Xenophon: Anabasis — What Xenophon's Leadership Crises Teach Christians About Integrity, Suffering, and the Servant King

Somewhere in the frozen mountains of Armenia, a general stood before the men he had led through one of history's most harrowing retreats and answered for the wounds he had inflicted on them. Xenophon, the Athenian soldier-philosopher who commanded the Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries marooned deep in Persian territory after their employer was killed in battle, had struck soldiers who collapsed in the snow. He had refused to let his starving army plunder a Greek city. He had been accused of pocketing Persian gold while his men went unpaid. These were not minor complaints; they were charges that could have ended in his execution. What he said in his own defense, and how he lived in a way that made the defense credible, has been preserved in the Anabasis for twenty-four centuries. For Christians reading him today, that defense turns out to be one of the most illuminating mirrors the ancient world holds up to the gospel.

 

The General Who Led Through Fire

The Anabasis is Xenophon's account of the retreat of the Ten Thousand, Greek soldiers who had marched into the Persian heartland in 401 BC to support the Persian prince Cyrus in his bid for the throne. When Cyrus was killed at the Battle of Cunaxa and the Greek generals were treacherously murdered, the army found itself leaderless, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by enemies, and marching through terrain that was trying to kill them as efficiently as any army. Xenophon emerged as the expedition's moral and strategic center. He wrote about himself in the third person, which later critics would take as a sign of self-promotion, and the Anabasis is at least partly a work of apologia, a formal defense of his conduct. But what makes it endure is not the self-justification; it is the picture of a leader who understood that authority is earned by what you are willing to suffer alongside the people you lead. When the soldiers froze and fell in the Armenian passes, Xenophon did not ride past them. He dismounted, stripped off his cloak, and swung an axe in a blizzard to split firewood. The men who watched him do that could hardly accuse him of comfort-seeking.

 

The Three Charges and How He Answered Them

The Blow That Saved a Life: The first charge against Xenophon was hubris, a word that in the Greek moral vocabulary carried far more weight than mere rudeness or arrogance. Hubris was the contemptuous use of power to humiliate and dominate, the act of a man who struck another not from necessity but from the pleasure of asserting superiority. To be charged with hubris was to be accused of a fundamental corruption of character, and for a leader whose entire authority rested on his claim to Socratic virtue, the accusation was existential. The specific incidents arose during the murderous winter crossing of the Armenian highlands, where cold, snow-blindness, and frostbite were killing men as surely as any Persian arrow. Soldiers collapsed. Some begged Xenophon to put them out of their misery rather than force them to walk. Others simply lay down, willing to die where they fell or be taken as slaves by pursuing enemies. Xenophon struck them and drove them forward. In the formal assembly where the charges were heard, he did not deny the blows. Instead he reframed each one as what he called a saving blow, a soteria plege, an act not of domination but of rescue. He recounted the specific case of a soldier abandoning a wounded comrade in the snow simply to save himself, a man whose dereliction would have cost another man his life. The strike was the intervention that prevented it. By demonstrating that every instance of physical compulsion served the survival of the collective rather than the ego of the commander, Xenophon transformed the charge on its face. The assembly accepted his defense. The army survived the pass. What the episode reveals is that the same outward act, a blow, can proceed from two entirely different hearts, one seeking to dominate and one seeking to save, and that the difference between them is precisely what a leader is accountable to demonstrate.

The City He Refused to Burn: The second charge was less a formal accusation than a sustained crisis of confidence, and in some ways it was more dangerous than the first because it put Xenophon at odds not with a faction of complainers but with the hunger and anger of the entire army. When the Ten Thousand finally staggered into the vicinity of Byzantium, they were unpaid, exhausted, and convinced they had earned something. Byzantium was a prosperous Greek city, and to men who had walked fifteen hundred miles through enemy territory on promises that had not been kept, its warehouses and homes represented the compensation that no one had given them. The soldiers wanted to plunder it, and they looked to Xenophon to lead them. He refused. The refusal was not cautious or hedged; it was a principled rejection of what he regarded as an ethical catastrophe dressed up as a practical solution. Plundering a Greek city would have destroyed every relationship with Sparta that the army's future depended on, but Xenophon's argument was not primarily strategic. He believed that an authority grounded in character could not survive the act of sacking an allied city for pay, that the moment a leader allows a worthy goal to justify a corrupt means, he has already lost the thing that made his leadership worth following. The friction this created was real and lasting. Soldiers who had trusted him through the Persian highlands now questioned whether his piety was genuine or merely the convenient posture of a man who wanted Spartan favor more than he wanted to pay his troops. Xenophon navigated it by negotiating provisions and a peaceful departure, giving the army something without giving it everything it demanded. The long-term result was the preservation of the expedition's honor and its relationship with Greek power structures, but the immediate result was a leader more isolated than he had been at any point in the retreat. He paid a personal cost to hold a moral line, and the willingness to pay it was itself the argument.

