For the Eleanor Shellstrops of This World

“Hello, everyone, and welcome to your first day in the afterlife. You were all, simply put, good people … So welcome to eternal happiness. Welcome to the Good Place.”

The Good Place S1 E1, ‘Everything is Fine’ (2016)

 

Some of the promotional material for The Good Place featured a stunned Eleanor clutching a number of balloons, so I decided to run with that as a theme.

I lose count of the quarters from which The Good Place has been enthusiastically recommended to me since the first episodes materialised on Netflix in 2016.¹ It’s really funny, everyone told me, plus, it would make great blog fodder. I ummed and aahed a bit about that. I often find stories whose prominent events occur after the characters involved have died to be slightly uncomfortable viewing, not, perhaps, so much because they entail gross inaccuracies about what really awaits human beings after death (though they certainly do), as because of my general distaste for the subjection of protagonists to what I perceive as grossly excessive suffering. I mean, our heroes almost always have a pretty rough time of it – peril and anguish make for engaging storytelling, after all – but to deny them relief from their troubles even after they’re dead just seems to push that streak of sadism a little too far for my liking.² Still, every rule has its exceptions, and it was into that category that The Good Place, which I finally starting watching just before the end of the last calendar year when my older sister sat me down in front of it, proved to fall.

Eleanor Shellstrop is dead. She wakes up outside the office of a kindly-looking bespectacled chap called Michael who tells her that in the afterlife, there’s a Good Place and a Bad Place. In Eleanor’s case, the good deeds she performed while she was alive have stacked her up enough moral points for her to snag a coveted spot in the Good Place, specifically in a brand-new neighbourhood of which Michael is architect and general in-charge person. There’s just one problem: every detail of Eleanor’s moral uprightness that Michael has in his records is a total lie. Eleanor was not a good person when she was on earth, and she knows it. Now, it seems, her only chance is to figure out how to become the kind of person that actually belongs in the Good Place before she’s exposed as a fraud and sent to the Bad.

To help her achieve this, Eleanor enlists the help of her designated soulmate Chidi Anagonye, who was a professor of moral philosophy when he was alive – exactly the sort of ethically savvy, robustly principled individual that belongs in the Good Place. Here come the spoilers, though – really, really big spoilers; seriously, I’m about to ruin the entire first series for you if you haven’t seen it – because it turns out that Chidi doesn’t belong in the Good Place, any more than Eleanor does. The giant word-flipping twist at the end of the first series is that Michael’s entire neighbourhood is in fact a fake: it’s not part of the Good Place, but a corner of the Bad Place that he’s appropriated for the conduction of an experiment into whether it’s possible to get human beings to emotionally torture one another (which would spare him and his fellow denizens of darkness from having to do all the torturing themselves). In truth, the only inhabitants of the neighbourhood who are real dead humans, rather than Bad Place staff pretending to be dead humans, are Eleanor, Chidi, and their neighbours Tahani and Jianyu. Although actually, Jianyu’s name isn’t Jianyu; Michael’s been introducing him to everyone as a Taiwanese Buddhist monk who’s still maintaining the vow of silence he took as a child, but he’s really Jason Mendoza, an amateur DJ from Florida who died during a failed robbery. If Jason isn’t surprised to find himself in the Good Place, that’s only because he hasn’t got the mental wherewithal to be; his behaviour on earth was arguably worse – certainly more criminal – than Eleanor’s. His designated soulmate Tahani, on the other hand, is completely confident of her right to be in the Good Place; during her life she was a prominent event planner and philanthropist who raised billions of pounds for charity.

Though none of the four humans has actually accumulated enough righteousness points to make it to the real Good Place, then – and yes, I know the whole premise of any human (bar one) achieving his or her own eternal reward through moral excellence is totally daft, but let’s take fiction as fiction, shall we – they fall very neatly into two categories as to how that fact plays out. While Eleanor and Jason have to have their very obviously morally lacking lives papered over with extensive and elaborate lies in order for it to seem at all plausible that they should ever have been allowed into the Good Place, Chidi and Tahani both completely buy that they genuinely have made it to the Good Place on the strength of the real way they remember having conducted themselves while on earth. And so does everyone else, actually. Even after she figures out that they’re really in the Bad Place, Eleanor has to ask Michael: “Wait, I don’t get something. I know why Jason and I were sent here, but why Tahani?”

