To end all culture wars

The theology in To End All Wars is so sound and explicit that it may turn off Christians reared on pop spirituality

COMING SOON TO A THEATER near you: a World War II drama featuring Kiefer Sutherland, one of the movie industry's hottest stars. It is rated R.

To End All Wars might have been pitched to the mainline filmmakers as Chariots of Fire meets Saving Private Ryan. Fans of the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, the true story of an athlete who refused to run in the Olympics on the Sabbath, will note the same Scottish accents, a similar soon-to-be church worker positively portrayed, and comparably high production values. But whereas Chariots of Fire, for all of its virtues, never got around to mentioning the gospel, To End All Wars amounts to a sustained meditation on the core of Christianity: Christ dying for sinners, and what that means in the most extreme trials of life.

To End All Wars is based on the true story of Ernest Gordon, the long-time chaplain at Princeton University. Mr. Gordon, who died just a few months before the film was completed, was a captain in a Scottish Highland regiment in World War II. When the Japanese took Singapore-in those early days of the war when Japan was sweeping away all opposition-Mr. Gordon was captured. He spent the next three years in a Japanese POW camp, enduring hardships, brutality, and spiritual challenges that became for him a crucible of faith.

The film, based on Mr. Gordon's autobiography Through the Valley of the Kwai, does not shrink away from the torture, degradation, and cruelty of the Japanese camp. It also dramatizes how evil breeds evil, even in its victims: Allied prisoners, struggling to survive in this dog-eat-dog environment, start adopting the values and behavior of their captors.

But then, to hold on to whatever shreds of their humanity are left, a number of prisoners remember their old vocations and decide to exercise their callings in the teeth of the most hostile surroundings. A former university instructor organizes a philosophy seminar, and prisoners get together, in the mud and squalor of the camp, to discuss Plato's philosophy of justice.

Another prisoner had been an actor. He forms a troupe to perform plays by Shakespeare (which he had thankfully learned by heart). A group with musical talents carves recorders out of bamboo, making themselves into an orchestra that plays Bach. (Yes, it sounds bad objectively, but, in a clever bit of filmmaking that renders the prisoner's point of view, to those deprived of every pleasure, it sounds heavenly.)

And, most significantly, a group of the prisoners, using a smuggled Bible, starts a Bible study. They mark out a secret church, with a cross in a small clearing in the bush.

They also form relationships with their guards, some of whom are transfigured from stereotyped villains into genuine human beings.

But the brutality reasserts itself. The Bible is confiscated (for a while), prisoners are punished and pushed into betrayals, compromises, and impossible moral dilemmas.

The issues they had been learning about in their "Jungle University" are tested. What is justice and can it really be achieved in a sinful world? What does it mean to love one's enemies? How could Christ take other people's sins upon Himself? What does it mean that Christ died for sinners, atoning for them and granting them free forgiveness?

Eventually, the allied forces liberate the camp, whereupon the prisoners have the opportunity to do unto their enemies what the enemies did unto them.

To End All Wars is the brainchild of producer Jack Hafer, an ordained Baptist minister who, while pastoring churches part-time, made a career for himself in the entertainment industry. He rose in the ranks to become the general manager of GMT Studios, supervising the financial and technical operations of a studio that turned out movies such as L.A. Story, Philadelphia Experiment, and Predator.

Forming his own production company, Gummshoe Productions, Mr. Hafer bought the movie rights to Mr. Gordon's autobiography. His goal was to make a film that would not be a "Christian movie," in the stereotyped sense of a low-budget vehicle for proselytizing that never breaks out of its subculture, but a good movie-good in Hollywood terms, good in its production values and its artistry, a movie produced and distributed through regular Hollywood channels-that also embodies and expresses a Christian worldview.

Mr. Hafer collaborated with director David Cunningham and screenwriter Brian Godawa, other Christians who had paid their dues in the film industry, and developed a script. After raising some $14 million from investors, the production company sought out the best filmmakers it could find to make the movie. Instead of doing everything on the cheap or seeking out Christians-who may be zealous but underqualified and unconnected to the movie industry-to play all the parts and to do all of the work, the production team brought in the most experienced, well-regarded professionals they could find.

