Between the Finite and the Infinite: Luther, Kierkegaard, and the Cinema of Surrender

In this essay, I will trace how post-Reformation theology, existential philosophy, and quantum physics converge in 20th-century cinema to reveal a radical truth: that meaning is not inherited, but constituted—through faith, suffering, and the act of witness.

Before the Reformation, morality in the West was inherited—virtue and vice embedded within a fixed spiritual and social order. Martin Luther ruptured that order. For him, reason was inadequate to grasp divine truth. He called it “the devil’s whore”—a servant of vanity and sin, not salvation. In its place, he elevated faith: irrational, immediate, inward.

This was more than a theological shift. Luther’s doctrine of sola fide—faith alone—rendered morality a private reckoning, no longer mediated by the Church. It initiated a fundamental reorientation of human agency: from outward obedience to inward surrender.

Søren Kierkegaard inherits this rupture—and deepens it. Like Luther, he sees man as born into the aesthetic life: driven by comfort, art, beauty, and the avoidance of pain. This pursuit of pleasure is not neutral—it is sin. Reason, left to its own devices, chooses the path of least resistance. Therefore, the rational man cannot be the moral man.

Kierkegaard’s rejection of Hegel is essential here. Where Hegel proposed that reason and religion ultimately converge in historical synthesis, Kierkegaard insisted on the irreconcilable. Faith, if it is real, must be absurd. It cannot be rationalized or resolved—it must be leapt into.

Morality, for Kierkegaard, is existential—it’s not derived from history or reason but from a personal, unrepeatable choice. It is the either/or: one chooses either the aesthetic life of pleasure or the ethical life of duty to a divine law that cannot be rationally justified. There is no middle path, no pragmatic compromise. This is the fracture point between Catholicism, with its doctrine of inherent vice and virtue, and the Protestant existential condition: virtue must be chosen, not inherited.

This existential divide mirrors a later schism in science: Newton’s deterministic universe—a closed, calculable system where every cause has an effect—versus Niels Bohr’s quantum universe, where observation alters reality and certainty collapses into probability. The moral universe, like the physical one, is no longer fixed; it’s uncertain, stochastic.

Kierkegaard insisted that those who claim morality must have suffered for it. Belief without suffering is hollow, performative. The rational man seeks to avoid pain, to distract himself from the void, from the deep existential terror that life, in itself, might be meaningless. But the one who suffers, who confronts despair, is humbled—not by the inevitability of death, but by the weight of life itself.

Meanwhile, utilitarian thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill reframe morality in the image of rational self-interest. They extend this pursuit of pleasure into governance itself: a good society is one that maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain—the greatest good for the greatest number. But this is a moral system built on avoidance: avoid suffering, avoid sacrifice.

For Kierkegaard, morality can’t be calculated. It is what survives reason’s collapse. It begins in pain, in the decision to suffer rather than to retreat into comfort. This is the true burden of the ethical life: not simply to act rightly, but to choose righteousness without the assurance of reward.

From Luther’s deterministic grace to Kierkegaard’s existential despair, and finally to Bohr’s stochastic universe, the same tension unfolds: we live caught between what is fixed and what is possible. Between predestination and free will, between determinism and uncertainty. And it is not through reason, nor through action, but through surrender—through observation, through faith—that a single reality becomes real.

In the 20th century, physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated the Uncertainty Principle, showing that certain properties of particles—like position and momentum—cannot be known simultaneously. This shattered classical notions of determinism. Around the same time, Niels Bohr, through the Copenhagen Interpretation, proposed that quantum systems exist in a state of superposition until they are observed. Observation itself becomes a creative act—it collapses a cloud of probability into a single outcome.

In this light, Bohr’s view of quantum reality mirrors Kierkegaard’s conception of faith: both posit a world in which reality is not resolved until it is confronted, and in confronting it, we transform it—and ourselves.