“Oh yeah,” interjects Jason. “Didn’t you raise, like, a thousand dollars for charity, or whatever?”

“Er, sixty billion, actually,” Tahani corrects him. “So…” She looks up at Michael, and twigs something; her smug expression collapses into one of hurt despair. “Oh. But it didn’t matter, because my motivations were corrupt. I didn’t care about helping the people I raised the money for. I just wanted to prove my parents wrong, stick it to my sister, get fame and attention. My only real goal was to snog Ryan Gosling at the Met Ball. Which I did. Couple of times, actually.”

 

Probably not quite sixty billion dollars there.

Eleanor isn’t done with her questions yet, though. “But wait, why is Chidi here?”

Chidi assumes a solemn expression not dissimilar to Tahani’s a moment ago. “Well, er … there’s something you don’t know about me.” Eleanor looks over at him in sudden alarm, as he ploughs on: “I read an article saying that growing almonds was bad for the environment, and yet I continued to use almond milk in my coffee–”

“No, dingus!” Michael interrupts him. “You hurt everyone in your life with your rigidity and your indecisiveness.”

Chidi’s eyes widen in sudden realisation. “Oh, fork!³ You’re right. Every friend, every girlfriend was driven nuts because I couldn’t do anything. I missed my mom’s back surgery because I had already promised my landlord’s nephew that I would help him figure out his new phone. I made everyone miserable.”

Before that moment, though – before being confronted with the fact that they were already experiencing posthumous punishment for their misdeeds, and needing an explanation for that – neither Tahani nor Chidi had any idea that they weren’t the good people they thought they were. Chidi even needed Michael to spell out the precise nature of the wrong he’d done before he could see it at all. Eleanor knew she wasn’t a good person, and it was for that reason that she started taking moral philosophy lessons from Chidi in order to try to become a better one. She knew she wasn’t a good person and that that was a problem that required a solution. Neither Chidi nor Tahani saw any such problem in themselves, nor, therefore, any need to seek a solution.

The analogy just falls out of this jazz, doesn’t it?

And the scribes of the Pharisees, having seen that he was eating with the sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples: He eats with tax collectors and sinners? And having heard, Jesus said to them: The healthy have no need of a doctor, but the sick; I didn’t come to call righteous people, but sinners.⁴

Jesus says he didn’t come for the righteous. Well, of course he didn’t. If you’re righteous – if you’re morally upright enough to gain your eternal reward all by yourself – then what the heck would you need Jesus for? Why would you ever need him to do something as drastic as drinking the cup of God’s wrath to the dregs on your behalf, if there’s no cause for God to hold any wrath against you anyway?⁵ If there’s no problem, in short, why seek a solution? It’s for the Eleanor Shellstrops of this world that Jesus came, for those who aren’t good people and know it. And the thing is, adelphoi, you all know that. You know that in the depths of your soul. It is so obvious. It is so, so obvious that Jesus came to call sinners like us. The very fact that we’ve been called by him makes it obvious to us. But I’m not sure it’s obvious to everyone else.

I suspect that quite a lot of people think that the big, difficult obstacle of thought one has to get past in order to become a Christian – the fundamental prerequisite belief after which the rest can fall into place without hindrance – is there is a God. And to a large extent, who can blame them, when so many of our apologetic efforts are concentrated in that direction? Nor, to most people, is that proposition by itself an intolerably unattractive one. It’s certainly not the hardest sell among our most basic doctrines. But of course, there’s no point, no point at all, in convincing someone merely that there is a God; assent to that fact no more amounts to the repentance and belief necessary for salvation than refusing to speak makes one a Taiwanese monk called Jianyu. What I think the big, difficult obstacle of thought that sits in most people’s way on this front actually is, is this: I am not a good person.

