It turns out that Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ has come top of the league of TV complaints! I have yet to work out what the complaints about this were actually about. The usual repot is that Jesus has sexual fantasies about Mary Magdalene, but this is misleading. The crucial temptation that Jesus faces is to give up his mission and settle down to raise a family with Mary. But if he wasn't tempted by this, if he felt no attachment to life as an ordinary human being, then in what sense was the incarnation anything more than a fantasy itself? Still, you can always trust certain parts of the Christian community to complain noisily about something that they don't actually understand.
Theology and the Man in Black
I went to hear a paper at the University this evening entitled 'The Apocalypse according to Johnny Cash: Examining the 'Effect' of the book of Revelation on a contemporary apocalyptic writer'. As well as some fine music and lots of humour from YouTube , the paper was examining how we detect the effect of the Bible on the world, and using Cash's The Man Comes Around as a means of doing this. One of the papers themes was that because Cash doesn't name Jesus as the Man (who comes around) he has a weak Christology and leaves his work open to a range of interpretations of who 'The Man' could be - from Cash himself to George W. Bush! Lots of food for thought about how what we say is then heard and repeated in our culture, which has little understanding of the Gospel. But the thing that really stood out for me was the suggestion that it was possible to tell that Cash was really reading the Bible in this song (rather than just regurgitating what his traditio
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