Basket-weaving the biblical narrative

My introduction to Douglas Rushkoff was the excellent Frontline special, Digital Nation, which Rushkoff helped produce and appears in. This post isn't about that Frontline special, but I'm serious when I say everyone who uses digital, networked technology (and if you're reading this, you do) should watch it. I also saw him in a scary/awesome documentary called We Live in Public, which is about an eccentric visionary in the early days of the internet (whom Rushkoff knew personally). While poking around on Rushkoff's website, I found that a few years ago he wrote a four-volume comic book series called Testament.

Comics were a pretty significant part of my childhood. So were computers. I grew up going to church, too, so the Bible was also in my awareness (although not as prevalent in my consciousness as the other two). I stopped reading comics regularly back in high school but I never lost my love for them. So when I discovered Testament, it immediately caught my attention: Old Testament biblical narratives (Rushkoff is Jewish) are told and then re-told as near-future cyberpunk narratives. A cosmic spiritual battle that happens outside of time (and outside the actual frames of the comic's pages...very clever) rages, with ripples being felt in both time-periods. Spiritual warfare is a topic I've done some thinking and writing about this year, so it thrilled me to see it depicted so interestingly here. The cyberpunk narrative folds in the rampant expanse and corporatization of technology in society, which is a special interest of mine. To top it all off, at the end of each volume, there is about 8 to 10 pages of biblical commentary from Rushkoff as it relates to the comic! Basically, this comic felt like it was written especially for me. Thanks, Douglas Rushkoff!  So read on after the break for a few comments on this amazing comic...

The bogey of the spiritual

In late 2005, a few months after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast of the United States, five people from my church in Iowa, including myself, drove the church van down to Thibodaux, Louisiana, to do relief work through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. Thibodaux had largely been spared from the devastation of the hurricanes but was near areas that had been severely hit, the bayou country to the south and New Orleans to the east. We worked for a week in a warehouse that received truckloads of donated goods coming from all across North America. Aid was then either shipped out to nearby areas or, in a few cases, representatives for communities in need could come and pick up supplies themselves. It was in this way that I heard the story of Tony and his wife, Linda.

Tony was 100% French Cajun and came on behalf of an Assemblies of God congregation deep in the bayou country. For Tony, the ordeal of not only surviving the hurricanes but also seeking to provide leadership and assistance for his faith community was an outright spiritual battle on the field of lived experience. Even driving up to Thibodaux that day, Tony and Linda were dodging the slings and arrows of the Devil. Sharing with us an experience that nearly ended their trip to pick up aid, Tony said, “It was a close call, but I rebuked the Devil, said, 'Devil, you ain't gonna stop me from God's work!'”

This experience marks for me an important turning in my own faith, from one that attempts to rationalize and demythologize all such experiences as Tony related to one that takes such experiences seriously, and on the grounds of a biblical Christian theology that is neither naïve nor uneducated, as many (including myself) have been tempted or conditioned to believe. The topic of this paper is “spiritual warfare” and the frame is my position on said topic. At this early point in this short reflection on such a huge topic, my position can best be described metaphorically as standing on shifting sand. I locate in my own understanding a shift through time on a topic that is not only interesting to me (for indeed, it is) but holds the potential to profoundly alter the meaning of not only my own faith but also my conception of reality itself. In other words: These are not children's toys I'm playing with. Read on after the break to see how I'm attempting to deal with these questions...

God at War in "Gabriel"

While poking around Netflix the other night, a movie I had never heard anything about was suggested to me, and it caught my attention: Gabriel, released in 2007. I watched the trailer online and it looked like your run-of-the-mill low-budget action good-guy/bad-guy movie, this time pitting angels and demons against each other in a city-based depiction of purgatory that looked like a prototypical dark, gothic city in the tradition Frank Miller (Sin City), or perhaps The Crow.

Normally, I would steer clear of these kinds of movies, because they strike me as formulaic and unimaginative. However, the namesake of this movie, the archangel, Gabriel, is a being that I have an affinity for. You see, I've assumed the role of the angel Gabriel for two film projects done last year for a seminary class (see Millennium Update episodes One & Two). I also steer clear of these kinds of movies because my wife can't stand them. But, as luck or fate or predestination would have it, my wife was gone this particular evening, and the movie was available for instant streaming, so I pulled it up and gave it a watch.

Read on for my review of the movie, Gabriel, with some theological reflections interspersed throughout...