We’ve been domesticating God for a couple of centuries. In the 19th century, we cast him as Father Christmas, benign and generous, a good liberal monarch, if not quite constitutional, certainly more reasonable than the Kaiser. In The Humanity of God, Karl Barth called this process of domestication, the reduction of God to “a pious notion—to a mystical expression and symbol of a current alternating between man and his own heights or depths” (40). The idea was to minimize the divinity of God, and highlight the humanity. That’s why Nietzsche said God was dead, and that we killed him. To kill the divinity of God is to kill God.

Barth’s entire theology is an attack against and resistance to such a domestication. The recognition that if God is God, he is utterly beyond our heights and depths. But Christ is also God, and He is or was human and divine. If God is utterly other, then all our prayers and talk of God become failed monologues, which would be better than pretending our monologues were dialogues, which is what the liberal theologians tried to pretend. So this gave Barth (and I would argue all of us) a challenge: how to keep God God, but to speak with God not in monologue (which is to just speak to ourselves) but in dialogue. The Apostle shows us this kind of dialogue, not as a theory of theology, but as a lived experience of the most fundamental kind of faith.

I want to accept the force and claim of this experience of faith, but my theological reasoning resists that desire. Like Barth, I imagine that if I am going to grasp the humanity of God, I must somehow “derive the knowledge” of that humanity “from the knowledge of His deity” (The Humanity of God, 38). This has always seemed right to me—I have to go from God’s divinity to Christ’s humanity and not the other way around. If we go from humanity to divinity, I fear we will always just get humanity. The Apostle does not rehearse some kind of counter-argument to this idea. Rather it provides a confession of human faith that seems a revelation of the divinity in humanity. But this divinity is not some kernel of perfection, of moral purity, or innate goodness. That would be a self-serving circularity. Somehow the film reveals—and that is the necessary word—it reveals in our human practices of pentecostal religion a holiness that is greater than our own petty concerns. It shows the holiness of a sinner.

Sonny, played by Robert Duvall, has a wandering eye and a temper. His wife takes over his church in an underhand way, and also is having an affair. The realization of this betrayal sends Sonny into drink and anger. He lashes out and sends his wife’s lover into a coma. He later dies. But before he does, Sonny flees Texas, drive his car into a pond, and then makes his way into Louisiana. Not just a fugitive, but a penitent. He re-baptizes himself as the Apostle EF, and begins to build a church with the help of a retired black preacher, the reverend Blackwell.

Our sense of sin has degraded. We think of sin as sickness, as either a consequence of human corruption (a bad upbringing or a weak psychology) or as something inhuman (psychosis). To the degree that we oscillate between self-righteous moralizing and endless emotional indulgence, we have forgotten what holiness might be. God is no petty reprimand. Our weaknesses are not mere mistakes of poor reasoning or failures of feeling. Sin is endemic. The Apostle shows sin to be a convoluted mix of fate and choice.

The film shows us a good man who is also a sinner; a sinner who is also a devout holy man. Duvall explains:

[W]e judge Sonny quickly and harshly. But, you know, he’s just an ordinary guy. He did not commit premeditated murder. He didn’t go to that church social and the baseball game with the intention of killing the young preacher. It just happened. Smack! (Blizek and Burke, 5)

Duvall does not excuse Sonny. In the film, crime will not pay. He will be punished. But he is a mix of sin and devotion, and not simply bad. Duvall admits that “[s]ome religious people might ask why I would make such a movie and emphasize that this evangelical preacher has weaknesses. And my answer is that we either accept weaknesses in good people or we have to tear pages out of the bible.” We would have to tear out the Psalms and everything about David, who sent Uriah to die in battle so he could sleep with Bathsheba. Duvall describes Sonny in this way: 

No, he was never a bad guy. He was a good guy. But he did something bad. So he is full of good and bad. Sonny’s a good guy; he believed he had a calling from the time he was twelve; and he errs like most characters do, you know? . . . He’s a kind of percentage mixture at the beginning and at the end. There’s a certain percentage chance he will do good and a percentage chance he will again err. But he knows he has erred and that he needs confession and redemption. (Blizek and Burke, 6)

This last claim is all important: he knows he has erred and that he needs confession and redemption. He doesn’t defend, explain, exonerate himself. He knows he sinned. He doesn’t want human forgiveness; he strives for redemption, knowing, of course, that such redemption is in God’s hands, not his own. But he can and does attempt to make himself worthy of God’s grace. 

Sonny is a struggling soul, devout and committed to his calling. He is no fraud. The Apostle is no fake Hollywood film, showing faith to always be bad faith. As Ebert comments, “There isn’t a canned and prefab story arc, with predictable stops along the way. Instead, the movie feels as alive as if it’s a documentary of things happening right now.” Many of the actors in the film are not professional actors. Duvall describes how he made the film:

I tried to mix the non-actors with the actors. I tried to turn the whole film-making thing around as much as possible. I didn't want to come in and tell them what to do. I wanted them to show me what they do. That is why we used non-actors with that kind of background. (Blizek and Burke, 5)

 The events and dialogue of the film were derived from the stories, phrases, and words he had collected from people from small southern churches and evangelical events for over thirteen years:

“I always call you ‘Jesus’; you always call me ‘Sonny’”; “I’m on the devil’s hit-list”; “I’m gonna get on Jesus’ mailing-list!”; “Holy Ghost explosion”; “Short-circuit the devil!”; “I’m a genuine Holy Ghost Jesus-filled preaching machine here this morning!” I use those phrases in the film. I heard them from the preachers and from the people. These were their terms. God is immediate to their lives. (Blizek and Burke, 7)

The immediacy of God is manifest in the everyday poetry of their everyday speech. It is not just that the prayers of these people are a kind of breath, as Kierkegaard calls his prayers, but that their breathing is continual prayer. 

