I recently watched the film Avatar, which has stirred up some controversy. I leave aside its comments on war, greed, capitalism, colonialism, terrorism, the displacement of indigenous peoples, and the like. Some viewers have thought its handling of such topics a simplistic morality play; others have responded that there is enough content in our history to warrant a morality play, simplistic or not. However, as a theologian, I find its pantheism most noteworthy.
Pantheism is the belief that everything in nature is divine and that God is simply the sum of the spiritual forces found in every living creature. The religion of the Na’Vi is certainly pantheistic. As such, it is at odds with sound Christian theology, which teaches that God is both transcendent (He is not to be identified with His creation, but is distinct from it and greater than it) and imminent (He is involved with His creation and is not an absentee God). Pantheists stress the imminent nature of God to such a degree that they forget that the creation itself is not divine.
The film’s pantheism has certainly earned it its critics among traditionalists, who see it as an assault on the Judeo-Christian worldview. But I have a slightly different take on the film’s religion: we live in a culture where pantheism is as profound a spirituality as the average citizen can fathom. The prevailing ideology in the Western world is materialism, the philosophical (and theological!) belief that matter is all that exists. Those who rightly recognize that materialism is a bankrupt and bankrupting idea are nonetheless children of materialism who cannot grasp that there is something completely transcendent above matter. They are intellectually materialists who cannot emotionally or spiritually stomach the consequences of believing in a purely materialist universe. The best they can do is to think that matter must have some deeper ontological or spiritual significance.
This is not a new phenomenon. The eighteenth century was dominated by materialism, and the early nineteenth century reacted vehemently to its mechanistic understanding of the universe. In American letters this reaction to materialism is often called Transcendentalism, despite the fact that it is closer to pantheism than to traditional Christian transcendentalism. And so the debate in the last three centuries has been whether the living world is a soulless machine or a machine with a ghost in that machine. That life might be a creation of God and animated by the Holy Ghost never enters the mind of the debaters.
It would be easy, of course, for us Christians simply to scold our pantheistic and materialist neighbors and say that they should really learn theology better. Of course, they should, but we cannot ignore our complicity in creating the materialist philosophy of the eighteenth century and the necessary romantic reaction thereafter. By the time of the early eighteenth century Christians had begun speaking of the universe as a watch made by a master watchmaker. But a weakness lay hidden in that argument: a watch doesn’t need the ongoing help of a watchmaker. Thus, a deism emerged that could affirm that God had created the world to work in a fine, mechanistic manner, but also taught that He could leave the scene upon completing that task. Materialists then came along and suggested that if the world functions now in a mechanistic manner, there might be a purely mechanistic explanation for its origin. And so we painted ourselves into a corner where pantheism might seem the only way out.
Anyone who has gone hiking in the mountains or looked at a sunset from a beach knows the power of nature’s beauty. Christianity says, “Such things stir the soul, but there is One who is even greater than that. The heavens are not God or even His glory. The heavens merely declare the glory of God, who therefore must be greater than them.” It may not be the usual pantheism that passes for spirituality in our country, but we worship a greater God than what most people’s imagination can muster.
