Posted on 12/04/2006 7:52:47 PM PST by Pyro7480
'The Nativity Story' Movie Problematic for Catholics, "Unsuitable" for Young Children
By John-Henry Westen
NEW YORK, December 4, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A review of New Line Cinema's The Nativity story by Fr. Angelo Mary Geiger of the Franciscans of the Immaculate in the United States, points out that the film, which opened December 1, misinterprets scripture from a Catholic perspective.
While Fr. Geiger admits that he found the film is "in general, to be a pious and reverential presentation of the Christmas mystery." He adds however, that "not only does the movie get the Virgin Birth wrong, it thoroughly Protestantizes its portrayal of Our Lady."
In Isaiah 7:14 the Bible predicts the coming of the Messiah saying: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel." Fr. Geiger, in an video blog post, explains that the Catholic Church has taught for over 2000 years that the referenced Scripture showed that Mary would not only conceive the child miraculously, but would give birth to the child miraculously - keeping her physical virginity intact during the birth.
The film, he suggests, in portraying a natural, painful birth of Christ, thus denies the truth of the virginal and miraculous birth of Christ, which, he notes, the Fathers of the Church compared to light passing through glass without breaking it. Fr. Geiger quoted the fourth century St. Augustine on the matter saying. "That same power which brought the body of the young man through closed doors, brought the body of the infant forth from the inviolate womb of the mother."
Fr. Geiger contrasts The Nativity Story with The Passion of the Christ, noting that with the latter, Catholics and Protestants could agree to support it. He suggests, however, that the latter is "a virtual coup against Catholic Mariology".
The characterization of Mary further debases her as Fr. Geiger relates in his review. "Mary in The Nativity lacks depth and stature, and becomes the subject of a treatment on teenage psychology."
Beyond the non-miraculous birth, the biggest let-down for Catholics comes from Director Catherine Hardwicke's own words. Hardwicke explains her rationale in an interview: "We wanted her [Mary] to feel accessible to a young teenager, so she wouldn't seem so far away from their life that it had no meaning for them. I wanted them to see Mary as a girl, as a teenager at first, not perfectly pious from the very first moment. So you see Mary going through stuff with her parents where they say, 'You're going to marry this guy, and these are the rules you have to follow.' Her father is telling her that she's not to have sex with Joseph for a year-and Joseph is standing right there."
Comments Fr. Geiger, "it is rather disconcerting to see Our Blessed Mother portrayed with 'attitude;' asserting herself in a rather anachronistic rebellion against an arranged marriage, choosing her words carefully with her parents, and posing meaningful silences toward those who do not understand her."
Fr. Geiger adds that the film also contains "an overly graphic scene of St. Elizabeth giving birth," which is "just not suitable, in my opinion, for young children to view."
Despite its flaws Fr. Geiger, after viewing the film, also has some good things to say about it. "Today, one must commend any sincere attempt to put Christ back into Christmas, and this film is certainly one of them," he says. "The Nativity Story in no way compares to the masterpiece which is The Passion of the Christ, but it is at least sincere, untainted by cynicism, and a worthy effort by Hollywood to end the prejudice against Christianity in the public square."
And, in addition to a good portrait of St. Joseph, the film offers "at least one cinematic and spiritual triumph" in portraying the Visitation of Mary to St. Elizabeth. "Although the Magnificat is relegated to a kind of epilogue at the movie's end, the meeting between Mary and Elizabeth is otherwise faithful to the scriptures and quite poignant. In a separate scene, the two women experience the concurrent movement of their children in utero and share deeply in each other's joy. I can't think of another piece of celluloid that illustrates the dignity of the unborn child better than this."
See Fr. Geiger's full review here:
http://airmaria.com/
Are we humans or are we robots? God gave us the heart and the mind. We have a choice. He did not compel me.
(Also note that 'works' follow 'faith', and not the other way around)
Are you suggesting the Apostolic Church teaches otherwise?
Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ: Is the above presumptuous to you ?
You know, if you think about it from the Reformed logic, why would +Paul even have bothered to write his Epistles to these churches if it was all a predetermined thing?
The reformed theology claims that true believers would never "fall off" and those who did were never believers to begin with. The reprobate were never among the 'elect,' and it was not their decision, but God's, so what business did +Paul have correcting that which God rejected?