I mean, obviously you have got to start believing that there is a God in order to turn to him for forgiveness – but you’re never going to turn to him for forgiveness if you don’t think you need it, even if you believe he exists. Tahani and Chidi didn’t seek a solution for their moral undeservingness, because, real as the problem was, they couldn’t see it. It was Eleanor who knew something had to change if she was to come to belong in the Good Place.

I am not a good person is a harder sell than some of the other basic tenets of our faith. It’s a less appealing thought. It’s a more difficult proposal to communicate in a loving way. But if Jesus didn’t come to call righteous people, then it is absolutely crucial that we do nonetheless try to communicate it. If Jesus didn’t come to call righteous people, then people need to know that they are not righteous before they stand any chance of turning to him. I think we all know this with respect to ourselves – by necessity, if we’ve repented and believed, we’ve grasped the error of our former ways – but we need to know it with respect to others too.

It goes without saying that we can’t just suddenly make someone see his or her own moral inadequacy, but we work in partnership with a God who can. Funnily enough, indeed, convicting the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement is precisely what Jesus said the Holy Spirit would do when he came, which, spoiler, he now has done. We preach the gospel in word, backed up by how we live; the power of the Spirit brings the conviction that needs to come along with that in order for the chosen to come to hope in the Lord Jesus Christ.⁶

And, magnificently, once one does come to hope in him, that’s the end of one’s moral inadequacy in the eyes of God. Eleanor Shellstrop knew she wasn’t a good person and she sought a solution – but moral philosophy lessons with another human little better than herself never stood any chance of making her truly righteous. The blood of our Lord spilled on our behalf, by contrast, makes us – in spiritual terms, such as pertains to heaven and the world to come – so unimpeachably good, exactly as good as he is, that there is no way in all creation that that status could ever be diminished or revoked. I am not a good person may sound like a hard sell as a concept, but it’s the gateway to the best deal anyone has ever been offered. Preach the gospel. And lean your hope ever more firmly on the one who came to call Eleanor Shellstrops like us.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is: https://www.netflix.com/title/80113701. If you have any inclination to watch the first series, you might want to do that before reading the rest of this post.

² “But don’t you believe in eternal damnation of the lake-of-fire variety, Anne?” Yes, I do, but that’s God’s job, not ours. The principle extends more broadly that what’s right for him to do isn’t necessarily right for us to emulate.

³ Bad language is censored to similar-sounding common nouns in the fake Good Place, just to make that clear.

⁴ That’s from Mark 2: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+2&version=ESVUK. The scribes’ question might have had a ‘why’ on the front of it, depending on where you want to put the punctuation, but it’s a weird word for ‘why’, so I wasn’t totally convinced. Either way, though, the gist is the same.

⁵ Try, for instance, Jeremiah 25 for that concept, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+25&version=ESVUK, and compare Jesus’ remarks in Matthew 20:22-23 or Mark 10:38-40, and John 18:11.

⁶ I here quote John 16:8 and riff on 1 Thessalonians 1:3-6 a little.

Iconoclasm and the Preservation of Knowledge

“vita hominis plus libro valet.”

Rachel Caine, Ink and Bone (2015)

Suppose the Library of Alexandria had never been destroyed. Now suppose that it was kind of running the world. Suppose that it didn’t only collect literature, but also exercised complete control over people’s access to literature; suppose that it had a enforced monopoly on human knowledge, and owning original copies of written works, rather than official library ‘blanks’, were a crime. And stick all that in a sort of steampunk dystopia run on alchemy and clockwork, and you should have something approximating the world of Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine. Henceforth be spoilers.¹

 

A library - though this one’s at Trinity College Dublin rather than in Alexandria.

