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I love going to the movies, even though it is no easy matter these days to find at the local multiplex thoughtful compositions that engage the Christian mind. I am not even asking for a screenplay free of gratuitous gore and silly, vulgar language. I am just seeking a film that actually presents its audience with one or two challenging ideas.

Not long ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find such a film in director Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, which was inspired by Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography of the mathematician John Nash. Although by no means an explicitly Christian story—or even, in conventional terms, a religious one—the film's narrative provides a vehicle for elucidating important Christian principles.

John Nash, as millions of people now know, was a brilliant graduate student at Princeton back in the 1940s, when, among other accomplishments, he invented an analytical tool now known as the "Nash equilibrium." This discovery, for which Nash received the Nobel Prize in 1994, turned out to be one of the foundations of modern game theory, with application to everything from arms control talks to pricing goods in a competitive market.

It is also consonant with profoundly Christian ideals.

Here's why: the Nash equilibrium posits that there are circumstances in which we are better off if we settle for something other than that which we most desire. This may be counterintuitive, but the mathematical proof (which is available for a general audience in William Poundstone's excellent book, Prisoner's Dilemma) is quite elegant. Indeed, the implication of the Nash equilibrium is that sometimes the entire community is better off when we choose not to pursue that which we want most desperately.

Isn't there a Christian parallel here? So much of Christ's teaching is about self-control, and so much of the Christian life (exemplified, say, by Paul's letter to the Romans) is recognizing how we serve God's ends by pursuing his purposes rather than our own fervent passions.

What gives both film and book their poignancy is that Nash, having made his great discovery and climbed to the top of his profession, slipped slowly into paranoid schizophrenia. Sylvia Nasar gives his descent impact by the cool, almost clinical detachment with which she describes it; Ron Howard takes the opposite route, inviting us into Nash's madness until we, too, find ourselves unable to distinguish delusion from reality.

The Christian conversation that the film should spark involves Nash's escape from the clutches of his mental illness. No, there is no conversion, no turning to the Lord when all else has failed. But, in describing his battle with the hallucinations that plague him, Nash explains in the film that he had to put his mind "on a diet." What this evidently means is that he has to force his mind to reject certain tempting ideas in the same way that dieters must force their bodies to reject certain tempting foods. Isn't this precisely what Christians are called to do?

A Beautiful Mind has been criticized by some for the liberties it takes in telling Nash's story. To be sure, the real-life Nash was, during the years covered by the film, an atheist of sorts who, according to Nasar's biography, refused a Catholic wedding. I say "of sorts" because among the many delusions left out of the screenplay was his occasional belief that God was telling him what to do. At one point he thought of himself as "the Left Foot of God," and he often imagined himself a prophet.

In fact, Nash must have known his Bible quite well, because he found constant parallels between his own situation and the biblical narrative. For example, Nasar tells us that Nash saw his own perceived ostracism as a working out of the story of Jacob and Esau. He drew analogies between his own situation and the final Day of Judgment. He traced biblical analogies in the stars. And he sometimes imagined himself in heaven, although in Nash's schizophrenic vision it was a rotting, polluted place.

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April 1 2002, Vol. 46, No. 4