Prologue

The year of the great snow, a thing I had prayed for since I was five years old.

The year I sat in a rumbling theater watching the 20th-anniversary showing of Revenge of the Sith—this time beside my nephew, a film I first saw alone in 2005, when I was his age—listening to Obi-Wan deliver the saddest line in cinematic history: “You were the chosen one.”

It was a weird night, too. The kind of night that goes out of its way to taunt you when you’re just trying to enjoy yourself. Don’t ask me to explain because I can’t. I got Covid (again) the next day and was down for two weeks. I am not the chosen one.

2025, the year I got stabbed in my left foot on July 4th for going down a pontoon slide into shallow water. What got me? No idea. But the raw physics of entering the water feet-first, only to be stabbed in the top of my foot, still elude me. I’m also that rare kind of idiot who brings the first-aid kit on a pontoon boat and ends up being the only person who needs it.

The foot healed with a scar (hey, what’s one more?), but two months of inexplicable anxiety followed, which I didn’t talk about. Turns out I just needed Vitamin D.

The year I ate bad chicken and spent two weeks with food poisoning. I thought it was a kidney stone. And, as usual with my low tolerance for suffering, I thought I was going to die.

The year I chased vapor, hoping I might catch it.

The year, by God’s grace, I bought my family’s house back. Let no one boast except in Christ. That’s a story I’ll tell sometime, too. The story I want to tell—now that we’ve cleared the prologue—is about the year 2026.

But before we go, let’s make no mistake. The lesson of 2025 was in the absence of reliable interpreters.

Dreams

Ten years ago, I dreamed a mystery.

I stand on the deck behind my house—the one I just bought back—overlooking the water. But the water is also an aquarium, and swimming there, big and bold as anything, is a dolphin the size of a killer whale.

This dolphin lives to perform. She does tricks nonstop. Her glory, which she reflects heavenward, is in being the world’s biggest dolphin. In the dream, I call out to my mom, “You gotta see this.” But my mom says, “I’ve already seen it.”

Typical of dreams, I am teleported to the Arctic under a night sky, enclosed by two giant emperor penguins who tower over me.1

One of the penguins instructs me in proper diving methodology while the other demonstrates. The whole time, I am reminded of my dad (I always say he dives off the blocks like a penguin). While the dolphin lived to be its genuine self, the emperor penguins live to master form, excel at their craft, and pass on their knowledge.

So far, we have two giant, larger-than-life swimming animals, one associated with my mother, the other with my father. Creativity and method. Fair enough.

But they always come in threes, don’t they?

The third scene teleports me to a pitch-black, six-by-six enclosure, the darkness rising infinitely above me. The only thing separating me from the void below is the cold water in which I float. The third animal? A thumb-sized, alien-looking fish with spiky scales, dead eyes, and a lantern attached to its head.

“I fear you more than any spectre I have seen.”

The lantern is the only light to see by as the fish swims in circles around me. Deaf, dumb, and blind, this creature does not perform or speak.

As the truth of my dire surroundings settles, I know I have only one option. I must dive into the abyss, breath held, guided only by the lantern’s pale light. The alien fish will lead me down and down while I surrender to trust.

The dream ended there.

Predictions and resolutions

Happy New Year. Time to wake up.

In 2026, I have no idea what will happen. The economy may boom or collapse. The world may go to war or continue spinning rumors of war. Some prophets may prove true. Others, false.

But one thing I have determined, with a resolve that would make Willy Wonka on his psychedelic nightmare cruise look like a chump, is this: I cannot afford to take counsel from anyone who does not exhibit the radical faith towards God that we see in the New Testament Church.

Period.

I’m talking about the same radical faith required to dive into an abyss and trust that 1) you know who you are, 2) you’ve trained well, and 3) God is with you, even if he makes himself seem alien and small.

If I’m wrong and the New Testament is a lie, then I defer to Pascal’s Wager. I choose Aslan even if Aslan never was. Any insight that strays from this center is an unwelcome guest in 2026. Call me closed-minded, if you want.

A voice calls to me from the wasteland, where nothing false survives.

I can be friends with plenty of people in 2026, mind you. In fact, I hope God gives me more friends next year. That’s a real prayer of mine, believe it or not. Miracles happen every day. But the way is narrow, and few there are who find it when it comes to giving me advice.

Everybody wants me to succeed (whatever that means). Nobody wants me to fly the Falcon into an asteroid field.

Never tell me the odds

Forgive me, but I no longer have room in my soul for calculating the odds.

Scott Galloway (a.k.a. C-3PO) says that—according to the data—I should be a radicalized substance abuser because I’m a man in my thirties and live alone. The odds of surviving your thirties without a romantic partner are approximately 3,720 to 1!2

In the immortal words of Han Solo, “Shut him up or shut him down.”

Scott is right—up to the point where he forgets to acknowledge the one, time-tested and dreaded solution to the problem of despair: the scandal of the cross. He’s great at identifying the issues, sure. Yet, I’m mildly persuaded that his proposed solutions suck. The vast majority of atheistic solutions do.3

Drink more alcohol socially? So I can drift deeper into contemplative silence? All it takes is one Old Fashioned for me to go “further up and further in” and forget I was ever at a party. Make more mistakes? All I’ve ever done socially and romantically is make mistakes, Scott. Small ones. All the little faux pas that get you “icked” out of the arena. It’s why I am where I am.

Still, he is right about one other thing. I have been radicalized.

Rejoice evermore

Radical faith does not guarantee a definition of success that the world can get behind. Sometimes it does, but more often it guarantees only the courage to face suffering, exile, or death with humility and boldness. If you’re lucky, you have a haunted night at the movies. Or you get stabbed in the foot as a reward for going outside. Tattoo Psalm 91 on your forehead and count it all joy.

Sometimes, it snows in Florida.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the field, bald Christian YouTubers in their forties are telling me the most meaningful and American thing I can be is a husband and a father. And if I’m not those things, well, it’s because I need to cut out the video games. (Never mind the great schism of men and women that began with the sexual revolution and maybe long before, going back to the Fall. But what do I know?)

Thanks for preaching the glorified pull-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps self-help idolatry. Tell Job’s three advisors I said howdy-do when you see them.

“Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?” (Job 4:7, NIV). Wow, let me think...maybe, all the f*$#ing time? Somebody tell Eliphaz the Temanite to go easy on the shrooms. Oh wait, God already did: “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2).

No one is safe in 2026. Not you. Not me. For everyone who has, what they have can be taken away without explanation. And what they have lost can be returned to them—again, without explanation.

So, be thankful. Pray for divine protection and rejoice evermore.

I open at the close

In 2026, I cannot afford to entertain the obfuscation of God’s plans. I’d rather spend my time in prayer, with the source. And if He ain’t talking back, then silence will suffice. Or, the select counsel of a few highlighted individuals who wear radical faith like bronze shields on their backs.

Consider a message delivered to a man in jail about to be beheaded: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Luke 7:22).

My hope is in Christ alone. And you cannot come to that kind of single-minded hope until everything else has failed you, when you have spent the better part of decades leaning on your own understanding only to realize, in one sweeping instant, that God alone wields the eucatastrophe, the great reversal of fortunes.

Never tell Him the odds.

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Part One

Wanted: an attractive woman who will tell me to f-ck off.

You may be thinking, “Easy.”

You’d be wrong. It turns out, getting an attractive woman to tell you to f-ck off requires first finding one who possesses the uncommon courage to look you square in the eyes and speak the deplorable words.

It also requires you to define your terms. Like, for example, “attractive,” “f-ck,” and “off.”

By attractive, we mean anyone whose eyes, smile, physique, or any wondrous permutation of charms “tickles your twig,” as the sages might say. By “f-ck” and “off” together, we mean, “depart from me, worker of my discomfort and disgust. I never knew you.”

The challenge should be self-evident: These are not easy words for even the bravest person to speak openly, whether male or female, Jew or Greek, attractive or plain. On the contrary, such words are a divine pronouncement and irreversible invocation. They crush the man who hears them, but only because of their raw power to level strongholds and break chains.

“The truth will set you free.”

It is good for a woman to tell a man to f-ck off because in doing so, she speaks the truth that sets him free. She also extricates herself from an otherwise underwhelming entanglement. A classic “win-win” for her and a solid “lose-win” for the aspiring suitor.

As the book of Proverbs famously says, “A woman who tells you to f-ck off is from the Lord.” And, “Who can find a woman who will tell me to f-ck off? For her price is far above rubies.”

Perhaps you’re concerned that uttering such words means “burning a bridge.” I hate to tell you this, but that bridge is already on fire. The man determined to cross it must do so while wearing flaming shoes; any man who has ever taken the first step knows this is a universal law. As ordained by the ancients, he brings with him the tools of his own demise and bears the risk of the crossing.

The choice is not whether the bridge will burn, but whether it will go up in the glorious white flash of atomic detonation, or if the flames will grow by degrees until the unsuspecting courter, still clutching a fagot1 of roses, burns alive slowly like a Reformation martyr when he would’ve much preferred sudden yet blissful obliteration.

Most of the time, it is the woman who holds the detonator. This is right and proper. But in my not-so-many forays across the fiery bridge, I have yet to encounter a woman willing to use it. Granted, I’m not exactly working with a large sample size.

Still, like a Spartan surveying the Persian hordes, I can only pray there is one out there who will grant me the death I think I deserve.

But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m praying for a miracle.

Part Two

Now, assuming I have alienated my readers and all women everywhere, I would like to explain myself to the few of you who have remained. The explanation is a question, one that may seem out of left field.

What is the difference between saying to someone, “f-ck off,” and “I never knew you: depart from me...” (Matt. 7:23, KJV)?

Quantitatively, there is no difference. The outcome is identical.

Qualitatively, though, one is an impassioned curse spoken by a fallen and often fickle human being; the other, the dispassionate eschatological pronouncement of a divine and perfect God intrinsically incapable of sin.

Yet we have a problem. This same God, intrinsically incapable of sin, is also incapable of self-rejection. One might wonder, then, how such a God can say to someone who bears His image, “Depart from me,” when He knows full well that such a thing is physically and logically impossible.

I mean, He may as well say the other thing.

“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Psalm 139:7, KJV).

An image divided against itself is nonbeing.

If humanity is made in God’s image, and that image is ontologically grounded in God’s being, then rejection of the image-bearer would entail self-rejection on God’s part.

That seems incoherent; God cannot deny Himself. (Not to be confused with Jesus’ self-denial on the cross, where “self” in that context is human rebellion.)

If every human bears the image, though tarnished, then the divine “No” cannot be final annihilation—it must be a purifying exile that ultimately restores, reconciles, or redeems.

Perhaps that is the real miracle, one that persists despite my nihilistic prayers.

The predicaments of the man on the burning bridge and the human standing before a just God at the last judgment are jarringly similar. But there is one key difference.

The man before the woman, feeling the sting of gathering flames, hopes for a quick and painless death, a balm for wounded pride.

The human before God knows there is no such thing.

“‘What use are the best of arguments when they can be destroyed by force?’”

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

I don’t know much. I have not watched the assassination video. I prefer to keep gun violence in the fantasy world of video games—but maybe that’s a problem, too. May the Holy Spirit guide us in all things.

I’m here, briefly, to share an undercooked thought or two, or three.

The first thought goes something like this.

When I was in my twenties, my parents’ generation had no idea that the secular universities were and had been, for several decades, a battleground for the souls of our nation’s youth. If they had known or even suspected, they would have paused before throwing parties for me and my friends for getting “accepted.”

I struggle to recall a time in my life when I felt more unsafe than in a college classroom, where the instructor(s) had us watch porn. But it was a student film, or the women were scratched out to symbolize objectification—so that made it A-okay art.

That’s what I get for choosing the humanities.

After two semesters, I wanted to go back and tell all the parents I had ever known that they did not have a blankety-blank clue what they were celebrating when these institutions accepted their kids. But I held my peace.

I took two dreaded “W’s” on my transcript and never got a penny back for those classes. Thank God I never borrowed a penny, either.

I wish someone like Charlie Kirk had been speaking at college campuses then, prompting me to rethink my path. I had at least enough discernment to realize that something wasn’t quite right, that the whole enterprise had all the whiff and nonchalance of an entrenched racket. Maybe that’s why I steered clear of the loans….

Even so, I had to navigate that path with all its pitfalls alone. The best I can say is I now know how the secular university monsters operate, and I can guide the next generation in my immediate proximity. God willing.

My counsel is Gandalf’s to the Fellowship: “This foe is beyond any of you. Run.”

But, I must salute Kirk. That foe was not beyond him in the slightest.

My second undercooked thought follows.

Since my time in the fray, secular universities have become more religiously devoted to their secularism, and one result is that they have become adversarial to the Christian ethic, which should come as no surprise to anyone who understands secularism’s natural trajectory.

All signs have been pointing this way—I believe that may be why Kirk felt called to the university battleground in particular. He knew they had become ideologue factories with a mystifyingly self-destructive intent to undermine Western Civilization. But I think he also dared to hope that the days of the secular university as a bedrock American institution were numbered.

I unapologetically share that hope. The true scholarship Kirk embodied will live on and perhaps even thrive, but the American university as we have known it is a goner.

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin…

Translation: Good riddance.

Third and final undercooked thought on the shooting.

Was Kirk’s murder conspiratorial or a one-off act of malice? No idea. We’ll get the official story, and I’m sure we’ll hear all sorts of alternatives to that story in the weeks, months, and years to come.

If it turns out to be conspiratorial, may the God who tramples demons watch over us, and may Jesus come soon.

But what if it turns out to be an act of isolated, individual malice? Well, it may be that the institutions known for equating words with violence have inadvertently created a new kind of zealot—someone who will take physical violence against a fellow image-bearer and believe it to be an act of goodness.

It is unwise to speculate, but the only valid response I feel to that—to all of it, really—after the seething rage, is a compulsion to pray like I’ve never prayed before. For the bereaved, our nation, our broken world, the quick and the dead, and everyone in between.

Closing.

Take what you will from these thoughts. Today, I remain convinced: The only way to resist evil is with the hope and power of the Gospel. I suspect Charlie Kirk knew something about that, too.

And now, a prayer. We could use one right about now.

In times of trial and times of joy, may our merciful and valiant God be with us in the person of Jesus and the life of the Holy Spirit. I trust He is, even now. Always.

“We are not nearly as responsible for our success as our popular views of God and reality lead us to think… Most of the forces that make us who we are lie in the hand of God.” - Tim Keller

“What do you have that you did not receive?” - 1 Cor. 4:7, NIV

Suppose the Incarnation is true.

1. Suppose Jesus of Nazareth possessed a full, undiminished human will and mind—suppose he was fully human.

2. Further, suppose this same Jesus was fully God.

3. Finally, suppose that this man, being fully God, was sinless by nature and therefore incapable of rejecting God.

This would mean that Jesus was fully human and incapable of sin. If so, the capacity to reject God cannot be essential to human freedom or nature. Why? Because there was a human who lacked that capacity, yet lacked nothing.

But wasn’t Jesus tempted in the wilderness? Temptation does not prove the possibility of sin—it proves the reality of pressure. An unbreakable wall under siege must remain unbroken, or else it is not an unbreakable wall.

Jesus was incapable of sin and yet was not an automaton. He was a free human being. Arguably, he was the freest.

Anyone who claims that God “respects” your freedom to reject Him assumes that your freedom to sin is a necessary feature of being human.

Where did we get that idea?

Christ’s impeccability did not diminish His humanity. It revealed its perfection. If Jesus was fully human and incapable of sin, then the freedom to sin cannot be a set precondition of being human. The freedom to sin is not freedom at all.

So, what is it? Well, I happen to think it is precisely what it is not.

We must see sin and alienation from God not as natural capacities of the human will but as distortions of it, enslaved privations of the truly human. An absence. A gap. A non-thing with zero strings to pull.

True freedom is not deliberative liberty—the mere knowledge and ability to choose good over evil—but the unimpeded realization of the Good brought to light in and by Jesus Himself.

One free and perfect act of God in the person of Jesus was enough to swallow up all so-called “choices” forever.

We were slaves to sin. We are now slaves to Christ.1

The idea that I can, in the fullness of God’s becoming all in all, freely reject God is about as rational as the idea that I can freely reject my own birth.

P.S.

For a smarter, fuller, and more “fleshed out” treatment of this argument (pun intended), see David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved.

The usual disclaimer

I have long avoided writing about politics. Some would say that makes me wise.

I like to think it is because I have had enough humility, at least in writing to the public (all thirty of you), to recognize that I am either “out of my element” or “in over my head.” Pick the cliché you like best. Pick both, and you may be on point.

But today feels a bit different. I feel a bit different. So, I’m going to try something new. I will share my perspective on current events while unabashedly pretending that I am not writing about politics.

And to give an early warning: this is an opinion piece from the so-called conservative viewpoint. One that will fail to capture the nuance of every claim I make (and every breath I take).

Election Results: Trump vs. Harris

As of 10:02 PM CST on November 9th, we know that Donald Trump has won the presidency, and we know he has won it in part because his opponent, Vice President Harris, received 10,353,039 fewer votes than Joe Biden received in 2020.1 Conversely, Donald Trump has secured 432,181 more votes than he did in 2020.

When you read this, those exact numbers may have changed. But the proportions will be nearly identical.

Please take a moment to ruminate on the disparity of those proportions before we go any further.

The Obama Era

Let me take you back to 2008 when Barack Obama ran against John McCain.

At the time, I was among the few people (34%) my age voting for McCain. I played it secretive while attending Gulf Coast Community College, listening to my peers talk in the parking lot about how they couldn’t wait for Obama to become President.

I remember every news and media outlet fighting like hell to help Obama win the presidency, with Fox News being the only run-down place a right-winger could go for self-ideological-reinforcement. It wasn’t easy being proud of Fox News, either.

The odds were not in our favor for gaining a media foothold.

Meanwhile, I watched as late-night talk shows and SNL did their duty to mock the McCain-Palin campaign and to glorify the Obama-Biden troupe. I accepted it, too, because I knew—this was the deal. Hollywood and the media buoy up and champion the left. On the right, we fend for ourselves and hope for the best.

It was how the world worked, and I didn’t question it.

Obama made it even easier. He was a good-looking, charismatic speaker and personality, achieving celebrity status with what seemed a minimal effort. If all panned out, he would become the first black President of the United States. McCain never stood a chance. I was on the losing side, and I knew it.

Recently, a close friend of mine, recalling the same period in his life, admitted to having felt a sense of pride in a black man becoming President of the United States even though, like me, he voted for the other guy. I also remember feeling this pride—a feeling that, even though I hadn’t helped, we had finally done it.

We, Americans, had gotten over that line.

I remember tuning in to most of Obama’s speeches, too. Even though I worried his policies would draw us closer to a socialist outcome from which we could not extricate ourselves, I still wanted to hear from him. It was an odd period of duality for me, and I embraced it.

Four years later, we played a similar game, and I joined forces with the losing side again. But I remember feeling even less invested then. Why? I guess I knew one of two people more qualified than me would attain the presidency. Meanwhile, I would have to continue figuring out what to do with my life, largely unaffected by either outcome.

Again, the media championed the Obama presidency. Our Mormon boy, Mittens, did the best he could. But by then, Obama’s hold on culture was unbeatable. The Democrats had a real champion.

The Trump effect

Fast forward to circa 2016, where Donald Trump blasts onto the scene and, in so many words, tells the establishment GOP and the whole DNC to kiss America’s ass.

The media loved him by hating him—they covered him 24/7 because they knew there was no way in Hell America was going to vote for a guy who talked and behaved like that. This time, the Democrats didn’t need a champion because the Republican frontrunner had no chance of winning the presidency.

Right?

But the media didn’t understand who they were dealing with. As for me, I had an idea. About nine years before, I had read a book by Donald Trump entitled, Think Big and Kick Ass. That book alone was enough to tell me what this guy was about, and I remember having the uncanny feeling that I knew something the media at large did not. In the back of my mind, I knew Donald Trump stood a chance of becoming President.

The media dealt standard, predictable blows to John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008. But with Trump, they launched their entire arsenal of nukes. Did you hear what he said today? Did you see what he did? Can you believe what he said about women? About black people? About Hispanics? About building a wall? We’re a nation of immigrants! We don’t build walls! This will be the end of democracy as we know it.

You know the story. Trump won in 2016, shocking the world.

From that point on, the media ensured that everything we saw or heard had to do with identity politics and the imminent threat of racial injustice, which somehow justified riots—but remember, riots are not the same thing as insurrections. Insurrections are organized.

We had ushered in a new age of demonization. On steroids.

Identity politics and the culture wars

Speaking of riots, I remember when George Floyd was murdered, and people were traumatizing themselves by watching it on social media.

On Blackout Tuesday, I logged on to Apple Music, only to find a stripped-down version of the app, blocking other menu options, as the platform’s Beats 1 Radio service streamed a playlist of music by black artists for 24 hours, songs that exemplified, in their words, “the Black American experience and struggle.”2

I wondered at the time if any of my black friends or acquaintances had wanted to listen to a Mozart station that day but couldn’t because Apple insisted on force-feeding them their music. Apple must have forgotten that black people also gave America jazz and rock and roll.

The mega brands and S&P 500 corporations were joining with black people everywhere in solidarity. Because of how much they cared. Not because they had anything to gain. Not because marketing—in all its guises—works like a thirty-seven-year-old Toyota.

How could these companies not see how racist they were being? How could the public not see it? I felt like I was taking crazy pills. The media and the soulless corporations were capitalizing on a man’s death, weaponizing it for their political gain. And people bought it.

Biden's rise: eighty-one million votes

Fast forward to the 2020 election. Trump stuck to his guns. Biden preached unity. As a result, and assuming no foul play, Biden won ten million more votes in 2020 than Kamala Harris has attained in 2024, despite support for Trump remaining relatively even across both elections.

Again, recall those proportions I gave you earlier.

How we account for that disparity remains to be seen, but I suspect Biden had the support of the moderates—people who wanted the unity he preached, hoping for the culture and race wars to come to a decisive end.

And so, they seemingly did, as far as I can recall. Excluding January 6th, 2021, when a Trump rally turned into a riot. One that got coverage. A lot of coverage. I guess D.C. should have waited a few months before defunding—er, I mean reallocating $15 million away from their police department.3

Whether spontaneous or instigated, that event played conveniently into the pervading narrative that Donald Trump was a clear and present threat to democracy. True or false, they needed that narrative to play out to its ultimate conclusion—not just the accusation of insurrection, but the conviction that would once and for all prevent Trump’s return to office.

Like it or not, that didn’t happen.

From 2017 to 2021, all we heard about was how the free world was going to end because of racism, COVID-19, and Global Warming under the diabolical regime of Donald J. Trump. Enter Biden, and we stopped hearing about two of those things. Did Covid and racism go away? Or did they cease to be relevant political weapons?

You tell me.

As for Global Warming, we all know it’s the most time-sensitive issue our planet faces today. Right? That must be why Hollywood and the left-leaning media despise Elon Musk and his ultra-successful EV company. That must be why we’re sending billions of dollars to Ukraine to aid them in yet another forever war.

