply with one of the primary questions to trouble the world in the aftermath of World War II—how was it possible for a country as civilized as Germany was in the 1930s to be responsible for so barbaric an atrocity as the Holocaust?

For instance, what stood out to Hannah Arendt at his trial was how “normal” he was; that is to say: he showed no special signs of hatred, or psychosis, or insanity. She points out that no less than six psychologists examined Eichmann, and they found no evidence of abnormal personality whatsoever. One doctor remarked that his “overall attitude towards people, especially his family and friends, was ‘highly desirable.’”

Hannah Arendt uses the term “the banality of evil” as a way of making sense of this incongruity—how a “normal, everyday guy” could be responsible for one of the most heinous crimes in all of history. The term, the “banality of evil” is her way of suggesting that that evil breeds in the everyday—in the normal—in the banal decisions we all make, or don’t make, all the time.

On his blog Experimental Theology, Richard Beck summarizes the point like this:

The argument Arendt makes ... is that evil isn't dark and deep but is, rather, thin and superficial. Evil is ordinary people thoughtlessly making a million small choices. ... The Holocaust couldn't have happened if people hadn't over time gradually consented to it, through seemingly insignificant daily choices. Laughing nervously, but without objection, to the anti-Semitic joke. Not shopping at the Jewish store. Accepting that promotion when the more qualified Jewish person was passed over. Casting a vote on election day. And so on.

I have wrestled with Arendt’s assessment of the “banality of evil” ever since I came across the concept, and from time to time I still wonder what normal, everyday activities I participate in, as a simple matter of course in a modern society, that history will look back on as evil.

The reason I’m mentioning “the banality of evil” here, in a blog series on the filmography of Tom Hanks, though, is because somewhere around the midpoint of my journey through the complete cinematographic works of Tom Hanks, I began to notice a theme that connected, in my mind, to Hannah Arendt’s work.

It was Tom Hanks penchant for playing ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and exploring the momentous consequences of their mundane decisions to “do the right thing.” I think I noticed it first in Sleepless in Seatle, where a grieving father is thrust into the very real drama of figuring out how he will parent his motherless son well in the midst of his own loneliness and longing (never mind that he ends up with Meg Ryan at the end of the film, the premise that this journey to magical romance started out with is, sadly, about as ordinary as they come).

That was just the tiny tip of an emerging iceberg, though, because shortly afterwards he played Andrew Beckett, the corporate lawyer in Philadelphia who sues his employer after he is fired for having AIDS. Although the legal drama the unfolds quickly leaves the realm of the ordinary, beneath the surface of the story lurk all sorts of questions about standing up for what’s right, even when it costs you, for choosing not to discriminate even though it’s easier to let stereotypes and prejudices do the thinking for you, and discovering the shared humanity in “the other.” These are, of course, ordinary decisions we are all faced with every day in our profoundly polarized world.

The iceberg came into clear focus in his next outing, though, because in 1994, he starred as Forrest Gump, the character that made Tom Hanks both a household name and a Hollywood A-lister. The story probably needs little re-cap, but just recall how Hanks’s portrayal of Forrest—who is, by his own admission, “not a smart man”—emphasizes simple things like commitment to ones friends, and devotion to one’s beloved, determined loyalty, artless honesty, simply “knowing what love is.” And then connect those mundane virtues to the epoch-making moments of American history that Forrest found himself thrust into, as a result of them.

If Hannah Arendt observed at Eichmann’s trial that incomprehensible evil emerges out of the ordinary, everyday decisions we make, all the time, that we won’t do the right thing, Tom Hanks’s films, it seems, offers the other side of that argument; that world-shaping goodness emerges out of all the ordinary moments we decide that we will.

Using Arendt’s language, we might say that Tom Hank's filmography, taken as a whole, makes a case for the banality of goodness. Because after Forrest Gump, this theme becomes a bit of a central preoccupation in Hanks’s movies—the World War II sergeant who does his duty faithfully in Saving Private Ryan— the prison warden who treats an accused sex-offender kindly, in The Green Mile—the politician who decides to give up his life of philandering and take up the cause of the oppressed in Charlie Wilson’s War. There’s also Ben Bradlee’s intractable commitment to reporting the truth in The Post, and James Donovan’s determination to give a Soviet a fair trail, despite the cost to his reputation, in Bridge of Spies. And don’t get me started on Mr. Rogers.

Among other things, what binds all these characters together are the simple decisions they face to do right instead of wrong; though often these decisions very quickly cease to be simple, they bring into being a goodness that often grows to monumental proportions, with world-changing stakes.

This is a Christian assessment of Tom Hanks’s movies, of course, so, having pointed out the “banality of goodness” that his work often illustrates, let me simply recall that Jesus himself taught something very similar—that the least would turn out, in the final analysis, to be the greatest, and the those who were faithful in the small things would be faithful in the big. Perhaps, among other things, our Lord had in mind the truth about the banality of goodness—that goodness thrived, actually, in the small, the mundane, the ordinary—when he said this.

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A Humanist Portrait of the Heart: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (Part III)

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You don’t especially notice it when you’re just watching the odd film here and there, but when you try to watch the entire Tom Hanks filmography from beginning to end, like my wife and I did last year, you might notice, after a while, how distinctly godless his whole body of work actually is. This would stand out all the more markedly if, like me, you then wanted to write a blog series looking at his films from a theological perspective. Unlike the movies of Charleston Heston, for example, that were so often so explicitly religious (The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur), or the movies of Jim Carey, let’s say, that often deal indirectly with very deep theological themes (Bruce Almighty, The Truman Show), God rarely figures, either as a character or a consideration, in most Tom Hanks movies.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. Certainly Forrest Gump is replete with theological themes, and The Green Mile can quite easily be read is some sort of a Christian allegory. There were one or two religious moments in Joe vs. the Volcano, to be sure, though these are largely forgotten; and in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Hanks plays a bona fide Presbyterian minister, though the religious element in his portrayal of Mr. Roger’s story is distinctly muted. And anyways, these few films with expressly religious themes are quite overshadowed by his involvement with the Da Vinci Code movies, a trilogy of (mostly awful) movies that paint the story of the church with such bright swatches of cynicism, skepticism, an free historical invention, that it often borders on blasphemy and more than once crosses over the border completely.

