“Christopher Nolan has a new movie out. Do you want to go see it?”

“Who?”

“The guy who directed Inception and the Batman movies.”

“Oh… then heck yeah.”

So went the conversation between my wife and me this past week. Given Christopher Nolan’s track record, I feel confident when I sit down for one of his movies that I am going to be thoroughly entertained. His new film Interstellar is no exception. A top-notch cast including Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, and a surprise A-list actor (you’ll have to wait until the last hour of the movie to find out who) brings to life Nolan’s vision of a not-too-distant future in which humanity has all but worn out the Earth. Knowing that his children’s generation will be the last to survive, a pilot-turned-farmer named Coop (McConaughey) leads a last-ditch mission into a distant galaxy in order to find a new home for the human race.

As we have come to expect from Christopher Nolan stories, the plot of Interstellar bends not only time and space but also the minds of the audience. While taking occasional creative liberties, the script makes reasonably good use of modern scientific knowledge of gravitational time dilation, black holes, and wormholes. (You can listen to astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse’s commentary on the movie here.) As the movie’s protagonists make their way deeper into space, they also take us further into the depths of our humanity. Conversations between Coop and his planet-hopping companions raise questions about the goodness of humanity, the limits of scientific objectivity, and the tension we all experience between altruism and self-preservation. Would it be possible to leave behind humanity’s flaws by starting over with an exceptional group of people? Is a decision untrustworthy simply because it is motivated by love? These are a couple of the issues the crew of the Endurance wrestle with as they simultaneously confront the challenges of deep space exploration.

One of the most interesting questions raised by the film is how it might be possible for superior beings to communicate with human beings. One of Coop’s crew members, Dr. Brand (Hathaway), suggests that it may be fifth-dimensional beings who have been mysteriously aiding their efforts to save humanity. Her suggestion prompts the question: How does a being who is not bound by the limits of space and time communicate in a way that is comprehensible to beings like humans who are constrained by these limitations? The solution ultimately offered at the climax of the film is less interesting than the question. Fortunately, this is not the only lead Nolan gives us.

Even though the director apparently did not deem it worth developing, I found the solution proposed by Hathaway’s character midway through the movie to be far more profound. Perhaps, mused Brand, love is the way fifth-dimensional beings guide third-dimensional beings. Love is, after all, the only thing we know of (other than gravity) that transcends time and space.

At this point, I think you can appreciate why Brand’s musings would interest a theologian like myself or, for that matter, anyone trying to grow closer to God. Many of us have wondered at some time or another why God does not answer. Why would God remain silent when a parent cries out in sorrow after the loss of a child, or when an immigrant prays for safe passage into a foreign land, or when a child in her innocence asks if God is really listening. Perhaps Christopher Nolan’s latest work has something to teach us in this regard. Perhaps we should be asking not why we don’t hear God, but whether God might be communicating differently than we expect.

It is in this way that I think Interstellar provides some salutary stimulation for the Christian imagination. Nolan’s characters suggest that the limits of time and space prevent human beings from communicating directly with higher beings, which seems an accurate enough characterization of our relating to God. However, I would add that, when it comes to God relating to us, we can take it on good faith that, however God chooses to communicate with us (or not), God has our best interests at heart. To be sure, it can be hard waiting in the silence, but Scripture gives us reason to believe that Dr. Brand may have been on to something: For “no one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us….God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in them” (1 Jn 4:12, 16).

At movie’s end when Coop finally comes to understand all of the mysterious events that led him to that decisive moment, he realizes that he can’t save the world himself and, furthermore, that he was never the chosen one to begin with. I suspect a similar realization awaits each of us at that moment just before the final credits roll on the story of our life. We all tend to imagine ourselves as the hero of the story and want the solutions to come on our terms. This is a perfectly natural way to act, especially when our pleas for help seem to go unanswered. But the truth is that none of us can ensure a happy ending on our own. For that to happen, we have to recognize that we have been in more capable, loving hands from the beginning and entrust ourselves into them once again.