As Christians we are called to let the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus and as I explained in my previous post I believe this means that Christian ethics must reject the dualism inherently present in the separation between good and evil. Christian ethics should not concern itself with the distinguishing between good and evil, rather its subject matter is our participation in the Kingdom of God. Now we are at the core of the Christian life and I would like for us to move this discussion back to the cross and our participation in the death of Christ Jesus.

My claim is that the life we experience as a result of our participation in the death of Christ is a life characterized by a communal identity, which gives birth to subjectivity within itself. In other words, to die with Christ means that we die away from a life apart from God, outside God, and this death is what must occur for the resurrected life within the Body of Christ to be attainable. To share in the death of Christ therefore signifies a move away from having our hearts turned upon themselves towards a truly human life in which we know all things in God and God in all things.

Unfortunately this is rarely spoken of within our churches. Rather we are all to often being told that becoming a Christian means that our individual needs will be taken care of, that our fears and anxieties will go away, that we will go to heaven when we die, and so on. Such understandings totally miss the point because the essence of such beliefs is that if we become Christians the world and God will adjust to us. We are thus still the main character within our particular narratives and our lives apart from God remain untouched. Although such believes might prove to be therapeutic they do not move us closer to knowing our true origin and they should therefore be rejected.

To be clear, my understanding that participation in the death of Christ implies that we die away from ourselves does not mean that we cease to exist as individuals. Hence I am not preaching the end of subjectivity; rather I proclaim that true humanity can only exist within a communal identity, namely the body of Christ. When we speak about the Church we should therefore avoid such understandings that describes it as individuals coming together, rather our individuality is a result of being reborn within the Church. Our primary identity is thus a communal identity within the Body of Christ in which God is known as our true origin.

Hence, when Christ proclaimed ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’, this is the life he invited us to become part of. To be sure, all this must be interpreted eschatologically. Christ made the future present and his life, death and resurrection is therefore a testimony that we will all one day be reconciled with God, each other and the whole of creation. The eschatological vision of a universal reconciliation made known through God’s raising of Christ is therefore a moment in time where the distinctions between past, present and future are dissolved and where the worldly division between individual and communal existence is deconstructed in order to be reconstructed.

Consequently, when Christ preached that we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, he was not imposing an impossible ethical demand on our lives, rather he was asking us to let the same mind be in us that was in him. He was asking us to perceive God in everyone and everyone in God. His eschatological vision was a fully reconciled world and his claim was that this future is available now. Hence, ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near’. What arises from such an understanding is a prophetic Christianity that unveils the sins of the world. Our love is thus judgmental, but it does not condemn for eternity, rather it points to the universal reconciliation of everything in heaven and on earth. Our love is therefore patient and kind, it does not envy or boast, it is neither proud nor rude, it is not easily angered and it keeps no record of wrongs. This is all possible because of the radical embrace of Christ Jesus who loved us first so that God can live in us and we in God. We therefore love because he first loved us and embrace the other because he first embraced us.

If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. [1 John 4.15-21]

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. [1 John 3.16]

To ask whether God is necessary is a very common question. I know that I began my previous post by saying the same thing but today I would like to revisit this question with a different perspective in mind. When speaking about who God is I believe that it is problematic to assume that God is a necessary being since the necessary God will always be confined by human reason. Hence I critiqued this theological understanding and said that it is idolatrous and dangerous, the latter since the common image of God ultimately will be that of the ones in power.

To move this discussion forward I would like to use a famous quote that Sartre assigned to Dostojevskij, namely that ‘if there is no God then everything is permitted’. It is a seemingly reasonable statement since if human morality is all we have then moral values cannot be conceived as anything but subjective human opinions and the result is a world of moral relativism. Several apologists find this to be an extremely sexy argument for the existence of God since they believe that objective moral values necessarily exist. Clearly they have not paid much attention to Nietzsche. However, as Lacan critically retorted, ‘if there is a God, then everything is permitted’. Lacan thus seems to share my concern about the necessary God since his critique was directed against them who use God to justify their own immoral and oppressive actions. Such thinking is predominantly shaped by what is referred to as historical millenarianism but it is present also in other theological misreadings of the biblical texts.

