what does it mean to believe?
by Douglas Messerli
Lucas Hnath The Christians / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum, the performance I
saw was a matinee on January 9, 2016
But the sermon on this Sunday,
presented in four parts, we soon perceive, is something different. With his
wife, Elizabeth (Linda Powell), his associate pastor Joshua (Larry Powell), and
church elder (Philip Kerr) sitting on the plush chairs beside him, Paul tells
the story of missionary friend in Africa who tells of a building that has been
attacked by terrorists going up in flames. Suddenly a young boy plunged into
the burning building and brought out a child, evidently his sister, into
safety. But the boy himself was burning and quickly died. The missionary
explains how sad he was that this young hero, whom he had never been able to
convert, will never go to Heaven and be condemned to Hell.
The friends’ story troubles pastor Paul,
and over the last many months or years he has apparently pondered over the
problem of why God would not admit such a being simply because he had not
converted to a Christian religion. Searching and rereading his Bible, Paul
finds no actual words of description of Hell in the Biblical texts themselves. Gehenna—the only specific reference he
can find to anything like the idea of Hell—he explains, was a word that the
Jews used to describe a kind of refuge dump (actually my Biblical dictionary
describes it as the valley near Jerusalem where apostate Israelites, such as
those who worshiped Moloch, and burnt their children as sacrifice to the God,
lived). Why then do his fellow believers persist in their conviction that those
who are not saved will surely be punished by the devil. Christ, he argues, came
to save all men, not just those who believed in him.
The congregation remains silent, but the associate pastor, Joshua, after
delivering the usual prayer, cannot remain still, expressing his shock for his
associate’s expression of what he perceives as an obvious heretical position.
He argues that although the congregation has remained quiet, a large number of
its
members will surely disagree with
Paul’s hermeneutical expression. Paul suggests a collection plate vote,
discovering that at least 50 individuals are immediately ready to side with
Joshua, and soon after Joshua and those parishioners leave the church.
After the service, the elder takes him aside to further discuss the
schism Paul has created, worrying deeply about the ability of the church to
survive if it loses more of its congregation, which, indeed, soon happens.
Paul has no choice, given his position,
but to admit that they too would be heaven. All mankind has been saved, not
just those we as humans might choose. When she argues that his is an irrational
view, he posits that his God is beyond human rationality, is something larger,
more incomprehensible than the human mind can accept. His God, he suggests,
must encompass more than the human mind can comprehend.
But why, Jenny challenges, did he wait
until the church was paid for to express his views. Had he, in fact, determined
to share his revelations only when it became convenient to do so?
In Hnath’s thoughtful play, Paul cannot
answer some of these questions; he can only beg that Elizabeth stay, and hope
that in his new preaching, he will not lose everyone.
His play, accordingly, asks questions
instead of providing simple answers. And in that fact, The Christians is a work that does not use its own title to
challenge of demean those who do believe.
If one might have wished that Hnath took
his argument just a bit further, questioning even the idea of Heaven, positing
the possibility, as a reformer like Calvin did, that what he describe has
heaven and hell exist only here on earth, one cannot diminish the profundity of
the questions his play does pose.
Personally, I was put off by the
director’s (or author’s) decision to present these issues to the audience by
means of microphone; yes, we know that the evangelical preacher’s use these
devices to raise their voices to the rafters; but in the intimate Mark Taper
Forum, where actor’s voices easily carry, it seems somewhat off-putting to
direct all conversations through electronical means. I was somewhat amused that
a large number of the elderly audience had purchased hearing devices, when,
surely, even the deaf might have heard every word of this production.
Moreover, the microphones delimit the
movement of characters, who, tied to their chords, find it difficult, at times,
to move more than a few feet, which helps to reiterate that Hnath’s play was,
primarily, a didactic dialogue.
But I have nothing against such
dialogues, particularly when they ask for their audiences simply to listen and
weigh the meaning of the character’s pronouncements on such important issues as
belief and doubt.
Unfortunately, it appears that some
audience members saw the play as a testimony for belief itself. A friend asked
me, after the play, “Did it make you believe?”
“No,” I replied, “I remain a
non-believer. Although I grew up in a church, I find such beliefs somewhat
repugnant and dangerous in a world that continues to use religion and culture
as something to segregate and cut themselves off from others.” But I also don’t
feel that Hnath’s play demanded that you should believe in either Paul’s gentle
epistle or Joshua’s roaring blare of disregard. Rather, the playwright asked
those who might believe—and even those, like me, who find they cannot—to ask
some serious questions. What does it mean to believe, and how does any belief
exclude others: simple questions we should perhaps daily ask.
Los Angeles, January 11, 2016
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2016).