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The most misused verse in the Bible

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God…”

…is not a complete sentence.

I mean, it is technically, but not in this case. It’s not even the beginning or end of a sentence, it’s literally the middle. Yet I cannot fathom how many times this poor verse has been yanked out of the middle of its own sentence just to prove the point that we are all miserably bad and can do nothing right.

Here is the full sentence, spanning three whole verses:

“22 There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

See how when you read the whole thing it actually seems to say something pretty different?

It’s interesting to me that we highlight the fact that all have sinned, but not the fact that — in the very next verse — all also get justified.

Maybe you grew up knowing this as the first step along ‘The Romans Road,’ which is basically the constructed system for salvation for the past hundred years or so, give or take. I don’t think it’s all awful or entirely wrong, but taking a verse out of the middle of a sentence so it proves YOUR point is never a great way to start a theological system.

Just the other week I was (forced) into a men’s Bible study to listen to a dude who hammered in the fact that we are all utterly sinful, cannot do anything right, and are all destined for hell, except for a small number of believers (read: Fundamentalists who believe exactly what he does). And he started with this verse.

I raised my hand and asked if he’s ever read the whole sentence.

You would think I just spat on all the men’s mothers by suggesting there could be another way to read this verse. It’s like an odd sacred cow among hyper-conservative evangelicals. Like, if you try to understand it any other way, you’re anathema to them and they may edge on using the h-word on you (heretic).

I asked if ‘all’ means all when it refers to who has sinned.
Of course they said yes.

I asked if ‘all’ means all when it refers to who God justifies.
They launched into full-on battle stations like the Gerries were bombarding their trenches.

It couldn’t mean all there, because, of course, you have to read it in context, and it’s this and that, and the thing that… and then two of them had aneurisms and one hyperventilated.

It’s weird how much we’ve come to love the angry god motif.

But it logically makes sense: If you firmly believe that God is angry, you’d be very cautious about someone coming along and misrepresenting him. And I mean that sincerely — logically, the rigid defense of who and how God is holds up. But perhaps, just maybe, we got something wrong along the way…

Myabe this verse is not actually about beating people up and telling them that they’re just pieces of crap, but when we read the whole sentence, maybe it’s about how God has already fized us up.

Like it’s saying, yah, you’re all a little wonky and everyone has screwed up, but God really wants to fix you all and has already made a way for it to happen.

Idk about you, but that sounds like good news to me.

I’m not necessarily going to exegete the entire sentence (a whole three verses!!) right now, but I just wanted to point out that I’ve read the rest of the sentence recently and it changed a lot for me.

Like, it almost sounds like God doesn’t hate us and we aren’t starting from hell and working up, but maybe there is a slightly better, slightly more beautiful story being told in the Bible than the one you’ve heard on The Romans Road.

e

100 days of blog, day 21

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An Examination of Karl Barth’s Response to Friedrich Nietzsche

Today’s blog is a paper I just finished for seminary…enjoy!

Introduction to Nietzsche

In the late 1800’s, Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced his famously controversial phrase, “God is dead” in his book The Gay Science. It has often been misunderstood, misquoted, and given many Christians the false impression that Nietzsche was some uneducated simpleton who thought he was some conquering victor who had defeated a deity. One theologian in the following century who gave Nietzsche his due response was Karl Barth, who sought to understand what Nietzsche meant with this enigmatic statement, as well as the context in which it was uttered, and the man himself. This paper will first attempt to understand what was meant by Nietzsche when he penned the statement, then examine and evaluate Barth’s response to Nietzsche and share how this reflects the Christian thought of his day.

“God is dead.”

Nietzsche rapidly developed a reputation for being blunt — more of a sledgehammer than a philosopher. His ego seemed to expand to fill rooms, evidenced by things he wrote such as: “it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book.” If his goal was to get people talking for the next two centuries, he succeeded. Part of Nietzsche’s strategy for staying alive in the world of philosophical conversations comes from the fact that he often chose to write through parable or prosaic verse rather than in direct philosophical description. So, when he penned those three most famous words, they were in the context of a story, a conversation between two characters, which affects the way the statement is understood. To many modern Christians specifically, the statement comes off as a pithy pronouncement of the triumph of atheism over religion, rather than what it really was — a foretelling, or even a warning of the crumbling morals of religion and a prophecy of coming chaos. And Nietzsche was right: with the rise of secular governments came the bloodiest century in human history. It seems fitting that Nietzsche died in 1900, the dawn of this new age where to the popular mind, God was as good as dead, and human progress had taken the throne.

After all, atheism was nothing new by the time of Nietzsche, even if it was still controversial and a minority view. The system has simply been “represented with less restraint and we might almost say with greater honesty by Nietzsche.” So what Nietzsche observed could be described, not as the birth of atheism, but as the prediction of its logical end.

To better understand the phrase, one must first put it in context and summarize the full anecdote. A madman approaches “many of those who did not believe in God” who were standing around together, and says he is looking for God. The group seem to be haughty and scoffs at the madman, mocking him. It soon becomes apparent that the madman is a representative for Nietzsche himself, who turns out to know more than the cynical, laughing atheists, and end up being the prophet instead of the fool. It’s also interesting that Nietzsche seems to admit that he, via the proxy of the madman, has also been searching for God. In other words, he may be saying that he initially set out to find God, not destroy the idea of Him.

After the mocking from the atheists, the madman launches into his poetic tirade:

‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea?…What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?…Where are we moving to? Away from all suns?…Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?…God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves?…”

The madman in the story clearly has a better grasp on the implications of the removal of God from reality — or at the very least, the removal of a deity from the popular subconscious which bound together social principles and the morals and ethics along which they lived — than the laughing mob of casual atheists. Nietzsche seems to paint the atheists in this story as fools or scoffers who lack the full ability to comprehend the depth of where this shift will take the world.

