The Matrix Has You

The Matrix is one of my favorite movies of all time. It may be 10 years old, and I may have watched it several dozen times, but every new viewing remains a treat. The special effects blew us away, but it's the depth of the story that keeps me coming back.

Theology?

The Matrix is one of those films that readily lends itself to philosophical and religious discussion. How do we know what is truly real? And doesn't Neo seem to be a Messiah figure?

I'm not going to argue about the Wachowski brothers' theology, which is imperfect. Of course, we have to admit the same is true of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Barth, and every other theologian who has ever lived. We see in a dim mirror, as the Apostle Paul put it.

The Matrix can really stretch your mind. It helps me challenge long held assumptions and reframe my thinking. It's stimulating.

Analogies

We're created beings, and we can't really grasp God, eternity, or just how God knows everything. I was a philosophy major in college, and these are heady concepts. We can glimpse parts of them, but never comprehend the whole. (As Augustine said, "If you believe that you have comprehended God, what you have comprehended is not God." God is too big, too other, too holy for mortal minds to fathom.)

I've found some analogies that help me understand creation, eternity, predestination, and human responsibility a bit more.

• Creation is like a book that God has written. He created a plot outline, fleshed it out, made edits and revisions, and when that was done, he spoke and it came to be. As some fiction writers know, some characters take on a life of their own a sometimes follow a path the author would just as soon avoid. (For example, read about Joshua in The Arm of the Starfish by Madeline L'Engle.) Just as human author lives outside the timeline of their stories, God exists outside the timeline of creation.
• Creation is like a play that God has written. He wrote the whole, gives each of us a role, and judges us on how we live our part. Do we trust the playwright, or do we actors believe that we understand the play better than its creator? Do we embrace the life that God planned for us and live it to his glory?
• Creation is like a movie that God has scripted, directed, and edited. When we view a movie, it's put together a certain way, even if the scenes were filmed in a different order. Some scenes end up on the cutting room floor. Some scenes are shot over and over again until everything works just right. The producer has a vision, and the only thing that counts is the end result, not the exact steps involved in creating the final cut.

These are imperfect analogies, but I find them helpful.

To top it all off, the Son of God became a character in the book, play, or movie. Somehow.

It's mind boggling.

'The Matrix Has You'

The Matrix gives me another set of analogies. We discover that what everyone believes is truly real is just a massive multiplayer virtual reality created by the machines. Everything works as we expect it to because the story masters/programmers make no allowances for anything else. Life is predictable and comprehensible. And when things go awry, they send in the Smiths, special programs designed to deal with the few who won't conform to the parameters of this virtual reality.

As many philosophers have asked, "How can I trust my perceptions?" In The Matrix, you can't, because the true reality is that human beings are functioning in a virtual world while their bodies are used to power the machines that enslave them through this simulation.
The key idea behind The Matrix is that there is a true reality behind perceived reality, and because it is truly real, those who can tap into that truth are able to bend or break the laws of the virtual reality. Neo can dodge bullets, move at inhuman speeds, and come back from the dead because he knows he has a real existence outside the simulation.

What we perceive is a construct designed to emulate what is real.

The Matrix Has Us

I'm a Boomer. I grew up and attended school in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a heady time. Science had given us computers, television, rockets, nuclear energy, and much more. We had grasped reality with the laws of science, and nothing would be beyond our grasp. We might inhabit space. We could play with the power of the atom. We could find a way to cure any disease. What we considered unimaginable wonders would become commonplace by the 21st Century. And science fiction became my favorite form of fiction.

Using the scientific method, we would eventually be able to understand and control everything. Beyond the physical world, we could analyze individuals and societies. Even theology - the study of God - became subject to the scientific method. Well, religion. In the end, the universe is comprehensible, and we have or will develop the tools to comprehend it.

The name of this matrix is materialism. Materialism holds that matter is the only thing that exists. There is no reality that cannot be counted, measured, and analyzed. We are the sum of our body chemistry and the electrical impulses coursing through our bodies. If spirits exist as some sort of residual energy after we die, we can detect them. And we can fix psychological problems with electricity, surgery, or chemistry.

By definition, Christians are not materialists. We believe that something exists outside the cosmos, outside the material world. The universe is a created thing, and while we may not be able to measure God, he exists. Not only that, but part of who we are is intended for eternity, for a life beyond the restrictions of this physical world.

That said, many Christians are functional materialists. We theoretically believe in a God not bound by the laws of nature, but we live as though the material world is all that is real. Heaven and the hereafter may be different, but here and now we live as though we are bound by physical reality - by the matrix.

Breaking Free

I have a really hard time believing - really, truly, honestly, completely believing - that what we understand to be the real world is really a construct, a virtual reality that we cannot distinguish from anything else. Yet if we take the Bible as truthful, we know that God intervenes and is not constrained by the laws of creation. Jesus turned water into wine, healed the sick, multiplied fish and bread, cast out demons, walked on water, and came back to life after he had died.

