Yesterday at church I found in our library the non-fiction book Life in the Balance by Joni Eareckson Tada and Joni & Friends. I’ve learned a lot from Joni and her ministry, but I admit I haven’t read a lot of her later books. This one I eagerly checked out.

Surprise, surprise, the book is not at all what I thought it would be, though I’m not quite sure what that was. Here’s a part of the foundation Joni lays in chapter one:

The other day, while having coffee with my friend Shirley, our conversation turned to the unlikely subject of people in comas. Six months earlier, her cousin had suffered a severe stroke and has yet to respond. With hopes for a full recovery quickly diminishing, and health insurance nearly depleted, Shirley explained that her cousin was yet again transferred to another nursing home. This one was more of a state-subsidized warehouse for “hopeless cases.” My friend looked at me with doleful eyes. “What would you say to the family, Joni?”

It happens to me more often than it use to . . . questions like that. And they’re not just about end-of-life implications o someone in a coma. Today, it’s questions about stem cell research and abortion. It’s what to do with the little boy with autism who’s disrupting Sunday School, or the marriage that’s cracking apart from caring 24/7 for a parent with Alzheimer’s . . .

Joni goes on to give a thumbnail sketch of each of the upcoming chapters, and it’s clear, this book is about ethics in a culture undergoing scientific and technological change that is outstripping our understanding of their implications. How do we as Christians know what to do when we face troubling circumstances: disabilities, abortion, choices between life and death? All of that makes me think, What do we as Christians do in a world of super drones and string theory and cloning and possible pandemics and the push for euthanasia?

Serious subjects. At least one speculative author has taken the task of facing such questions head on in her fiction. I’m referring to Karen Hancock in her 2009 novel Enclave.

Here’s what I wrote soon after its release:

Karen Hancock’s The Enclave [is] a science fiction/suspense novel dealing with such issues as cloning, genetic engineering, and cryogenics. One of the things that struck me about this novel was how necessary it is. We live in an era of scientific revolution, much of it centered on the human genome.

For me as a non-science oriented person, I’d just as soon ignore it all. But the fact is, the discoveries of today will be married to a set of ethics to be determined, and that interplay will affect society. We Christians need to be at the forefront mapping out how right and wrong fit with these new discoveries. Because Man can clone, should he? Because Man can tweak a baby’s DNA to make him taller or stronger or maler, should he?

Karen Hancock opens up a number of these scientific topics, then couples them with an exploration of cult activity. But here’s the thing. Karen says what Christians need to hear. Her story brings serious matters front and center, not in the form of absolutes already digested, but in the form of questions.

After all, the protagonist in The Enclave is a brilliant geneticist, and he is a Christian. Not an Intelligent Design Christian, either, but one who believes in creation. You see the questions that spring to mind with nothing more than that simple description.

It is this aspect of speculative fiction—the ability to look at the hard issues, the complex topics—that I think too many people overlook…

The Enclave doesn’t dodge any of it, but neither does it give easy or simplistic answers. The problem isn’t “cloning,” or the answer, “down with science.” Instead, because of the second story thread, the one for which the book is named, the real problem comes to light—Man has a desire to be God.

The science issues, then, take a backseat. There is no answer to them apart from the answer of bowing to our sovereign God and saying, Your will, not mine. No legislation will insure that cloning will not violate someone’s human rights or spiritual well-being. No advancement in the study of longevity will ensure immortality. In other words, the science issues, while important for us to think about, should only lead us to the realization that God must be honored as God before we proceed in these endeavors.

And as our culture shuttles Him off to the side and claims that faith should be private, not public, we open ourselves up to antichrist figures such as the one that serves as the antagonist in The Enclave. Yet again we see the truth surface in a work of speculative fiction.

What books have you read that are addressing the big issues of our day? Can speculative fiction do a better job of that than can non-fiction or contemporary fiction? Why do you think so, or not?

It was certainly an enlightening moment in my own life when I came to realize my modernist prejudice in considering modern theological terms superior to biblical imagery and story. The chart below is an example of the kind of comparisons I had to make to reflect upon my modernizing tendency. I had come to prefer theological technical terms over their biblical images and metaphors.

Excerpted from Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story and Imagination.