I was hooked on Ink and Bone right from the first chapter, when our young protagonist Jess Brightwell, the son of a professional book smuggler, successfully delivers the single surviving copy of the most valuable book in the world, Aristotle’s On Sphere Making, to a wealthy customer, only to witness the man tear out page after page and stuff them into his mouth. The man finds satisfaction, somehow, in obtaining what’s rarest and devouring it so that nobody else can ever have it, but to Jess – and indeed to us the readers – the thing feels like a horrifying outrage: This was like watching murder. Defilement. And it was somehow worse than either of those things. Even among his family, black trade as they were, books were holy things. Only the Burners thought different. Burners, and whatever this perverse creature might be.

The Burners mentioned are a radical political faction whose motto is vita hominis plus libro valet: a human life is worth more than a book. Burners resent the Library’s oppressive control of written knowledge, and protest it in various ways, including, when they get the chance, setting fire to original copies that the Library is hoarding for itself. The Library, of course, would never dream of destroying a book. Or then again, would it? Later in the story, Jess undertakes training in order to work for the Library, and on one occasion, after a day spent raiding illegal book stashes, one of his classmates, Izumi, raises the question as to what the Library actually does with all these books once they’ve been confiscated. If they’re unique, fair enough, they’ll be kept so that they can be alchemically transferred to blanks for people to read, but what if they’re duplicates? Why would the Library waste all that storage space? Izumi’s heard that, despite everything they teach, the Library takes confiscated books and destroys them in a furnace – by fire, just as the Burners do.

Another classmate, Portero, is outraged by the suggestion and immediately denounces it as a lie. Mind you, though, he’d displayed his own fair share of Burner-esque tendencies earlier on, during a carriage ride through the city:

Portero idly stared out of the window as the wide, clean Alexandrian streets rolled by. They’d all got used to the sight of the teal-blue harbour and white-sailed mountains of ships floating there, but Portero was staring out at the old Egyptian gods that lined the roadway, still mighty under the sun after so many thousands of years. He clicked beads between his fingers, and Jess finally realised they were part of a rosary.

‘Does it bother you?’ he asked Portero, and nodded out at the gods on the street. Portero shot him an unreadable look.

‘Shouldn’t it? They’re false gods.’

Jess shrugged. ‘Real enough to the Egyptians,’ he said. ‘And they’re beautiful, in their way.’

Portero was already sweating from the intense heat; even the carriage’s cooler interior couldn’t keep it all out, especially next to the windows. ‘They should have been pulled down ages ago,’ he said. ‘The Christians and Muslims agree on that much.’

Jess flashed back to the death of On Sphere Making, and felt a slow roll of revulsion. ‘That sounds like a Burner talking,’ he said. ‘Destroying what offends them, and never mind legacy.’

Portero turned on him angrily. ‘I said nothing of the kind! I would never harm a book! Never!’

‘Not all knowledge is books. Those out there, they’re history in stone. Men carved them. Men sweated in this sun to put them there, to make their city more beautiful. Who are you to say what’s worthy for men to see today, or tomorrow?’

‘You’re an irreligious bastard,’ Portero said. ‘I knew you would be.’

‘I’m as good a Catholic as you,’ Jess said. ‘I just don’t hold with making the world into copies of what I like.’

Jess seems on pretty solid ground here in his insistence that ‘book’ is not automatically a special category: other material objects are indeed also able to make contributions to human knowledge of what the world is and has been like, so there’s no logical reason to treat written documents as an exception to any rule. And as a result, the question that keeps raising its head here is: for what if any reason is it acceptable to destroy a physical vessel of human knowledge? For mere personal pleasure, like the customer who ate On Sphere Making? For political protest against an oppressive system that places too little value on human lives, like the Burners? For the straightforward convenience of not having to store multiple superfluous copies of one work, like the Library, according to Izumi’s hypothesis? For the purging of the trappings of idolatry from a monotheistic society, as Portero advocates?

For the purging of the trappings of idolatry, is it acceptable to destroy a physical vessel of human knowledge?