As is often the case in didactic tales like these, the madman is really the one with a grasp on the truth, and he is able to see how the tectonic shifts of this removal of God from the world is leading to a lack of unity, orientation, et al. Perhaps Nietzsche, and others who employ a similar narrative approach, paint the sayer of truth as the madman, not because they are mad, but because they seem mad to the larger populace, when in reality they are the only ones who can see a bigger picture (as is the case with nearly every prophet in the Bible, starting with Noah, who were thought to be fools by everyone in their time). This is bolstered by what happens after the madman’s rant: he is met with silence, throws down his lantern, and says that he came too early; the people can’t see what they’ve done to themselves, as it is still too far off.

It is apparent that what Nietzsche is communicating through this parable is not a triumphal proclamation of man’s defeat of the divine, or a discarding of their need for him. Rather, it is a solemn warning about what is coming because they thought that way. Nietzsche spends several sentences pounding in the fact that humans have untethered themselves from anything that gives them a sense of orientation or solidity, and that now, they are adrift. None of the repercussions for ‘killing God’ listed off by the madman are positive. Therefore, it is all the more foolish to read this passage and come to the conclusion that Nietzsche was happy or optimistic about the death of God in the popular mind — very much the opposite. He may have been an atheist, and believed truly that there is no God, but he fully acknowledged that this is a dangerous truth, and the future would prove to be vastly different, not necessarily in a good way, as a result.

Wrestling with Nietzsche’s statement is tough to decipher, because while he appears as a grave prophet for what humanity has done in their rejection of God, he was also a staunch atheist and critic of religion, especially Christianity. In The Antichrist, he wrote that Christianity is the “one immortal blemish upon the human race.” Perhaps one could say that, while he himself rejected the idea of God on philosophic, moral, or even emotional grounds, he still could see the doom this unmooring spelled for the coming century(s). One modern commentator opined that, “When Nietzsche says that God is dead he doesn’t just mean that the Christian God is dead; God here doesn’t refer to the narrow religious definition but to the broader idea of universal and transcendent truth. A more accurate expression of what he meant [may] be ‘Truth is dead.’” This interpretation would certainly align with Nietzsche’s prose about the loss of direction and gravity and anything that could possibly unify humans toward a common goal or good. Many philosophers may see the two as interchangeable, at least in this context: If there is no universal truth, there is no way that humans can unite for a common purpose. This seat was held by God, according to Nietzsche and his ilk, for millennia, but now He is gone, and the result will be disastrous.

Barth’s Response

Barth’s initial response to the quickly-spreading idea that God had passed away seems lighthearted and jovial, almost dismissive. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:

“Be cheerful and of good courage. The statement that God is dead comes from Nietzsche and has recently been discovered and trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians and now by certain schoolboys. But the good Lord has not died of this; he who dwells in heaven laughs at them. This is all I have to say on the matter.”

Fortunately, it was not all he had to say on the matter. Barth was certainly smart enough to know that Nietzsche was deeper than an insult-hurling child, and was making a far more profound observation. Initially, however, in the third volume of his Dogmatics, one of the first things Barth writes regarding Nietzsche, as stated above, is his own self-involvement: “Nietzsche never spoke except about himself… [things] interested him only as a paradigm and symbol, or, to use his own expression, a projection of himself.” Or that, “Nietzsche was of the opinion that with his Zarathustra he had given humanity a greater gift than any so far given.” Barth seems to almost feel sorry for Nietzsche, as he talks about him being lonely and loveless, isolated from anyone who would want to share life with him. Barth writes: “His only impulse towards man is that of the hammer to the stone.”

Barth adopts Nietzsche’s autonym of the “anti-donkey,” because he found himself repeatedly opposing anything and everything he could, with the culmination of this being him becoming a manifestation of the Antichrist, or, one who is against the greatest being mankind has produced, the one who is the image and heart of the Western art, ethics, philosophy, and society which he fought, and resulting in his book of the same title. The climax of Nietzsche’s book Ecce Homo, according to Barth, is the single sentence: “Am I understood — Dionysius against the Crucified,” with Dionysius as a stand-in for his egoistic self. Barth goes on to explain that this was Nietzsche’s contention of himself, his own will, ‘the will to power,’ against all the Christian ethics which he saw as weak and therefore, bad. “According to Nietzsche‘s Thus Spake Zarathustra, an individual, asserting himself, should raise himself above the masses of humanity to overcome man, to be a god unto himself.” Christianity, exemplified in the life and teaching of Jesus, is opposed to this attitude. It says, in Barth‘s words, that the individual is not God but a man, and therefore under the cross of the Crucified and one of its host.” Christianity confronts the individual with the ‘suffering man,’ Jesus, and, “demands that he should see the man, that he should accept his presence, that he should not be man without him but with him, that he must drink with him at the same source.” Perhaps it was because Christ calls humans to suffer, and Nietzsche didn’t like the idea of the existence of humanity to be one of mere suffering until death. Whatever the reason for his repulsion, his opposition to Christian ethics was absolute. Writes Barth:

“What is the absolutely intolerable and unequivocally perverted element which Nietzsche thinks that he has discovered, and must fight to the death, in Christian morality, and in this as the secret essence of all morality?… It is because Christianity is not really a faith, and is not really “bound to any of its shameless dogmas,” and does not basically need either metaphysics, asceticism, or “Christian” natural science, but is at root a practice, and is always possible as such, and in the strict sense has its “God” in this practice.”

Barth sees Nietzsche first and foremost as an ethicist, and the ethics of Christianity clashed with his own. According to Barth, Nietzsche preferred man to be “lonely, noble, strong, proud, natural, healthy, wise, outstanding, splendid man, the superman,” all of which — on the surface at least — run contrary to the morals taught by Christ. Although he was incredibly well-versed in the Bible, Barth seems to say that Nietzsche did not see it as having any sort of authority or input on any metaphysical or epistemological levels — it only played in the arena of ethics, and it was these ethics which bothered Nietzsche endlessly. Nietzsche’s ethic was to raise oneself over others — made evident even in the name he gave his ideal man: the overman. Rising above is built into the naming of his ideal, an ideal which is fundamentally at odds with Christianity.

