DeConick A.D

125
PAUL AND GNOSTIC DOGMA
In a grisly satire of this problem, Kevin Smith, in his film Dogma , plots
out what it might look like today if the laws in the Bible and their death
penalties actually were enforced. To stage this problem, Smith features an
ongoing dialogue between the two rogue angels, Loki and his friend, the
guardian angel Bartleby.
As the angel of death, Loki’s job is to mete out God’s punishments, to
kill those who break God’s commandments, as scripture demands. Loki is
the one who killed humankind in a flood that spared only the righteous
Noah and his family. He rained down fire and brimstone on Sodom and
Gomorrah and beset the Egyptians with plagues. Loki is the avenging
angel, until Bartleby convinces him that killing people as a punishment for
breaking God’s laws might be cruel and unusual, that Loki should simply
refuse to do his job. When Loki decides to stop the killings, God exiles
him and Bartleby from heaven.
As the plot thickens and these rogue angels figure out how they might
turn themselves into mortals and reenter heaven through a Catholic loophole,
Loki decides that he had better take up his old job again. “What
better way to show I’ve repented than by resuming the position I denied,”
Loki tells Bartleby.
As a demonstration of his repentance, Loki shows Bartleby an article
about a company that he judges to be idolatrous, given that they are
profiting off the image of Mooby the Golden Calf. So Loki drags Bartleby
along to the company’s corporate headquarters, where he faces off with
Mooby’s board of directors. He accuses each board member of a variety
of sins, everything from adultery to profiteering.
During this tirade, all in the boardroom stand frozen in their sins, terrified
by Loki. The angel of death is disgusted with them all. “What makes a
human decent?” he asks them. “Fear . . . None of you has anything left to
fear anymore. You rest comfortably in seats of inscrutable power, hiding
behind your false idol, far from judgment, lives shrouded in secrecy even
from one another. But not from God.” His accusations end in a violent
purge, his gun blazing, bullets ripping through all the men in the room.
What Smith sets before our eyes in cinematic gore is the gruesome
reality that Paul pinned down two thousand years earlier, that the commandments
God established in the Bible can never be kept by human
beings, who are privately immoral. If the punishment for breaking God’s
commandments were actually enforced, practically everyone would be