James calls attention to the double-mindedness in his introduction.

But he must ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

Later in his books he mentions it again.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Though mentioned in only these two passages, double-mindness or what in Greek James literally calls two-souled appears as the defining theme of James. It plays a role in almost every passage of this little book.

The theme continues in the duality that James describes

The double minded man is moved by circumstances (poverty and riches)

The double minded man is at odds with God’s constant goodness.

The double minded man plays favorites (favors the rich and ignores the poor)

The double minded man is inconsistent with words and actions (speaks but has not faith)

The double minded man speaks out of both sides of his mouth (blesses and curses)

The double minded man

I recently had a conversation with a friend in which he was repulsed at the thought of confessing his sins to anyone but God. “God alone can forgive,” he objected. But while God’s forgiveness is an important end of confession, confession is not just about forgiveness. Confession, the act of admitting sin to another, is also the means to heal the divide in us. It’s about bringing into one the person that we are and the person we know we should be. James was written to address this problem.

The Double Minded-Man in the Book of James

The theme of the double minded-man or what in the Greek he literally calls the two-spirited man plays an important role in almost every passage of this little book.

James calls attention to the divided self in his introduction between faith and doubt

Next James turns to those who claim that God is tempting them to sin. James wants them to make no mistake. Their own duality is what is driving them to sin.

“God cannot be tempted by evil, and Himself does not tempt anyone”

The reason for is that unlike us He is One and the same in all his ways.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow. (James 1:17)

The theme of the divided self continues throughout the rest of James.

James 1:22

But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.

James 2:1

My brethren, do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism.

James 2:14

What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him?

James 3:10

From the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be this way. Does a fountain send out from the same opening both fresh and bitter water? Can a fig tree, my brethren produce olives, or a vineproduce figs? Nor can salt water produce fresh.

James 3:17

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy…

James 4:7-8

Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

James 4:12

But above all, my brethren, do not swear either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath; but your yes is to be yes, and your no, no, so that you may not fall into judgment

James statement on confession at the end of his little letter thus becomes extremely important for understanding how we fix the problem of the divided self. Through the act of confession we take an active step in eradicating the divide. Confession wips away our masks and leaves standing naked and exposed before our God who is One and the church who is was made in his image.

“Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”(James 5:16)

Doubt can be a painful thing. a scary place. Something we don’t want to go through. Faith is necessary. Doubt can destroy everything. but what can we benefit from our doubts.

What are they?

The person who say’s there’s no place for doubt in the Christian life is wrong

Faith is an essential component of our walk with God. Without faith it is impossible to please god. It’s also true of every human endeavor. Every jJourney is taken in faith – without knowing the end from the beginning. The vision of the unseen destination must be believed sufficiently to compel each of us forward. No athlete reaches the top without first believing that he can. Those who disbelieve always sit on the side lines. Faith is an essential component of all those who succeed. Not everyone who has faith will succeed but no one succeeds without faith.

James tells us that he who doubts is like the wave of the sea tossed back and forth. By this I take James to mean a person that is constantly going between a state of belief to unbelief and back again. This is not the type of doubt to which I refer. But there are times where doubt is appropriate. The psalmist wrestles with questions. Jude tells us to be patient with all those who doubt. Paul tells us that everything that is not of faith is sin. But even Jesus appears to have doubted the fact that God was with him. “My God, My God why have you forsaken me.” The cry of dereliction from the cross is a cry of doubt – a belief that God has abandoned Jesus… Which he had not done.

Doubt within its proper place is an aide of a healthy faith. Doubt is a lot like pain. There’s something deeply wrong with pain – pain can be debilitating and ultimately destructive. But that doesn’t mean pain doesn’t have it’s place. Just as with pain so to there is something wrong with doubt but doubt with its proper limits does have its benefits. Here are 7.

1. Wards of false belief
Doubt is the aid of a healthy faith. Like white blood cells which fight off invading sicknesses, doubt is a defense against harmful points of view.

2. Fosters Humility
Doubt is a buffer (thorn in the flesh) that keeps you from becoming too self assured. Doubt reminds us that we don’t know everything and still have need of growth.

3. Motivates you to learn (search for answers)
Doubt often comes in the form of a question that demands to be resolved. Like pain, the feeling of doubt in part motivates us to seek answers to our questions.

4. Opportunity to exercise your faith
Moments of doubt give opportunity to trust. Paul says who hopes for what he has. In doubt we feel the absence and in these moments we must trust all the more.

5. Hedge your bets. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
It’s not always good to place all of our hopes and dreams in a single outcome. Doubt causes us to step back and balance our intentions through other options. God will heal my child but I question the means by which he will do that. I pray but I also take my child to the doctor.