Is it any wonder that Americans are calling out the legacy media for its overt hypocrisy and partisan coverage unapologetically favoring the left?

The legacy media vs. the new media

I use the word legacy now to come full circle if I can. If the American people proved anything last Tuesday, it was this: they are officially unburdened by the influence of legacy media.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t just crying because he fears for American democracy. He’s crying because he knows his days of influence are numbered.

Meanwhile, the new media has taken the stage and given voice to alternative perspectives. Love or hate them, people like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have figured out they can launch their own shows (in true entrepreneurial spirit, I might add) and not be canceled because they say the wrong thing. Joe Rogan can host a three-hour conversation with a presidential candidate, allowing people to find out what they think of him or her. Or just him, I guess, since the “her” declined to take the interview. Whoops.

Brand these rising pillars of new media heretics all you want. They’re here to stay.

Meanwhile, the old guard stands at a crossroads. The legacy media that held all the cards and all the sway when I was watching Obama vs. McCain in 2008 will die with the boomers. And when that happens, the Democratic Party as it has come to be known (but unlike anything it was in that mythologized era of classical liberalism we keep hearing about) will face a choice: evolve or die.

In a free enterprise society, we call this “disruption.”

Unburdened by what has been

So, with great optimism salted by a pinch of trepidation, I deliver these parting words to ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, the AP, and all their bumbling, fumbling ilk (you, too, Fox News).

Ten million fewer people showed up for your champion this time around. Why? I think I have an idea.

1. You leveraged racial injustice and the pandemic as political weapons and then dropped them when they no longer suited your agenda.

2. You told us that COVID-19 vaccines were effective while Pfizer sponsored you. (The same Pfizer that paid the largest healthcare fraud settlement in history back in 2009.)4

3. You told hard-working Americans they were racists, fascists, and bigots for exercising their right to vote for the person you hated as they participated in the democratic process that undergirds the sanctity of our constitutional republic.

4. You condemned and excommunicated as heretics anyone with legitimate questions about vaccines, masks, and lockdowns.

5. You censored yourselves and others in favor of partisan reporting when you knew not to do so might mean deducting points from your chosen candidate.

6. You pretended that our current President, Joe Biden, was in his right mind until you could pretend no longer.

7. You supported the installation of a puppet candidate to replace our mentally declining President even though the Democratic Party never once consulted its constituents about what or who they wanted.

And you had the nerve to call this “joy.”

So, to you, I say...

Good night and good luck.

P.S.

Whether the new media will prove to exist for our ultimate benefit or become susceptible to the same faults as the old, time will tell. But one thing for me at least is clear: I’ll be damned if I go to the likes of SNL to find out who my next President is. America has officially called BS on the weaponized political media machine. And frankly, I approve.

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Romans 5:12-19 is a master class in the poetic and logical mirroring that recurs throughout the Bible. In these verses, Paul speaks of a “universal damnation” that is inescapable yet reversed (and beyond) in the person of Jesus (Adam 2.0).

But a solid majority of Christians, in multiple denominations and sub-groups, will likely all agree that this universal and inescapable damnation through Adam is countered in the person of Jesus by… (drum roll…)

A conditional reconciliation that IS escapable.

Hold the phone. A universal damnation matched by a conditional reconciliation? To quote a vanishing René Descartes, “I think not.” (That’s a bad philosophy joke, in case you were wondering).

Inverse realities

I prefer the more exact mirroring: Just as we were the recipients of a universal and inescapable damnation in Adam, we are now the recipients of a universal and inescapable reclamation in Christ.

The essential question should be: can one choose to remain in the old man if the new man has rendered him utterly void? How can I remain in that which is no more? How can I remain in death if death is swallowed up in victory? Indeed, these are the questions that have divided the camps. 

But as I leave such questions to smarter and wiser people, let’s instead attempt to observe the base mechanics of these inverse Adam/Christ realities, if we can.

Despite my agonizing free will, up to now, I have been unable to opt out of the death that entered the world through Adam. Just so, should I assume that I am any more able to opt out of the life and reclamation that has entered the world through Christ? Many would say, “Yes, and it is clear from scripture.”

Clear as mud, perhaps. Or, to be more precise, clear as context.

If I say, “I reject death; I choose instead to live forever,” most people, Christians and non, will call me a deluded fool, and rightly so.

But if I say, “I reject the gift of God freely given in Christ Jesus; I choose to die and suffer forever,” the same people will nod and say, “Yes, you have that option if you wish.”

I’m not saying this isn’t true or isn’t the correct awareness of the raw state of things. I simply draw attention to the logical imbalance between the Universal Damnation on the one hand and the apparent Conditional Reconciliation on the other.

Logical (or illogical) considerations

But here’s what I’m contemplating, and I beg your grace and forgiveness if these ruminations already have a long history of being rebutted or, dare I say it, refuted: 

1. Death enters the world through Adam. Whether I know Adam or anything he supposedly did or didn’t do, I receive the universal consequence of Adam’s sin. Free will has no power here; I cannot opt out of Adam’s reality. And neither can you.

2. Justification and life enter the world through Jesus Christ. Now, allow me to apply the same logic I applied with Adam above. Whether I know Christ or anything he supposedly did or didn’t do, I receive the universal consequence of Christ’s obedience (covenant faithfulness). Free will has no power here; I cannot opt out of Christ’s reality. And neither can you.

To this, some will quote from the same chapter, “But the gift is not like the trespass” (5:15, NIV). To which I would reply: No, it certainly isn’t. Life is nothing like death. And Paul makes that clear when he distinguishes the condemnation that enters the world through Adam from the justification that enters the same world through Christ.

“Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people” (5:18).

Adam — all people. Christ — all people.

A brief appeal to expert commentary

Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers expounds on Romans 5:15 as follows:

"Now comes the statement of the contrast which extends over the next five verses. The points of difference are thrown into relief by the points of resemblance. These may be, perhaps, best presented by the subjoined scheme:--

Persons of the action.

One man, Adam.

One Man, Christ.

The action.

One act of trespass.

One act of obedience.

Character of the action viewed in its relation to the Fall and Salvation of man.

The great initial trespass or breach of the law of God.

The great accomplished work of grace, or the gift of righteousness.

Persons affected by the action.

All mankind...."

All mankind? All mankind….

Conclusion

I’ll close by saying that I’m conscious of the dangers inherent in reading snippets of Romans in isolation, with a philosophical-over-exegetical bent and without taking the entire letter into account, e.g., its cumulative implications regarding the overarching Law/Grace exposition and the “all” encompassing both Jew and Gentile. So, here’s a link to N.T. Wright’s Romans for Everyone. There, now I feel better.

Well, that’s all for today. God bless!

P.S. Enjoy this "small working model of new creation" I made in 2018. It seems to fit with the overall theme of today's post.

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”

I was five years old when I saw A Muppet Christmas Carol in theaters.

The year was 1992. Walt Disney Studios, then at the peak of its movie-making prowess, timed the film’s release for December 11th, just in time for the Christmas season.

I don’t remember much about the experience. For instance, I couldn’t tell you what candy I got at the theater, if any, but I doubt I much cared. And I don’t remember exclaiming, “Ew!” when the Marley brothers sang, “Our hearts were painted black.” But my sister tells me I did, so I’ll take her word for it.

What I do remember is my feeling of total surrender to the characters, the story, and Michael Caine’s unmatched performance as Ebenezer Scrooge.

It is probably a trick of memory, but when I look back on my experience seeing A Muppet Christmas Carol, I remember it as me reliving a story I had already known and loved for a long time.

But, as I said, I was only five years old. So, it must be a trick of memory. Or more of gravy than of grave, perhaps.

The Finer Print

Since it is my favorite holiday film, I try to watch it every Christmas. I did this year, and it was worth it. With every year that I grow a little older and, I hope, a little wiser, the more I see my capacity, if not tendency, to fall into Scrooge’s reclusive pattern, and the more my heart opens to the warning and the gift this story offers.

But this year, I decided to go beyond the Muppets and read Dickens’ classic novella for myself.

And I’m glad I did.

As it turns out, A Muppet Christmas Carol does not deviate far from the source. I’m not sure if that’s more a compliment to Dickens’ conciseness or the filmmakers’ respect for the work as written. Either way, I was pleased to find that the experience of watching the movie—apart from, you know, Muppets—is pretty much like reading the book.

(If I’m being honest, I visualized the characters as Muppets even while reading.)

Still, the movie had one deviation from the book that continues to haunt me (pardon the pun). It was in the changing of a single word in a dialog exchange that takes place almost verbatim in both the book and the film, where Scrooge first encounters the Ghost of Christmas Past.

The Exchange 

In the film, the exchange plays like this:

SCROOGE
What business has brought you here?

GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST
Your welfare.

SCROOGE
A night’s unbroken rest might aid my welfare.

GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST
Your salvation, then. Take heed.

The One Word

Can you guess which word they swapped?

In making the movie more accessible, I appreciate that the screenwriters chose “salvation” instead of the word Dickens wrote. Often, in film adaptations, such deviations are justified. Given the younger and more contemporary audience, this case is no exception.

But the word Dickens chose is, without question, objectively the better word, modern preferences be damned. Dickens’ word is better because it reaches farther back in time and hints at a soteriology (doctrine of salvation) that we modern folk seem to have forgotten or, if not forgotten, dismissed in our glorification of personal responsibility.

To be clear, I am a big fan of personal responsibility, and I believe we are given the will to choose whether we will “take heed” and embark on the soul-saving journey—or resist love unto our final regret.

The only thing I won’t go as far to say is whether that regret, even in its finality, is irreversible. Why would I bear that burden? Why would you?

But where were we? Oh, yes, the mysterious word. In the book, the Ghost says, “Your reclamation, then.”

A Matter of Interpretation

Now, the way I see it, you can interpret this foreshadowing in one of three ways.

The First Interpretation

Option 1: Scrooge will reclaim something of value that he lost, likely from his past, given the immediate context. Or, more broadly, he will reclaim his generosity, love for life, and compassion toward his fellow humans (assuming he ever possessed any of those benefits).

Yes, I suppose you could read it that way. It’s not exactly wrong.

But I bet you can already guess where I’m leaning. So, I’ll save you time: I think Option 1 stinks. I think it stinks so bad it deserves to go to the dreaded dark place where all things that stink go. If Option 1 is how you interpret this exchange, then I think your soteriology stinks, too. And if you claim you have no soteriology, that stinks even more.

If Scrooge were the one doing the reclaiming, as Option 1 would have us believe, then the spectral messengers who come to facilitate his redemption serve no real purpose. They are merely projections of some deeper part of his innate will to discover secret knowledge, the lost part of himself which, if he would only make an effort, he can reclaim in a single night—miracle or no miracle.

In other words, Ebenezer Scrooge must reclaim himself. The act of salvation lies with him and him alone.

Bah, humbug.

The Second Interpretation

Option 2: Dickens was a closet Calvinist. So, while Marley may be “dead to begin with,” Scrooge was always destined for divine election.

Except, for all practical purposes, I’ll claim that Dickens was no Calvinist, in or out of the closet. And so, I say God bless him.

Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that Marley’s apparent irreversible state as an imprisoned, wandering spirit at the story’s onset raises questions about how the Divine Judge sees fit to give Scrooge one last shot while letting Marley die in his sins. But this is the arena of advanced philosophy, and I’m little more than a critic at my best.

Suffice it to say that A Christmas Carol isn’t Jacob Marley’s story. Suffice it further to say that even out of the haunting shadows of spiritual exile and despair may come something like a glimmer of hope—even if it takes the shape of a cold, jaw-detaching dread. And could it be that hope for one is also hope for all? Perhaps. Perhaps not. 

Again, I won’t bear that burden beyond daring to hope.

But I don’t believe Dickens paints a picture of Scrooge as, in and of himself, divinely elected. So, with Option 2 now ruled out, let’s move on to the third and final apparition—er, I mean interpretation.

The One That Sticks

Option 3: After all these centuries, and despite all our best efforts at reducing a profound and wonderous mystery to a pseudo-infallible instruction manual, we still don’t understand the breadth and scale of true, Incarnational, God-becoming-man, Merry-Christmas-ya-filthy-animal salvation.

Still, let’s interpret the original exchange of dialog through the lens of this third view as far as we can.

Reclamation. As in the reclamation of Ebenezer Scrooge.

This, of course, invites the question: the reclamation of Ebenezer Scrooge… by whom? While it is true that Scrooge does “take heed”, accepting the call to adventure, it is also true that the noun, reclamation, is not applied to him as the subject.

Scrooge is not the one doing the reclaiming; he is the object of another subject’s reclamation—that is, an implied subject, an unseen actor who works behind the veil of our immediate awareness, shape-shifting from past to present to future, hinting at a form beyond form itself, beckoning to us with one ghostly hand and pointing with the other toward the dreaded truth, etched in cold stone, that might yet set us free.

The Mystery of Reclamation

As the story crescendos to its iconic climax, Dickens gives us another haunting scene. In his final moments with the shadowy, hooded Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Scrooge, now on his knees, reaches out and takes hold of the “spectral hand” and, striving with it, detains it—though only for a moment before being repulsed. But the repulsion doesn’t stop him. He strives all the more. At last, he prays. And then, it’s over.

Scrooge has wrestled with God, and God has relented.

You know what happens next if you’ve seen or read the story. Scrooge welcomes Christmas and embarks on the day as a man forever changed in his heart and as one reclaimed.

Now, we return to the crux. If Scrooge is the one being reclaimed, we have a different story here—one that points to an irresistible Power hell-bent on reclaiming what has always belonged to it. That is to say, us.

This Power, beyond immediate perception, reaches into our broken, doomed existence. It incorporates time, space, and matter into itself, retaking them and us for its own—whether we know it or want it, though we must come to want it in the end.

Yet, this same Power compels us to strive with it, only to repulse us at the point of crisis, at the point of our wanting. Why? So that, in the final act, a dogged faith may take the stage. An irresistible power that longs to meet its match in an immovable faith. The perfect collision.

That, as best as I can describe it, is what we call a mystery.

The Other Protagonist

In A Christmas Carol, we find a story about a man, at his worst, so loved by God that this same God would descend into his reality and, in the span of a night, or three nights, or three eons in a night, lead him to the one repentance that restores his soul and reunites him with the fraternity of redeemed, image-bearing humankind.

At last, and if I may stumble into cliché territory, we have a story showing us the meaning of Christmas. You know, the reason for the season that the churchy folk just won’t shut up about. The mystery of God with us, despite sin, despite lies of separation, despite the thing I thought I defeated, rearing its ugly head yet again.

Despite the problem of evil and the gluttony of death.

Bah… humbug?

Epilogue

I’ll leave you with a quote from Clement of Alexandria (which I have the good fortune to include here, thanks to a well-read friend sharing it with me this week).

“All men are Christ’s, some by knowing Him, the rest not yet. He is the Savior, not of some and the rest not. For how is He Savior and Lord, if not the Savior and Lord of all?”

Allow me to put that in layman’s terms.

Scrooge was Christ’s: to begin with.

Merry Christmas.

References

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. First Edition, Chapman & Hall, 1843.

Henson, Brian, director. A Muppet Christmas Carol. Walt Disney Pictures, 1992.

Clement of Alexandria. The Stromata. Translated by John Ferguson, 1994.

I've struggled recently to conjure ideas for a new post that people will find entertaining. Being skilled enough to follow Infinite Mass (which I thought was solid) with something of equal weight seems to be my primary hang-up.

In that struggle, it never crossed my mind that this is my column for posting whatever I want, whenever I want. It's a lot like MySpace in that way—and just like my extinct MySpace profile, it gets about as much traffic.

So, to hell with it. I'll write about what's on my mind and call it a Digressionary Piece (like that's a thing; if it's not, I'm coining it).

Today's topical headline swirling around my brain, daring me to convey my thoughts and feelings about it with an ounce of clarity:

What does it look like to adopt a lifestyle of radical open-mindedness in a world of divergent truths?

While I cannot credit him with the notion, I'm taking the idea of radical open-mindedness from Ray Dalio's book, Principles. You can read a summary of it here.

I'm sad to say I haven't read Dalio's book cover to cover. Still, I think I have an intermediate understanding of the concept. My question attempts to apply the concept more broadly, however.

This may be a mistake, but let's get on with it.

Digression 1 - Me, misappropriating the principle.

To my mind, adopting a lifestyle of radical open-mindedness means embracing an ancient affirmation:

"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt 5:5, KJV).

And for those who still scratch their head whenever someone uses the word meek, here's Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers:

"…it may be worth while to recall Aristotle's account of [meekness] (Eth. Nicom. v. 5) as the character of one who has the passion of resentment under control...".1

So, let's see how I'm doing:

1. I aim to possess an open mind. 

2. But the passion of resentment stands opposed to my aim.

3. Resentment is a shadowy, darker form of pride, which we know is the opposite of meekness.

4. I have pride in my established knowledge and framework for interpreting reality. 

5. I resent attempts to undermine that framework. 

6. Expanded: I resent attempts to undermine the framework wherein I've established the fundamental premise—to be radically open-minded is to be meek (i.e., having resentment under control).

If that ain't a Rubik's Cube, I don't know what is.

Alas, I now begin to digress.

Digression 2 - A famous woman

In A.D. 28, a certain woman was born into an aristocratic family with somewhat close political ties to the ruling Julio-Claudian dynasty during the reign of Tiberius.

Her name was Berenice, and if not for her love affair with the Flavian emperor Titus in A.D. 67, we probably wouldn't know much about her.

Luke gives her a feature in Acts 25-26, where Paul finds himself on trial in Caesaria before Berenice's brother (and lover?), Herod Agrippa II.

Luke's choice to include Berenice suggests one of two possible scenarios to my mind:

1. Luke is writing late in the first century after the siege of Jerusalem because, by this point, Berenice is a celebrity on par with our present British royalty. In turn, this would likely suggest the end-times prophecies in Luke's Gospel are backward-looking (because Jerusalem is already in ruins).

2. Luke is writing early in the first century and has no idea that Berenice will one day achieve even greater fame by falling in love with a Roman emperor-to-be. But, early or late, she's already a well-known figure as a member of the Herod family. And for some reason, Luke mentions her.

But I guess the real question at this stage of our digression is: what's my point?

Indeed, what does this woman, famous for being famous, have to do with adopting a lifestyle of radical open-mindedness?

I warned you this would be a digression.

Digression 3 - Under control

A recent conspiracy theory concerning the authorship of the four Gospels has had an unfortunate resurgence on YouTube. According to this theory, the Flavian Emperors commissioned Josephus to write four Gospels (but not the Apocrypha) to quell and control the unruly Jews by giving them a pacifist messiah.

A pacifist messiah crucified under the former Roman dynasty, who rises again on the third day, ascends to his Heavenly Father and pours out his spirit on his apostles at Pentecost. One of the results of this outpouring? A persecutor-turned-saint named Paul of Tarsus travels to well-known Gentile cities and overtly undermines the worship of revered Roman deities.

I hope I don't need to spell out the absurdity here.

To be clear: the theory claims that Josephus wrote all four Gospels but is unclear as to his involvement in writing Acts. It also doesn't account for why Josephus wrote three Synoptic Gospels and one weirdly poetic, red-headed step-gospel claiming that Jesus is the eternal Logos (an idea the Arians didn't care for2).

But, here again, I digress. Also, apologies to my red-headed friends. Jesus loves you (but the Arians do not).

Digression 4 - Back to Berenice

So, what's my point in bringing up Berenice of the infamous Herods? I have no point other than to highlight a seemingly random character that Luke, whether writing early or late in the first century, chose to include in his narrative and whose existence the historians Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus corroborate.3

Perhaps it's also worth noting that Josephus and Tacitus corroborate the existence of one Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Palestinian Jew who may or may not have performed miracles.

Or, perhaps, I digress.

Digression 5 - What if orthodoxy is a thing?

In my view, adopting a lifestyle of radical open-mindedness begins not by challenging the beatitude's orthodoxy or historical veracity, suggesting instead that the Flavians commissioned Josephus to write four pacifist manifestos to subjugate Jewish factions under Rome (never mind that Luke wrote his Gospel to Gentiles, by all accounts, and never mind the Pauline epistles, written almost exclusively to Gentiles).

Rather, because I'm a layman and have only so much time in a day, it begins with me applying a watered-down version of Occam's Razor to the text. 

1. There was a first-century Palestinian Jew named Jesus of Nazareth.

2. He said something about the meek inheriting the earth. 

3. Some years later, someone wrote it down.

In 2023, I think treating a canonical gospel this way takes a radically open mind. It takes a mind open to the possibility that the stories are true or, at the very least, truth—and I concede the two are not identical. Still, it takes a mind unhampered by resentment toward religious structures to accept such a possibility. I see this as an economical approach and a good starting point.

Perhaps if Joe Rogan were to invite Tom Wright on his show, the swarm of self-made internet pseudo-intellectuals (like yours truly) might also see meekness as a more commonplace, rational approach to gaining wisdom and, by extension, inheriting the earth.

Still, I digress.

Digression 6 - Jesus was really X, and the Bible is really a big, fat Y.

Shedding my resentment toward authoritarian structures like "the Church," I can now entertain new evidence to suggest Jesus wasn't there, never said anything of the sort, or decided to get high at the Last Supper (even though the Law he claimed to fulfill forbade the practice of pharmakeia to gain divine knowledge).

After all, everyone knows the only way to see a burning bush is to do shrooms. The same goes for lonely, crazed islanders who write something called apocalyptic literature. Thanks to Peter's rooftop vision in Joppa4, we must inevitably conclude that drug-induced sorcery was back on the mystic menu, where it belonged.

Primary source textual evidence, you ask? Speak not of such things.

I can also consider whether Jesus was "just another Gnostic" until the Church allied itself with the state under Constantine in the grand conspiracy to exile heretics (albeit one that ended infanticide unfairly targeting girls, which feels like a win) and relegate all but the four supreme Gospels to the restricted section at Hogwarts.

I can entertain all these ideas and more. Indeed, everything in that prosaic whirlwind above may be true (infanticide certainly was). Meekness—radical open-mindedness—demands I quietly and calmly entertain them all like chaff waiting to be sifted.

But, dare we hope, it may be true that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under a Roman procurator named Pontus Pilate.

It may be true that the women who followed Jesus were the first to discover an empty tomb on the third day after his death.

And it may be true that if you were manufacturing a fake religion in the first, second, or even third century, you wouldn't be so out of touch as to portray women as the first evangelists—because who would buy that?

Question: Can one be both meek and sarcastic?

For the last time, I digress.

Scrambled Outro

I'll leave you with a fun, ironic fact.

Our oldest New Testament script dates to the second century A.D. (not the first, when the texts were supposedly written). We call it P52 or Papyrus 52. It contains a snippet from John 18, verses 31-33, and verses 37-38.

I'll give you the scene that transpires in 37-38:

"Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all" (KJV).

