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The Bible & The Matrix

By Tony Watkins.

International managing editor of CultureWatch,

and co-ordinator of Damaris Workshops

and Damaris Study Groups

The Matrix trilogy is one of the most significant phenomena in our culture at present. Christian leaders need to respond to it - and to films and the media in general - but how? Why is it important to make connections between the Bible and contemporary culture? How can resources from Damaris Trust help?

No film has ever generated as much discussion as The Matrix and its sequels, Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. Just six months after the first film came out, there were millions of postings on Internet discussion boards, many of them dealing with serious issues. Since then we've seen thousands of websites spring up which analyse the film from just about every viewpoint imaginable.

Is The Matrix Christian?

A variety of different groups have claimed The Matrix for their own. There has been a great deal of discussion within Christian circles about the metaphors, names and concepts within the film. Some of this is entirely valid; some of it tries to push the connections too far and comes unstuck; some, naively, even argue that The Matrix is a Christian film. Far too many Christians, it seems to me, have failed to allow for the fact that there are Buddhists who find it to be rich with concepts from their own worldview, plus Hindus, Gnostics, existentialists and postmodernists, not to mention fans of Greek myths and Arthurian legends.

Writers/Directors Andy and Larry Wachowski have used Christian ideas and imagery in remarkably sensitive ways (compare with Andrew Niccol's overwhelmingly negative use of Christian imagery in The Truman Show which was released the same year as The Matrix 1999). There are several obvious parallels with the gospel, with some of the most powerful and emotional in Matrix Revolutions. But the Wachowskis are not Christians - their first film was a lesbian film noir called Bound - and they did not set out to make a Christian film. One writer wrote that it 'functions as a kind of Rorschach [ink blot] test, setting in motion the universalized process of recognition . . . practically every orientation seems to recognize itself in it.'1

The Wachowski brothers were out to explore some of the biggest questions we humans face: What, if anything, is real and true? Is there any purpose in life? Am I free, or am I entirely driven by the laws of nature? There are many wildly different answers out there, and the Wachowski brothers have cleverly woven many of them into their story. Some people have criticised the films for what they see as a pretentious mishmash of influences and themes. But once you realise what's at the core, much of it begins to make sense.

First, there's an intellectual underpinning of postmodern theory. In particular, the Matrix trilogy draws strongly on the thinking of French intellectual Jean Baudrillard and his denial of reality. Second, there's a spiritual exploration of those big questions, hence why the elements from so many religions. Third, the narrative framework appears to derive from Joseph Campbell's idea of the Monomyth - the one hero myth which underlies every hero myth.2 Campbell believed that every myth essentially communicates the ideas of a certain strand of Hinduism. Fourth, the heart of the story is Neo's journey of self-discovery - the great quest of every human.

Searching questions

But what difference does any of this make to people in ministry? That all depends on what kind of ministry you want. If your congregation is made up entirely of older people, the Matrix trilogy may not be immediately relevant. But if you want a congregation which includes the under 40s, we need to ask some searching questions about why we struggle to connect with people of that age group, and why so many people are going out of the door but not returning.

All around us people are asking searching questions about the point of life. They want to know how to be happy and whether there really is such a thing as freedom. They want to know how they can be loved. But where do they go for answers? Not to the church - they don't believe that Christian faith has any answers worth having.

Instead, they go to the cinema because it is films like the Matrix trilogy which grapple with those issues. It's in the cinemas that they find their models to live by, their guidance for life, and their shared emotional and spiritual experiences. Many of those who have given up on church say it's because the church doesn't help them in their spiritual journey - it doesn't connect with life.3

The relevance of the Matrix phenomenon to ministry is that it has caught the imagination of huge numbers of people in a way that the church fails to do. It has made people ask some of the biggest questions of all in a way that the church fails to do. But it's not only the Matrix trilogy - it just happens to be the most significant example around. Films like The Truman Show, Gattaca, Mulholland Drive, Minority Report, American Beauty, Changing Lanes, Phone Booth, Bruce Almighty, etc. have all made people think. And it goes beyond film to television, music and contemporary literature. Today it is the media that shapes belief, influences lifestyle, and determines morality.

So how do we respond?

Two traps and a tightrope

Again and again the church has fallen into one of two traps. We either become submerged in the surrounding culture or we cut ourselves off from it.

The trap of conforming to the culture in which we live is obvious. We know that the world is an ungodly place. And yet for many Christians the world around us still has a strong pull. It's tempting for most of us to keep our heads down and blend in with everyone around us. And wouldn't life be easier for us if we played down the challenging dimensions of the gospel? We want others to approve of us, so we try to make ourselves likeable. We want them to see that we're relevant, in touch and cool. We don't want to put them off Jesus after all! All of this adds up to a strong pressure to conform to the pattern of this world.

But as soon as we lose our distinctiveness as Christians, our witness is wrecked. All we then have to offer people is a watered down version of the good news, sanitised by our personal internal spin-doctors. Even if we still feel we have something to say, who will listen when words and lifestyle don't match up?

But if we're not careful we can fall into the opposite trap: escapism. One of the famous Greek myths is the story of Odysseus sailing past the island of the Sirens who sang so sweetly that they enticed all passing sailors to their doom. Odysseus's solution was to plug the ears of his men with wax and have himself tied to the mast. When he heard the Sirens' song he pleaded with his men to cut him free. But they couldn't hear and just kept rowing on past, oblivious to the alluring voices.

