The idea of general revelation seems forgotten in the modern theological discourse as we debate things like “Would Jesus allow trans kids to play games with their friends?” and “Is empathy a sin?” But the idea that all people understand on some level that there is a Creator remains one of the most crucial tenets of faith. Taken to one extreme, it becomes the founding idea of Universalism, to another the way you explain other faiths sharing creeds and ideas with yours. Others see it as permission to condemn those who “know better.”
I’m not saying that Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) is the greatest example of general revelation in film, but I did say that when I was a punk kid in Theology 201 trying to explain the idea to classmates. More than that, it’s the idea of God itself that the film really illuminates for those who are not equipped to turn the abstract concepts of predestination and free will over in their head. If God is a being outside of time and space who is encountering all of time at once, are these two ideas not the same phenomenon described from a linear and non-linear point of view in time?
What better description of such a God is there than love as a metaphysical force of nature that reaches out through time and space and nudges existence to inform, yet relies on the actions of the individual to accomplish the goal? If you struggle with conceptualizing God as anything beyond the human on the cross, take in Interstellar, and let your mind reconcile the abstract with the literal. It’s a great tool.
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