In case you missed it, the oldest known fragment from the Gospels that we have (predating the "conspiratorial" First Council of Nicaea, I might add) ends with the question: "What is truth?"

It takes an open mind to consider such a question.

I think it takes a radically open mind to accept Jesus' answer.

Share

References

Ellicott, Charles J. Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers. Accessed Mar. 19, 2023. https://biblehub.com/commentaries/ellicott/matthew/5.htm

Notes

Disney and the Mangling of Lucasfilm IP

The past eight years have been anything but kind to the nostalgic IP of the 80s and 90s.

Although opinions vary depending on who you ask, the general impression I get from people (and a sentiment I share) is that Disney has all but destroyed Lucasfilm's intellectual property—to such a brutal extent that I would now entertain a conspiracy theory suggesting that it was all part of Disney's deep-rooted revenge plot to brutalize the franchise it wished it had thought of, to begin with.

I won't repeat how I and others feel about the Star Wars sequel trilogy except to say that I'll likely never watch any of them again, and for me, that's the litmus for whether I think a movie is any good.

But I admit there is a high probability I'm out of touch with what appeals to most people. For example, I thought Rogue One was a steaming slice of crap—mainly because if you hold up a freeze-frame of the movie's protagonist, Jyn Erso, alongside a faceless slab of moldy cardboard, I would have difficulty telling the two apart. But I realize that for most Star Wars fans, all that matters is whether Glup Shitto makes his cameo. So, what do I know?

There is another...

Still, for me, the last strike was how Disney portrayed Obi-Wan Kenobi as an incompetent, bumbling fool whose lack of intentionality would make even Winnie the Pooh shake his head in disapproval. Oh, bother, indeed. 

Or, I thought this was the last strike. But I forgot what many have already pointed out—there was one final IP for Disney to mangle and leave bleeding in the street. As Yoda famously said to Obi-Wan in The Empire Strikes Back, "No, there is another."

And what's his name? Indiana f#@%ing Jones.

Indiana Jones and the Dole-out of Distended Plot

I'm not sure what frustrates me more—that the filmmakers thought Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was good enough to distribute or that movie-goers feel the need to affirm it because it gave them their much-needed dose of member-berries.

But again, I'm usually interested in things that most people don't care about, like bigger ideas around magic and belief that explode from the original, Spielberg-directed Indiana Jones trilogy and reach out to you across the screen, reminding you of something transcendent, seemingly out of reach, and yet undeniably real. 

"What are you on about now, Adam?"

The magical, the spiritual, and the supernatural

Raiders of the Lost Ark

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy starts his journey by telling Marcus, concerned about the Ark's mysterious secrets, "What are you trying to do, scare me? You sound like my mother... I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I'm going after a find of incredible historical significance. You're talking about the bogeyman."

And how does Raiders end? It ends with Indy telling Marion to keep her eyes shut—because it's real. It's all real. The stories are true. The Ark has power. Whether for good or bad, the God of the Old Testament exists.

Indy's humility before the unknown and the unknowable is the only thing that saves him and the love of his life from certain and horrifying obliteration. In story-telling parlance, we call that a character arc.

The Temple of Doom

In The Temple of Doom, the arch-villain, Mola Ram, tells Indy: "You will become a true believer... We will overrun the Muslims. Then the Hebrew God will fall. And then the Christian God will be cast down and forgotten."

What a fascinating thing for an arch-villain to acknowledge—that his primary ambition is to overthrow the God of Abraham. And the only thing standing in his way? Indiana Jones, the unbeliever.

(Modern Hollywood, especially Disney, has more in common with Mola Ram than it might be willing to admit.)

The Last Crusade

In The Last Crusade, we see Indy exploring his father's ransacked home, with echoes and images of Grail lore scattered about the place.

With John Williams' haunting score setting the tone for the rest of the film, Indy, with deep conviction, asks Marcus Brody, "Do you believe, Marcus?" Framed behind him and a little to the right rests a painting of Christ at his crucifixion, the blood from his pierced side flowing into the fabled cup.

Marcus, ever the contemplative, replies: "The search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us. But if you want facts, Indy, I have none to give you. At my age, I'm prepared to take a few things on faith." 

In the climax, the story's principal villain (and fool), Donovan, shoots Henry Jones Sr. and tells Indy, "The healing power of the Grail is the only thing that can save your father now. The time has come to ask yourself what you believe." 

Queue John Williams' signature, haunting theme yet again as Indiana Jones must now approach the first test and, to survive it, truly know for himself that "only the penitent man will pass."

Strangely dressed for a knight...

Indy's path to the Grail echoes the path to Christ: penitence in God's presence, acknowledgment of God's name (identity), and the leap of faith required to transcend the chasm of separation between God and humankind.

Regardless of your spiritual beliefs, one thing is certain. This definitive and daring religious symbolism would not pass in today's Hollywood. Yet, it is the path Indy must take on his journey from unbelief to belief. And it runs through the heart of those original stories like a vein of untapped Mithril. It's also why The Last Crusade is one of the greatest of the series, even if it does not quite surpass Raiders in terms of sheer action and suspense.

Indiana Jones and the Call of the Divine

In case you missed it, all three original Indiana Jones films: 

1. Acknowledge the reality and power of the divine.

2. Frame their villains as forces trying to appropriate the divine for their own malicious cause (or, in the case of Mola Ram, eradicate it in favor of death worship).

3. Feature Indiana Jones as fate's chosen champion in the cause of the same mysterious divinity, regardless of whether he believes in that silly stuff.

Fast forward to Dial of Destiny, where the filmmakers go out of their way to introduce a misdirect in the film's riveting intro (I give the intro props for echoing the original trilogy). That misdirect is a relic presumed to be the tip of the spear that pierced Christ's side. However, on closer inspection, it turns out to be a fake, at which point the film introduces us to a new relic: the mysterious dial of Archimedes, also known as the Antikythera. As if to set us straight, we hear the villain say something about how "math" is more powerful than superstition.

It's almost like the writers are trying to tell us something—as if they're trying to tell us that the time of framing Indiana Jones in a spiritual or biblical context is a thing of the much-to-be-derided, politically incorrect past.

Let's keep it clean

From that point forward, the movie leaves the spiritual element of Indy's prior films in the dust, never acknowledging it again except when Indy tells his god-daughter, "It's not so much what you believe. It's how hard you believe it." I don't know about you, but I love it when a story takes the safe, middle-of-the-road position. It keeps things vague enough for us all to have the same mediocre film-going experience.

All that "Christ stuff" was a bit heavy-handed, anyway. Math is cooler (I guess?)—except that the movie never explains much of the math. And for a story that emphasizes the brilliance and genius of Archimedes, it ironically seems to lack a grounding in logical plot development and suspenseful exposition that the three original films didn't lack, for all their hocus pocus. 

I understand the writers' aim may have been to try something different, and I salute that effort, but the result was shallow and uneventful. And you already know why I think that's the case.

Dial of Destiny also dispenses with the not-so-spiritual hallmarks of an Indiana Jones movie.

In terms of what else it lacks outside the spiritual component, I have a short list of additional gripes:

• Indy always fights a guy bigger than him.* Even Crystal Skull remained true to this signature, recurring action piece. In Dial of Destiny, Disney subverts our expectations by having the boring tag-along kid trap the big man underwater. And that's that, as they say.

  • *I know The Last Crusade is considered the exception, but that was because it already featured an intense top-of-the-thundering-tank fistfight between Indy and General Vogel (Michael Byrne).

• There were zero booby traps. Indy has to escape from pretty alarming traps in all three original films. Not so in Dial of Destiny, where it's an overlong chase, a meandering dive, or a plodding walk-slash-climb to each quest item. Looking for that signature "We—are going—to die!" moment? Re-watch Temple of Doom.

• In the original trilogy, Spielberg rooted his action sequences in suspense—you were genuinely afraid for Indy's life (or the life of one of his allies). Although you don't often hear people acknowledge it, Spielberg was a master of suspense-based action sequences. (Tom Cruise is the only other person in Hollywood today who comes close.)

What else have we lost?

In the original films, Spielberg was a master of framing scenes of dialog in which multiple characters would engage with each other, much like they would on a stage, in a way that modern filmmaking has abandoned.

As we descend further into the abysmal, churning depths of shorter and shorter attention spans, à la TikTok and YouTube shorts, it saddens me to think that the art of holding a frame on multiple characters is a thing of the not-too-distant past. 

But what upset me most about Dial of Destiny was how the writers chose to end it. Don't mistake me—it was a happy ending (I guess). But it was weak and tired, like an eighty-year-old man. And compared to The Last Crusade’s final shot, where Harrison Ford and Sean Connery ride off into the sunset, it was an ending I could have done without.

What can I say? I guess I'm tired of seeing Hollywood portray my childhood heroes as worn-down, dying old men. I choose the Indy riding off into the sunset over the Indy crying in his crappy NY apartment any day of the week.

Still, even this has its own poetry to it, for just as the original Raiders of the Lost Ark poster advertised itself as “the return of the great adventure”, it stands to reason that Dial of Destiny can label itself as the slow, uneventful death of the same.

What does the death of magic mean for the future?

I don't know. Also, I'm not convinced that the magic is completely dead, so much as it is just changing hands (sorry, Disney, but you've lost it). But I can say this: the safe, middle-of-the-road approach to telling stories for the lowest common denominator won't sustain a studio, and it won't sustain an industry, either.

And then, there's the problem in the opposite direction, where a studio tries to do something bold and daring and, as a result, [SPOILER ALERT] decides it's a good idea to kill off James Bond. If that's not a sign of the times, I don't know what is.

Despite my disappointment with the present Hollywood machine, I'm pretty sure the films of Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, and Wes Anderson will keep me returning to the theater for many years. So, at least, that's something to be hopeful for. But even these artists only have so many years ahead, and the need for original, well-crafted stories is as urgent as ever.

I'll say it again. We have a clear and present need for new blood, stories, and legends. Because Disney, Warner Bros., and Universal will continue to milk their life-support IPs until their dying gasp.

Or, maybe the present state of movies is exactly what the new blood wants. If that's the case, so be it. I always knew my days were numbered, anyway.

P.S. 

Speaking of Villeneuve, I had not felt in a movie what I felt in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring (at 13 years old) until I saw Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune in 2021. Suffice it to say I cannot wait for Dune: Part Two. 

Long live the fighters.

The church feels Anglican, appropriate for the circumstances. The pulpit rests beneath an arched dome inlaid with what looks like gilded embroidery. Circling the same space, organ pipes adorn the hollowed-out walls between cylindrical columns. The only instruments on site are an oak-stained grand piano and the organ, which I like to think of as the control station. It looks like one of those old-timey phone operator booths I've only ever seen in classic movies.

And as if in strict defiance of stage rules, the organ keys face out toward the congregation so that the organist must sit with his back to us as he plays. I wonder if this aids his focus; I suspect it might.

Beneath the organ pipes and hovering centrally behind the podium, above what I think must be a baptistry (I've been out of the formal church setting for too long, it seems), is engraved the affirmation: "One Lord — One Faith — One Baptism."

The Setting

Four multi-story arched stained glass windows line the wings. I find them vibrant yet soothing. I want to describe them as Romanesque or Renaissance to sound more educated, but if I'm being honest, I'm not sure what they are. They're nice-lookin' windows, and I bet they cost a lot of money.

Take away the pews, and the sanctuary would make for a not-too-shabby, more American replica of the Great Hall at Hogwarts, and I mean that as the sincerest compliment to its architect. It's not every day in the U.S. you find yourself in a building that pays proper homage to the old ways. Since I'm here with over four-hundred-plus other people of varying ages and denominational backgrounds to hear the British theologian, professor, pastor, and former Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, better known as N.T. Wright, the Hogwarts analogy seems to carry even more weight—like Harry on his first day, I've stepped into a world within a world.

Before Professor Wright speaks, we start each session by singing two hymns. It's a Southern Baptist church where hymns are still a thing. I'm guessing some Baptist churches out there avail themselves of more contemporary modes. I wouldn't know.

All I know is this organist could play in the big leagues if the big leagues wanted organs. I never thought I'd be moved nearly to tears by church organ music. But I guess that's one of the risks of keeping and nursing an open heart.

The Strike

As I come from a more charismatic tradition with chorus sheets and mounted HD TVs, I'm not used to the traditional, encyclopedic hymnal with its precise, numbered selections. However, I do recall singing hymns on many Sundays (and despising them a little unfairly) as they held a nostalgic appeal to our senior minister then (or what I guessed at the time was nostalgic, though I suspect it might run a little deeper than that, now). But I'm over a decade out of that world, and this is all a bit surreal.

The first hymn we sing is Holy, Holy, Holy by Reginald Heber, who, like Tom Wright, was also an Anglican bishop. I don't notice it yet, but I will the following day—Professor Wright, situated at the front left of the auditorium, is singing along with us, but he doesn't use the book. Why this strikes me like an arrow through the heart, I don't yet know.

He doesn't need the book. Indeed, I suspect he has been singing these hymns most of his life. And while I admit this isn't the kind of "revelation" that ought to strike a person, it strikes me nonetheless. Sitting at a hotel conference table as I write, I feel a hollow forming at the top of my lungs just thinking about it. (It's also worth mentioning that this is the same Tom Wright who, if you listen to his podcast, you'll sometimes get to hear singing Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen songs.)

If I had to venture a guess, I think the simplicity of his devotion is what wrecks me (to borrow the modern parlance). Here is a man who has spent his life studying, exegeting, and teaching the Bible in addition to serving as a pastor and an appointed bishop. He knows the hymns by heart because the Bible and the Church are his dual vocation. If I were prejudiced against institutions, I might be inclined to ignore such a man.

And thus, I'm also stricken for another reason. Below the surface of my immediate awareness lurks the unsettling suspicion that a younger version of me would've scoffed at the present proceedings and even at the man himself—the younger me who would've proudly proclaimed, "I am of Christ's Kingdom and, therefore, immune to your religion." Some of you won't understand what I mean by this. That's fair. Allow me to expound.

Shadows of the Past

Without digging in the dirt (to find the places we got hurt)1, allow me to describe briefly or, shall I say, hint at the world I come from. The world I was born into. The world I grew up in. The world that made me what I am. Am I starting to sound like a comic book antihero yet? I made you? You made me first. (100 points to anyone who gets that reference without Google or ChatGPT).

Jokes aside, like anyone raised in church, I grew up within a certain theological framework. You would think that would be a given, but to some people, it goes unnoticed. It went unnoticed in my church of origin where, ironically, it would never have openly identified itself as theological because "theology" was just shy of a curse word—but it was a theological framework, nonetheless.

Certain. Theological. Framework. Keep that ambiguous phrasing in mind as we continue; I promise it's deliberate. I'll paraphrase it (and unfairly reduce it) as follows: "The Holy Spirit can reveal to you in a moment what you'll never get in decades of studying theology. Religion will keep you in bondage, but the Holy Ghost will free you."

The irony of a statement like that is it tries to side-step theology and doctrine, only to end up being both resolutely theological and doctrinal. And as such, it demands both an intellectual and biblical defense (among other things). It is, as I said, a certain theological framework, one for relating to God, the Bible, and—though it may not be explicit—other people.

Other... people. Let's keep that phrase in mind, as well.

But you know what else? It's not wrong. Yet, embedded within it like a shive that has lain dormant and deemed forgotten is a false opposition. Can you detect it? The false opposition looks a bit like this: the Holy Spirit's life-giving power opposite devotion, study, intellection, tradition, sacrament, liturgy, knowledge, deacon boards, etc. Come to think of it, I think I've written about this topic already to some small extent.

The Holy Spirit versus Religion with a capital R. And what is Religion? Any church or religious institution outside of whatever we are—our cohort, our tribe, our clan, our category.

The Elephant Graveyard

I grew up in a world that cut itself off from other churches that weren't directly tied to our very specific network and strand of thinking (which, I admit, did have its subtle variances). Why? Because other churches were lumped into the elephant-graveyard category of Religion, that very real and corrupt self-serving entity that killed the prophets and crucified the Messiah. Yes, Religion, in that sense, is real. And it is a terrible force that, like Saul of Tarsus, persecutes both Messiah and Messianic people under a banner of Godly zeal.

But as real as that force is in the world today, it does not remotely characterize the diverse and dynamic group of believers I find myself surrounded by as we close our hymnals, take our seats, and abide in intense silence, listening to one professor and theologian expound the Book of Acts within its historical and biblical context with precision, logic, and clarity, unlike anything I've experienced while sitting in a church auditorium.

And the funny thing is, this is a lecture. That's right. It's not a fiery sermon. It's not a passionate, prophetic utterance. It's not a worship service at Bethel. It's not even a Carman concert circa 1993. 

It is a lecture entitled "Acts: New World, New People," and it is being delivered in a place where the younger me wouldn't have been caught dead: a Southern Baptist Church in the heart of Houston, Texas. The supposed elephant graveyard. Religion.

But Religion, in the prior context I've defined, is a word that does not characterize a group of people, some of them Baptist, some Anglican, some Methodist, some Charismatic/Pentecostal—hell, I think I overheard someone say there were a few Mennonites in the crowd—who have all come together under one roof to acknowledge by their unified chorus and resonant Amen: "One Lord — One Faith — One Baptism."

On the contrary, I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't the one who, for the first twenty-five years of my life, abided unknowingly under the shroud of unfounded religious prejudices rooted in a cynicism which, like the second velociraptor on the hunt, I didn't even know was there. Although it masqueraded as holiness, it was little more than self-righteousness on its best day. Clever girl, indeed.

Elvish Reflections

In moments like these, when I find myself in a new, unfamiliar place I never envisioned, yet ever conscious of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with me in their mind-boggling tri-unity, I am also aware of the need that confronts each of us to get out of our "father's country" and gain a little perspective, a little glimpse of a reality beyond the pale of our preconceptions.

And to be clear, you may not need to go very far. For Peter, it was as simple as going up to the roof of a friend's house: "Rise, kill, and eat."2

In these moments, I also remember Gildor Inglorion's famous words to Frodo Baggins at the onset of his dangerous quest: "The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out."3

The Challenge (Easier Said)

Other... people. Other believers. Other followers of Christ. One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism. The promises of God to Israel fulfilled in Jesus and bursting forth into the wider world of Samaritans and Ethiopian eunuchs whether we like it or not. Hate or love me when I say it: categories of people are a decaying relic of the past,4 and only Religion will keep you in one.

Granted, families and communities who agree on specific emphases of scripture will persist, as they should. Denominations will persist. But if I can, insofar as it depends on me, I also want to abide in this truth: God's world is diverse, and his soteriological opus in Jesus is bigger than a denomination or a non-denomination, vaster than our categories can contain for all their fruitless aspirations.

So, let's make an effort to dispense with the old wineskins, shall we?5

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As someone who navigates the spoken word like an uphill ice slope, struggling with gasping efforts at articulation, should I find the grace of your undivided attention, you can understand how I might feel about such interruptions.

You can understand me when I say: it would not strike me as unjust to round up these renegade road warriors and detain them for questioning. But I promise this sentiment is academic; I mean them no harm.

And you know that whenever someone says, “I promise,” you can bet grandma’s farm that they mean it.

You see, I’m the kind of person who likes to sit and think—sometimes about deep, meaningful things, but more often about things that don’t matter, things that could never happen, but I sure as Hell know exactly how I would behave if they did!

If you know me, if we’re even the slightest bit friends, there is a good chance I’ve spent the better part of an hour sitting and thinking about how I might rescue you from a band of ornery terrorists armed with nothing but my cunning and my trusty Red Rider BB Gun.

I’ve burned more hours in serious, internal debate as to which of my family members—if any—I would confide in, supposing I had a real-life bat cave or if I were suddenly endowed with the coveted power of bodily flight. Would I believe my eleven-year-old niece if she claimed to have found a snowy forest (and a curious creature like a faun) just beyond the second carton of oat milk in the fridge? Thus, I have spent the better part of countless days.

Now to the crux: it is my fundamental need to sit and think up eventful nonsense that has me wrestling with angels to understand the kind of person who needs their “Hammer-of-Thor” engine to split the anvil in my skull before I can follow my God-given bent and think with vivid precision about things that aren’t so silly.

And there it is. My fundamental need to sit and think makes neither threat nor attempt to upset the RW’s need to be loud. Alas, if only this were a two-way street. If by my sitting and thinking, I could push the limits of human evolution (not unlike the RW pushing his machine to the edge of its specifications) and, achieving telepathy, interrupt his loudness with my nonsense, then this, and only this, would serve as a kind of justice.

I can see it now: an overweight, twenty-something good-ol’ boy, let’s call him Cooper, racing up 23rd Street at ten o’clock on a Wednesday night, as pleased with his external big bang as he is oblivious to his internal dark matter, beset by a vision of a thirty-something male, five-feet-six-inches, vice-gripping a terrorist’s throat with his cyclist’s thighs while dismantling a bomb and shouting “Yippee-ki-yay, mother-f***ers!” In honor of Hitchcock, the bomb never goes off. 

Of course, Cooper doesn’t know anything about Hitchcock, though he digs the Die Hard reference (who wouldn’t?). But the thing that haunts Cooper as the vision fades and as he speeds along on Hell’s highway is not so much the unsolicited violent thought as it is the loudness of having to think—about anything—in such high definition. Cooper finds that he has been interrupted by a kind of noise, one he doesn’t like.

If such an absurdity were possible, I would have no cause to complain. Rather, my telepathy would bring the present state of the world just a bit closer, if I am allowed a cliché, to something like an “even playing field.” I say the world, but of course, I mean my world. 

And with all this talk about justice and even playing fields, I should at least confess that, in Cooper’s case, I have crafted a caricature, a straw man, a dummy villain who cannot speak for himself unless I give him the words, without whom my complaint might seem little more than a geriatric groan, despising youth (or something like it) all because it happens to be too loud and too fast.

Sure, that might be all there is to it.

But loud and fast are relative terms devoid of context. Rest assured, the loudness and fastness alone are not the sources of my ire. A movie sequence can be loud and fill the senses with awe; a roller coaster can go fast and awaken the inner child. No, it’s something deeper. 

As for Cooper’s sawed-off muffler, the car’s loudness and fastness exist for one, self-absorbed purpose—not merely to let everyone else within a two-mile radius know that Cooper is alive and well, but to cancel all thought and conversation in a grand, smiling-dick attempt to re-affirm that singular and (debatably) unfortunate fact.

The Coopers of the world are so preoccupied with alerting us to their existence that they’ve lost the ability to alert themselves. God help them if they should ever endure more than a few seconds of quiet introspection, for it might lead to a terrible revelation, a beholding of a two-faced self—one clothed in torn rags drooping over leprous flesh, encumbered by sin; the other, more terrifying, stripped down to its naked soul reflecting the light of a thousand sunrises, waiting to be clothed in new flesh, the kind that will never age, gash, or rot. 

Although Cooper is unlikely to discover this in the first encounter, the image is misleading. While it suggests a duality of opposing selves on equal footing, the truth is quite different. Both selves are waiting for the first to die, whereupon the second self can suit up and, at last, assume an identity.

