Avatar, Star Wars, Pantheism & Deism

"The great mother does not take sides, Jake. She only maintains the balance of life."

James Cameron's film, Avatar, marked his triumphant return to the big screen after an absence of a dozen years when he swept the Oscars with Titanic.  Box office receipts so far for Avatar are $730,344,000 as of March 14, 2010, making it the highest grossing film of all time. Cameron's Titanic comes in second with $600,779,824. (Realize of course that these totals are not adjusted for inflation.)

I’ve seen Avatar twice now and continue to be stunned by visual graphics that Cameron pioneered in the film. The visual and technical effects signal a great leap forward in the way that Star Wars  set a new standard in film technology.

I also see another parallel with Star Wars. When Star Wars was released in 1977 there was significant controversy that surrounded it.  At that time, I was in my final year of my Th.M. program. I and most of my friends loved the film but despite this love, we did sit around the tables in the coffee shop debating the concept of the Force. We of course recognize that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Buddhism and Eastern thought, but that did not detract from being caught up in the epic story that was unfolding on screen. Others saw  Star Wars and its sequels as more sinister.  Norm Geisler and Jeff Amano wrote a small book entitled, The Religion of the Force, warning about its dangers.  While the incipient pantheism was without doubt a theme in the first movie, it became more developed in the sequels.  Interestingly, the pantheistic elements in the series were modified to accommodate the western sensibility, e.g. Obi Wan, Yoda and Anakin appearing at the end of Return of the Jedi does not fit the pantheistic mold. In true full-blown pantheism all personal distinctions cease at death and the life-force is reabsorbed into the impersonal unity of all life like a drop of water dripping into a lake.  Once the merging of the drop has happened, there is no individuality left. The energy continues but you disappear forever. 

Likewise the force was impersonal and encompassed both light and darkness (good and evil) without distinction, (although there are hints that darkness is more powerful than light).  This same theme is picked up in Avatar when Jake prays to the great mother Ewah. He is told by Neytiri  "The great mother does not take sides, Jake. She only maintains the balance of life." Questions of good and evil are irrelevant in this  universal monistic worldview.

Christianly Today’s reviewer noted:

This notion of natural balance plays into the movie's spiritual side. The Na'vi revere the natural world; believing the whole planet is connected and alive with energy. It's akin to personifying the Earth as Mother Nature, but can also feel like pieces of Native American spirituality, New Age mysticism, and Wicca. Some Christians will be bothered by the worship of the Na'vi's unseen female deity—there are scenes of worship, rituals, and prayer to her. But vagueness about this entity makes it possible to view her not as a New Age goddess but as just one more strange piece of fantasy in this alien world. In fact, there's suggestion that this entity is Pandora itself: one big, living alien.

I wouldn’t quibble with this too much.  However, I think that this brings up another bigger question:  Why is it that we see this theme continuing to show up in many varieties in popular culture?  As I noted, the origin of this theme here in the West goes back decades, but we are seeing more and more nature spirituality, mysticism, Wicca (Mother Goddess worship-not a form of Satanism as some Christians assert).  As we have entered the post-modern era, is this a reaction against Christianity?

I am convinced that it is not a repudiation of historic Christianity per se.  Rather it is a repudiation of the Deism of the Enlightenment that has shorn creation of any sense of the spiritual, any sense of wonder, and replaced a respect for the creation with a utilitarian attitude which allows humans to exploit  the earth because we can.

Christianity as well as Judaism before it rejected pantheism and nature deities.  Contemporary conservative Protestantism has continued to hold onto the ancient doctrines of the faith on one level, but on a deeper level has capitulated to an Enlightenment worldview that is at best deistic, as opposed to historically Christian.

We watch the evening weather report and see maps detailing high and low pressure systems; storms developing far out in the Pacific or in the Gulf of Alaska; Doppler radar images that present us with the path of the weather systems as they make their way across the country; graphic representations of the predicted storm patterns extrapolated from past experience.  The weather is a natural process arising from naturally occurring patterns and governed by natural law.  The more data we have the more we are able to foretell what will happen.  We do not connect these patterns as having anything to do with God.  They operate simply by natural law.  If we only had enough data, we might even be able to control it.

This is how we as contemporary Christians unthinkingly view the natural order.  God is virtually uninvolved on a day-to-day basis.  He created the world to operate under natural law.  We even speak of miracles as a violation of natural law!

This deism, and materialism to which it has given birth has sucked the soul out of both creation and life for the modern human and left it empty seeking for a some kind of meaning and for connection with the divine.

This is not a Christian understanding of God’s relation to the created order.  Ian Barbour (Issues between Science and Religion) has noted that with within 75 years of Newton’s discovery of his laws of motion, the common orthodox Christian view of God’s relationship to the created order was virtually indistinguishable from that of the deists.  The only significant exception was that God occasionally broke into the system from the outside to do a miracle or two.

Historic and biblical Christianity asserts that God is both transcendent and immanent. He is not only “out there” (i.e.  beyond the material creation) but here (i.e. personally present within creation) as well.  If we look into the Old Testament, we see clearly the immanent and intimate personal presence and involvement of Yahweh with the natural order including bringing or withholding the rain, for blessing and even at times what we would call natural disaster. The New Testament too views the presence of God in the created order as immediate and intimate.  In fact, rather than having an independent existence, the apostle John, Paul and the author of Hebrews assert that not only is Jesus the creator, He is the sustainer of the universe as well,  the one that holds all things together with the word of his power.