Last week, a good friend and I took a trip to the British Museum to see the exhibition ‘I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria’.² It was a brilliantly curated tour through Ashurbanipal’s family, his reign, his empire, his warmongering and his garden-planting, his legacy in more recent culture – but then it finished with a section devoted to archaeology in Iraq, exposing the devastating destruction to which the standing remains have been subjected by the actions of Islamic State in recent years. I think the proportion of Nineveh irreparably lost was cited as 80%, though don’t quote me on that. While it was encouraging to get a snapshot of some of the efforts that are being made to train and equip Iraqi archaeologists so that they can address the damage and undertake further work to preserve their country’s heritage, to walk out of this stunning collection of ancient artefacts into a blank-white corridor where their cities of origin were said to have been almost obliterated was still a stark kind of heartbreaking. To be fair, given that trying to extract contributions to human knowledge from centuries-old artefacts is literally my day job, I probably find this stuff more moving than many. Still, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that, contra Portero, the vast majority of us, regardless of religious persuasion, lament rather than advocate the wilful destruction of ancient sources, whether literary or material, that represent religious beliefs and practices contrary to our own.

So what, then, are we to make of those passages of scripture where people are commended, even upheld as exemplars, for destroying objects associated with idolatry? I’m thinking, for instance, of Hezekiah, who removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah and even crushed the bronze serpent that Moses had made according to God’s instructions for the relief of the plague of serpents back in the wilderness, because people had been sacrificing to it: In the LORD, the God of Israel, he trusted, and after him  none was like him among all the kings of Judah, and who were before him. For he clung to the LORD; he did not turn aside from (going) after him, but he kept the commandments that the LORD had commanded Moses. And I’m thinking of course of Josiah, who went through his kingdom on a destructive rampage of unprecedented scale, burning idols and pulling down altars and desecrating sites of pagan sacrifice: And like him was no king before him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, and after him none arose like him. And I’m thinking of the new Christians at Ephesus who brought their expensive books of magic out of their houses and publicly burned them: Thus, according to the Lord’s power, the word increased and prevailed. How is it consistent to echo the Biblical authors in affirming these actions as right and praiseworthy, and then turn around and mourn the loss of the pagan artefacts at Nineveh or wherever?³

Well, I think it is consistent, and here’s the crucial difference between the two scenarios: Hezekiah and Josiah and the Ephesian believers – and everyone else throughout scripture who is commended for destroying idolatrous objects – were all acting against idolatry within their own covenant community. The objects in question were ones that people who were supposed to be serving the LORD their God, and worshipping him only, were using to serve and worship false gods instead. Hezekiah and Josiah were destroying idols and trappings of idolatry in current use by the subjects over whom it had been granted them to rule; the Ephesians were burning their own books. These were not trips out into the surrounding pagan world to tear down its idols. In fact, in that regard, consider Paul in Athens: his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was rife with idols – as Portero’s was in Ink and Bone, but check out the difference between his response and Paul’s – so he reasoned therefore in the synagogue with the Jews and the worshippers, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.⁴ There’s a stark distinction, then, in the correct response to seeing idolatry in the world, and the correct response to seeing idolatry in one’s own covenant community. In the latter, absolutely, pull down the idols, desecrate the altars, burn the books; but in the former, do nothing more violent than starting a debate.

 

The Erechtheion, a temple in Athens dedicated to various deities, principally Athena. It was built in the 5th century BCE, so it would have been there in Paul’s day too.

For the purging of the trappings of idolatry, is it acceptable to destroy a physical vessel of human knowledge? Only if said vessel is yours to destroy. And if it is yours to destroy, then destroy it you must. But if it isn’t, you’re better off taking the reminder of how badly the world needs the gospel and starting a conversation about it. In which respect, there’s no prohibition on better equipping ourselves to start such a conversation through familiarising ourselves with the nature of the idolatry that surrounds us: if, for example, Daniel and his friends didn’t object to being instructed in the literature of Babylon, idol-endorsing as it doubtless was,⁵ neither need we shrink from studying the culture of the idolatrous world around us.