The explosive engine also serves Cooper more clandestinely. Not only is it the mechanism by which to cancel all thought and deliberate speech, but it also shields him from the one telepathic interruption that might lead to such introspection, which in turn might lead to a first date with self-awareness and, in the end (and God forbid), something like a mystical experience.

To be clear, my telepathy is not fighting for a shot at Cooper’s undivided attention—for (surprise!) I do not have that power. But there is One who does, and once anyone should be so unlucky as to encounter the blossoming image of His gentlest thought, there is no unseeing, no un-knowing, no washing away the tan from that momentary spotlight on the stripped-down and shivering soul. For Cooper, the stakes have never been higher.

The same rings true for you and me. But we’ll get to that momentarily.

At present, I admit I have been unfair to Cooper, for he is not the only archetype with a canceling mechanism, albeit his is arguably the most disruptive given its blast radius. What I mean is, if you think I will stop at pointing out that Cooper is the one archetype capable of constructing external mechanisms to ensure he remains blind to the sin-laden, zombified self, then you have either underestimated me or misread my intentions. That’s the first point to get out of the way. 

The second is that if you think by my describing two selves, one “material” and the other “spiritual,” that I should espouse both Platonic and Gnostic creeds, you will have misinterpreted me again, and this time in such a way as to—how should I put it?—piss me off.

I like to think I’m smarter than Cooper. If I am, you can bet my mechanisms are not only more sophisticated but also more sinister. Earlier, I spoke of justice and even playing fields. In meandering turns of prose, I said that I would like to assault Cooper’s mind, incepting violent (albeit action-packed) visions that would startle and even frighten. Were you paying attention?

But if Cooper is ever to become the second self (the one from the vision he refuses to behold), then the telepathic intrusion into his awareness for which I ought to hope is not one of my infantile fantasies, where the violence is comical.

Rather, I ought to hope for an 8K HDR snapshot of the only violence that has ever done the world any good. I should hope for a vision of Golgotha, and there, one like a Son of man being nailed to a scandalous cross.

But in my corruptible heart, that’s not what I want. What I want is something like the Western-Evangelical certainty that some, as if predestined, will welcome the second self in totality while others must—inevitably—allow the first to drag them down to the fiery dungeons of Tartarus (with obligatory pit-stops at Hades and Gehenna on the way).

In a spirit of devout Augustinian1 hope, I want Cooper to go on being a smiling dick so I can go on being a frowning one, waiting for the justice I know is due to all unbelievers, self-promoters, and speed-obsessed materialists. In the most distorted irony, I want to keep that privileged vision of the second self all to my first.

As I said earlier, if I could achieve telepathy, I would barrage Cooper with every untamed thought and image in my expansive repertoire—every image except the Imago Dei, rescuing all who behold it.

Recall my warning not to mistake me for a Gnostic; that warning re-emerges here in higher resolution. At its core, Gnosticism proclaims a deity who not only averts its gaze from the sin-laden self but abandons it at the apex of its suffering and demise. Not so with the Imago Dei, Who became sin (yet having no sin in Himself)2 so that we might become Imagoes Dei, spitting images of God-With-Us.

“That’s great, Adam, but what does this have to do with Cooper and his thundering, second-rate Batmobile impersonation?” Nothing, except that of all the archetypes I could see myself most willing to inflict the judgment of eternal conscious torment, Cooper wins first prize. In other words, it is my lack—my vengeful, scheming, warped intelligence masquerading as piety—that deserves to be put on trial.

Cooper is, indeed, a straw man, but one I have created to draw out the worst bits of my nature into the spotlight for your inspection.

We all have our Coopers, that category of people we’ve written off. The introspective bookworms, like me, have written off the engine-revving road warriors, and vice versa. The Baptists have written off the Charismatics, and vice versa. The Liberals demonize the Conservatives, and most certainly vice versa. One group is going to Heaven, the other is going to Hell, and it’s anyone’s guess whether any of them will make it halfway to something like a unified and transcendent hope. 

Although I have justified opinions on which groups are more wholesome, that’s not the point, and my opinions do little but exacerbate the issue. The point is that cutting through the noise will require an exhibition of healing, forgiving, and redemptive power, unlike anything the world has ever seen.

To that end, it will demand we obey perhaps the most controversial command of our present epoch: to love our enemies and to pray for them.

And this next part is key—the exhibition cannot belong to a single individual or a charismatic personality. It must belong to an entire people, unified in faith, so that when anyone asks, “Who is to blame for this unprecedented age of mercy and miracles?” the answer will be: Christ and Christ alone. That’s the man you want, officer. It’s all His doing.

“So, Adam, are you saying we should all just give in to our opponent’s demands and let them steamroll us in the name of loving our enemies?” No, and I hope I can get away without addressing that specific issue. My best answer to that problem, as it stands before us all, is that we continue to do the good we know we ought lest, in neglecting it, we succumb to the habitual sin of apathy. And I hope that is a sufficient stance for the present. 

My point remains: if we can pursue “the good” without demonizing our antagonists, all the better and, perhaps all the sooner, we might catch a glimpse of something like a Kingdom not of this world.

The furious north wind will never get the pilgrim to take off his coat. Who then can be saved?

This is the universal paradox of humankind’s deliverance: the Imago Dei rescues and transforms all who behold it while suffering no living soul to look away. Perhaps some of you will balk at this remark, citing John 6:36, “…you have seen me and still you do not believe” (NIV). I hear you, and I concede that the burden of believing without seeing rests upon us all.3

I’ll counter by saying that my use of the word “behold” encompasses its etymological root, “to keep.” What an interesting predicament for me that I should be faced with the impossible task of sharing the very thing I am compelled to keep. And with Cooper, of all people (can I rescind my wish for telepathy?). With man, this is impossible. But with God….

The image of Christ, the lamb slain from the foundations of the world, is a rescuing image—one that exists as a thunderous intrusion into the benignly horrifying status quo of history. All who behold and hear it will be salted by its fire. To quote T.S. Eliot: “The only hope, or else despair / Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— / To be redeemed from fire by fire.”4

Today’s specials include a flame-broiled pyre. Or, if you’re in the mood for something a little less intense, we also have a slow-roasted pyre. What’ll it be, folks?

Jokes aside, the Kingdom of Heaven presents us with a dreaded absolute: either we will put the zombified self to death now, or Christ will do it for us in the final rendering. And who can say how much more painful that experience will be should we attempt to prolong the inevitable?

If I cannot even wish to share the salvific vision, then all my quiet, calm, collected introspection is as worthless as dead grass. Cooper can speed by my office every day and every night for all I care—we are both burning vital fuel and going nowhere fast, though he is going there a little faster. It is thus all the more urgent that we share the vision. I said we would come round to it again: for us, those who claim to believe, the stakes have never been higher.

In the end, the rescuing image calls us to become rescuing people, a people for whom the phrase “whatever it takes” is as common as breathing.

As Cooper interrupts my thought with yet another fiery blast, my first response is to wish for the perfect revenge rather than to pray for a redemptive encounter with the Holiest of life-giving Spirits. But I am not beyond hope.

For it is this same Spirit that confronts me with the weight of my sin and then, in the grandest of plot twists, takes it all into Himself, where it has endless space and yet, nowhere to go but into a burning reservoir—a glorious flaming lake of infinite mass.

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Released December 18th, 1997, for the Sony PlayStation (and later ported to the Nintendo 64), Mega Man Legends is the blue bomber's first foray into 3D adventure gaming.

Although perhaps not as well-known as Ocarina of Time (1998), Capcom's bold move to reincarnate their flagship 2D hero in a 3D open world created a game that has taken its place among some of the past three decades' most excellent, albeit underrated, adventure RPGs.

What this Legends post is, and what it isn't

Full disclosure: This is not an exhaustive description of Mega Man Legends, with a history of its development, its sales statistics, critical reception, the decisions that led to its one successful sequel, or the failed attempt to produce the long-prophesized Mega Man Legends 3 in what might have been the sexiest game trilogy of the modern era.

Nor is it a strategy guide. Nor is it about Netflix making a Mega Man Movie. That content already exists. You can find links to various resources provided at the end of this post.

Instead, I intend to share the following: 

• My experience of Mega Man Legends (i.e., my altered memories of the truth)... 

• The meaning I derived from it as an eleven-year-old... 

• The fragmented meaning I derive from it now... 

• And the power it had to shape my creative imagination.

If that sounds like the Mega Man Legends you remember, then please read on. On the other hand, if you have no idea who Mega Man is, still read on—you may find a diamond buried in the rough.

Mega Man Legends - Chapter 1

The Quest for a New Legend

Imagine a time when Metacritic and YouTube don't yet exist. Imagine a world where making a quality, informed video game purchase demands a trip to your local Blockbuster (or playing at a friend's house) to attain an unshakable conviction that your next $30 - $50 purchase won't be the bane of your prepubescent existence.

You could also go to your local bookstore, unperturbed by the rising Lord Commander, Jeff Bezos, and read up on the latest games in PlayStation Magazine or Nintendo Power.

Or maybe you're one of the lucky kids whose parents let you subscribe to these monthly mailbox treasures. Of course, you're too young to know the difference between genuine "user reviews" and marketing placements.

Ignorance is bliss.

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Toys "R" Us, Spring 1999

The year is 1999, and the struggle is real, as finding a game worth owning requires a sharp intuition and a unique set of investigatory skills, neither of which I claim to have possessed.

Now imagine that you're me, that the thrill of picking a new video game is enduring the mystery—until you cut away the shrink wrap, pop open the jewel case, and insert the signature PS1 black-mirror compact disc—of whether it will be any good.

Imagine that you purchased the Sony PlayStation with your birthday money last November, and your life's most meaningful ambition is to expand the catalog, whatever the cost, come what may.

The Video Game Aisle

Imagine roaming the video game aisle searching for that E-rated gem because M-rated games are out of the question. Sometimes, you can negotiate with Mom to nab a T for Teen, where Mom takes this petition before the high council, a.k.a. Dad, for a final say.

But you also have learned to pick your battles, and you know from experience that forcing yourself into tighter creative bounds can occasionally produce unexpected rewards.

Imagine being just a bit shorter than the average eleven-year-old boy, the displays on either side rising like battlements that stretch half the length of the largest retail store dedicated to toys and toys alone.

Traversing it feels like navigating the streets of a fabled city in the sky. Every familiar turn affords some discovery—some new bright magic or some ancient, shadow-veiled devilry (i.e., all the toys you make sure not to tell your youth pastor about).

Along the most treasured aisle, each video game is represented by a small, flip-out card with a stack of tickets underneath representing the available stock (because they didn't want you stealing the high-end merchandise).

To see screenshots of the game or read its marketing synopsis, you must step onto a floor-level display rack, flip up the card, and inspect the laminated, graphical insert with periscope focus.

Finding Mega Man Legends

I've had my eye on most of these games for a while, and now that I'm a bonified PlayStation owner, choices abound. But one thing is sure—I'll be walking out with a factory-sealed copy of something, anything, and praying the entire car ride home that I have not committed the irreparable sin of "making an unwise purchase."

And then I see him, a character I've met before, but with a new face, decked in alluring metallic blue armor and portraited against an eye-catching red-to-yellow gradient background.

Even more intriguing, I've only ever seen this character with a helmet—but this rendering has him with a wild head of jet-black cartoon hair and stark green eyes.

Then, there's the game's title font. How do I describe it? Silver, polished, liquid metal calligraphy confirming my suspicion—this is a Mega Man game, one I've never heard of. And it's on sale for $29.99.

I get close enough to flip the card and examine the "one-pager" before one-pagers existed.

This is what I see:

THE BLUE BOMBER BLASTS INTO A WHOLE NEW DIMENSION

AWESOME WEAPONS!
(There darn-well better be in a Mega Man game!)

DIABOLICAL BOSSES!
(I don't know what dia-bol-whatever means, but hell yes!)

LEGENDARY GAMEPLAY!
(Oh, I am beginning to believe it, Capcom!)

NON-STOP 3-D ACTION!
(Non-stop, you say? 3-D, pray tell?)

If the "Shut up and take my money!" meme existed in 1999, it would have applied here.

According to my altered copy of a memory, I am now the only one in the Toys R Us—for a fleeting instant, the store and everything in it belongs to me. But like the shrewd merchant in the Parable of the Pearl, I'm ready to trade it all for one game, one story, one hero.

The laminated game card slaps the display rack as I snag the voucher.

The next thing I remember is not a specific series of events so much as a furious ignition and an unbroken propulsion toward a tenuous, flickering second star to the right.

Mega Man Legends - Chapter 2

A Mega Intro: I Meet the Blue Boy

The intro to Mega Man Legends expertly places itself within the adventure genre's preexisting framework. In the first quest, it even pays an endearing nod to Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Mega Man locates and burgles a refractor (i.e., a giant diamond) sealed within an ancient, booby-trapped, robotic-themed crypt.

After a cutscene of Mega Man escaping the treasure room within an inch of his life, the game returns you to the driver's seat. From here, you follow a maze of shadowy corridors into a large, open chamber, where you encounter the game's first boss: a giant robot guardian called a Reaverbot, left behind to protect the ancient vault.

This first encounter foreshadows all the high-octane action to come, where you will be pitted against enemies of either colossal size, raptor-like speed, or a combination of both.

By now, the game has introduced me to its unique control scheme of R1/L1 for camera panning and R2 for targeting enemies. Even though Mario 64's C-button camera controls are etched in my brain, it doesn't take me long to adapt, and I'm swept into the flow of what will be the first among many time-sucking maze-runs, a.k.a. dungeon crawls.

A world covered by endless water...

Exiting the crypt triggers another cutscene, which can be engaging or frustrating depending on the game or the player. In the case of Legends, from my perspective on the bedroom floor, my trusty bag of potato chips at my hip, I'm all in—give me the cutscenes. Give me all the cutscenes.

We have a hero, danger, and a world for them to clash at varied and unexpected turns. I'm ready for this story to unfold.

I wipe off potato chip grease on my shorts. Now, back to the game.

A classic escape

Atop the tower's landing platform, Mega Man finds himself trapped on the precipice, looking out over an endless ocean and sky just as the Reaverbot reappears behind, looming with impending and inescapable malice.

In what might be another pop culture nod, this time to Back to the Future II, Mega Man hops off the ledge, leaving us to wonder about his fate.

We soon learn as we see his red and yellow skyship, the Flutter, ascends into view, bearing our hero safely away from the ancient tower and the watchful Reaverbot, powerless to pursue.

Meanwhile, I'm spellbound.

This isn't just a nod to the adventure genre. In all its purist, classical, romantic glory, it is the adventure genre.

It's a shape-shifting Van Gogh squeezing itself into 480x640 pixels on my twenty-two-inch CRT.

I have no idea what lies ahead for our hero. But in one of my mind's subterranean vaults, I know I've found that game, that story, that one-of-a-kind experience to shape my creative vision for the rest of my life.

I've found a refractor, and I've awakened a sleeper.

Purchase verified.

Mega Man Legends - Chapter 3

The Legend Ascends: The World Above

Intro complete, Mega Man and friends learn that the Flutter's engine is burnt out on facilitating narrow escapes.

Mega Man's closest friend and adopted sister, Roll, executes an emergency crash-landing on Kattelox Island, which I will discover is haunted by a legendary, recurring disaster of genocidal proportions—but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

(Fun fact: her name is Roll because Mega Man's original name in Japan is "Rock Man," i.e., Rock and Roll.)

Upon landing, the immediate objective is to find a populated city or town to secure parts and a new refractor for the Flutter's engine room (the one we just unearthed needs to be bigger, it seems). But there's no need to venture far, as the island police arrive with sirens on full blast. 

After a few sequences of dialog and some mundane early-game exploration, Mega Man gets an ID card to enter the city, which soon enlists him to protect the island's commercial districts from a band of aerial pirates, also newly arrived. 

Funny how that works. It's almost as if the game wants you to get into fights to keep its non-stop action promise. Very well, Capcom.

The Bonne Family - Pirates from the sky

Lured by the knowledge that Kattelox may be the location of a fabled treasure known as "the Motherlode" (I concede the game creators could have come up with any number of better names), the pirates demand access to the sealed-off ancient ruins beneath the island.

But, for fear of the disaster legend, the mayor of Kattelox refuses their demands, forcing the pirates to take a more violent approach to achieve their goal.

Irony much?

Thus the game calls upon Mega Man to begin the Hero's Journey and introduces the central, driving conflict for the world above.

As to whether Mega Man is the reluctant hero, having fate thrust upon him, or the ambitious protector, ready to act in the service of others at a moment's notice, depends on how much time you spend wandering the shopping arcade before initiating the mission. 

The way I'm playing it, it's probably the latter.

Pacing - High notes and dynamics

The game's varied pirate encounters add the right amount of flavor and pacing to a world that might have been unbalanced without them, offering action-packed gameplay sequences that serve as dynamic shifts from the longer, meandering periods of underground exploration.

Ever true to the adventure genre, the game gives players a mid-game boss battle at sea, complete with missiles and torpedoes, later followed by an aerial sortie while atop the Flutter's deck, with bombastic cannons lighting up the afternoon sky above Kattelox.

(This skyship battle will become my favorite moment in the game, influencing my future creative pursuits in ways I would never have expected).

Even better is that each of these pirate missions results in live media coverage by KTOX TV. Unlike the quiet, unsung isolation of Link's triumph in Ocarina of Time, the people of Kattelox must either celebrate or outright blaspheme my repeated acts of heroism, thanks to KTOX TV News.

As an eleven-year-old Tony Stark wanna-be in the making, I wouldn't have it any other way. "I am [Mega] Man."

A Quick Interlude About Seeking Fame

At the time of this experience, I have not yet played Ocarina of Time, and I won't play it until I'm thirteen.

It makes sense for an eleven-year-old to want to be seen and recognized, even if Mega Man doesn't seem to care either way.

(Hell, now that we live in the age of influencers and the war for undivided attention, I should amend my statement: it makes sense for a thirty-one-year-old to need to be seen).

Only when I look back through the lens of truth, i.e., Ocarina (undoubtedly the better game with a superior story), will I catch a glimpse of the futility of desiring fame—or, worse still, getting it.

The heroes of the real world, like Tolkien's Dúnedain Rangers of the North, walk unseen along the fringes, keeping the shadows at bay while the rest of us sleep, eat, drink, and complain.

Or, in the case of Link in Ocarina, they occasionally must turn back time and, in so doing, erase their heroism.

The biblical notion that the just shall live by faith and be rewarded according to their deeds may be true.

To Mega Man's credit, he dedicates his focus to executing the mission. That people see him doing it seems to carry little to no weight. If anything, it's a peripheral agitation at best.

Perhaps there's something to be said about that. Maybe I'm saying it now.

Now, back to Mega Man Legends and the Pirates.

Where were we? Oh yes, the pirates. They are hardly cookie-cutter baddies, to the game's credit, even if they are a bit childish.

As the story unfolds, we get subtle hints that the Bonne Family (Teisel, Tron, and Bon) are orphans (albeit wealthy enough to have an entire fleet of destructive robots at their disposal). These hints recall a scene from the game's intro, where we also learn that Roll is on a quest to find her missing parents, so the story draws us in a little further with a unifying, subtextual thread.

"In a world covered by endless water," families are separated, scattered across both charted and uncharted isles atop mysterious, ancient ruins of non-human civilizations from long ago. And the bravest of them, the ones who keep the economic engines running for the rest of the world, are the diggers.

On the other hand, pirates don't care about the wayfaring diggers or the islands they visit for trade. The Bonne Family is no exception; they're in it for themselves (and, something tells me, for the portrait of Mom and Dad hanging in the lounge aboard their giant, weaponized sky yacht).

I drive home the point again: the Bonnes are in this for themselves.

The Conflicted Antagonist: Tron Bonne

Add to this the layered though trite complication of Tron—a young brunette who appears to be Mega Man's age and maybe his type, too—who develops a love-at-first-sight connection with the blue boy.

Torn by her loyalty to her family's quest (which demands that she kill Mega Man the first chance she gets) and her newfound crush, she remains an agonized and conflicted antagonist throughout the game.

I'm not sure if her agony is intended to be funny, but it makes me laugh anyway. My first encounter with something like unrequited love is still far off. Before it comes—and it will come—one can only hope I'll have learned to laugh at yours truly.

But I'm getting years ahead of myself and eons ahead of the game.

A bonified digger's license

Upon defending Midtown and Uptown from the pirate onslaught early-game, the mayor grants Mega Man the thing the pirates were trying to take by force—a digger's license, which will be my key to the ancient ruins and the secrets (and enemies) within.

(Okay, technically, the pirates are after the key to the Main Gate of an ancient ruin, not a digger's license. But getting the license is Mega Man's first step toward obtaining the key, so...)

It seems the mayor isn't so worried about Mega Man waking the legendary disaster. Funny, as that's exactly what he does in the game's climax, after using his highly-coveted digger's license to crawl every dungeon beneath the mysterious but otherwise tranquil island.

But again, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us now descend into the ruins, where KTOX TV cannot follow.

Mega Man Legends - Chapter 4

The Legend Descends: The World Below

No longer am I watching a story unfold. I am a participant, a protagonist with wants and ambitions. Whatever I may look like, in my mind, I am Mega Man. His friends are my friends, his enemies equally my own.

Whenever I have a question, I visit Data, my robot monkey, who hints that he knows everything about me, including my amnesia-ridden past.

But like a wizened sage, he withholds, insisting that I discover who I really am by undertaking the quest and, though he won't say it outright, suffering the non-negotiable ordeal. And that ordeal must begin with finding three ancient keys to a locked door far underground.

Very well. Into the ruins we go.

I'll admit I do not remember much detail regarding the game's various treasure hunts. Mostly, I remember feelings and sensations tinted by a thin veil of dread.

Even now, I recall the stifling closeness of every shadow, matched only by the elation of discovering a treasure chest. These chests might contain a much-needed buster part (a component for upgrading weaponry), a piece of armor, or a truckload of cash, a.k.a, "Zenny." A few of them are traps that try to kill me, but that's par for the course.

Seeking the three keys

Like ordinary treasures, the three keys are hidden in underground vaults. However, I remember these vaults are unique from the standard dungeons in that they rest, undisturbed until my intrusion, under an open, starry heaven.

How such a thing is possible remains unclear. Perhaps the closer I get to the game's final act, the more paradoxes abound.

Per usual, these heavenly vaults are also teeming with powerful Reaverbots that I must destroy before entering the treasure rooms containing each key.

Jet Skates to the rescue

By now, I've also upgraded my suit to utilize a pair of jet-powered skates, which allow me to zoom from point A to point B, unencumbered by heavy armor. If anything, the skates make dungeon crawls more endurable, though it is impossible to attack with them engaged. But given how overpowered that would make me, I see it as a fair trade-off.

I love these shoes. What else can I say? Anyone who has played either Legends game knows that the jet skates are non-negotiable upgrades. You find them, Roll crafts them, and then you spend the rest of the game racing past cars in midtown while they trudge along at five miles per day. Okay, maybe not the rest of the game, but you get the idea.