They brought in Penelope Foster, a veteran producer and director, as co-producer. They signed up top casting agencies, enabling them to land some major stars. Three years ago, when the filming took place, Mr. Sutherland had already distinguished himself in some 60 films, but this was before his hit TV show, 24, the unity-of-time suspense drama now in its second season that has probably made him unaffordable to independent filmmakers today. But he was cast in To End All Wars as Lt. Jim Reardon, a young American prisoner who becomes the story's spiritual barometer.

The part of Mr. Gordon is played by the award-winning Irish actor Ciar‡n McMenamin. British actor Robert Carlyle, who starred in The Full Monty and Trainspotting, plays Major Ian Campbell, Mr. Gordon's cynical opposite. James Cosmo (Babe: Pig in the City) plays the resolute Colonel Stuart McLean, and Mark Strong plays Dusty Miller, the devout strongman.

The crucial parts of the Japanese officers-Ito, the camp commandant (Sakae Kimura); Captain Noguchi (Masayuki Yul); and Colonel Nagatomo (Shu Nakajima)-are played by actors who learned their craft under the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

Drawing on other respected film professionals for the design, camera work, editing, and special effects, the film was shot in Hawaii. It made the rounds of film festivals, where a mainline movie distributor picked it up.

Like other independent films, To End All Wars is first being released in selected markets, with plans for broader national release sometime early this year.

Films dealing with serious themes of any kind often have a hard time competing with the sex, sensationalism, and explosions that characterize most movie blockbusters. And yet, independent films with a positive message-such as My Big, Fat Greek Wedding-sometimes become breakout hits.

The question with To End All Wars is not only whether the general public will attend a film with such a powerful message. The bigger question is whether Christians will attend.

Here is a film that conveys the Christian worldview and that communicates the gospel more clearly and directly than any film in recent memory. But it is rated R. That alone will keep away a good number of Christian viewers who otherwise would crave a movie like this (see "Rating the ratings," p. 11). The violence is explicit. But the theology is also explicit. And many Christians today may draw away from that, as well.

Christianity is a challenging faith, full of complexities and mysteries, with depths upon depths of truth and insight. Just as the entertainment industry has often favored superficial entertainment over profound artistic expression, contemporary Christianity has often favored superficial pop spirituality to the red meat that is in the Bible.

To End All Wars does not present a conversion, after which one lives happily ever after. Nor does it present a "name it and claim it" solution to the hardships of life. Nor does it leap over the demands of the Christian life to shift attention to a fantastical apocalypse at the end of time.

Rather, it puts the life of faith in a worst-case scenario-which is not pleasant to contemplate-only to find in that crucible that it is refined into something beautiful.

The movie is also startlingly relevant to our own times, in ways not evident when it was first made. The movie was going to be shown at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 11, 2001, a showing that was canceled when the terrorists attacked.

Now that our nation is at war with terrorists and is approaching war with Iraq, the movie is more immediately relevant than when it was made. The movie, despite its title, is not anti-war, but it does take seriously Jesus' commandment that we should, on an individual level, love our enemies. What does this mean, and how can we do such a thing, especially in light of terrorist atrocities and the new cultural climate of fear and insecurity?

This is a movie that is challenging both to non-Christians and to Christians. Whether they flock to theaters to view this film remains to be seen. But if they do, they will come out deeply moved by the experience of having watched a really good movie.

A former university instructor organizes a philosophy seminar, and prisoners get together, in the mud and squalor of the camp, to discuss Plato's philosophy of justice.

NPNF1-02. St. Augustin's City of God and Christian Doctrine Author: Schaff, Philip (1819-1893)

Chapter 11. How Plato Has Been Able to Approach So Nearly to ...