Hang on, back up: so you’re saying you would advocate the destruction of a book or an artefact, if it belonged to your fellow-believers and were being used by them for idolatrous purposes. Um, yeah, I would, actually. The preservation of my brothers and sisters in the faith of their salvation is to be counted as a smidgen more important than the preservation of material objects, however great a contribution said material objects may be able to make to human knowledge. A human life is, indeed, worth more than a book. But that said, I don’t think destruction of material objects is typically the main manifestation of the fight against idolatry in our church communities and our own individual hearts. A lot of the idols we most commonly find ourselves guilty of serving, I think, are things that aren’t inherently bad and are actually kind of necessary, like money and food and work and other human beings, and tearing down those altars is a far more complicated process than tearing down physical ones. But the ruthlessness with which Hezekiah and Josiah and the Ephesian converts carried out their destruction of idols still provides us with an example for the approach we’re to take in carrying out this work amongst ourselves.

The destruction of certain material objects may sometimes prove useful for our sanctification, but it isn’t ever going to bring about the process of repentance and belief. It isn’t ever going to raise dead spirits to life. And so iconoclasm is only to be carried out within the covenant community, not imposed on a world that isn’t in any way claiming or striving to adhere to the standards demanded by the scriptures. There’s no inconsistency in both applauding the actions of Hezekiah and Josiah and the Ephesian converts and so forth, and mourning the destruction of pagan artefacts, and with them the knowledge they contained. Still, when we see our world rife with idols, material or otherwise, it’s right that our spirits should be provoked within us, and that that should prompt us to preach the gospel ever more urgently – because the gospel and the gospel alone is what will bring about the process of repentance and belief, what will raise dead spirits to life. And only after that has happened can any idol of any sort be torn down in a way that gives glory to the true God.

Footnotes

¹ If you fancy a read, here it is on Hive, https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Rachel-Caine/Ink-and-Bone/17352580, though personally I got it out of the library and then consulted it for this post using the Libby app, of which I’m a huge fan, and suspect you probably will be too if free ebooks sounds appealing at all: https://meet.libbyapp.com/.

² It’s on until 26^th February, so you’ve still got time to go and check it out if you fancy it: https://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/ashurbanipal.aspx. Student tickets are buy-one-get-one-free on Fridays.

³ Check out 2 Kings 18: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+18&version=ESVUK, 2 Kings 23, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Kings+23&version=ESVUK, and Acts 19, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+19&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Acts 17 for that one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+17&version=ESVUK. The word I’ve given as worshippers is here best understood as a technical term for Gentiles who worshipped the God of the Jews.

⁵ And last scripture link of the post to Daniel 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=dan+1&version=ESVUK.

A Little Convenient

“It's a little convenient that you're saying all this after Hope Yards was exposed as an actual evil plot to destroy the city.”

Ms. Marvel (2015) #3 (2015)

Thanks to the talented DocLew at new grounds.com for the truly epic fanart.

I collect Ms. Marvel compilations. By this I in fact mean that I have an obliging sister who knows how much I love Ms. Marvel, aka Kamala Khan, and often buys me successive instalments of her illustrated adventures as gifts on appropriate occasions. So far I've seen Jersey City's polymorphous protector battle a plethora of foes, including a human-bird hybrid with plans to reappropriate young people as living batteries, a perfect-boyfriend-material family friend who tries to draft Kamala into his Inhuman-supremacist terrorist group, alien tech smugglers, living pizza dough, and what appeared to be the actual end of the world (but then sort of wasn't, or something; I think one has to trouble oneself to follow more than one superhero's story arc to really get to grips with the substance of these grander storylines). The latest compilation I've been gifted, however, sees Ms. Marvel face arguably her most terrifying enemy yet: an unscrupulous urban development corporation.

The first taste we get of the Hope Yards Development and Relocation Association's unscrupulousness is the fact that they've slapped Ms. Marvel's face all over their marketing materials, assuring their audience that to buy into their gentrification plans is to ‘help Ms. Marvel clean up Jersey City’, without having bothered to ask the permission of the hero herself for the use of her image and brand. Certainly if they had asked, that permission would have been withheld: Kamala is severely unimpressed with the posh flats and artisanal sushi restaurants in favour of which the area’s previous tenants have been ungraciously turfed out. Beyond that, though, she's suspicious of some of Hope Yards’ equipment - like state-of-the-art crowd dispersal gadgets, winged security drones, and mysterious purple refrigerated goop, touted as a new energy drink, that turns out to be crammed full of definitely-illegal brainwashing nanotech. (I mean, of course.) So she barrels in and busts the bad guys just like she usually does. Except this time things are different. This time she's beset by a crowd of anti-gentrification protestors demanding an explanation for her supposed selling out. And just to make things worse, said crowd is fronted by her best gal pal, Nakia, who has no idea about Ms. Marvel's true identity.