I pause the game to retrieve a handful of potato chips. 

A Quick Interlude About Speed

Twenty-one years later, I will crash at twenty-five miles per hour on a OneWheel Electric Skateboard (seven miles per hour faster than recommended spec), breaking my right collarbone and requiring surgical robot parts to mend it.

To some extent, this will happen because of how easy Mega Man made it look racing around those underground, starlit dungeons on his one-of-a-kind jet skates. Inception is a real thing, whatever anyone might say.

And yes, I am aware that any man over thirty who isn't named Tony Hawk has no business being on a skateboard.

When Mega Man descends, he kicks butt. When I descend, I go on a blind date with reality and beef it up.

This must be the ordeal Data hinted at: the realization that I am not Mega Man and never will be. Thanks for the heads up, Data, you worthless dancing monkey. I could've gained the same wisdom by spraining a wrist.

I ought to have remembered my lore: Mega Man is "a genetically and cybernetically altered robot" designed to kill other giant robots.

Meanwhile, I am a flawed, breakable human, and the dreaded question of whether I am designed for anything looms larger and casts a broadening shadow the older I get, as it should.

Again, back to Mega Man Legends and the Starry Underworld.

Once more, I wipe off the chip grease on my shorts, unpause the game, and go back to being eleven years old. After locating the three keys, I look up at the starry heavens and feel myself on the edge of remembering... What? I cannot hold onto the feeling of being torn between two worlds, whatever it might mean.

I return to the surface and call Roll to pick me up in the Support Car. The time has nearly come for me to pass the ancient gate.

But first, a spontaneous trip to Uptown to patronize the arts.

Mega Man Legends - Chapter 5

Mega Man's Bane: Judgment on the Carbons

Taking a much-needed hiatus from the labyrinth, I visit the museum in Uptown.

And I ought to, seeing as how I paid somewhere between thirty and fifty-thousand "Zenny" for its reconstruction after the pirate disaster. Or maybe it was City Hall that I paid for?

Museum, City Hall, one thing is clear: I've spent a fortune to rejuvenate this cursed island. For some reason, the city cannot reconstruct its damaged buildings unless Mega Man donates large sums from his treasure hunts. Go figure.

Visiting a museum in a video game is like visiting one in real life—you spend most of your time exhibit-hopping to see as much as possible so that you're incapable of giving any piece of art or history the contemplation it deserves.

But this time is different. 

"I feel what's to happen... all happened before."

There, among the quietude of undisturbed relics, I happen upon a painting, and its impact is so pressed and immediate I must let the controller rest and allow Mega Man to idle amid the cadence of relaxing elevator music. 

I stare at the screen, awestruck, impressed by ideas that, though I recognize them, I've only ever perceived as dancing shapes across a misty lake—until now. When something takes you out of a story like this, it's usually a sign of poor craftsmanship. But as I said, this is different.

Although I may one day look back on it as a bit cliché, the image I behold forms my first encounter with the idea—sometimes buried expertly at a story's heart or so "on the nose" it makes you sneeze—that everything that ever was, is, or will be is pre-ordained.

Whether one believes such an idea is unobservant, wishful thinking, or the essential truth of our reality, it remains one of the few transcendent ideas our species has been unable to escape. Every myth holds a prophecy.

A Vision from the Past

The relic in question is a painting of a warrior in blue armor wielding a drawn bow against a Sphynx-like giant with purple hair, its colossal hands reaching out to steal, kill, and destroy. Above the warrior's gleaming helm, fire rains down—there is no escape.

Little do I know about the art of foreshadowing in story-telling. But I know I've never experienced anything like this level of depth in a game. And I am unsure what to make of it.

That is until I enter the final dungeon and stand before the three sealed doors, each requiring the named keys:

1. The Watcher

2. The Sleeper

3. The Dreamer

A Quick Interlude About the Three Keys

Contemplating these three keys and their ordering, it dawns on me that these may be three lesser-recognized stages of grief.

I say "lesser-recognized" because while the wider publicized stages (such as denial and acceptance) tend to be the most overt to our experience, these three stages may lie beneath the surface of our conscious experience.

We face tragedy, and so we dedicate our lives to watchfulness. But we soon grow tired. We sleep. At last, we dream of a purer, untarnished time before the devasting demise of our hopes.

We watch, sleep, and at last, we dream.

Now, back to Mega Man Legends and the Final Encounter.

Entering this empty chamber, I approach an upright sarcophagus at the farthest wall. I know something isn't right, that whatever is within this ancient crypt should remain undisturbed.

A seal breaks, and the encasement opens with blasts of pressurized air. Within and presumably still asleep is the Sphynx from the painting. He is an android like me, only taller, seemingly wiser, with long, purple hair.

In shock, I ask, "It's a man? A person?"

I'll soon learn the truth. This entity, though humanoid, is far from human.

Calm, collected, and diabolical

Opening his eyes, the awakened stranger smiles. He introduces himself as Mega Man Juno, then reveals my designation: Mega Man Trigger.

Recognizing that I have suffered amnesia, he explains his purpose—to initiate a protocol called "Eden," which will summon a legion of robots (ten thousand, to be exact) sequestered in a space station, to descend on Kattelox and purge the island of all "carbon units," thereby restoring a warped caricature of paradise.

In other words, Juno's purpose (as Watcher, Sleeper, and Dreamer) is to summon his heavenly hosts and kill everyone on the island. And I've woken him up early.

The moral of this encounter? Beware of cutting yourself off from the real world and all its suffering, only to sink deeper into an imaginary world of idle dreams. It might just turn you into a soulless psychopath. And if you ever meet anyone like this, try to let them sleep (until you clear some distance).

Otherwise, things could escalate just as they are about to now.

For the love of humanity...

A fresh-off-the-assembly-line Mega Man Trigger would have taken no issue with this protocol. But the dual-citizen Mega Man, who has learned through arduous trial and painful error to hybridize the robotic world of his origins with the world of human relationships (and all its unpredictable dips and lurches), cannot abide it.

One may freely wipe and defragment an artificial system. But to attempt the same with human lives reaches the pinnacle of evil ambition.

As I do not attempt to hide my disapproval, Juno feels he has no choice but to imprison me until he can return to wipe my memory and, you know, set me straight.

Entrapped by a field of electromagnetic energy (because why not?), I watch as Juno exits the chamber, brandishing his signature condescending smile. Powerless to pursue, I rage against my bonds.

Meanwhile, Juno heads for the control room, where he will initiate Eden.

Conflicted antagonists to the rescue...

Unbeknownst to me, Teisel and Tron have followed me underground. No doubt their original plan was to let me find the Motherlode and then kill me or seal me up forever while they escaped with the goods.

But Juno's supervillain monologue has affected in them a momentary change of heart.

Sometimes, Redemption is kicking a pole

Tron kicks the machine holding me in stasis (apparently, kicking is sufficient to dismantle ancient security systems), and the electromagnetic field dissipates.

Praise on high! I'm free to blow sh*t up once more.

It says something about the story and its depth of characters: even the vindictive, self-centered pirates, when they overhear Juno's plan, relinquish their vendetta to aid me—their former enemy—in my final test. Juno's matter-of-fact genocidal directive doesn't sit well, even with them.

As far as I can tell, there must be something about being part of the collective human race that's difficult to shrug off, even for the self-seeking.

After setting me free, Teisel tells me to hurry up and stop the soon-to-be mass murderer, and Tron tells me that she won't forgive me if I die in the attempt.

And so, thanks to their penitent solidarity, I must become the hero in the painting. I know it now, as do my friends and former enemies. Not far down the last shadowed corridor, the inescapable fire awaits.

Mega Man Legends - Chapter 6

The Intercessor Motif

Now, this is where I stop referring to Mega Man in the first person. It was fun for a while, but I'm not eleven anymore, and the wisdom we gain in living this life, as far as it will take us, is to recognize and accept our limitations.

In the game's final confrontation, Mega Man battles Juno to the death, hoping he will halt the Eden protocol by defeating Juno in his physical form.

After a harrowing boss fight, Mega Man defeats Juno. (At least he does when I have the controls; I can't speak for other players).

And yet, in a dark twist of fate, Mega Man is too late to cancel the protocol. As cylindrical space pods (each one stamped with a solitary, red Egyptian eye) descend on Kattelox, Mega Man wrestles with what to do. Everyone he cares about is counting on him to succeed. If he fails, they all die.

We would call this a "high-stakes" climax in typical story-telling parlance.

Mega allies to the rescue

Enter Data, the dancing monkey. Pulling from his memory reserves, Data issues a series of verbal commands to the underground mainframe, hijacking Juno's control over the system and giving it to Trigger. When Data instructs the computer to indefinitely postpone Eden, the cylindrical space-pods retreat back to the heavens.

Meanwhile, the good people of Kattelox throw parties in the streets.

(Because Data waits for Mega Man to defeat Juno before stepping in to solve the insurmountable problem, I have decided this is not Deus Ex Machina. Prove me wrong.)

Seeking Self-Knowledge

At this juncture, Mega Man asks Data, "Do you know who I am?"

(Well, Mega Man, it would seem you have the authority to control and override ancient protocols of devasting power if you only knew what to say. So, there's that.)

But to this, Data keeps dancing and tells Mega Man, for some unknown reason, that he cannot reveal that secret knowledge... yet.

And perhaps these details should be withheld for the present, leaving our imaginations to fill in the gaps with the transcendent hero myth of which we're all at some level conscious—whether we know anything about Joseph Campbell and his outlandish ideas about a Hero with a Thousand Faces.

A familiar Story

To some extent, Mega Man Legends is an amalgamation of borrowed themes, which I will not realize until my college English major experiences decades hence. At present, the game is a kind of children's illustrated and abridged version of a story I'm too young and naïve to digest were it to manifest its purest form.

Now, I'll take it upon myself to answer Mega Man's question since Data refuses:

"Mega Man, you are yet another incarnation of the interceding hero archetype dating back at least to the four canonical Gospels. Perhaps the archetype goes back even further than the New Testament—beyond my present expertise. Either way, congratulations and well done."

But unlike Christ, Mega Man exhibits a more contemporary, perhaps Western literary trait: he has no idea who he is or why he's here. 

In other words, he's still just a boy. Maybe that's the better answer to his question. And perhaps it's the better answer to yours and mine, too.

Conclusion: Mega Man's Legend

We've made it to the end, and I'm still unsure what this post is and why I feel compelled to write it. But I'm glad it's out of the way, and perhaps you are, too.

Mega Man Legends opened my mind to a wider landscape of creative possibilities. By the time I was seventeen, I had written my first novel. Granted, I was no teenage prodigy, and the novel could've been better, but I also know I never would've written it had I never played Legends.

And that means something to me whenever I happen to think about it.

Like Legends, my teenage novel was a sweeping ode to the adventure genre—a genre that now seems eclipsed by swaths of grittier material. Don't get me wrong; I like gritty stories. But sometimes, I want to see a pirate ship and a sword fight.

Sometimes, I want a fable, a tall tale, a legend.

In the eye of the beholder

Still, I cannot help but see myself in Mega Man, even though I'll never be like him. More so, I cannot help but see myself in the painting within a painting—as though my story is playing out toward an ultimate crossroads, a Rubicon, a dreaded and fateful confrontation without guarantees of success, reward, or of learning, at last, who I am and why I'm here.

Or it's just a video game, and I need to stop interpreting my life through the lens of hero myths and other peoples' fringe, pop-culture intellectual properties.

Now, what did I do with that bag of potato chips?

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Related Resources and Articles for Mega Man Legends:

• Ars Technica: I don't want another Netflix adaptation...

• Fandom Overview

• Full Game Playthrough at 4K/60FPS

• Mega Man Legends 3 - What Happened? - YouTube

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

• Walkthrough - IGN

• Wikipedia Page

The classroom is large enough to hold about thirty students, one professor, and two chaperones, which works out swell because that about sums up our group. I'm attracted to the huge industrial-grade windows at the back of the room, more so for the rich Los Angeles cityscape beyond them. If you smash your face against the window and slide your eyes to the left as far as possible, as if to embody Jim Carrey on his best day, you can see almost half the city. Not saying I did this, but if you happen to meet anyone from the building across the street, maybe don't mention that you know me.

Or do mention it. It's not as if the suits in the building across the busy street know my name. Just my contorted, idiot face trying to see if the Uruks really are taking the hobbits to Isengard.

The room has a clean, indoor smell, though if it were my forty-story building, I would've stripped and replaced the carpet months ago. Correction: I would've sold the building and set up shop on an island in the South Pacific. But that's neither here nor there—strike that, it's all there and 5,501 miles from here, a classroom in a corporate-collegiate building in downtown LA.

Befitting a typical Southern California summer, the room is always about two degrees too cold. I suspect the AC in this type of building only knows two ways to perform: overcompensate, forcing you to stash a hoody in your backpack or fail to deliver anything like a respite from the semi-arid, Mediterranean heat—not to be confused with Heat (1995), also set in LA, directed by Michael Mann and starring Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, and Val Kilmer.

I pause my internal narration to smile; leave it to a film student to draw a line from the weather to a critically acclaimed crime drama with an all-star cast and a rockin' script. But that's why I'm here, 2,200 miles from home. I'm here because I believe there's a chance, with odds like one in one thousand, that I'll one day write a movie like Heat. One in one thousand odds may be too optimistic, but I don't care. It's a vision worth beholding.

Hanna: I don't know how to do anything else. 

McCauley: Neither do I. 

Hanna: I don't much want to, either. 

McCauley: Neither do I.

Because I opted to attend a Christian university (I'll save the pros and cons list regarding that decision for another article), we begin each eight-hour session with one student choosing a devotion from an e-book written for aspiring screenwriters, followed by a prayer. (Yes, you read that right: an e-book devotional written for aspiring, heretofore unsuccessful screenwriters. For every market, there is a product.)

Prayerful observances conducted, we then get to the business of learning from industry pros, everyday people once upon a time like us, now kind enough to pause their bustling schedules and teach the few aspects of LA that can be taught. If time allows, we get to the nose-to-grindstone work of ideating and, God willing, writing our short film scripts.

If time does not allow, and it usually doesn't, then we dedicate the mornings to writing. Or, at least, I do.

Our industry pro guest list comprises writers of well-known films and teleplay episodes and some producers and TV show editors. In other words, people who have accomplished what seems, from my heavenward, detached-jaw gaze on the ground floor, the impossible. 

However, today's special guest is the author of the e-book containing our daily devotions. For my part, I have enjoyed reading his custom-made devotional for aspiring writers like me, and so I look forward to meeting him in the flesh and hearing what he wants to teach us. Sure, he is not as credentialed as some of the other guests we've seen, but I don't care about that—I'm engaged and eager to learn all the things.

"All right," he says about fifteen minutes into his talk, "who has begun work on their short film?"

A reasonable question to a group of students participating in a class entitled "Writing the Short Film." I had started mine earlier that morning after a productive development session with our course instructor. So, in a spirit of genuine sincerity, I raise my hand.

Despite being attracted to the rear window, I have chosen to sit at the front of the class. As I said, I am here to milk the last ounce of value from this experience. Three grand is a lot of money to most people, and though I have a noble dream to one day wipe my butt clean with a stack of "hundos," that blessed day has not yet come. For now, I am but a humble, full-time grad student working a full-time job to cash-flow his low-ROI ambitions of becoming a better writer.

"Go ahead," he says, gesturing to me. "Pitch me your logline."

For the uninitiated, the logline is a one or two-sentence summary of the story, encapsulating the central conflict and, if possible, the most compelling character and plot elements with razor precision. As a snapshot of the film's essence, it is one of the most complex forms of writing to perfect. A fun and helpful way to learn this craft is to create loglines for your favorite movies and see how they stack against the originals (if published).

As a renowned archeologist competes with the Nazis to uncover the Lost Ark of the Covenant, he must confront an old rival obsessed with finding the Ark and attaining the power of God.

To be clear, that's a mediocre logline. In the presumed original (which I cannot locate at the moment), the phrase "goes on a quest" probably carries more weight in the adventure genre than my use of the verb "competes." Also, the original logline pits Doctor Jones against Hitler's Nazis. That's an eye-catcher, to be sure.

Mediocrity aside, now you know what a logline is. And the guest teacher is asking me to share mine. But there's a complication. As a rule, and unless it's one of Tolkien's poems, I usually don't memorize things that I can look up in less than a minute. As justification for this rule, I recall a vague snippet from a Sherlock Holmes adventure where Holmes tells Watson that one must not pack too much into one's mind. I had written a logline for my short film earlier that day but buried it in a subfolder on my computer where I kept all my coursework. What can I say, except that I like having organized file systems? Dumbledore transfers his heavier memories to the Pensieve—so I'm not crazy.

"I have to find it," I say. "Give me one sec…." 

And now passes an awkward five seconds of me double-clicking into a maze of my own design, with Gandalf's remark about the dwarves and their lost passwords echoing in my subconscious.

"Time's up!" he says. "I just got off the elevator, and the doors are closing. You gotta memorize the logline for the elevator pitch. Who has one ready?"

When he says that nonsense about getting off the elevator, my father's fighting spirit rises.

"We're not on a goddamn elevator," I say.

Just kidding. I say nothing.

I have paid good money to be here, and I am not about to get expelled from this class just to enjoy an instant of blind, ecstatic Burdeshaw rage. So, I sit, silent, breathing in and out, doing all I can to reframe my awareness and return my attention to the guest speaker whose devotional e-book I've vowed never to rest eyes on again.

He points to the next student with a hand raised, the next, and the next. One by one, every student in the class recites his or her logline. Did some students have their loglines memorized? Probably. But here's what I think. Unlike me, most of the other students have saved their files in some haphazard way on their desktops, allowing them to retrieve their loglines and to demonstrate to the entire class that they have, in fact, "memorized" the same. Meanwhile, I have again fallen into the archetype of the sacrificial lamb, buying time for everyone else.

When he gets to the last student, I have long since opened the Word document with my logline and synopsis. I wait for him to return to me, but he never does. He carries on with the talk, where he goes on to compare John Lennon's "Imagine" to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). A fair connection, I admit. But I'm too knotted up to care too deeply. At the moment, I think I would like to hear John's song again, even if it is, in some vein, a dreaded vision of false peace.

Twenty-something students, and I'm the one who fails the elevator pitch—because, if we are to treat the metaphor with any weight, I am the only student on the damned elevator. The other students, my worthy classmates, are in the lobby, the hotel bar, or wherever the hell it is this bigshot producer lands when he steps off the elevator and, as the doors close, tells me to do better next time. Leaving me safely behind, he walks into a room full of people ready to pitch and decides to mingle with them because he's not on the elevator anymore.

So that's that. I ride the elevator down to Tartarus and confront my rage. Somewhere in the distance, "Imagine" starts to play. I pitch my logline, now memorized, to the four corners of the underworld, and then I ride the elevator back up to greet the sunlight.

I spend the next week writing the first draft of my short film. With help from the course instructor, who knows a thing or two about writing scripts, it passes with flying colors. I return home. A year passes. I successfully defend my portfolio and graduate with an MFA in Cinema and Television. Another year passes, and I move to Sacramento for my job (and to meet new friends—which I do). Here, I spend between nine and ten hours per day at a co-work office, bio-hacking my way through SEO and a major website migration project.

During one of these "killin'-it" days, I get a call.

It's a professor I've never met from my alma mater on the line with a student director looking to make a short film for his final post-graduate project. They tell me they want to make my movie. A moment of disbelief, and then I tell them to go for it. The process begins, and I spend the next month providing them with rewrites. I take all their advice, making slight changes to the script, adding details, and subtracting superfluity. This is the job I trained for, and it's the best job in the world.

They never ask me for my logline.

A semester passes, wherein the student director gathers a cast and crew and makes my screenplay into a living, breathing short film. He executes it in a way that I know I never could, not being the diplomatic or rallying type. Of course, I have critiques on some of the performances, but that's because I'm a snob. He sends me a copy, and I laugh with genuine joy as I watch the credits roll. A hundred names float up the screen right after mine. A hundred names. Maybe more. All of them real people who worked on a movie that I wrote.

Six months later, the director, Nathanael, emails me the week of my thirtieth birthday to let me know that our movie won Best Screenplay at the Poe Film Festival in Richmond, VA, a city I've never visited. About three months later, I receive the commemorative glass award in the mail. I keep it on my bookcase and hope to God I never drop it during a move. A Raven is inscribed on the glass, an obvious homage to Poe (which is funny given that the film is a light-hearted rom-com), and below that, another inscription reads, "Best Screenplay."

To my recurring frustration, it does not read "Best Elevator Pitch." 

I have searched it front, back, and upside down, hoping to locate this single affirmation. But alas, it is nowhere to be found.

For listeners: Listen on Spotify.

Note: if you haven't yet, check out Part One of this series here.

Contents

1. Intro

2. The Assumptions

3. The Errors

4. Death Defeated

5. Models and Semantics

6. Outro

Intro

“If you died today, where would you go?”

If you have ever lasted until the end of a typical church service, I assume you have heard one of the elders ask this question, usually as one of the worship leaders plays the piano or guitar softly in the background. Before I expound on the question, I want to point out that this is not a bad way to end a Sunday morning service, at least in terms of cadence and structure.

Quite the contrary, it is an ideal denouement, a chance for those visiting and even the regular members to reflect on their standing with the God whose only passphrase for granting them salvation is that they merely believe. 

And the journey we start after believing, with its sudden turns and pitfalls, convinces me it is never wrong for us to pause and reflect on our standing with God. However, if such reflection leads us anywhere, it should lead us to inspect the question of “where we go when we die” within a biblical framework. As we reflect, we might discover a set of untested assumptions beneath the question’s surface and at least two resulting fundamental errors.

The Assumptions

As to the set of assumptions, recall from Part One, where I quoted Sam Harris:

“The whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal wellbeing of human souls.”

(00:59:01)

As I expounded in that article, even if Sam Harris does not believe this to be the biblical point of Christianity, most Christians do and have elevated it to the status of ultimate good, hence the question, “If you died today…”. 

The underlying assumptions upholding this belief are as follows:

1. This life, as we know i,t is our only opportunity to know Jesus and thus receive his salvation.

2. Humans are spiritual beings living in and constrained by material aspects.

3. As spiritual beings, humans possess innate immortality that allows the spirit or soul to transcend bodily existence when the body dies.

While I could rustle up a few more assumptions to add to the list above, I think these three are the most prominent within Christendom and impactful to our Christology. Besides, three is a complete number, and we only have so much time. 

(Note: my goal is not to disprove these assumptions but to put them under biblical scrutiny.)

Assumption 1: This life as we know it is our only opportunity to know Jesus and thus receive his salvation.

Here is one of those firmly held beliefs we adopt at the start of our Christian journey, and I do not claim it is wrong.

