Following on yesterday’s post about Mel Gibson‘s new movie, “The Passion,” neither the Chronicle nor the NY Times reviewers were particularly impressed from a filmmaking standpoint. From the Chronicle review:

It’s a stylish and visually polished re-creation of the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus — unrelieved suffering and martyrdom, in other words. Controversy over whether it will inflame anti-Semitism guarantees huge audiences, and many people may be profoundly moved. But as a film it is quite bad.
It isn’t awful merely because of Gibson’s obsessive need to zoom in and linger on bloodletting, although this makes it difficult to watch. It’s awful because everything he knows about storytelling has been swept aside by proselytizing zeal. Without doubt, this is a heartfelt expression of religious faith, but it is so naked an expression — untempered by detached, mediating intelligence — that it speaks solely to the converted.

And the NY Times review adds:

“The Passion of the Christ” is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it. Mr. Gibson has constructed an unnerving and painful spectacle that is also, in the end, a depressing one. It is disheartening to see a film made with evident and abundant religious conviction that is at the same time so utterly lacking in grace.

But Kenneth L. Woodward observes in this NY Times op-ed that the public’s interest in the movie is due largely to the sanitized versions of Christianity that are so prevalant in America today:

Mr. Gibson’s raw images invade our religious comfort zone, which has long since been cleansed of the Gospels’ harsher edges. Most Americans worship in churches where the bloodied body of Jesus is absent from sanctuary crosses or else styled in ways so abstract that there is no hint of suffering. In sermons, too, the emphasis all too often is on the smoothly therapeutic: what Jesus can do for me.
More than 60 years ago, H. Richard Neibuhr summarized the creed of an easygoing American Christianity that has in our time triumphantly come to pass: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment though the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Despite its muscular excess, Mr. Gibson’s symbol-laden film is a welcome repudiation of all that.
Indeed, Mr. Gibson’s film leaves out most of the elements of the Jesus story that contemporary Christianity now emphasizes. His Jesus does not demand a “born again” experience, as most evangelists do, in order to gain salvation. He does not heal the sick or exorcise demons, as Pentecostals emphasize. He doesn’t promote social causes, as liberal denominations do. He certainly doesn’t crusade against gender discrimination, as some feminists believe he did, nor does he teach that we all possess an inner divinity, as today’s nouveau Gnostics believe. One cannot imagine this Jesus joining a New Age sunrise Easter service overlooking the Pacific.
Like Jeremiah, Jesus is a Jewish prophet rejected by the leaders of his own people, and abandoned by his handpicked disciples. Besides taking an awful beating, he is cruelly tempted to despair by a Satan whom millions of church-going Christians no longer believe in, and dies in obedience to a heavenly Father who, by today’s standards, would stand convicted of child abuse. In short, this Jesus carries a cross that not many Christians are ready to share.

The religious website beliefnet has been sponsoring an online debate over The Passion and the theological issues it raises. The participants are two scholars representing diverse theological and academic perspectives. John Dominic Crossan is a well-known liberal New Testament scholar whose approach to Jesus is creative, but rather bizarre and skeptical. Ben Witherington III is an outstanding academic from Asbury Theological Seminary who advocates orthodox Christian theology. These two scholars are publishing a measured dialogue that is must reading for people who want to wrestle with the serious issues raised by The Passion of the Christ.