All You Want to Know About the Bible in Pop Culture: Finding Our Creator in Superheroes, Prince Charming, and Other Modern Marvels

INTRODUCTION

The Art of Our Time

Can you keep a secret?

You better lean in close; we don’t want the powers that be in the entertainment industry to hear this. And don’t start any hashtags either. If the E! Network notices this trending, we could disturb the little baby sleeping peacefully on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Broadway. Let’s just keep this to ourselves, okay?

All right, here it is. . . .

Pop culture loves the Bible.

Now zip it. Quietly turn around and go back to watching your animated movies that speak to your identity in Jesus. Return to your couch and your Keurig and enjoy the next marathon of your favorite reality show depicting a family not unlike those we find in the Bible. And carefully slip on your headphones and (not too loud!) jam to your favorite MTV artist talking to God. Let’s act normal, people. There’s nothing to see here. . . .

Okay, so we’re clearly joking. There’s no need to keep this secret. Scream it from the middle of Best Buy. Get on your iPhone and hashtag away. (#BibleInPopCulture, #HollywoodAndBible, #BieberLovesBible, to get you started.) And the truth is, I’m not even sure how much of a secret it really is. After all, why would pop culture, and the entertainment industry specifically, not love the Bible? Inside this best-selling book, we read stories of little shepherd-boy David versus the behemoth Goliath, a disciple betraying his friend and then hanging himself out of remorse, people beaten up and left for dead being nursed back to health by the unlikeliest of passersby, epic battles of three hundred versus tens of thousands, horrific moments of bloodshed, and an apocalyptic ending too frightening for even the big screen.

Inside the Bible, we also find the ultimate love story, the highest of sacrifices, the fulfillment of purpose, unimaginable grace for even the most lost of souls, and redemption found for all mankind. It’s the feel-good story of every year.

And the popularity of the Bible in pop culture goes well beyond the more obvious biblical stories to have found success on both the big and small screens. But these certainly don’t hurt the argument being made here. Take these R-rated movies, for example: The Hangover (all three of them), Ted, Saving Private Ryan, 300, 21 Jump Street. The most successful of those (The Hangover) still came up over $90 million short of the $370 million that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ brought in back in 2004 when it became (and remains as of this writing) the all-time box office champion for an R-rated movie.¹

Almost a decade later, in the spring of 2013, the History Channel and über-producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor and The Apprentice fame) released The Bible, a ten-hour miniseries based on stories taken straight from . . . well, the Bible. The first episode premiered to an audience of 13.1 million people, and over the next ten weeks maintained that number with an average of 13.19 million total viewers, making it the third-most-watched cable show of all of 2013—almost 5 million more viewers than the mega-hit Breaking Bad.²

The same people who brought us The Bible followed it up in February 2014 with a movie adaptation called Son of God that brought in more than $25 million its opening weekend, higher than the opening weekend box office of most other major releases that same month, including: The Monuments Men, Three Days to Kill, Pompeii, RoboCop, Endless Love, and Winter’s Tale—most with bigger budgets and more popular actors attached to their vehicles. And in December 2013 NBC announced that it was signing Burnett to produce a follow-up series to The Bible based on the book of Acts, expected to be released in the spring of 2015.

Mel Gibson and Mark Burnett aren’t the only ones filling the entertainment industry with the Bible, however. Usually it’s much more subtle and sometimes without even its creator’s intent to do so. But God, the sovereign Creator, will always find a way to reach his creations. And he’s not afraid to use pop culture to do so.

Picture in your mind different eras of culture as being represented as one big pyramid much like one built by Pharaoh and the Egyptians. Imagine on top of this pyramid that represents culture an insanely huge block of ice, way too big to even really balance on top of a pyramid. (But we’re just imagining, so it’s okay.) This massive block of ice represents the Bible, and the very top of the pyramid on which it balances represents the era around the early Middle Ages when the biblical canon was finalized and the Bible basically became the culture.

The lower you go down on the pyramid, the more recent periods it represents, past the Middle Ages, through the Victorian era, the Industrial Revolution, and into the twenty-first century. As that block of ice (representing the Bible) melts, of course it’s going to flow through and cover more of the skinnier areas of the pyramid at its zenith. In the Middle Ages, the Bible and religion was the culture and what most of the laws, traditions, and opinions were built around. When trade and literacy began evolving more quickly at the end of the Middle Ages, due in part to the invention of the printing press, the Bible became more widely available to the people than it had ever been before, and they began reading and studying it more independently and interpreting it without clerical assistance. However, they also began reading Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne. The philosophical ideas of Francis Bacon, who proposed a pursuit of knowledge that stood apart from faith, rather than blended with faith,³ as well as those of many other scholars and philosophers, began spreading. Suddenly, the Bible was no longer the book, but one among many.

But still, the ice kept melting and slowly creeping down the pyramid. It certainly did not cover as much as it did at the top, but its downward flow could not be stopped. Even today, as wide as that pyramid is, the ice keeps melting and seeping through the cracks, weaving its way down the cultural pyramid. As cable channels multiply, new movie studios pop up, more and more books hit the Kindle shelves, and celebrities are made on YouTube, there’s a great deal more of the pyramid to cover, and yet the water continues to find its way through more of it than one may realize. You only need to know what to look for.

From LEGOs to Lost, Miley to The Mindy Project, Superman to Sheldon Cooper, and a great deal more, today’s pop culture is still allowing the thirst-quenching Bible to seep its way into the cracks of its foundation. Clearly, culture still finds the Bible extremely relevant, even if some don’t even recognize how God’s Word has helped shaped their art. Pop culture has begun the dialogue; will the church continue it?