We as 21st-century Westerners look at the material order as solid and having an independent existence. This is true, whether we are Christians of any sort or, if we are atheists. As Christians, we understand that God created the cosmos ex nihilo (that is out of nothing) and that while the universe looks to God as its first cause, it now continues on its own functioning according to the laws that God built into universe that creation. What is astonishing is that this is not historic Christian orthodoxy.

We only need to look back less than four centuries to see a very different understanding of the cosmos. Looking the Scriptures, we find the concept that God is intimately involved in the created order,  not only as the one who spoke everything into existence, but also as the one who continues to hold the universe together.

The shift in understanding of the nature of the created order arose from the implications of the work of Sir Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton was of course, the discoverer of gravity, and codifier of the laws of motion. Newton's view of the universe was that it was an incomprehensibly large cosmic clock that God had wound up at the creation and left to function on its own. Newton's understanding became a key plank in the origin and propagation of deism. During the Enlightenment (circa 1650—1800) deism became the popular religion of the intelligentsia in the English-speaking world as well as in France and Germany. The Deists believed that  a powerful and moral creator had ordered the cosmos according to both physical and moral laws. The cosmos that God had created was a closed system, because it was a closed system. It was self-contained and self-sustaining.  This creator God did not involve himself in the day to day operations, nor did he relate to human beings individually. 

The Deists denied miracles generally, and they specifically  denied the incarnation. Newton himself was a very devout religious individual who adopted a theological position of Arius fourth-century opponent of the great Athanasius. Arius had insisted that God was singular and indivisible, and hence could not be Trinity. The Word of God, spoken of by the apostle John was not himself God, but rather was the first creation of God, who in turn created everything else. The problem is that the pre-incarnate Christ is a creature who has” nothing proper to do with God.”  The Word was in short a demigod, powerful yet himself created by the One eternal God.  Athanasius understood that if Arius’ claim were to take hold that the possibility of salvation would destroyed.

Deism sank its roots deep into the psyche of Western culture. During the 17th century Deism was opposed by a group of scholars and theologians in England who sought to defend historic Christianity from the onslaughts of deism. One great irony of this defense, according to Ian G. Barbour (issues in Science and Religion, 37-55, esp. 37-40) was that within 75 years. The defenders of historic Christianity's view of God's relationship to the world was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Deists.

As Baxter Kruger has observed, the modern Christian mind has on the one hand conceptualized the creation as a kind of Energizer Bunny, i.e. creation maintains an objective existence separate from God.  Theoretically speaking, even were God to die the Energizer Bunny of creation would just keep going and going and going, until finally after millions or billions of years its battery was depleted.

We today as Bible believing Christians, who are the intellectual heirs of those discussions, are in many ways practical Deists. Our view of the nature of the cosmos is, by default, virtually indistinguishable from those who are Deists or even atheists. However, this is not a biblical position. We find in the Old Testament that God is intimately involved in the ongoing happenings in the created order. Whether these ongoing happenings have to do with weather earthquakes or pestilence or rain and sunshine Yahweh, the covenant keeping God of Israel in his role as Elohim the ruler of creation is intimately involved in all.

 The New Testament opens up an even more profound vista to us. We find that it is not just “ God,” who is involved in creation. It is specifically Jesus Christ, the beloved Son of the Father, who is both the creator and sustainer of all material and spiritual reality. The New Testament witnesses this reality, repeatedly.

We as laypeople still see inhabit the Newtonian clockwork universe on a day today basis. However, those working in the hard sciences proclaim that the Newtonian universe is dead. The reality that we now inhabit is one constructed by Albert Einstein on the one hand and the work of Quantum physics on the other.  The nature of reality is not one of the independent self-existence of each piece.  Rather the cosmos is dynamic and interconnected at a quantum level.

Friends of mine who are physicists tell me that whether looking at creation on the macro level of the Big Bang, or on the micro-level of quantum physics—the deeper the understanding the more questions of God arise in the researchers minds.

What/who is the logic behind the origin and the continuation of the Universe—it is a man, Jesus the Messiah.  It is through his creativity, love and goodness that there is something rather than nothing.  It is because of his love, goodness and faithfulness that we continue to exist day to day.

The scientific method while tremendously useful has hard limits.  It is material and only material in its orientation.  It cannot account for love, purpose, or beauty.

Alister McGrath decries the loss of the understanding of immanence in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment and argues that we must embrace the early Christian understanding of the “enchantment of nature” (The Reenchantment of Nature, Doubleday, 2002) as a place of God’s special presence and care.  This is theologically grounded in the scripture, grounded in the creation narratives as well as being a theme woven throughout the warp and woof of scripture.  It is the proper basis for ecology:  “The Earth is the Lord’s.” 

Pantheism asserts that nature/creation is God.  Deism contends that while God created the universe, it now exists on its own absent a divine presence.  Each view is not only inadequate if not heretical from a Christian perspective because each distorts the being of the triune personal God.  Neither view conceives of God as he has revealed himself to be: the personal, relational and loving trinity; a triune relationship whose humility and love and desire for relationship with his creatures caused him to change his eternal manifestation and draw humanity into his own personal life in the incarnation and to extend that life through his loving grace to a wayward and lost humanity who viewed Him as the enemy.