C.S. Lewis pointed out that the technical term for God, “The transcendent Ground of Being,” is simply not as rich or full of meaning as the scriptural metaphor “Our Father who art in heaven.”¹ Of course, the creation of theological terms is not inherently wrong, and metaphors are not the only way in which Scripture communicates God’s attributes. But I have to be careful that my theological shorthand will not overshadow or replace biblical longhand. The very theological words themselves reflect the modernist tendency to reduce truth to scientific terminology (every word having the suffix of “ology” or “ence”), which may ultimately depersonalize my faith and cast theology as a “scientific” study rather than a holistic biblical relationship with God.

Scholar Peter J. Leithart goes so far as to say that theology as we modern Christians understand it is against the biblical approach to truth, precisely because theology uses a professional language that is academic and obscure, “whereas the Bible talks about trees and stars, about donkeys and barren women, about kings and queens and carpenters.”

Theology tells us that God is eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. The Bible tells us that God relents because He is God (Joel 2:13-14), that God is “shrewd with the shrewd” (Psa. 18:25-29), that he rejoices over us with shouting (Zeph. 3:14-20), and that He is an eternal whirlwind of triune communion and love. Theology is a “Victorian” enterprise, neoclassically bright and neat and clean, nothing out of place. Whereas the Bible talks about hair, blood, sweat, entrails, menstruation and genital emissions.²

Israel’s theology was told as stories. The organizing principles of Jewish theology are characteristically expressed through narratives of creation, election, exodus, monarchy, exile and return.³ So it was most appropriate when Jesus and the Apostles proclaimed the New Covenant as the fulfillment of those stories—in stories and parables as well. Wright, a Pauline scholar, points out that even the Apostle Paul’s most “emphatically ‘theological’ statements and arguments are in fact expressions of the essentially Jewish story now redrawn around Jesus.”⁴ He points out that for the early Christians, disputes “were carried on not so much by appeal to fixed principles, or to Jewish scripture conceived as a rag-bag of proof-texts, but precisely by fresh retellings of the story which highlighted the points at issue…not a theory or a new ethic, not an abstract dogma or rote-learned teaching, but a particular story told and lived.”⁵

It would not be an exaggeration to suppose that Jesus would probably be scolded by conservative Evangelical theologues for not taking the Kingdom of God more seriously, because he seemed to spend most of his time walking around telling confusing stories rather than tightly organized three-point sermons. And even worse, Jesus would often avoid explaining those stories, preferring the “dangerous” ambiguity that modern Evangelicals complain leads to an unclear “Gospel presentation” or subjective interpretation (Matt. 13:10-15). Jesus just wasn’t precise enough by modern theological standards. Jesus just wasn’t a modern Evangelical.

Is Robert Liparulo the latest novelist to emphasize an Old-Testament-style MacGuffin?¹ His latest release, The Judgment Stone, is now in the Speculative Faith library, and the Thomas Nelson release’s back cover describes its titular object like this:

[T]he ruthless group of immortals called the Clan […] is after a prize that would give them unimaginable power — a piece of the Ten Commandments known as the Judgment Stone.

Those who touch the Stone can see into the spiritual world: angelic warriors, treacherous demons, and the blue threads of light that signal the presence of believers in communion with God.

By following the blue beam radiating from those closest to God, the Clan plans to locate His most passionate followers and destroy them.

He will take all the Mushim and put ‘em in a Mushim museum, and charge the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em.

Just now I noticed that this sort of thing often occurs in Christian speculative fiction, especially novels from mainstream publishers. Yet it’s hard to categorize this trope other than with something like my term above, OT MacGuffin. Surely there’s a Jewish-sounding name to serve as shorthand, so once again all those seemingly dull Biblical genealogies come to our rescue. Voila, we have a potential name, from 1 Chronicles 6:19: the Mushi.

Mush·i  (mŭsh`ē, moosh`ē)

noun

1. Proper name. A great-grandson of Levi described in 1 Chronicles 6:19.

2. A trope of Christian fiction, generally an object the novel holds as referenced in the Bible but which turns out to have Surprising Supernatural Powers for plot purposes and Quests and significant Battles Between Saints and Villains. (Very common in evangelical end-times and spiritual-warfare novels.)

New from Thomas Nelson.

