“The Apocalyptic Is The Mother Of All Christian Theology” rebuilds a cultural portrait of Paul the Apostle through a collage of biblical media

Mills Folly Microcinema concludes their 2023 screening year with Jim Finn’s latest experimental documentary on December 13.

The history of Christian media, much like Christianity itself, is full of losses and retrievals, with new-old ephemera getting rediscovered all the time. To the secular world, these are always a new discovery, something to giggle about while imagining the poor youth in church basements who take this as art. But for anyone who grew up in the faith (like yours truly), these texts can be as significant as the Bible itself in how they shape cultural memory. The songs, TV specials, and video games constitute a sort of neo-apocrypha, items that certainly aren’t canonical Christian texts (much as I wish VeggieTales was official scripture) but show the generic sturdiness of these ideas and the ways they adapt to new contexts. 

Filmmaker Jim Finn knows these materials well, and stuffs too many of them to count into his new essay film The Apocalyptic Is The Mother Of All Christian Theology (2023), screening at Arts + Literature Laboratory as part of Mills Folly Microcinema this Wednesday, December 13, at 7 p.m. Gathering found footage, live action and 3D recreations, and plenty of papercraft-like books and board games, Finn mounts a loose biography of Paul the Apostle that seeks to understand the man through more contemporary media.

This modern approach to biography is an apt one, given Paul’s own status as a shapeshifter: He was a Jew who went against practices of both Jews and Christians in his advocacy for the teachings of Jesus. Letters were attributed to him after his death, and his legacy has been co-opted by anti-semites and Jewish mystics alike. The material, then, is disparate not just in form but its depictions of Paul, all threaded together with a voiceover from Finn to corral the mixed material into a more legible biographical form.

This isn’t new territory for Finn, who has made his career out of  making lo-fi documentary whatsits, unafraid to marry the silly and psychedelic with the heady and academic. Still, his work has largely focused on political theory and history, as in his most famous films in the “Communist Trilogy” (2006-2010). The Apocalyptic, rather, has a more religious-historical bent. Amid the silly church-basement ephemera like footage of the “Michigan Praisin’ Raisins” (Christianized California Raisins), there are also plenty of fuzzy, VHS-warped visualizations coating the materials, which lends everything in the film the feeling of a half-memory, or pirated TV station.

The effect is softening, partly in how it can make visually unappealing material more fun to watch, but also in how it speaks to the pleasurable levels of even the most ascetic faith. Through all the technicalities around clarifying the life and thoughts of Paul, we ultimately know this was a man divinely touched, whose asceticism was its own form of ecstasy. Whether exploring Leninism or Christianity, Finn knows that any ideology exists partly on a partly spiritual level, as something that can only be intellectually clarified to a point past which it becomes pure vibes. 

While board games and cartoons about Paul are obvious attempts to market biblical stories to children, much of the material is telling in its clear desire to clean up the messy truths of Christian philosophy and biblical provenance. The history of Christianity is, after all, much easier to swallow with a Candyland-like track to follow, with evangelism quantified on fun little cards telling you the amount of people you converted last turn.

In Finn’s framing, this sort of presentation is a little dishonest or a way to present Paul’s journey as always righteous and pre-ordained—something that always made logical sense (from a contemporary vantage point). Lacing the film with examples of latter-day Christian radicals punished for actions deemed inconsistent with the church, Finn shows a faith perpetually catching up to the righteousness of its own practitioners.

Reflecting the untidiness of its subject, The Apocalyptic, too, seems to be constantly breaking down and rebuilding itself through its panoply of visual material and wide-ranging psych rock-laden soundtrack composed by Colleen Burke. Finn’s film is a classically good experimental documentary, one that demands its messiness be reckoned with in the mind of the viewer long after the viewing.