There are few better movies than Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, especially for Halloween.  I mean a guy dresses up as a bat to fight crime, seriously?  I’m not even sure what it is that makes it so good.  Is it the soundtrack by someone who may or may not be known as Prince?  I doubt it.  Is it the stupendous ‘80s stunts?  I doubt it. Is it the ridiculous, rocket powered custom Corvette? Maybe.

Batman 1989. Lobby Card.

Burton creates another world and populates it with characters apt for that world. And he succeeds in being other worldly while so many movies, especially today, can’t help but be mouthpieces for lame transient political causes.  Batman has stood the test of time. In fact this year marks the 30th anniversary of the film.  But it doesn’t feel old, the technology of the effects is not limiting to the story even 30 years on.  Aside from the Prince tracks, the Elfman themes are timeless and unmistakable to this day. There are even hints that the movie is older than it is.  The crazed Joker’s affinity for modern art while he defaces the works of the ancient masters, and God, are a jab at modernism from something older.  Most modern artists are as depraved as a playing card villain spray painting a museum.  The whole feel of the movie reminds me of some medieval feudal city state, and not just because of his armor collection.  Bruce Wayne Lord of the realm of Gotham, suits up to fight for his peasants when they need him.  The Joker and his besieging army even employ a sort of Trojan Horse when they are not using other means of subversion to attack the kingdom.  And good acting never goes out of style.  Keaton is Batman, to see him in other roles is to wonder what Batman is doing out of his movie.  And Nicholson is as bad as he need be. The one reminder of the movie’s age,  is how much more chaotic evil we demand of our villains today, being much more desensitized.

Gotham is dark, but it’s one light is photographer Vicki Vale.  Kim Basinger plays a Lady to Keaton’s Lord, complete with flowing hair and flowing gown.  She is beautiful, innocent, strong, capable, and feminine.  Oh for such women today, but that no longer seems to be allowed.  To maintain the theme of Arthurian myth, we even have a big of a love triangle with Vicki, Batman and Joker.  One of my favorite lines in the movie is from Vicki soon after she discovers that Bruce and Batman are one: “I just gotta know, are we gonna try to love each other?”  The kingdom is under siege, her lord is in the middle of fighting it’s battles against a mad man and she is wondering how their relationship is doing.  It’s just so wonderful.  Bruce says he would like to , but he has to go to work.  Reminding us that every man is a lord of his own manor, battling the world each day for his lady. The year may change, the price of the castle may vary, but the story line is the same, woman wants to be loved.  And that story should end, or begin in a cathedral, after he fights off his demons.

The other great line of the movie is from Nicholson near the end at the top of that cathedral: “I mean, I say I made you, you gotta say you made me. How childish can you get?”  And so one of the great themes of this and all Batman storylines:” we create our own demons.”  Oops sorry about that, slipped over to the other side there for a moment.  But there are few truer ideas in all of literature.  The best stories are of men and their own faults.  Blaming someone else for your problems is the essence of the coward.  Jack Napier made Batman, Batman made Joker.  We do it to ourselves.  Blaming someone else, or especially God for your problems is nothing new.  “The woman you gave me”  But it is certainly all the rage today.  And while we live in a world lit up by giant screens always in our faces, our world is become darker than Gotham.  We don’t allow Batman to be the hero.  Literally the newest iteration of the movie has no Batman, just Joker.  We don’t allow women to light the homes we come home too.  We drag her out in the streets of Gotham, butcher her hair, strip her of her flowing raiment and demand she work for the man.  The fairy tale which Vicki Vale preserved for us is banished from our public square.  And we have done this to ourselves,  we are worse than Joker.  And we are no less painted up, we put a happy face on our evil too.  It’s not murder it’s “a choice”.  It’s not the break up of the family, it’s ‘no fault divorce.’  It’s not the perversion of sodomy, it’s “a loving relationship”.  It’s not disobedience to God’s word it’s “Christian freedom” “a God thing” “God speaking to me”.  And so, like many stories told the right way up, Batman is more Christian than the stories we tell ourselves in many of our churches.  Did you ever dance with the Devil in the pale moon light?  Probably.  So knock it off and watch the movie tonight instead, when it’s nice an dark.  I’m not sure whether to watch in on VHS or HD digital.  But I doubt I can go wrong with either one.