Though physics cannot bear the full weight of theological or existential metaphor, its ontological shift from determinism to indeterminacy offers a profound structural echo of Kierkegaard’s paradox. In both quantum theory and existential theology, reality is not fixed until it is engaged. The electron exists in a cloud of probabilities; the self exists in a cloud of ethical possibilities. In Bohr’s view, measurement collapses the wave function. In Kierkegaard’s view, commitment collapses the self’s fragmentation. Neither system permits neutrality. To observe—or to choose—is to alter the world. While their domains differ, the structural resonance between faith and observation is unmistakable: both are acts of constitution, not discovery.

I. Luther: Surrender and Grace

Martin Luther, one of the most influential spiritual figures in Northern Europe, saw profound hypocrisy in the Catholic Church’s commodification of salvation. In Luther’s view, grace was stripped from God and given to the papacy to control, and routed through the idea of man’s good works, rather than pure surrender to God’s will. These two should not be equal in Luther’s estimation.

In his 95 Theses, nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, Luther wrote: “To say that the cross emblazoned with the papal coat of arms, and set up by the indulgence preachers is equal in worth to the cross of Christ is blasphemy.” For Luther, forgiveness was not earned nor bought, it can only be earned through surrender. This surrender is only possible through a truly penitent man; a man who recognizes his sins, is embattled by them, and seeks to evolve through God’s good grace.

This surrender, however, was not an act of holy striving but a relinquishment of the will. “The will of man is seen to act as a decisive factor in theology,” Luther acknowledged, but man’s participation was not active in the Catholic sense—it was embodied through passive receptivity. Goodness did not arise from action, but from grace working through the individual. Therefore, participation was not through acting holy, but its embodiment.

This stood in stark contrast to both Catholic orthodoxy and the Aristotelian logic embedded in Church tradition. Luther rejected the philosophical scaffolding of virtue ethics, arguing that Christian confession was not a matter of episteme but of belief. God's righteousness, he wrote, is a gift: sola gratia—grace alone. Salvation is not a reward for moral performance, but a miracle of divine mercy.

Luther never sought revolution, nor was it anti-institutional. It was true reformation — believing in the church as an institutional framework but not in its hierarchy of moral merit. Luther’s reformation shattered the Catholic framework of salvation as merit-based, rooted in confession and good works. By dismantling the Catholic framework of salvation-as-transaction, Luther offered a different metaphysical vision: a universe of predestination. “Man is like a horse,” he said, “either God or the Devil rides him.” In this deterministic world, salvation is not chosen by will, but received through surrender.

And yet, this surrender is not passive resignation. It is the one, terrifying moment of human choice—a gesture of existential humility in a cosmos we cannot master. Reason, Luther wrote, “is the devil’s whore.” Faith is not deduced or proven. It is a mystery endured and received.

In Luther’s theology, even the good works of man are not his own. They are larva Dei—“masks of God.” God acts through man, concealed behind the very deeds He animates. Moral action, then, is not discarded but reframed: not as achievement, but as evidence of grace having taken hold. Therefore, the good works of man do not offer salvation, salvation comes through his surrender; his body the vessel through which God offers goodness to others. By making good works God's masks rather than human achievements, he preserved the importance of moral action while stripping away human pride and merit. This maintains ethical behavior while eliminating the spiritual marketplace that had corrupted the Church.

This theological shift does more than correct ecclesiastical corruption—it transforms our conception of agency. In Luther’s cosmos, man cannot redeem himself through intellect or ethics. He must be undone to be remade. And yet, in that undoing lies the only true freedom: to surrender. In Luther's deterministic universe, where humans are like horses ridden by either God or the Devil, might seem to eliminate human agency entirely. Yet the requirement for surrender suggests a moment of profound human choice—perhaps the only real choice we have. This creates a theology that is simultaneously humbling and empowering: humbling because it denies human merit, empowering because it makes every believer a direct vessel of divine action.

