People sometimes avoid the most 'comic book-ish' parts of the Bible. As a person who loves comic books, I have never understood this. Actually, I think the visions of God and his armies doing battle with some enemy speaks to something deep in the human experience, as I've said before.. Martin Luther King Jr, in his sermon "Unfulfilled Dreams" talks extensively about the sense that there is some struggle at the heart of the universe. William James said he was religious in part because "life feels like a fight".
Mainline churches have all but abandoned the language of combat. Everything is psychologized, even sin. The struggle to be a good person is a purely internal struggle. "The only demons we have to fight are in our own hearts", Gandhi said. Me, I can't completely agree with this view. It simply ignores the full breadth of the problem of evil. It is interesting that in the Book of Job, the primary problem of evil is not moral evil. Most of the horrors visited upon Job are sufferings caused by nature. The Book of Job deals more with the 'problem of innocent suffering' than the 'problem of evil'.
Life was not a perfect harmony, even before man got here. The story of the snake in the garden is a primitive recognition of this fact. In point of fact, that snake has a long history. In Psalm 74 and elsewhere we hear the story of God doing battle with some ancient serpent or dragon, perhaps before the beginning of existence. Psalm 82 and Genesis 6 recount God being betrayed by beings known as the Bene Elohim, the "Sons of God". In Psalm 82, God looks at these beings and says, "I tasked you from caring for the earth, and yet the earth is a total mess. So I am coming to take the reigns myself and completely destroy you for your failure and betrayal." Think about this kind of atonement: Jesus is the fulfilling of God's promise in Psalm 82. Wow! What a thought! It just stirs something deep within me. In Numbers 13:26-33 we are told that the Jews were frightened off from entering Canaan by beings who were descended from the mating of the Sons of God and humans, a story recounted in Genesis 6. What? That's just cool, man.
I don't take the Numbers or Genesis passages as some kind of strict historical accounts, obviously. I don't think angels literally came down from some place 'up there' and mated with women. But all of these musings about the cosmic sources of evil point to something real. What that is I can only guess at by doing some 'mythologizing' or 'comic booking' of my own. Language like this excites us and gets us thinking, and that is a good thing. What's more it helps us make sense of our experience of evil. Any theology that tries to erase evil, or to deny it, or to somehow subsume it in some grand monistic scheme, divorces itself from the human experience of the world which is the only justification of the religious life. Our experience of evil is as palpable as our experience of good. If we fail to do justice to this fact, then we fail to do good theology. This is why people come back to combat myths even in a society that has separated itself from the religious spirit. Try to stamp the combat motif out, and it pops up again: in movies, in comic books, in literature. Today apocalyptic language, the language of combat and cosmic forces both good and evil, saturates our culture. It is ironic that a world that prides itself as secular betrays its inability to extricate itself from the religious spirit in every hit movie, and every popular comic book.
When I read the fights between angels in demons in Daniel, in the apocryphal book of Tobit, in Judith, and in Revelation, something in me indeed stirs. Yes, there is some truth in all of this. No doubt, picturing that truth is a tricky and maybe even dangerous venture. It risks flights of fancy. But are flights of fancy always bad? Perhaps an imaginative journey, which both reveals and obscures, is the only way to capture even a part of the truth of the experience. Building a metaphysical picture from this is dangerous and difficult, but I'm not sure we can escape it altogether. Some of the thoughts and reflections that have been brought forth from my apocalyptic moments are some of the most interesting, awe-inspiring and motivating thoughts I have ever had. But I worry about self-deception. In the end I'll probably embrace more comic book passages than I ignore or criticize. If nothing else, it makes the journey more fun. And what is wrong with that?
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