“Listen...” Kamala begins. “I never agreed to have my picture associated with this redevelopment stuff. This all happened without my permission. I don't want to be the reason Jersey City becomes the next Park Slope or whatever. I love this place.”

Nakia isn't convinced: “It's a little convenient that you're saying all this after Hope Yards was exposed as an actual evil plot to destroy the city.” Her fellow protestors rally with her: “No smoke without fire!” one of them asserts. “She's just trying to protect her public image!” In the next panel, Kamala stands forlornly beneath Hope Yards’ ‘Clean it up!’ banner while the crowd erupts into arguments before her, and mumbles a little lamely into the chaos: “But … I'm telling the truth…”

And she is. Kamala never endorsed Hope Yards’ activities, never wanted them carried out in her name, never suggested that to buy into that scheme was to play a part in her own work for the good of her neighbourhood. The whole notion that she approved of Hope Yards originated because they seized on her identity as someone to be respected, and declared her approval over something they were doing that actually had nothing to do with her - actually went against everything she stood for, indeed. But because they had declared her approval over it, however unjustifiably and deceptively, well, it nonetheless did then look a bit suspicious for her to turn round and publicly denounce Hope Yards only after it became clear and universally acknowledged that they were definitely Bad.

And I wonder whether I don't sometimes entertain similar suspicions about God as the crowd of protestors entertained about Ms. Marvel. You know when the church ties itself in knots stressing so hard that God doesn't endorse some attitude or practice considered particularly loathsome by modern western society - racism or misogyny or slavery or whatever - even though huge numbers of Christians in decades and centuries past claimed the very opposite? You know when the church cherry-picks its own history for examples of figures who don't stray too far from current societal orthodoxy on these matters, and glosses over anything uncomfortable? Like, we'll uphold William Wilberforce as a shining paragon of faithful Christianity, and John Newton will do because even though he continued his involvement in the slave trade for some time after his conversion, he did turn his back on it eventually, but please keep George Whitefield's founding role in the evangelical movement carefully separated from his economically-justified pro-slavery campaigning, thank you kindly. And you know when the church explains away confessedly ‘difficult’ passages of scripture that have traditionally been read as approving of such things, by babbling about Historical Context and Common Idiom and ‘well if you look at the Hebrew, this word really means such-and-such’ in a fashion that seems more embarrassed by God's revealed word than awed by it, and, perhaps more pertinently, doesn't strike one as all that compelling an explanation of the actual words on the page? Well, doesn't it ever put a little niggle in the back of your mind that it's a little convenient that Christians have started saying all this after the attitude or practice in question has come to be universally acknowledged as Bad? Doesn't it ever put a little niggle in the back of your mind that maybe the text really does imply what the exegetes of previous eras thought it did, or at least something closer to that than the modern church is prepared to admit?

Look, I'm not saying that when I come across someone making a spurious-sounding argument that ‘slaves, obey your masters’ doesn't really mean what it looks to mean, I immediately start seriously entertaining the possibility that God was actually a huge fan of the transatlantic slave trade, or something (he definitely wasn't). It's just a niggle, just a little niggle that our sudden rediscovery of the right ways to read these passages just in time to be in line, or in line enough, with the views of wider society on the issues in question, is a suspiciously fortunate coincidence. And a niggle like that, if undealt with and allowed to grow, essentially leaves you with two options: either you reassess your ethics and decide that the pro-slavery racist misogynists of days gone by were in fact onto something in terms of Biblical interpretation, however much nuancing that something might need; or you retain your ethical stances and start to question instead the extent to which the Biblical text really is infallible or reliable or literally intended. Call me crazy, but I'm not exactly enchanted with either possibility. So is there a truthful and compelling way to prevent or neutralise the niggle before it grows?