II. Kierkegaard: Faith as Leap

Søren Kierkegaard preserves Luther’s vision of grace as a gift, but internalizes its battleground: the struggle shifts from theological dogma to existential decision. Where Luther challenged the Catholic Church’s transactional faith, Kierkegaard challenges modernity’s over-reliance on reason. Against the backdrop of Hegelian dialectics—which posited no fundamental difference between religion and rationality—Kierkegaard insisted on a rupture. If faith is not something to prove but something to experience, as Luther taught, then no dialectical synthesis can unite faith and logic. Faith defies reconciliation with reason. It must be leapt into, not argued for.

Kierkegaard’s project, like Luther’s, begins with the human condition: we are born into sin—not merely as a theological claim but as an existential default. We pursue pleasure to avoid pain. We seek distraction to avoid despair. Even our loftier creations—art, beauty, language—serve as mirrors for our desires and shields against the void. In this schema, rational man cannot be holy, because reason is wired for self-preservation. Given free choice, reason maximizes comfort—not virtue. This, Kierkegaard suggests, is the structure of original sin: not wickedness, but self-interest.

To live rationally, then, is to live aesthetically. But the aesthetic life is not free—it is evasive. The rational man distracts himself not just from death, but from life’s inherent vacuity. Only when he strips away these illusions does he stand at the precipice of truth. That precipice is despair—but it is also possibility.

Kierkegaard proposes three stages of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The transition from the aesthetic to the ethical requires not simply morality, but commitment—an act of will that places righteousness above comfort. But even the ethical life, for Kierkegaard, is insufficient. It still measures itself against human law, public opinion, and social contract. To follow God’s law—where right and wrong are not always legible or logical—one must leap into the religious stage. Like Luther, Kierkegaard sees salvation as emerging through surrender. But for Kierkegaard, this surrender is a choice, and a terrifying one. It cannot be hedged with compromise. It must be made in full.

This is the Protestant paradox. Unlike Catholicism, where virtue can be cultivated through practice and piety, Protestantism—especially in its Lutheran and Kierkegaardian forms—frames virtue as a leap, not a ladder. The choice is binary: Either/Or. Either a life governed by certainty, or one governed by faith. Either Newton’s determinism, or Bohr’s quantum uncertainty. In Kierkegaard’s words: “To have faith is to lose your mind and to win God.”

For Kierkegaard, belief is not a matter of assent. It must be suffered. It must be lived through. Only those who have wrestled with despair, endured doubt, and still chosen faith can claim it honestly. Morality is not inherited; it is chosen—often at great cost.

In this way, Kierkegaard refracts Luther’s paradoxical view of man into an existential prism. Luther’s “horse”—ridden either by God or the Devil—becomes Kierkegaard’s finite and infinite self: a creature bounded by the world, but haunted by eternity. The task is not to resolve this contradiction, but to live within it—with faith not as resolution, but as revolt. And it is only here that we find true grace.

III. Cinema as Theological Witness - Ordet

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet is a film of silences—religious, existential, metaphysical. While its roots trace back to Kaj Munk’s 1925 play, its cinematic resonance emerges most fully in the wake of World War II, where both the horrors of human reason and the uncertainty of science demanded new questions about faith, grace, and reality. Dreyer had seen a world in which Hitler, under the guise of divine authority, rationalized genocide, and in which quantum physics—the science of uncertainty—ushered in weapons of unfathomable destruction. In response, Dreyer directs not a condemnation, but an interrogation. Ordet does not give answers; it evokes grace through a paradox.

The theological engine of the film is Lutheran, but its existential frame is deeply Kierkegaardian. Martin Luther’s Bondage of the Will insists that man is incapable of choosing salvation by his own reason or strength. Grace is not earned; it is gifted. The human being is either ridden by God or the Devil—there is no neutral will. Salvation comes only through surrender, through a letting go of all claims to rational agency.

