Title: The Crux of Salvation
Author: Michelle Warren
Date: 2016, 2018
Quote: "You are my brother. Shine the Light! Carry the cost."
For young Alex Kensington, to whom Joshua Davidson seems to be saying these words at the beginning of this novel, we must imagine the words feel a bit like coals of fire on his head. Though bright and diligent enough to finish a four-year degree in two years, Alex was the feeble little boy whose father, who was channelling the Evil Principle at the time, used him to recruit his best school friend into a satanic cult on whose behalf she would then help to kill her brother's friend, Joshua. Now his friend Selena is, apparently, dead. She died to protect him from his father--to stop his father torturing and killing other people. Alex can hardly feel much like the brother and heir to a religious teacher who healed people's bodies and minds. He's studying law, not medicine.
But Joshua is the hypothetical Christian who's been allowed to channel the spirit of Christ so fully that he can revive people who appear to be dead...including himself. In this novel most of Joshua's friends will appear to have died.
And have they "died, been taken to Heaven, and lived happily ever after"? Maybe. The story is ambiguous. Nobody has ever doubted that part of Heaven has to look just like New Zealand. Maybe even the cities.
The year is 2032. Queen Elizabeth II, now 106 years old, is still on the throne in England. New Zealand still has a Socialist Party, which has "reorganized" and repudiated its former leader, Eric Kensington, who was also the leader of a Satanist cult. Prime Minister Mark Blake's opposition to the Socialist Party leader, James Connor, is strictly political and seems mostly pro forma. (Nobody in this trilogy has said much about the civil rights and liberties of the individual, because New Zealand is still at the stage of democracy where people take those for granted. Nobody has, for example, set up policies to ensure that Alex can't finish a four-year degree at age eighteen, such as we have in the United States.) Rachel Connor, still married and now a "specialist" doctor, still has motherly feelings toward young Tristan Blake and even younger Alex Kensington. Alex is still new to being a Christian and not very good at it; he testifies in religious meetings, sometimes, and then again he channels Evil sometimes. And the Evil Principle, having created unrest in New Zealand, has gone on to stir up old conflicts--the United States and Russia are at war. That tsunami Joshua Davidson warned everyone about will come when they start mucking about with bombs.
There is, Alex tells a crowd, an alternative to retaliation. Spiritual life is stronger than death! New Zealand doesn't have to track down and kill the terrorists who have added to the chaos. The United States doesn't have to drop a retaliatory bomb on Russia...
I don't see the alternative of national nonresistance ever being seriously discussed in the United States. We have a minority of Christians who believe that individual nonresistance is what Christ has called them to practice, a majority who believe that violent criminals have no real right or reason to live, though we've compromised on life imprisonment. Non-Christians have no reason other than loyalty to the enemy country, or mere cowardice, to consider national nonresistance to an act of war. Much as people living on the Pacific islands, including New Zealand, that might easily be destroyed by a war between Russia and the United States, wish we could consider the option of nonresistance and martyrdom, as a nation we probably never will.
What is possible is that each generation of Russians and Americans grows up, a critical mass of Christians in each country will choose not to start dropping bombs. For that I think we can reasonably hope.
And so, on this most important religious holiday in all the Christian world, I pray.
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