So Tom Hanks, as an actor, seems not all that interested in exploring religious themes. This may not raise many eyebrows; neither does Sylvester Stallone or Tom Cruise, but you don’t see me blogging about them. What makes Hanks’s lack of interest in God of particular note, I think, is the fact that, in addition to his agnosticism, he has also earned the endearing reputation as one of Hollywood’s most wholesome actors.

He's often called “America’s Dad,” owing to the fact that his consistent portrayal of “genuine, honest characters” has “etched him into the heart” of the average American. Many even refer to him as an “everyman” actor—perhaps not realizing the irony that the phrase “everyman” was originally a religious term, used to describe a literary character who allegorically represents all of humanity in its relationship with the Divine. But if Hanks really is an American “everyman,” its especially notable how little relationship his films have, on the whole, with “the divine.”

Instead, what we find in Tom Hanks’s films is a general celebration of human goodness, things like honest grit, integrity no matter the cost, determination no matter the odds, a courageous sense of humor, self-made luck. While many Americans profess to being spiritual without being religious, Tom Hanks is, it would seem, religious without being spiritual. That is to say: he presents us with all the classic religious virtues—prudence, courage, temperance, and so on—without any of the traditional spiritual trappings—prayer, devotion to a higher power, self-sacrifice in service of the divine—that used to be understood as a clear path to their attainment.

This is not so much a critique as it is an observation. Religion does not de facto make a man good; history is stuffed with examples to prove that this is the case. However, it is interesting that in Tom Hanks’s characters, we see a wide range of virtues on display, with very little interest in wondering where they come from. It is assumed, I suppose, that they are simply there, present in the human heart; and provided one is willing to tap in to them, it seems, they can be accessed just as readily as their counterparts—cowardice, despair, decadence, and so on.

Or perhaps not quite as readily, necessarily. There is a reason Tom Hanks’s characters are so compelling, because they point us to something that we all hope is true but need some convincing to believe—that despite the great evidence to the contrary, the human heart is, at its core, bent towards good and tending towards great feats of quiet virtue.

On this point, a Christian assessment of the situation would be both in hearty agreement and also in vehement disagreement. Inasmuch as we believe that all human beings are truly made in the Image of God, it should not surprise us an iota whenever we glimpse reminders of the profound goodness of the human heart. At the same time, because we believe in the doctrine of original sin—the one doctrine, as Chesterton famously said, for which we have ample evidence—a robust Christian assessment of the idea that the human heart is inherently virtuous would also want to offer some very significant caveats. Yes, there is profound goodness woven into the fibre of the human soul, but let’s not forget how that same soul is curved in on itself. Short of a divine intervention, the highest virtues—especially faith, and hope, and love—can only, at best, be parodied, but never fully realized.

Perhaps it is too much to expect too theological an analysis of virtue in the films of a highly popular, widely beloved Hollywood actor, but for my part, the thing that makes Tom Hanks so compelling to watch on screen is the same thing that makes him so frustrating: his apparently naïve belief in a humanist vision of our inherent goodness. While I share the vision, I think, I find myself regularly wanting to ask him what he thinks it takes to realize it.

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The Sum of a Life's Work: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (Part II)

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Approximately a year and a half ago, my wife and I started a little film-watching project, working our way through every single feature-length movie Tom Hanks has made in his 40 + years of acting. The fact that this project took us over a year and a half to complete, watching movies at the respectable rate of roughly one a week, illustrates on its own how extensive and prolific his career has been. Over the course of approximately 64 films, we saw comedies, dramas, biopics, adventure films and 3-D animated cartoons. Along the way we saw at least one film in pretty much every definable genre, from westerns (News of the World) to science fiction (Finch), from gangster films (Road to Perdition), to legal dramas (Philadelphia), to war movies (Saving Private Ryan) and more.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am planning, over the next few months, to offer some spiritual reflections on the full filmography of Tom Hanks, as viewed through the lens of a Christian theology. And one of the first things that stands out when you start to think theologically about the movies of Tom Hanks is just how big and diverse a body of work they comprise. He is widely recognized as one of Hollywood’s most prolific actors, and the recognition is well-earned.

It’s not just the quantity of films, either, but also the wide range of quality. In the last year and a half, my wife and I saw some of the most poignant performances captured on film, and also some of the worst. That two of my favorite films of all time (Forrest Gump, Joe vs. the Volcano), and two of the awfullest movies I’ve ever seen (The Da Vinci Code, Volunteers) all starred the same actor says a lot about the range of this particular actor’s career. My strong impression is that, after he reached the point where in his fame where he could easily weather a flop, he started choosing his scripts based on his own personal interest in the story or the character, whether or not the project had all the ingredients of a hit. This has led to some fascinating gems that might otherwise not have been made, but also some nearly unwatchable movies.

As a small life lesson, the full Tom Hanks filmography illustrates how the whole of a person’s life is always greater than the sum of its individual parts. If the value of Tom Hanks’s career were calculated as a simple equation of “hits” minus “bombs,” it’s quite possible he might only break even (I’ve not done the math, but my strong hunch is that there is an equal representation of both on the list of his acting credits). Yet, when viewed as a whole, there is something about the full body of the man’s life work that transcends each individual success or failure.

Because his life’s work has been so well-captured on film, of course, it’s easier to notice this “something bigger” that emerges from the whole, but once you’ve seen, it encourages you to consider your own life’s work in a similar light. It can be tempting to dwell on either the successes and failures of life as though each one defines us or determines our worth on its own. One of the things you realize when you watch the full career of a prolific actor like Tom Hanks, however, is that the meaning of a life never really boils down to a single achievement or failure. The meaning of our lives, rather, emerges out of the entirety of our efforts—the good and the bad—and as such it transcends every individual homerun or strikeout.