Examples:

• Book of Days: The titular object, supposedly lost in Oregon, records all the world’s history as written by God. As a Mushi, though, it’s quite underplayed in the story.
• The Chair: This titular object was supposedly built by Christ the carpenter.
• The Cheveis Trilogy: Messes with convention by making the Mushi the Bible itself.
• [Every end-times novel ever written, more or less, by a popular Christian teacher known primarily for prophecy-oriented radio broadcasts]: bland heroes who question God’s existence are convinced when World Events confirm Ancient Texts.
• The Face of God: By collecting two valuable jewels originally found in the priest’s breastplate as described in Leviticus, you should be able to see the titular Face.
• [Most novels themed around the Nephilim]: Heroes seek old race of demon/human immortals dating back to Noah’s days. (For similar groups of Biblical-era immortal humans/creatures, see the Jerusalem’s Undead series or The Immortal Files series.)
• Rift in Time: Hero easily finds Noah’s Ark in opening chapters, then pursues a certain other Ark. In the sequel, Hidden in Time, he ups the ante for the Garden of Eden.
• The Sending: The Garden of Eden is the subject of another hero’s quest.

Note that I’m not critiquing these novels. With few exceptions, I’ve not read them. ² But the prevalence of these OT-based magic objects, Mushim, makes me curious. Why so many? I thought we had a whole Reformation over, in part, Church veneration of supposed magic relics. I thought Christians didn’t get into that whole relic-worship practice.

Here lie the mortal remains of Noah’s Ark.

Perhaps I’m being naïve. Professing Christians still have a craving for relics, from the Ark of Noah that keeps getting “found” to the Shroud of Turin claims, to “Bible codes” and Old-Testament prophecies that skipped their original readers to “apply” directly to Americans.

Evidently readers get bored with the Story of Scripture and prefer chasing its props.

Instead of the titles The Bible or The Gospel — i.e., God’s Spell, His transforming and even enchanting Story — its title in effect becomes Nephilim or Magic Ark/Prophecy/Shroud.

Why condemn this trope as evil? Its sin may be worse: being utterly joyless and boring.

And it may lead to (I say this in general) sillier stories based on relics, not relationships.

Aren’t people more interesting, with their dreams, struggles, and transformations? Isn’t a magical “Biblical” Mushi far duller even than the Mushi from 1 Chronicles 6:19?

Awhile back, I bought a used copy of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. After the purchase, I leafed through it and thought, Oh-oh – have I read this already? Parts of it look familiar.

That’s one of the nice things about this stage of life; because I’m so prone to forgetting, I can re-read a book as if for the first time. Kind of like my husband watching TV. He’s forever falling asleep at the beginning of a show, so in his world, there’s no such thing as reruns.

When I was young and had a memory, I didn’t read much science fiction. So when I inexplicably took up writing it, I had a lot of catching up to do. I’m still way behind—and, as noted above, much of what I read nowadays passes through the eyes to the brain where it gets lost in the haze. But circa 2008, when I discovered Ursula LeGuin (who’s been a big name in sci-fi since what, the 60s? and I’m just now hearing of her?), I was instantly impressed. My introduction to her work was the short story “The Day Before the Revolution,” which led me to the novel The Dispossessed. Pretty sure I’ve read some of her other stuff too, but… well, as noted above, I’m a little vague on the titles.

From what I can see, I probably have nothing in common with Ms. LeGuin’s social, political, or religious thinking. Nevertheless, her writing resonates with me. It cuts through the niceties straight to the heart of the matter, though she and I view that heart from different perspectives. I read her books and say, “Yeah! I want to write like that!”

It’s not her vision or her worldview that inspires me, but the clarity and artistry with which she pictures it. I feel like a first-year student watching Michaelangelo at work, or a ten-year-old vocal student listening to an opera star belt out an aria.

The Left Hand of Darkness was originally published in 1969, but the edition I have contains an introduction she wrote in 1976. I’d like to share it with y’all. Major excerpts from it, anyway. It deals with some of the things we see discussed on this blog. Even if you don’t care for opera, I hope you’ll bear with me while this intro sings:

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.”

Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn’t the name of the game by any means…

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

…

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

…

Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell

Copyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch

you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

“The truth against the world!”—Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth!

…

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

…

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life… Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel.

From the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1976

Man, I wish I’d said that.

Of course if I had, I’d have forgotten about it by now. I’ll bet that’s why Ms. LeGuin wrote things down.

One of Them

Alden stopped immediately. He knew the only thing a CON Man didn’t enjoy killing was time and he didn’t feel like testing their patience today. Shoot first, ask questions later was CON protocol. They were peacekeepers, Agents of CON, enforcers of the Construct upon which the great CON (Conclave of Nations) was built. They took pride in doing their job efficiently.

