I’ve been working slowly through older essays, upgrading footnotes and hyperlinks, making sure tables or links to tables are up-to-date. I discovered an unpublished addition to these essays. It wasn’t published earlier, I assume, because it doesn’t really deal with the movie Antichrist directly or John’s discussion of antichrists¹ or even the popular imagination of a future Antichrist. It simply recounts events that followed my own reaction in the previous essay in this thread to Lars von Trier’s film.

It does, however, contain an interesting musing regarding the religious mind of a serial killer which helps bridge the gap to the old human (τὸν παλαιὸν ἄνθρωπον). So, I prefer to have it in my notes and will include it here as an unpublished quotation to differentiate it from more current thoughts.

After I wrote about the women who socialized me in the preceding essay I had the opportunity to work two days doing location sound for interviews slated to be part of a television show about a serial rapist and murderer. It was a new experience. Usually the sex and violence are simulated. That doesn’t mean I’m never emotionally affected by it.

I remember working on the investment teaser for a film about a serial killer: I sat on the ground on a sound blanket behind a car monitoring audio while a young woman lying on another sound blanket in front of the car begged for her life. It brought tears to my eyes. But after several takes of her demise we all stood up and walked off to the next setup on the shot list, along with the “dead” woman. It was a performance. We were happy it was a good one.

The interviews we shot with police detectives, criminologists and a prosecuting attorney didn’t attempt to simulate sex or violence. They were cold, factual descriptions of real events. The locations weren’t movie sets but the actual places where women were raped and murdered. A surviving rape victim was our last interview before wrapping the shoot. We packed our equipment silently. I got in my truck and began the three hundred mile drive home—thinking about what I’d heard.

The rapist stalked his victims in shopping center parking lots. He picked them because he “liked their look.” He followed them home. He determined that they lived alone. He came back days, or a week or two later and broke into their homes while they were out. When a woman came home he was there—waiting.

It’s not something I ever worry about personally. If I did, I would still assume that the perpetrator would be a man rather than a woman. It was easy to understand why women with the opportunity to socialize a boy would want him to be something other than a serial rapist and murderer. And maybe it was a little easier to understand why women would consider themselves morally superior to men.

This particular man was a serial killer by definition but a rapist at heart. A prison mentor counseled him never to leave a witness alive. Prior to his first incarceration he had often apologized to his victims after the fact, even paid a few of them. But after his release from prison, though he obeyed his mentor’s rule at times, it lacked the power to perfect obedience. The rapist killed his victims haphazardly.

Once he was caught and sentenced again, he acknowledged his mentor’s rule in the interviews that were part of his plea bargain to avoid the death penalty, but couldn’t explain why he had killed some women and left others alive. His mentor’s guidance was like my use and understanding of the term religious: It was a religious rule, obeyed religiously, which is to say haphazardly, unlike the rapes that flowed from deep inside his being and out into the world.

The next night I was up late in a hotel room setting up equipment to wheel out for another recording assignment the following morning. A movie was playing on TV. When it ended, a new show about sex toys began, hosted by a pretty young woman wearing only a pair of heels. Most of the women who socialized me would have preferred that I had stood up and switched off the TV in disgust. But I was busy troubleshooting a problem with the recording equipment and, frankly, a pretty young woman comfortable in her skin doesn’t disgust me. She reminds me of Eve before Adam ate the forbidden fruit: The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.²

No one had to teach me that a naked woman was beautiful. Well, actually, I had to grow up into the “woman” part of that. As a boy I stared at a picture of a painting of a nude woman in a 3-D Viewmaster. I assume that the artist painted her because he thought she was beautiful, but I wasn’t so sure then. I decided that the most beautiful human being I could imagine was a naked girl about my age. She was smooth and sleek, without all the dangling stuff that I had between her legs, or those floppy things on her chest like the woman in the painting.

Apparently, I stared into the Viewmaster too long. My mother took it from me, looked into it, and said, “Shame on you!”

Another belief the women who socialized me attempted to cultivate was that if I saw a pretty woman naked I would want to fuck her. Men (also socialized by women, by the way) joined in on this one, too. So it was taken for granted that Bathsheba’s nudity was the “cause” of David’s sin (2 Samuel 11:2, 3 NET):

One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of his palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. Now this woman was very attractive. So David sent someone to inquire about the woman. The messenger said, “Isn’t this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”

My mother broke ranks with the common wisdom on that one, however. She was an artist. All her figure sketches started nude. “An artist has to know what the body looks like to drape clothes on it,” she told me. Though she didn’t approve of bikinis or scantily clad women in general she would not blame Bathsheba for bathing at night.

One of the first things the Lord did to break my allegiance to the belief that I wanted to fuck every woman I saw naked was to make me understand that the world was filled with beautiful women I would never fuck. I grieved over that for a time. Eventually I began to realize that if I was free from the obligation to fuck every beautiful woman I saw (whether naked or otherwise), I was also free to enjoy women in other ways—their beauty, for instance. “Why did you make them so pretty?” I complained to Him in the midst of this transition of faith and allegiance. “Shall I make them all ugly?” He said. For a split second I believed He actually would if I asked Him. “No,” I said, “no, change me instead.”

None of this is to say that I don’t have my own innate drive toward fucking. I do, and have since I was young.

But I have the Lord Jesus Christ. Or, more to the point, He has me:

By means of Christ I have been crucified, but I live hereafter not I but He lives within me, Christ, so who now I live within flesh, by faithfulness I live by means of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.³

I’m no longer left to the mercilessness of my old self (τὸν παλαιὸν ἄνθρωπον; the old human), which belongs to [my] former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,⁴ but live the Lord’s new self (τὸν καινὸν ἄνθρωπον; the new human), created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.⁵ This new human is continuously filled by the Lord’s own love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control [Table],⁶ his own righteousness, in a word, which transforms my mind and actions:

One morning I walked to a coffee shop to study the Bible with the Lord on my laptop as I ate breakfast. After an hour or so I went to the clubhouse at my apartment complex to study some more. The most direct route back to my apartment was through the walled-in pool area, but if people were swimming there, I walked around it instead. As I left the clubhouse that afternoon, the pool area seemed empty, so I took the shortcut. Halfway through I noticed a young woman sun-bathing in the corner. She had undone her top and wore only a thong as she lay on her stomach. I thanked the Lord as I walked on to my apartment: for her beauty, for my opportunity to see her beauty, and that I lived in a place where she was comfortable to sunbathe in nothing but a thong.

And as far as I know, no one raped or harassed or punished her for doing so.

Tables comparing 2 Samuel 11:2 and 11:3 in the Tanakh, KJV and NET, and comparing the Greek of 2 Samuel (2 Reigns, 2 Kings) 11:2 and 11:3 in the Septuagint (BLB and Elpenor) follow.