The Gold He Did Not Keep: The third charge was the one most likely to destroy him, because it did not allege a single violent act or an unpopular decision but attacked the integrity of his entire narrative. Toward the end of the expedition, soldiers accused Xenophon of having accepted personal payment, specifically gifts or funds from the Thracian prince Seuthes, while the army itself remained unpaid and desperate. The charge was not merely that he had taken money; it was that his visible self-denial, the shared toil, the cloak stripped off in the blizzard, the axe swung alongside common soldiers, had all been theater, a performance of virtue designed to mask the private accumulation of influence and wealth. If that charge held, then everything he had said about Socratic leadership and divine alignment was simply the most sophisticated form of manipulation, piety as a tool of personal advancement. Xenophon answered it in formal accountability sessions before the army assembly, the ancient Greek equivalent of a public audit. He gave a detailed account of his expenditures and his lack of private gain. He returned to the visible record of his conduct, not as a rhetorical flourish but as evidence that could be tested against the memory of every man present. Who had seen him exempt himself from labor? Who had seen him eat better than the soldiers or sleep warmer or march less? The accusers could not produce the witnesses because the witnesses did not exist. Several of those who had spread the slanders faced repercussions when the assembly turned against them. Xenophon's standing was restored, and he completed the leadership of the army home. Modern scholars have noted, with some justice, that the Anabasis itself, written in the third person and carefully managing the portraits of rivals like Menon and Clearchus, may be the final and most polished layer of that same defense. The text is his closing argument. Whether or not you find that entirely comfortable, the argument it makes is a serious one: that a leader whose daily conduct has been publicly visible, costly, and consistent has a form of evidence that no accusation can easily overturn.

 

The Old Testament Already Knew This Leader

You may be surprised to find that the Hebrew scriptures had already drawn this portrait centuries before Xenophon was born. When Moses stood between a furious God and an idolatrous Israel at Sinai, he offered his own name to be blotted from the book of life rather than see his people destroyed (Exodus 32:32). That is not the act of a man seeking personal advancement. When Nehemiah governed a rebuilding Jerusalem under constant threat, he refused the governor's allowance that was his legal right and instead fed a hundred and fifty people at his own table, because the burden on the people was already heavy enough (Nehemiah 5:14-18). Like Xenophon splitting wood in a blizzard, Nehemiah made his integrity visible through what he would not take. Both men understood that leadership among people who have every reason to distrust you can only be sustained by the kind of self-denial that cannot be faked. The accusations they faced were the same in substance: you are using us for your own ends. The answer in both cases was a life that said otherwise.

 

What the New Testament Does with the Same Question

The New Testament does not merely repeat this pattern; it breaks it open and fills it with something the ancient world could not have anticipated. Jesus, whom the disciples address as Teacher and Lord, wraps a towel around himself and washes their feet the night before his death (John 13:13-14). When James and John ask for the seats of honor in the coming kingdom, Jesus tells them that whoever wants to be great must become a servant, and then adds the sentence that shatters every merely philosophical account of leadership: the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:43-45). Xenophon struck men to save their lives. Jesus gave his life to save his enemies. Paul mirrors this in his defense of apostolic integrity in Second Corinthians, where he catalogs imprisonments, beatings, sleepless nights, and hunger not as credentials of power but as evidence that his authority is not of the kind that exploits (2 Corinthians 11:23-28). Yet Paul goes further than Xenophon at every point, because what undergirds Paul's integrity is not Socratic virtue but the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He bears in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus (Galatians 6:17). His suffering is not merely proof of good character; it is participation in a story of redemption that changes everything.