Should we then conclude that everything is permitted? To give a response to this question I would like for us to turn towards the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote in the posthumously published book Ethik that

The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge. In launching this attack on the underlying assumptions of all other ethics, Christian ethics stands so completely alone that it becomes questionable whether there is any purpose in speaking of Christian ethics at all. But if one does so notwithstanding, that can only mean that Christian ethics claims to discuss the origin of the whole problem of ethics, and thus professes to be a critique of all ethics simply as ethics. [Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Touchstone Edition, 1995, p. 21.]

Bonhoeffer’s rather bold response to Dostojevskij and Lacan is that they have both misunderstood what ethics is all about, or to put it in other words, that they are asking the wrong question. It is a critique against their ethics as ethics. Bonhoeffer’s claim is that man at his origin only knew one thing, namely God, and that the ethical division between good and evil is a clear indication that human beings no longer knows their origin. In knowing God, he says, mankind knew all things in God and God in all things, but this knowledge was lost. Hence the knowledge of good and evil reveals that we experience life apart from God, outside God. This means, Bonhoeffer writes, that

[Man] knows only himself and no longer knows God at all; for he can know God only if he knows only God. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil. But man cannot be rid of his origin. Instead of knowing himself in the origin of God, he must now know himself as an origin [and] he therefore conceives himself to be the origin of good and evil. [Ibid., p. 22]

I believe that this turn away from God can be seen throughout history but never has it been more clearly articulated than in the individualistic anthropocentrism of the modern era, which echoed the ancient philosopher Protagoras’ famous saying that ‘man is the measure of all things’. By this critique of modernity I do not mean to say that we should ignore it all together, that would be to totally miss the mark. Rather I believe that we need to re-imagine modernity, and subsequently post-modernity, in light of a narrative hermeneutical reading of the biblical scriptures. In regards to ethics this ultimately means that we look to Christ, who is the cornerstone of the house of God and a representation for what it means to be truly human.

From Bonhoeffer’s point of view, true humanity is to know only God; to know all things in God and God in all things. This perspective is present throughout the biblical scriptures but it reaches a new dimension in the figure of Christ, ‘who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness’ [Phil 2.6-7]. By forsaking heaven, Christ emptied himself for the sake of the world, but although he was born in human likeness he did not renounce to know all things in God and God in all things. Thus his life, death and resurrection unveils what it means to live a truly human life.

Is everything permitted? Yes, but this conclusion demands that we have considered the question from within the inner life of the body of Christ. Hence I am not saying that Christian ethics is nihilistic, rather my claim is that if we know all things in God and God in all things, then we desire nothing else than to follow Christ. That is not to say that ethical reflection is not necessary but it is no longer a choice between good and evil, rather we ask what it means to ‘let the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus’ [Phil 2.5].

To ask whether God is necessary is in various forms a very common question. It is also a deeply revealing question since the answers we offer unveils something of what our ultimate concern is – our ultimate concern is deeply connected to the reason for asking the question in the first place – and thus the nature of our faith. It could therefore be said that our answers to some extent defines the question since we cannot speak of our ultimate concern without at least implicitly also speak about God. Some might object to this claim by saying that it is possible for an atheist to speak of ultimate concern without God, but my response would simply be that a world unchained from God is a world without ultimate concern. The fact that many would contest this statement is just a clear indication that modern atheism, theoretically speaking, should be described as a misdirected theology rather than the result of scientific achievements or sophisticated reasoning.