Response & Evaluation

Both men were incredibly influential thinkers: Nietzsche as both an advocate for atheism and the prophet of its own collateral damage, and Barth as a thoughtful Christian theologian who helped adapt Christianity to be more relevant in the 20th century. Neither Barth nor Nietzsche were slouches on any intellectual front — both were incredibly well-read and aware of history as well as the times in which they lived, plus Barth aware of Nietzsche’s life and times. So it is surprising then, that Barth treats Nietzsche with a somewhat dismissive attitude. Toward the end of his extended notes about the German philologist, Barth wrote:

“Those who try to fight the Gospel always make caricatures, and they are then forced to fight these caricatures. Nietzsche’s caricature consists in his (not very original) historical derivation of Christianity from a revolt on the part of slaves or the proletariat…We all grasp at such aids as are available.”

Someone as intelligent as Barth would have known that Nietzsche was not simply a dull hammer, swinging at anything that he didn’t like, or that didn’t feel good to him. Saying that Nietzsche only disagreed with Christianity on ethical grounds is a bit trite, and doesn’t give Nietzsche the full response he may deserve. Perhaps, however, Barth is assuming that it is Nietzsche who is not taking Christianity seriously enough; maybe he assumes that Nietzsche can’t take Christianity seriously simply because it does not fit into his paradigm of power as the creator of ethics. After all, the founder of Christianity embraced weakness and suffering, and then died for his enemies — voluntarily lowering Himself below everyone else, or, becoming the untermensch. It seems to continually baffle Nietzsche that the religion of a man who chose to humble “himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross” is the one that overtook the world, even becoming a dominant ‘power’ in the West. Christianity is so contrary to Nietzsche’s ethic that it never should have worked. By his definition, Christ is the übermensch, as He won all these Christians over to His way of thinking and living — His ethics. Yet, Christ continually resists this categorization in the gospels, continually resisting power and choosing humility.

As Nietzsche constructed his own ethical system, Christianity is the one paradigm that throws a wrench into his way of thinking. Even Islam fits neatly into his understanding of the world, as it was founded by a powerful warlord who forced his beliefs upon masses. I can almost hear Nietzsche fondly admiring Mohammed: ‘He would have made a fine übermensch.’

Yet Barth does not seem to give Nietzsche his due analysis. As stated above, Barth seems rather dismissive of Nietzsche and labels him as a mere ethicist, without wrestling — in his writings at least — with many of Nietzsche’s metaphysical arguments. I would have liked to see Barth go deeper into analyzing Nietzsche’s own philosophy, instead of just responding to Nietzsche’s critiques of Christianity. What he does give us, however, is a Christian insight into the functional ethics of many atheists of his time, much of which is still helpful in understanding that way of thinking today.

Day 19 of 100 days of blogging

Bibliography

Barth, Karl and Bromiley, Geoffrey W.. Church Dogmatics, Vol. III, 2. New York: T&T Clark International, 1960.

Barth, Karl and Bromiley, Geoffrey W.. Letters 1961–1968. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1975.

Cussen, James. “God is Dead” — What Nietzsche Really Meant. Retrieved from: https://www.thelivingphilosophy.com/god-is-dead/.

Groenewald, André J. “Interpreting the theology of Barth in light of Nietzsche’s dictum “God is dead”.” HTS Teologiese Studies 63 (January, 2009): 1429–1445. Retrieved from: https://www.ajol.info/index.php/hts/article/view/148557/138056#:~:text=Karl%20Barth%20responded%20with%20his,a%20%E2%9CNicht%2DGott%E2%9D.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Antichrist. Trans. Anthony M. Ludovici. Buffalo, Prometheus, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900 and Walter Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York, Vintage Books, 1974.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Edited by Duncan Large. Oxford World’s Classics. London, England: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Wiley, Craig, “I Was Dead and Behold, I am Alive Forevermore: Responses to Nietzsche in 20th Century Christian Theology,” intersections 10, no. 1 (2009): 507–517.

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Christians seriously don’t get this.

The New Testament is a relatively short collection of books, yet it is unbelievably complex and intricate. One of the things it hammers in more clearly than nearly anything else is that Jesus is a God of this world, not of some ethereal heaven where we go after. 

The Jesus presented in the Gospels is a man who interacts with spit, food, mud, stones (he was a tekton, which is often translated carpenter, but more accurately is closer to a stone mason), and then later in the story, he makes pronouncements about economics, politics, and more. He teaches on divorce, marriage, forgiveness, money, and the damage of elevating religion and tradition over human beings. 

In other words, he teaches about real world STUFF. 

God has his hands in the ground with dirt beneath divine fingernails.

But do a thought experiment with me. Imagine you’ve never read the Bible, and the only impression you have of Jesus is what you hear from Christians and what you see in their lives. I imagine you’d think Jesus:

is primarily focused on getting you to heaven, or sorting out who goes to hellis very nice and prim and proper and clean and politekind of hovered over the ground and was really holy; too holy to worry about boring stuff like taxes, and too holy to touch mud or leperswas a Republican (Or a Liberal, depending on who you’re talking to); basically, that he fit in a nice, tidy ideological boxisn’t really involved in the things of our modern world, except making sure you don’t have pre- or extra-marital sex.

I interact with people all the time and it becomes obvious that, though they talk about Jesus, they haven’t read much of their Bibles. They haven’t gotten to know the Jesus presented in the gospels.

The sad thing is, there are countless nonbelievers in our world today who haven’t ever picked up a Bible, so largely, the above points are their impressions of who Jesus is. Our words and lives are the only exposure to Jesus they’ve ever had. Is it a good one? Is it even remotely close to the Jesus depicted in the New Testament?

