Heiser World Turned Upside Down

Finding the Gospel in Stranger Things
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68359-323-2
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten

What could the supernatural world of Stranger Things have in common with the Bible? The paranormal television series Stranger Things taps into the mysterious elements that have fueled spiritual questions for millennia. The otherworldly manifestations in Hawkins, Indiana offer compelling portrayals of important spiritual truths--and many of these truths are echoed in the supernatural worldview of the Bible. For Michael Heiser, Stranger Things is the perfect marriage of his interest in popular culture and the paranormal. In The Unseen Realm, he opened the eyes of thousands, helping readers understand the supernatural worldview of the Bible. Now he turns his attention to the worldwide television phenomenon, exploring how Stranger Things relates to Christian theology and the Christian life. In The World Turned Upside Down, Heiser draws on this supernatural worldview to help us think about the story of Jesus and discover glimpses of the gospel in the Upside Down. He argues that this celebrated series helps us understand the gospel in unique and overlooked ways. The spiritual questions and crises raised by Stranger Things are addressed the same way they are in the gospel, with mystery and transcendent power.

Michael S. Heiser (1963-2023) was a popular Bible teacher, author, and the founding executive director of AWKNG School of Theology. An expert in the Bible and ancient Semitic languages, he wrote numerous books, including The Unseen Realm, Angels, and Demons. For many years, he was scholar-in-residence at Logos Bible Software. He earned a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Semitic languages from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Heiser, Michael S.

Leseproben

1

AS LOST AS WILL BYERS

THE NEED TO BELONG

The very first episode of Stranger Things is entitled, “The Vanishing of Will Byers.” It’s a perfect beginning. The cryptic circumstances of Will’s abduction reveal just enough to let us know that something otherworldly is its cause. We’ll learn that Will is “here but not here,” trapped in a parallel universe, an unnatural world that is ultimately lethal to all who cross over into it. Three realizations flash through our minds and hearts in the wake of the tragic event: the pain of loss, the threat of death, and the impossibility of changing the situation. We’ll consider all of those disturbing intuitions in the ensuing chapters, but it is the first that will capture our attention here, at the outset.

Just as important as Will’s vanishing, we’re immediately introduced to the tight-knit group of boys that will propel the series: Will Byers, Dustin Henderson, Mike Wheeler, and Lucas Sinclair. The fact that the “Party” (as they refer to themselves) is playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in the opening scene not only portends the Demogorgon—a dreaded, lethal enemy that, unknown to them, has entered their reality—but anticipates what we’ll learn of their commitment to each other.

In the middle-school terminology of the eighties, the four are “nerds”—outcasts among their peers. They are united by the shared status of being uncool due to their mutual love for D&D, AV gadgetry, comic books, video games, and science fiction. I could immediately identify with them.

FAMILIAR THINGS

My own small cadre of friends formed our own club, complete with meetings, infrastructure planning, and (of course) hats. While I was into comic books and science fiction, my real obsession at their age was a statistics-based baseball board game called APBA—it was fantasy baseball before there was such a thing. True to form, I and my friends conducted ten-hour (or more) APBA marathons just like the Party’s D&D session that opens the first season of the show. Truth be told, we spent almost two years replaying the 1973 baseball season. Why? Because we wanted to see how realistic the replay was. It was an experiment. Geeky kids do those sorts of things.

Fortunately, my Party never lost a member, at least until we reached college age. But we had all suffered losses. My father left my mother when I was five and my brother three. For years I wondered if I had somehow contributed to the breakup, whether I had been a burden in some way. It was a misguided thought, but children don’t exactly have the capacity to reason deeply about such complicated things as divorce. When my mom remarried, it was to an alcoholic. My best friend had a similar story, though that divorce had a more clear-cut rationale: his dad couldn’t stand being married to a “Jesus freak.” The divorce of my friend’s parents left him and his three siblings, two of whom had cystic fibrosis, with insufficient support. To say they struggled would be a dramatic understatement. But it was in their home that I first heard the gospel, and it was through the influence of that friend that I came to believe its message as a teenager.

With one exception, each of my other middle-school friends also came from broken homes, one of which was also plagued by alcoholism. We each coped differently with what would now be clinically termed “detachment disorder,” defined by one source as “an inability to connect with others on an emotional level, as well as a means of coping with anxiety by avoiding certain situations that trigger it.”1 Our homes were a mess, but we had each other. We were a unit—a Party.

EVERYONE IS BROKEN A LITTLE

This sort of brokenness is at the heart of Stranger Things. Each member of the Party—really, every major character in the show—has a battle to wage against loneliness, lack of acceptance, fear of being unwanted, or tragic personal loss that makes them who they are.