We read of healings in the Old Testament and the New. We see the walls of Jericho crumble. We hear the locks of a prison undone so Peter can walk out. And yet we have a hard time believing it could still happen, because we have been conditioned by the matrix of materialism. There are incurable diseases (at least at our level of scientific knowledge). There are circumstances that God cannot change. Whatever our theology, in practice we see God limited to acting within the laws of nature.

Nonsense. God has never been bound, not even when Jesus took on human flesh and lived among us. Like Neo in The Matrix, Jesus was able to tap into the reality behind perceived reality.

Cosmic Christ

In the very simplest terms, Jesus came to save us from sin, to break the barriers between us and God. But there's a lot more to it than that: Just as all of creation was subject to sin through the actions of Adam and Eve, all of creation is redeemed through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul saw this clearly while writing his letter to the church in Rome. Here are three translations of the relevant passage:

"Against its will, all creation was subjected to God's curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God's children in glorious freedom from death and decay." (Rom 8:20, 21, NLT)

"For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." (Rom. 8:20, 21, NIV)

"...all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe - people and things, animals and atoms - get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross." (Col. 1:20, The Message)

Paul comes back to this theme in Colossians, when he says,

"...through [Jesus] God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ's blood on the cross." (Col. 1:20, NLT)

There's a catch: Everything that Jesus accomplished through his death and resurrection has not yet been completed within creation. The last chapter has already been written. It is finished. However, we are living inside the story, and while we know how it will end, the brokenness of this world will not disappear until the new heaven and new earth are made at the end of this story.

Beyond Materialism

Albert Einstein changed our understanding of the universe when he figured out that matter and energy are flip sides of the famous equation E = mc². Energy can be "released" from matter, a truth that showed itself in the atom bomb and nuclear power plants. On the flip side, matter is a form of energy - minuscule subatomic packets clinging together, orbiting each other, and making up the physical world. (Let's not even bring up quantum mechanics, which seems so counterintuitive from a material perspective.)

Energy is matter. Matter is energy. The great I AM spoke, and light and matter and planets and creatures came into being. Out of nothing but his creative power, God invented the reality we live within.

The physical is not all there is. Energy is fundamental, and the laws of physics have some surprises, such as quantum mechanics. How can something be in this orbit or that orbit, move between them, yet never exist between them? It boggles my imagination.

No matter how deep our understanding of this, we live our day-to-day lives rooted in reality as we perceive it - naive pre-theoretical thought. In the pre-scientific world, everyday life included miracles - lightning, the cycle of day and night, spirits, powers, magic - things we couldn't explain but believed in. (Some people are such convinced materialists that they will only accept scientific explanations, such as Arthur C. Clarke's third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")

For those of us raised in the Western world, it's hard to break our bondage to materialism. Spirituality is a state of mind. Religious experiences can be measured. God, if he exists, set the universe in motion and no longer interferes. There is no magic. There are no miracles. All we can know (as defined by science) is material.

Real Knowing

Materialism is a matter of faith, of believing that for all intents and purposes there is nothing outside the cosmos. This is all there is.

Yet the scientific worldview is a modern development. For millennia, people have believed in gods and spirits and powers not bound by the usual laws of nature. In many cultures, that's still part of the worldview.

Even in the Western world, our naive pre-theoretical thought knows that matter is not all that is. We grasp concepts such as truth, trust, beauty, love, and hope - and their opposites. Even if science can measure changes in our brain chemistry and electrical fields, we know that there's more to these ideals than a brain state.

Although I can't scientifically prove it, I know that God exists, that he loves me, and that he is trustworthy. This is as real to me as the keyboard on which I type these words. And it's a truth so fundamental that my life would be meaningless if it were not true.

There is a God who planned and made the universe and knows every bit of it. There is a God who planned me, brought my parents together to bring me into the world in accordance with his plan, knows my every failure and selfish thought, and loves me just the same. The Son of God came to show the world this love and break the barrier of sin and selfishness between we rebellious humans and the God who planned and made us. The Holy Spirit touches our hearts to convict us of our selfishness and sin - and to reveal God's loving plan to tear down that wall and draw us to himself.

I know all that. I live because that is true. And yet I have a hard time letting God be God in the physical world. I have a struggle knowing that God can and will bend or shatter the rules of the physical world even though I have heard the stories from childhood, hear of new miracles every month, and have seen and experienced some.

Matter is energy. God transcends the laws of nature. God has touched my spirit and transformed my life. And still I struggle with unbelief in this area.

In Mark 9, we read the story of a man who brought his son to Jesus for release from an evil spirit. Like me, this father had a hard time really believing, and he confessed to Jesus, "I do believe, but help me not to doubt!" (Mark 9:24 NLT)

I know the physical world is not all there is, and I know the God behind our perceived reality, but the matrix still has me to a good extent. "Help me not to doubt!"