Alden raised his arms and faced the CON Men as they dismounted their cycles and approached him with their palm guns aimed at his chest and black capes blowing in the wind. As a mechanic, he couldn’t help but admire the complexity of their mechanical makeup. In fact, to call them men at all was a matter of heated debate among some citizens. At first glance, the only thing remotely human about the men was the skin of their foreheads and the black top hats which perched properly atop them.

Once a man was chosen for the ranks of CON forces he received a series of mandatory “upgrades”. Limbs were replaced with robotic ones, giving them superior strength, speed and height advantages over ordinary citizens. Steel plates were affixed to their skulls for protection. Their faces were muzzled with black leather masks and a pair of round, red lenses hid their eyes from the public. It was the red lenses that had earned CON Men the nickname of Red-Eyes among those who secretly despised the Construct.

“Alden Two One?” The first of the towering CON Men asked as he approached. His voice was amplified and somewhat broken by the static of a radio implanted beneath the muzzle.

Alden nodded, still in awe of their impressive physique.

Without another word, a blast of electricity emitted from the CON Man’s palm. The powerful current connected with Alden’s chest, instantly paralyzing him and causing him to collapse in an unconscious heap beside his cycle.

* * * * * * * * *

The very next moment (or so it seemed), Alden awoke seated in the center of a dimly lit, circular room, on a cold cement bench, slumped over a cold cement table. He had no idea how long he had been out, but his legs were still tingling from the shock of the pulse which meant it couldn’t have been more than a few hours.

Scanning the circumference of the room, Alden was somewhat surprised to find that he was actually alone – no CON Men, no guards, no one at all. The walls were formed of concrete, but artistically cut in crisscrossing, layered angular lines. The only entrance into the room was a rectangular door set back in a double layered archway.

As Alden continued his exploration of the room, his gaze shifted toward the ceiling where a massive winged statue circled overhead, glaring down at Alden. It was Cockatrice, the two-legged dragon with a rooster’s head, the symbol of CON. It’s eyes, though only stone, were mesmerizing and seemed almost alive. Alden grew quickly uncomfortable with the gaze and looked away.

In the same moment, the doorway to the round room opened with a loud crack.

A tall, slender man in pinstripe slacks and a lavishly decorated trench coat emerged from the doorway carrying a leather satchel. His polished black shoes clacked loudly across the stone floor as he approached the table where Alden sat. Alden tried to stand but found his legs still unable to move.

“Greetings, Alden,” the man said in a strangely friendly voice. “Forgive me for the temporary pain you must be feeling. It couldn’t be helped, I’m afraid. It will pass soon enough.”

Alden rubbed his legs in response and stared back at the man who now sat across the table from him. He seemed strangely familiar to Alden. His face was as perfect as a poster – his skin unblemished, his raven black hair neatly trimmed and combed just-so, and his teeth were as white and straight as any Alden had ever seen. Clearly he was somebody important.

“Do I know you?” Alden asked, boldly.

“You should,” the man insisted, pulling a file folder from out of his satchel. “I am Lord Langley.”

Alden’s stomach dropped, how could he have not known. Lord Langley was the man who would soon decide his place as a child of CON. At sixteen, Alden’s abilities would be assessed and considered by the Lord. A decision would be made based on his abilities and the needs of the District. The Lord’s decision, if approved by the District Master, would be final. If he chose Alden.

“Forgive me, my Lord,” Alden said, bowing his head in reverence. “I didn’t recognize you in person.”

Lord Langley waved a hand dismissively at the boy and turned his attention to reading over the contents of his files.

“What matters is that we know you.”

Alden glanced nervously across at the papers. “Am I in trouble?”

Langley looked up from the reports and smiled.

“Should you be?”

Alden shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. The last thing he wanted to do was incriminate himself.

“We’ve been watching you, Alden. We have great interest in your, how should I say it…”
– – – – – – – – – – – –

Sorry! This is where I have to leave off the writing today. I’d love to hear comments on where you think this conversation should go between Langley and Alden. There are any number of directions I’m considering. Does Langley recruit Alden to be a Red-Eye? Or how about joining some kind of mechanic corp based on his skill set. Or perhaps this meeting has nothing to do with his placement, but with CON’s desire to track down Alden’s father – and they believe Alden might know or have a way to lead them to him? Or maybe you are seeing something else in the works… I’d love to hear YOUR ideas. Thanks for joining along in this writing adventure with me. ~ Chris

Well, the show is great but the books are more so

– George R. R. Martin, re. the Game of Thrones.

