DWill wrote:What little I've gathered about Niebuhr's theology, though, makes me think he wouldn't find the God of PL a good template. Do you agree? Also, would Niebuhr have assessed disdain for God any differently if he was with us today, vs. the situation in the 50s? The country is more religious now than then, though probably not in a way Niebuhr would have approved of.
At base I see Niebuhr and Milton as having the same idea of God as the law of love in the universe. Milton works this through analogically, but both have a deeply Christian vision that love was incarnate in Jesus Christ who had a filial relationship with the ultimate creative source. Looking from afar, I get the impression the USA's current religiosity is far more hypocritical, shallow, escapist and self-serving than the faith of the 1950s, when I think there was wider interest in dialogue. Your extremely telling comment earlier that fundamentalism has no theology just shows what a pack of liars American Christians are. You cannot be a Christian without a theology. Niebuhr says in
Faith and History The New Testament faith anticipates that man's defiance of God will reach the highest proportions at the end of history. Precisely in "the last days perilous times will come ..." (
2 Tim 3). This expectation of heightening forms of human defiance of God in history, which is also clearly expressed by Jesus himself in his warning of false Christs and false prophets (
Matt 24) is a symbol of the tremendously wide frame of meaning which the Christian faith has for the stuff of history. It envisages antinomies, contradictions and tragic realities within the framework without succumbing to despair. (p31-2)
It seems to me that Milton was similarly interested in explaining the seductive power of Satan to deceive, as a way of explaining the apparent contradictions in life, and that this deceptive tissue has lately become so powerful that people cannot imagine a path of love.
Your idea for the rock opera is good, maybe more promising than the movie under development, which I had no idea of. I'd be afraid that to commercialize the film, the battle scenes would be featured, and too much of that bores me. But spectacles in general tend to be my least favorite type of movie. On the website, users were asked to vote whether the movie would bomb or be the bomb. I'd bet money on the former.
You are right that an action movie alone would bomb, although the example of Jimmy Page helping with
Godzilla comes to mind. They should get Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton as musical consultants. $100m is big buckaroonies. I wrote reviews of
The Matrix and
Matrix 3, which I now see used Milton's idea of the war in heaven between Michael and Satan, and which operated on multiple levels, as should
Paradise Lost.