Having a form of godliness,

but denying the power thereof

from such turn away

II Timothy 3:5

I have a latent post somewhere about the evils of the oft repeated: “I have a relationship not a religion”.  In our day that mantra, that catechism we might say, brings more problems than it is worth.  But the idea it was intended to guard against, is the point of this verse.  We all understand that religious institutions can become hollowed out in the middle.  The form remains but the Spirit is gone.  Today we are met with a lot of claims of Spirit with no form.  In fact form is thought to be bad, gnosticism as it used to be called.  Neither of these is particularly good on their own.  Gnostics attacking Catholics and other dead established churches is more of a sad joke than anything.  We can admit that having the form only is a bad thing.  But can we also admit that it is not just religious institutions which suffer from this problem?  Or perhaps we just need to realize that there are only religious institutions.  Culture comes from the ‘cultus’ the ‘cult’.  What we act out is what we believe and that belief system is religion, by any name.

Can we just put he Spirit back in the Body and get on with it?
Illustration by Luigi Schiavonetti. Etching. c. 1808.

The more I mess with establishments the more I find nothing there.  The lights are on, but no one is home.  The form is there but there is no power.  Which generally leads to defensiveness.  One of the starkest examples is taking place in our airports every day.  It’s security theater.  The TSA has a 98% failure rate.  That means that 98% of weapons get through their security, in test runs.  But everyone puts on their TSA costume every day and pretends they are accomplishing something.  And we the people put up with it for some reason.  Because the sad reality is we like dead religion, it makes us feel better to go through the genuflection of taking off our shoes, the penance of bowing to the scanners and the prayers we utter, “please don’t let me be picked for a ‘random’ screening”.  So we let this dead religion continue.

The rubric of theater is so apt for so many things.  We have security theater in our airports and safety theater in our workplaces.  As government drones force us into religious services known as safety meetings.  All with less life than the ascetic monk who died weeks ago and had just been thought to be going for extra credit.  Safety is a combination of skill and intelligence and has nothing to do with government statistics forced upon the masses like the rules of indulgence.  But put on your orange vests and get out your lumbar support and standup desks, and put your faith in the mighty OSHA.  Everyone is doing it.

We could lump in the rest of the alphabet soup of government agencies.  EPA worship has cost countless millions of dollars and even killed thousands with encyclicals like CAFE standards.  The same could be said for the EPA, FDA, or even the FAA.  Recent groundings of 737 MAX planes now appears to be an attempt by Boeing to comply with environmental regulations and FAA regulations and still turn a profit.  There is no power, does anyone even know what the original intent of any of these religions was?  What was the spirit of them for?  Who knows.  There is no spirit.  We bow down with no heart in it.  No sense of a better world, or of pushing frontiers in the name of our Creator.  Just lemmings whose parting words are no longer ‘godspeed’ but ‘be safe’.  Be safe for something, I forgot what.

