But rather we Christians who are daily tempted to buy into this false economy of belief and life before God. It is not nominal Christianity that is primarily guilty of “living out” the Deus ex machina, such a counterfeit is easily visible in the Monday to Saturday of life. It is this god that represents everything that is antithetical to authentic Christianity. It is this god, the Deus ex machina, the god of nominal Christianity, the god who lives on the periphery of the life in the everyday lives of nominal Christians everywhere. I should like to speak of God not on borders of life but at its center.”īonhoeffer posits here that the god whom the nominal Christian calls on is otherwise functionally dead in their life but suddenly resurrects into life when called upon to quell an issue or soothe a sore conscience. “Religious people speak of God when human perception is at an end, or human resources fail: it is in fact always the Deus ex machina they call to their aid, either for the so-called solving of insoluble problems or as support in human failure… It always seems to me that in talking thus we are only seeking frantically to make room for God. This god acts as a safety net for those who have cashed in all their chips of human knowledge and understanding and now plead for the god of the periphery to heal all of their crooked behaviors. It is at this point they usher in their religion to rescue them.īonhoeffer in “Letters and Papers from Prison” speaks of the Deus ex machina as a god who enters the script of people’s lives by last resort and invitation only. This god of the periphery is never more starkly visible in their frame of belief than when they are stuck inside the insoluble turbulence of crisis, unable to see a way out. Deus ex machina, the god from the machine. The god of nominal Christianity has a name. They have a God for the Sunday and god for Monday through Saturday. But their inner life principally subscribe to a functional form Christian deism that forces God into marginality, distance, and foreignness in their life. A nominal Christian’s exterior religious life affirms creeds, councils, doctrines and all the normative Christian certitudes. In a similar way there is great continuity between the conceptional notion of the Deus ex machina and the superficial practice of religion found within nominal Christianity. This interventionist resolution to the prose may appear as a characters superhuman ability, the unveiling or realization of a mysterious minor character, the unforeseen entrance of an object that turns the tables, or even a shift in the rules that govern the stories script. The writer is now forced to “play the god card” producing an unexpected resolution that hasn’t yet been worked into the story. It’s for this reason it is viewed negatively since scene or story arc closure escapes the writer who has blockaded themselves inside their own narrative world. In staving off the tragic or the ‘not so happy ever after’, the writer would suddenly and abruptly resolve the seemingly unsolvable with a dose of “Deus ex machina”. The phrase, “Deus ex machina” translated from the Latin rendered “god from the machine,” is a literary device a writer or narrator employed in a text where the plot line of a drama arrives at an unsolvable problem in a story. However these iconic branded bikes, for all of their timeless appeal, do not hold a historical monopoly on the name they bear. Deus ex machina in our modern world is usually associated with the café racer style motorcycle brand which takes its lead from the cultic movement born in the 1960’s.
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