Kierkegaard preserved this vision but internalized it. For him, the battleground was not the pulpit but the individual self. He critiqued the Hegelian synthesis of reason and religion as a flattening of faith into system. Kierkegaard held that reason and faith were irreconcilable: to believe is not to reason but to leap, to exist in the absurd. One must choose—between pleasure and the ethical life, between certainty and uncertainty, between the finite self and the infinite.

The rational man, in Kierkegaard’s schema, seeks distraction to avoid suffering. He lives aesthetically, consuming art and ideas for pleasure, fleeing the dread of death and meaninglessness. But this life is despair: it denies the self’s true relation to God. The ethical man, by contrast, accepts responsibility beyond the self. He seeks righteousness not for reward but as an expression of divine love. Yet even this life reaches its limit—for true selfhood requires not only the ethical but the religious leap: surrendering all, one must choose God without proof.

This pattern echoes Luther’s monergistic vision. Man cannot save himself. He must die to himself. And in dying, be reborn. Thus Kierkegaard’s “infinite and finite man” is simply Luther’s paradoxical man in new form: the finite self who must embrace the infinite through despair, through dread, through faith.

Dreyer’s Ordet dramatizes this paradox. It is a story of a families divided by faith, where religious abstraction and theological debate mask a deeper silence. The characters invoke the Word of God, but fail to embody it. Only Johannes—deranged in the eyes of others—dares to believe literally. We see Johannes, who believes he is Christ, in one of the opening scenes— giving a sermon on the mound, but no one listens. Later, his father, a devout Lutheran, tells his daughter-in-law that he prays, but God does not listen and his prayers go unanswered. Yet when Johannes tries to speak with him about faith—challenging his mistaken belief that prayers must be answered in a transactional, synergistic way—he is ignored. This becomes a pattern: throughout the film, Johannes speaks, but no one truly hears him. Even when a new pastor visits and Johannes reveals himself a Christ, the pastor asks for proof, looking for the rational within the irrational. Then when his other son, Anders, wants to marry Anne, a girl in a different sect of Lutheranism, both patriarchs lean into reason surrounding their faith, rather than the teachings of Christ and Luther than implore love and kindness to others. They argue with words about the problems with each man’s faith, without looking into the Kierkegaardian void at their own shortcomings and surrender. They use theology as a form of control—a way to maintain rational mastery over divine mystery. During an argument, Morten, exasperated by Anne’s father’s evangelism, snaps: “I won’t hear another word of that rubbish.” Anne’s father replies, “You won’t hear me, but you will hear the word of God.” This exchange underscores the central tension: Morten refuses to hear the word of God in any form. His rationality is his armor—and his prison. His refusal to surrender is not just stubbornness; it’s a fear of relinquishing control.

Later, when Inger gently pleads with him to approve her brother’s marriage, Morten again resists—resisting not just the union, but the surrender it symbolizes. When she reminds him of love and compassion—acts through which grace is channeled—he rebuffs her. “You act as if God has forsaken you,” she tells him, trying to make him see the blessings he already has.But Morten’s obsession with control blinds him to a deeper truth: God isn’t silent. He just isn’t listening.

Dreyer reinforces this theme visually. When Johannes delivers his sermon on the hillside, he faces the camera, elevated above us. We become the congregation—positioned to receive.Later, Morten is framed in the same location, but with his back to the camera. It’s a mirror shot, but inverted in meaning: instead of reception, we see rejection. His body is turned away from God, hands lifted not in praise but in desperate demand. He asks for God—but cannot hear Him. The image becomes a metaphor for the spiritual deafness that accompanies pride.

Only in the final act does the family truly listen to Johannes. In a moment of radical surrender, they allow him to attempt the impossible: the resurrection of Inger. And it happens—not through doctrine, but through faith. Not as a rational miracle, but a metaphysical one—a gesture beyond comprehension.

This leap into faith mirrors the crucifixion. Christ cries out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Yet he surrenders. His trust becomes the mechanism of grace. The same arc is mirrored in Munk’s life. Though once sympathetic to fascism, he could not remain silent in the face of Jewish persecution. In surrendering to his faith, he was killed. That, too, is a resurrection—an act of grace born through death.