Once I saw a movie that was a true tragedy. As it happened, it was based on the life of a real person, and it was so sad. It moved so many in the theater to tears that you could hear sniffles coming from all around.

The movie had such a powerful impact on me that I decided to read the book. What a disappointment! I couldn’t believe what a let down it was. Apparently all the good parts of the movie were embellishments by the scriptwriter who wasn’t constrained by reality.

From that point on, though, I started noticing that books by and large trumped movies. TV wasn’t even in the running because the stories were too short to have any great impact.

Ah, but things have changed. TV now serializes stories, and in some ways serves as periodicals once did, doling out the equivalent of a novel or a novel series in bits week after week. In addition, technology has freed movies to create what we once thought could exist only in our imagination.

And yet, as much as I loved the Lord of the Rings movies, with orcs come to life and a Gollum who was eerily as Tolkien described him, I think they come in a distant second behind the books. The Hobbit isn’t so different, but for other reasons.

We don’t need to think twice about the Narnia movies (though I still rebel at the idea that NOT having them made is a better option). I’d have to say the Harry Potter movies are wonderful–inventive, consistent with the direction of the books–and yet they, too, come up short in a comparison.

Years ago I read a book made from a movie, and in that instance, I gave the movie the top rating, but the vast majority of the best stories, it still seems to me, are within the pages of books, not on the little or big screen.

Of course others are free to disagree, and I look forward to your thoughts, but here are the reasons why I think books are better:

1) The characters in books are more engaging. That’s because the reader can get into their heads and know what they’re thinking and feeling. Few movies or TV programs can pull that off. (There was a TV program called Veronica Mars that had the main character narrate the beginning of each show and places of particular importance. The 80s show Magnum PI used that same deice with great success. MOST shows, however, leave the viewer in the comfy chair as an observer, rather than a participant with the character.)

2) Books allow readers to imagine. Stories on the screen allow TV producers to imagine and directors to imagine and actors to imagine. Viewers, however, are primarily driven by what we see, not by what we imagine.

3) As a result, movies seem content to infuse the viewer with a shot of endorphins, adrenaline, or testosterone, as if inducing a chemical response is the ultimate in storytelling.

4) Books, in contrast, can make you think and give you time to do so. Yes, they also make you feel, but it has a greater impact, not lesser, because you’re more invested in the character (see point 1)

5) Books, the good ones, seldom seem outdated, whereas movies need to be remade with some frequency–except the good ones no one is willing to touch (Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind–which desperately needs a remake, if you ask me).

If I took the time, I’m certain I could think of other advantages books have over visual storytelling, but these jumped out at me.

Do stories told with visual images have advantages over books? Certainly. Surprisingly, the first one that came to my mind was sound.

Movies and TV programs utilize music in a way that enhances a story. It can build tension or diffuse it, induce romance, suggest danger, create peace or . . . well, if you can feel it, music can enhance it.

Visual storytelling makes full use of that capacity, but also of sound effects.

The visual also brings to life the images which the words on a page have suggested. There’s something magic about seeing a hobbit house after reading about one and imagining what it might look like.

There are undoubtedly other advantages, and I hope you’ll point out the ones I’ve neglected.

However, I can’t help but wonder if we wouldn’t be losing something vital if visual storytelling crowded out books. Do you think that’s possible? Will the next generation prefer the visual so much they stop reading for pleasure?

Can movies or TV do as good a job telling stories as books can? Why do you think so? Or why not?

– – – – –

And speaking of books, don’t forget to pick the books that look most interesting to you from the list of Clive Staples Award nominees, and read, read, read. We want YOU to be an eligible voter.

Excerpted from Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story and Imagination.

Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God mostly through parables. And those parables communicated invisible reality in terms of visible, sensate and dramatic images and metaphors. To him, the Kingdom was far too deep and rich a truth to entrust to rational abstract propositions. He chose pearls, dragnets, leaven, mustard seeds, virgins, children, slaves, hired workers, vineyards, and buried treasure over syllogisms, abstraction, systematics or dissertations. And his usage of such metaphors and images was not a “primitive” form of discourse, as if ancient Jews were not sophisticated enough to understand abstraction. In fact, at the time of the writing of the New Testament, Israel was competently immersed in the Hellenistic culture that dominated the Middle East with its heavily abstracted thinking. They could do abstraction. They chose not to.