And those who believed that they believed, but turned out to be reprobate, must have presumed that they have faith for an unspecified period of time. And some must, no doubt, continue presuming.
After all, it costs nothing to presume and the rewards may be worth it. Take out 'whatsin-it-for-me" the life-everlasting formula out of the Christian equation and see how many people profess faith in God for His glory alone.
Then you must believe that man's rebellion against God is not really a "rebellion," but something God determined must happen. It was then God's decision, right?
No, man's rebellion was a real rebellion, AND God determined it must happen. God could have prevented it in any number of ways, but did not. That says it was part of His plan. However, this doesn't relieve the participants from their culpability. God did not zap them with sin, forcing them to commit it. He left them by themselves, knowing what would happen.
A price for what? What did man do that God didn't want or allow him to do? Did man's rebellion change anything God did not choreograph from before all ages? Where is the crime?
Man did nothing God didn't allow him to do. So what? Is the only way for a price to be required if man managed to surprise God somehow? All of God's creation is His to do with as He pleases. He has chosen to allow all of us to commit crime. That is part of His plan. Where is His duty to prevent it? When He chose to allow crime, along with that came a demand for a price for that crime. That is, if any are to be saved. It's a package deal that God fully thought through before He instituted it. The argument you appear to be making is that under our view, God isn't being "fair". The last thing in the world I want from God is "fair".
It's like asking that you to pay a penalty for getting sick.
No, all sin is through free will choice. We are still responsible regardless of whether choosing not to sin was an option. God doesn't owe us that option. We follow our nature, unless it is changed by God.
And what was God supposedly so 'angry' about? He didn't know that we would turn out to be a rotten bunch? Why was He 'offended?'
I'm not sure if you are referring to something specific. If not, then sin in general is what makes God angry and offended. He has the power to eliminate sin, so as to never be angry, but He chose not to do that.
My parents had thrown me out of the house. I was sleeping in a bed roll high in the hills of Berkeley, and coming down the hills to make my communion at the Episcopal Church which had a daily celebration.
Now my parents have passed and I have a child older than I was then. And it was never in any of our plans that I would be arguing belligerently for the RCC point of view anywhere.
Moral of story: Make your plans, but hedge your bets, except where Jesus is concerned. There go for broke.
"Unless you believe you will not understand" is alleged to be a mistranslation of Isaiah 7:9.But whatever the provenance or accuracy of the rendering, the thought is accurate. God answers (since "rewards" will scandalize those who have taken one sip and think they have drained the cup) faith with increased understanding, always, as it seems, asking us to take the first step out of love for Him. Only after we have stepped off the edge do we see that it was He all along, from before the idea of taking any steps at all occurred to us. He made our feet itch; He made us long to set out; He brought us to the edge; He gave us the "subjective principle of volition (Kant)" to step out over the edge; and then it was He who showed us how we were surrounded, protected, born up -- so that our foot would not be suffered to dash itself against the least little stone -- with love.
This is one game, the only game,where the only smart thing to do is bet all you have on each roll.
No, all sin is through free will choice. We are still responsible regardless of whether choosing not to sin was an option.
Isn't it contradictory to say you have a choice if you can't choose it?
"This is a remarkably important story."
Indeed it is, on many levels. Tonight, for those of us in The Church, it can teach us among other lessons that what we have been seeing here on this thread and our reactions to it, have likely been very, very unfair. Now I'm going to be charged with Gnosticism, but you know what I mean.
If you (being, for the sake of argument, a hetero-male-human type personnel) treat women like pleasure machines, one day you will wake up surrounded by machines, and long for human company. (I don't know about you all, but I look on Hugh Hefner and weep in grief and horror -- I'm serious.)
If you think money is the only important thing one day you will wake up surrounded by assets and commodities you own, when what humans need and long for is to be owned by the one who made us.
If you envy your brethren, one day everyone less well off than you will be a threat, and everyone more successful than you will be an insult, when what we all long for is friends for whose losses we can grieve and in whose joys we can rejoice.
And so on. The wrath of God is not in God as such, but in the essence of not loving God. The wrath of God is merely the manifestation of what our sins really are.
The Dawg is silent.
One of my favorite passages in the Hobbit is, "Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck just for your sole benefit?".
