Refiner’s Fire: Raiders of the Lost Ark Puts God in a Box

By the time the final credits begin, Jewish and Christian viewers of Raiders of the Lost Ark will probably be wondering why the producers of the film brought God into all this. And in a box at that.

Raiders is the latest production of Lucasfilm, Limited, a movie company owned by George Lucas, the man who created Star Wars. The director, Steven Spielberg, is a friend of Lucas, and the director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both have specialized in fast-paced adventure films, and the result of this, their first collaboration, is an exhilarating story of suspense.

The film is set in 1936. Archaeology professor Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is commissioned to locate the lost ark of the covenant. It seems that Hitler is determined to acquire the ark, convinced that it will make him invincible. The Nazis are on the verge of finding it. Jones must find it first.

The story moves from Nepal to Egypt to a secret Nazi base in the Mediterranean as Jones chases his prize. At every stop there are new opponents, new dangers. Jones faces certain death even few minutes, but he always manages to outwit or outfight his enemies. In its concentrated excitement, Raiders almost makes Star Wars seem dull.

Yes, the film is immensely entertaining, and the kids will love it. And yet—what is God doing here? And in a box, at that?

George Lucas is the most religiously oriented of American filmmakers. The Star Wars epics have an explicit theological content. Of course, Christians have frequently complained about the grab-bag theology of The Force, and rightly so. It’s there, though, an inseparable part of these films.

It is also worth noting that Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters lends itself to theological interpretation. It is easy to see images of religious ecstasy melded with the science-fiction plot of visitors from space.

So, we have had God as energy field from Lucas, and God as space traveler from Spielberg. But when they join forces, they give us—God in a box. It’s a let-down, but not really a surprise.

In the Star Wars films we are given a mushy, indefinite religion. The Force can’t be defined exactly. Only certain adepts can use it, and they can turn it to evil as well as good. Lucas stands behind goodness, but apparently just because he thinks goodness is nice. His heroes have no principles, only urges.

Nevertheless, because this religion is so vague, because it requires no hard thinking or believing, it is a safe religion. Lucas can ramble on about The Force for movie after movie and never alienate anybody.

Close Encounters provides a similar example. Spielberg’s aliens possess the usual science-fiction technology, combined with an ineffable incomprehensibility that Spielberg invests with religious overtones throughout the film. Some critics complained that the aliens’ actions make no sense. But indeed they do, if you realize that, for Spielberg, their coming is a religious experience. But Spielberg offers us a religion without reason or consistency: a safe religion.

Now these two talented men have presented us a golden box with God in it. But this time it’s our God, Yahweh, the historical God who has done real things in real places, about whom people believe specific things.

This is why Raiders has almost nothing to do with God. Except for the climactic theophany, this film could have been about the Maltese Falcon, or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or the Light at the End of the Tunnel. Plainly, the ark of God was chosen as a dramatic device to raise the ante as high as it could go. The question whether God is inside is raised to create emotional tension, not to present the most basic of moral questions. These questions are deliberately ignored, because the answers are hard and lead us where we would not go. Biblical faith is not safe.

In the beginning, Jones believes that the ark is no more than a valuable treasure. By the film’s end, after God has put in an appearance (a feminine apparition!), Jones has advanced little further. He realizes that the ark is a storehouse of incredible power, but he never connects this power to the God whose ark it is. He closes his eyes in God’s presence and is therefore spared, but the implications of his escape are never brought up. Having seen proof that one Bible story is true, he does not ask whether the others might be true also. He does not wonder how else God might work in the world.

And why should he? To judge by this movie, the Hebrew God is a local entity, real enough, but only inside that old box. The Force changes the destiny of planets. The spacemen in Close Encounters bring enlightenment to mankind. But the dusty old God of Moses has climbed into a gold-plated hope chest. And the worst thing you could possibly do is open the box and let him out. After punishing the Nazis who open the ark, God climbs back inside and slams the lid.

Of course, nothing blasphemous occurs in Raiders. Irreligion doesn’t sell tickets. And yet, one senses a certain contempt for God in all this: the idea that he’s all right in his place, but that it’s wise to keep him locked away when he’s not killing Nazis.

Jews and Christians know that God is everywhere, not just in the ark, and that his wrath is only one manifestation of his being. We may know it, but generally we don’t live as if it were so. If we did, there would be less reason for people like Lucas and Spielberg to lock God in a crate with Top Secret stenciled on the side. If it is unsafe for God to be let loose, in our entertainments or anywhere else, it is because we have made it so.

HIAWATHA BRAYMr. Bray, a free-lance writer in Chicago, is employed by the U.S. Postal Service.

Where Is the Ark?

Probably most Christians and Jews have never wondered what happened to the ark of the covenant—until Raiders, that is. The movie story line has the ark taken from Jerusalem by invading Egyptians and hidden in the ruined city of Tanis in North Africa.

William LaSor, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, told an Associated Press reporter of legends that say the prophet Jeremiah hid the ark in limestone caves around Jerusalem. However, if the ark was hidden in a cave in the temple area, he said, it would now be under the Moslem shrine (the Dome of the Rock), “and you can’t take a bunch of Jewish archaeologists in there to dig.” He doubts the likelihood of discovery: made of wood in the fourteenth century B.C., it is hard to believe it has been preserved all that time.

Biblical archaeologist Edwin Yamauchi of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, told CT he is unaware of anyone ever trying to find the ark. Most archaeologists believe it was stolen by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem. And Gerald Larue, professor of biblical history and archaeology at the University of Southern California, says the prospect is that the Babylonians stripped the gold from it, or just held it in their collection.

—Editors

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