Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Entertainment Inspired By Revelation

Entertainment inspired by the Bible is not something to fear or shun even when it is created by non-Christians.  Rather than engage with and analyze such works of entertainment as intriguing products of artistic minds, plenty of Christians act like they are automatically uneasy at the thought of anyone changing part of a Biblical idea despite them not necessarily presenting it as a fully accurate depiction of Christian theology.  Of particular popular culture significance and controversy are works inspired by Revelation, especially video games.  In the controversy or focus on the games' artistic merits, it could be easy for some to overlook a potentially surprising detail about more than one title.

Recent video games loosely inspired by the book of Revelation tend to also feature imagery or references from Genesis as well, which is fitting and ironic given that Genesis is the first book of the Bible that starts with creation and Revelation is the last book that, regardless of how literal or figurative certain passages are, ultimately concludes with the final judgment of the unsaved to the second death and the eternal life of the saved in New Jerusalem.  There is a theological link between the beginning and end of the Biblical story beyond the fact that they are opposing sides of the same broad set of interconnected stories: things like the tree of life appear in both books.  Some video games intentionally or unintentionally reflect the overlap between the two.

Darksiders and Agony are two examples of creative games (even if the latter has plenty of artistic problems and misrepresents the Christian afterlife more than many other works of entertainment do) that draw predominantly from Revelation but also include elements of events or places found in Genesis.  In the Darksiders series, the playable Four Horseman are actually Nephilim, beings almost exclusively mentioned in Genesis and briefly mentioned later in Numbers 13:33, yet they are based on the four riders of Revelation 6 and tied to apocalyptic events that start when the seven seals are broken.  In Agony, players guide a damned soul through an unbiblical version of hell only to eventually learn that he is Nimrod from Genesis, a man associated with an empire that spanned Babylon and Ninevah.

It is in one sense not wholly unlikely that multiple developers of different eschatological games based on elements of Christian theology would draw from Genesis as well as from Revelation since the two books are somewhat connected beyond the fact that both are in the Bible.  It is nonetheless a noteworthy pattern that games as different as Darksiders and Agony would make somewhat obscure Biblical figures from Genesis the identities of the playable characters while putting them in an eschatological setting or in hell itself.  Plot-wise and conceptually, this is a great move for the sake of Biblical references, even if the Biblical Nephilim and hell are very much not what they are presented as in the games.

Beyond appreciation for the artistic style and risks of games like Darksiders or Agony, the fact that secular people in the entertainment world are interested in Biblical ideas, words, and imagery--no matter how rare it is for these aspects of the Bible to be appropriated into something that in other ways contradicts Christian theology--is not something thoughtful and intelligent Christians (aka, not evangelicals, fitheists, or those who cling to traditions for the sake of tradition) should be frightened or discouraged by.  If nothing else, entertainment like that inspired by Revelation and to a lesser extent Genesis can call attention to theological concepts in a culturally helpful way.

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