It would be more accurate to suggest the other way around, that indeed, stories and parables may be superior means of conveying theological truth than propositional logic or theological abstraction. As scholar N.T. Wright suggests, “it would be clearly quite wrong to see these stories as mere illustrations of truths that could in principle have been articulated in a purer, more abstract form.” ¹ He reminds us that theological terms like “monotheism” “are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them [narrative], and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology, not mere childish expressions of a ‘purer’ abstract truth.”² Wright concludes that storytelling is in fact the way theology was done in both Testaments: “If Jesus or the evangelists tell stories, this does not mean that they are leaving history or theology out of the equation and doing something else, instead… [T]his is how Israel’s theology…found characteristic expression, we should not be surprised if Christian theology, at least in its early forms, turns out to be similar.”³

Brad Young, who has written in-depth on the Jewishness of Jesus’ theology, reminds us that our Western view of theology as a discipline is more philosophical than Jesus’ own Eastern culture within which he taught. “As Christians, we study God and systematize belief. The Eastern mind tends to view God through the emotions of human personality and individual experience. God is viewed through the lens of metaphors and parables of real life which make the abstract concepts more concrete.”⁴ Our Western bias toward rational discourse can too easily blind us to the biblical power of story and word pictures to embody truth.

Bailey writes about the tendency of Western culture with its stress on reason and logic to reduce biblical metaphors and parables to mere illustrations of concepts, as if word pictures or images were not essential to the teaching of theological truth. As if it is the idea that matters and the illustration is mere window dressing. “This,” he says, “is a time honored way to ‘do theology.’” But then he enlightens us,

There is, however, another way to create and communicate meaning. It involves the use of word pictures, dramatic actions, metaphors and stories. This latter method of “doing theology” shines through the pages of Scripture. Dale Allison has written, “Meaning is like water: it is shaped by the container it fills.” The biblical writers and reciters make extensive use of metaphors, parables and dramatic actions. Jesus does not say, “God’s love is boundless,” Instead, he tells the story of the prodigal son. He does not say, “Your benevolence must reach beyond your own kith and kin.” Rather, he tells the story of the Good Samaritan.⁵

Bailey concludes his analysis of Jesus’ own use of such word pictures, “Jesus was clearly a “metaphorical theologian” whose primary style of creating meaning was the skillful use of metaphor, parable and dramatic action.”⁶ And this “story” approach to theology means that stories are not mere carriers of doctrine, as if they can be discarded once the doctrine or “truth” is figured out. A parable does not contain a single truth or doctrine. It is a complex web of relationships and ambiguity interacting with the audience and their understanding and misunderstanding of God. Stories must be inhabited by the audience for the truth to be understood properly. They cannot be separated from the truth they embody.⁷ The parable of the prodigal son, for instance, is a complex network of metaphors for Jesus (the father), gentiles and outcasts (the younger son), self-righteous Jews (the older son) and their relationships. Bailey contends that the parable is not even intended to express salvation of an individual as much as it is intended to be a retelling of the story of Jacob (and therefore, the story of Israel) with Jesus as the replacement of Israel, along with other challenges to people’s view of God.

(Caution: if you see the name of a novel or film you still want to read or see, ‘ware spoilers.)

Subversion can only go so far. Once it was more clever to treat one villain as the real threat all along. Now more storytellers like to pull out the floor out from under readers, not only to attempt creative plot twists, but to challenge readers’ perceptions of good and evil.

Our most recent example comes from the latest Marvel superhero actioner Iron Man 3. I understand this came as a shock to comics fans, but the filmmakers took the chance of showing that the story’s main villain — the villain promised in all the film’s teasers and posters and other marketing materials — was a false front all along.

In some sense this was not a new idea; it was merely an extension of the first Iron Man film’s story that Tony Stark’s business partner had used foreign terrorism to bolster his own (admittedly vague) war-profiteering plans. But 3’s emphasis was more overt.

Thus it was more subject to truth and potential lies at the same time.

