John Van Sloten Analysis

To John Van Sloten, nothing is off limits to God’s redeeming power. That is, nothing in this world is void of God’s presence. God did not simply create the world, take a step back, and allow humans to fend for themselves. Instead, God is actively involved in every aspect of his creation. It is important to note that we humans have perverted creation and have altered the God-intended uses and purity of everything we touch. While our actions continue to taint and pollute God’s creation, God is still evident in everything. His truth glimmers through the waste we have created. Van Sloten argues that we should not avoid this waste but should, instead, seek God’s truth within the waste we have created.

Van Sloten would suggest that even if all we

Thus, I shied away from R-rated films, music with excessive swearing, and anything I or my parents deemed “worldly.” As I grew older, I became more and more interested in films with excessive gore, particularly zombie films and TV shows. At first, it was hard to see where God could be in these shows. Often, the characters blatantly reject God or point to his inexistence now that the zombie apocalypse has overtaken the world. Ironically enough, the popular zombie TV show The Walking Dead deals extensively with Christian themes, has had many scenes in churches and many Christian characters, and involves many of the same struggles modern Christians have. With such turmoil, grief, and death, the characters have to find something to hold onto, something greater than themselves to stay alive and make it through. While they often cling to family, killing, or life itself, these characters realize that there is something greater than themselves (similar to sensus divinitatis). The characters in the current season are doing something they have never done before: killing live people (non-zombies) they do not know. They are doing this in order to get food and supplies from another group of people. This may seem terrible, but the people they are killing refer to themselves as the “Saviors,” and have lost all concept of community. Still, the viewers are able to see the hardship and struggle the characters go through when they kill these people in their sleep. They say desperate times call for desperate measures, but I never thought it would come to using such evil to destroy evil. Van Sloten would argue that God is at work in this world, even when it seems dismal. He claims that “God himself crashes into a hopeless situation and remakes it from the outside” (pg.