Certain partakers with us in the grace of Christ, wonder when they hear and read that Plato had conceptions concerning God, in which they recognize considerable agreement with the truth of our religion. Some have concluded from this, that when he went to Egypt he had heard the prophet Jeremiah, or, whilst travelling in the same country, had read the prophetic scriptures, which opinion I myself have expressed in certain of my writings.1 But a careful calculation of dates, contained in chronological history, shows that Plato was born about a hundred years after the time in which Jeremiah prophesied, and, as he lived eighty-one years, there are found to have been about seventy years from his death to that time when Ptolemy, king of Egypt, requested the prophetic scriptures of the Hebrew people to be sent to him from Judea, and committed them to seventy Hebrews, who also knew the Greek tongue, to be translated and kept. Therefore, on that voyage of his, Plato could neither have seen Jeremiah, who was dead so long before, nor have read those same scriptures which had not yet been translated into the Greek language, of which he was a master, unless, indeed, we say that, as he was most earnest in the pursuit of knowledge, he also studied those writings through an interpreter, as he did those of the Egyptians,-not, indeed, writing a translation of them (the facilities for doing which were only gained even by Ptolemy in return for munificent acts of kindness,2 though fear of his kingly authority might have seemed a sufficient motive), but learning as much as he possibly could concerning their contents by means of conversation. What warrants this supposition are the 152 opening verses of Genesis: "In the beginning God made the heaven and earth. And the earth was invisible, and without order; and darkness was over the abyss: and the Spirit of God moved over the waters."3 For in the Timæus, when writing on the formation of the world, he says that God first united earth and fire; from which it is evident that he assigns to fire a place in heaven. This opinion bears a certain resemblance to the statement, "In the beginning God made heaven and earth." Plato next speaks of those two intermediary elements, water and air, by which the other two extremes, namely, earth and fire, were mutually united; from which circumstance he is thought to have so understood the words, "The Spirit of God moved over the waters." For, not paying sufficient attention to the designations given by those scriptures to the Spirit of God, he may have thought that the four elements are spoken of in that place, because the air also is called spirit.4 Then, as to Plato's saying that the philosopher is a lover of God, nothing shines forth more conspicuously in those sacred writings. But the most striking thing in this connection, and that which most of all inclines me almost to assent to the opinion that Plato was not ignorant of those writings, is the answer which was given to the question elicited from the holy Moses when the words of God were conveyed to him by the angel; for, when he asked what was the name of that God who was commanding him to go and deliver the Hebrew people out of Egypt, this answer was given: "I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, He who is sent me unto you;"5 as though compared with Him that truly is, because He is unchangeable, those things which have been created mutable are not,-a truth which Plato zealously held, and most diligently commended. And I know not whether this sentiment is anywhere to be found in the books of those who were before Plato, unless in that book where it is said, "I am who am; and thou shalt say to the children of Israel, who is sent me unto you."

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), the Roman Stoic philosopher, said this concerning the natural law:

There is in fact a true law--namely, right reason--which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men and is unchangeable and eternal. By its commands this law summons men to the performance of their duties; by its prohibitions it restrains them from doing wrong. Its commands and prohibitions always influence good men, but are without effect upon the bad. To invalidate this law by human legislation is never morally right, nor is it permissible ever to restrict its operation, and to annul it wholly is impossible. Neither the senate nor the people can absolve us from our obligation to obey this law, and it requires no Sextus Aelius to expound and interpret it. It will not lay down one rule at Rome and another at Athens, nor will it be one rule today and another tomorrow. But there will be one law, eternal and unchangeable, binding at all times upon all peoples; and there will be one common master and ruler of men, namely God, who is the author of this law, its interpreter and sponsor. The man who will abandon his better self, and in denying the true nature of man, will thereby suffer the severest of penalties, though he has escaped all other consequences which men call punishment. Francis W. Coker, Readings in Political Philosophy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), 151.

On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), letter to Judge William Johnson, (from Monticello, June 12, 1823)

The Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary, as distinguished from technical meaning; where the intention is clear, there is no room for construction, and no excuse for interpolation or addition. - Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, 1 Wheat 304; Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat 419; Brown v. Maryland, 12 Wheat 419; Craig v. Missouri, 4 Pet 10; Tennessee v. Whitworth, 117 U.S. 139; Lake County v. Rollins, 130 U.S. 662; Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1; Edwards v. Cuba R. Co., 268 U.S. 628; The Pocket Veto Case, 279 U.S. 655; (Justice) Story on the Constitution, 5th ed., Sec 451; Cooley's Constitutional Limitations, 2nd ed., p. 61, 70.

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