6. Gives you an opportunity to grow.
This is more or less a combination of all these ideas. Doubt held in balance with a healthy faith. Its not the doubt of James.

7. Allows you to see things from another point of view.
Doubt allows us to wrestle with the views of others. Without it we would stop up our ears to anyone else’s point of view. I want the people I witness to to at least ponder the questions that I posses to them – to question the veracity of there own beliefs. In the process I question my own.

Necessity of faith

Direction!!! Every Journey is taken in faith – without knowing the end from the beginning. The vision of the destination must compel us forward.

1. Rest in things that cannot be seen
The future
Moral/values
Meaning and Purpose

2. Keep Doubt in Check

3. The plasibo effect is real.

Symbolism: Ex Machina and the Key to Reading Other Minds

“Is there anybody there?”

The first time I saw Cast Away, I found it odd that a man trapped on an island alone for four years would not once try to talk to God. After Chuck washes ashore, he wonders about the island for what seems like forever, calling to anyone who might be there to help. He’s met with only silence however, which persists. As long as he is on the island, we hear only the sound of wind and surf and an occasional falling coconut. The director, Robert Zemeckis, even denies us a musical score. And still Chuck doesn’t speak to whatever invisible spirits might be listening. Instead, the screenwriter has him talking to a volleyball.

Now contrast that with a survival film like the Gray. When Ottway (played by Liam Niesen) finds himself alone after his companions having been eaten by wolves and he himself being hunted by these same wolves, he turns to God for help.

Ottway: Do something. Do something. You phony prick fraudulent motherfucker. Do something! Come on! Prove it! Fuck faith! Earn it! Show me something real! I need it now. Not later. Now! Show me and I’ll believe in you until the day I die. I swear. I’m calling on you. I’m calling on you!

[receives no response]

Ottway: Fuck it. I’ll do it myself.

But in the silence of Castaway, it would seem EVEN the thought of God doesn’t exist. And that seems to be Cast Away’s point.

In two earlier videos, I’ve tried to show how Castaway is a far more subtle and interesting film than most people realize. In my first video, I showed how Castaway makes an overarching allusion to Robert Zemeckis’, most famous film – Back to the Future. Like the earlier film, Cast Away is about a character marooned out of time. The theme and images of time play at the heart of both films. While Chuck doesn’t literally go back in time, the Island represents a more primitive way of life as he reverts back to the existence of a Stone-Age man. And just as Marty Mcfly is only able to get back to the future by connecting his mast to a precisely timed bolt of lighting so Chuck is able to get back to his modern way of life by connecting his mast to a precisely timed turn in the wind.

I explored the meaning of this allusion in my second video. Through these comparisons, Cast Away underscores an important difference. Back to the Future is an optimistic comedy, told from the perspective of youth. Though it hints in the plutonium powered time-machine of the dangers of America’s then nuclear arms race with Russia, it’s ultimately about the power we have over our own destiny. Marty, through his actions, easily gets back everything he’s lost and more in the end. A new black Toyota pick-up truck parked in his garage comes to mind. By contrast, Cast Away is a serious drama about a middle-aged man’s inability to control his world by modern technology and his devotion to time. Though Chuck extolls the power of the clock (like the power of a nuclear bomb) in retraining the now defeated Russians, it’s this materialistic view which is his ultimate undoing. Chuck’s time on the island is the aftermath of a symbolic divorce. Technology gave him a sense of power and control but it ultimately drove him away from his girlfriend Kelley. The island represents a place of isolation and loneliness where Chuck is dying and learning to live again without his former sense of control. Wilson is the symbol of a split between the old and new Chuck. Wilson is the old Chuck from whom the new Chuck must separate if he ever wants to live a life off the island. But when Chuck returns home, he find himself being given the keys to his former black Jeep parked in his now married x-fiancé garage. Though Chuck gets back some things, he still has to go on letting go of the things that truly mattered to him.

The comparison and contrast between the two films is perhaps most interesting in their final scenes. In Cast Away, Chuck stands at a cross roads looking down every road. In Back to the Future Marty tells Doc as they are about to race off in the time machine, “we don’t have enough road to get up to 88 miles per hour.” To which Doc responds, “roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” At which point the time-machine begins to fly, unbounded from the limits of the road before them. It’s an optimistic message of the limitless possibilities of our future. Cast Away likewise ends with a sense of hope as Chuck appears to have found a new love interest, someone who’s had a similar journey through divorce on an island (in the Texas plains). But as Chuck looks down every road, he doesn’t seem to have the same unbounded sense of freedom. Chuck has been made to arrive at this place despite most of his choices.

