In his films Dogville and Manderlay, Lars von Trier offers an account of divine justice which has paradoxically offended humanists but has struck a chord with some Christian theologians. This paper seeks to show that the account of divine justice in the book of Amos and in the Hebrew Bible more generally is illuminated by juxtaposition with von Trier's work. Importantly, however, the two films cited have to be seen as part of a uncompleted trilogy which means that the criticisms directed at von Trier on the basis of the first film alone need to be reassessed in the light of the second. Key issues that emerge are the relationship between individual and communal guilt and the arrogance involved both in judging and not judging others. Justice is not to be equated with law or individual deserts in either Von Trier or Amos but is more closely related to the inevitable restoration of balance in a natural system. Such justice is rough-both approximate and violent-but arrogant attempts to mitigate that roughness almost always end up with even more approximate and violent results.
The relationship between the difficulty of a text and its function as scripture is explored in a juxtaposition of the books of Zechariah, Daniel, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and the diaries of Sibelius. On this basis, the argument is made that the difficulty of a text for its readers may reflect the difficulty its writers had in reading precursor texts. Zechariah enacts the difficulty that the post-exilic community had in reading its own documents which were coming to be regarded as scripture. The discourse of revelation and immediate vision is itself dependent on previous reading. This, however, does not vitiate the claims of a text to be scripture, as this is a matter not for the author but for the readership to decide. For a text to be scripture describes a mode of reading rather than content. The difficulty of scripture is its point, and what it reveals is the inadequacy of the human grasp of revelation.
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