The film is titled Ordet—“The Word”—yet it is silence that redeems. Not the word of scripture. Not the rituals of religion. But grace enacted in faith. As Dreyer writes, quantum physics opened “new perspectives” where “one realizes a deep connection between exact science and intuitive religion.” The world is not fixed—it is relational, participatory. Neils Bohr’s work on quantum uncertainty suggested that reality itself is shaped by observation. In Ordet, we find the same pattern: faith does not observe—it participates. It changes the world.

This idea—of participatory ontology—links theology, philosophy, and science:

• Luther: Grace is not earned, but given. Salvation is God’s act alone.

• Kierkegaard: The self is not found, but chosen. Faith requires the absurd leap.

• Bohr / Quantum Theory: Reality is not fixed, but emerges through interaction.

  
  

Physicists like John Wheeler describe the “participatory universe,” where measurement collapses probability into reality. Relational quantum mechanics and QBism suggest that outcomes exist only in relation to the observer. Karen Barad’s “agential realism” pushes this further: meaning and matter co-emerge.

Across all three—Lutheran theology, existential philosophy, and quantum science—we find a structural isomorphism: determinacy does not precede engagement, it emerges through it. The divine, the self, reality—each comes into being not through mastery or control, but through surrender, through participation, through faith.

This is what Ordet understands. Not as dogma, but as cinema. Its miracle is not a violation of natural law, but a revelation of another—one rooted in grace. And that grace is not spoken. It is lived.

Not in the Word. But in the act.

IV. Cinema as Theological Witness - The Silence

If Ordet is about finding God not in words but in acts of grace and silence, Bergman’s The Silence imagines silence as the complete absence of God.

In Ingmar Bergman’s work, he wrestles with morality through the fears, questions, and resentments rooted in his Lutheran upbringing. His father was a strict pastor, and that presence—disciplinary and theological—weighed heavily on him throughout his life. Nowhere is this more evident than in his so-called “faith trilogy”: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence.

When asked what he hoped to achieve with his films, Bergman once said: “I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain… Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.” Though he described himself as an agnostic, religion—or more specifically, its absence—remained a central concern for much of his creative life. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, this concern became the focal point of his work. Films like The Seventh Seal and The Magician (aka The Face, 1958) critique institutional religion while still floating the possibility of spiritual connection. ‘Grace’ isn’t a word that fits easily in Bergman’s vocabulary, but something resembling it can be found in the fragile, human communion his characters sometimes reach for amid alienation and suffering.

Bergman’s crisis of faith, I believe, was not centered on whether God or the Church was “real,” but on what it would mean—morally, spiritually, existentially—if God were wholly absent from human existence. Though he exposes the hypocrisy and hollowness of religious structures, he does so with the terror of someone peering into the abyss left behind in their wake. And that’s where The Silence begins — Bergman describing The Silence as “a rendering of hell on earth—my hell.”

In The Silence, the city hums with the distant sounds of war—violence that never quite arrives. The conflict is ambient: omnipresent yet abstract. The world moves, but without direction. Similarly, the two women travel without a clear origin or destination. Their journey is suspended in meaninglessness, much like the foreign language spoken around them—unintelligible, impenetrable, devoid of connection.

The boy, Johan, has no father. Whether absent or nonexistent, the father’s absence becomes metaphysical—a mirror of the world’s complete severance from God. This isn’t just a world where the father is gone; it’s one in which he may never have existed at all.

Inside the hotel, they find shelter—but not from spiritual consequence. The space is liminal, a vacuum where morality is muffled, participation is suspended, and consequence quietly dissolves. Time drips forward, but nothing redeems it.

This inertia reflects the dual nature of Bergman’s agnosticism: the absence of faith is not neutral—it is its own kind of weight. The silence is not peaceful; it is oppressive. A child, Johan, shoots a worker with a toy gun. The man collapses in play. No one reacts. There is no moral fallout. The moment lands with eerie emptiness—no cause, no consequence. All move like ghosts, severed from spiritual connection.