The main problem

I’d say one of the main issues with today’s Christianity is actually thousands of years old: gnosticism. 

It’s a complex belief system, but largely, it says that God cares about ‘spiritual things,’ and doesn’t really care about the stuff in this world. This world will blow away and then all that will be left is our spirits…so focus on those and don’t fret too much about the things of this world.

“The things of this world…”

As in, spit, mud, food, stones, economics, politics, divorce, marriage, forgiveness, money, and the damage of elevating religion and tradition over human beings.

As in, the things Jesus mainly taught about.
You see how that works? 

How do we have Jesus come and teach about all of this, and then end up with a belief system that disregards, like, all of it? It’s baffling. But I think that’s one of the ways our psychology works against us. 

We figure that since we can’t see God, He doesn’t care about things we can see. (I know that was a mouthful)

Or, since God is invisible, He is only concerned with invisible things, not all these normal things of our world that we deal with day to day.

I’m always left with the question, then, of what are spiritual things then? For all that we can interact with are visible, natural things…

We assume God is bigger and more mysterious than our little earth, so He couldn’t possibly be too concerned with the stuff we have going on down here. And this is the root of so many of our problems. Our Christianity is a theology of ‘out there,’ not ‘right here, right now, among the sweaty August days and my flat tire.’ 

And it expands into so many other areas. How you use your body matters to God. Jesus gives a rip about how and where you spend your money. Etc.

Christianity is not about ‘flying away from this world to heaven,’ but it’s about bringing that kingdom of heaven here, to earth, today. And properly understood, this should change our actions and lives drastically. (Jesus barely talked about how to get to heaven, or what it’s like. He actually never talked about ‘going to heaven,’ but about ‘being with him,’ but that’s a story for another day)

Let’s not let our theology be too lofty to put its knees in the dirt or touch another human. Just as Jesus came down and dwelt among us, eating and working and pooping, we can come to see God in the seemingly normal, everyday aspects of this world as well.

e

Day 18 of 100 days of blog.

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The Holocaust of God

There are three types of holocaust.

With a lowercase ‘h,’ the word holocaust refers to the sacrifice of an animal (or otherwise) that is completely burnt to ash. 

hólos, “whole” + kaustós, “burnt” = holocaust. The burnt whole.

This is different than a sacrifice that results in a communal meal. In the Old Testament, there were many times that a sacrifice would result in a meal for the priests. But other times, they are instructed to have a ‘burnt offering,’ or a korban, which is something totally and utterly devoted to the Lord.

In the second century BC, Antiochus IV Epiphanes broke into the temple in Jerusalem and erected The Altar of Holocausts, and the fact that there are no hardcore bands with that name is a shame. 

On it, AIVE burnt a bunch of pigs, which were unclean animals to the Jewish people. This was like spitting in the face of the Jews. In Daniel, Matthew, and Mark, this is referred to as ‘the abomination of desolation.’ 

Researching all of this for a sermon on Sunday led me to reflect on the nature of sacrifices and what their true purpose is/should be. 

Years ago, when I first learned that the priests ate many of the sacrificed animals, I thought What the heck, that’s not really a sacrifice then! They still got to eat it!

But let’s think about this for a second: First, the animals would come from a tribe other than the Levites, who didn’t own any land or crops or animals. It was a sacrifice from someone else in the community to support the priests. 

And second, think about how much more conscientious the priests would be as they consumed that meal. Imagine sitting down to eat food after going through laborious ritual to remind yourself that this food is first and foremost God’s food, and you’re simply benefitting from it with your life. 

Your entire being and sustenance comes from God.

Imagine how much more aware of that fact you’d be while eating a sacrificed bull. 

Now, it’s the holocaust I have more problems understanding. Why would God want us to waste a perfectly good animal?

At worst, this seems like a foolish superstition. Ward off the anger of the gods by sacrificing perfectly good animals. The technical term for this is a apotropaic magic, or rituals done to ward off evil or wrath. Which really is the heart of superstition. Do some random thing so that bad things don’t happen to you. 

Burning up entire herds of animals seems like a superstitious waste: they don’t nourish anyone or anything; they don’t contribute to the life of the world. And perhaps this is why God doesn’t demand korbans from us anymore. 

But then I realized that, this is only a waste if God is not real. 

Throughout the Bible, we are told that the scent of sacrifice (which to us would smell like blood and death and rot) is an aroma to God’s nostrils. When we give something of value up to God, it is not wasted because it is bringing joy to God.

It is showing Him that we trust Him enough to have an abundance mindset over a scarcity one. If we were scared of running out of food — as the ancient Israelites often were when they stocked up on manna — then we would inherently be saying we don’t trust God enough to provide for us. 

But to sacrifice good animals, reducing them to ash, shows that we are not scared of running out of food because we believe in a God of abundance. He hasn’t let us starve yet, and He won’t in the future. 

A holocaust is an act of faith. 

There are two types of animal holocausts: One is terrified of an angry God, so it superstitiously burns up good animals to ward off bad luck. The other is an act of gratitude, faith, and abundance.

But what about in the New Testament, where Paul says to give ourselves as a burnt offering to God? 

What if we are the holocaust?

What if we are to be the ‘burnt whole’?

I struggle with making metaphorical, or ancient symbolism tangible in my own life. I don’t know how to give myself to God fully, as a burnt sacrifice. 

But I know it involves giving up my own desires and letting them be replaced by what God wants for me. 

I think it includes trusting that my life will bring sustenance to others, the same way the bulls of the Old Testament gave their lives to sustain the priests who ate them. 

It means that I, myself, will need to make sacrifices of certain things, and let go of a scarcity mindset. (Just to steer us clear of any sort of prosperity theology, this doesn’t mean that I expect riches and profit in and of myself, but that I believe in a God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills and He will take care of me.)

And it takes trust to believe that when I do this, it will not be wasted.

