The Omen (2006)

Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains, rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water” in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive, rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.

Robert Thorn remembers and repeats the poem—which as a cinematic device subtly tells the viewers that the poem is important in the film. The poem goes as follows: “When the Jews return to Zion, when the comet fills the sky, when the holy Roman empire rises, then you and I must die. From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore, turning man against his brother, till man exists no more.” It is the Antichrist, Damien, who will set man against man until everyone is dead, and presumably in hell for having fought rather than loved one’s enemies. The poem goes from religion to astronomy to the political domain (the Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in history), and thus runs the risk of conflating qualitatively different, albeit related, domains of human phenomena. This risk is a bit like treating different genres of film—fiction, nonfiction, westerns, sci-fi, and horror—as interchangeable. Closer to my point, the risk is like assuming that genres of literature—religious myth, historical accounts, novels, nonfiction, and academic treatises—are interchangeable, such that a myth could legitimately be taken to be a historical account. That which is distinct about myth would be lost, even though the writers of myths did not view themselves as historians and thus subject to that genre’s criteria.

In what follows, I subject the first few subordinate clauses of the poem to critique in line with my thesis. By the way, my intent is to support my thesis with arguments, rather than to convey or prescribe my own religious beliefs; this holds for the books I’ve written too. Applying Hume in the concluding chapter   of Godliness and Greed, which is on the history of Christian thought on greed in relation to profit-seeking and wealth, and then altering that interpretation by incorporating the divine Logos in the final chapter of God’s Gold do not reflect my own religious beliefs. Hence scholarship can be distinguished from opinion pieces.

The phrase, “when the Jews return to Zion” raises the question of whether Zionism is primarily religious or political; if both, then the concept can be regarded as messy. The risk is that a portion of a myth could be misconstrued as translating directly into the political domain. Exactly twenty years after the remake’s release, weaponized Israeli settlers in the West Bank presumed the political right to walk into the houses of Palestinian homeowners, declare that God gave the house to the Hebrews, and kick out the residents. One video shown on social media shows a settler removing a refrigerator from a house owned by a Palestinian family in the West Bank, as if the Jews’ deity declares in the Bible that God has given the refrigerator to that particular settler. The genocide then still going on in Gaza illustrates how atrocious misconstruing the genre of myth as valid in the political domain can be.  Life can give art added significance and clarity, and art can inform how geopolitical events are interpreted and situated paradigmatically.

The association of the return of Jews to Zion with the apocalypse can be interpreted in religious terms as ushering in the Antichrist’s role in turning man against man. That is to say, theologically the return (and stay) would be a bad rather than a good thing. In 2026, the International Court of Justice declared Israel to be illegitimate because that state’s government had refused to exit Gaza and the West Bank. A UN commission had determined that Israel was guilty of committing a genocide in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants. Any of these determinations would have been out of line had they been based on the theological interpretation that the Jews returning to Zion is a bad thing in religious terms. Jurisprudential and political judgment is properly made on political grounds even if personal religious belief is related.

Turning to the poem’s second phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” jumps from myth to astronomy, and thus science, as if these domains were continuous rather than discrete. In the Nativity Story in the gospels, efforts by scientists to find a comet misconstrue myth as a distinct genre. The inconsistency of a star being in that myth and a comet being associated with the birth of the Antichrist is not a problem in the genre of myth because the point is not astronomical or historical, but rather in signaling heightened religious meaning. Put another way, even if no star could be found to have occurred over the Middle East, this would not detract from the meaning that the star plays in the Nativity story. A star determined empirically to be over a particular town and thus serving to locate the town from a distance is not possible, but this is not a problem as long as myth is construed as myth rather than as astronomy or history). The phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” risks being taken as empirical astronomy rather than as in the religious genre. To be sure, myth can incorporate empirical events, natural as well as human, but changing those events to make religious points is totally acceptable in the religious genre, which thus cannot be assumed to contain historical accounts.

