The Gospel According to "Interstellar"

I saw Christopher Nolan's new mind-bender, Interstellar, a few weeks ago, and although it ranks lower for me on the overall list of Nolan's films, I still found it very engaging in all of its cosmic glory. As the movie zips through much of the Earth stuff so it can to get to the space stuff (often sacrificing character development in the process), we are progressively shown that this space journey, akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey, has a singular dominant theme beyond all of the visual grandiosity: Love. In a decisive moment in the movie, Brand, played by Anne Hathaway, declares, "Love is the one thing that transcends time and space." The transcendent bonds of love portrayed in Interstellar surface in multiple ways, but the most prominent connection is shown in the familial context, specifically between father (Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey) and daughter (Murph, played by Mackenzie Foy and Jessica Chastain at different ages).

What was interesting to me about this pervading theme of love was how unexpected it seemed. Judging by the minimal amount of information I knew about the movie, I had assumed that the most important message I was going to be told was that science is the answer to all of the problems we have, and that scientists were going to be the heroes that saved the human race from its own self-destruction. I expected to be assured by Nolan that rationalism harnessed through technology and innovation was going to be the key to unlock the door to ultimate human flourishing.

Surprisingly, however, we were informed that love, an unquantifiable emotion, was the supreme force that governed and surpassed all things material, space and time included. Science was indeed the major tool that saved the human race in the film, but the message communicated by the aforementioned quote tells us that science as a discipline was ultimately inferior to intangible, abstract subjects that talk about love such as philosophy, psychology, and theology. The feelings and actions of love, we are told, have superior and transcendent importance over against sheer facts, equations, and calculations. 

Now, regardless of whether Mr. Nolan holds to any theistic view of reality or not (his education is in English literature so I would assume he is more philosophically-minded), one can still find many religious inferences throughout Interstellar. Megan Garber, in a poignant article from The Atlantic about the religious overtones of the film, quotes Slate in saying "For the first time, Nolan's universe has a God, or something like one" - those who are called "they" - and Garber further states that, "[The film's] villains are the characters who trust too much in logic, without the ballast of something more transcendent. They are the ones who choose physical survival over everything else - who prioritize living, you could say, over life."

One could argue that the power of transcendent, sacrificial love is truly what Interstellar is all about. What struck me the most was how a presumably non-Christian filmmaker could touch on the most powerful theme of the supernatural Christian gospel while also applauding natural science for its important place in humanity. Interestingly, this balance is reflective of the Christian understanding of reality found in the Bible. In one of his most fascinating discourses about the natural and supernatural, the Apostle Paul declares, "There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory" (1 Cor. 15:40, 41). Now, Paul's thesis in this section is to ultimately point to the glory and splendor of God's omnipotent power and love in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and not to simply praise the natural world. But the fact that he attributes some kind of "glory" to the earthly creation in the midst of magnifying the supremacy of the heavenly is remarkable, revealing the inherent value that all of creation maintains.

Christopher Nolan, like Paul, seems to see 
beauty in both the natural and supernatural, 
the concrete and the abstract. Nolan writes, 
"Love is the one thing that transcends time 
and space", while Paul famously wrote, "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends...So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:7, 8a, 13). And the greatest, most sacrificial and transcendent love this world has ever seen is in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Creator and Sustainer of all reality, found only in the glorious splendor of the Servant-Messiah-King, Jesus Christ (Col. 1:15-20).