The burning of my whole self will hurt, and it will take a lifetime to burn me down to an ash, but it will be worth it, if God is real, and good, and a God of Abundance.

The Holocaust of God

The last type of holocaust is the holocaust of God (another metal band name?). What are we to do with a God who gave Himself as the totally consumed sacrifice? In what category does that God fit?

The ancient view of the gods were as angry and superstitious: Give to them to avoid the bad things. But the view of God presented in Jesus is this: A God who gives Himself to the people to avoid the bad things. That’s ridiculous.

God has become the holocaust for God’s people: A sacrifice that was totally destroyed in order to give to them a future.

So it’s to this type of God that we should be able to give everything.

e

Day 17 of 100 blogs

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Why I love horror (as a Christian)

Recently, a friend genuinely asked me why I like horror so much, and it prompted me to verbalize the reasoning behind my interest in the genre. So this is my response, filled out for further explanation. 

Plus, I added a bit of, for lack of a better word, ‘justification’ for why I think it’s not only permissible, but encouraged for Christians to enjoy the occasional horror film (depending on what it is and who you are, etc. Not everyone can handle everything. There are plenty I still won’t watch!)

When done right, they have the potential to be the MOST creative of all the genres.

Horror more than many other genres necessitates throwing the doors off when it comes to creativity. Yes, there are crappy horror films that rely on tired religious tropes and cheap jumpscares, but the best horror films have come up with entirely new ways to remind you that your life is fragile and there are more things to fear than we used to think.

For example, in recent history, some ultra original titles have been It Follows, Talk to Me, and Barbarian. These all found a new way for humans or creatures to live; new systems in which people get entangled. They left me chewing on them for days. How would I escape the ‘thing’ in It Follows, if that happened to me? 

More than, say, a rom-com (and I have nothing against rom-coms), the horror genre is free to push the boundaries of creativity, coming up with new monsters or villains or situations, et al. In fact, it kind of needs it unless you want another kid in a crypt with an undead nun who keeps popping out at them. Like, how many of that exact movie have they made?

Perhaps this is because they dabble in the supernatural, which opens up new realms of creativity and expression of ideas which don’t really get explored in a rom-com or action, etc. 

Horror films expose many of the deep and honest things in humans:

Namely, that we have fears we don’t want to acknowledge. That we aren’t really safe and never have been.

I sent these texts from my grandparent’s house in Pennsylvania, which is in the middle of nowhere in farm country. Inside, it feels so cozy and safe and warm, but walk 100 feet from their house into the corn field and there is a WORLD of terror at this time of night. 

Are we actually any safer inside their house? Not at all. They don’t even lock their doors, lol. Any intruder would have no problem getting in and doing whatever he wanted. A determined bear or wolf could easily get in. 

The horror film is the thing that takes you by the hand and says, look, you’re not safe at all and never have been, and safety has always been an illusion, and here’s some reality for you.

Because the reality is, we have far more things in the world to be afraid of than not. 

Most of the universe exists in night, not day.

People often use comedy or action or anything that feels light as an escape. In some ways, horror draws us back to the grim truth of reality. Most of the world is dangerous and wants to kill us. Heck, 70% of the earth is ocean and how many of us suffer from crippling thalassophobia? And you want to tell me the world is just a cute, safe, PG-rated place? 

They address necessary themes.

In a similar way, how many rom-coms have addressed the nature of death or the supernatural? How many of them have wrestled with the lurking mysteries beneath the thin veneer of our physical reality? There may be some, but they’d be the exception.

The Bible itself contains numerous stories that, if we really thought about them or turned them into films, would be R-rated horror. For example:

Jesus in the graveyard with a demon-possessed dude who is chained up near a herd of pigs, crying out and cutting himself with stones.Saul seeing a witch in Endor and bringing Samuel back from the dead.Herod is struck dead by God, then eaten by worms before he dies.The night of the Passover, the angel of death goes throughout Egypt killing firstborn sons. Even that scene in the Prince of Egypt was pretty freaky.I could go on for a while, but people are hacked up, lit on fire by God, swallowed by the earth, or drowned en masse by a global flood, and we haven’t even touched on the psychedellic book of Revelation.

The thing is, if you deconstruct horror to its basic elements, you’ll find that there are typically most or all of these present: Dread, hopelessness, suspense, violence/gore, supernatural elements, and darkness.

Now think about the place in the Bible you have all these things, and I’ll give you a hint: it is absolutely the center of the Christian faith.

The crucifixion.

I mean, The Passion of the Christ can easily be considered a horror film; which of those things does it not have? The disciples lost hope, they were terrified of what would happen to them now. There was blood and gore and violence, and when Jesus died, don’t forget, many dead people got up and walked out of their tombs. Plus, literal darkness covered the land and the curtain in the temple tore by itself.

You don’t have Christianity without horror.

But why should Christians fill their minds with this stuff?

Well, ‘should’ may be a strong word. I don’t know if anyone should do anything like this, especially if it produces nightmares or anything of the sort. That can’t be good for our mental, or probably physical health. 

But if you can handle them, I think the occasional horror film is good for the psyche. 

The creators of The Conjuring series are Christians and said that they wanted to make those films to remind people of the reality of the spiritual world. And if you talk to many people who saw those films, they succeeded. 

Again, I’m not saying that all horror films are good and worth watching. Some are just ‘torture porn,’ and others are just lame and replete with easy jump scares — those don’t teach anyone about the ominous nature of the universe. But the good ones do. 

One of my favorites is A Ghost Story, because it reinforces human mortality and demonstrates just how long time is, versus the brevity of our lives. It’s haunting, pun intended, because it has lingered in my mind for years since I first saw it. 

Don’t confuse symbolism with reality. 

I think much of what people fear or label as ‘dark or evil’ is just symbolism.

For instance, goat horns and upside-down stars may trigger tremors in some people and make them think something is instantly dark and anti-God. 

