The title of the movie is taken from George Elliot. In Middlemarch she writes:
"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on
unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might
have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited
tombs."
Though Evans (Elliot) was an infidel, the quote as it stands
is true and worthy of reflection. We might modify it a bit and rather than
think in terms of the 'growing good of the world', instead we can ponder the
testimony that will be revealed in heaven itself. Hebrews 11 tells us that the
'winners' in terms of the Kingdom are those who wandered about destitute,
living in caves and other lonely places, suffering torture and even death. In
the world's eyes they were losers but as Christians we don't see these things
or reckon them as the world does.
The testimony of Church history is largely the same. The
heroes you read about in the history books are often those who made peace with
power or captured it. Or other times it's a story of those who were
misunderstood and hated in their day but subsequently 'claimed', appropriated,
and lionised by those who in reality oppose them. Like the Pharisees who built
the tombs of the prophets and yet were of the same ilk that killed them – so it
is with many ecclesiastical denominations and hierarchies in our day and the
mythologised figures of Church history. They lavish praise on figures that were
they to appear in their midst, they would hate and seek to destroy.
The Elliot quote (while placed in a wrong context) hints at a
profound truth, the real movers and shakers in terms of real history – in terms
of the eschatological are often unknown and ignored (or largely so) by the
history books and the historians who are concerned with different criteria than
that of the Scriptures. There are many great heroes of the faith whose names
echo through eternity that are forgotten, ignored, or even despised by the
world-compromised False Church, its court historians and the culture at large.
We shouldn't expect any different. It's interesting that
Elliot (who was basically a pagan) picked up on that but then again I think
it's judgment on that age that many of the authors, thinkers, and artists (who
in many respects came to repudiate Christianity) were more often than not
rejecting the norms of Victorian society and its sham Christianity. It needed condemning
and should have been by the Church but instead it took the 'rebels' like Elliot
and Hardy to do it.*
Ironically others like Dickens did the same but their message
is lost as today's Evangelicals attempt to 'claim' (or appropriate) them. It's
a travesty but one easily foisted on an ignorant age.
The Elliot quote is appropriate to the film because in many
respects the testimony of Jaegerstaetter is one that had no impact on the war.
His resistance and death did not stop the Nazis or for that matter have any effect
on the people around him or the soldiers that killed him. And yet his testimony
stands sure. He was right and at this point in time history has vindicated him.
Whether he was a believer or not (in Biblical terms) the Day of Judgment will
reveal, but his testimony stands true and is worthy of praise.
Evangelicals also offered praise to the movie though I have
often found their admiration to be tepid. The whole message of the movie flies
in the face of the 'mover and shaker' mentality they celebrate and champion.
To understand the real import requires a different
understanding of the nature of the spiritual conflict we are engaged in. The
audience is not just the world in the here and now but the celestial order
which also includes how we conduct ourselves in private, in prayer, worship
etc., things the Dominionist movement has largely denigrated or relegated to
being of secondary importance. For them the primary act of piety is to impact
culture and the idea of martyr-retreat – for them, is no occasion to glory.
Christians rooted in Biblical faith know better and unlike the Evangelicals who
pay lip service to prayer and the proclamation of the Word, they know that
these things do far more than all their activism. Indeed the activism they
engage in merely confuses the Church, sidetracks it and eventually leads it
astray. We are to bear testimony to the world – something Jaegerstaetter did –
and according to Kingdom ethics, something Evangelicals do not seem to
understand.**
The movie also presents something of a dilemma for
Evangelicals. Here was one who courageously opposed the Nazis but was not a
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He didn't 'actively' resist. He didn't participate in the
resistance nor collaborate with those trying to overthrow the government. His
resistance is of a different nature and in terms of ethics – it's Christ-like.
Bonhoeffer on the other hand lived and acted in terms outside to and in
violation of the New Testament. Bonhoeffer was not a martyr, he was a political
prisoner who was executed for his crimes against the state. It may have been an
evil state but that doesn't excuse Bonhoeffer's actions. Christians never
plotted to kill any of the Caesars. Jaegerstaetter on the other hand died a
martyr for his beliefs.
Evangelicals profess to admire the moral message of the film
and yet I find this disingenuous because historically they excoriated and
continue to detest war resistors of America's wars – even when the conscientious
objector's who did so, did it on a moral basis because the US military was
involved in evil behaviour. Jaegerstaetter's stand could just as easily be made
against the US and its wars. Evangelicals and other Right-wing advocates attack
the equivalence argument but those who know better and read history with an
honest eye can attest that US actions on the ground in places like Korea,
Indochina, Afghanistan, and Iraq were (at least at times) Nazi-like and evil.
Those that would reject American calls to 'serve' would be hated by the Church
– just as they were in previous decades, just as they were by the majority of
Christians under the Third Reich. The American public has been heavily
propagandised to support its nation's wars. Americans tend to think something
like Nazi Germany could never happen here. History and recent events tell a
different tale. Americans not unlike quite a few Germans and Japanese after the
war are in a state of denial about what their nation is and what it has done.
I found the movie to be moving and a condemnation of not just
Nazism but all militarist bestial regimes, adjectives which describe all
empires.
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*Needless to say Iain Murray completely misinterprets the
impact of fiction and literature in late nineteenth and early twentieth century
Britain. In his 2009 The Undercover
Revolution he argues that fiction played a significant role in dismantling
Victorian and Imperial Britain – the Britain he glories in.
Murray is in agreement with WR Inge who argued the social
change being advocated would lead to:
No God. No country. No family. Refusal to serve in war. Free love. More
play.
Less work. No punishments. Go as you please. It is difficult to imagine any
programme which, if carried out, would be more utterly ruinous to a country
situated as Great Britain is today.
What can we say? Obviously the breakdown of society can have
terrible consequences but the British order was ungodly at its foundation and
yet purported to be Christian. If the 'no god' wasn't the God of Scripture to
begin with, then what difference does it make? Refusal to serve in war? Praise
be to God if that's the case because a country that equates Christian ethics
with flag waving nationalism and an unquestioning willingness to kill men for
king and country – that's not the Christianity of the New Testament. I would
applaud any moral assault on that order just as I must condemn the new order
that would arise in its wake. We are always strangers and pilgrims here –
something Murray has seemingly forgotten.
It was judgment that these authors had more moral sense than
the court theologians and apologists for empire. The same is no less true today
in the United States.
** It is at this point that Rome's remnants of nature-grace
dualism shine over and against the monistic intellectual and ethical tradition
of Magisterial Protestantism and particularly its Confessional heritage. While
Rome's theology (generally speaking) is quite friendly to the world and willing
to integrate with it (and its knowledge) in order to build a grand Christian
order, Catholicism is broad enough that it also incorporates a dissident
tradition, one that embraces pacifism and separation from the world as a higher
calling. These two forces exist in tension within the Roman tradition while the
mainstream Protestant legacy (both Mainline and Confessional) that rejects the Pietistic
and First Reformation heritage (and their impulses) has always been hostile to
any hint of duality, even if it's found in the New Testament itself.