God On Trial Analysis

Perhaps the most unfathomable and horrific event in all of history, the Holocaust shook people’s understanding of faith and religion down to the core. In the movie God on Trial, A barrack full of Jewish prisoners decide to place God on trial for breaking the covenant he made with the Jewish people in the Old Testament. They are charging him with murder, collaboration, breach of contract, and more murder. To decide whether in fact God was guilty or not, the men discussed various opinions defending their stance on the matter. An argument that of the prisoners posed is that God was never truly good, he only seemed good because things worked in the Jewish people’s favor. While this argument makes sense in some situations, such as when God killed …show more content…
There is one thinker featured in the chapter that truly embodies the ideals the movie works to portray. The scholar, Baptist Metz’s, idea that we cannot beautify or rationalize the suffering in life describes the plights facing the prisoners in Auschwitz. Within the arguments made by the prisoners, one is the fact that innocent people were being killed because only the most beautiful individuals are worthy sacrifices to God. Yet, this beautification of death is exactly what Metz wants people to remove from their mindset. He thinks that when death is thought of as a positive thing, that humans forget the pain and anguish surrounded by the pain and loss of that person. If suffering is beautified, then it takes away from the significance of the impact that person’s life had on those around them. We cannot try to remove the idea of suffering from our life, but instead remember those who have suffered, as well as our own suffering. Through this remembrance humans must lament and cry out at the injustice of suffering. By questioning God’s intentions, it serves as a means of coping with the suffering being experienced. This mechanism serves as the basis for God on Trial because putting God on trial is the prisoner’s way of trying to rationalize their position. Their main goal is not to disprove God’s existence, but to hold him accountable for the wrongdoings that are executed against them. Another concept of Metz’s featured in the film is the fact that God is suffering along with them. One man states that God is not absent, but all around sharing in their suffering and pain. If God, who is an omnipotent and eternal being, is truly suffering with his people, that means suffering in the world is eternal. Humans will never be able to escape suffering, which can be seen by the persecution the Jews suffered