On its own this observation is wise, maybe, but not profoundly spiritual, or explicitly Christian. It becomes so, however, when you connect it to Christian concepts like grace and discipleship, holiness and forgiveness. Because the Christian life places such a strong emphasis on living in obedience to the teachings of Jesus (Matt 28:20), working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12), and having a righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees (Matt 5:20), it can be tempting to assume that our lives as disciples of Jesus can be evaluated in simple terms of our moral successes weighed against our moral failings. It’s equally easy to suppose that those individual “works”—for the good or the bad—in some way define us as either a success or a failure, spiritually speaking.

But if the life’s work of an actor with the scope and range of a Tom Hanks is greater than the sum of its individual films, this is infinitely truer for the life’s work of a sincere follower of Jesus Christ, someone seeking authentically to live their lives in his footsteps. When viewed though the lens of God’s grace, the meaning and the value of our lives as disciples emerges as a whole that beautifully transcends the individual steps forward or backward we may make in seeking to follow Him. And only God himself knows what will be revealed in the end, when the full filmography of our lives is viewed in its entirety, and we stand before him to receive our reward.

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You Never Know What You’re Gonna Get: Christian Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (I)

Some time in the spring of 2022, I happened to catch an interview with Tom Hanks on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They were talking about his latest film at the time, the musical bio-pic Elvis, and at one point Colbert referred to him as “America’s Movie Dad.” The description struck me as poignantly true, and it flashed me back to one of my earliest experiences watching a “grown-up” movie as a child: his 1984 romantic comedy with Daryl Hannah, Splash.

It occurred to me that nearly as long as I have been watching movies, Tom Hanks has been starring in them. I was born in 1974; Tom Hank’s first cinematic appearance was a bit role in a 1980 slasher flick called He Knows You’re Alone. Many of my favorite films of all time are Tom Hanks outings, including Joe vs. the Volcano, Forrest Gump, and The Green Mile. I remember watching Big with my cousins when we were nearly the same age as the protagonist in the story; and I remember watching The Man with One Red Shoe with my parents when I was much too young for it (I never did get to see the end, because they shut it off part way through).

So I have to agree with Stephen Colbert on this one. If any one deserves to be called my “Movie Dad,” it’s probably Tom Hanks, who has more or less been with me since childhood.

It inspired me, somewhat impulsively, to set a goal to see if I couldn’t watch every single movie Tom Hanks ever made. Looking up the entire list on Wikipedia, I discovered that—not counting cameos and Toy Story spin-off cartoons—the entire Tom Hanks filmography includes no less than 64 films, spanning a full 40 decades. I invited my wife to join me, and sometime around the end of June, 2022, we started, working our way through the list, more-or-less in chronological order, watching roughly one film a week.

A few weeks ago, about a year and a half later, we watched the final film on the list (it was Elvis for us, but only because we'd watched Asteroid City out of order). We were amazed to discover the breadth and depth of his acting career. There were some pretty deep cuts on the list that we’d never even knew existed; but there were also some classics that, coming back to them after a few decades since first seeing them, took on new light and deeper meaning than we’d ever seen in them before.

Part way through the project, I started to notice some running themes and consistent motifs in Tom Hanks’ acting career that seemed to intersect in curious ways with Christian spirituality and theology. Not that any of his movies were explicitly, or even allusively Christian. One of the curious things in the full Tom Hanks filmography is how seldom anyone thinks much at all about God. Instead, what I found in Tom Hanks were hazy hints at powerful ideas that a robust Christian understanding of the world would want to reply to with a, “Yes, and….”

For me, the Tom Hanks filmography was like a huge, unfinished connect the dots of concepts and intuitions. On its own, it seems somewhat scattered, but my own faith allowed me to connect these dots in ways that formed a fascinating picture of profound spiritual significance.

All of this is by way of introduction to a new series I’m planning for the next few weeks here at terra incognita, which I’m calling “You Never Know What You’re Gonna Get: Christian Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks.” My goal is to spend some time reflecting deeply on the movies of Tom Hanks and seeing what theological themes emerge.

We’ll get started doing that in earnest in the days to come, but for today, let me answer the most common question I got asked when people heard I was working my way through the entire filmography of Tom Hanks: which movie is your favorite?

It’s actually a bit difficult to answer that question succinctly, since, as I said above, the full list includes no less than 64 films; so instead of naming a single movie, let me offer here, in closing, a few top-ten lists of best and worst Tom Hanks performances.

Top Ten Favorite Tom Hanks Performances
1. Forrest Gump
2. The Green Mile
3. Greyhound
4. Catch Me if You Can
5. Castaway
6. Cloud Atlas
7. News of the World
8. Philadelphia
9. Saving Private Ryan
10. Captain Phillips

Top Ten “Diamonds in the Rough”
1. Punchline
2. Every Time We Say Goodbye
3. Joe vs. the Volcano
4. A Hologram for the King
5. The Post
6. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
7. Nothing in Common
8. The Terminal
9. A League of Their Own
10. Bridge of Spies

Top Ten Worst Tom Hanks Films
1. Bachelor Party
2. Volunteers
3. The Ladykillers
4. The Da Vinci Code
5. Larry Crowne
6. The Circle
7. The Man with One Red Shoe
8. Pinocchio
9. Bonfire of the Vanities
10. Toy Story 4

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A Fresh Look at Cross-Dressing in Deuteronomy

A few years ago I was speaking with a colleague in ministry about how the church responds to trans people. I tried to suggest that, strictly speaking, as a question of chapter-and-verse citation, the Bible does not say anything about the morality of gender transitioning, and, therefore, it is probably best for the church not to frame it as a moral issue.

My friend cocked an eyebrow. “Really?” he said. “You don’t think the Bible addresses this?” And then he cited Deuteronomy 22:5—“A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this”—and he rested his case.

At the time, I hadn’t spent a great deal of time digging into Deuteronomy 22:5, so I didn’t argue the point. I was pretty sure, however, that a single verse in Torah hardly made an airtight argument. I felt this especially because Christians believe as a foundation of their faith that the Lord Jesus has fulfilled all of Torah in his death and resurrection, and the single command to love our neighbours faithfully in Jesus Christ fulfills the entirety of Torah (Galatians 5:14).