I believe that the understanding of God as a necessary being always moves us towards an idolatrous faith situated within systems of thought created by man. The fundamental problem is thus that the categories of thought are too narrow to contain what one attempts to talk about. I would further argue that to assume that God is necessary not simply diminishes God but also that such believes are potentially dangerous and oppressive. God is not to be thought of as a necessary being that we weave into our beliefs of existence in order to cover the gaps of our understandings. Rather than thinking of God as a ‘deus ex machina’ we should acknowledge that God is the Crucified One who forsook heaven to perform the ultimate kenotic move for the sake of the world. Theology should therefore begin in the receiving of the broken body of the Crucified since this practice acknowledges the brokenness of humanity while it allows for God to be God and our ultimate concern to be shaped by the apocalyptic event of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

If our theology is a result of the conviction that God is necessary, then God is necessarily confined by our reason since our reason is what determines what is necessary. Unfortunately, this way of reasoning is all too common because modernistic theology has bought into the lie that our epistemology must be rooted in our own, individual existence. The modern quest for self-certainty resulted in an anthropocentric worldview that expelled faith from its rightful place and considered it to be either distinct from reason (atheism) or the result of reason (conservative and liberal Christianity). The truth is that everything we consider to be reasonable essentially is the result of faith. Christian theology should therefore be understood as faith seeking understanding, not understanding seeking faith, and at a fundamental level the humbling task of the theologian is therefore to make sense of that which God has revealed in order for it to guide our understanding of the world and our actions in it.

Is God necessary? I initially remarked that our answer to this question to some extent defines the question and in light of what I have said in this post I therefore feel compelled to say no, God is not necessary. That is not to say that God is not, rather that the question itself is corrupt since it is spelled out from an anthropocentric perspective.

In my previous post I suggested that theology starts with the receiving of the broken body of the Crucified and that the unity of the Church does not ultimately depend on specific doctrines. Rather, I claimed, the unity of the Church is a unity in Christ and it is held together by him. Throughout the post I therefore criticized all manmade structures that aims to control people in order to keep the Church together since such structures ultimately attempts to domesticate Christ by assuming his place.

Is not then my belief that theology starts with the receiving of the body of the Crucified simply another idolatrous structure that attempts to confine Christ – the God-man – within itself? This question might seem reasonable since it would be foolish to criticise others only to repeat their mistake, but my claim is that this particular question only appears to be fitting when it is understood from within such manmade structures that I am criticising.

My belief is that the good news of the Christian faith proclaims the end of all structures that attempts to domesticate God. Rather than understanding God as part of our own particular narrative we are called to embrace that we are part of God’s universal narrative that aims to reconcile all things in heaven and on earth. Hence by receiving the body of the Crucified we become parts of a narrative and an identity that transcends our own particularity and creates the possibility for many to become one. The ultimate concern of the Christian faith is therefore not to comprehend God but to live in accordance with God’s promises, which ultimately was unveiled by the resurrected Christ – the first fruit of the new creation.

Consider Abraham. He is not called the father of faith simply because he obediently walked up Mount Moriah in order to sacrifice Isaac as a respons to God’s command, but as Kierkegaard pointed out, because he believed that he would get him back. Abraham’s ultimate concern was God’s promised future, which was tied to the life of his son. Hence belief in God’s promised future required for Abraham to believe that his son would not be taken away.

We cannot rationally comprehend God from our human perspectives but we can allow for our lives to be transformed by the receiving of Christ’s broken body and thus by participating in the coming future that God promised by raising Christ from the dead. Given that the future of the risen Christ is the universal reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth we can therefore conclude that the object of the Christian faith is not doctrinal but relational, and for this reason that love is the fulfilment of the law rather than submission to specific beliefs.

To be clear, the aim of this argument has not been to say that the Church’s doctrines are not important, rather I have explored this subject for the purpose of articulating my understanding of where I believe that theology should begin. I will continue this pursuit in my next post in which I will discuss the relationship between faith and knowledge.