Are they, or have they just been presented to us that way over a long history of symbols and collective imagination? Who invented 5-point stars…was it not God? Who gets to decide that if we rotate them 45 degrees, they’re suddenly evil?

Same with goats: How would you feel is someone decided that your horns looked like satan, the angel cast out of heaven? 

What about 666? Oh, you mean the number that is FROM THE BIBLE and refers to Caesar, not satan?

We could go down the list of all the symbolism and how they are ‘dark and evil,’ but unless you’re actually using Ouja boards and summoning demons, I think you’ll be ok. 

So? 

I think horror has a lot to teach the Christian who can bear it. There is truth in it which is often missing from other genres of entertainment. The world is a dark place, and God Himself has entered into our darkness, so we shouldn’t fear it. 

Plus, do you really think an episode of Friends is any more godly or less dark? Is satan not equally happy that they’re all sleeping together and pursuing selfish hedonism and individualism above all else?

We’ve lost sight of what is truly dark and become a confused people. I’m not saying don’t watch Friends, just watch everything with your brain turned on, including horror. 

e

Day 16 of 100 blogs

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different kinds of sitting

There are different kinds of sitting.

Perhaps my least favorite part of traveling is when we sit on the runway. When all the passengers and crew have boarded and the doors have been shut, and then you sit. 

I traveled last weekend and this one, and last weekend, we ended up sitting on the runway for an hour. They had “overfueled the plane,” which I didn’t realize was a thing (When I told my mom about it later, she asked if I saw some guy out there with a garden hose sucking the fuel out, LOL. I told her it was the best joke she’s ever made). 

I’m currently in the air somewhere over Indiana, and before takeoff, we sat out there for ten minutes before taking off, but the panic began to sink in that we may need to deplane again and get delayed for hours, as I was last weekend. But fortunately, it was just the normal ten minutes needed before liftoff.

But here’s what I realized in those ten minutes: That there are different kinds of sitting. 

When we are sitting on the tarmac not moving, my activity is exactly the same as when we are airborne, throttling through the atmosphere at 4,000 miles per hour (or however fast airliners go, idk). 

Either way, I’m just sitting here. 

But there is a notable difference. In one, it feels like nothing is getting done and we aren’t going anywhere. My heart rate is spiked and my impatience soars the way I wish the plane would. I feel my body willing us to take off, now. And once we do, in the other type of sitting, we are literally hurtling toward our destination: there is tangible progress being made toward our destination. 

It’s productive sitting.
It’s sitting, forward.
It’s sitting that gets you somewhere.

It’s like that meme about waiting faster.

But here’s the little realization I had in today’s iteration of Sitting: The Next Generation. Even when I’m sitting in my seat while the plane is stagnant on the runway, things are happening. The pilots are going through very necessary checklists and processing paperwork which is mandatory to keep all airlines operating and running smoothly and getting planes in the air. 

Even when it feels like we aren’t going anywhere, we kinda are. 

When it feels like nothing is happening (from my vantage point back in 35A), many important things very much are, which are necessary to get me home to Denver. And me being stressed and tight and desperately longing for it all to hurry up, doesn’t do a darn thing to speed things along.

Of course, this is a synecdoche for all of life, and various seasons in which we find ourselves not moving forward. Sure, it feels like nothing is happening and we aren’t getting anywhere, but things most certainly are happening. Like the checklists run by the pilots, we can’t always see the important things going on, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t about to take off and get moving in just a minute or two.  

I’ve had many seasons like this, and I’m sure you have too. It’s helpful to remind ourselves that the ‘sitting on the tarmac’ seasons of life are just as important to getting us where we need to go as the ‘shooting through the sky’ seasons, where movement is evident. 

I can breathe, lower my blood pressure, and sit the same way, letting the plane and crew get me where I need to be. 

e

100 days of blogs, day 15

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The Building, part 7, the end

The two guards walked toward me. They weren’t in a hurry, they seemed more to be coming over to hear a news update. I kept forgetting that I looked just like one of them now, and they couldn’t tell I was an intruder. I also thought about how easily one of them had earlier killed one of his coworkers in my home, and knew I had to tread carefully or risk the same fate.

As they ambled over to me, I decided to confidently point at one of them, then point to the lift. He simply nodded and walked past me, onto the lift. He closed the gate and apparently knew exactly where to go, as I saw him pushing a button and going down.The other guard turned and walked back to resume his pacing around the grand lobby. I decided to try talking to him without betraying my identity.

“How is he today?” I asked.

The guard looked at me and said nothing and at first, I thought I had already given myself away. Then he shook his head and said, “Don’t know. Haven’t seen him yet.”

“Should I go in and check on him then?” I asked. I wondered if my curiosity would eventually get me killed.

“Be my guest. Just don’t forget what happened to Cyphil.” Of course, I had no idea what had happened to Cyphil, and figured it would be better not to know.

I approached the large, ornate office doors and gave a courtesy knock as I pushed one open. I peeked my head in and looked at the man I’d been wondering about for over a year.

Nephilous Krimm stood looking out a window on the opposite side of the office, and I still had no idea how there were windows in this eye-covered building. He turned to look at me and gave me the same smile I’d seen him give the crowd months ago.

“Yes?” he said with a kind tone of voice.

“We — “ I began, unsure of what to say. “We just haven’t seen you all day and I wanted to be sure you’re alright, sir.”

His warm smile didn’t change as he answered. “Yes, thank you for checking. But please never interrupt me uninvited again. This is your first and last warning,” still with the unbroken smile.

“Yes, sir, I apologize,” I said.

“No need to apologize, just don’t let it happen again.”

I turned to leave, disappointed that I didn’t get any more insight about…any of this, when he said, “You must be one of the new ones, huh?”

“Uh, yes sir,” I said, as it was not a lie.

“What’s your name?” he asked. His smile seemed warm and sincere, but I also couldn’t help but wonder if this was some sort of test.