In the sixth century BC, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded Judah and forced the surviving Israelites into exile. In the early years of this exile, Nebuchadnezzar ordered one of his chiefs to educate some of the young Israelites in the "language and literature of the Chaldeans, the people who lived in Babylonia (Dan. 1:4). He wanted fit young men with no physical or moral infirmities, handsome, skilled in all wisdom, knowledgeable, discerning, and understanding" (v. 4). Four of the young men chosen were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. (The latter three would come to be known more famously as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego.)

The Bible says that after three years God had given these four an unusual aptitude for learning the literature and science of the time (v. 17 NLT 1996). Nebuchadnezzar was so impressed with these four that he appointed them to his regular staff of advisors and found the advice of these young men to be ten times better than that of all the magicians and enchanters in his entire kingdom (v. 20 NLT 1996). Two more kings would succeed Nebuchadnezzar, which led to a fiery furnace, a lions’ den, and finally this proclamation from King Darius: I decree that all people everywhere who live under my sovereign rule ought to tremble before and fear the God of Daniel. For He is the living God, and He will endure forever (Dan. 6:26).

The king of the very civilization that had taken the Israelites into exile acknowledged that the God of Israel is the God. All this as a result of four teenagers whom God gave an unusual aptitude for learning the literature and science of the time.

Like those four heroes of the Bible, would you dare to join me in learning more of the art of our time and see what God can do through us?

They flood our movie theaters every summer and our streets every Halloween. They fill the shelves of comic book stores and the hallways of Comic-Con. Some can fly and catch bullets with their teeth; others are mere mortals with cool gadgets. Some consider their alter ego a curse, while others see it as their calling.

Whatever the case, whoever the superhero, the world is fascinated with them. Considering that almost eighty years after Superman’s comic book debut in 1938, movie audiences will be lining up to see him in a (please, please, pleeeaaase be) legendary movie that also stars Batman and Wonder Woman, it’s safe to say the extreme popularity of superheroes is not just a fad trending online for a few days. And perhaps there is something to say about that. Maybe our fascination with superheroes is because we are being drawn to something innate in us. A longing for something more. Something perfect. Something supernatural.

At some point in their lives, most people look in the mirror and see their deep flaws. They realize their physical limits, that they are not as invincible as they thought they once were. They have come to terms that they are not capable of rescuing themselves out of every hole they fall into. And they know they need help.

Is it possible that Superman, the world’s first comic book superhero, was inspired, intentionally or not, by the only real Superhero?

And a few of these flawed, limited humans created superheroes for the world to enjoy. People who were capable of doing what we couldn’t. But is it possible that Superman, the world’s first comic book superhero, was inspired, intentionally or not, by the only real Superhero? Take this verse, for example: Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you are not one of them. They could be a great people . . . if they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son¹ (1 Superman 3:1).

Did I have you there for a minute? This sounds like something God might’ve told Jesus as he was being baptized, right? It’s at least more biblical than some of what others seem to think is in the Bible, such as the faux verse God helps those who helps themselves.

Jesus was raised as a human being, although he wasn’t exactly like the rest of them. Check.

Jesus told us he is the light of the world. Check.

Jesus is God’s only Son. Check.

It turns out Superman had a few things in common with Jesus. The previous quote is taken straight from the 2006 film Superman Returns. It was even chosen as the narration for the film’s preview that was released the previous year. And to top it all off, the actual line delivered by actor Marlon Brando was taken from cut footage of the original 1978 Superman.

Superman may have been the first superhero (at least the first one with supernatural abilities) given to us in 1938, but there has been no shortage of new ones given to us since. Beginning with what is known as the Golden Age of comic books (c. 1938–1950) when we were given Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and Captain America, among others, to the Silver Age (c. 1956–1970) that brought us Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man, and more, we could write pages upon pages listing the superheroes in the Marvel and DC Comics universes alone.

In the dates of these two comic book eras, as well as the recent boom of superhero movies in the last decade-plus, there is one undeniable common theme that perhaps sheds some light on the culture’s sudden need for such supernatural heroes in their lives.

War.

The Golden Age paralleled World War II and the unrest the world felt with the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. When the war ended, so did the popularity of many comics; but the Silver Age emerged when conflict rose again, this time in Vietnam, as well as the nuclear arms chess match of the Cold War. And between this writing and when the War on Terror began in late 2001, we have had six X-Men movies, five Spider-Mans, three Batmans, three Iron-Mans, two Supermans, two Hulks, two Thors, two Captain Americas, and one too many Green Lantern movies.

When war surrounds us and evil rears its ugly head, we look for good to prevail. When soldiers are dying to defend freedoms, we search to find a higher purpose emerging from their sacrifices. Many find comfort in God our Creator and the Bible, his message to us. Others perhaps resist this dependence on God but still seek supernatural comfort in heroes created during times of crisis.

NOTE TO COMIC BOOK Loyalists Who Are about to Put Me on THEIR BLACKLIST

This chapter on superheroes is based entirely on recent movie adaptations, not on any of the comic series that have been around for decades. Although I’m sure a much more involved literary piece would result from a study based on the thousands of comic books written on these four characters, I have chosen to write a condensed chapter based only on a handful of movies. Perhaps my brother, who if his house was on fire would carry out his wife in one arm and his comic books in the other, could one day write that book.

If we could see God in Superman, the first superhero, it would stand to reason that we could also find him in many of the others inspired by Superman. After all, to mimic something is to pay the greatest compliment to it. Although no movie or comic book could ever get away with mixing DC and Marvel Comics superheroes, the following is one geek’s version of a different type of Avengers. Four superheroes whose recent Hollywood depictions together paint a vivid picture of the true Superhero.

NOTE TO MY PASTOR Friends Who Are about to Put Me on THEIR BLACKLIST