In the book God as the Mystery of the World Eberhard Jüngel writes that the real definition of the word ‘God’ is ‘the Crucified One’. I affirm the validity of this statement and I believe that what we can say about God must be worked out from this foundation since no one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. We should therefore not begin our theological reasoning from abstract, onto-theological principles; rather the doing of theology begins with the communal receiving of Christ’s broken body. Hence, the unity of the Church does not depend on the individual conformity to specific doctrines. The unity of the Church is a unity in Christ and it is held together by him. Any attempt to create structures in order to keep people submissive to specific doctrines is therefore equivalent to the building of the tower of Babel since it replaces the true God with an idol made by man.

While I believe that theology is a communal activity that must start with the receiving of Christ’s broken body I also acknowledge that the death of Christ must be interpreted in the light that his resurrection sheds on this event. Without the resurrection the crucifixion of Christ is meaningless and our faith is in vain, and without the crucifixion the resurrection of the Crucified One could simply not have happened. To receive the broken body of Christ is consequently an acknowledgment of the hope for a universal reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth since this is the eschatological vision that the apocalyptic resurrection of the Crucified One unveils.

The fact that the broken body of Christ is given to us also tells us that we are invited to participate in this eschatological process, which was inaugurated by his resurrection. This invitation is at the outset an invitation to die with Christ. For this reason Paul wrote in Romans chapter 6

But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

From this follows that a life in faith means to live a life in faithfulness to the universal telos of the risen Christ. When you die with Christ you die away from sin and death and you are raised into a new life of truth, beauty and reconciliation in Christ. This is what it truly means to be alive. This is what it means to be truly human. The kingdom of heaven is thus available here and now and it is a kingdom that is fundamentally different than the kingdoms of this world. Hence we should not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds, so that we may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

To conclude this post I would like to say that my argument affirms that our theology should be a result of our faith, which is a gift from God that we receive as we take part in the body of the Crucified. Hence our belonging within the sanctorum communio is not predicated on specific doctrines or worldly authorities but on the grace of God who sent his beloved Son to the world in order to redeem and reconcile all things in heaven and on earth. I would further claim that this belief opens up for an understanding of the Church that allows for God not to be replaced by worldly and idolatrous structures. God is thus suitably allowed to be God.

Biblical faith means waiting with anticipation in the things promised but not yet seen. To have faith in Christ therefore means to anticipate the fullness of God’s kingdom on earth. This is what the Christian faith proclaims and it is what shapes our hope. Christian hope is consequently a belief that everything in heaven and on earth will one day be reconciled and made new, which means that the home of God will be among us, that he will dwell in our midst, that we will be his people, that death, mourning, crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. As Christ’s body was broken by the power of darkness, so this world must also perish in order to share in his resurrection. Thus Paul made clear that ‘Christ is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross’.

Christ emptied himself for the sake of the world on the cross and as his body, his church; we are called to walk as he walked. Waiting with anticipation in the things promised but not yet seen should therefore not be equated with a personal conviction; rather it is a call for a communal life in faithfulness to the will of God. Hence our faith will be made visible to the world through our love for one another and our works. This implies a willingness to be drawn into a life that moves towards reconciliation of all things by the power of God’s self-giving love, which ultimately was made known as Christ walked obediently towards his death.

The universal future of the risen Christ should therefore be the Christian communities ultimate concern. Elevating particular cultures to the level of ultimate concern is thus nothing but idolatry. Nationalism is consequently destructive for the purposes of God since the apocalyptic event of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ unveils a future of reconciliation between all things in heaven and on earth, including nations, cultures and so on. Hence Paul Tillich wrote

In true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about the truly ultimate; while in idolatrous faith preliminary, finite realities are elevated to the rank of ultimacy.

So far most self-professing Christians would agree but as soon as one replaces their nation with their particular Christian congregation, denomination or tradition, numerous people will (consciously or unconsciously) start to protest…

Throughout the Biblical scriptures there is a tension between order and chaos. In the beginning, we read, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. Then God said, let there be order. This order, it seems, was based on loving relationships; organic, kind, giving, creative, truthful relationships that was never meant to be disrupted. But they were. They were not completely terminated but they were infected by some kind of formless, disordered, destructive chaos.

