Carl Schultz’s film, The Seventh Sign (1988), centers on the theological motif of the Second Coming,
the end of the world when God’s divine Son, Jesus, returns to judge the living
and even the dead. In the movie, Jesus returns as the wrath of the Father,
which has already judged humanity as having been too sinful to escape God’s
wrath. David Bannon, who is the returned Jesus in the film, is there to break
the seven seals of the signs leading up to the end of the world, and to witness
the end of humanity. Abby Quinn, the pregnant wife of Russell Quinn, asks David
(an interesting name-choice, given that Jesus is of the House of David in the
Gospel narratives) whether the chain (of signs) can be broken. How this question
plays out in the film’s denouement is interesting from a theological
standpoint. Less explicit, but no less theologically interesting, is what role
humans can and should have in implementing God’s law. The film both heroizes
and castigates our species.
The lamb of God now returned
as God’s lion, the second person of the Trinity (i.e., the Logos incarnated),
tells Abby that God has already judged against humanity due to too much killing
of humans by humans. A quarter of a century into the twenty-first century, David
would only have to point to the Russians in Ukraine and (especially) the Israelis
in Gaza as more than enough support for God’s wrath. That the Israelis atop Israel’s
government and military even enjoyed the mass killing, including by starvation,
of hundreds of thousands while more than a million residents of Gaza were being
made homeless (and even bombed in temporary camps), all in the Hebrew deity’s name
could easily excite the deity’s wrath because the residents were not worshipping
another deity. Jesus’s notion of God, which is primarily mercy because,
as Paul and Augustine wrote, God is love—a statement that applies even to God’s
love for people who intentionally offend and even reject the Trinity—would be,
from at least my limited, human, all too human, perspective, utterly shocked by
the atrocity unleased by the “chosen people” against innocent civilians as if
they were subhuman. The Zionist biblical claim that Yahweh gives the
lands of Gaza and the West Bank to the Hebrews translated into public policy evinces
a category mistake in conflating religious narrative, or myth, and empirical
public policy. Ignoring this category mistake, we could look at the Old
Testament to find Yahweh punishing the Hebrews for willfully disobeying the
deity and conclude that it would support a government’s military conquering and
clearing out Israel. Ignoring the category mistake, more than one scriptural
precedent could be found.
In the film, the
presumptuousness of humans applying God’s law to other humans and even executing
punishment is personified in Jimmy, a young adult who even has Downs Syndrome and
yet thinks he is able to decide against his parents because they were brother
and sister before he spread gasoline on them in bed and burned them alive. If
such a severe punishment fits such a sin, then even more severe punishments surely
befit greater sins. Clearly, the execution of Jimmy hardly qualifies as the
death of the last martyr. That David (i.e., Jesus) comes to Jimmy’s cell and
pats him on a shoulder is perhaps the filmmakers’ greatest blunder. Sympathy
with a person with Downs Syndrome would be appropriate were one a victim, but
Jimmy is no victim; in fact, the name Jimmy applied to an adult who has Downs
Syndrome can be considered to be a pathetically patronizing puerile appellation.
The execution of the Word of
God killer is one of the signs of the apocalypse: the last martyr. Therefore, Jimmy’s
death is very significant theologically, for if he is not killed, the series of
signs is interrupted and the world does not end. Jimmy’s excuse for killing both
of his parents so grotesquely is, “It’s not murder if it is God’s punishment,”
but if it is God’s punishment, and, notably not even specified in the Hebrew
Bible, then it is presumptuous of any human to decide what specific
punishment fits the violation of the sin, and then to go on as the executioner
adds presumption on top of presumption. Jimmy’s certainty may even evince self-idolatry.
Only a deity with Downs Syndrome would think such a heinous punishment fits a brother
and sister who marry because they have fallen in love. To be sure, I am not
advocating such a marriage. Rather, as Lyle and Erik Menendez found out in the
twentieth century, not even having been psychologically abused and repeatedly molested
by one’s own father justifies killing him, and those two brothers were better
equipped cognitively than is Jimmy in the film.
That in history so many people
have unilaterally presumed an entitlement to know and execute God’s law makes
clear the serial, recurring lapse of which the human brain is all too prone commit,
wherein theology (as in scriptures) is treated as the same type as are history,
politics, and even science. Religion is a qualitatively different domain, so it
is worse than unfortunate that the human mind seamlessly goes from a
theological tenant to empirical criminal justice; presuming that a scripture is
also a historical account (rather than making selective use of events in
history) also evinces the cognitive vulnerability.
It is no wonder that the proverbial
“public square” in many societies has become secularized; the cleansing of
religious activities and artifacts may have been due at least in part to too
many people applying their religious beliefs in objectionable ways to other
domains, such as politics and society. The core of the mental problem may be
that the self-check function of the human mind tends to be turned off or
dismissed as irrelevant in the domain of religion (and that of political
ideology too). A brain could do worse than to periodically keep the need for
self-checking in mind whenever anything religious (or political) is being
thought. Furthermore, keeping in mind that theology is a distinct domain, or
discipline, would be a good addition to a person’s spiritual exercises. Even if
a deity is not finite, the human mind is, and thus the latter is inherently
limited, and thus hardly omniscient. Epistemological humility applied to religious
thinking can go a long way, given the salience of subjectivity, which includes
ideology, inherent in human nature.