In the film, the next phrase, “when the holy Roman empire rises,” is erroneously interpreted, which can be expected when geopolitics is conflated with religious myth. Historically, the Holy Roman Empire was primarily geopolitical rather than ecclesiastical; it was not a religious organization. In the film, the European Union is assumed to be the new holy Roman empire because of the Treaty of Rome, but the Maastricht Treaty is arguably more significant to that political union, and the E.U. state of Italy can hardly be said to dominate at the federal level; the state of Germany has arguably been the state with disproportionate influence, especially during the debt crisis in which the Commission sided with German creditors over the E.U. states of Greece and Spain. So to refer to the E.U. as Roman—not to mention holy!—is ludicrous. The adjectives holy and Roman may alternatively lead to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church instantiates the Roman Empire in a new guise. Such an interpretation would resituate the phrase properly within the religious domain. The Crusades, selling indulgences, the Inquisition, prosecuting Galileo as if the criteria of religion were hegemonic over scientific criteria in the domain of science, making a treaty with Hitler, and covering up rapes committed by pedophile priests on children, and social prejudice within the Vatican against Blacks, gays, and even women, and even the obsession of the identity of Christ over preaching and practicing humane compassion especially when doing so is least convenient (e.g. to detractors and enemies as well as to people who have been rude, arrogant, or subject to one’s prejudices—we all have them) have at the very least compromised the legitimacy of that religious institution even though the religious and ethical domains are distinct. This is not to minimize the actual worship of the divine in the Mass, or the faith of the faithful who yearn to transcend the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion to the beyond, whether personified and thus anthropomorphic or not.

Self-idolatry on a collective scale—rather than an astronomical event or the formation of a political empire such as the E.U. or U.S.—and the tremendous harm unleased by such selfishness at the expense of other people can be regarded as the Antichrist personified in us. In the film, Wonder Woman (2017), Mars, the Greek god of war, tells Diana (Wonder Woman) that he doesn’t have to do much to facilitate man turning against man in war; aggression is very much in the nature of the beast, according to that god. Diana, on the other hand, refuses to view humans as beasts, for she has come to love the species (and Steve Trevor in particular). She sees our better nature, whereas her nemesis sees no positive worth in our species existing at all. The complexity in human nature itself is personified by deities in that film; in general, polytheism reflects our non-simplistic nature that can be analyzed into parts.

In both versions of The Omen, Damien survives being murdered physically and spiritually by Robert Thorn, so evil ends up with the upper hand. The god of war would be pleased, but human nature is more complex and thus may forestall the final verdict of extinction, even though climate-change, Russia invading Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran (and Lebanon) evince a troubling trajectory. In the economic and political domains, however, selfishness (stemming from self-interest) rather than self-idolatry (a sin) is pertinent even though the two concepts can be related to each other. For example, Adam Smith’s economic theory of the competitive market is premised on economic self-interest. Even though the latter can be related to self-love, and thus self-idolatry, the claim that Smith’s theory of capitalism is based on self-love would be based on a category mistake even though self-interest is arguably sourced in self-love taken as a sin. In terms of navigating in a certain domain of human experience, it is important not to drift or swerve into another lane as if in driving on a road no lanes can be discerned. The poem that undergirds The Omen (2006) swerves between lanes as if none exist, and thus invites erroneous category mistakes and thus flawed interpretations.

The Apocalypse

In the film, The Apocalypse (2002), the Apostle John is a prisoner at an island-prison because he is a Christian. He is having visions of heaven in the last of days and Valerio, another prisoner is dutifully writing what John dictates so various church congregations can know of John’s revelations. He is esteemed so much by other Christians that he feels pressure to steer them to God’s truth. Too much esteem, I submit, is being directed to John, as he is, as he admits, only a human being, though he does get caught up in his own direct access to God, as in being able to know the will of God. This is a temptation for any religionist, especially religious leaders. Although subtly, the film conveys John’s over-reaches though without having another character explicitly refer to them as such.

In one of his visions, John hears the question, who is worthy to open the scroll of the meaning of mankind to God. That is, why did God create our species? What does God intend for us in creating us? The answer that John receives is that God wants people to turn back to God to praise God and feel God’s love. Who is worthy to break the seven seals on the scroll? Only the innocent lamb who gave himself to be sacrificed for humanity. “Look,” an angel tells John during a vision, “the Messiah has triumphed, and so he will open the scroll.” Indeed, as John points out, the core of the Christian faith is that God will be victorious over evil at the end of time. In the meantime, John believes God is calling him to lead people to God’s kingdom.