It is the crux of the question, i.e., if you die today, you will either go to Heaven or Hell because it is only while you are alive that you can come to know Jesus and thus be saved. Indeed, to give the belief its due credit, this is a logical inference when we note the urgency that characterizes the New Testament, especially scriptures like Revelation 21:7-8.

But as I stated in my prologue:

…we find a culture uninterested in the Resurrection and with no urgency for repenting from dead works.

It is not that the New Testament does not impel us with its urgency. Rather, the New Testament’s urgency ought to impel us in a particular direction; it ought to drive us toward the Holy Spirit’s resurrection power to transform us from the inside out, taking all our fragments in Adam and reassembling them in Jesus. For what purpose? So that we may reflect Christ to the world and thus embody God’s promises to Israel through and through—Christ in us, the hope of glory. 

Great, you might say. But this still demands that we know and confess Jesus as Lord, right? Yes, but also consider the following by C.S. Lewis:

“We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know him can be saved through him” (60). 

I’ll allow you a moment to untangle that before moving on. But after untangling it, if you happen to disagree with Lewis (and my appeal to his authority), perhaps you will agree with scripture instead: 

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ 

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Matt. 25:37-40, NIV).

In case you missed it—the righteous have no idea that they have kept Christ’s commands and, likewise, that they ought to be saved. Furthermore, they are claiming to Jesus’ face that they have no memory of ever feeding him, giving him a drink, inviting him inside to warm up, or offering him an extra pair of pants. Although it seems they know enough to call him Lord, it is not self-evident from the text that they know who Jesus is or ought to know.

As to the specific notion that salvation is only available to us in this life as we know it (which I have not adequately addressed), let’s see how that idea fits into a well-known dark night of the soul: miscarriages, abortions, and the death of infants. All three are tragic. But under the shadow of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, all three must warrant a one-way ticket to Hell—unless Christ’s saving power extends to those who do not consciously know or acknowledge him in this life as we know it.

Yet, because most of us cannot stomach the idea of babies going to an eternal Hell—with good reason—and because we cannot fit the “unless” contingency into our existing framework, we are compelled to drum up extra-biblical explanations to handle this “unique” case instead of what we ought to do, which is to return to our fundamental assumption and hold it under a biblical microscope.

Take the following by Gabriel Finocchio, a teacher I respect but must also disagree with on this point: “The second layer [of Hell] is the limbo of infants where those who die in original sin without any actual sin are confined and undergo some sort of holding” (00:10:59).

I want to say: are you joking? We cannot have it both ways—we cannot say in one breath that adults who never professed Jesus as their savior go to an eternal Hell, and in the next breath, say that babies are absolved because of the fine print about original versus actual sin.

(Regarding fine print, let me know where I can find this chapter and verse.)

To his credit, Finocchio admits that this is a speculative doctrine. Nevertheless, he resorts to it as the most definitive answer available rather than confront the underlying assumption forcing him into a philosophical corner—as do most Christians.

But suppose we draw a line from Romans 10:9 to Philippians 2:9-11. In that case, we get something like this:

• “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

• “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place / and gave him the name that is above every name, / that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, / in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, / to the glory of God the Father.”

First, Romans provides us with the if/then conditional format for salvation, and then Philippians says, “Oh, by the way, everyone in heaven, on earth, and under the earth is going to meet this condition, so….”

Finally, consider Luke 20:38, where Jesus says of God, “‘He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.’”

To God, all are alive? It would seem so, according to the gospel. While I cannot speak with any authority about what we will face on judgment day, one thing remains biblically clear—we will all be alive: not in a holding place, not in a limbo of fathers or infants, but alive. Knowing what Jesus achieved through his bodily death and resurrection, how could it be otherwise? So, with that in mind, if I may be allowed to show the extent of my Latin, I conclude with this: “Dum spiro, spero.”

And then I defer to C.S. Lewis: we know some things but do not know others.

Assumption 2: Humans are spiritual beings living in and constrained by material aspects.

Of the three assumptions, this is perhaps the most harmful to the biblical framework because it stems from Platonic philosophy and early Gnostic teachings and so downgrades death from an enemy to a nuisance.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here is a good summary of Plato’s influence on Christian thought:

“We are urged to transform our values by taking to heart the greater reality of the forms and the defectiveness of the corporeal world. We must recognize that the soul is a different sort of object from the body—so much so that it does not depend on the existence of the body for its functioning, and can in fact grasp the nature of the forms far more easily when it is not encumbered by its attachment to anything corporeal” (Kraut, par. 2).

While the above summary is only a snapshot of Plato’s contribution to philosophy, I find it an alarmingly accurate description of what most Christians believe about the soul (or, in charismatic circles, the spirit). And like any skewed doctrine, it starts true, as we are “urged” to thoughtfully consider the “defectiveness” of our world. That is a biblical perspective, to be sure.

But biblically speaking, it falls apart when it dismisses the body as something that we are ultimately better off without, an idea that later formed the core of Gnostic philosophy.

Take the following from Robert Gundry:

“Plato’s dualistic contrast between the invisible worlds of ideas and the visible world of matter formed the substratum of Gnosticism, which started to take shape late in the first century and equated matter with evil, spirit with good.... Physical resurrection seemed abhorrent so long as matter was regarded as evil” (72).

Recall from Part One, where I identified the lie—that the body is evil because it is of the material world. But also recall that it is Adam’s flesh that Christ chooses to inhabit and, by extension, redeem.

While Plato’s doctrine says that the natural world is defective and that we ought to escape it, the gospel says that God loved this natural world so much that he sent his only begotten Son to rescue and then start the project of remaking it.

To quote Lewis yet again:

“Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy” (86).

With this idea in mind, I would argue that Plato’s influence on Christian thought regarding the immaterial aspect of the spirit has produced, if not an antichrist doctrine, something dangerously close to one.

Recall from 2 John that “many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist” (1:7). If Christ chose flesh as the primary vehicle for rescuing creation,[1] what are we saying to him and about him if we reject flesh on the grounds of it being cumbersome to our “purer” and seemingly more spiritual disembodied souls?

Allow me to reframe the question in the affirmative. If Plato’s dualism seeks to lower and dissolve the same body Christ aims to raise and glorify, then Platonic dualism is opposed to Christ—i.e., anti-Christ.

(Note: some of you might be quick to reference Paul’s use of the word “flesh” in Romans and elsewhere to mean something opposed to a more spiritual mode of being, but that word in context refers to our pattern of sinful habits in Adam’s fallen condition and thus our failure to meet the requirements of God’s Law, which Jesus does meet. But luckily for me, I have not set out to expound on Romans, so I’ll leave it at that for now).

To be human is to be created in God’s image, and to carry out this daunting task requires a body in some shape or fashion. And while our bodies may be of the Adamic corruptible sort for now, the incorruptible and indestructible life of which Jesus is the glowing prototype will soon overtake it.[2]

Or, to remix Paul, we will not be finished blinking before the lightning has struck.[3]

Assumption 3: As spiritual beings, humans possess innate immortality that allows the spirit or soul to transcend bodily existence when the body dies.

This is an extension of the second assumption and, like that idea, stems from Gnostic teachings that were mainly foreign to first-century Judeo-Christian thought. According to Gundry, “the contents of a Gnostic library discovered in the 1940s at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, give evidence that a full-blown Gnostic mythology did not yet exist at the time Christianity arose” (73).

Yet, we know that while the Sadducees rejected the soul’s immortality and the resurrection from the dead, the Pharisees subscribed to and upheld both ideas. Thus, questions of immortality and resurrection were circulating when Christ entered the scene.

But when Christ enters that scene, he begins the work of resetting and reframing messianic and soteriological expectations (excluding Luke 20:39, where we see the Pharisees openly agreeing with Jesus while still failing to grasp the scope of his intentions).

Furthermore, two things become clear in Jesus’ dealings with these unique groups:

• The Sadducees revered the Pentateuch as an ultimate good; Jesus said that he came to fulfill the same and that it all pointed to him.

• The Pharisees revered the spirit of the Law and hoped for a resurrection of the dead; Jesus embodied the Holy Spirit through a life of compulsive obedience (Torrance, 19) and said he was the resurrection.

Suppose I diverge from the Pharisees’ notions regarding the soul’s immortality. In that case, I do so with the following logic: to say that we possess something innately transcendent, such as an immortal soul, is to say that we don’t need the Incarnation, which would be to shroud our Christology in vague, shadowy incoherencies.

Because of such incoherencies, we might often hear someone claim, in an off-handed way, that all religions are essentially the same. But the problem with Christianity is that, in its truest form, it is not a religion at all—it is a person.

Remember that Paul was also a Pharisee (and a good one) until he met the risen Jesus on the Damascus Road.[4] But Paul’s experience and knowledge as a Pharisee could only get him so far. In the end, his former theology gave way to a higher Christology. So, perhaps we can employ a pinch of caution before adopting a Pharisee’s perspective.

Biblically speaking, if we do possess immortality, it is only because immortality is innate to Jesus himself, for in him, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:29).

If I may be allowed a cliché, emphasis is everything.

The Errors 

Now that we have covered the assumptions, let’s move on to the errors. The topical question’s first fundamental error is that it is not biblical. And by that, I mean if you search for it in the Bible, good luck on your quest.

And while I have already explained how and why the question’s inference from scripture is suspect, some might still say, “Well, the Trinity is never mentioned in the Bible either, but we have defendable evidence that it was a concept in circulation among the early church.” Very well (regarding the Trinity).

But while the contemporary, Americanized church insists on the postmortem reward of going to Heaven and escaping eternal hellfire—and has the nerve to call this soteriology—I believe the New Testament insists on a solution more applicable to the problem at hand: “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). 

Indeed, the Lord’s prayer is not for our disembodied souls or spirits to shuffle off their mortal coils and ascend skyward. Rather, the prayer is that God’s kingdom will come to earth because it is his will to dwell among us in bodily form and launch the grand campaign of setting right a world gone wrong.

The question’s second fundamental error is not as much a scriptural error (though it still is to a degree, which I intend to demonstrate) so much as a logical one. And the most logical answer I might give to the question, “Do you know where you would go if you died today?” would be, “No, and neither do you.”

To be clear, I can and should deliver this reply with all due respect. But if you still contend that you know for sure, I ask you to return to the same Bible on which you establish your belief and consider the following admonition: “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). In other words, avoid certainty like the plague.

Meanwhile, the most biblical answer might be to quote the Psalmist: “When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.” (Psalm 146:4). The writer of Ecclesiastes echoes this idea when he writes, “in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom” (9:10).

Paul, speaking in the light of Christ’s resurrection, chose different language but conveyed a similar idea: “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13). Paul then emphasizes Christ’s resurrection as the hope for those who have fallen asleep (which solves the infant mortality dilemma we wrestled with earlier).

This is crucial for reorienting our traditional view of afterlife toward a more biblical framework of understanding 1) death as the consequence of sin and 2) Jesus as the person (body) through whom death devours itself from the inside out.

Please note that I gave the logical response before the biblical to draw attention to the apparent fact—no one can know what happens after death because the only way to know, scientifically, is to die. That goes for the biblical authors, as well. And for now, I’m going to exclude NDEs (near-death experiences) to ascertain “proof,” given the volume of intense debate within that field of study, not to mention that people of different faiths often report experiences that only serve to reaffirm their religious persuasion.

Instead, my emphasis remains on the biblical thinking about death, which the authors rendered not in terms of afterlife but rather in terms of 1) Adam’s curse (a.k.a., the Fall) and 2) Christ’s redemption of the created universe.

1. In the OT, death is a cessation of being: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen. 3:19). The point here is that death, according to Genesis, is a curse (an idea we will revisit).

2. In the NT, death is a place or state of slumber for those in Christ. For those outside of Christ, it is the same sleep, but one where the waking will be to an everlasting judgment (2 Thess. 1:9).

So, with the evidence I have given thus far, I am troubled by a conundrum: Christians believe that the dead in Christ are in Heaven with God, yet Christ himself could not ascend to his Father in Heaven until after he rose bodily from the dead.

Perhaps one could argue that his ascension provides a place for those who sleep. But, if they who sleep in Christ are with God in spirit (whatever that means), I find it odd that the rules applied to Christ as the Son of Man do not apply to the rest of us. To be clear, I am not saying it is impossible, but that I find it odd.

According to Romans, Paul believed that the key to sonship was the physical resurrection of his body from the dead, for it was the Resurrection that vindicated Christ as the firstborn Son of God (1:4):

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (8:22-25).

If you are of a more charismatic persuasion, perhaps you will tell me that you have already been adopted into sonship. Congratulations, with all sincerity. Meanwhile, I still wait for my body to be redeemed. This is the hope for which my spirit groans, the elemental construct to which I must return to be remade.

Forgive me if I am not satisfied with my adoption being limited to a heart-warming but otherwise useless metaphor. I can call myself a son all day long. But until I am vindicated by the power of either transfiguration or resurrection (whichever comes first), I am a candidate for sonship only.

Faith produces the righteousness (sonship) over which death has no power. But to be vindicated by faith as a son of God, I must become a new creation just as Christ became and inaugurated the New Creation when he walked out of his tomb.

And this next point is even more critical: I have no victory, inherent immortality, or eternal nature apart from these characteristics summed up in and through the Incarnation and the Resurrection.

And neither do you.

Death Defeated

Earlier, I mentioned that I would revisit the point of God pronouncing death as a curse on Adam and his generations as the penalty for sin. Allow me to return to it now within the context of a more radical claim that, once again, hails back to my assertion in Part I about atheism being the better way forward.

Here goes nothing: the atheist view of what happens to a person when they die is more biblical than the so-called Christian view.

Now, what am I up to here?

The atheist believes that when a person dies, that’s it—no more thoughts, no more consciousness. Recall my earlier quotations from Psalm 146 and Ecclesiastes 9 affirming the same view. But here, some might quote Isaiah: “The realm of the dead below is all astir to meet you at your coming; it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you— all those who were leaders in the world; it makes them rise from their thrones—all those who were kings over the nations” (14:9).

This could counter my claim, except for what we encounter in Jonah: “From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry” (2:2). We know from that story that Jonah is not dead; he is trapped inside a giant fish.

If Jonah can get away with referring to the realm of the dead with poetic license, then so can Isaiah. We might even affirm that the biblical authors used poetic language to convey ideas for which they had no other rubric (Jesus was in the same habit, but more so for our benefit).

If the biblical language surrounding death is more often poetic than literal, what can we conclude about death as an inescapable reality? Well, the first thing we ought to conclude is that death is evil and adversarial to God’s intentions for humanity, and the second is that “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12).

Consider the following dilemma: if the atheist is wrong, and we find after death an afterlife where the faithful ascend to Heaven and the unfaithful crowd into Hell, what exactly did Christ achieve?

What is the point of defeating death (1 Cor. 15:26) and bodily rising from the grave if, on the other side of death, we enter eternity as uncoupled, disembodied souls? That does not sound like a penalty (though Hell certainly does), and death does not sound like an enemy—at least not an enemy that warrants thwarting via the largest-scale rescue mission of all time.

Recall one of my earlier remarks, now edited for clarity: the Platonic doctrine of disembodiment harms our Christology because it downgrades death from an enemy to something more like a nuisance.

For death to be a significant consequence of sin, it must impress us with its finality, just as it impressed Christ’s disciples when his body was taken down from the cross and entombed. Did they host an after-funeral homegroup to assure one another that Jesus was safe at home (with himself?) and could finally rest in peace?

No, they did not have the luxury we take for granted of entrusting their belated friend and relative to a higher power. How could they? Their Lord was dead, and he was the higher power, or so they had vainly hoped. That’s the point—death is final. It always has been for the just and the unjust alike.

Or, at least, it was until Jesus upstaged it.

But because the disciples failed to understand the prophets concerning Jesus’ death and resurrection (Luke 24:25-26), they endured a weekend of quiet hopelessness as they came to grips with a brutal reality. At worst, their Lord was a false messiah. At best, he was a wise, righteous prophet who, like all God-fearing Jews before him, would rest safely in Abraham’s bosom, meaning he would be protected in God’s promise to Abraham and sealed in Abraham’s righteousness (Hebrews 11:39-40).

Luckily, we know better because we know the rest of the story. We know that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). The dichotomy is self-evident, and nowhere in that dichotomy is space given to a disembodied afterlife. If I have made any point, I hope it is this—afterlife, by its nature, is antithetical to God’s will as manifested in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself.

Or, to quote N.T. Wright (I take every chance I can get):

“The traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage, postmortem journey represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope. Bodily resurrection is not just one odd bit of that hope. It is the element that gives shape and meaning to the rest of the story of God's ultimate purposes” (par. 2).

As I said, the atheist view of what happens to a person when they die is fundamentally more biblical than the so-called Christian view. But the genuinely biblical view is even higher resolution, for it says, through Jesus: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die” (John 11:25-26).

I make no claims to understand this affirmation’s mechanics other than to say and to drive home yet again my thesis: where we go seems far less biblical than who we know—and the “who” claims to be the resurrection and the life.

Models and Semantics

If you are still with me, I want to emphasize a point lurking in the subtext of my claims, which I have yet to bring to light. If there is a state of being in God’s presence after death but before a literal resurrection in Christ at a certain point in time, and if we want to characterize that state as a Heaven where we enjoy the rewards of eternal salvation, fine by me. Indeed, I welcome that reality.

But my point remains: such a reality can only exist because Christ “is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). In other words, it is only through an Incarnational lens that such a reality can be conceived, much less be said to exist.

Still, I maintain that the Bible and its authors are not the least concerned with afterlife. Instead, the Bible emphasizes eternal life through New Creation, where the timeline is not linear but circular. All who lived and died before Christ and all who live and die after him will be caught up in the same Exodus event that we call the Resurrection. This is the hope in which we are saved.

As to how we envision such a timeline, observe the following diagram called “Tragedy and Hope: Biblical Perspectives on Heaven and Hell.”[5]

In this graphic inspired by Tim Mackie's podcast, “Heaven w/ Christ” appears as an intermediate state that follows physical death. As I recall, N.T. Wright also uses a similar analogy in his phrase, “life after life after death.” Again, this is fine by me (and I defer to the Ph. D.s whenever I can). 

But as I viewed the diagram and considered its linear implications, I was reminded of something I once read in a science textbook, where I had to study a model of atomic and subatomic particles.

The first thing I remember from that textbook is not the structure of the particles (which has long since passed through my mental incinerator to make room for less lucrative interests), but rather a disclaimer offered alongside the models, which read something like this: these are simplified representations.

While I think the above timeline is an ingenious way to capture the split between the traditional view of “afterlife” and the biblical view (which I hope I have emphasized), it is prone to the same limitations as the textbook. It is what N.T. Wright might refer to as a “broken signpost,” pointing us toward the final reality but not the reality itself.

The medium is not the only limitation. We struggle to envision a reality where God unravels time and space into their divine and final states, not to be abolished but to culminate in Christ as more time and space than we can yet comprehend. At the risk of sounding mystical, we might one day find a reality in which time and space are alive and, dare I say it, happily married—a mirror of the union between Christ and his spotless bride.

If I have lost you at this point, don’t worry; I have also lost myself. Suffice it to say that because of our conceptual limits, we have defaulted to the lowest-resolution image of the biblical hope in Christ by reducing that hope to a mere question of what happens to us when we die.

While such a question may be palatable to the lowest common denominator, I think I have a better one (or, if not better, at least more biblical): when the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night, will we be ready?[6]

My question invokes an essential, underlying premise—if there is such a thing as a day of the Lord, then we might conclude that God intends to go on acting in time and space through both the person of Jesus and the infilling of the Holy Spirit, that is, Christ in us.

After all, time and space are the abode of bodies. Ironic that modern Christendom should emphasize man’s urgency to become a disembodied spirit when the Bible emphasizes the Holy Spirit’s urgency to become an embodied man.

Such urgency extends even to us, as Jesus lost no time in ascending to God’s right hand so that we might be filled with the same Spirit that raised him from the dead (Rom. 8:11). If my words seem too mysterious, only note whether they echo the teachings of scripture, then pause and reflect.

Outro 

To put the original question to bed, allow me to answer it afresh within a biblical framework. If I died today, I have no idea where I would go—but I know to whom I belong. I have no desire to hypothesize what becomes of the mind or the soul after death, for my eyes are fastened on the hope and the mystery embodied in the one who defeated death.

Vague promises of eternal disembodiment in either Heaven or Hell have robbed us of the resurrection power that would set us apart from the systems of this world, both political and religious. We are not called to be people who escape the agonies of Hell to attain heavenly bliss. No, we are called to be people for whom death has lost its sting, even in the face of suffering and seeming defeat.

When we meet Christ and choose to walk with him, all questions of what happens after death slip away. Should we glance over our shoulder, we might see those questions stripped of their philosophical worth, laid bare by the desert winds. And then we might hear the Lord say to us, as he said to Peter, “What does that matter? You follow me.”

P.S. I know some of you are thinking: “But didn’t Jesus descend into Hell?” Good question. I hope to offer my thoughts on that in Part III.

Works Cited

Finochio, Gabriel. “Hell: Why Universalism is Wrong.” TheosU, 2022, https://my.theosu.ca/programs/hell?cid=1959621&permalink=hell-hot-topic-lesson-1

Gundry, Robert H. A Survey of the New Testament: 5th Edition. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2012.

Kraut, Richard. “Plato.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford University, Feb. 2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/plato/. Accessed 03 May 2022.

Harris, Sam. “The God Debate II: Harris vs. Craig.” YouTube, uploaded by University of Notre Dame, 12 Apr. 2011, 

Lewis, C. S. “Mere Christianity.” The C. S. Lewis Signature Classics. New York, HarperCollins, 2017.

Mackie, Tim. “Tragedy and Hope: Biblical Perspectives on Heaven and Hell.” Exploring My Strange Bible. BibleProject.com, https://d1bsmz3sdihplr.cloudfront.net/media/Study%20Notes/emsb-notes-heavenhell.pdf, Accessed 03 May 2022.

The Bible. New International Version. Bible Gateway, 1993,

https://www.biblegateway.com/

, Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.

Torrance, T.F., and Robert T. Walker. Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ. Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press, 2008.

Wright, N.T. “Heaven is Not Our Home.” Christianity Today, April 2008. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/april/heaven-is-not-our-home.html, accessed 4 May 2022.

Footnotes

[1] See Romans 8:3.

[2] See Heb. 7:16 and 1 Cor. 15:53.

[3] See 1 Cor. 15:52.

[4] See Acts 9.

[5] Although the image and linked PDF are attributed to Tim Mackie’s podcast series, Exploring My Strange Bible, I cannot verify if his team developed this resource.

[6] See 1 Thess. 5:2, 2 Pet. 3:10, and Rev. 16:15.

Prologue

What follows is a layman's attempt at a theological argument, which I suppose makes it a shot in the dark. By taking this shot, I risk the assumption that no stray dart will cause harm. But I think my assumption is low-risk for the following reasons:

1. I will only be read by a few people.

2. These same people are confident in their faith but not so arrogant as to avoid a challenge.

3. Metaphorical arrows fired into a metaphorical abyss don't usually derail someone's life-size relationship with their Creator. 