A while later, though, I had occasion to look more closely at the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 22:5, and I noticed something I had never considered before.

You see: the most common word for “clothing” in the Hebrew Bible is beged. It comes from the Hebrew root word bâgad, “to cover,” and occurs 217 times in the Hebrew Bible. Other common words for clothing include lebûsh (32 occurrences), malbûsh (8 occurrences), śimlâh (29 occurrences) and mekasseh (4 occurrences).

In contrast to this, the word “kelı̂y” (319 occurrences) is a somewhat flexible word, which generally means something like “equipment” or “furnishings.” It can refer to a vessel or sack that contains something, to jewelry, to a tool or weapon, to gear that someone might wear for a specific purpose, or to a soldier’s armour. The meaning of kelı̂y is very much dependent on the context in which it is being used.

The most common word for “a man,” in Hebrew is the noun 'ı̂ysh. It occurs 2163 times and means “a man” in the most general sense. The second most common word for “a man,” is the word 'âdâm, with 541 occurrences. This is the word that the name “Adam” comes from and can mean a “man” specifically, or a human being more generally (regardless of gender, as in “God created 'man' in his image”). The Hebrew word for “male,” with special reference to the sexed-body, is zâkâr (with 82 occurrences).

In contrast to these various terms for a “man,” the word geber literally means something like “valiant man,” or, more loosely, a “warrior.” It occurs 65 times in the Hebrew Bible.

With that rough and ready Hebrew glossary in mind, let me return to Deuteronomy 22:5, and its prohibition, seemingly, against men and women wearing each other’s clothing. Because the word it uses for “man” is not 'ı̂ysh, or 'âdâm, or zâkâr. And neither is the word for the man’s clothing beged, lebûsh, or śimlâh. The word the NIV translates as “man” is geber, “a mighty man,” and the word the NIV translates as “clothing” is kelı̂y, “gear/equipment.” Admittedly, the word geber can be used in the Hebrew Bible to describe a man generally, in a way similar to how the word 'ı̂ysh is used, but in this context, paired with the word kelı̂y like this, it seems obvious to me that simple, generic “cross dressing” is not what the verse has in mind.

Literally, we might render it like this: “There shall not be ‘the gear’ of a ‘valiant man’ upon a woman, and a ‘valiant man’ shall not put on the mantle (simlat) of a woman.”

A rough and ready gloss of the verse might run like this: “A woman shall not put on the equipment of a warrior, and a warrior shall not put on a woman’s dress.”

It would take more unpacking than I have space for in a simple blog post like this to determine how accurate this gloss is to the original intent. It’s notable to me, however, that the prohibition against a woman “wearing a warrior’s arms” appears in Chapter 22, shortly after a lengthy list of laws pertaining to how the Israelites are to wage war (or not to wage war, as the case may be) with the nations they will encounter in the Promised Land. Verses 21:10-14, for instance, give careful guidelines for how the Israelites are to treat a woman taken captive in war.

With this context in mind, I can’t help but wonder if Deuteronomy 22:5 actually has nothing to do with the act of cross-dressing, but instead is prohibiting the people of Israel from using their women as soldiers in battle, or allowing their male soldiers to shirk their “manly” duty to fight on behalf of their people (both of which, in an Ancient Near Eastern context, would be an affront to the nation's honor (see, for instance, Judges 4:9)).

Even if these arguments aren’t conclusive, they strongly suggest that we cannot read Deuteronomy 22:5 as some sort of a definitive word on the modern day phenomenon of gender dysphoria, or use it as a some kind of directive on how we ought to respond to trans people. If we do, we'll be doing a kind of violence to the text (to say nothing of what it does to trans people themselves), wrenching the verse from its context and making it say something it’s not meaning to say.

A Fresh Look at the Prophet Daniel

Last week I shared some thoughts about an often-overlooked detail in the story of the Road to Emmaus, and the possibility that, counter to generations of tradition, the two disciples that Jesus encountered that day might not both have been male, that they might have been a married couple. That post received an unexpected level of engagement at my church, so much so that I thought I’d share another “overlooked detail” that I came across in my daily Bible reading, that maybe sheds some interesting light on an familiar story.

The story in question involves the prophet Daniel, one of the best loved prophets in the Old Testament. Many of us have probably heard the stories of Daniel interpreting King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, or reading the writing on the wall, or braving the lion’s den, but the other day I was reading Daniel Chapter 1 and I saw something I never noticed before.

In verse 1:3, we are told that Daniel was brought to Babylon from Jerusalem during the exile, and that upon arriving in the palace he was placed in the custody of Ashpenaz, the chief of Nebuchadnezzar’s court officials. That is how the NIV renders the verse, anyways. The NASB reads the same, though it includes a footnote clarifying that the word could be translated as the “chief of the king’s eunuchs.” This is, incidentally, how the old King James version translates it.

Was Ashpenaz actually the chief of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace eunuchs? If so, what would that have meant for Daniel, to have been placed in Ashpenaz’s custody?

The word in question is sârı̂ys, a Hebrew word that comes from a root word that literally means “to castrate.” It’s the word used in Esther 2:14 to describe Shaashgaz, for example, who was the eunuch in charge of the King’s harem, and certainly in the context of that story—which shares many similarities with Daniel, by the way—in that story it is highly probable that Shaashgaz, as the keeper of the king’s harem, was a eunuch in the literal sense of the word.

The word sârı̂ys can also simply mean an “official” or “officer of the court,” however, with no implications as to the person’s reproductive status. In the story of Joseph and Potiphar, for example, we’re told that Potiphar was a sârı̂ys of Pharaoh, and later we discover that he is married, and may even have had a daughter (Gen 41:45). In that story, it’s not likely that Potiphar was a eunuch in the technical sense, which is why most English translations call him an “official” in Pharoah’s court.

