That would have been really cool Byonarn
See below for I have a suggestion about how to do a counter judgement scene to Chick’s (great minds think alike!!!) ![:smiley: :smiley:](https://forum.evangelicaluniversalist.com/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=5)
I’ll have to ‘fess up’ here; I used to hand out Chick comics/booklets when I was a teenage fundamentalist – they’d been recommend to me by my elder and better ‘mature Christians’ you see as ‘these great little booklets’ and ‘ a really powerful presentation of the Gospel for today’. I now believe it was ‘sinful’ for me to hand them out because I think they bring shame upon the Gospel; but I did so ‘through ignorance and though weakness’ rather than through my ‘own deliberate fault’. So here am I taking responsibility for what I did by telling you what I, as an adult, think of/know about these booklets.
The booklets I remember clearly were ‘Bewitched’, The Gay Blade, ‘The Poor Revolutionaries’, and ‘Somebody Goofed’. In the last one I’ve named, I remember that in the closing scene a young boy is in Hell after being killed in a car accident by a newfound friend who has told him that it’s no great issue to accept Jesus. The young boy, when his friend tells him that they are in hell, shouts, ‘You goofed; you told me not to worry about these things’. At this the friend removes his human skin mask and lo! it is the fiend Satan laughing and scoffing – ‘It’s you who goofed little buddy – you didn’t accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and personal Saviour!’ And here in comic book graphics was portrayed the very real ‘Lord and Personal Satan’, well substantiated with Biblical proof texts in the space below the pictures.
I had an astute friend – an agnostic who I was always witnessing to – but he liked me and we remained friends. He pointed out to me something interesting about ‘The Poor Revolutionaries’ Chick comic. In this, the (Marxist?) revolutionaries have done the dirty work of Anti-Christ by overthrowing the state, and their three ringleaders are betrayed/executed by the same Anti-Christ. My friend pointed out that each ringleader was depicted as a stereotype – the Black Feminist, the Intellectual, the Jew. And I am grateful for his insight – it began to sow seeds of healthy doubt in me.
I’ll never forget the judgement scenes in Chick booklets. An enormous and faceless figure sitting on a gigantic throne dwarfs the solitary and wretched individual that stands before. Jurgen Moltmann the Universalist theologian points out that we will actually be judged together, not alone, and the judgement, however painful, is for healing between us. He also points out that the figure who sits on the throne of judgement has a face – the face of one like a Son of Man – namely Jesus, the same Jesus we meet in the Gospels. I’d side with Moltmann against Chick on this.
Regarding Chick as a false Accuser and False Witness – or at least a very gullible man, lead astray by his hate filled beliefs into the hands of fraudsters – I note that one of the heroes of the Chick ‘oeuvre’ is Alberto Riviera, who claimed to have been a Catholic priest and had inside information on a international Catholic conspiracy for world domination. Riviera was ‘exposed as a total fraud by non-Catholic (evangelical Protestant) Gary Metz, in two articles appearing in evangelical magazines:
- “The Alberto Story,” Cornerstone, vol. 9, no. 53, 1981, pp. 29-31.
- Christianity Today, March 13, 1981’.
See the following websites for the full story.
socrates58.blogspot.com/2007/03/ … ivera.html
thoushaltnotbearfalsewitness.wor … com/about/
Chick’s other heroic informant was a certain very shady John Todd –
‘Jack Chick’s comic book Spellbound features Todd appearing under his claimed “witch name”, Lance Collins. Spellbound claims the entire rock music industry is controlled by witches, who cast spells on the master tapes to cause evil spirits to follow all the recordings thus produced, resulting in kids becoming demon possessed from listening to rock & roll. The comic concludes with a good Christian record and book burning, during which a young born-again convert shouts “WOW! I feel F R E E!” upon seeing her heavy metal albums going up in smoke. Chick’s comic book The Broken Cross, featuring two evangelists busting up a Satanist cult that had taken over a California town, also cites Todd as its primary source. An early version of Chick’s anti-Dungeons and Dragons tract “Dark Dungeons” encourages readers to burn their occult books “including C.S. Lewis and Tolkien”; after people called B.S. on both of those Christian authors being so labelled, Chick said John Todd had been his source for this but removed it from later versions’.
Again Chick listened to the false witness of a fraud about organised Satanic cults, The Wikipedia article on Todd is well sourced –
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(occultist
I need to do another post on the Satanic Panic here sometime to give balance to my account here. But for the moment I will just say that these conspiracy theories of world takeover by Freemasons, Illuminati, Witches, or whatever all follow an archetypal pattern. This is based on ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ a forgery made by the Tsar’s secret police in nineteenth century Russia alleging a plot by International Jewry to take over the World. The Nazi’s were much inspired by this document, and today it is revered by the ‘Christian’ Identity movement as well as, depressingly, doing the rounds in the Muslim World.
I guess as Christian Universalists we need to believe in a conspiracy of hope rather than/stronger than a conspiracy of evil. For those of us who find the image of God playing a trick on the Devil in the Ransom theory of Atonement helpful, I would suggest that this image expresses a ground for our hope – God uses the force of evil to defeat itself, almost like a judo throw.