Bergman is not simply critiquing organized religion—he is mourning what it no longer provides. Despite his agnosticism, he returns to faith again and again—not as doctrine, but as inquiry. In this way, he is almost Kierkegaardian: not because he affirms God, but because he is committed to the suffering entailed in trying to believe in it. He has looked into the abyss—of his own moral failings, of others’ failings, of a world fallen away from grace—and still searches for a trace of it.

The Silence becomes a parable for what happens when society listens only to the void, blocking out not just God, but all transcendent meaning. The void, in Kierkegaardian terms—amended for a world without God—is not charged with divine mystery, but emptied of direction. It becomes limitless potential without anchoring truth; a landscape of infinite choices stripped of purpose. The two women serve as allegorical figures, each embodying a failed framework for human existence in a godless world. One sister, Ester, clings to intellect and moral rigidity. Her asceticism becomes a shell—a dogmatic structure emptied of warmth or communion. Her ideals, detached from living faith, leave her ill and isolated. The other sister, Anna, represents nihilistic abandon: impulsive, sensual, emotionally indifferent. She lives without guilt, but also without meaning or connection. The freedom she expresses is not liberation—it is debasement of her own virtue. They represent the twin dead ends of life without transcendent meaning—intellectual rigidity emptied of warmth, and sensual abandon divorced from purpose.

Between them is Johan—the child, the soul, perhaps even Bergman himself. He is caught between these two poles: sterile obedience and purposeless freedom. Neither offers him guidance. Neither offers grace. He cannot choose because there is nothing worth choosing. This speaks to Bergman's vision of the modern predicament.

Where Ordet offers divine intervention, and Through a Glass Darkly offers a flicker of relational grace, The Silence strips away both. There is no miracle. No redemptive act. Only the inconsequential noise of war. Only the empty silence. And the ache of meaninglessness. This place is not the hell we had always imagined—one of fire and brimstone—nor is it a place of dramatic malignancy. No, it’s something far worse: a place of apathy, void of any emotional breath.

And yet, the film does not collapse into despair. In its final moments, an ambiguous act is rendered. Ester, the sick sister, writes a letter to Johan. She includes a few words from the foreign language—an attempt to communicate, to connect. The words are meaningless to him, perhaps even to her, but again—like in Ordet—it’s not the words themselves, but the gesture that matters. It’s a seed. A fragment. A trace of the infinite, passed between finite beings—just enough to stir a small bit of hope in a space otherwise devoid of grace.

This is where Bergman’s vision becomes most Kierkegaardian: not in belief, but in the decision to evolve. It is not a leap of faith, but a small evolution—a movement toward the other. The act of love or connection in the absence of metaphysical certainty becomes its own kind of faith. It is not salvation. It is not resurrection. But it is not nothing. It is a letter, handed from one person to another in the void.

No one in The Silence is, in Luther’s words, “ridden by God.” They are riderless. The silence is complete. And yet, the letter is a collapsed wave function: it converts ambient noise into intention. It is not divine grace, but something close to human grace—a willingness to send meaning into the abyss, unsure if it will be received.

The absence of God, Bergman shows us, reveals how deeply human beings still crave the infinite—even if it’s only found in a word, a letter, a gesture. In The Silence, there is no revelation. But there is still a reaching. A residual hope, however faint, that something might answer back.

V. Cinema as Theological Witness - Breaking the Waves

If Dreyer’s Ordet reflects a Lutheran worldview of grace as surrender, and Bergman dramatizes Kierkegaardian despair in the face of divine silence, then Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves takes us a step further. His cinema inherits both Luther’s radical grace and Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, but explodes them into raw emotion and suffering.

