A Pauline Exegete Watches Aronofsky’s Noah

I said on Twitter earlier today that one nice
thing about Darren Aronofsky’s new Noah
movie is that I have another illustration for the students in my Pauline
Epistles class of how the apostle does not
read Old Testament narratives.

What I meant is that Paul has a habit
of locating the explanation for divine mercy and grace in God’s own
determination to have mercy rather than in the worth or character or
achievement of its recipients. He does this most prominently with the
Abraham material (see especially Galatians 3 and Romans 4), transforming the
story of a faithful patriarch into an instance of what he calls the “justification
of the ungodly”: Abraham too, just like the former pagans to whom Paul addresses his
letters, was in need of forgiveness and redemption. But Paul also follows
the same pattern with Isaac and Jacob (Romans 9) and even the righteous
remnant of Israel: that faithful band, along with their exiled
co-religionists, constitutes an illustration of justification by grace, not works
(Romans 11:5-6).

Paul didn’t talk about the Noah story
in his extant epistles, but here’s how I imagine he would have read it.

Noah found favor with God, says
the text of Genesis (charis, or “grace,” in the Greek
translation of Genesis 6:8). And, for Paul (in contrast to many of his fellow Torah-reading
contemporaries), “grace” is defined as a gift given to the unfitting (Romans
4:4-5). Genesis subsequently notes that Noah was a righteous man (Genesis 6:9),
and according Paul, that’s the proper order: first grace, then the status of
righteousness. It’s not that God found someone who had already attained a
certain level of goodness and then crowned it with the verdict of
justification. For Paul, the reverse is true.

And this is what Aronofsky’s film
complicates. On the one hand, the movie features a startling exploration of
unrighteousness—“wickedness,” the screenplay calls it—in Noah’s own family. Even
after the violent hordes are drowned, murderous rage is still present among the
select few that are preserved inside the ark. Noah’s immediate family,
including Noah himself, can’t escape the corruption that finally doomed
those outside. In that way, I was surprised by how close Aronofsky gets to
the indictments of Genesis 6:5 and 8:21 that bookend the story
of the flood. On either side of the narrative, evil lurks. There was evil
before the flood, and there was evil afterwards, and the film depicts this
reality with raw power. So far, so Pauline.

But near the end of the film, Emma
Watson’s character, Ila, gives up the game. She says to Noah that perhaps
God preserved him because God knew that he had a merciful heart. Perhaps, she
speculates, that’s exactly the sort of person God could count on to renew
the world non-violently, peaceably, and responsibly after the flood. And in this
way, the film ends up locating the rationale for God’s mercy in some
native spark of goodness in Noah that will, viewers hope, make the
new, post-flood world more livable than the antediluvian one.

In his commentary on Genesis, the
great twentieth century Lutheran scholar Gerhard von Rad notes how un-Pauline
such a reading is:

This saying of Yahweh [“And when the
Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never
again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil
from his youth…,’” Genesis 8:21] without doubt designates a profound turning
point in the Yahwistic primeval history, in so far as it expresses with
surprising directness a will for salvation directed towards the whole of
Noachite humanity, “although” (the Hebrew particle can be translated in this
way) “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” So far as that is
concerned—Calvin says in his exposition of the passage—God would have to punish
man with daily floods. In its hard paradox this v. 21 is one of the most
remarkable theological statements in the Old Testament: it shows the pointed
and concentrated way in which the Yahwist can express himself at decisive
points. The same condition which in the prologue is the basis for God’s judgment
in the epilogue reveals God’s grace and providence. The contrast between God’s
punishing anger and his supporting grace, which pervades the whole Bible, is
here presented almost inappropriately, almost as an indulgence, an adjustment
by God towards man’s sinfulness.

The point of the Noah story,
on von Rad’s deeply Pauline interpretation, is not that Noah
possesses in himself the seed of a better humanity. The point is that God
promises to show mercy, even when Noah’s offspring prove just as violent and
evil as the descendants of Cain.