Seeing God through the eyes of The Dark Knight

I started a new thing for our youth group this month that I'm calling "God Goes to the Movies" in which we watch a movie and then have a discussion about ways in which we can see/understand God in the midst of that movie. The key to it is not to watch "Christian" movies like Fireproof or End of the Spear - movies that few people would watch outside of the church, but actually stuff that people would go see in the theaters. The goal is to see that God is present in everything that we do, not just the "church" stuff, but the regular stuff, too.

While there are definitely differences in what motivates the secular and what motivates Christians, to draw the two as two separate worlds really puts God into a box and prevents us from believing that God can speak through anything that isn't inherently Christian. I think that's a poor understanding of both the nature of who God is, and of the world we live in. This is not a universalist "God is everything" kind of view, but rather an omnipresent understanding that God is reflected in some way in everything.


Sometimes we can even see God in the absence of God. The book of Ecclesiastes is essentially that.

For our first movie, we watched The Dark Knight (well on it's way to being the most successful movie of all time). It was a great movie (on many levels), but really gets into the nature of temptation, and the brokenness of humans. As the movie unfolds, you see the face of temptation toward sin (the Joker) as being at the same time horrifying, and yet he is the most interesting and exciting character in the movie. We know he is evil, yet we are drawn to and intrigued by him.

In the end, must chose to take on the sins of Harvey Dent, to become a criminal in the minds of the citizens of Gotham in order to save them... hmm.

We approached the movie thinking that it might be a stretch to find God in The Dark Knight, but the more I watched it, the more the parallels began to clearly emerge.

God is not relegated to Sunday morning worship or church sponsored fellowship, nor is God only apparent in some of the lackluster "Christian entertainment" that is marketed by people who are trying just as hard to make money as anyone in Hollywood. As I said earlier, in one way or another, God is reflected in everything in one way or another.

When you turn out the lights to a room, that doesn't mean that the things in that room disappear, it's just that the light isn't bouncing off of them, giving them a visible appearance. They are still physically there. God can be seen in sort of the same way.

Just because we are living with the lights off most of the time doesn't mean that we are in an empty room.