Consider other uses of the same surprise-villain trope:

• In the Star Wars films, Darth Vader isn’t the real villain. Surprise! It’s the Emperor.
• In the novel Ender’s Game, as recently noted, the ending is vague enough to suggest that the Buggers aren’t so bad. Surprise! The real villain might be … ourselves.
• 

  “Everything we know about them is wrong.” So why assume otherwise about the giant kingpin dragon?

  In the film How to Train Your Dragon, none of the cute dragons are the villains. Surprise! The real villain is a giant mountain-sized dragon who’s enslaved the others.

• In The Hunger Games trilogy, President Snow and The Capitol are not the real villain. Surprise! The real villain is human inclination toward repeated acts of tyranny.
• For another Marvel film, Captain America: The First Avenger, Col. Phillips specifically says in the trailer, “Your enemy — is not who you’d expect.” So the Star-Spangled Man won’t be punching the real-life Hitler? Surprise! The real villain is the Red Skull.

The truth

Am I critiquing these surprise villains? Would I prefer only up-front villains such as Lord Voldemort, Sauron, The White Witch, Khan Noonien Singh, the Dominion, and Loki?

Not at all. Under the surprise-villain trope lies powerful truth based on God’s Story.

• We might fear sinful corruption from cultural influences or what we take into our selves, but evil sneaks out from us, for it comes from our own sinful hearts (Mark 7).
• We might fear homosexual or “gay marriage” activists, but become actual bigots who reject opportunities to love people despite their sin and share the Gospel.
• We might fear Islamic terrorists, creeping Sharia law, and false “tolerance” that only leads to enabling real evil, but become hateful religious extremists ourselves.
• We might lambaste the secular media for ignoring or twisting facts, but fall into the sin of spreading our own rumors or plain lies about religious and political enemies.
• We might guard against something in red tights, or humans who overtly push the occult, forgetting that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” and that “his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness” (2 Cor. 11: 14-15).

The lie

“Sure, never worry about me. Look only for the real villain behind me.”

I doubt many storytellers are trying to challenge core moral assumptions about evil. Often they are simply trying to be clever; often they succeed. But when one film’s surprise-villain describes his scheme and name-drops Osama bin Laden as an example of a false-front evil that lets him commit real evil behind the scenes, that can make the trope a half-truth.

At the very least, such views end up ignoring moral truths that make a truly complex story.

Evil does come from our hearts, but it is reflected in sinful culture. Christians might become bigots, but the homosexual agenda is also sinful. We might condemn all Muslims for the sins of some, yet Islamic terrorism is still evil and must be condemned. We might fault secular media and give Christian rumor mills a pass, but many journalists are still biased.

And though Satan likes to disguise himself, sometimes he does kill people by daylight.

Ultimately the surprise-villain trope is like a lot of things in culture: a mixture of profound and even Biblical truth, but often repeated to the point of losing its impact and complexity.

Can our stories not show that yes, human nature is the real evil here, but the Devil or other foes are also evil and must be stopped? Can we specifically explore the fact that reactions to terrorism or villainy might be evil, but that we must still oppose the overt villainy?

And perhaps most interestingly, when story heroes do discover the Surprise Villain, why on earth do they instinctively give him the final beatdown, after just showing sympathy to the false-front villain? How do they know that this one is merely a second false-front before yet another third-tier surprise-villain? How do they know the first false-front villain is not just extraordinarily clever and merely invented the “real villain” in the background to take the blame, while the first and supposedly false-front villain gets away with worse evils?

Well, now. Where have I been?

Sorry, folks. It turns out that digging myself out from under Lent and Easter took me longer than I expected. I don’t know why that is. Part of my problem also is that I haven’t had much to say lately. I’ve been reading; I’ve been writing; but I haven’t had any cogent thoughts worth sharing with anyone.

I’m still not sure if I do have something to share or not. We’ll just all have to strap and see, huh?

Actually, lately, I’ve been on something of a Star Trek binge. And no, it’s not because of the soon-to-be-released Into Darkness. Truth be told, I’m still a little upset that I was wrong about Alice Eve’s character. I was so sure that she was Dr. Elizabeth Dehner as opposed to Dr. Carol Marcus. But this post isn’t about the new movie.

No, about a year ago, I started an interesting journey. I discovered that Netflix had put all five Star Trek series on instant streaming. This was a huge deal: I had only seen about half of the original series episodes. I had only seen one of the animated series. I had missed an episode or two of Voyager. And I had given up on Enterprise after two seasons. I realized I could finally watch all of them.

