“Matrix” as not a christian movie.

I don’t have much time before I have to feed Soren (my 5 five month old son).

I absolutely love this friend of mine as my own family, I’ve seen his two sons grow up and everything, he is great, but unfortunately last night he was the perfect icon of all that is wrong w/ evangelical cultural interpretation of culture and I just. He relentlessly reinterpreted “Matrix Revolutions” (and really the whole trilogy) as representing the Gospel. According to him, Neo is a Christ figure, the matrix is the fallen world, the Agents are temptation, and Neo’s sacrificial death frees mankind, etc. (these are basically his words).

Now, this is certainly reading into the “intentions” of the film beyond even the explicit “christian” imagery of sacrifice/death resurrection/trinity etc. And this does violence to the text. We should value the creation of any text, rather than just read them the way that we want to (in order to “evangelize” or something like that.) anyway, i’m still in process about the right way to articulate a theological cultural hermeneutic (i’m not sure if that’s the best way to think of it. the cultural studies question).

all this to say that the “matrix” in my opinion is an “eastern” tale of a salvation rather than a Christian one. The logic of sacrifice and balance in the matrix has very little affinity to the gospel, and any allusions to the contrary cheapen the work of Christ and the Incarnation. But I’ll have to leave this interpretation for tomorrow. anyway, we all to figure out how to think through questions of culture together so that we’re not just moralizing or inserting the gospel everywhere, thereby making it into nothing.