For human beings this mysterious chaos appears to be exceptionally attractive and we apparently desire to understand it in order to control it. As if it could ever be controlled. Perhaps this desire is so strong within us because we believe that we need to master the chaos or we will simply be controlled by it. Hence, when the unimaginable happens we immediately attempt to gather as much information as possible to see whether the darkness behind the event is present also in our own lives or the lives of those around us.

In other words, it appears as if we believe that freedom from chaos must come from understanding its design, its order. Our modus operandi is thus predicated on the conviction that if only we could know what constitutes good order and evil chaos, then surely we could also know how to distinguish between the two. But what if chaos can never be comprehended; what if it does not have a design that can be understood. Then it will not matter how much effort we put in for the purpose of mastering it because it will always break our attempts apart from within.

In my understanding of the Biblical narrative this futile struggle of ordering chaos is constantly present in the stories it tells and the same is true in our own present day lives; in our religions, cultures, politics and so forth. The tension between order and chaos therefore makes the Bible appealing to me since it tells a story that I can relate my own existence to. Unfortunately, as I see it, many Christians do not accept this understanding and they therefore attempts to create one uniformed message out of the tension between order and chaos. My claim is that the theological understandings that results from such a violent reading of the Bible always will correspond to the building of worldly empires since both undertakings share the belief that chaos can be ordered by force.

I believe that the Bible unveils the truth about the way to a life in freedom but I do not imagine that this way is constructed out of ordered chaos, rather my faith is that the creator God sent his son Jesus Christ into this world of disorder and broken relationships for the purpose of sowing a seed of a new creation that is constituted by loving relationships; organic, kind, giving, creative, truthful and everlasting relationships.

One of the central words in our cultural vocabulary is ‘freedom’. It is regarded as a positive word and it seems as if we all desire to achieve it. When I contemplate the sense of this word it strikes me that there is a significant difference between the freedom I believe the Church is called to preach and the freedom the world proclaims. For the world, freedom means something like ‘possibilities for the individual’ and the aim of this freedom is ‘personal happiness and fulfilment’. The irony of this cultural quest for freedom is that no one ever seems to find it. Few ever reach a state of personal fulfilment and for those who do, it does not appear as if it last for very long. Consequently the small part of the world’s population that actually are free to pursue their own happiness search for something that no one has ever truly acquired. The search for personal happiness could therefore be described as a leap of faith and my claim is that it is a futile one.

The truth is, I believe, that individuals can never be free alone; rather freedom can only be found when our subjective identities are expanded into non-existence as they are incorporated into a greater communal life – the Sanctorum Communio. The central problem of the modern search for individual freedom is not simply that it is ultimately unattainable but that the search for it always takes place at the expense of ‘the other’. This is most likely more true today than ever before but the strong economic growth in the ‘Western’ parts of the world the past centuries has pushed the negative consequences of our individual search for freedom out of sight. There are of course poor and suffering people in our ‘Western’ countries as well but you need different measurement when you deal with the issue of financial injustice on a global scale. My point is that the negative effects of the search for freedom is not particularly visible to us and the consequence is that we feel pity when we see the starving children in Africa rather than experiencing guilt. We do not see the connection between them and us. Our pity then leads us to donate a small portion of our income to charity, and we then walk away feeling good about ourselves while our ignorant attitude keeps the status quo in place.

My biggest frustration in regards to the ‘Western’ search for individual freedom is that the Church seldom appears as a radical alternative to the world. It seems as if we have accepted the notion that religion should be a private matter and my claim is that we are in need of some fresh prophetic voices and an Exodus from this idolatrous and self-serving culture. ‘I’ can only be free insofar as ‘you’ are free and ‘we’ can only be free insofar as ‘they’ are free. The word ‘freedom’ should mean something to us but it is a communal word based on loving relationships, not selfish desires.

