God of Trial


Written by Frank Cotterell Boyce


Hat Trick and WGBH Boston for BBC Scotland



god-on-trial
My principal at theological college told us, sadly, the story of the mathematician Ramanujan dying in hospital and visited by a colleague whose idea of bedside chat was to remark that the taxi he came in had the dull number 1729. “No, Hardy,” says Ramanujan, “it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways”. How sad to be on the verge of eternity, we were told, and have your head still full of mere numbers. Personally, I thought there was something rather splendid about it.

How then about spending the night before your execution putting God on trial? Whatever my principal would make of it, it’s a magnificent idea. ‘Chutzpah’ is the word, I suppose, but also ‘biblical’, in the tradition of Job and other books in the wobbly middle of the Bible, who seem to maintain that any God worth a skull cap would respect truth and justice more than grovelling.

The story is another familiar one, which Elie Wiesel says he witnessed in Auschwitz. As the Jewish people are being exterminated by the Nazis, prisoners in one block set up a rabinical courtroom and put the Lord on trial.

It’s seems a tricky thing to dramatise. The Holocaust offers a dangerous shortcut to tragedy and importance, while on the other hand the entire story is discussion in a shed. Courtrooms are an endless source of drama, but one where the defendant either doesn’t exist or is technically incapable of wrongdoing is another matter.

As it turns out, God on Trial is not only a superb drama but the most compelling work of theology I’ve come across in years – something I would have confidently predicted never to say about a TV programme.

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Frank Cotterell Boyce is a Catholic writer behind 41 episodes of Coronation Street and films including 24 Hour Party People. His framing device is a coachload of tourists arriving at Auschwitz today, which merges into a trainload of Jewish prisoners. Assuming we know all we need to about the atrocities of the camp, he takes us almost straight into the trial.

The charge they decide on is breach of covenant: ‘I will be your God and you shall be my people,’ and now this. ‘It’s hard to see how the charge can be refuted,’ says the judge, and it looks as if it will all be over within 30 seconds. But then the arguments start coming.

Is it not us who broke the covenant and are being punished? Is God a surgeon using the knife for a greater good, like when the destruction of the temple sent the Jews all round the world? Are those we have lost unblemished sacrifices for the glorious future of our people? Have we not felt God’s presence with us even here in a way that a Nazi never could? Should we uphold our faith to stop the Nazis taking our God, whether he exists or not? Or should we admit that the God of scripture always preferred violence to justice? ‘We are learning how it was for the Amalekites… He was not ever good, he was only ever on our side… We should have stood up to him.’

Boyce never tries to broaden the question beyond the Jewish experience, and yet somehow it seems all the more universal for that. This being the BBC, the extremes of religious debate are well represented, loud atheism and loud piety, equally unsympathetic but reacting in interestingly different ways when the final call comes. In between, there are those who have lost mothers and sons and still feel God’s blessing. All the time the most compelling presence is the one we never see, almighty, broken, inscrutable and inexcusable.

Surprisingly, we do not see the verdict, only hear about it, then cut to a powerful stylised scene (marred by a shockingly glib final exchange) where tourists stand among the victims in the gas chambers who, in a final act of holy defiance, recite prayers to the God they have condemned. It seems we are being invited to stand in their place and reach a verdict for ourselves – while at the same time being asked whether, until we have stood in such a place for real we have any right to do so.

First published in Third Way

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