Well, let's go back to Ms. Marvel and the crowd of protestors. What she said did seem suspiciously convenient from their perspective, but we the readers knew that in actual fact she was telling the truth, that she had never given Hope Yards her approval. All their claims that they were working in her name were false, and that fact couldn't be negated, even by the most suspiciously fortunate coincidence in the world. Convenient doesn't necessarily mean untrue.

Plus, people do frequently commit the same offence against God as Hope Yards committed against Ms. Marvel: they take his name, his ‘brand’ if you will, as someone to be respected - and how much more so! - and they claim his approval of things they're doing that have nothing to do with him, that go against everything he stands for, indeed. This jazz is all over the Bible: Aaron called the worship of the golden calf he'd made a festival to the LORD; some bloke called Micah made himself some household gods and expected the LORD to prosper him just because he'd managed to persuade a Levite to serve as his priest for them; the Rabshakeh told the inhabitants of Jerusalem that the LORD had told him to destroy their land and they therefore shouldn't expect their God to save them (hint: he totally saved them). But the example I'm going to zoom in on is this, from Jeremiah 7:31: “And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.”

Note how God is kind of clarifying here: I did not ask you to perform human sacrifices, he says. That did not even occur to me as something to ask you to do. The implication being, of course, that people had somehow got it in their heads that that was something he'd asked them to do. The funny thing is that even today some people try to claim that the Bible does actually advocate human sacrifice. They pick out the binding of Isaac (where the whole point is that he isn't sacrificed because it's an incomplete prototype of the cross), the story of Jephthah and his daughter (where the moral is, don't make blank-cheque vows you might not want to keep), the command to give firstborn sons to God in Exodus 22:29 (ignoring the earlier instruction in 13:13 that firstborn animals were to be sacrificed, humans redeemed). There's enough material there to create a niggle, if you don't know the rest of your Bible well enough, the way the anti-gentrification protestors didn't know about Ms. Marvel having opposed Hope Yards from the start.

That said, when Ms. Marvel turned round and denied any endorsement of Hope Yards, the crowd knew they were dealing with a human being, a fallible, changeable, not-always-entirely-truthful human being likely to be looking out for her own interests; their suspicion was justified. When God turns round and denies any endorsement of something, on the other hand, we know he's infallible and unchangeable and always entirely truthful.

Now, obviously the above ramblings have not solved the problem of any of the difficult passages. They have not attempted to identify any specific areas in which the church has followed modern thinking too far, or, conversely, clung to things God doesn't endorse because earlier saints thought he did. They have not really dealt with the problem of any particular niggle. But I hope they might have vaguely indicated a few tools and principles by which various niggles might be dealt with. The point is, people have always been declaring God's approval over things he doesn't actually approve of. It shouldn't surprise us if society's changing ethics sometimes provide the necessary jolt for us to examine those lies and recognise them for what they are. And it shouldn't surprise us if we find ourselves disagreeing with traditional exegetical positions; but at the same time, we need to be humbly conscious that we share the same faults as our predecessors, the same tendency to want to claim God's endorsement of whatever it is we're already doing or want to do. And we need to know our Bibles really, really well - not just the words on the page, but the heart of God, the essence of what he's like, that’s revealed by them - so that any niggle that impugns the perfection of his character can be swiftly debunked.

It does sometimes seem a little convenient that the church has taken up a given stance on an issue at a time when said stance has become widely acceptable - but convenient doesn't necessarily mean untrue. The Bible itself, and not how anyone else happens to have read it over the centuries, is our standard for truth. People have been declaring God's approval over wrong attitudes and practices pretty much since records began; our burden is to aim, with the Spirit's guidance, to correct their mistakes and avoid making more of our own - all the while knowing and trusting that any we do make are forgiven by the blood of Jesus shed on the cross. Now isn't that convenient?