In some cases, as in the story of Esther above, the context itself can help us decide how the word is being used. We know, for example, that in 2 Kings 20:18, when the Jewish King Hezekiah sins by showing off his wealth and military might to the envoys from Babylon, the prophet Isaiah warns him that, as a result, his children will be taken away and made to be sârı̂yim in the palace of the Babylonian king. Given the severity of this threat, the context suggests that Babylon will “make eunuchs” of Hezekiah’s sons in the literal sense, not simply make them into court officials. It is possible that this was a common practice—or at least, not uncommon—for Babylon to castrate its prisoners of war before making them servants of the court.

So what about Daniel? Does the term sârı̂ys in this story mean more than just “an official?” Was Daniel literally “made into a eunuch” when he came to serve under Ashpenaz, the head of the king's eunuchs?

Admittedly, the final answer is inconclusive (hence the NASB’s footnote leaving both possibilities), but my hunch, for what it’s worth, is that he was.

I say this partly because of the similarities between the story of Daniel and the story of Esther, another Jewish captive who experienced sexual violence at the hands of the Persian court (though admittedly Esther’s sexual violence was of a different nature). I also say it because of the way 2 Kings 20:18 seems to foreshadow Daniel’s situation so directly.

It would be easy to make a much bigger deal out this detail than the context warrants; Daniel being “made a eunuch” does not make his situation the same as people who identify as what now adays we might call a “sexual minority.” At least, not exactly the same. If Daniel was a eunuch, it was not sex-change surgery he received. He was violently mutilated by an oppressive empire. It would be anachronistic, I think, to over-lay his story onto the experience of people today who identify as trans, or experience gender dysphoria.

At the same time, it would be easy to make too small a deal out of this detail, too; and that, I think, is the greater danger. In Deuteronomy 23:1, we’re told quite explicitly that no one who has been castrated is to be permitted in the assembly of God’s people. It’s not clear what should be done with them, but it’s clear they are to be “excluded from the assembly.” And yet, if my reading of Daniel’s story is accurate, then in Daniel we have at least one instance of someone who falls under the Deuteronomy 23 prohibition, but instead of being excluded he is, rather, used powerfully by God.

There’s a line in Daniel 10:11 that I’ve always found to be very poignant. Daniel has received a horrific vision of the future and is in deep distress. He’s been praying and mourning for three days straight, when a divine visitor finally comes to comfort him with the interpretation of what he’s seen. Before this theophanic messenger does that, however, he starts by saying: “You, Daniel, are ‘highly esteemed.’”

That’s how the NIV renders it, at least, but I don’t think it’s strong enough. In Hebrew the word is châmad, a word that literally means “desirable,” or “precious.” It’s the word used to describe precious jewels in 2 Chronicles 20:25, precious gold in Ezra 8:27. In Psalm 19:9-10 it’s the word used to describe “the judgements of the Lord”—they are more desirable (châmad) than precious gold.

The use of this word to describe Daniel in 10:11 would hit you in the gut with its beauty, if, in Daniel 1:3, it really was the case that he had been castrated when he was brought into the service of King Nebuchadnezzar. Because if he was, then according to the Law of Moses, his status as someone whose body lacked “full sexual congruity with his gender,” so to speak, would mean that he should have been excluded from the community, cut off from life with God (no pun intended).

And yet, Daniel discovers just exactly the opposite: his divine messenger assures him that he is deeply loved—desirable even, and precious—regardless any sexual violence he may have experienced at the hands of the oppressor, and whether or not his body was “sexually whole” (for lack of a better way of saying it). Those things would not determine his worth in God’s eyes, or, more importantly, his desirability as a servant of the Lord.

Neither do they determine our worth in God’s eyes, if we are in circumstances similar to Daniel’s: if we have experienced sexual violence, perhaps, that has left a permanent scar on us, if our bodies do not align wholly with our sense of who we are, if there is something about our bodies that feels to us “un-whole,” and we think, as a result, there’s no place for us in community. If I’m on to anything in my reading of Daniel’s story, none of those things make us any less precious to God, or God less able to use us powerfully for his purposes.

A Fresh Look at the Road to Emmaus

In Luke 24:13-32, we’re told about a mysterious encounter two disciples had with the risen Jesus, in the afternoon on the day of his resurrection. It’s sometimes called “The Emmaus Road Encounter,” because these two disciples encounter him while they’re on their way to Emmaus, a small village about seven miles outside of Jerusalem. At first they don’t know it’s him, and the text strongly implies that somehow or other they are being supernaturally prevented from recognizing him. They start sharing with him the bewildering story they'd heard that morning, about an empty tomb and a risen Lord, and he explains to them how it had all been predicted in the Old Testament Scriptures. When they finally reach their destination, and he joins them for dinner, we’re told that they suddenly recognize him “in the breaking of the bread.” The instant it dawns on them who they’ve been talking to, however, he vanishes, leaving them with racing thoughts and burning hearts.

It’s a great story, one of the most famous post-resurrection encounters in the New Testament. One Easter I was researching it for a sermon, however, when, like the disciples recognizing Jesus in the breaking of the bread, I came across some details that helped me recognize someone in the story I'd never seen before.

 

You see: every illustration of the road to Emmaus I’ve ever seen has always been roughly the same. Two men are seen, walking along an idyllic country road, with a mysterious stranger (usually in white) walking between them. I’ve sprinkled a few samples throughout this post to help you imagine it.

The details may vary somewhat from picture to picture, but, in addition to the presence of the mysterious stranger, there’s one detail they all share in common. The two disciples are always both depicted as being male. I’ve never seen a painting of the Emmaus Road Encounter that bucks this trend: a mysterious Jesus walking along the road with two men.

Now, this post is primarily an exegetical reflection, not an advocacy piece, but let me humbly point out that there is nothing in the text that would require both disciples to be male, and there are, actually, strong exegetical reasons to suspect that one of the two was, in fact, female.