Throughout the years I have often come across people who preach a theology of power, security, order and exclusion. What they advocate is a kind of hierarchy where God unveils the Christian message to the powerful who then see it as their mission to determine what should and what should not be passed on to the weak and vulnerable. I believe that this is done in order to keep the status quo and thus the overarching structure in place. Those in power clings desperately to their positions and this has caused their theology to represent themselves rather than Christ and his kingdom. This, I claim, is a complete and utter failure of the Church and this must change if we desire for the kingdom of God to fundamentally transform the world. We therefore need to direct a radical critique against the persistent order of the world if we have any intentions of speaking with a prophetic voice to those who live around us.

Christ was crucified in weakness and despair but very seldom do you see those claiming to be his highest and most worthy representatives open up their lives for the existential hell that Christ went through, and the consequence is a disastrous situation for the ones who are weak since they do not perceive God as present in their suffering, doubts or solitude. Christ cried out ‘why have you forsaken me’ as he lived through his final hour at the cross and many people would like to cry out with him but they cannot since the structure that captures their lives does not provide a language that makes such a cry possible, rather they are led to believe that God has orchestrated their suffering for a purpose that transcends their individual experience.

For this very reason I believe that the Church needs to embrace the absurdity and ambiguity of life since such an embrace is necessary for hope and freedom to truly become visible in the same way as death must precede resurrection. Behind these words hides the profound biblical affirmation that God is present in suffering and that reconciliation and new creation is possible as a result of Christ’s emptying of himself at the cross for the sake of the world. The transforming power of the Christian faith does therefore not come from some distant power in the sky or from church leaders with slick suits or prestigious hats but from the embrace of the other while facing death and destruction. That is how I believe that God becomes visible in the midst of human misery.

Modern popular culture has always had a particular interest for the so-called ‘walking dead’. Although this has been a reoccurring theme for a long time few would protest that the past decade has shown a dramatic increase of zombies and other soul-less beings in books, movies and television shows. I believe that this increase can be explained in two different ways; the first is a common fear of what will happen if we continue to mess with nature (genetic modification, destroying the ecosystem, and so on) and the other is an individual fear of non-existence. Popular culture has addressed both these types of fears therapeutically and I believe that is why so many people – consciously or unconsciously – find them to be meaningful depictions of reality that offers hope.

In regards to our common fear that we have screwed up nature these books, movies and television shows have presented us to a few heroes in post-apocalyptic worlds that has been able to preserve their humanity while the larger masses has either died or been turned in to walking dead (I am Legend, The Book of Eli, The Road, etc). The heroes then sustains our hope for the future of humanity since their preserved humanity implies that they have within them the capability to start over. In this sense these stories are equivalent to the ancient ‘flood stories’ and they reveal to us what is needed for a new beginning to be possible. Primarily they centre our attention on values of religion, culture and the family and thus also imply that it was the lack of these values that caused the apocalypses our heroes managed to live through. The messages of hope for the future are therefore also inherently critical towards the secularization and demythologization of the modern world.

The other type of walking dead stories is fundamentally different in what they are saying. What they acknowledge is that we actually are the walking dead. The aim is therefore to offer us hope by depicting the walking dead as carrying within them the possibility of becoming human. Hence, Robert Pattinson’s character in The Twilight Saga can resist the inner drive to suck the blood out of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart). On the surface this story is about a young girl’s forbidden love for a vampire but what really matters is the counter narrative, which reveals to us that it is possible for the walking dead to love. My analysis is therefore that the message in The Twilight Saga is equivalent to what Richard Dawkins say when he adamantly argues that atheists can be spiritual.

My conclusion from these analyses is that the increase of walking dead in popular culture the past decade is a result of the modern desire for freedom, which has created a rupture in our relationship to God, nature and each other. Our anthropocentric understanding of reality and our unwillingness to exist with and for each other has resulted in a world where nature has been manipulated and ransacked for our own short-term winnings and where humanity has been dissolved into separate entities of walking dead. In light of all this it is no wonder that people experience an existential agony and therefore search for hope and meaning in popular culture that addresses this very crisis of our existence.