It sounds like a good strategy for us too. Plug our ears and just keep on rowing. But once we start cutting ourselves off from the world around us, we stop hearing what people are saying, and they stop being able to hear us. Meaningful communication soon dries up. We isolate ourselves because we fear contamination. The result is that, while we may be very holy, none of it impacts on anyone outside the kingdom of God. We become self-righteous. In the end we become hypocrites claiming that God longs for lost people to come to him but refusing to do anything about it ourselves. Again, our witness is wrecked. The Pharisees of Jesus' time fell into the same trap. They were 'good' people: the most orthodox in their belief, the most faithful in their duty, the ones who knew the Scriptures best (just like today's evangelicals!). But they despised Jesus for mixing with 'sinners'. They maintained their purity only to discover that the Son of God had saved his most stinging criticism for them. The family of God should be a missionary family, but we'll never manage to do a thing if we keep ourselves shut away for fear of something tainting us.

So we have to walk a tightrope between conformity and isolation. Our message is a challenging one but we must be absolutely faithful to it. We must maintain our convictions in its truth. We must live by it, letting it shape our thinking and behaviour so that we are radically different from those around us. But we must also genuinely engage with those around us, letting them see that radical difference, and communicating our radical message in ways that they can both hear and understand. This is not the kind of balance achieved by compromising a bit on each side. Neither aspect is negotiable. We must be uncompromising about our distinctiveness as Christians and about understanding a world that needs Christ. This is being 'in the world but not of it.'4

Responding to culture

Engaging with our culture means responding at three levels: to personal issues in the lives of people around us; to issues within society generally; and to the media specifically. It's important that before we rush in with our pre-packaged (and sometimes inappropriate) answers, we learn to ask questions like:

* What are the real issues?

* What are the underlying beliefs, values and attitudes?

* What's good?

* What's bad?

* How do I respond?

Answering these questions with integrity means we have to spend some time grappling with what the media in our culture is saying, just as Paul must have done in Athens when he engaged with his pagan audience there, and used their culture to communicate his biblical message in relevant ways.

Linking the Word to the world

The process of making connections between the Bible and our world needs to go in two directions: we must work out how we make connections from the Bible to culture, and we must find connections from culture back to the Bible.

Connecting the Bible to culture should be an integral part of every sermon and every Bible study. We must help people see what this timeless, inspired and authoritative book says into the world in which we live. If we want people to realise that Christianity isn't a relic of the past, we must relate it to the present.

It's not just a question of sprinkling contemporary quotations through a sermon, but of understanding how the media are addressing exactly the same issues as the Bible, though from a very different perspective. Quoting from Matrix Revolutions may help you look contemporary, but does it actually help serve the purpose of the sermon which is to help people know God and know how to respond to him? The Matrix trilogy has some wonderful illustrations of parts of the gospel, but it doesn't go deep enough. However, understanding how self-knowledge is the central element to the story, for example, may be a powerful way of communicating the difference between the world's solution to the unrest within us and the biblical perspective that we need God if we are to find peace with ourselves. We, like Paul, need to know the culture well.

At the same time, we need to understand our Bibles better so that, when we see a film raise some big issues, we can fairly quickly begin to help both Christians and non-Christians understand what a truly biblical perspective on the subject is. When the Matrix trilogy makes people start asking, 'What, if anything, is real, and how do we know?' we must be able to help people understand the importance of revelation which transcends human knowledge, and the importance of our being made in God's image. If God has spoken to us, we are not limited solely to what we fallen, fallible, finite beings can work out for ourselves - he guarantees the existence of truth. And if we are in God's image we have a capacity to know that truth.

Dealing with the Unknown God

Paul talks about his ministry as 'demolish[ing] arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God,'5 and that is what we need to be doing every time we preach or lead a Bible study. The strongholds which we must demolish are not just in the thinking of non-Christians, but sometimes get rebuilt in the minds of Christians as they soak up the media's messages day after day. We must constantly be showing that the message of the Bible is true in a way that nothing else is, that it fits with the real world in a way that nothing else quite manages, and that it works in a way that nothing else can come close to.

At the same time, we must not be blind to the fact that God's grace is already at work in the world long before we get a chance to contribute. Every person who makes a film or a television programme, or who writes a song or a book is both made in the image of God and loved by God. Because they are image-bearers, they still have access to some truth and they still have some kind of inbuilt longing for God, even if they are doing their best to deny it. That means that what people create can still have elements of truth within it. If 'eternity is in the human heart,'6 that deepest of all longings can find expression in all kinds of ways. In his book Hollywood Worldviews, Brian Godawa argues that the search for redemption is at the heart of every powerful film. The solution is almost always human but the longing is there. I believe every human's pursuit of happiness is really a longing for shalom - an all-embracing peace that springs out of peace with God. So when we see a filmmaker including some truth in a movie, or when we spot the longing for redemption or shalom, we need to point people to it and say, 'Do you see that? Even someone who's not a Christian understands that this is important! Now what you worship as something unknown, I am going to proclaim to you.'

Damaris resources

Damaris Trust provides resources, workshops, information, books and computer programmes for people who want to relate Christian faith and contemporary culture. They can be contacted via their websites: www.culturewatch.org and www.damaris.org.