Certainly, one of them is quite clearly male. We’re told he’s named Cleopas, and he seems to be doing most of the talking. The other disciple remains unnamed throughout the encounter, and, though he or she may have spoken at some point, the narrative uses a plural verb, “they said,” to describe it; that is to say, it only describes the second disciple speaking with Cleopas together, so we don't have any specific personal pronouns we can use to determine his or her gender. 

All we know that he or she was traveling with someone named Cleopas, and they apparently lived together; at least, they’re staying at the same house when they arrive at Emmaus.

This details stands out pretty markedly when you go looking elsewhere in the New Testament for evidence of who this Cleopas might have been, and who might have been living with him in Emmaus.

In John 19:25, we’re told that when Jesus was crucified, a woman named Mary, was standing at his cross, along with Jesus’s mother, Jesus’s aunt, and Mary Magdalene. This fourth woman, we’re told, was “Mary the wife of Clopas.”

Could that Mary, the wife of a man named Clopas, be the same disciple in Luke 24:13, walking along the road with a man named Cleopas? 

Before you answer, I should point out that: (a) both names are a variation on the Greek name Cleopater; (b) some ancient manuscripts spell the name in John 19:25 as Cleophas; and (c) at least some Christian traditions hold that they are the same person.

Of course, if the Cleopas that Jesus met on the road to Emmaus really was the same Clopas mentioned in John 19:25, whose wife was standing at the cross when the Lord died, then it doesn’t take much to connect the dots. It’s very likely, and certainly not impossible, that the second disciple on the road to Emmaus was a woman, Clopas’s wife, herself a devoted follower of Jesus Christ.

Even if these exegetical arguments don’t satisfy, it does raise some crucial questions: why do we always assume that the unnamed disciple in the story was male, when there’s nothing in the text itself to justify that assumption?

And what does it say about us and our biases when reading Scripture, our tendency to project onto the text what we assume is there, instead of opening ourselves to see what’s really there?

And what else might we be missing in our reading of the Scripture—who else might we be excluding from the story—because our cultural biases, our complacency with tradition, and/or our spiritual prejudices have blinded us to their presence?

My 2023 in Books

 Happy New Year, everyone! Each year in January I like to take some time to review the year that was, and set some goals for the year that will be. One of the ways I do this is by looking back on the books I read in 2023, the things I learned from them and the way they impacted me. As far as "years in reading" go, 2023 was a bit leaner than pervious years, but that's partly because I finally buckled down and tackled 1692 page treatise on the Apostle Paul's life and theology, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. This book absorbed the bulk of my reading time and energy, both, and I didn't have much left over for other books, when it was finally through. That said, here's an annotated list of my reading in 2023.

The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Written in 1948 by a Catholic paleontologist, this book is old, now, and feels somewhat dated, but it is one of the first honest efforts at presenting a thoughtful case for theistic evolution. Even though it got overly mystical towards the end, with its talk of the Omega point and the consciousness of planet earth, still it gave me a lot to think about.

Perfect Present, Greg Boyd

I read Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil, and God at War, almost a decade ago, now. and found his case for a Christus Victor theology of the atonement, and his love-requires-free-will justification for the existence evil thought provoking and compelling. This book surprised me, for both its immensely practical approach to the devotional life, and its tendency towards subjective mysticism. It is essentially a collection of reflections on how to practice the presence of God in our daily life, and exercises for growing in the practice. 

Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson

Each year I make a point of reading some fiction, and inasmuch as I grew up reading a lot of J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks, I wanted to put some high fantasy on my 2023 reading list, for old time's sake. Although Sanderson's Mistborn came highly recommended, I have to be honest and say that I found this book mostly tedious and frustrating. I felt the magic system was too pedantic, the plot too meandering, and the world-building unfocused. I know it's well loved by many, but it just didn't do it for me.

The Relationship Cure, John Gottman

One of the most recognizable names in marriage therapy, John Gottman has written multiple books on marriage enrichment. In The Relationship Cure, his major take-away is the concept of the "emotional bid," the ways in which people make subtle, sometimes subconscious requests for emotional connection with their significant other. Gottman shows how these bids function in the dynamics of a relationship, how to respond to them in ways that enrich the relationship, and what happens when they are rejected.

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, John Ratey

This was my "self-help" book for the year. Ratey presents some very compelling evidence from multiple scientific studies, showing that regular physical exercise has all kinds of positive effects on cognitive functioning and mental health. Regular exercise can boost your memory, increase your academic success, cure depression and prevent cognitive decline in old age. If you needed motivation to hit the gym, this book should be first on your reading list.

King, Magician, Warrior, Lover, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

Moore and Gillette suggest that there are four primary character dynamics that together make up a mature masculine experience. They present a neo-Jungian reading of history, literature, and mythology, to illustrate each one, and show how they manifest in the lives of men. While I did find some of their ideas helpful-- the concept of "accessing" different energies in different circumstances, for instance-- a lot of it felt like pseudo-psychological mumbo-jumbo. Though it is occurring to me, as I write this, that the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles each align with one of the four archetypes; so maybe they were on to something.

Paul and the Faithfulness of God, N. T. Wright

As mentioned above, this book was a massive undertaking, a thorough and painstaking analysis of Paul's writings, situating them in their 1st Century context and showing how they related to his three worlds-- the world of Judaism, the world of Rome, and the world of Greek philosophy. Because the first three books in Wright's Christian Origins and the Question of God were complete game-changers for me. Although this one felt repetitive at times, and widely-meandering at other times, still, it continued to change the game for me, when it comes to my understanding of the world of the New Testament.

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry

Perry's thesis is that the modern sexual revolution, though it was billed as a step towards the liberation of women, has actually had the opposite effect: it has predominantly benefitted men, who now have greater access to no-strings-attached sexual experiences, it has led to greater exploitation women, who are now being told that commodifying their sexuality is in their best interest, and it has led to increased violence against women, as culture becomes increasingly desensitized to more and more violent forms of pornography. Writing as a feminist sociologists, Perry surveys a wide range of cultural data, and though her case is grim reading at times, I found it very compelling.