Just suppose all of what has been planned and purposed for us is part of a larger drama being played out cosmicly beyond our time and space and we are a part of it and maybe even the central part. Suppose that real life experience of Job was already played out with Adam and Eve and Satan had his audience with God just as He did over Job, however God had already planned the satisfaction for sin that Lucifer could never pay for his own sin. Remember Lucifer's sin was he wanted to be on a par with God and he was judged for it and lost his place, access and ultimately his freedom. He can't create but he tries to do the next best thing and that is to co-opt God's creation; turn it to himself away from God. His problem being that when man succombed to his temptation, instead of turning to Satan away from God, man turned to himself and made of himself a god. Thus his futile battle over the minds and hearts of God's elect. That our salvation is not only a display of God's justice in paying the penalty for our sin but a grand display of His grace and mercy to us and an exhibition of His triumph over Satan and his followers.
The rest of it will work itself out. Our mission is clear, and as lovely and easy as a child on its mother's breast.
If you get drunk, you are certainly responsible for trashing your own judgment and reaction time and all.
But while drunk you get behind the wheel of a car and, as happened here, kill a baby in a baby carriage.
So, you didn't have a choice, not really; your faculty of choice was trashed, by John Walker or Monseigneur Courvoisier, or, ah, Mr. Night Train.
So how fair is it to lock you up for vehicular homicide when all you "really" did was DUI?
I mean it about it's being a serious question. I used to think we ought to lock up ALL DUIs for a long time no matter what happened, even if no one was hurt.
Now I'm thinking the REAL crime is renouncing what makes humans dignified, to wit: reason and a love of the good, however corrupt; and the law compliments us by ignoring our renunciation and holding us as responsible as if we weren't trashed.
Kolo is an attorney as well as a baklava-eating schismatic, so he may have a(nother) needed correction for me.
You know, if you think about it from the Reformed logic, why would +Paul even have bothered to write his Epistles to these churches if it was all a predetermined thing?
It was God's will that he (Paul) do so.
The preaching (and teaching) of the gospel is the way that God accomplishes His will regarding the salvation of men.
The reformed theology claims that true believers would never "fall off" and those who did were never believers to begin with. The reprobate were never among the 'elect,' and it was not their decision, but God's, so what business did +Paul have correcting that which God rejected?
It is also God's will that Christians grow in godliness. The teachings of scripture are also useful for facilitating this growth.1 Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:I don't find scriptural evidence that Paul attampts to correct the reprobate, but rather, ... that he warns the believer against reprobation.
17 That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.
And those who believed that they believed, but turned out to be reprobate, must have presumed that they have faith for an unspecified period of time. And some must, no doubt, continue presuming.
I believe that there are those ... though I believe that they are few ... that will taste the gifts of God ... and make a conscious decision to walk away from them. For such ... the reprobate ... there is no coming back.Hebrews 6:4 For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost,After all, it costs nothing to presume and the rewards may be worth it. Take out 'whatsin-it-for-me" the life-everlasting formula out of the Christian equation and see how many people profess faith in God for His glory alone.
5 And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come,
6 If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.
Note that God did not offer a salvation devoid of benefit to us. It was not His will.
Please forgive me for butting in, but this whole thing started with Marlowe defending YOU! I think you have misinterpreted his 7646. Marlowe is not Catholic and is certainly no liberal. You're going after the wrong man. :)
My musings on the Revelation prophesy of the heavens being rolled back like a scroll are different from yours --- which might be expected since I am drawn to geometric physics.
To me, it is literal and is related to the structure of physical reality which I see as more than a four dimension block, three of space and 1 of time.
I tend to agree with Vafa and Wesson that there are more temporal (time) dimensions – also that the extra dimension(s) can explain mass. (Particularly expanded dimensions versus compactified Kaluza-Klein dimensions.)
After all, the Higgs field/boson which the standard model "needs" to explain ordinary matter (5% of the critical density of the university) has not yet been observed or made by either Fermilab or CERN. For those interested, 25% of the critical density is dark matter, high gravity such as in the center of galaxies. The remaining 70% is dark energy which behaves like negative gravity – or space/time “outdents” accelerating the expansion of the universe.
That is what I see happening in the Revelation prophesy, an inter-dimensional negative gravity phenomenon which accelerates the universe, making it “roll up like a scroll.”