More sinister yet is the death of our legal system.  This the heart of our turning from the real God to false ones.  The once great edifice founded on the British common law system which traces its roots back to Alfred the great, who got it from the Old Testament, in service of his God.  Today everyone is still there in their costumes, the judge wears a robe, the lawyers wear monkey suits.  In England the garb includes a powdered wig.  But for something that should be so important can you name your local judges?  Do you care at all what goes on there?  Do you care about the spray paint graffiti on this great edifice like, no fault divorce, complete lack of due process, and laws written merely to get someone we don’t like rather than to serve an actual standard of justice?  Even worse we created the home game, like the personal dashboard Jesus, we militarize millions of cops with their pocket judge and jury to go around accusing people of ridiculous traffic violations.  And just like the endless rules of the Catholic church, written in an unknown Latin, our rules are written in lawyer-speak, and number more than any man can count.  In the New Testament Jesus regularly mocks the Pharisees for their dead religion, more correctly their wrong religion.  But we shouldn’t separate them from their real task, they were the people’s lawyers.  And lest we think that was a theocracy and our system is so intelligently separate, church and state.  What exactly is a law?  It is imposing morality on someone, that’s how it works.  There are no laws which do not have moral backing.  Our Pharisees are lawyers and they have forgotten the purpose of law just like those whom Jesus ridiculed.  The hoops they create and then collect millions for navigating, are just as sinister.  And one day Jesus will damn them to eternal fire as well.  They mock the poor as they make their careers exploiting them, climbing ever further up the greasy pole, to President or behind-the-scenes-government-lawyer.  Don’t put your faith in this system with David French, be Andrew McCarthy, come to the light.  Don’t get caught up in years and years and piles of money required to get to the end of any trial.  Don’t show them respect, seek Church arbitration as Paul counseled.

And even worse, we forget that politicians are the lawyers who write all these crazy rules.  Politicians, who are usually the most disliked group of people on the planet.  Yet what we the people demand of them has less to do with character and statesman ability, and more to do with outward trappings.  Speech codes, dress codes, focus group driven everything.  This reached it’s height under Obama, who not only had to be clean and articulate with properly ironed pants, he had to have the right skin color.  The next diversity qualification is searching for a woman or half-pseudo-sexual-deviant.  And what happens when you don’t follow this religious creed?  Ask Trump.  It is fair to say that his supporters are the brave few who want relationship and not religion.  They like him, and they don’t care about D.C. dogma.

And finally the most prevalent form without a soul, is science.  The scientific method was a simple organized way of testing the real world.  It had rules for ensuring that experiments could be conducted and repeated.  A peer system was created to ensure that truth was discovered, with no manipulation.  This system became so successful among the applied sciences that every field of study wanted in on the action.  And so these sacraments were adopted in all of academia.  And as Satan ate out their heart with deception and evil, men didn’t want to face the truth they were discovering.  Science begun by faithful Christians serving their God, became a framework for lies and manipulation.  Men in white coats need only utter the sacred word ‘science’ and the masses bow down, casting their money upon the alter.  That’s not a baby, it’s a mass of cells, a priest of  Science says so. Macro evolution is real despite having no scientific evidence, just put your faith in the institution.  Chromosomes no longer matter, gender is a social construct, professionals said so.  Sex for fruitful procreation, can be ignored, we have a study.  Discipline of children can be ignored, we have a study.  Oh and also the planet is dying because humans drive cars.  Despite a fossil record containing 98% of species before humans tuned the first carburetor. Despite volcanic activity venting more gas than all the cars ever.   Just put your faith in science, and you can gratify your sexual urges and go to paradise with 72 virgins.  Excuse me, I get my false religions mixed up.  The form and the respect for Science and academia remain, but the power is gone.  Sure some mechanistic ends are still met, machines move, buildings are built, diseases are cured.  But no one knows why.  And soon, they will give it up, white robes and all, because woke, racism, patriarchy.

But I don’t really like this cathedral of the West in ruin, I want to turn away as Paul commands Timothy.  Can’t we have both form and Spirit?  Can’t we have religion and a relationship?  We Christians have the power of God, we can move mountains, why do we let the church die in exchange for all these false religions?  What is wrong with you people?  I think I know, you want a relationship with the world and not religious devotion to the One True God.  You want religion to be handled by all these dead systems. You don’t like the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, who brought you out of Egypt, he embarrasses you in front of all these false priests.  And you hate his son Jesus the Christ despite claiming to feel something about him.  So knock it off and put the Spirit back into this incredible form, built by the faith of our ancestors, before it’s too late.