Sackett, Louis L'Amour

My father-in-law is a big Louis L'Amour fan, and though I've never been a fan of the genre, I felt it behooved me at some point to experience a good old-fashioned Western novel. This one was about as old-fashioned, I think, as they come. It was full of tough, lonely, resourceful men, determined-but-dependent women, gun fights, fist fights, land claims and gold rushes. I found it tedious reading at times, predominantly plot-driven and only loosely interested in delving the characters with any depth, but it gave me a lot to think about when it was done, regarding the myth of the mature masculine (see above), and the way that myth has been perpetuated in popular culture.

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

I was somewhat disappointed with this highly recommended meditation on the creative life; I think I was expecting something more concrete, practical, action-able than I got. Pressfield's major take-away is that anyone who commits to a creative life is going to encounter resistance-- practical realities, relational pressures, emotional pushback, psychological blocks, concrete obstacles-- to pursuing their art. It is inevitable, and what separates the artists from the amateurs is that the artists have fought through the resistance, no matter the cost, and whatever the sacrifice. Pressfield says little about how to actually fight the war, but by laying it out in such start terms, he certainly challenged me to ask some hard questions about what it really takes to pursue the arts vocationally.

Hondo, Louis L'Amour

See my thoughts on Sacckett above, for how this book made it to my list this year. According to the jacket blurb, John Wayne called Hondo the greatest western novel ever written. I was warmly surprised by the occasional moments of real poetry in the book-- Louis L'Amour's description of the southwestern landscape often reflects real experiential knowedge and great love. That said, I was startled by the explicitly racist undertones of the book. Indigenous people (in this case the Apache) are presented as vicious savages whom the white hero of the book greatly respects, for their woodcraft and warrior culture, but also exceeds in every respect. 

Blossoms in the Valley, Dr. Thomas Choy

Dr. Choy was psychiatrist-in-charge at the Schizophrenia Program at the Scarborough Hospital for many years; in Blossoms in the Valley he shares the heart-felt stories of 10 real-life people he encountered in his practice who have recovered from schizophrenia. Choy speaks very eloquently about the importance of maintaining hope in the midst of mental illness, and of adopting a strengths-based approach to treatment. I read Blossoms in the Valley for a course on psychopathology I am currently taking through Tyndale University, and, while it was required reading, it challenged me deeply to reflect on the realities of psychopathology and how our society responds to the mentally ill.

Troubled Minds, Amy Simpson

Another read for my course on psychopathology, Simpson's book deals especially with the way mental illness is stigmatized and demonized in church communities, specifically. Writing as the daughter whose mother suffered from schizophrenia, Simpson shares some poignant reflections on the was Christians often respond in harmful, hurtful ways to the mentally ill. A very important read for church leaders.

Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor

I was expecting a deeper exploration of the spiritual, theological and emotional dynamics involved in letting go of the vocation of being a pastor. As it was, Leaving Church is more a memoir about being called to ministry than it is about the struggle to leave ministry (she only makes her decision to "leave church" in the final third of the book). Even so, I find Barbara Brown Talyor's writing thought-provoking, and found much I could personally resonate with in this personal account of what it's like to be a pastor.

Music, Ecstasy and the Brain, Robert Jourdain

I posted a full review of this book a few months ago, in which I dissect some of the philosophical bones I had to pick with Jourdain's analysis of the phenomenology of musical experience. Those bones notwithstanding, I have to say that his detailed discussion of how the human brain perceives music, processes it, and translates it into emotional experience inspired me personally to thank God for how fearfully and wonderfully we are made, to meditate on the deep connections between musical expression and religious experience, and to listen more intently to some of my favorite music. In short, it helped me become more ecstatic in my own appreciation of music. 

On Psychology and Faith, A Theological Exploration of Psychotherapy (III)

A sobering question that rises for me as I reflect on the findings of psychology in relation to my Christian faith, is the tenuous nature of the “self”; the filament-thin connections, I mean, between all the different aspects of our selves that together make us who we are. This often hits me most sharply when I’m learning about neuroscience in the context of my study of psychology. Although there are still vast regions of the brain that remain uncharted, still, humans have discovered amazing amounts of information about what makes our grey matter work. When I come across detailed discussions of the brain’s inner-workings, however, I often struggle with feelings of existential dread. If the brain really is a network of cells and synapses, charged with electricity and surging with chemical reactions, and if this really is what our thoughts “consist of,” then what is there about those thoughts that makes them more than merely those pulses and charges and chemical reactions.

These questions intensify for me when I discover how quickly certain medications can alter a person’s personality or transform their mental state. If ingesting a tiny amount of some specific chemical compound or other can actually change how we experience our selves on a fundamental level, you can’t help but wonder what a person really “is,” that it can be so easily manipulated by such material means.

A book by Christian Sociologist Christian Smith called What Is a Person? recently helped me wrestle through these questions. Smith defines a person as a “conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending centre of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who . . . exercises complex capacities for agency . . . in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with [other selves] and the non-personal world.” It’s certainly a mouthful of a definition, but each morsel in there has been carefully chosen to express something about the fundamental nature of human personhood. When you take the time to unpack it, you start to see that what makes me or you you or me is a subtle, intricate interaction of realities that together are greater than the some of their parts.

This is actually a central idea in Smith’s definition of personhood, something he calls the concept of “emergence.” According to Smith, emergence refers to “the process of constituting a new entity with its own particular characteristics through the interactive combination of other, different entities that are necessary to create the new entity, but do not contain the characteristics present in the new entity.” Emergence occurs when two or more entities at a “lower level” interact, serving in this way as the basis for a new, “higher level” entity with characteristics that cannot be reduced to those of the lower entities. With this definition in mind, we can say that a person is an “emergent reality,” coming into being through the “lower level” interaction of our bodily components, our mental and emotional capacities, our relationships with others, and so on, in a such a way that the whole of who we are is greater than the sum of these individual parts.