Luther famously wrote, “Man is like a horse”: he is either ridden by God or by the Devil—there is no neutral ground. This reveals Luther’s deep belief in the radical incapacity of the human will to choose righteousness on its own. We are born into sin, and only grace—unearned, often absurd—can redeem us.

Bess, in Breaking the Waves, is a character ridden entirely by God—at least in her own mind. She submits to suffering with disturbing purity, convinced her pain serves a divine purpose. Her “leap of faith” is neither rational nor ethical by human standards. It echoes Luther’s fixation on the chasm between divine will and human understanding. Even the title—Breaking the Waves—gestures toward this futility: how can a person break a wave? It breaks itself. It is nature—or perhaps God’s will. And yet Bess takes on that task, believing suffering is the only proof of love.

A religious woman living on a remote Scottish island, Bess leaps into marriage with Jan, an oil rig worker, shortly after meeting him. The opening scene is her reckoning with church elders over this decision. Though they express their own irrational anxieties to dissuade her, she chooses marriage in the only way someone with the truest sense of faith can—fully, blindly, with total conviction.

When Jan becomes paralyzed in an accident, her faith is tested. He tells her she must sleep with other men—a twisted act of grace in his eyes, meant to free her from a life of caregiving. But Bess, rooted in her deeply internalized faith, interprets this not as liberation but as a call to sacrifice. She begins sleeping with other men not out of desire or duty, but as a form of spiritual surrender—a self-flagellating devotion meant to restore Jan’s health through her own suffering.

To the audience, her sexual debasement feels needless, painful, tragic. To her community, it appears sinful or mad. But Bess remains unshaken. Her husband says, “Love is a mighty power... if I’ll die, it’ll be because love cannot keep me alive.” This is as much about a man’s love for a woman as it is about humankind’s love for God. All of their acts are irrational—because they are emotional. Bess has abandoned the rational, ethical man entirely, and von Trier shows us that trying to glean meaning from the irrational is a fruitless task. Life, like faith, is random—stochastic—and in that randomness, if we don’t let go, we’ll fight the wave we cannot win. It will drown us.

This randomness is mirrored in the camera. It does not steady or guide us; it moves where it wants, ignoring our expectations. We are unmoored, out to sea, drifting in the irrational, while an oppressive cloud of faith looms overhead. Yet even as the camera, the edits, and the narrative itself swirl with disorder, Bess remains resolute. She is the rock upon which the waves break—but they do not break her.

Even the edits carry emotional weight. Anders Refn said, “Lars and I decided to cut emotionally. We shouldn’t respect the rules of visual continuity in the traditional way.” The film often enters at the emotional peak, only to cut away, denying us catharsis. The wave never crests—it just holds. This evokes the zealous abandon of faith’s irrationality. It’s the purest form of surrender, but through the lens.

Bess even proclaims to her church, “You cannot love words. You cannot be in love with a word. You can only love a human being. That’s perfection.” Like Ordet and The Silence, Breaking the Waves suggests that faith is not about intellectual assent or theological language. It is not passive, nor rational. It demands surrender. Surrender being as much passive as it is active. In Bess, we witness not just the absurd endeavor to resist the natural order, but the possibility that through faith—radical, painful, and transcendent—the waves of human nature might be broken, and the divine might arrive.

She pushes beyond what is necessary even when her surrender should be enough. But she continues to suffer, to bleed, to offer herself—believing her sacrifice might heal her husband. Her faith bypasses merit, reason, and moral calculation. It is imputed righteousness—not earned, but given. Even though her zealousness leads to an absurd suffering and unnecessary death, a miracle emerges. And in the film’s final, surreal gesture—the ringing of church bells in heaven—we glimpse a return to Luther’s idea of grace: irrational, brutal, undeserved, and entirely mysterious.

Kierkegaard builds upon Luther’s theology by personalizing it. He introduces the “leap”—the existential decision to follow faith beyond reason and ethics. Bess, like Abraham, commits an act that violates moral law in obedience to a higher spiritual calling. Her community sees madness; she believes she is obeying God. In Kierkegaard’s terms, she is a “knight of faith”—one who walks alone, misunderstood, yet unwavering. But in von Trier’s hands, that walk becomes a crucifixion: a return to Luther’s brutal grace, where salvation is not earned but suffered into being.