“My old name?” I asked, totally guessing at what sort of answer he wanted, also guessing that they changed or lost names in this place.

“Good,” he smiled again. “Just making sure.”

I went to leave again when he said, “One last thing. Now that you’re here, you’ve got me thinking…I could use some decompression. Come on up.”

I had noticed a spiral staircase that went up to the ceiling, presumably to the 86th floor. That must be where he lives, in the penthouse. He turned to walk up the stairs and I didn’t know what decompression meant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It seemed like all the other workers were somewhat brainwashed and did whatever he wanted, and I didn’t want to be another one. However, the combination of my curiosity and fear of what would happen if I resisted drove me to follow him up the stairs.

What I found was, unsurprisingly, the nicest apartment I’d ever seen.

Krimm led me up the stairs and through the kitchen, presumably to his bedroom, but I never found out. I apparently was going too slowly through the kitchen, looking around and soaking it all in, and he walked back toward me.

“Look,” he said, with no more warmth in his tone. “Something has been off about you from the start. Do you need to go through orientation again?” Once again, I didn’t want to know what orientation entailed.

“No sir,” I replied.

He stared at me a second longer, then approached me and reached for my mask, to lift it up. But I grabbed his wrist. Quickly, without thinking, I pulled a small knife out of my belt with my other hand and rammed it under his armpit. He was so shocked it took a few seconds for him to react. He inhaled sharply, gasping for air. His eyes stared far away, and the strength slowly left his legs.

Nephilous Krimm began to say nonsensical things as he died. “With…hair? …Not on this…basket.” He fell to his knees. Blood ran down his side and onto his pants.

I was somewhat shocked too.

I have no idea what drove me to pull the minion’s knife from his belt and kill the most powerful man in the city, but it felt like the right thing to do. He had become too powerful and needed to be stopped.

My curiosity drove me to dig through Krimm’s pockets and see what I could find. I still wanted to know so much more. But both his front pockets were empty, and then I noticed it. The chain of a necklace lay around his neck. It had risen up above his collar when he had fallen onto his side. I reached down and pulled it out of his shirt, and on the end was a jewel colored like I’d never seen before. It was a rich hue, and it wasn’t just one color that could be described. As I rotated it, the hue changed. It was unbelievable.

I pulled it over his head and examined the jewel closer. Then I put it over my own head.

And suddenly I saw.

in a way that transcends words, I could see everything. All the eyes of this massive building were somehow routed to my brain, and I could process and comprehend it all.

I saw my minions coming and going and I had perfect control of them all, the way a pianist has perfect, individual control of each of her fingers.

And I liked it.

The End. 

e

Day 14 of 100 days of blogging

The post The Building, part 7, the end appeared first on ethan renoe.

The Building, part 6

We pulled up to the back of the building—the side on the opposite side from the glass door I’d tried to peer into before. There was a loading dock and port where the truck pulled into and we all got out. I walked with the men up and into the cargo doors, and expected them to take me to Krimm, or some other official who would review my situation.

Instead, they just walked in and spread out, each going to tend to his own duties, leaving me entirely alone, assuming I’d go about whatever it was I had to do. I stood in the middle of a bustling commotion of minions for a moment, waiting for someone to come and direct me to my debrief, but no one did. Each one seemed to be going about his own business, with no one caring about the expendable workers who now lay dead in my home.

When I realized no one was going to tell me what to do or where to go, I suddenly snapped into action, realizing that standing still would look more suspicious than walking with intent. I assumed a brisk pace, but also tried to look around and soak in the sight around me.

The innards of the tower were unrefined. In the middle of it was a massive opening which seemed to rise almost to the top of the tower. This surprised me that the inside of the building was nearly hollow. Around the edges of the building, on each level, was a walkway where minions paced constantly, each running to execute a duty or perform their function.

Along each of the walls ran those red cables which looked like veins or vessels of some sort. They were clearly the inputs from the eyes on the outside of the building, communicating somehow with the workers inside the building. There were so many of them it nearly felt like being inside a living, breathing organism. The walls were also pink and wet and seemingly alive, like the inside of a cheek.

I could not figure out how the eyes and the organs of the building communicated with the minions. How did they instantaneously know where to go and what to do? It felt so instant and thoughtless that it was more like instinct than a relayed, verbal message—like when you sense your hand nearing a hot stove and jerk it away without thinking. That’s how the workers seemed to interact with the tower and all of its eyes.

I looked up the center of the building, where I could see up dozens of stories, and on each level I could see, the workers were running around, carrying out their various tasks, each set on doing whatever they were assigned. There was no rest, no break areas, no sleeping mats. I wondered how they had the energy to be in constant motion with no rest or sleep. Surely they didn’t go home and sleep—the fact that no one had left the building in plain clothes had been clearly reported.

But now here I was, an intruder in the building, undetected, and apparently, not on the same wavelength as these workers.

I walked over to a lift that went up as far as I could see, and waited by the door until the cart appeared. I stepped on with a few other workers. They all pushed a button for their floor, and I pushed the second from the top.

One of the others looked at me and simply said, “85?”

I looked at him and nodded and that was that.

The other guards. each got off at their respective floors and I rode it slowly up to the 85th floor. When it arrived, the fence slid open and I stood on a floor that was mostly empty. It was above the hollow area of the building, so the floor seemed to take up the entire breadth of the building. It was a mostly open floor with a high ceiling. On the far side of this lobby, straight across from the lift door, was an ornate looking double door.

To my right and left were tall windows. In any other building this would have seemed perfectly normal, but then I remembered that I was in a building covered in eyes, which from the outside, had no visible windows whatsoever. How could there be windows from the inside but none visible on the outside? I didn’t know, but couldn’t think about it right now.

Two guards walked around the open lobby space, and both looked at me as the lift opened.

