So. How many of you have tickets to Star Wars: The Force Awakens? No, don’t answer—rhetorical question. You all have tickets by now. Or you wish you did. Or you stumbled on this website by accident.
Sure, there are some folks out there who couldn’t give a whit’s end about the Star Wars franchise. But for the most part, our culture has collectively gone bonkers for BB-8 and the rest of the Force Awakens crew. In my eight years reviewing flicks for Plugged In, I’ve never seen the kind of anticipation we’re looking at for the latest Star Wars movie. But trust me, I get it: I was probably a Star Wars fan before some of you even discovered the beauties of a pacifier.
I was about 8 when the first Star Wars movie came out (that’d be Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope for the whippersnappers out there). Before then, my favorite film was The Cat From Outer Space. But from the moment that big ol’ Imperial Star Cruiser rumbled across the screen, I was hooked.
For a year thereafter, my whole life revolved around Star Wars. When the car squeaked, I pretended it was R2-D2. When I couldn’t sleep, I replayed the entire movie in my head until I dozed off. My family was too poor to buy any Star Wars toys, so I made my own out of cardboard.
I liked it, is what I’m saying. And even now, when I hear the vwwooom of a light sabre, part of me becomes 8 years old again.
Fast-forward a few years. I’ve discovered that life has other joys beyond Star Wars—girls, football, bacon cheeseburgers, primarily—but I still dig George Lucas’ creation. So when my dad invites me to a special service at his church wherein a guy named Dr. Norman Geisler (who I’ve since discovered is kind of a big deal) will be speaking about the theology of—gasp—Star Wars, I’m all in. What could be better than that?
But Geisler, alas, was not the Star Wars fan that I was. He told us that Star Wars was just chock-full of dualism and Eastern mysticism—philosophies that ran counter to Christian doctrine. He said that the Star Wars universe was predicated on a cosmic balance between good and evil (this was before the prequels introduced the more pedantic concept of Midi-chlorians). We Christians think that’s poppycock, said Geisler—a surprise to me at the time.
Forget the concept of darkness and light being locked in an eternal harmonic struggle. In Christianity, darkness is the absence of light. Evil isn’t so much a “force” as it is, simply, a vacuum—an absence of goodness. God is the only being who can create much of anything. Anything real and tangible, at any rate. The only thing Satan can do is twist and corrupt what’s already there. (Geisler described evil as the rot in an apple or the holes in a moth-eaten sweater.)
Well. I left the service a little ticked at Dr. Geisler, taking on my favorite movie franchise like that. (“It’s just a movie,” I likely mumbled, somewhat ironically now.) But I was also fascinated by the underlying theology that Geisler brought to the conversation. Ticked or no, I bought a tape of his sermon. And a book. If Dr. Geisler has a private boat somewhere, I’m responsible for a bit of the tackle.
If Geisler hoped to dissuade me from loving Star Wars, it didn’t work. But he did help me to watch those movies, and many others, with a more discerning eye. Moreover, Geisler’s distillation of the nature of good and evil—a concept that, I later learned, we owe to Augustine—has impacted me mightily. Perhaps as much as Star Wars itself. In fact, it’s the cornerstone of my books and my work at Plugged In.
See, I believe that stories reflect that same dynamic that Geisler talked about. Stories are, after all, a bit of an act of creation in their own right. And as such, when we create them, we’re paying (often unconscious) homage to God, the only true Creator. Our feeble acts of creation—even if it be as simple as creating a blog post—is, in a way, a holy endeavor. Even if they’re not particularly God-honoring stories, they still reflect—sometimes in a very miniscule way—God’s creative nature. And yet, because these creations are of man—and made in a fallen world besides—these works of ours are inherently twisted and broken by sin and evil.
Our stories are a little like us, I believe: Imperfect and broken, both beautiful and horrible. No story is perfectly good, because we aren’t. But by the same token, there is a whisper of something good in them because we’re using God’s raw materials to make them.
What we do here at Plugged In is all about examining these stories—these movies, television shows, albums and games we write about so much—and trying to determine what’s good and what’s bad in each … and help you decide whether the good is worth the bad.
It’s fascinating work, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it. I’m looking forward to seeing just what Star Wars: The Force Awakens may offer us. And I’ll be watching for glimpses of theological truth—and error—while I do so. Because I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for Star Wars—and had someone not taken the time to bring the story of Star Wars to a church service.
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