As for the writing itself, I share ideas I've wrestled with for many years. In the contest, I've come to such a point of mental and physical exhaustion that I feel the only way to find rest is to publish the work in its current, incomplete form and allow more educated people to obliterate it. The gnawing reminder that I am not a studied, credentialed theologian has kept me from my writing desk, and perhaps that is not terrible. Like any sober person, I am persuaded that shooting anything in the dark is unwise. 

A few years ago, I ultimately abandoned the material. I told myself I didn't know what I was doing. The Samwise Gamgee in me decided it was best to let the Gandalfs of the world do their job. Meanwhile, I would go back to gardening in the Shire. This, I told myself, would please both God and man. And I knew I was bound to get most of it wrong, anyway.

After a prolonged but not uneventful hiatus, I returned to analyze the first draft. What I found confirmed my suspicions: I could not remain true to a theme, my ideas were chaotic, and a sequence of poorly founded theological affirmations blurred into what, I was sure, must be the prosaic equivalent of a Michael Bay film. Even for careless prose, this was not to be borne. So, I returned to the work to seek out that elusive theme that I hoped, by some spiritual guidance, lay hidden like a diamond in the rough despite my whirlwind of creative but imprecise ideas.

Sifting through a series of claims that might be viewed as controversial, liberal, or even heretical, I found a familiar story in the eye of the storm. It was so familiar that I wondered whether the real problem was not that the material was unfocused, misguided, or heretical so much as unoriginal. Or, to quote Chesterton: "I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."

At the core of it all, I found a story about God's self-denying love in the person of Jesus, his everlasting life, and his redemptive power to overcome what the apostle Paul referred to in 1 Corinthians as the last enemy to be defeated, death (15:26). Big deal, I thought. Everyone knows this story.

Don't they?

Perhaps. Or perhaps not. After all, there is an unsettling trend in our American religious culture characterized by a lack of critical thought and investigation of the scriptures. And by investigation, I don't mean textual vivisection, where the aim is to pick scripture apart piece by piece and have it turn on itself while it writhes and screams on the floor. The sorts of people who engage in that reading style are anything but exegetical in their approach, and what they produce can hardly be called hermeneutics. There is no need to present examples of them here other than to say that if you've ever seen a fragment of scripture reduced to a sociopolitical meme on social media, you've encountered both the fruit and dead-end limits of their critique. Ignore them if you can.

No, when I speak of the lack of critical thought, I speak in the context of what I reluctantly label the median Christendom of the present age, a culture where few talk about immortality, the physicality of the resurrected Christ, or the power of the Holy Spirit opposite suffering. Likewise, we find a culture either oblivious to the philosophical problem of evil or, if not oblivious, afraid to get too close to its shadow. And lastly, we find a culture uninterested in the Resurrection and with no urgency for repenting from dead works.

We find too much obstinate loyalty to ideas that, when investigated, remain tenuous if not unproven. Conversely, we see too much avoidance, confusion, and indifference toward those scriptural tenets that seem to me most self-evident.

Indeed, what once was self-evident is now mostly forgotten.

Note: If you have made it this far, wonderful. Please read and enjoy the first part of what I hope will be a larger, four-part series on what I have gathered from reading and interpreting the Bible with as few cultural lenses as I can manage.

Granted, it's no easy task. But let's make an effort, shall we?

Part I - The Body

1. The lie: the body (flesh and blood) is of the material world and therefore evil.

2. The truth: the body (flesh and blood) is of the material world and therefore fallen.

What's the difference? Only one word, and yet the difference is remarkable. According to Christian eschatology, whatever is evil must be destroyed at the end of the age. But that which is fallen can, by self-evident implication, be raised again to its original stature. It can be redeemed. As I said, what a remarkable difference one word makes.

So, should I then insult my Creator by believing the lie? Should I tell him that my body, formed of earth, is that part of me least like him? If you are reading this, you likely know the story: when he took the red dirt and forged humankind in his image, he looked at what he had made, breathed into it, and called it good. For no one is good but him, and what he creates must, by extension, reflect that goodness.

And, of the unaccountable ways in which God might have revealed himself to the world, he chose flesh and bone, body and blood; not the present dissociated body that you and I inhabit, but a bodily existence nonetheless—that first flesh unified with his Spirit and vivified by it. One could almost imagine a beating heart being secondary to the Spirit's life-giving power before the Fall, a backup engine in the event of sin (God forbid).

But from the moment of this body's alienation in Adam, the God of Heaven sought to renew flesh and make it good again through not merely Man as such, but rather the Son of Man and the only begotten of God. The plan began immediately, almost as if it had been the real plan.

Skipping over the narrative of that plan (you can find it in the Old Testament), we come to our midpoint protagonist: Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. According to the story, did Christ abandon his body in the tomb? It's not a trick question. The answer is no. He ascended to the eternal realm not as a disembodied spirit but as a man, in a human body and marked by his wounds: "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness" (Colossians 2:9-10, NIV).

Bodily form. We can debate its meaning and arrive at varied interpretations. But whatever your belief, "supernatural" is the word for this event, for it is more natural than anything we can yet comprehend, a physicality and a power that defies both expectation and experience. Even so, I must drive home the point: the God of Heaven needed a body of his own to lead our bodies free from the captivity of death. If God is not man, man is not saved.

This is the original design restored. But what design can we study amid the indifferent chaos of our cosmos? We do not see order, only coincidence. Can we not conclude that design, if intelligent, would envision a different or better universe? This assumes that life as we know it is a less-than-optimal system. And so, it is. In isolation, separate from the realm of God, life is less than optimal and has existed in that fractured state as far back as we can remember.

If the world we know is the byproduct of sin rather than union with God, then perhaps our atheist brothers and sisters are not far off the mark: we are not in our present state the result of intelligent design but of a cosmic train-wreck. After all, what is so intelligent about an unpredictable world, one moment receptive to life and the next hostile toward it? Are we not at the mercy of those forces of nature subject only to the laws of time and chance?

We are asking the wrong questions (and for now, we'll overlook that presupposing such things as the laws of time and chance demands we acknowledge an older source or configuration of laws, farther back than we can yet reach).

Before I get to what I think the right questions might be, allow me a detour. For all practical purposes, I am a theist. However, I think of atheism as a sensible worldview relative to the common, low-resolution image of who and what "God" is in history. Relative to how God's nature and character have been portrayed in the modern world, I might even be an atheist for all impractical purposes. The general idea of God has gotten so out of hand that I would go as far as to say that if we intend to go on referring to him as "God," then I think atheism may be the better way forward.

Now, assuming I have not lost my Christian readers at this sudden turn, let me see if I can explain myself with what I think is the right sort of questions (or, at least, the right sort of tangents).

When consciousness awakens, finding itself endued with free will, it starts upon a universe with the potential to err. This is the risk inherent in the construct and the challenge of divine sovereignty. Divine and sovereign: these are two old words the modern world despises or, at the very least, dislikes. But we should appraise them fairly, for it is through divine sovereignty that we encounter grace. "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," says the Sovereign One (Hosea 6:6). Truly, to be holy and sovereign is to flood humanity with mercy unlike anything it has ever known. And according to Hebrews 10:10, Christ, as the last sacrifice, ushered in the age of mercy to end all sacrifices.

Yet divine sovereignty as a misconceived idea leads us to assume the following: if a righteous God did exist, he would not permit evil. And, if he does allow evil, he is an unrighteous God. But here, we ignore the element of free will, the god-image within man that in communion with the Father will produce the fruit of righteousness and, in rebellion against him, will cease to bear the divine image, leading to sin and its inescapable consequence, death. In this reality, it is now sin that takes on the sovereign image of humankind and propagates the cosmos with its terrifying likeness.

If we exclude this detail from our evaluation, we commit the logical fallacy of drawing inferences about the puzzle from only a few pieces. For an all-powerful God to erase humanity's faults in one swift stroke, that same God must break his covenant of trust with humanity and negate his omnipotence. To end human sovereignty, that self-government that has ever been the fruit of humankind living in perfect relationship with the sovereign Lord would be tyranny worse than death.

Here, some might say that the cross erased our faults, but I think that is to degrade the cross. It would be more accurate and pack more punch to say that Christ began the project of remaking the cosmos through the cross. And in that project, we now find ourselves wrestling not against flesh and blood but rather against principalities and powers (Eph. 6:12). You know, the forces of evil.

Am I justifying the reality of evil, of death? No. I could say that evil and death are present because we live in a fallen world, and then I could base that conclusion on the authority of scripture. But this oversimplifies a problem that demands every ounce of our God-given intellect, humility, and patience. The Genesis story vaguely accounts for natural evil by suggesting that Adam forfeited his dominion over the earth (natural evil refers to tornadoes, floods, diseases, unlucky circumstances, and the many other random acts of nature with an unsettling proclivity for decimating our lives).

As for willful evil, to say that the early Genesis narrative of Adam's sin presents us with the best possible explanation for darkness and injustice is to misinterpret a story that was written not to hand us a contrived answer for the problem of evil but to engender in our hearts a mystery and a hope which points beyond the problem toward what is unseen and yet fulfilled in the risen Christ.

As N.T. Wright puts it,

"The various accounts of evil functioned, not as scientific 'explanations', but as signposts to dark and puzzling realities. Human rebellion, idolatry, and arrogance, mingled with shadowy forces from beyond the present world, had infected the world, humans and Israel itself" (740).

In the wake of so much death and injustice in the world, people of the post-Enlightenment, post-modern era could no longer stomach the idea of an all-powerful and good God who permitted and even willed evil. It's not that their logic is unsound, but rather that it is applied to a fictitious, low-resolution caricature of an absentee God, one unlikely to reduce himself to the confines of time and space to be brutally beaten and humiliated, and ultimately to expire on a Roman cross (never mind how clear the Gospel makes that point).

And I say, "willed evil," not only to again draw attention to our faulty understanding of sovereignty but to steer us back to my previous, radical claim:

The general idea of God has gotten so out of hand that I would go as far to say that if we intend to go on referring to him as "God," then I think atheism may be the better way forward.

As I was writing this, I decided to pause and check my email. Among other notifications, I received an automated email from a church inviting me to start my Sunday morning with a song from Elevation Worship; the email included a link to the song on YouTube. So, curious as ever, I clicked the link to the video.

Within one minute, I encountered the following lyrics (sung beautifully by artists who know what they're doing, I might add): "You would cross an ocean so I wouldn't drown." In this context, the "You" is meant to be Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or God, whichever one prefers. But what most struck me about the lyrics was not the ambiguity as to which member of the Trinity it might be sung, but rather that it implied something about Jesus that I'm not sure is biblical in its final rendering. Allow me to explain what I mean.

You may recall the following remark from my prologue: 

Likewise, we find a culture either oblivious to the philosophical problem of evil or, if not oblivious, afraid to get too close to its shadow. 

As to what I mean by this, I think the lyric about God crossing an ocean to save us from drowning presents a perfect example. But before elaborating further, let me establish two nonnegotiable tenets of my personal belief.

1. The first is that God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believed in the same Son would have eternal life (John 3:16).

2. The second is that God's love, expressed through the person and body of Jesus, is both macro and micro in its infinite scope—macro because it envelops the infinite cosmos, time, and space, and micro because it reaches me, a nobody outside my own social circle and a blip alongside the vastness of humanity.

You might be thinking: so, what does this have to do with the problem of evil or song lyrics about God crossing an ocean?

Well, let's try statistics. In Florida alone, ninety-eight children drowned in 2021 (Saeidi). Now, imagine being the parent of one of those children. And as the parent of one of those children, imagine being in a worship service, surrounded by hipster Christian millennials with their eyes closed, their hands held out in front of them as if waiting to be handed a slice of cake, singing about the God who crosses oceans (so they won't drown)—metaphorically speaking.

And that's just the problem. Our Americanized Christendom has reduced Jesus, the Incarnate Uncreated One, to an emotional crutch, a disembodied construct capable of little more than making us feel loved and babied while we soak in his "presence."

Forgive me for what I say next, but I feel compelled: To Hell with that nonsense.

Meanwhile, in the land of the living, Jesus is calling his true followers to plunge headfirst into a corrupt, broken, suffering world and (God help them) purify it, reset its shattered bones, and when all else fails, suffer with it.

Now, do you see what I mean about "the Church" being oblivious to the philosophical problem of evil? If he is the God who can cross oceans, what agency prevents him from crossing the street to prevent horror and tragedy? Well, none, if he is truly all-powerful. But if no agency exists that can prevent an omnipotent Creator from doing anything he wants, then we must conclude that the same Creator witnesses the tragedy and allows it to unfold. And these are just accidents. I've left out examples of willful evil like human trafficking, rape, and murder, among a list without end. Thus, the atheist is right to disavow such a God. But more importantly, Christianity is to blame for reducing God to the kind of caricature the atheist has every right to disavow. So, you might ask at this stage, how exactly should a good God be conceived in relation to a world subject to horror, tragedy, and despair? 

When in doubt, look to the Gospel—God becomes a man and then suffers horror, tragedy, and despair. In other words, and for some reason beyond my capacity to comprehend, God does not erase evil in the person of Jesus. Rather, he confronts it, and then—and this is where the going gets tough—he calls us to do the same. Nowhere in scripture has God promised us that he will cross oceans to save us. Rather, what he promises is something far less warm and fuzzy: The world hates you? Good. But remember that it hated me first (John 15:18).

So, my fellow Christians, forgive me if the only valid response I feel to a song about God crossing oceans to save me from drowning is to float both middle fingers over my head like bull horns while beelining for the nearest exit. We all have thorns in our sides; I suppose this one is mine.

In the same vein as the Church side-stepping the problem of evil is its insistence on a disembodied eternity. Note the following by one of the foremost intellectuals (and atheists) of our time, Sam Harris:

"The whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal wellbeing of human souls."

(00:59:01)

To give Mr. Harris credit, he knows from his careful study of religion that this is not the biblical point of Christianity and has said so publicly. But the key phrase in his statement is "or so it is imagined," to which I would ask, or so it is imagined by whom, exactly? If Sam Harris had made this claim to convey the biblical view of things accurately, he would have been guilty of a common hermeneutical mistake. But perhaps he made this mistake in jest to draw attention to a more disconcerting truth: it's the same mistake that millions of Christians in the West make every day when trying to explain their own religion and interpret their own Bibles.

But if believers know anything, they ought to know this: the point of Christianity is Christ, the Incarnate Ancient of Days, which is now officially and without any valid contention, not just the new way of being human, but the only way of being human. To be anything else is not to fall short of deity but to fall short of humanity. Paraphrasing T.F. Torrance, Robert T. Walker put it like this:

"There is no spaceless and timeless knowledge of God. We cannot therefore think of a static eternal God apart from the living God who actively makes himself known to us in time and space in the history of Israel and above all in Christ. Abstract western or eastern philosophical views of God are very different from the God who makes himself personally known in word and action in biblical history."

(Torrance, xli)

To this, I would add: to go on casting this story in the light of whether a postmortem, disembodied soul finds itself in either Heaven or Hell is to make a caricature of God and his Christ. So, if people of the post-modern world can no longer stomach the idea of an omnipotent and good God, perhaps it is because the Christian world has misapprehended him. And by that, I mean that we in the Christian world have done much to disembody the God who chose embodiment as the final means of remaking the cosmos and restoring humankind to the Adamic status of image-bearers.

After all, it's so much easier to aim at nothing than to aim at something. Just ask the servant who buried his talent (Matt. 25:14-30).

Biblically speaking, where we end up when we die is of no immediate consequence. If it were, the Bible would have more to say about it—but it does not. Hate me or love me when I tell you: the Bible says nothing about loved ones being reunited in an afterlife, nor does it say much about an afterlife, period (if you are paying attention). What the Bible does tell us is more mysterious and intriguing: "the Kingdom of God is already among you" (Luke 17:21).

Rather, who we become while we are here is of the highest consequence. As to my eternal reward, my hope is found in Christ alone. And the point of Christ is that he is still very much alive despite any cynical opinions to the contrary. Did not Paul say that we would be fools in the world's eyes because of this belief? We believe in a man conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, who as an adult claimed to be both the Son of Man and the Son of God, who was subsequently accused of blasphemy, then tortured and crucified, and three days later—came back to life after being dead. 

If at my death I am carried into God's presence and redeemed from the pit of eternal torment, it will only be so because of the Incarnation. It will only be so because the "whole point" is and always has been Jesus, the one who makes all things new, and thus once and for all lays low the strong arm of death.

Tragedy may beset us for a time, but we believe in the One who met tragedy head-on, who took all of it upon and into himself, and who, with his last words on the cross, echoed the despairing cry of Psalm 22 (My God, my God) knowing well that the same scripture ends with the following affirmation: "They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!" (v. 31).

So, if I haven't yet, I must drive home the point that when we refer to "God," we should be as specific as possible. We should be so precise as to remember the Gospel: if God is not man, man is not saved. If God is not Jesus of Nazareth, then no lamb has been slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8), and death still holds dominion over all things. Soak in that for a change.

As I said earlier, I am an atheist for all impractical purposes, just as the first and second-century Christians were atheists for rejecting the godhead of Caesar and proclaiming instead with vivid precision that God had decided to become one of us, die, and then return—a trick Caesar could have only imagined pulling off in his wildest dreams. 

So, with any luck, we are back to where we began:

1. The lie: the body (flesh and blood) is of the material world, therefore evil.

2. The truth: the body (flesh and blood) is of the material world, therefore fallen.

3. The truer truth: the body (flesh, blood, and soul) is remade in the image of God's only begotten Son and is now perfected through the Incarnation.

As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, "The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God" (145). First, God created man and called him good. Second, God became man to keep his word. And third of all, God filled humankind with himself so that, among other things, humanity could bear witness to the truth that Jesus is the man God became.

Christ's embodiment is so essentially Gospel that to go on ignoring it in the light of what the New Testament insists, I feel, would be an error of devastating consequence.

To be continued Part II - Disembodiment: The Great Lie. I know you can't wait.

Works Cited

Chesterton, G. Orthodoxy. Independently published, 2020.

Elevation Worship. "Jireh | Elevation Worship & Maverick City." YouTube, uploaded by Elevation Worship, 26 Mar. 2021, 

Harris, Sam. "The God Debate II: Harris vs. Craig." YouTube, uploaded by the University of Notre Dame, 12 Apr. 2011, 

Lewis, C. S. "Mere Christianity." The C. S. Lewis Signature Classics. New York, HarperCollins, 2017.

Saeidi, Mahsa. "98 children drowned in Florida in 2021, a record number, according to state data." WFLA, https://www.wfla.com/8-on-your-side/98-children-drowned-in-florida-in-2021-a-record-number-according-to-state-data/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.

The Bible. New International Version. Bible Gateway, 1993, https://www.biblegateway.com/, Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.

Torrance, T.F., and Robert T. Walker. Incarnation: the Person and Life of Christ. Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press, 2008.

Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2013.

The popular idea that the pursuit of theology must cancel out the pursuit of God’s presence is, in a word, false. The same notion in reverse is also false.

I say the idea is popular because I hear it come up often enough in any conversation that skims the shallows of biblical criticism and layman’s hermeneutics. And while I consider myself a layman among laymen, I do not consider myself a moron among morons. (Those of you who get to spend time with me regularly should take this as a compliment.)

Being somewhat intelligent at my best and viciously anti-moron at my worst, I am compelled to call out false dichotomies when they try to sneak by me. Note: I do not suggest that the compulsion is righteous.

Allow me to paraphrase seven variants of one false opposition as I’ve encountered it:

1. Theology doesn’t matter. Just follow Jesus.

2. Theology doesn’t matter. God triumphs in the end, and evil is self-defeating.

3. Theology doesn’t matter. Love God and love people.

4. Theology doesn’t matter. Pursue relationship (the presence of God).

5. Theology doesn’t matter. The religious leaders were theologians; the Apostles followed Christ.

6. Theology doesn’t matter. We should pursue oneness in the Body of Christ.

7. Theology doesn’t matter. We should be led by the Holy Spirit.

And so, I’ve found myself thwarted by what John Steinbeck referred to as the “authority of ignorance.” Here I mean ignorance in its etymological sense: the act of ignoring the false oppositions we create when wrestling with the details (and getting pinned down).

Now, allow me to reframe the above affirmations by stripping away their opposition:

1. Follow Jesus.

2. God triumphs.

3. Love God and love people.

4. Pursue relationship (the presence of God).

5. The religious leaders were theologians; the Apostles followed Christ.

6. We should pursue oneness in the Body of Christ.

7. We should be led by the Holy Spirit.

I assume most of us who believe the Bible can agree that these affirmations are true, even if a bit simplistic. So, I now ask you: how are any of these affirmations opposed to the pursuit of theology?

What is theology, anyway?

Let us define theology before we go any further. According to Merriam-Webster, theology is “the study of religious faith, practice, and experience; especially: the study of God and of God’s relation to the world.”

So, with this definition in view, let’s look again at the false opposition:

To study religious faith, practice, and experience, and to study God and His relation to the world:

1. Is to not follow Jesus.

2. Is a waste of time considering God’s ultimate triumph.

3. Will distract you from loving God and loving people.

4. Will distract you from pursuing a relationship with God.

5. Will make you a Pharisee, Sadducee, or a grumpy old member of the Sanhedrin.

6. Will cause division in the Body of Christ.

7. Is to reject being led by the Holy Spirit.

Framed this way, I now assume we can agree that the above affirmations are not only untrue but idiotic. Now, to reaffirm my opening argument: the idea that the pursuit of theology must cancel out the pursuit of God’s presence is, in a word, false. The same notion in reverse is also false.

But still, you may draw attention to one of the points above as a counter to my position. I’ve made it obvious for a reason:

The religious leaders were theologians; the Apostles followed Christ.

Allow me to expand this:

• The religious leaders were theologians who wanted to maintain the status quo (reasons for which may include corrupt personal agendas, blind adherence to dogma, skepticism toward would-be messiahs, etc.). We, too, can use theology to maintain the status quo. (We can also rely on a misunderstood idea of being led by the Holy Spirit to maintain the status quo and to keep ourselves enslaved to a wrong way of thinking, but I digress.)

• The Apostles followed Christ and, in the process, re-formulated theologies rooted in their Judaic context so that they might justify the promises to Israel fulfilled in Christ. Thus, once and for all, Israel could become the people through whom all nations could be saved, among other things.

So, one could say of the Apostles that, as they committed to following Jesus, proclaiming God’s triumph over death, loving God and loving people, pursuing a relationship with God and with the brethren, not being Pharisees or Sadducees, cultivating oneness in the Body of Christ, and being led by the Holy Spirit, they were also good theologians.

And why shouldn’t they be? They were good theologians because they studied the faith and practice and kept close their experiences. They paid attention to the past while pursuing the living Hope they had seen and touched.

