We went to see Wall-e earlier this week. It’s a pretty good Disney/Pixar film which has, for me, echoed, albeit poorly and incompletely, some of Tom Wrights views that I have been reading in Surprised by Hope.

The background to the film is that the earth has been wrecked by the rubbish of humanity. Humans have left in a spaceship leaving robots to clear up the rubbish and make earth inhabitable again. The spaceship left on a planned 5 year cruise and we pick up the story around 500 years later!

In that 500 years people have ‘evolved’ – they are transported in chairs, have everything they need, and are in a kind of ‘paradise’. People are actually unaware of each other as they float around their paradise cruise.

Wall-e meets Eve, another robot, one of many routinely sent to find signs of life on earth in a way that clearly echoes Noah sending doves from the Ark.

I was struck by how ‘pathetic’ people were portrayed at the start of the movie. Humanity was a collection of self centred obese people who were carried everywhere and had everything they wanted at the touch of a button. While I don’t think the traditional Christian view of ‘heaven’ sees us becoming obese and selfish, I do think it embraces the similar view of paradise providing everything we want and that everything being to our own personal preference. I remember one big well known preacher a few years ago preaching that for the golfers heaven would be one big golf course in which they would never have to queue again for the tee off, for the coffee lovers it would be a never-ending supply of the best coffee … and so on. Quite an individual and selfish outlook – with personal needs paramount and being met. This does not strike as much of an alternative society which Jesus implies the Kingdom is all about.

The turning point in the film is when people start to see an alternative when they notice the beauty around them and that they have an ongoing mission or role. They have been on the cruise since birth and after falling out of her chair a middle aged woman says ‘I never realised we had a pool’ although her chair had been taking her to the pool deck every day for the last 40 or so years. The classic comment comes later, being ‘I don’t want to just survive … I want to live’

This is then backed up with people realising that they belong on earth, that this ‘paradise’ was only ever meant to be temporary and that their real ultimate destination is on earth where they have a role in and responsibility for its renewal.

People that have been reading my ramblings for far too long are aware that I believe God attempts to reach us and speak to us through film and music. While the message is incomplete, the fingerprint of God is, nevertheless, identifiable in this film.

I was excited to see whisperings of Wrights view of heaven here in this film. A paradise, or heaven (in this case a spaceship), that is a temporary holding place until God decides it is time to act and recreate the new heaven and the new earth as told in Revelation. In the film the people rise up out of their reclining chairs. In reality, we will rise up in new resurrected bodies as promised by Jesus. A new earth that we then inhabit, in our resurrected bodies, with God … such an amazing thought!

I am not sure where I am totally with the view of our future that is held by Wright – but it is starting to make a lot of sense to me. I have never been comfortable with the idea of life being all about getting to heaven, as that does not sound much like good news to me. But … a new body, and working with God on a new created earth which is the planet how it was always meant to be does sound pretty exciting to me.