While Chuck does a great deal to free himself from the island, his power and choice alone were not themselves the key to his release. The wind and the surf held him in his prison for four years until a sail washes ashore. When Chuck looks down the roads that point to where he now stands, I think he’s realizing what we’re likewise meant to realize: that Chuck was never truly alone on the island.

Cast Away is in some ways like the movie Signs. In Signs, we’re told the story of a former pastor and father who’s lost his faith after the tragic death of his wife. Graham, played by Mel Gibson, struggles with his feeling of abandonment which ultimately is revealed as hatred for God. But in the end the odd quirks of the family become the means by which we see a benevolent God working all things together for their good.

Castaway too shows us God through such signs but it never puts the pieces together so overtly. The silent subtly and very real possibility of being missed is precisely the point Cast Away is making. One of the main messages of the film is how technology and our modem way of life is leading us towards a loss of what is seen when times are less hurried. The film wants us to stop and put away our cellphones and watches (the thought of what’s going to happen next) and become acquainted with silence and peaceful contemplation and see the world again, as if for the first time. It forces us to see what we do not, in our modern way of life, take the time to see. And if it hit us over the head with its message like Signs, it would have undermined its very message. Cast Away is challenging our modern way of life which by and large cannot see God due to distractions.

These idea are more clearly expressed in an early draft of the script. Chuck is so busy that he fails to take note of the glory of the northern lights, only cursing them when they interfere with his use of technology. In this draft too, we also see Chuck being troubled by prayer, showing us that prayer (speaking to God) was on the mind of the author and that it’s absence from the final film may also be intended to communicate the same idea.

Though God isn’t directly mentioned in the film, it’s hard not to seem him being alluded to from the start. Cast Away begins with Chuck telling us who he thinks God is. He preaches a sermon about time. And paints a picture of time as a God. We must all devote ourselves to it or become sinners for our failure to obey. But it’s his devotion to the idol of the clock which fails Chuck. Chuck finds the clock broken as he washes ashore. Here, he must live in the world without the distractions of modern life, becoming accustomed to the more natural rhythms of the heavens as the earlier draft shows.

But It’s in this scene of Chuck calling out to a ship on the horizon that I think we missed something truly important. Chuck calls out to it for help with the use of his little flash light. And when that seems to fail and the dawn fully breaks, he jumps in his raft to race out to meet it. But he’s blocked and broken by the tide. A storm comes in and Chuck finds shelter in a cave. He passes out exhausted on the cavern floor. The film suggests this as a metaphorical death as the little light of his flash light likewise dies while he sleeps. Chuck’s eyes are then opened by the light of the sun (about the size of his flashlight lens) shining through a tiny hole in the cave wall.

The sequence only truly begins to make sense in hindsight. The hermeneutic circle is the key to interpretation as I’ve referred to in my video on Arrival. The meaning of the parts are defined by their relationship to the whole. The sequence begins with Chuck calling to ship. But is it a ship? Given how the sequence revolves around Chucks electric light and the more natural light of the heavens opening his eyes. I think it’s more likely that Chuck has mistaken the light of heavens (the morning Star) for a ship. Chuck calls to it but is prevented from reaching it. Instead the heavens come to him. The full brightness of the sun shines in his eyes as if to say “here I am.”

It’s this heavenly presence which remains with Chuck while he’s on the island. He marks the course of this light over the four years on his cavern wall – it’s the sign of infinity, eternity. And it’s the light which seems to be what releases Chuck from the island. The most obvious sign that this is Divinely appointed is so subtly displayed. The calendar shows that the sail arrives four years to the day that he first washed ashore.

Chuck returns to a world that is insensitive in its speed, a world that’s moved on without him. Chuck seems both cast Away and left behind. He has a new perspective. He’s quite and reserved. He walks with a leisurely pace, taking everything in.

Now at the Crossroads, Chuck seems not to be asking which direction should I go. Instead, he seems to be realizing that he’s at the nexus of where he was met to be, that every road he might have taken, would have lead him to this.

There’s a poem called “footprints” which conveys something of the idea.

Last night I had a dream. I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from my life. For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand: one belonged to me, the other to the Lord.
After the last scene of my life flashed before me, I looked back at the footprints in the sand. I noticed that at many times along the path of my life, especially at the very lowest and saddest times, there was only one set of footprints.
This really troubled me, so I asked the Lord about it. “Lord, you said once I decided to follow you, You’d walk with me all the way. But I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life, there was only one set of footprints. I don’t understand why, when I needed You the most, You would leave me.”
The Lord replied, “My son, my precious child, I love you and I would never leave you. During your times of suffering, when you could see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”

Chuck: “Is there anybody there?”