In my not-so-humble opinion, it never entered their minds that the pursuit of God’s presence should detract or distract from the pursuit of wisdom (i.e., that which I have heretofore referred to as theology but which I now call by a name that might make you less likely to resist me), any more than it would enter the mind of a Renaissance man that his proficiency in music should detract or distract him from his proficiency in science. On the contrary, he does everything well.

We ignore theology at our own intellectual and spiritual peril

So, the next time you say, “Theology doesn’t matter,” consider if you are afraid to say what you mean. Don’t be afraid—just spit it out. Here, let me help you:

1. I don’t give a damn about theology. Just follow Jesus.

2. I don’t give a damn about theology. God triumphs in the end, and evil is self-defeating.

3. I don’t give a damn about theology. Love God and love people.

4. I don’t give a damn about theology. Pursue relationship (the presence of God).

5. I don’t give a damn about theology. The religious leaders were theologians; the Apostles followed Christ.

6. I don’t give a damn about theology. We should pursue oneness in the Body of Christ.

7. I don’t give a damn about theology. Just be led by the Holy Spirit.

But, seeing as how you just made seven theological affirmations in a row, I’d advise you to leave out the part about not giving a damn. Besides, you stand on the shoulders of men and women who did give… well, you get the idea.

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About a week before the 2020 election, while driving home from Orlando, I saw a sign that read, "In Trump We Trust." And all I could think was, "That'll have to be answered for, and probably sooner than we expect."

God will not be mocked.

Now, seeing America's Charismatic and Evangelical Christians teetering on the cusp of an existential crisis fills me with hope. Perhaps I need to see a pastor and, you know, get that looked at…

Dark humor aside, I find I have less in common with the bold-faced Christian nationalist worldview and what seems its self-evident aim to interweave "God" and country with each year that passes. At the same time, I remain convinced that just as Christ should become Lord of our lives, hearts, and minds, he should also become Lord of our communities, cities, states, and nations (which, I admit, makes me something of a Christian nationalist myself, though I can only hope more so in the vein of C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton). But as to how that is to happen and how I am to walk that line, I am uncertain.

But maybe that's a good thing. Perhaps a little uncertainty, a little trepidation, could help us walk that line—right through the center of boldness and humility, of fierce zeal for God's justice and the quiet, stoic patience needed to trust Him fully.

In case you are unsure of what I'm talking about, I am alluding to two recent phenomena, both of which require a caveat: 

1. First, I am referencing the union between the American Evangelical and Charismatic churches and the candidacy/presidency of Donald Trump.

   • Caveat: I understand that it may be unfair to generalize Evangelical and Charismatic, knowing that both categories comprise many people groups exhibiting diverse political and theological opinions. Still, I use these categories to make my life easier and establish a firm albeit debatable thesis.

2. Second, I am referencing the variety of so-called modern-day Charismatic prophets who proclaimed Donald Trump's re-election, citing it as the will of God.

   • Caveat: I understand that a few of these leaders have since repented to their followers and congregations.

Now that we've covered what I'm rambling about, let's get back to it. Where was I? Oh yes—God will not be mocked. While I'm sure a political sign on the freeway affirming unmitigated trust in "Trump" is of no consequence to the Uncreated One, I'm also persuaded it may represent a larger constituency of American "Christians" than we would like to admit. 

And that, if true, suggests to me that these same Christians have set before them as precarious a ledge to navigate as the self-deceiving ideations of the dreaded radical left.

But I'm not writing to the radical left—why would I? Their epistemological framework is so skewed that such a noble but foolish attempt would implode well before lift-off. Their political ideology is their religion, in and through which they spawn proselytes like swarms of baby spiders. You can find them crawling all over social media, entangled in their own webs and drowning in their own vitriolic bile.

But alas, there I find you also, "Beloved," spinning webs of your own. Should we not, therefore, take heed lest our political ideology become our religion? Or am I too late?

The great delusion...

At the heart of "In Trump We Trust," we circle around again to the problem of misguided prophecies and, by extension, false prophets. I'm not going to waste time detailing what some of these talking heads had to say about Trump's God-ordained re-election or the wicked schemes they believe must have succeeded to oust him from office. Rather, I want to target the crux of their delusion, which is this: like the radical left whom they abhor, they have conflated their political aims with a pseudo-divine, super-moral, transcendent self-righteousness without a face or a name—a nonhuman.

What do I mean by this?

Such religious-political aims, when prioritized, obscure the truth of the Gospel, a truth to which no one can lay claim because of its universal transcendence and because it demands more of us than we can give, in and of ourselves. As a matter of reflex, I am now wary of anyone claiming exclusive access to the truth, especially when that truth coincides with preexisting beliefs, expectations, and self-imposed interpretations.

Thus far, my study of the Bible has led me to this conclusion: Truth is a person, and He has a name. Truth emptied himself on a cross not to transform our politics but our hearts. He did not live, die, and live again so that we could keep our guns, nor did he preach to undermine or resist the god-emperor of Rome, who stood in idolatrous rebellion against the one God of all creation, time, and space.

God does not need to undermine all that he will outlast.

Rome had long been aborting its babies, had long festered in the decay of sexual immorality and bloodlust. The Herodians became Roman tetrarchs, while Pharisees and Sadducees vied for spiritual power within a political context that smiled down at their struggle with something like parental condescension.

Our claim to the truth within America's political context may be a joke that deserves more than a condescending smile. But, thank the God of Heaven, none of us have to get what we deserve. 

God has become man and thus has gathered all of humanity into his kinship. This is the Gospel we preach. Any other gospel is from the evil one.

Perhaps that is too absolute and severe a judgment on my part, but I hold to this: any gospel that does not point toward the lordship of Christ, the utmost Human, is a false and nonhuman gospel, and any pretender prophet who propels such a message is, by extension, equally false.

And so, I believe it's time for the Body of Christ to turn away from America's so-called prophets and instead read the Bible for themselves, allowing it to speak on its own terms, in its own context.

Test and approve...

At this point, some may ask if I have given up on prophecy or prophetic ministry altogether. The short answer is: No, I have not. The longer answer is: We have a responsibility to ourselves and one another to qualify all prophecy in the light of the Gospel.

In Romans, Paul offers the oft-quoted axiom: 

"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." (12:2, NIV).

Let's break that down, shall we?

1. Don't conform to this world's pattern.

2. Renew your perspective and thoughts instead.

3. Then, test and approve God's will.

Test… and approve. This is the language of scientific methodology. So, let's get scientific.

1. Prophecy is the conveying of God's will to individuals. 

2. You cannot claim to be a prophet and shy away from the burden that comes with it—that what God tells you to speak, you speak, e.g., "Thus, sayeth the Lord." 

3. You can, however, claim to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit and avoid that burden altogether, which I believe is the preferable way to live. 

4. But whatever your choice, Paul advises the rest of us to test and approve God's will. 

5. Therefore, it stands to reason that we should test and approve anything claiming to be prophecy.

God knows prophecy is wasted on the cult of American politics. Even so, most self-proclaimed charismatic prophets spend the bulk of their efforts here because confirmation bias sells. They offer profane prophecies in which a 50/50 outcome will determine whether they are true or false prophets. I don't know about you, but I'll take those odds to Vegas any day of the week. Had I known prophecy was as simple as flipping a coin to determine which of two primary candidates might win the Oval Office, I might have enrolled in Hogwarts, er, I mean Prophetic Training Ministry, years ago.

But all jabbing aside, recall that it was the prophet Isaiah who wrote: 

"They say to the seers, 'See no more visions!' and to the prophets, 'Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions'" (30:10, NIV). 

For too long, many Christians have looked to America to be a Christian nation, appealing to a bygone time and claiming we have strayed from our Godly roots, ever oblivious to the watchful, Deist Eye of Providence lurking in plain sight on our nation's currency, ever ignoring the phallic obelisk erected as a monument to ancient Egyptian demons. 

Despite our best intentions, we cannot pour new wine into an old wineskin. For that reason alone, I can imagine very few things more to be dreaded than the idea of a Christian nation.

Per Kierkegaard, such an institution would be self-defeating—for the New Testament identifies the follower of Christ by his being opposed to "he that is in the world." Hence, Kierkegaard's paradox: a Christian nation ceases to be Christian when it takes that title for its own. Instead, it becomes something more like a great prostitute… if I may be so bold.

My aim here is not to become cynical about America's future; rather, I want to remain sober about its past (a subject whereon I do not claim to be an expert). But more than this, I want to see a people in whom Christ, not politicized Christianity, has become the focal point. I want to see a people in whom perfect love has driven out fear, including the fear of woke politics, postmodernism, Marxism, hedonism, angry Twitter mobs, and whatever else the media puppeteers, from their obscure vantage on Mount Olympus, demand we acknowledge.

The time has come for God's people to stop playing the world at its own game.

The so-called prophets who stood behind Donald Trump, who prayed for and proclaimed his victory in the 2020 U.S. election, now have the precarious task of covering their asses and securing new seats of influence, assuming any are left to snag. They have taken up the mantle of Balaam (whose ass tried to save him) and at great personal peril. Perhaps many of them can still read your mail or tell you what you ate for breakfast two weeks ago. What of it? Pharaoh's conjurers could transmute wooden staves into writhing serpents along with the very best (or worst) of their ilk.

But in these last days...

To vote for a presidential candidate according to my conscience is my right as an American citizen. But if I am a believer—specifically, a believer in Christ, firstborn from among the dead—my true loyalties must lie with the government that is not from this world. And so should yours, if Christian you claim to be. Vote according to conscience, then, but more importantly, live as if you truly believe the hope in which you have been saved. Live as if you know that to hope in anything or anyone except the One whom God sent is idolatry on par with Baal worship.

But above all, live as if you believe the following to be a reality:

"In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe." (Hebrews 1:1-2, NIV).

Test and approve. Think, consider, and welcome Logos on all occasions. Both the Bible and the Son speak for themselves.

Let them.

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The evil of murder, of racism, of social injustice, of systemic prejudice (fill in the blank for whatever comes next)—these will be cast like veils over our perception until blinded in our relentless pursuit of justice, we can no longer tell our friends from our enemies.

And, most important of all, we will cease praying for both.

Like the avenging disciple, we may feel inclined to take up the sword and lop off the closest ear, enemy or no. We will rage at the bloodshed a thousand miles away and grow deaf to some gnawing desperation that feeds just two doors down.

Soon enough, people will find themselves in groups: those who stand in solidarity, those who resist in anger, and those who hide in fear. If I have to choose one of these three hills to die on, then I suppose the first is the most like euthanasia.

Although this sorting of identities into traceable groups may arise organically, in the end, a manufactured and curated morality will take the stage, placing its impossible demands on sovereign individuals. Its final demand may sound something like this, “Either you are with us, or you are against us.”

It will hold every aspiration to righteousness up to eviscerating scrutiny and shout “Hypocrite!” before we can erase our internet history. Under this self-imposed regime, all righteousness will become self-righteous. Blind to its nature, this new order will call itself a revolution against oppression. But its victims will be you and me.

Even when no one is around, the problem of evil demands the leveling of blame. Strike that: especially when no one is around.

All is vanity.

We have been swallowed by a world where communication now exists in a vacuum, where sound cannot travel. No one can hear your voice, only your opinion. You and I are being reduced to static images, frozen in time, of the curated good we uphold and the curated evil we deride. Ironic, considering that we were created to be living images of perfect Love. But we are still eating from the same damned tree, and one rotten apple is as good as another to those who have never tasted anything better.

But you and I, we have tasted better. Haven't we?

Is there a punchline to all of this? Yes, and we are that punchline. Curated morality begets a curated evil that will soon sit on a throne of accusation and watch, delighted, as we devour each other.

Now, all I can hope to think, say, or do is echo the plea of the last New Testament prophet when he said, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

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(because prologues are cool)

While dining at my sister’s house, I sat beside my nephew, Leader, who was seven or eight years old at the time. He is eleven now. Guided by a profound impulse, he decided to ask me a series of theological questions, which he has been known to do at odd times (for example, he once told me I had to “fight the dragon” so that I could become “a king of forgiveness”).

“Unky Adam,” he said.

“Yes?” I said, turning toward him.

“Do you love God more than money?” he asked, his smile as big as a crescent moon.

“Yes,” I said. I returned to my food, thinking that would be the end of it.

“Do you love God more than houses?” he asked, his tenor elevated. He seemed to know well enough that sequels should raise the stakes.

“Yes,” I said.

His smile broadened. I decided not to take the next bite, knowing that another question must follow in the series. To him, it was a kind of game where the questions must be part of a trilogy.

“Do you love God more than the world?” he asked, raising his volume to something like half a notch above inside-voice acceptable decibels.

I waited, wanting to give myself a moment to be honest, even if it led to disappointment. Anyone claiming to be a believer would want the answer to be “Yes”. But I gave myself enough time for it to be a cold, cowardly “No” if the truth of my heart demanded it. I gave myself time to fall if fall I must.

“Yes,” I said.

As soon as I spoke, I knew I had done what for me had always been unthinkable. I had made a commitment. Leader smiled bigger, but not because he had trapped me. He smiled in a kind of child-like awe. You see, because I had affirmed my love for God above money, houses, and the world—because of these affirmations of faith, he seemed to think I was some sort of hero.

The Storm

“Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.” - Isaiah 8:13, KJV

I am awake when the iOS alert goes off. FIND SHELTER NOW. The sound is a challenge to describe. For me, it invites a sudden onset of nausea. If I manage to sleep, I awake within a few hours drenched in chilled sweat. Earlier this year, in Ecuador, I had descended four flights of hotel stairs to the same sound going off minutes after the building had shaken and swayed—a 6.2 temblor 75 miles west had thus announced itself. Guayaquil has seen worse; the traffic never stopped, and we were back in our rooms within the hour.

Fast forward one month later: on October 10, 2018, my city saw the worst.

We fled at exactly 7 AM and reached Birmingham just as Michael made landfall as the third worst storm in modern U.S. history and Bay County’s most devastating storm on record. But I have no interest in writing about Michael’s power over physical objects. I am not here to remind you how bad it was—if you live there, grew up there, or have family there, then you already know.

No, I am interested in something else. I will tell you now so you can make an early break for the door if the topic seems vaporous, like the kind of nonsense a sage would ramble about while falling asleep in his favorite chair. What interests me is the thing we lose when we rely too heavily on our experience. I am interested in my capacity to feel dread—that ancient enemy of Certainty and one of the oldest friends of Spirit. I am interested in the end of pride and the beginning of wisdom.

Remember that Michael was hailed as an unprecedented storm before he made landfall. Keep that word in mind as you read: unprecedented. It is the word of the hour, the year, maybe even the decade. Perhaps your mind has already retrieved a list of unprecedented events of the past ten years. For my purposes, the word deserves to become a proper noun: a name.

Before Michael, Unprecedented may as well have been a street-corner prophet or a flittering, homeless junkie—I would rather dodge into oncoming traffic than pass within six feet of him. You, too, have been avoiding him at every turn. But at last, we have seen him uncloaked, and there is no dodging him now.

You might ask why I have chosen a gender-specific pronoun for Unprecedented. For now, suffice it to say that Wisdom will introduce herself soon, and it suits my sense of mise en scène to permit a balance of male and female players. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Not until Unprecedented has made himself more than a street-corner prophet—indeed, not until he has risen to the level of Archangel will Wisdom make her appearance.

See what I did there? Aren’t I clever?

Maybe you agree that I am clever, or maybe you are convinced (reasonably) that I have taken the metaphors too far, that I have wandered into the misty Lost Woods of creative interpretation and have strayed from reason’s guiding melody.1 Perhaps I have. But let me be clear: unlike our Puritan forebears, I do not interpret the ransacking of my village as some divine penalty for my apostasy. If that is your perspective, suit yourself. It is not mine.

When I think of Michael, I do not think of wrath or judgment. Nor do I think God is the mastermind behind a storm whose sole purpose was to prompt knee-jerk repentance on a massive scale. I am not Jonathan Edwards, nor am I on the lookout for the next great awakening (sorry to disappoint my fellow charismatics).

Rather, I seek an awakening where we learn that we have all been, at one time or another, patrons to a false god who offers us the promise of certainty in exchange not for our faith but for the complete lack of it.

What false god? What is he talking about? Doesn’t he know we just went through hell and misery and that all we’ve been doing for weeks is helping each other rebuild (while he sits pretty in California sipping a latte, I might add)? Please do not mistake me. You have shown your mettle and are to be held in high esteem. I can only speak of what I have found in myself and, perhaps in the process, help you renew your hope and reaffirm the cornerstone of your faith.

That thing you are holding on to—that job, that man, that woman, that ideal, that business, that house, that goal, that church, that order of things, that prophecy, that calling: imagine yourself without it. What do you fear most in this life to lose? If you can, envision yourself on the other side of that loss. Put yourself in a virtual reality where dread is the dominant emotion. But be warned: this will be almost as painful as the reality itself. Proceed with caution into this lucid nightmare and crisis of the soul.

Take a moment to manifest the vision. Breathe.

Now, what are you left with? What shape does the monster take that now stares you down? Take a long look at this “you” separated from all qualifiers, preconceptions, and ideals, from everything you think you know about yourself. Put away your Bible, your creed, your kingdom, your ecclesia, your academia, your wealth, your poverty, and above all, your experience—anything that has brought you certainty, negative or positive. They cannot enter here. What did you see? Who did you meet?

When I remember Michael, when I remember my dread, I am left with an opaque vision of something like a jealous Love, an untamable Hope, and Mercy as a juggernaut. If you think this is how I cope with the vision, very well. You might be right. But I believe it is something more. You see, I am a bit cracked in the head. I think the Spirit of the Living God is leading me to a deeper revelation of his power and love.

And this next one is a bit more controversial: I happen to think that, in his relentless mercy, he fortifies my faith in him despite my resistance. After all, I tried to ally with Certainty and build walls on the foundation of my experience. But thanks to Unprecedented Uncloaked, the deal fell through.

In case you did not see it coming, Unprecedented Uncloaked has a name: Michael the Fierce, who, in a spirit of might, reminds us of one mightier still. He comes because he wants us to remember that our experience counts for nothing unless it can be transformed and redefined by Spirit. He wants us to realize the truth (there is no spoon)—that trust in our experience has led us to invite Certainty into our hearts, where only one can dwell. Little did we know that Certainty would paint himself as a bullseye on our foreheads. A bullseye for whom?

All this time, and we never knew: our trusty old friend was in league with his older sister, Chaos, from the start. What a twist, indeed. Certainty guaranteed our comfort and swore upon his foundations that we would never hunger or thirst if we sustained him with our lack of faith.

But that is just the problem. Certainty had no basis for his oaths, and like the serpent before him, promised what was not his to give. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they will be satisfied.2 To hunger and thirst is to suffer. Faith leads to righteousness, and righteousness requires suffering.

We are all going to suffer regardless of where we put our trust. The question is, rather, will we suffer bitterness and betrayal at the hands of Certainty, or will we suffer ourselves to trust in Spirit? Hint: the former guarantees the absence of dread—but who can know the cost?

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.3

For some of us, Michael may be that beginning. To dread the Almighty is to invite his guiding power to transform our hearts and minds until we depend on him alone; “let him be your fear, and let him be your dread” commands us to make him our certainty.

Lucky for us, sometimes that guiding power manifests whether we invite it or not. We have all welcomed Certainty—a vampire must be invited before he can enter, after all. But the grace of God hovers before no threshold, bows beneath no arch. No longer will we be detained by the prince of this world and his false promises, for Michael has arrived.4

Epilogue

(because I obsess over symmetry)

“When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’” (John 21:15, NIV). Whenever I read this passage now, I am moved by its eerie resemblance to the exchange between me and my nephew on a day so uneventful I do not recall the month or the year.

But that part about “When they had finished eating” also makes me laugh since Leader did not wait until I had finished eating before asking me a similar trilogy of questions. He just went for it.

If you have made it this far, you might ask how this story is relevant to dread, devastation, faith, or a hurricane. Well, I am still in the middle of making sense of that myself. But if I must give an answer, here is the one that comes to me: my nephew, inspired as he is by Spirit, asked me the same question three times in a row.

He asked me if I loved God more than Certainty. He wanted to know if I had the one thing required to please God—to please Being itself.5 And, in the moment, I had answered in faith, “Yes”, knowing nothing of the wrath to come. Now, on the other side of desolation, I can say with some confidence: to that answer I hold.

What will your answer be?

P.S.

I pray that those of you affected by this terrible, unprecedented storm are recovering well. If you can, surround yourself with friends and loved ones. If what I have shared here seems too simplistic, please forgive me. Perhaps it would have been easier just to quote a sage and hope for the best:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” - Rom. 15:13, NIV

The Man is afraid, abiding the moment as one in a trance or stranded in a dream idling on the edge of wakefulness. The blaze is hot but not stifling. It is a perfect heat if such a thing can be perfect. Purple and pink tendrils of lighting reach over the mountaintop as if drawn by the flames. The fire drinks the rain. It is a fire unquenchable, just as the force fueling it is unstoppable.

The ground is sacred – take off your shoes and feel the earth. Be in this moment. Hear me. Believe me. Trust me. Do everything I say and never again know the fear of man.

Wake up. I am the Lion and I am the Lamb. I spoke and light tore through dark matter like a splintered diamond. I breathed, and the wind skipped across an eternal storm igniting a restless ambition. Wake up. Be light. Know me. I am the Lion and I am the Lamb.

I never tire of the flames or of the furious speed. I do not grow weary at the vastness of my thoughts. The songs of stars are not repetitious to me.

Have you ever waited and listened to the trumpet blast of supernovas? Have you counted the gems of Heaven? Do you know their names or their ages? I have waited – I am Time’s Master. I have counted them all. I know their names. I remember when each was born.

I am the Lion. I am the Lamb.

I am the Phoenix. And the resurrection fire is my cloak.

I am the Healing Serpent, untethered and shedding his bronze scales; they lie like sunbaked husks in the desert. You could follow them, but your path would be aimless, for the relics do not point to me.

I am the unexpected creature that comes after the Great Unraveling of Time and Space.

I am Abel’s blood, shed on every battlefield. I am the mark upon Cain and the desperate mob in swift pursuit. Blood for blood. Mine for yours.

I am the Lamb.

Where can righteousness be found? Who is seeking it?

Seek the Lamb. You will be cleansed.

Seek the Lion. You will be vindicated.

Seek the Phoenix. You will be restored.

Seek the Serpent. You will be forgiven.

Seek the unexpected creature. Follow her into the storm, beyond the great terror at the edge of infinite possibility, where love perfected drives out all fear. When you arrive, the only dread will be the dread of me.

The Man blinks, and the fire is gone. His dripping clothes sag and cling coldly to his skin. The leaves jostle in the wind and cast a cool mist. No smoke. No ashes. A flick of lightning far off tells him the storm passed hours ago. But he knows that one day it will return to this hallowed place.

It must return because it isn’t finished.

He turns and appraises the dirt path that will take him down again into the valley, across the mile-long field, and at last to the tent where his wife and sons still sleep. Could he not lie down beside them and wait for the morning? Could he not go back to tending sheep?

It isn’t finished. And neither is he.