Mixed-up morality

Paul Schrader’s new movie First Reformed (rated R for a disturbing scene of suicide) is a rare film that’s being praised far and wide for its thoughtful depiction of Christian faith. NPR hailed it as a “spiritually probing work of art.” The Washington Post described it as “a listening for God’s call.” Most intriguing, the San Francisco Chronicle called it a “seriously Christian movie.”

Except it’s not.

What it is is a movie that offers humanist philosophy masquerading as Christian profundity.

Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is a former military chaplain who, after losing his son to war and his wife to divorce, whiles away his time playing caretaker to a dying church. When parishioner Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks him to counsel her environmental-extremist husband who wants to abort their baby, Toller betrays startling Biblical illiteracy. When the husband asks if God can forgive us for what we’ve done to this world, Toller answers vaguely, “Who can know the mind of God?”

Um, we can. At least on this question, because the Bible answers it with absolute clarity. God can forgive any destruction of nature, just as He can forgive our destruction of ourselves and each other. Not surprisingly, the extremist begins to have more influence on Toller’s thinking than the other way around. And this activist awakening is presented as evidence of the pastor’s spiritual growth.

Ethan Hawke brilliantly captures the doubt many believers wrestle with, but the film never seriously engages with the counsel the Bible offers to deal with it. Toller is too despairing, too world-weary to be subject to such childish restraints as Scripture, as when he asserts his sexual relationship with a choir director wasn’t “real sin.”

It’s not intellectually serious, it’s not adult, you see, to view sex outside of marriage that way. And this is a film entirely populated by adults, all of whom are too proud of the maturity of their pain to turn, like children, to the comfort their Father offers.