Other Christians in the movie think John’s significance is more than merely preaching on how God’s truth can lead people to God’s kingdom. Gaius, the leader of a congregation, says, “We must wait until his letters show us God’s will.” This implies that John has a special access to God in virtue of having visions and being the last person alive who witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Irene implores John to come with her to escape from the prison. “We need you so badly. You’re the only witness to the resurrection of our Lord. They will listen to you. You will save us.” It is highly significant that in praying, John says, “I am only human,” and he replies to Irene, “Only the Lord can save us. But now he wants me here to deny my own name and testify to his.” John believes that Jesus is keeping John at the prison. It is God’s will. But is it? Even John finally admits to Irene that he could be wrong. After all, John feels that he should help Christians who are lost. So, after John tells her, “I have to stay. The Lord has spoken to me,” and Irene begs John in the name of Jesus to escape to save her and the other Christians, he suddenly realizes that he, a mere mortal, could be mistaken, so he joins her. As it turns out, the Lord has not spoken to John; his place is with the struggling Christians rather than in prison. In fact, John is very mistaken.

John’s sudden realization should be a wake-up call for any Christians who are so utterly convinced that they know the will of God in their lives. It is not as if everything that happens is God’s will; such a belief ignores the impact of free-will, which in turn is necessary to avoid the conclusion that God is responsible for evil. Historically, the Jansenists, for whom Augustine’s later works rather than the early book of free will are important, believed that the Fall damaged free-will rather severely such that no good whatsoever can come from us. In the film, John voices this theology in stating, “my strength is not from me; it comes from the Lord. But to stave off the self-love that manifests as selfishness, is it necessary to deny having any strength of one’s own? Augustine holds that self-love of that of oneself that is in the image of God has positive religious value. Must even such self-love be denied in order for the sin of selfish self-love to be expunged from a person’s nature? Augustine clearly thought that self-love is not necessarily a sin. Even Jonathan Edwards argues that self-esteem is a neutral self-love in religious terms.

Therefore, John deserves some credit for giving food and drink to an old man and Valerius, respectively, when they are mistreated by Roman guards in the prison. Acting thusly in line with Jesus’s preachments and example, John does not risk incurring the sin of self-love. Ironically, in believing that he knows God’s will for him, that sin can find enough pride to grow on. John’s compassionate acts matter in a religious sense, in terms of him entering the kingdom of God. So, John is mistaken again when he states, “He who believes shall have eternal life.” Without love put in action, even faith that moves mountains is for naught. John is correct, therefore, in stating as a Christian that “God is love, and whosoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.” John is hit by the Roman head of the prison and put in a cage for days for having wiped the back of a violent, nasty prisoner whom a guard has just whipped.  John uses his free will in compassion to an undesirable and thus not only believes that God is love, but actively chooses to participate in loving acts that are inconvenient. It is subtle, but very important, that the other prisoners and Roman guards are taken back as if in awe when John is compassionate in actions to the weak, old, and even nasty. This awe is not owning to John’s salvific personhood, as though he has direct access to knowing God’s will and can save Christians who feel lost.

In short, John’s strength is not wholly due to God; free-will was not so warped in the Fall that Christians do not deserve some credit for choosing to act in line with Jesus’s teachings on how to enter the kingdom of God that is within, rather than just at the end of time. The film could do more to emphasize that John’s compassionate acts instantiate the presence of the kingdom of God within him, and this would not be the case were John not able to exercise enough of his free-will in choosing to act rather than just believe consistent with the type of inconvenient love preached by Jesus in the Gospels.

