I just watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time since I was probably five. That was a great film, when Ford was at the top of his game, just before Blade Runner. Among the many bits I appreciated as quality Spielbergian filmmaking (along with a fantastic soundtrack—John Williams is certainly a jewel among soundtrack composers) or as overwhelmingly nostalgic were things that I didn’t understand in the slightest when I saw it at a young age.

One of the things that struck me in particular was the seed of relativism tucked away in its sandscape. Notice in the last scene where the Shekinah glory of God comes roiling down across the steps and out of the Ark: the horrific, consuming God of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, as it were, the Almighty One of Israel strikes down all these Nazi oppressors who dare to look upon the contents of the Ark.

In the very next scene, we see Washington, D. C., whereat Jones is arguing with colleagues about what is to be done with the Ark; and then, in the last cut, it’s wheeled away in a wooden crate, identical to so many others, in a presumably-top-secret American government warehouse by some average Joe who has no idea what his paws are wheeling down the aisle.

So we have an ambivalent relativism. On the one hand, the God of the Ark is given the symbolic victory over the supreme human evil: the Nazis. On the other hand, it is a talismanic, automatic incantation on the level of B-rated mummy movies: just as in the “mummy” flicks, the Egyptian gods protect mummies of royal lineage and high stature for their own sakes from the obviously inept or corrupt hands of archetypal evildoers, so in Raiders do we see the God of Israel protecting nothing more than His Ark of the Covenant from unworthy hands (and eyes).

It’s not that Elijah prayed and called fire from heaven to show the heathen the glory of God in spite of themselves. It’s that the trigger clicked, the mechanism by which wrath was released was set into motion, and when the mission was accomplished, the Shekinah and all the angels of death returned to their little box.

And then that box was put into a larger box, just like all the rest, and was wheeled away into a government-kept warehouse where all the other magical artifacts from Long Ago & Far Away, presumably each with its own significance, each with its own unique “powers.” What we fade away from to black as the credits roll is a symbol of what has happened in America and across the globe since 1981 and before: the packaging of varied and sundry gods into little non-descript crates, each with some value, some greater, some less, to be found by the merely curious and motivated.

I just watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time since I was probably five. That was a great film, when Ford was at the top of his game, just before Blade Runner. Among the many bits I appreciated as quality Spielbergian filmmaking (along with a fantastic soundtrack—John Williams is certainly a jewel among soundtrack composers) or as overwhelmingly nostalgic were things that I didn’t understand in the slightest when I saw it at a young age.

One of the things that struck me in particular was the seed of relativism tucked away in its sandscape. Notice in the last scene where the Shekinah glory of God comes roiling down across the steps and out of the Ark: the horrific, consuming God of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, as it were, the Almighty One of Israel strikes down all these Nazi oppressors who dare to look upon the contents of the Ark.

In the very next scene, we see Washington, D. C., whereat Jones is arguing with colleagues about what is to be done with the Ark; and then, in the last cut, it’s wheeled away in a wooden crate, identical to so many others, in a presumably-top-secret American government warehouse by some average Joe who has no idea what his paws are wheeling down the aisle.

So we have an ambivalent relativism. On the one hand, the God of the Ark is given the symbolic victory over the supreme human evil: the Nazis. On the other hand, it is a talismanic, automatic incantation on the level of B-rated mummy movies: just as in the “mummy” flicks, the Egyptian gods protect mummies of royal lineage and high stature for their own sakes from the obviously inept or corrupt hands of archetypal evildoers, so in Raiders do we see the God of Israel protecting nothing more than His Ark of the Covenant from unworthy hands (and eyes).

It’s not that Elijah prayed and called fire from heaven to show the heathen the glory of God in spite of themselves. It’s that the trigger clicked, the mechanism by which wrath was released was set into motion, and when the mission was accomplished, the Shekinah and all the angels of death returned to their little box.

And then that box was put into a larger box, just like all the rest, and was wheeled away into a government-kept warehouse where all the other magical artifacts from Long Ago & Far Away, presumably each with its own significance, each with its own unique “powers.” What we fade away from to black as the credits roll is a symbol of what has happened in America and across the globe since 1981 and before: the packaging of varied and sundry gods into little non-descript crates, each with some value, some greater, some less, to be found by the merely curious and motivated.