While von Trier’s depiction of Bess can be read as either profound spiritual insight or exploitative spectacle, her predicament parallels Abraham’s dilemma in Fear and Trembling—when God pits the moral against the ethical by commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac out of obedience.

One reading of Breaking the Waves is allegorical: Jan stands in for God. Bess’s friend tells him, explicitly, that she would do absolutely anything for him. Like God in the Abraham story, Jan issues a command that defies conventional morality. On one hand, he may exploit this devotion, manipulating her into sleeping with other men after his paralysis. On the other, his request could be a sincere gesture of liberation—freeing her from a lifetime of caretaking.

Here von Trier probes humanity’s image of God: benevolent or malevolent? I think he rejects the binary. God, in this reading, is morally neutral. Bess—formed by her religious understanding—can only receive Jan’s request as a call to martyrdom. She transforms what might have been mercy into torment because sacrifice is the only language of love she knows.

Jan’s eventual recovery is not a transactional result of her acts. It is a neutral byproduct of the aggregate—unearned, inexplicable, arriving not because of human action but despite it, alongside it, or through some logic entirely alien to human calculation. It is neither exploitative nor caring, but a true act of mystery.

Like Abraham, Bess interprets the command through her own framework, one in which love demands suffering, obedience, and total self-abnegation. Viewers who see exploitation reveal something about their own moral lens; those who see a miracle reveal another; those who see mental illness, still another. Von Trier doesn’t offer the “correct” interpretation—he creates a space in which our deepest assumptions about suffering, love, and divine action are forced into the open. And in this we understand that what unites Von Trier, Luther’s surrender, and Kierkegaard’s leap is this: reality is not fixed. It is formed. Cinema operates in the same way. It is not a passive reflection of reality but an active force that shapes it. The cinematic moment becomes real only through the viewer’s surrender—through belief.

This mirrors Marshall McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message.” Film is not merely a vessel for content; it is an environment that reshapes perception. It alters how we see, feel, and believe. When Bess enacts her final, sacrificial gesture, the medium itself transforms. Her suffering is not simply represented—it is imprinted upon us. The viewer’s surrender collapses ritual into reality.

Both quantum mechanics and media ecology suggest that perception is formative. Bohr’s theory of wave function collapse proposes that reality is shaped by observation. Film behaves similarly: meaning is not preexistent—it is constituted through the act of watching.

Bess’s faith, then, becomes real not because it is rational or earned, but because it is witnessed. Through that witnessing, we participate in its creation. The screen dissolves. The bells ring. And we are left not with explanation, but with grace—irrational, brutal, undeserved, and entirely real.

VI. Conclusion

Why is this important?

Because we live in an age obsessed with explanation. We have inherited the Enlightenment’s promise: that reason can penetrate all mysteries through logic and analysis. But it cannot. And we’ve tried to force cinema into that same mold.

Yet cinema, at its best, mirrors Luther’s surrender. It need not explain. It need not resolve. Entering a theater is an act of faith. Most art invites us to interpret, analyze, or appreciate. Cinema invites us to believe—and to believe completely.

We cannot reason our way into a film’s reality; we must submit to it. In that submission, film becomes a form of witness—not to doctrine, but to mystery. It invites us to peer into the abyss: to doubt, to despair, to confront the limits of human will within the vastness of human potential.

Cinema becomes not a sermon, nor a solution—but a testament.

If Luther and Kierkegaard teach us anything, it is that the greatest act of faith a filmmaker can offer is to resist the urge to explain. To resist the demand for reason. And instead, to allow the audience to sit with the inexplicable. To bear witness. To feel.

And in that space—in that silence, however brief—we may encounter something we long for: the divine.