The Omen

Released in 1976, The Omen reflects the pessimism in America in the wake of the OPEC gas shortage and President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up, both of which having occurred within easy memory of the two notable assassinations in 1968. Additionally, the drug culture had come out in the open in the anti-Vietnam War hippie sub-culture, and the sexual revolution, which arguably set the stage for the spread of AIDS beginning in the next decade, was well underway, both of which undoubtedly gave evangelical, socially-conservative Christians the sense that it would not be long until everything literally goes to hell. The film provides prophesy-fulfillment of a birth-narrative (i.e., myth) and a supernatural personality known biblically as the anti-Christ, who as an adult will set man against man until our species is zerstört. It is as if matter (the Christ) and anti-matter (the anti-Christ) finally cancel each other out at the end of time. Economically during the 1970s, inflation and unemployment were giving at least some consumers and laborers the sense of being in a jet trapped in a vertical, free-fall dive of stagflation that not even fiscal and/or monetary policy could divert. The pessimistic mood was captured in another way in another film, Earthquake (1974), in which a natural disaster plays off the mood of utter futility throughout the decade. It is no wonder that Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” resonated so much as a presidential-campaign slogan in 1979 as Jimmy Carter was mired in micro-management inside the White House.  The optimism of a resurgence in political energy overcame the decade’s sense of pessimism. That Damien, the anti-Christ in The Omen, survives the attempt on his life by Robert Thorn, his adoptive father resonates with that pessimism. Satan’s plan is still “game on” as the film ends, and this ending fits the mood in America during the decade. With this historical context contemporaneous with the film laid out, a very practical, manifestation of evil subtly depicted in the film and yet easily recognized by customers frustrated with corrupt and inept management of incompetent employees will be described in the context of pessimism from utter frustration. Such frustration survived the squalid decade of the 1970s at least decades into the next century.

The film’s plot, briefly summarized, begins with the adoption of Damian by an American diplomat and his wife just after their own baby died (was murdered) at birth. Damian, it turns out, was born of a jackal as foretold in the Bible. Followers of Satan recognize Damian’s true identity, which the couple only come to grasp after it is too late for them.  Robert dismisses the prophetic warnings by Father Brennen at the peril of Katherine Thorn, and ultimately Robert fails to ritually kill Damien in a church. Robert is especially slow to pick up on the signs; Katherine is more perceptive in coming to realize that the boy she thinks is her own son is evil. Robert is clueless regarding the “red flags” concerning Damien’s second governess, Mrs. Baylock, who is an “apostate from hell” according to the man who gives Robert the set of ritual knives with which to physically and spiritually destroy Damien. I want to focus on the employer-employee relationship between Robert and the second governess to render transparent a very realistic manifestation of evil that could otherwise simply be reckoned as merely unethical. Although the supernatural elements of the film are more dramatic, such as the hounds of hell attacking Robert and Jennings in a graveyard outside of Rome, the role of the dog that Mrs. Baylock unilaterally allows to live in the Thorns’ house is much more interesting from the perspective of how the banality of evil can and does manifest in our daily lives without us realizing how sordid such a manifestation of evil actually is.

Besides lying to the Thorns that her “agency” proactively sent her to apply to be Damien’s governess when in fact she was presumably sent by Satanists or even Satan itself to protect the devil’s Son, she presumed to ignore Katherine’s order that Damien be dressed to go a church wedding with his “parents.” Later, opening the bedroom door to let Damien out into the second-floor hall corridor on his tricycle even though Katherine is poised on a chair over a balcony in the hallway and then going to the hospital to throw Katherine out of a high window extend so far beyond being a bad employee that Mrs Baylock becomes unrelatable from the standpoint of employer-employee relations. She is more relatable—more realistic even though less titillating—in repeatedly ignoring, and thus disobeying, Robert’s order that that dog-protector of Damien must go. It is in this that the banality of evil shows itself.

In spite of having initially told the governess to get rid of the hound from hell, Robert is stunned on the night of the day when Katherine has her “accident” and is hospitalized, because he finds the dog still in Damien’s bedroom. Days later, Robert sternly reminds the governess that he had told her to get rid of the dog. “He’s gone now; they took him away this morning,” she lies, for when Robert subsequently returns from Rome, he sees the dog is still in the house! That the governess had initially presumed to allow the dog in without asking the Thorns for their permission is bad enough; that she repeatedly ignores Robert’s order is without doubt a valid enough reason for Robert to end her employment, but strangely he does not, and she even physically attacks Robert as he carries his boy out of bed, as if that were suspicious.