In the Christian circles I have lived in my whole life, despite trying to escape, I often hear people say things like: “The Old Testament Law was impossible, that’s why Jesus had to come.”  Which I find, not to be true at all.  The whole point of the Law is that you are going to fail, and there are remedies for that failure.   What, you can’t sacrifice a few turtle doves?  You can’t stop cooking goats in their mother’s milk?  You can’t stop touching dead bodies?  Well even if you do we’ll give you a few days of separation to cleanse yourself, and you are back in the fellowship.  Or some of the harder ones; You can’t stop having sex with your neighbor’s wife?  You can’t stop pretending your friends butt is a woman?  Well there is a solution for that too, you are executed.  Problem solved!  What, you can’t be executed?  I think all of these things are eminently doable.  Now granted, not in our insane time.  People might make fun of you.

Moses with the Tablets of the Law. Guido Reni. C. 17th . Oil on Canvas.

It seems to me that some of the confusion comes because we mix up what Jesus said with the Law.  Jesus raised the ante, he was changing the paradigm.  He pointed out that the Law didn’t fix anything ultimately.  Hebrews makes the same point over and over.  The sacrifices had to keep coming, because the sin kept coming.  But it wasn’t impossible, and it wasn’t pointless.  What’s impossible is pleasing a Holy God.  But The Old Testament is about grace, which is why he made it doable.  And to this day the people still trying to keep that Law, namely the old Jews, those who rejected their Messiah, along with some Christians who still do what Paul said and treasure the Old Testament, are blessed immensely for it.  They have monitary wealth, mental health, technological advancement, peace of mind, and on and on the tangible benefits go.  We Americans’ are even benefitting from the vestiges of the Old Testament, originally the foundation of our system, which still remain in our common law tradition.  There is also some confusion because of Paul and Romans, but I’m not getting into that.

The Law said murderers should be put to death.  Jesus said that anger in your heart was the same as murder.   And by implication that those people deserve death too.  The Law said if you stole your neighbor’s wife you should be put to death.  Jesus said that lust in your heart is the same as adultery.  And by implication. . .  The Law was doable, pleasing an Infinitely Holy Being, not doable.  The problem is that the Jews thought they were pleasing an Infinitely Holy Being by keeping the Law.  They were hoping to be rewarded, not just in eternity but on this earth.  They thought that their good behavior warranted them being liberated from Rome.  Jesus raised the bar, he wanted to save not just them but the whole world.  And he didn’t just want to save it from political oppression, but to reverse all sin, even sin in the heart.  And so he sent his Holy Spirit to guide us.  So now we have an even more impossible task, and supernatural ability to do it.

I think a lot of the hand wringing over the Old Testament is just a complex excuse for pretending that God doesn’t care about holiness.  We know we should stop staring at our neighbor’s wife, we could stop.  But it’s easier just to throw up our hands and say “God demands perfection, and I just can’t do that”.  It’s easier to pretend that there are two Gods the OT God and the NT God.

It also saves us from actually having to think through the Old Testament.  The provisions of the Law are complicated, because the evil we weave is complicated.  There is no end to the evil of the human heart.  I am reminded of how the Jews turned rules about charity into and excuse for not taking care of their elderly parents.  There are even comments in the Law about possible perversions.  Don’t loan someone something when you know you are going to get it back in a jubilee year.

And then the real difficulty with the Law for our time: it’s so judgey.  Oh God do we really have to punish people who break your rules?  What about all those warm fuzzy grace banners?  Can’t we all just have tolerance?  Wasn’t Jesus a hippie?  Why do you have to be such a downer man?  And that gets to the heart of the Old Testament Law.  It is the community admitting what sin is collectively.  When someone breaks the rules of God, we the ‘congregation’, the people of God, the Church, don’t sweep it under the rug, we deal with it.  And we should be better at dealing with it than the world, according to Paul.  They should marvel at how we deal with it.  Sin is still serious.  That’s why Jesus had to die, it’s that serious.  Ananias and Sapphira just lied about their offering and they were put to death, in the New Testament.  And you can’t even tell someone that leaving theier spouse is unchristian?  The Old and New Testament are one, they express the revelation of one god, The One True God.  The divide is between modern American Evangelical churches and that God.  There is no interetestamental chasm.  There is a huge chasm created by the sin in our hearts.  So knock it off.  Because you can.