So I got an email criticizing my post below for not talking up ELI as representing the truth that is Christian theology. Good point, actually. Here’s my feeble memory of what the movie’s unfashionable but genuinely illuminating teachings are along those lines:
1. Each of us has free will and a personal destiny. No situation genuinely deprives us of all choice.
2. Prayer is first of all about gratitude about what we’ve been given. Maybe the main failing of the modern, high-tech world is that people had much more than enough but less gratitude than ever and so wasted much that was good. People forgot how and why to pray.
3. It’s almost easier to pray when you’ve been given just enough and so you can see more clearly what’s genuinely indispensable or precious. (Eli here reminds us of Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag.)
4. What we’ve been given that’s most precious is God, family, and friends. Life without any of those is the closest experience we have to hell. Without those, we become worse than the other animals—cannibals, for example.
5. We should do more for others than for ourselves. Eli read that in the Bible but was so mission-driven that he forgot to live it. But then he willingly surrendered the pleasure of reading the Bible to save a friend, a beautiful woman to whom he was not physically attracted. And his friend (Solara, the source of light) learned that, of course, not from the Bible, but from her love of her loving and sacrificial mother.
6. We will all be judged for what we do.
7. God is personal, cares about persons, and is incessantly active in the world. Creation wasn’t some one-time thing at some point in the past as, say, Locke or the Big Bangers teach.
So I agree with Bob, finally, that the movie was, in the most important ways, neither stupid nor ridiculous.