The sheer presumptuousness of the governess stems from what Augustine describes as the bad manifestation of self-love wherein a person’s love is focused on one’s own superiority, importance, or preeminence. Such sordid self-love, which is a sin rather than just selfishness, which is merely unethical, because in loving oneself above loving God, a person rebels from God in setting oneself up as a deity in self-idolatry. Pierre Nicole, a Jansenist (i.e., strict Augustinian) priest who lived in the seventeenth century in France, dismissed Augustine’s claim that self-love can also manifest positively in loving God’s image in oneself as a part of love directed to God; to Nicole, even enlightened self-love is still a sin.

The arrogance of self-entitlement such as evinced in sordid self-love is of course the foremost sin of pride, which lies beyond self-esteem, which is fine. In the film, Mrs. Baylock’s stubborn refusal to act on her employer’s order that the dog must go immediately stems from the sin. Seldom, if ever, do bosses or complaining customers realize that employees who presumptuously ignore orders or customer complaints are not just willfully stubborn, and even passive aggressive, but also manifesting a certain banality of evil in the midst of our everyday lives. Too often, supervisors would rather look the other way than expend the effort to fire and rehire, and even merely to keep tabs on an incompetent or rude employee rather than naively and conveniently assuming that giving an order is enough in such a case. Company executives, and even customer service departments, in such companies understate the severity of the managerial problem, which includes a faulty hiring process, and the problem with non-supervisory employees, including those in customer service.

The mass-transit company in Massachusetts is a case in point. Too many bus and subway-train drivers operate the respective vehicles aggressively in hitting the brake pedal so abruptly that passengers are literally jerked around as the buses and trains abruptly stop while still going too fast to stop without slowing down more. I recorded video and submitted complaints to the subsidized company’s customer service department over a period of months in 2025 only to find that even the same drivers were going along as if their supervisors were looking the other way in dismissing complaints of the reckless driving. The drivers, and I suspect their supervisors, and perhaps even the customer-service managers, conjoined incompetence to create the “perfect storm” of dysfunctional management (at taxpayer expense). The syndrome was systematic at the macro level, as employees of the mayors of Boston, Cambridge and Revere also dismissed the complaints because apparently in Massachusetts, the cities are not able (i.e., willing) to contact state-level agencies.

Even as the system from top to bottom in Massachusetts was at least as of 2025 mired in laziness, incompetence, and sheer stubborn passive aggression, it is the stubborn refusal of the bus and subway drivers to stop jolting the vehicles by driving very primitively that I submit resonates with Mrs. Baylock’s mentality in the film. Beyond merely being incompetent and having an attitude problem, supervisors, lazy customer-service managers, and aggressive employees can evince the banality of evil, which is ultimately based on the sin of self-love, which is really rebellion against God as superior to oneself. The aggressiveness and stubbornness of the bus and subway drivers can thus be viewed as symptoms of something deeper.

Although by 2025, the societal pessimism in American during the 1970s had passed, I would not be surprised to find that the level of customer-frustration with incompetent managements and rude, pathetic employees was sky-high. Not only had business schools failed in both research and teaching on lower and mid-level management, but the depth of the problem was often trivialized or overlooked entirely. The banality of evil may be as difficult to recognize in the film as it is in our daily lives as customers.

The BART and MUNI subway systems in the San Francisco metro area in California demonstrate just how incompetent and aggressive Boston’s mass-transit employees had become by 2025, because the operators in the Bay Area routinely stopped buses and trains normally. Managerial competence along with good hiring rather than expedient hiring to fill openings goes a long way. Following up with problematic employees should not be a managerial luxury but an integral task of supervision. The banality of evil, which transcends incompetence and attitude, does not extend supernaturally to bus and train machinery. The Omen is more practical than the film appears to be from all the titillating supernatural elements that promote ticket sales. 

 

The banality in Boston's mass-transit company can be grasped even from the sheer repetitiveness of the aggressive braking in spite of ongoing customer complaints:

Only some of the visible recalcitrant repeat-offenders in the system are pictured below, and of course their abjectly incompetent supervisors are hidden from the view of the paying customers but are no less culpable:

 

The Seventh Sign

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.