Setting Free the Captives, Literal and Figurative

Advent imagery is very strong on release of prisoners.

One example is in a hymn called Hark the Glad Sound, which we sang at worship in the sanctuary at Shepherd of the Valley in Apple Valley, Minn., over the weekend.

He comes the prisoners to release
In Satan’s bondage held
The gates of brass before him burst
The iron fetters yield.

Such imagery is scarcely surprising, when one considers the source. It comes right out of the prophet Isaiah, who sought to offer a prophetic word of encouragement to Israelites exiled in Babylon.

But in what sense are people today prisoners in need of release?  The anwer turns, of course, on how one understands the reality of sin.

During the Reformation, Luther and Erasmus had a lively debate about what sin does to the concept of free will. Luther argued that sin throws the will into bondage. Erasmus thought that view was too extreme and discounts the degree to which, despite sin, humans are still made in God's image.

Reflecting on the concept of captivity from the comfort of  a comfortable suburban home is a rather odd experience. Though I live far from any literal prison, I see four possibilities:

• Literally in prison, but spiritually free

• Literally in prison, and also spiritually in bondage

• Literally free (not in prison), but spiritually in bondage

• Literally and figuratively free

Given these logical possibilities, it makes sense that St. Paul was such a formative explicator of the concept of spiritual freedom. For Paul, after all, spend considerable time in a literal prison cell.

Room for the Wrath of God? Not in "Salt"

I felt like some escapist summer fare at the cineplex, so I took a couple of hours of vacation time and went to see Salt, which was purportedly a spy thriller.

Excrebable, is what it was. Ludicrously stupid. Redundantly violent. The worst movie I've seen in years.

The basest of behaviors, however, can point us back to first principles. For me, that means the Christian alternative to the practically non-stop fit of vengeance wrought by Angelina Jolie's preposterous character.

Cf. Rene Girard, in Violence and the Sacred: "To make a victim out of the guilty party is to play vengeance's role, to submit to the demands of violence."

Sounds like Angie's Evelyn Salt, alright, beholden to a vendetta. Yes, she does switch vendettas midway through the flick, changing a Russian, retro-Cold War vendetta for her own personal one. But it comes to much the same thing: trying to put an end to violence through violence, not recognizing, or perhaps not caring, that constant retribution creates a ceaseless cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal.

The apostle Paul urged a different way in Romans 12:19: Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."

Angie's scriptwriters probably didn't see the right box office equation in that view of the world. (Although Werner Herzog certainly got a lot of ironic mileage out of the "wrath of God" in his film Aquirre, der Zorn Gottes.)



Girard again: "By denying religion any basis in reality, by viewing it as a sort of bedtime story for children, we collaborate with violence in its game of deception."

By shelling out $6 for a late-afternoon matinee of Salt, was I collaborating with volence?