BTW, Lisa Randall suggests (and I agree) that the reason gravity is so small by comparison to the other three fundamental forces (electromagnetic, strong atomic and weak atomic) is that gravity is inter-dimensional.
And my personal favorite is offered by P.S. Wesson in his article Five Dimensional Relativity and Two Times: that time-like paths of massive particles in four dimensions can arise from null paths in a fifth dimension, where there is an oscillation around the hypersurface we call space/time. His article also suggests that a particle in the fifth dimension could be multiply imaged in the four dimensions, and that the weak equivalence principle in the four dimensions may be the symmetry of a corresponding five-dimensional metric.
Or to put it another way, instead of there being 1080 particles in the visible four dimensions, it could actually be the case that as little as a single particle in the fifth dimension is imaged 1080 times in the four dimensions of normal human experience.
Any hoot, that’s my two cents for the discussion…
As space expands, the volume of the vacuum expands. That requires an increase in energy. The energy comes from the gravitational field that already exists. So, the strength of the field drops and the expansion accelerates. The expansion of the universe is driven by vacuum expansion. During the inflationary period, for the first nanosec of the universes existance, the vacuum energy was must higher due to the intial symmetry breaking at the beginning of time. Inflation ended and expansion began when the vacuum energy dropped.
Much of the dark matter is contained in particles called axions, which were found recently. The process that generates them, is what provides for CP symmetry in QCD/standard model.
"Vafa and Wesson that there are more temporal (time) dimensions – also that the extra dimension(s) can explain mass. (Particularly expanded dimensions versus compactified Kaluza-Klein dimensions.)"
Each of those particle models, with more than one time, has a corresponding string theory with compactified dimensions. The theories are the same, just different mathematical ways of looking at the same thing. Wesson's is a simple 10, or 11d string theory.
Randell's theories are on what's called anti-DeSitter Space, as opposed to DeSitter space. In DeSitter space, all the energy appears in the universe and the vacuum, and doesn't move back and forth. In anti-DeSitter Space it does. In string theory there are open strings and closed strings, which are loops. The end points of the open strings must lie on a brane. The universe consists of the strings and the branes. All interactions are string energies passing through the brane, between strings. If the ends of the string, weren't on a brane, the energy would arbitrarily wander off from the universe. Closed strings can't lose energy from the ends, because there is none.
In anti-DeSitter space(Randell) the grvitational coupling constant is high, the gravitons, which are closed strings, can lie off the branes and outside the universe. Some are essentially "in the vacuum". So, most of them do. The result is the few that remain in the regions around the brane, result in a weak field.
That Higgs boson experiment will be done next Nov. The guns haven't been as big as required so far, but CERN is. Regardless of the string theory and corresponding particle theory, such as Wessons, whatever is found will look just like a Higgs boson. That's because all the theories would show the same phenomina if they are correct. Differences are usually found in particle decays, like the proton decay rate, which causes some theories to fall.
Amen. And the reason for all of creation is to bring glory to His name. Our salvation is "sweet savour" to God.
For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ." -- 2 Corinthians 2:14-17"Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place.
I gave a decription of DeSitter space(dS) and AdS that left out one point. There are points on the energy scale that are Points of symmetry breaking. Coupling constants for the forces vary along that scale and merge at those points. ie the electromagnetic and weak force merge at one point, then merge with the strong force at higher energies. At those points, the symmetry breaking causes an increase in the vacuum energy. A reappearance of symmetry would cause a decrease.
LOL!!!
Yes it has but, beyond that, I won'd say anything else. :O)
That's one heck of a lot to simply put aside and see where it leads her.
Yes, in this case by the choice you made to get drunk.
I'm not saying we are totally free. We do each have capacities and we are also constricted by our conscience.
Neither are we completely determined.
Reality always lies in between completely determined and complete free. We are neither of these extremes. What I see as going off a wrong end is the on/off switch of free will/choice - believing that only saved Christians can choose to do good for example. And further that "saved" is always an instantaneous on/off, and even when some say on/off from birth.
At this extreme there is no true free will and therefor no responsibility for any of one's decisions.
"Kolo is an attorney as well as a baklava-eating schismatic, so he may have a(nother) needed correction for me."
Huh? Must be the baklava. I haven't a clue what you're talking about! I am, after all, the simple grandson of simple Greek peasants! :)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.