Collide Magazine

Faith in Eli Stone

Scott McClellan - Originally posted Thursday, May 1, 2008 -

It’s hard to know what to do with a show like Eli Stone. In case you’re unfamiliar with the premise, Eli Stone is a successful lawyer who begins seeing visions—visions such as George Michael singing “Faith” in his living room. Often these visions lead Stone to a person who needs his help. As a result, one of the people Stone turns to for guidance is convinced Eli’s visions are messages from God, missions to do His work. Suddenly, Stone has been cast as an unwilling and unwitting prophet who struggles with the very ideas of faith and purpose.

As I watched the first season of Eli Stone, I couldn’t decide what to make of it. On a technical level, the show has a few flaws that will prevent it from reaching legendary status. I like it, but I don’t love it. On a deeper level, I’m not sure what to make of the overt spirituality embedded in the show’s identity—having faith, doing the will of God, serving people in redemptive ways. I should be overjoyed about the primetime preaching of Eli Stone, shouldn’t I?

Instead, I struggle. I struggle with everything the producers, screenwriters, and actors get wrong. I struggle with their elementary, works-based theology. I struggle with the sin they still embrace. I’m beginning to realize that I want to see more of God in pop culture, but I also want it to be a precise representation of the God I believe in. Selfishly and impatiently, I want it on my terms. With me, it’s all or nothing.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God “has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” In reading that passage, I can’t help but wonder if it perfectly describes our culture as a whole, let alone Eli Stone. Most of the great art in the world is about the search for redemption. After all, most of the people in the world are searching for redemption, thus the art they create and the art they enjoy tends to reflect that search. But as we often see, artists don’t have a clear picture of what true redemption looks like. That’s why artists’ renderings of redemption are typically ephemeral (winning the big game, getting the girl, finding the treasure, etc.) rather than eternal.

So what’s the point in persevering through the misguided quests for redemption going on all around us? Watching people arrive at unsound conclusions can be incredibly discouraging, but I wonder if we should try our best to find comfort in the search. In Acts 17, Paul says God created human beings “so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” Perhaps Eli Stone (along with millions of other instances of spirituality in pop culture) is a sign that some are getting closer and closer to finding God—perhaps not. Honestly, we may not know for sure in this life. But as George Michael would say, you’ve gotta have faith.