It will be surprising if Meryl Streep doesn't win an Oscar (along with a Bafta and Golden Globe) for her mesmerising performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. There are naturally plenty of people who don't agree with Streep's interpretation of Thatcher's character – Norman Tebbit, not surprisingly, has been scathing about the film because he feels it portrays her as half-hysterical and over-emotional; others are unhappy with the way it focuses on her to the detriment of the men in her cabinet, making it seem she was the only figure who counted in the 1980s; still others can't believe the film doesn't criticise her policies more. Speaking as someone who never voted for her, I think the portrayal was a sympathetic one. I didn't come out loving her, but I wonder if some of those who hated her are simply too mean or embittered to accept anything that paints her in a positive light. She divided the nation then and it seems she is still doing it now.
There has also been talk about how appropriate it is to produce a film about her particularly from the perspective of her struggle with dementia. I don't expect her family or those who admired her find that aspect easy to watch, and they probably have a case when they say that this part of the film is inaccurate and could be perceived as being unkind, but it didn't come across that way to me. It works well as a story-telling method and enables the film to present her as more human than I ever perceived her, although I recognise that this is precisely the problem with these docu-dramas: you never know where reality ends and fiction begins.
So how should we assess events and the people who make them happen? On occasions you will hear critics say that we are too close to events to assess them, that you have to leave a respectful gap of decades before you can start writing history; at other times, people will complain that we are too far removed by time really to understand what went on, that documents cannot convey what happened, why they took place, how people understood these events and so on. It seems that we are sometimes wary of the eyewitness accounts for being too close to events, and suspicious of historical accounts for being too distant.
The same sorts of questions arise when we think about how we understand and evaluate the events that form the New Testament account of the life of Jesus. In the New Testament we have a historical account of what happened that comes from eyewitnesses who are at pains not merely to relate those things, but also give us an authoritative account of what they mean for us today. It is at this point that most people part company with the Christian faith. There used to be a great deal of talk about rejecting the 'Christ of faith' and getting back to the 'Jesus of history'. That came because people believed that over the centuries the church added layers of dogma and doctrine about the Christ onto the simple story of Jesus of Nazareth. If only we could cut away those layers, so the argument goes, we could then get back to the real Jesus. But that is just not the way it happened. There is clear evidence that the documents we possess were produced between 25 and 50 years after the events they describe, and that they were informed by the testimony of those who saw those events unfold before their eyes.
Of course these accounts are not neutral (there is no such thing as 'value-free neutrality' anyway); they come from people who were changed by what they saw, but who then, under God's guidance, put down a careful record of those world-moving happenings so that we might grasp the reality for ourselves. John the apostle writes in one of his letters that they saw and touched the one who was the “Word of Life”, Jesus, which we obviously cannot do. So they then wrote for us what happened so that we might share that experience by reading their account and through this come to know Jesus for ourselves. But it is more than just a human record of the past. They were guided by God in this process to give us God's perspective on what these events mean for us, so that we not only have a description of what happened, but God's own interpretation of it all too, that Jesus is the Saviour God sent for us, as well as the Lord before whom we must all bow. And this is why what we make of the account of Jesus is more important than any view we might take of our leaders. With human leaders we can assess them, judge them and evaluate their qualities. We like to think that we can call them to account for their actions. But when we read the life of Jesus, we discover that he is in fact doing that to us.
There has also been talk about how appropriate it is to produce a film about her particularly from the perspective of her struggle with dementia. I don't expect her family or those who admired her find that aspect easy to watch, and they probably have a case when they say that this part of the film is inaccurate and could be perceived as being unkind, but it didn't come across that way to me. It works well as a story-telling method and enables the film to present her as more human than I ever perceived her, although I recognise that this is precisely the problem with these docu-dramas: you never know where reality ends and fiction begins.
So how should we assess events and the people who make them happen? On occasions you will hear critics say that we are too close to events to assess them, that you have to leave a respectful gap of decades before you can start writing history; at other times, people will complain that we are too far removed by time really to understand what went on, that documents cannot convey what happened, why they took place, how people understood these events and so on. It seems that we are sometimes wary of the eyewitness accounts for being too close to events, and suspicious of historical accounts for being too distant.
The same sorts of questions arise when we think about how we understand and evaluate the events that form the New Testament account of the life of Jesus. In the New Testament we have a historical account of what happened that comes from eyewitnesses who are at pains not merely to relate those things, but also give us an authoritative account of what they mean for us today. It is at this point that most people part company with the Christian faith. There used to be a great deal of talk about rejecting the 'Christ of faith' and getting back to the 'Jesus of history'. That came because people believed that over the centuries the church added layers of dogma and doctrine about the Christ onto the simple story of Jesus of Nazareth. If only we could cut away those layers, so the argument goes, we could then get back to the real Jesus. But that is just not the way it happened. There is clear evidence that the documents we possess were produced between 25 and 50 years after the events they describe, and that they were informed by the testimony of those who saw those events unfold before their eyes.
Of course these accounts are not neutral (there is no such thing as 'value-free neutrality' anyway); they come from people who were changed by what they saw, but who then, under God's guidance, put down a careful record of those world-moving happenings so that we might grasp the reality for ourselves. John the apostle writes in one of his letters that they saw and touched the one who was the “Word of Life”, Jesus, which we obviously cannot do. So they then wrote for us what happened so that we might share that experience by reading their account and through this come to know Jesus for ourselves. But it is more than just a human record of the past. They were guided by God in this process to give us God's perspective on what these events mean for us, so that we not only have a description of what happened, but God's own interpretation of it all too, that Jesus is the Saviour God sent for us, as well as the Lord before whom we must all bow. And this is why what we make of the account of Jesus is more important than any view we might take of our leaders. With human leaders we can assess them, judge them and evaluate their qualities. We like to think that we can call them to account for their actions. But when we read the life of Jesus, we discover that he is in fact doing that to us.
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