I often appeal to an argument made by David Wiggins in order to explain our secular condition. What we have lost, Wiggins argues, is the notion that faith in God can rest in “a posteriori arguments” (90). While someone in the 18th century would often appeal to a priori arguments for God, most people “in that age would have hastened to amplify with a more hazardous or a posteriori conception” (90).  An a posteriori argument is one that derives from observation and experience, one form of which would be to appeal to history or nature as evidence of God’s providential power. Another way of understanding this is to note that we have lost confidence in the idea that nature is itself purposive. We have lost the idea, for example, that “there exists a God whose purpose ordains certain specific duties for all men, and appoints particular men to particular roles or vocations” (89). We no longer act (nor should we act or believe) that we can read God’s purposes in the world and from the world. Nor do we have confidence (nor should we) that we each have a particular, preordained role or purpose. I say all of this, speaking confidentially of a “we”, about others and about the social and intellectual history of the last 200 years. The Pentecostal faithful, however, did not get the memo.

I know many people might pretend to believe in God’s providential powers, but for the most part that belief is mere window-dressing. Their faith in such powers is mostly talk. The faith in God shown in The Apostle is both a priori and a posteriori; it is for me the picturing of a world that is shrinking away, a diminished remnant of an earlier providentially infused existence. God is present in some form in what happens in their world. I cannot enter into that remnant, but I respect those living amidst that faith and am moved by it, as was Duvall.

Sonny tries to live in togetherness with God, through preaching and good works. He brings together a community of people around and through his own charismatic and deeply honest faith and love. The film shows this togetherness and community as real. It’s music is its theology. And this music is all prayer, all praise. And in the dark moments of confusion and despair and hurt, Sonny’s prayers are filled with anger, but they continually acknowledge God. Sonny and his congregation live within the framework of their faith. Both Sonny and the Reverend Blackwell hold to an elemental faith, articulated beautifully in a conversation between Blackwell and the Apostle towards the end of the film. Blackwell says, that God “places us right where he wants us to be, in all times and in all places. You believe that?” Sonny responds: “Amen, brother. I do. . . I do.” They both do. This is an a posteriori sense that God’s will can be read in the history of what happens.

However, I still do not imagine that we can know God by a posteriori means. And yet, Reverend Blackwell’s and the Apostle EF’s absolute faith in God’s providential care and power moves me to tears. What I hear is their togetherness with God, which is Christ. I cannot help but respect and admire this faith, even if I cannot confess it myself.

Sonny will not escape punishment. The police find him, and come to the church. He has expected this. He is allowed to finish his preaching, to offer a final benediction for those he serves in the church they have all built. Towards the end of his preaching he holds a little baby—and asks the congregation and us, who watch, if we have the love to pierce this little baby hand that he holds and shows us with an iron nail. Can we nail this little hand to a cross? Sonny, the Apostle, confesses that he does not have that kind of love, but God does—to sacrifice his only child for us. The baby and its little hands—the visceral reality of those hands—holds us both in his preaching and in the film. With this child before us, he then asks us to imagine the baby crucified. He reminds us that this is what redemption entails. It is awful—humans are awful to require such a thing and God is awe-full to grant it. While Sonny underlines that we lack the kind of love that God has, he also intimates to us how horrible that love is (I see the child’s hands pierced). This is redemptive love.

The crucified child, however, was not this child, but God himself. It is Himself that God sacrifices for us. Sonny reminds the congregation that Christ, as God, could have called to his 10,000 angels to rescue him, which is to say, he could have rescued himself without effort. But he did not. That is His gratuitous gift to us.

Sonny, at this point in the film, will not try to escape from punishment. But his final sermon is not a confession, even if he is contrite. In this final sermon to his church, he does not preach his guilt. He is not concerned with himself. He preaches God’s crucifixion and thus God’s love for all of us. He preaches for the sake of the others in the church, for the sake of that community that has come together. His faith is expressed in his commitment to the church. Before he is handcuffed, he takes off his watch and other jewelry to be sold so as to help sustain the church as long as possible.

He shows us in his final sermon, and in the making of this church and congregation, that all our prayers, all our angry and loving talk towards God, is always already answered by Christ’s crucifixion. In faith we are always in dialogue with God. He speaks to us because he has already spoken to us in the grace and gift of redemption. It is up to us to show that we are worthy of it and that we hear Him.

Works Cited

Blizek, William L. and Ron Burke. "The Apostle": An Interview with Robert Duvall. Journal of Religion and Film.  2.1 (1998).

Ebert, Roger. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-apostle-1998

Wiggins, David. “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life.” In Needs, Values, Truth.  3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford UP: 1998, 2002.