When Will Byers goes missing, we are introduced to his family. His mom, Joyce, is a harried single mom who becomes absolutely frantic to find her son. Will’s brother, Jonathan, is a loner who carries resentment toward his father, Lonnie, for abandoning them. Joyce and Jonathan carry the guilt of not being at home on the night that Will vanishes due to the burden of cobbling jobs together to make ends meet. Joyce’s irrational refusal to accept another loss, even when the authorities recover a body, conveys a woman teetering between psychosis and unquenchable faith.

We are eventually introduced to Dustin’s broken home (he lives with his mom; his father is never mentioned) and the pathological detachment of Mike’s father in basically every regard. The only family not torn apart by divorce and tragedy is Lucas’s, but as he is African-American in a lily-white small town, his own consciousness of otherness leaks through in both sad and comical ways. The jaded, alcoholic, womanizing chief of police, Jim Hopper, lost his only daughter, Sara, to cancer in her early years; the tragedy haunts him throughout the show but steels him in his pursuit of Will and justice against the evil engulfing Hawkins. Emotional destitution and yearning for deep relationship are threads that run through Nancy Wheeler’s guilt over the death of her friend Barb, her vacillating feelings for Steve, and her developing bond with Jonathan.

SOME PEOPLE ARE BROKEN A LOT

As wistful and poignant as these backstories are, they pale next to that of the central character of Stranger Things. Eleven is the show’s archetypal figure of adversity, neglect, and exploitation. Our first glimpse of her occurs a little over halfway through the first episode. No sooner does the creepy Dr. Brenner pronounce “she can’t have gone far” after assessing the destructive aftermath of a mysterious lab catastrophe than the scene cuts to a barefoot girl in the woods, clothed only in a tattered lab gown, face smudged with dirt, her head shorn. Hungry, she sneaks into the back of Benny’s Burgers, a Hawkins greasy-spoon where fried food and local gossip dominate the menu, to forage for food. In a few minutes she’s caught in the act by Benny, who tries to help her and later pays the price for doing so at the hand of the seemingly pleasant woman from social services who’s actually a government assassin.

The Eleven we meet can barely communicate. We quickly see that, even in the company of friends, her vocabulary is limited and her social skills nonexistent. She has lived all her life in a cloistered, clinical environment, cut off from ordinary human interaction and relationships. When Mike asks her what her name is, she can only identify herself by the numerical tattoo on her arm. Not only do we learn that she’s been deprived of the most basic human psychological needs—companionship, trust, loyalty, and love—but she was punished for disobedience to her overlord, “Papa,” with further isolation.

While searching for Will in the pouring rain, Lucas, Mike, and Dustin stumble upon Eleven in the woods behind Hawkins National Laboratory (“Mirkwood”), which is adjacent to the Byers house. The boys are naturally stunned to find the girl, drenched and shivering, clad only in an oversize T-shirt. In ensuing episodes we witness Eleven encounter television, recliners, and Mike’s toys for the first time; her reactions range from wonder to bored disinterest. Eleven gives every indication that she’s utterly disoriented by anything we and the rest of the characters would consider normal.

Given my own backstory the show’s plotlines struck chords of memory. Though I got along with everyone I knew, I was a broken kid. Things weren’t the way they were supposed to be. But what I hadn’t known until I heard the gospel was that I was as lost as Will Byers. It isn’t long before we learn that Will is trapped in another reality plane, the Upside Down. He’s powerless to escape. His condition is irreversible. Without the intervention of a greater power and someone courageous enough to seek what was lost, he will die and be forever separated from those he loved and who loved him. Without Christ, that is our destiny—it was my destiny.

CREATED TO BELONG

The Bible teaches that alienation from the God who made us and loved us is a tragic anomaly in God’s intended world. Will Byers found himself in an anti-world, a bizarre, abnormal place foreign to human inclusion and experience. We’re no different. Estrangement from our Father and his home is an unnatural condition that’s out of step with what God wanted from the very beginning.

Think about how the Bible’s story begins. When God created humankind, he was acting intentionally. We know that God wasn’t trying to fill some deficiency in himself. His perfection rules that out (Ps 18:30; Matt 5:48). God wanted us to exist in order to enjoy us and to have us enjoy him in return.

Because the Bible teaches that human life is God’s creation, it’s no surprise that God is portrayed as “Father” and all human beings as his “children” (Acts 17:26–29). Adam was God’s “son” (Luke 3:38). The people of Israel (Exod 4:22) and Israel’s king (Psalm 2:7) are described as God’s sons. Those who embrace the gospel are the children of God (John 1:12).

Think about that vocabulary. What’s the context for words like “Father” and “children”? Family. While this observation might seem elementary, the...