And now, after who knows how many episodes, I’m almost there. I’m about to finish the first season of Enterprise. And it’s that show that I want to talk about for a little bit.

I still remember my disappointment with this show when it came out. At the time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it frustrated me so much. I mean, it’s a great idea (or at least, it seemed like one). A Star Trek prequel, one that showed us humanity’s first steps into the wider Trek universe? Yes, please! At the time, I was looking forward to seeing how humanity earned its place in the galactic community. And yet, when these episodes first came out, I can remember getting more and more frustrated with them until finally, at the start of the show’s third season, I simply gave up on it and stopped watching. Apparently a lot of other people decided to do that as well, since it didn’t last much longer.

Now, though, over ten years later, I went in with a critical eye. I went in with a sort of post-mortem attitude, determined to figure out why I grew so frustrated and what killed this show.

And after one season, I think I know.

Instead of boldly going where no man has gone before, Enterprise tepidly rehashed Star Trek cliches.

That’s the one thing I’ve noticed in my Star Trek journey. The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all had cliche episode content, stuff that they rehashed and recycled ad nauseum. In the later seasons of TNG, Captain Picard and company often encountered mind-bending missions, where they had to travel through someone’s subconscious either via telepathy or the holodeck or dreams or some combination therein. In DS9, it was the Ferengi episodes. In Voyager, it was time travel or quantum-temporal-what-have-you. If the writers on these shows were out of ideas, they seemed to fall back on these plots with alarming regularity.

I think what ultimately killed Enterprise (or at least bogged down its start) was the writers pulling out these same cliches, more specifically, the one that Voyager‘s writing team relied on so much.

Let’s take a look at the pilot episode. You can almost see the potential getting squandered. A Klingon crashes his ship in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, where he’s chased by three aliens we’ve never seen before. A human farmer shoots the Klingon, which creates a dilemma for the newly minted Starfleet. The Vulcans, who the humans don’t trust, want to take the Klingon off their hands. Captain Archer insists that humanity do it. Archer wins the argument and takes his unproven crew and untested ship into the great unknown, where they encounter hostile aliens and a life-or-death adventure.

Not too bad, right? The writers were able to take some Star Trek conventions and set them on their ears (pun intended). Instead of being the stoic, trustworthy folk we’ve seen in previous iterations, the Vulcans are devious and untrustworthy. Instead of being the glue that holds the galaxy together, humanity is the brash upstart who threatens to topple everything. Instead of a galaxy that knows peace and prosperity because of the Federation, we see a galaxy in desperate need of that, an interstellar Wild West.

This could have been an awesome show, detailing humanity’s first steps into the galaxy and how we managed to forge a lasting peace in spite of our mistakes.

“What you’re looking at right now, Captain, is our Nielsen rating taking a nose dive.”

Instead, that potential is wasted with the introduction of a cliche, one that can be summed up in three words: temporal cold war.

Suddenly we’ve got time travelers trying to manipulate Captain Archer and his foes for their own nefarious reasons. And, from where I’m sitting, it sucked all the fun out of the show. I’m sure the writers thought that this would raise the stakes and make us second-guess everything we were seeing. Instead, it makes me want to cringe every time someone brings it up. My guess is that the writing team from Voyager got transplanted into the new series and they brought their baggage with them. And it ruined what could have been a really fun show.

It’s not just the temporal cold war either. In Enterprise, we also saw the return of the Ferengi (which makes absolutely no sense from a canon-perspective), the Borg (don’t get me started), and apparently the Mirror Universe (another DS9 trope). In short, what dragged down a promising series were the ghosts of the past.

Actually, now that I think about it, I’m actually worried that this is what could happen with Star Trek Into Darkness as well. Why? Because as of right now, imdb lists Benedict Cumberbatch’s character as Khan.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a bad idea? Khan Noonian Singh, while a memorable Star Trek villain, has been done and done definitively so far as I’m concerned. Why succumb to the “been there, done that” syndrome with him as well? Star Trek is supposed to be about “boldly going where no one has gone before.” It’s shame that the people in charge seem intent on meekly going where we’ve already been.

So what’s my point? I . . . uh . . . don’t have one. Sorry. Sometime my inner geek needs to vent and unfortunately, you all bore the brunt of it this time.

But I will leave you with a question: What was your favorite episode of a Star Trek series?