In the film, Jimmy connects a
passage that he has read in the Old Testament with the fact that his
parents deserved to be burned alive. In the Euthyphro, Socrates points
out to Euthyphro that the prosecution of his father for having left a murderous
slave in a ditch overnight (such that the slave died) does not count as piety
to the gods; for one thing, the son has violated his duty to his father. That
filial duty has not even registered indicates that Euthyphro is too certain
that he knows what piety is. In the film, Jimmy commits the same sin, and yet
is treated as a martyr even by Jesus.
Given the propensity of humans
to implicitly lapse into wanting to be gods—a motive anathema to Augustine and
yet urged on by Marsilio Fincino during the Renaissance—the motif of the individual
hero in Christian theology may seem to be paradoxical, or else as saying that
we can be awesomely good even in our weakness and yet we can be horrific
creatures. The sheer distance between these two poles is astounding; human
nature is indeed complex rather than isomorphic.
In the film, Jimmy, motivated
by his religious beliefs that he misconstrues as facts, has burned his
parents alive; his execution, as a martyr, even has apocalyptic significance.
On the other end of the spectrum, Abby, who has attempted suicide, is in a
position to bring life not only to her baby, but also to the whole world. Strength
out of weakness is perhaps the motif of Christianity, epitomized
theologically by God’s agape love in emptying Himself by incarnating in lowly flesh.
God loves our species even before Creation by the unincarnated Logos of God, and
such spontaneous, unconditional love is very, very different than any love that
a human being can have and extend to others. So that God reverses judgment on
the species because of the use of free-will by one person makes sense even
though it can be asked why should humanity’s fate depend on just one person? In
the film, that person is not David (i.e., Jesus in the Second Coming); rather,
Abby is decisive, for her infant is to be stillborn without a soul unless she
gives up her soul for her child.
Earlier in the film, before the
birth, Abby asks David whether she can do anything to break the series of the apocalyptic
seven signs. David points out that it would require her to have hope, and yet
in attempting suicide she had none of that; she had given up not only on the
world, but also her own life. “How can someone who cared so little for life
give life to the world?”, David asks her rhetorically. She could stop the sign
of the soulless birth of her child—souless because the hall of souls in heaven
is now empty—but she would have to die for her child, and in so doing she would
give humanity a second chance as her self-sacrifice would be enough for God to
freely reverse His judgment on the sinful species.
“Will you die for him?” is the line that she hears repeatedly in dreams. The voice is that of Cartaphilus, the gatekeeper of Pontius Pilote fated to live until the Second Coming for having hit Jesus on His way to the Cross for going too slow (as if the Romans were justifiably in a hurry). In the film, Cartaphilus is Father Lucci, the Roman Catholic priest who shoots Jimmy before the execution to make sure that he dies so the series of signs does not end part-way because the last martyr is not martyred. Lucci is in a hurry to die because he has become tired of living for so long; death is the only redemption that he can have, for he is not sorry for having struck the definitive, soteriological martyr whose death is believed by Christians to be redemptive. Yet apparently not enough, for just after Abby declares while giving birth that she will die for him—her soulless baby—Jesus aka David Bannon enters the operating room and declares “The hall of souls is full again. It was you, Abby, with hope enough for the whole world.” He addresses Abby’s young Jewish friend, who is presumably now Christian, “Remember it all, write it down, tell it, so people will use the chance she has given them.” Out of her weakness—her utter lack of hope—she has mustered enough hope to give humanity another chance.
With the twentieth century as the bloodiest century, to be followed by so many killings of innocent people in Ukraine and Gaza after two decades in the next century, it is hard to argue that the Christian message has made much of a difference. As beautiful as “strength out of weakness” is, too many people still value “might makes right.” So, I think the film hits a nerve in that a second chance is needed; the Christian Passion Story has not been sufficient to change how people, especially those in power, behave. The high are not made low. Corporate CEOs give only lip-service to “servant leadership.” Too many universities in the U.S., even private elite ones, had by 2025 been intentionally made into virtual police-states, with Yale even inviting the FBI in to train the university’s private police force in counter-terrorism tactics that could used on even paying students. Even university administrations can be seen as being visibly backed up ultimately by their own hired guns. But it is perhaps the engineered genocide of Gazans for two years without the world coming to their rescue that damns the species.
At the very least, the notion that the
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ had redeemed the species could be viewed
as having been debunked (and rejected) by the species as a whole, for the value
in kindness and compassionate help being directed to enemies clearly has not
taken hold of humanity. On an interpersonal level, responding compassionately
to human needs of people whom a person dislikes or are disliked by the person
is so rare that we can declare after two-thousand years that Jesus’s message
has been de facto rejected by the species as a whole even if the preachment has
made a dent in some people. The leitmotif of the film, that our species is in
need of a second chance, is as much an indictment on historical Christianity as
it is of our species. Perhaps with less hero-worship and more attention to the substance
what it takes to enter the Kingdom of God before physical death, our
species could have that second chance.
