I watched Terminator Salvation this evening, and despite what might be considered a corny ending with a confusion of the metaphorical and the literal, it had enough that was good to make it enjoyable overall.
The commercials for the movie annoyingly gave away that one of the characters was a human-machine hybrid of sorts, but presumably that eliminates the need for any spoiler warning here. I was struck by the tactics of both sides: one concerned that they may lose what distinguishes them from machines, the other trying to make a machine human enough that it can infiltrate among humans and betray them. But in the process, it turned out they made their human-machine human enough that he sided with the humans.
This has always been the concern that religious believers have regarding apologists, or which they ought to have if they don’t. In order to be an apologist, you have to be able to make your case in terms that your opponents might find persuasive. Although ultimately apologists help those who are believers to bolster their confidence in their beliefs, if an apologist never persuades anyone then they will fail to serve this function.
What happens in the process is that these “hybrids” bring something of that which is outside into the fold, even while maintaining as their express aim the conversion of the outsiders. And so it was that apologists arguing with philosophers made philosophical terminology the key to doctrinal debate. And so it was that those arguing against scientific advances that were felt to be a threat couched their beliefs in the language of science (although in many cases lacking the substance thereof).
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Religions that do not defend their beliefs (and in the process develop them) do not last. But I wonder whether, if we at long last come to understand the processes that are involved, the dynamics of legitimation, we may not take a more positive approach to them. Religious believers do not need to be an embattled group desperately trying to avoid being changed by the views of others. We can never be hermetically sealed off from others, and we cannot avoid being shaped by our contact with others.
Those who deny that “the world” has anything to do with them tend to reflect cultural values uncritically, all the while denying that it is so. Isn’t it better to acknowledge that we cannot be unaffected, and attempt to engage in critical appropriation of that which is new, and critical preservation of that which is worth clinging to in our own tradition?
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