pirates 3

This is not a movie review, because I’m a horrible critic. There isn’t much I see that I don’t enjoy. Especially films like Pirates 3. It would have taken an awful movie to get me to say I didn’t like it.

Call me overly evangelical, but I have this belief that as far as our culture tries to run from religion, the impact of the Bible and it’s themes on our culture are inescapable. Sometimes this seems a bit more intentional in movies like the Matrix which sought to simply communicate world thought.

Other times movies accidentally stumble onto theological themes. If you haven’t seen the movie and care about everything being a surprise then stop reading.

Here are two quick ones I noticed.

When Will’s dad “Bootstrap Bill” is freed by Will from his debt, he replies that he will stay with Will to endure his newly acquired task. (Rom 6:18)

Here another one. When they are returning from initially saving Jack from the world end, they pass from death to life through water.

But far and away the most interesting one to me was the scene where Jack is stranded at the worlds end with all the other Jack Sparrow’s. I suppose I have a special interests in doctrines about heaven, hell, soteriology, and post-mortem existence, hence my interest in this scene.

As many of you know one of my favorite books is C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. I think Lewis gets a lot right including the way he presents salvation having to do with nature of one’s character’s initial encounter with the presence of God.

As good as C.S. Lewis is, his book is fiction as his introduction emphatically suggests not be systematized into our theologies. Someone who puts theological language to the direction Lewis is going is Greg Boyd in his chapter on Karl Barth’s das Nichtege and his subsequent understanding of hell. Boyd, who wants to avoid annihilationism proposes that we understand damned beings as eternally existing ontologically only unto themselves. Thus they have a place in eternity, but not a place in heaven.

I felt like that’s what this scene in the movie communicated. Sparrow, got his final wish at the world end. Himself as the only reality (Lewis’s neighborhoods moving further and further apart from one another). Here’s something else I thought was interesting. The real genius in the depiction of Sparrow was the actual Sparrow was the one who was barking orders out to all the other Sparrows and selfishly eating the last peanut. Thus, not the one who suffers the loss of something, but the loss of giving to someone and overcoming the problem of self.