The value of this concept in understanding the self—especially from a Christian theological perspective—is the way it guards against reductionism, the modern tendency to view human persons as “nothing but” the material elements of which they are composed. Smith refers to the reductionist move as “Nothing Buttery,” and argues that such a view keeps us from understanding the full breadth and depth of what it means do be human. In contrast to this, an emergent view of human life insists that there are higher, irreducible levels of meaning and purpose that are not immediately present in the lower levels of human existence. This non-reductionistic view intersects meaningfully with a theological anthropology, which has always insisted that there is more to us than our biological matter.

Of course, the Christian tradition has long maintained that there are spiritual realities emergent from the material components of human life. I often feel, however, that this is not well understood in popular Christian teaching. A common Christian assumption is that the spiritual is separate from and more important than the physical, and certainly not in any way related to the material. Smith’s discussion of emergence is a helpful reminder that, whatever the “spiritual” aspect of human life may be, it is emerges from the material, depending on it in some way while being at the same time “greater than the sum of its material parts.” This encourages a more holistic, and ultimately more biblical approach to things like worship, prayer, and other Christian practices, one that engages the body along with the mind and the spirit.

While Christians are not usually guilty of reductionism when it comes to spiritual things, and rightly argue against seeing human beings as “nothing but” their material bodies, a perspective like Smith’s helpfully guards us against an error Christians often make in practicing reductionism in the other direction. By this I mean the tendency of Christians, and especially of evangelicals, to reduce human persons to “nothing but” their immaterial spirits, “contained” in physical bodies which have no importance beyond their role as “vessels” for the spirit. This shows up in the work of ministries that emphasize “saving souls” while downplaying “social justice” and denigrating “the social gospel.” It shows up more subtlety in the common evangelical suspicion of creation care and environmentalism as legitimate Christian concerns. Christians can be just as “Nothing Buttery” when it comes to spiritual things as secular people can be when it comes to physical, and a deep engagement with sociological ideas like the ones presented in What is a Person? would help us guard against this kind of unbiblical dualism.

On Psychology and Faith, A Theological Exploration of Psychotherapy (II)

I did not fully appreciate the schism that exists in some circles between psychology and the Christian theology, until I took some introductory-level counseling courses for my Masters of Divinity, when I was preparing for ministry back in 2004. That was some 20 years ago now, of course, and the schism seems less wide now than it did back then. Between the various efforts in secular culture to shine a spotlight on the very real challenges of mental illness, on the one hand, and the good work of Christian psychologists like Larry Crabb, Mark McMinn, and Grant Mullens, on the other, there seems to be much more cross pollination between these two disciplines than there was two decades ago. Back then, one of the hotly debate topics in my pastoral counseling courses was whether or not there could be any reconciliation between faith and psychology at all; and though none of them were endorsed by our instructors, I did read a good number of books by evangelical pastors, back then, that issued a flat-out, resounding “no!” to the question.

Today, as I say, there is less a schism than an uneasy cohabitation. Certainly most clergy that I know and work alongside will agree unbegrudgingly that psychology has its place. Many churches I know offer bona-fide Christian counseling services, and those that don’t frequently refer parishioners to such services. The Christian embrace of psychology is not universal, by any means. I still have colleagues among the clergy who cock questioning eyebrows when discussing the reality of mental health in the church. Richard Beck, one of my favorite psychologist-theologians, recently did an extended series on his blog about the challenges many Christians face in understanding and responding well to mental health issues (I’d encourage you to check out that series here). So there are still many corners of Christendom where psychology, and the issues it addresses, are viewed with great suspicion.

As someone who has studied psychology at length, and worked for many years in pastoral ministry, who has, as it were seen both sides of the fence, I find this suspicion difficult to understand. As someone who has personally benefitted from the work of a trained therapist, I find it regrettable. My personal conviction is that the theories, findings, hypotheses, and models-of-the-self provided by psychology can actually expand and enrich our theology as Christians, and the help that psychology can provide to those suffering mentally is a gift that should be welcome in the church.

I have wondered if one of the reasons Christians might feel uneasy about making space for psychology in the ministry of the church has to do with an incomplete, and largely unbiblical understanding of what human beings are. In Christian circles, we tend to think of human nature as a body/soul duality in some sense. Sometimes this is divided even further, to a body/spirit/soul dichotomy, or a mind/body/spirit division, but the key point is that “we” (whoever we are) are not our “bodies.” The true “me” is the immaterial, interior, soul within, but not the flesh and bone vessel that contains it.

Biblically, however, human beings are not so much “souls” contained in “bodies” as they are body/soul unities. Space precludes an extended exploration of this claim, but most contemporary theological readings of the scripture point in this direction: that the human being is not a body/soul duality, but a unity.

We do not “have bodies”; we are bodies.

Neither do we “have souls”; we are souls. And body and soul together make the human creature what it is. In lieu of an extended biblical exegesis, let me simply point you to the bodily resurrection of Jesus to make this point. Our bodies are not immaterial parts of ourselves, easily cast off when no longer needed. They are so integral to who we are that we are promised, in the Christian hope, resurrection bodies like the resurrection bodies of our Lord.

If it’s true, this claim has all kinds of implications when it comes to making sense of psychology as a Christian, but two stand out in particular to me. On the one hand, it would mean that, in principle, Christians should not hesitate to seek the help of psychologists for mental unwellness, any more than they’d hesitate to see a doctor for a broken bone. If the body and the soul really do make an integrated whole, then it stands to reason that both can legitimately be addressed by modern medicine, and neither is “off limits” as a domain of scientific understanding.

On the other hand, the body/soul unity we discover in scripture reminds us that both can and should be an object of Christian care, concern, and compassion. If the body is integral to being human, then caring for its physical wellness matters. And if the soul—the “inner self”—is inextricably bound to the body, then caring for our mental wellness matters just as much.

There is more to say, certainly, about the role of psychology in a Christian understanding of the self. More to say, for instance, about acknowledging the limits of psychology. And more to say about the way that Christian faith imposes its own unique ethic on the use and practice of psychology. But if nothing else, the fact that humans are as much their minds as they are their bodies should assure us that there is a place in a Christian understanding of the world, for the things that psychology can teach us about ourselves.