I had clearly come to Nephilous Krimm’s office.

to be concluded…

e

day 13 of 100 days of blogging

The post The Building, part 6 appeared first on ethan renoe.

The Building, part 5

The guard was several inches taller than me, so I felt like a child as he advanced further into my home, right where I wanted to draw him into. I backed into my kitchen and pulled the lever I had rigged. It pulled a string through several hooks that led it up and along the ceiling to the front door. It released a sledgehammer that had been fixed up above the door, and now swung down and into the face of the guard at the door. It swung in a perfect arc, and my estimation of his height and placement had been perfect. It appeared to hit him right in the nose beneath his mask, and he crumpled to the ground right in the doorway.

This all happened so fast that the minion who was now in my kitchen wasn’t even aware that his partner was down before I grabbed the pot of boiling oil I had left on the stove and threw it on his face. Even through his mask, it burned his skin. It hit some exposed parts of his neck and ran down his torso.

He screamed and fell to the ground as well, clawing the mask from his head and wiping at his face. The skin was burned and melting. He kept crying out and I grew worried one of my neighbors — or worse, Krimm — would hear. 

While he cried out, I quickly ran to my doorway and pulled the other guard inside, slamming the door closed and praying that the eyes hadn’t seen what I just did. They could clearly see my doorway from the tower, but there was a small sliver of hope that none of them had been watching during those few seconds.

Now there were two men in my home: One unconscious and one screaming in agony from his burning skin. I figured it would only be a matter of time before he went into shock from the pain, but I figured I could help him along. I had a bottle of ether on my counter, which I now poured onto the rag by the sink and held it over his mouth, telling myself it was the most merciful thing I could do. The man whose skin was still bubbling fell silent and breathed in small, shallow breaths on my kitchen floor.

I returned to the man by the front door and began removing his uniform. I now realized that to put them on, both would be too large for me, and I had to choose between a mask filled with blood or a mask filled with oil and burnt skin. I opted for the bloody mask after a thorough scrubbing. I knew I had to work quickly before the men woke up, so I put on the uniform, rolled up the pant legs and tucked them into the boots so they didn’t look so long, and scrubbed the inside of the mask with bleach.

But then I realized my miscalculation: the minions never traveled alone. There were always at least two or three walking together. Would Nephilous Krimm see this from his tower and be suspicious about the lone minion?

I decided to tie up the one who now lay in his underwear, so that when he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to get out. Once he was secured, still bleeding profusely from his nose and mouth, I returned to the guard in my kitchen. I pulled his mask back over his face and dragged him to the front door by the wrists.

I opened the front door, turned toward the panopticon, and waved my arms over my head. I saw several of the eyes lock onto me immediately. To them, it looked like two guards — one waving and one unconscious on the floor. And for now, that was true.

It was barely two minutes before one of Krimm’s trucks turned the corner onto my block. It pulled right up to the front door and two minions ran out while the driver waited behind the wheel.

“What happened?” one asked me.

I didn’t want to answer in case they noticed the voice being different, so I just pointed at the body and at the kitchen. The guards were in such a hurry they barely took notice of me. They saw the blood on the ground and the oil spilled all over the kitchen, and decided it was too much work to clean up or help. After thinking for just a few seconds, he took a strange weapon out of his belt. It was gray and smaller than a brick, but I could barely see through the foggy lenses of my mask. He unfolded it once, so it doubled in length and extended it toward the man’s head. It clicked with a sound no louder than a seatbelt, and I could tell that the man on the ground was now dead.

I couldn’t react and risk giving myself away, so I watched in silence. I was grateful the mask hid my face, because I had no idea what it was doing currently.

“Come with us,” the minion said and turned to walk back to the truck. He left the door open and gave no other instructions, so I turned and followed him to the truck. The other one who had gone to the house said nothing, just walked back to the truck behind me.

I was so nervous I felt like I’d throw up the entire trip to the tower. I would likely go into the mysterious building, and may even speak to Krimm himself. Would they interrogate me? Ask about the death of ‘my partner’? What would I say?

to be continued…

e

100 days of blogs, day 12

The post The Building, part 5 appeared first on ethan renoe.

The Building, part 4

It seemed that Krimm had no blindness. That was his aim after all: to see everything in the city, at once, not missing a thing.

Living under a new regime that had arisen with next to no resistance meant that this was all anyone talked or thought about. We could not talk about it in public, because although it was obvious that Krimm saw everything, it was assumed that he also heard everything, though we had no direct evidence of this.

I thought about this day and night. What’s the one thing that someone who has eyes everywhere can’t see? What’s the one thing that he whose ears litter the streets can’t hear? It plagued the back of my mind like an ongoing riddle.

It seemed like Krimm had thought of everything. We daily heard stories of attempted resistance and subsequent arrests. It even felt like his eyes could somehow see through walls and roofs. There was no escape from his all-seeing eyes; no place was safe from his gaze.

So one day, for no other reason than that my curiosity had grown to border violence, I stood on my front door step and stared at his building. The eyes were in constant motion, as always. A thousand eyes scanned every iota of the city, in constant motion. I stood there, gazing intently at the tower until, I couldn’t be certain, but I swore that one of the eyes stopped moving and locked onto me.

I stared back.

It didn’t move, but looked right at me standing in my doorway.

It wasn’t more than sixty seconds until I saw two guards turn the corner onto my block, walking right toward me. I took a step back into my door when one of them called out.

“Citizen. Mr. Krimm wants to know why you were staring at his tower.”

I took another step back into my home and was about to close the door when one of their gloved hands slapped against the door and pushed it open. He matched my steps — as I stepped backwards, he proceeded into my home. The other one stood in the doorway and stopped.

“Can I help you?” I asked the guard while still retreating back into my home.

He repeated himself. “Mr. Krimm would like to know why you were staring at him.”

I didn’t know how to answer, or what sort of response would best satisfy them. I kept backing up.

to be continued…

e

Day 11 of 100 blog days

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