The title of the Oscar-nominated movie The Theory of Everything might seem a little ambitious, even ironic in its magnitude, and in some ways it is. The title refers to physicist Stephen Hawking’s initial desire to find what he called a theory of everything, a single equation to explain the creation of the universe and everything in it. Having never settled on such an equation, Stephen’s ambition evokes an inevitable failure but also an unexpected earnestness, because the film’s themes are seemingly endless. Everything’s here: birth and death, science and faith, friendship and love, the mystery of time. Most striking, though, is the persistent beat of a theology of the cross.
The story begins timelessly. Stephen Hawking meets Jane Wilde at Cambridge. She studies arts; he studies science. She loves to dance; he doesn’t. She’s a Christian (“C of E!”); he’s agnostic. Despite being at odds in nearly every conversation, they fall in love. Still, they could never anticipate what happens next: Early in their relationship, Stephen is diagnosed with some form of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. They are told his body will deteriorate to virtual paralysis; life expectancy is two years. Jane chooses to stay with Stephen, to love him to the end, though Stephen’s father tries to dissuade her. Bluntly he tells her that the weight of science is against her. She responds, “I may not look like a very strong person. But I am one.” Incredibly, Felicity Jones portrays nearly thirty years of Jane’s internal struggle while Eddie Redmayne’s award-winning depiction of Stephen shows his relentless external decline.
Losing motor skills, mobility, his voice, but not his brain, Stephen persists in his exploration of the universe as well as in his marriage to Jane. They raise kids. They vacation. They grow together, stronger, older, side by side. But Stephen’s 1963 diagnosis gave him a life expectancy of two years, and, in what seems to be evidence of the miraculous, he’s still alive today.
Jane, even as she insists on her strength, begins to falter. In the end, both Jane and Stephen realize that they are not strong enough to sustain their marriage. Jane admits the devastating truth that she thought this would only last a few years. She believed she would be widowed earlier. A few years ago, The Observer interviewed the real Jane:
…she went into their marriage knowing the worst [Stephen’s death] was almost certainly around the corner. ‘Yes, but at that stage I did not want to think about that. Also, we had this very strong sense at the time that our generation lived anyway under this most awful nuclear cloud—that with a four-minute warning the world itself could likely end. That made us feel above all that we had to do our bit, that we had to follow an idealistic course in life. That may seem naive now, but that was exactly the spirit in which Stephen and I set out in the sixties—to make the most of whatever gifts were given us.’
Initially Jane saw her marriage to Stephen as an ephemeral gift, not a lifelong trial. As the film shows, she realized that as Stephen’s crippled life crawled forward, there was no end in sight for their pain. In one of the most critical but heartbreaking scenes, they agree to separate. At this point, Jane, the film’s spokesperson for Christianity, looks a lot like Peter in the Bible: fleeing crisis, denying her partner, denying the marriage ‘ordained’ by God. She turns away. Jane, who begins the film as the trope of the “good Christian” fails to fulfill the law of her archetype. But the reality is that she fed, clothed, and loved Stephen Hawking for thirty years, then got tired. Also like Peter, she’s human (Matt 14:30, Matt 26:31). She realizes that her own strength can’t justify her.
More than this, however—and here is the interpretation to which I’m more inclined—maybe Jane isn’t ‘just’ like Peter. I think there is a way in which she’s also like Christ, crucified in this moment. Her pride, her aspirations about her own strength, her desire to prove to Stephen that she’s right about the existence of God—all of this is pinned, so to speak, to the cross.
In the beginning, she says the most important theme of her life was her belief that:
Despite it all, everything was going to be possible. That Stephen was going to do his physics, and we were going to raise a wonderful family and have a nice house and live happily every after.
The audience wants her to have these things; we ourselves yearn to have everything in life. As a self-proclaimed Christian viewer, I found myself willing Jane to be stronger, to be a better wife, to be more convincing in her religious apologetics. Maybe if she did these things, her faith would be strong enough to give her everything she wanted, everything I wanted for her. She could prove to Stephen she was right about everything, but what is unfolding here is what you could call a theology of glory.
Similarly, Jesus’ first-century followers followed him into Jerusalem, cheering him on with palm branches and cries of excitement, believing that he would fulfill their own aspirations: overthrowing Rome, delivering Israel to freedom. Shortly thereafter, their hope is dashed on Good Friday when this same man, their king, dies on the cross. In his short handbook On Being a Theologian of the Cross, Gerhard Forde writes that “the real seat of sin is not in the flesh but in our spiritual aspirations, in our ‘theology of glory.’” A theology of glory is based in pride; a theology of the cross crucifies it.
We might worry, Forde continues, that the theology of the cross is “‘only’ concerned with crucifixion. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, a theology of the cross is impossible without resurrection.” By giving up their marriage—by giving up generally—Jane and Stephen see their pride sentenced to death, but it is only afterward that the film displays something like redemption.
The Theory of Everything left me weirdly uplifted. In the final scene, the clock runs backwards and gives us one last look at Jane and Stephen’s relationship. Montage meets music, in a way that I found emotional, to say the least. The backwards time-travel points to something important: that both time and resurrection remain beyond our understanding. At Mockingbird, we’ve looked before at the difference between chronological and kairological time, chronological being normal time, day after day, the ordered passing of one moment to another. Kairological refers instead to God’s boundless perception of time—the capacity to imbue a fleeting moment with eternal significance. In some ways, I wonder if, in a kairological sense, the entire movie isn’t some kind of resurrection.
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4 responses to “The Theology of Everything”
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I didn’t think I wanted to see this, and now I do!
Wow
C.J., astounding work. I watched the movie over spring break and after reading your piece I feel like you brought together so well a lot of the thoughts on grace, our own projection of personal spiritual aspirations onto the characters, and the law-based “Christian archetype” that I had during the movie, while adding even more new insights on how the crucifixion, resurrection and this idea of kairological time (a new concept to me!) play an even more powerful role. Pumped to read more from you in the future
Nice review. Facets I hadn’t noticed when I first watched… I like that you mentioned chronos and kairos. I soooooo frequently replay over and over (and from finish to start and back again) points along my own timeline. Worrying, obsessing, analyzing, operating with a sum / total perception. Operating under my own deception that those moments begin, end and are over never to be revisited and only plots towards an agenda……. But then…. Ahhhh beautiful spherical kairos. God’s timing. God’s unfathomably perfect spherical time….. I love it so much and forget about it so frequently, i tattooed it on my wrist.