Those who believe the story of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16) is a parable are right.  If they also believe it’s a parable about a rich man and a poor man, they’re wrong.  Dressed in the royal color of purple (Judges 8:26) and having five brothers, the rich man, true to the character of a parable, symbolizes Judah: the (royal) tribe of Judah: the Jews of Judah.  The story has the rich man in a tormenting fire, although it’s not even certain he is being actually tormented.  He is being judged or chastised, though, and he doesn’t like it.  That is, the Jews of Judah are being judged or chastised because they have violated the covenant of God.  The same fate will befall the rich man’s five brothers—five tribes.  All six of these Israelite tribes originated in the union of Jacob and Leah.

If the rich man is in Hell, as most Christians hold, it must be admitted that the Jews of Judah are in Hell, and that those of the other tribes will be too.  Do we really want to believe that?  One Jew after another goes to a place of everlasting torture?

In point of fact, where the rich man goes when he dies can be called “the invisible” or “the unseen” (hades), and there’s nothing in the text about the distress in this place being eternal.  In my view, if the Greek word kolasis (“punishment” in Matthew 24:46) means correction, the Jews of Judah are being chastised in order to be corrected.

And what about Lazarus?  Simple: he represents saved Gentiles.  More on that later, perhaps.

Natalie Portman, actress. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Five women (Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, et al.) investigate a dangerous swampland captured by something known as “the Shimmer,” previously investigated by military operatives who lost their lives.  This is the premise of the recent movie Annihilation (2018), a sci-fi tale largely nonsensical and thus inferior—but intriguing too.  It is also deeply disturbing, in a way that has the ring of truth about life.

What seems to be the case about the Shimmer area is that it is representative of pathology.  It is a place of metastasizing, of mutation, of refracted DNA.  The dialogue contains references to cancer, dementia, etc.  The women are in a sphere of deadly catastrophe essentially no different from their own.  What has to be done to annihilate the annihilator?

Sophisticated acting by Portman and Leigh and others enrich the film, and director Alex Garland “has crafted sequences of strange splendor” (Alan Scherstuhl).  Annihilation, in truth, is neither a success nor a failure (I don’t know about the novel from which it is adapted).  It is simply disappointing as sci-fi and compelling as representational art.

Did you ever see the late Dr. Richard Eby, a Christian physician, on Christian TV?  Like Bill Wiese, he claimed to have visited Hell (in the guise of an unbeliever) and to have witnessed Revelation’s lake of fire.  In his telling, the lake of fire is not merely the “second death,” as the Book of Revelation teaches.  But Christian universalist Gary Amirault maintains that Eby eventually told him he believes God will save all mankind, and that he read a letter from Eby to his cousin with statements to that effect.  Curious.  Was Eby not sent to Hell, after all?  Did he never see the damning lake of fire?  He used to assert that these were loci of everlasting punishment.

Another thing that should be pointed out is that Eby declared on TV that at some point Jesus told him Eby would still be alive when Christ made His second coming.  But the man died in 2002.  And this is to say nothing about whether in his stories about Hell there are the same kinds of contradictions that exist in Bill Wiese’s stories.

Rembrandt – The Mennonite Minister Cornelis Claesz. Anslo in Conversation with his Wife, Aaltje (detail) – WGA19143 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Taking the existence of God for granted, Silent Light (2009) is a truly religious picture—and a superlative one.  In it, the head of a Mennonite family living in northern Mexico has confessedly fallen in love with another woman (“confessedly” because he told his wife about it).  That the wife is as understanding and tolerant as she is just might strain credulity, but so be it.  What’s important is Carlos Reygadas’s poetic filmmaking for the crafting of something spiritually, metaphysically meaningful.

The first half of this long film is partly about the illusion that sin is some kind of summum bonum—evident in the scene of outdoor smooching between the two adulterers.  Assuredly the second half is about sin as well, but the theme of grace also emerges.  The “silent light” of the title—since light never makes a sound, it must be a metaphor—is a divine miracle near the movie’s end.  It may be a miracle hard to accept, but Reygadas is intimating that the concept of the Deity in control should not be hard to accept.

Silent Light is a Mexican film whose dialogue is in the Mennonite low German language.

For a long time now, the United States has had imposed on it the concept of Salvation By Bureaucracy.  Not spiritual but material salvation.  Welcome to our welfare state.  It isn’t the kind of welfare state we should have, since these bureaucracies are inadequate and wasteful and very expensive, and government deficits are still rising.  Every year 70 billion Medicare and Medicaid dollars are lost to fraud and improper payments, which means every year 70 billion is poured down a rathole, thus we often have Salvation By Bureaucracy for people who don’t need to be saved.

I say we ought to do what Charles Murray has proposed:  abolish Medicare and Medicaid and all other transfer-payment programs, and replace them with an annual grant of $13,000 to every adult in the nation, 21 and older.  The grant would be reimbursed through a surtax placed on what are by anyone’s estimation decent salaries.  This way, Salvation By Bureaucracy is attenuated.  This way, low wages are less of a burden.  This way, Social Security and Medicare never become unspeakably insolvent.  This way, bargaining for a particular salary can be a sure thing.

My own view is that at the same time there should be nationwide federal propaganda teaching the American people to use this money for health care, assisted living, car insurance—the important things.  It should stress that this is all the government money they will be getting, unless the states are stupid enough to provide some welfare dough of their own.  Many will not listen, of course, but others will; and why, in any case, should we have a government which babies American adults?  Bureaucrats regularly decide things for low-income people, as though they alone possess the smarts for this.  They won’t be propagandists; they’ll be—and they are—nannies.  But nannies can’t prevent the staggering debt that will spring up when, in the span of two decades, millions and millions of Americans start receiving Social Security and Medicare.  What politicians have recently done is cut taxes by $1.5 trillion, but, well, what’s going on is not exactly economic conservatism.