Frame on "Signs"

Today, I was looking for some theology resources and came upon theologian John Frame's website that he shares with Vern Poythress:

https://frame-poythress.org/

It offers some great FREE resources, including chunks of excerpts from their books.

John Frame wrote a book about movies back in 2005 and it is available in its entirety on this site. I perused a few reviews and then I saw that he had reviewed one of my favorite movies by M. Night Shyamalan, Signs. It's ostensibly about aliens, but there is much more to the movie. I really like what Frame has to say about its themes:

So the film works on several levels. On one, it is a reprise of “War of the Worlds,” but much scarier than any other movie about aliens I can recall. On another, a study of a very real family, responding to their fears in the midst of equally difficult problems of health, regrets, and loss. On still another level (I think even deeper), it is a film about worldviews.

Shyamalan was born into a Hindu family. Later he went to an Episcopal school on the Philadelphia Main Line. I don’t know much about his theology, but this film gets deeper into theology than any other film this year. For Christians, it raises the question of general revelation. When we think about general revelation we tends to think, Thomistic fashion, about causality: God reveals himself in the starry heavens, because who else could be great enough to bring them into being? Or teleologically: God reveals himself in the intricate machinery of the human eye (or now, thanks to Michael Behe, the living cell) because these machines require intelligent design. But Signs suggests that general revelation is also to be found in the rhythm of human life, the structure of coincidence, the fact that one event prepares us for the next. Apparently meaningless events turn out, maybe years later, to take on importance in our lives. And as we reflect on that, that too seems to presuppose a designer.

This kind of teleology is not so much that of a machine-designer as that of an author writing a novel or play, using one event to anticipate another. We are not surprised to find insight into that kind of teleology from a gifted writer and film director like Shyalaman, for it is precisely his business to design a world with such a structure of foreshadowing and recapitulation. The interesting thing is that that kind of world, from my experience anyway, comes out looking very much like the real one.

If you haven't seen Signs, you should.