CGI (computer generated imagery) has changed the way movies are made. Many people agree that the use of CGI as extravagant eye candy has decreased the overall quality of movies. I have seen it used well occasionally. Some of my favorite CGI scenes are the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” and the grand battlefield scenes in “The Gladiator”. Those scenes are beautiful and they make perfect use of CGI to help the author’s imagination come to life in a believable way. It doesn’t always work so well. The story line of the Matrix is one of my all time favorites and it’s a wonderful movie, but the CGI eventually becomes a distraction for me (even more so in the two horrible sequels). When the CGI effects steal the show, the overall value of the movie is diminished as the movie eventually becomes less real and more difficult to believe.

So what does CGI have to do with the theology of God becoming man? Our language about the incarnation of God into the world as the living Christ can bring the story to life or it can make the whole story look silly and unbelievable. The history of human theological endeavor contains a variety of hits and misses. Most of the misses might be blamed on too many philosophical special effects. We can find the first traces of this phenomenon by watching the story of Jesus develop over the decades between its earliest versions and the final full blow CGI presentation in the gospel of John. I’ve recently come to grips with John’s symbolic portrait of Jesus, but for many fundamentalists, the special effects have become the entire focus of their theology. Current flavors of fundamentalism rely heavily on a kind of CGI interpretation of God that fills in the gaps where human actors could not possibly succeed. By fixating on the imagery, the underlying plot is lost.

This brings us to an ironic twist. The idea of God becoming incarnate in Jesus was originally a beautiful attempt to show God as something more real, more human, and more in our reach. But like a cheesy summer block buster, Christianity may have allowed our thirst for action and larger than life cinematography to spoil the plot. I’m not suggesting that we take a Jeffersonian response that butchers the script and removes all the symbolic scenes, but if we continue to craft Jesus with heavy doses of CGI, we may undo what the plot of incarnation means to accomplish – show God as something we can access, relate to, and believe in.

Contrast those CGI movies with a movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable”. Here we have the presentation of a comic book character (something outside of our experience and understanding) in a more down to earth package. This movie seeks to realize the unreal. The story suggests that a superhero might be more plausible than we first thought rather than using CGI to help us visualize something less plausible. This movie still coaxes our belief, but not by suggesting that we suspend our inclinations of reality. The result is a more authentic connection to the subject and a more believable story.

Modernity has left us feeling tired from the fight between secularists debunking the mythic CGI scenes in the Christian story and fundamentalists trying to blur lines with apologetic theological cinematography. Both sides of that battle have chosen a naive approach to studying myths. The postmodern response to this problem is to embrace the story without trying to defend its historicity. Postmodern responses transcend the modern era bible wars by seeking to make the values of Jesus more realistic now rather than insisting that the facts were real then. The result might mean fewer Christians waiting around to have our mistakes corrected in post-production and more Christians accurately portraying the values of Jesus in each scene of our lives.