 

The Difference That Changes Everything

Here is where Xenophon's mirror becomes most useful, because it shows you exactly where the ancient world ran out of resources. Xenophon's leadership philosophy was coherent, admirable, and finally insufficient. It could produce a man willing to die alongside his soldiers, but it could not produce a man willing to die for his enemies. It could teach self-discipline and transparency and principled restraint, but it could not address the corruption that runs below the level of visible conduct, the self-interest that survives even the most rigorous philosophical training and shows up precisely in moments of accusation, when the temptation is not to plunder a city but to protect your reputation by sacrificing the truth. Xenophon's Anabasis may itself be such a moment: scholars have long noted that his third-person narration and his portrait of rivals like Menon and Clearchus serve his own case rather too conveniently. Even the best ancient leader was finally still managing his image. What the gospel offers is not a better strategy for image management but the death of the image-manager and the resurrection of someone whose standing before God rests entirely on Christ. When Paul says that he has been crucified with Christ and no longer lives but Christ lives in him (Galatians 2:20), he is not speaking metaphorically about improved character. He is describing a transfer of identity that frees him from the exhausting project of self-justification, because his justification has already been accomplished by another.

 

The Leader You Are Meant to Become

If you lead anything, a church, a family, a team, a classroom, the Anabasis deserves your careful attention. Xenophon shows you what integrity under accusation looks like when the charges are false. He shows you that authority built on shared suffering survives where authority built on position or rhetoric collapses. He shows you that the refusal to exploit, made visible and costly and habitual, is the most effective argument a leader can make against the charge of self-seeking. Take his example seriously. But do not stop there. The Holy Spirit offers you something Xenophon never had: not merely the model of a servant leader to imitate but the indwelling presence of the Servant King himself, remaking your desires at the level where image-management still whispers. You are not being trained to manage your accusations more skillfully. You are being transformed, from one degree of glory to another (2 Corinthians 3:18), into the likeness of the one who answered every accusation against you by bearing it on a cross and leaving it in an empty tomb. That is the leader the world is waiting for. That is the leader Christ died to make you.

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Euripides: The Trojan Women: Lamentation, Empire, and the God Who Answers

Euripides produced Trojan Women in 415 BCE, on the very eve of Athens’ catastrophic Sicilian expedition, and the timing was no accident. The previous year, Athens had massacred the men of Melos and enslaved its women and children — an act of imperial brutality that hung over the theater like smoke. Into this charged atmosphere Euripides brought not soldiers and glory but enslaved queens, murdered children, and burning towers. Picture Andromache in the final moments before the Greek soldiers come for her son Astyanax — holding him against her, memorizing his face, knowing that the heroic world her husband Hector died defending has produced, as its final dividend, the murder of a child. That image is not ancient history. It is the face of every war, in every century, including this one. The play opens with the gods Poseidon and Athena conspiring to punish the victorious Greeks for sacrilege committed in Troy’s temples, then unfolds as a series of harrowing scenes: Cassandra departs as a concubine to her death; Andromache loses her son; Hecuba, once queen of the greatest city in the Aegean world, crouches in the dust awaiting slavery; and Troy burns. There is no catharsis in the Aristotelian sense, no redemptive arc, no restoration. The play is a structural lament — raw, relentless, and deliberately unresolved. Its power lies precisely in what it refuses to provide: comfort, meaning, resolution. And here is what makes Euripides worth reading two and a half millennia later: he told the truth. A physician who names your disease accurately deserves respect, even when he has no cure. The question the Christian reader brings to these ashes is whether anyone does.

Relations to Homer, Herodotus, and the Wider Greek Tradition

Trojan Women cannot be read in isolation from Homer. The Iliad’s royal women — Hecuba, Andromache, Helen — reappear here, but Euripides has inverted the epic’s logic entirely. Where Homer celebrated martial excellence and granted even the defeated a kind of heroic dignity, Euripides strips away every such consolation. The glory for which men fought at Troy yields, in the end, only ashes and chains. Iliad Book 24, in which Priam crosses enemy lines to recover Hector’s body and Achilles briefly glimpses the common humanity of grief, represents Homer at his most compassionate — and yet even that luminous scene belongs to a world where heroism retains coherence. Euripides systematically dismantles that coherence. His victors are not magnanimous; they are bureaucratic in their cruelty. The play also connects to Herodotus, whose Histories had traced the long arc of Persian imperial hubris meeting divine nemesis. Herodotus understood that the gods punish overreach — that Xerxes’ bridges across the Hellespont and his lashing of the sea were not merely foolish but impious. Euripides inherits this moral framework but strips it of comfort: the gods in Trojan Women punish the Greeks, yes, but the punishment comes after the women have already been destroyed. It is worth pausing here to note what distinguishes Herodotus’ nemesis from the biblical doctrine of divine judgment: for Herodotus, divine retribution is essentially a cosmic correction of imbalance, impersonal and mechanical, with no moral agent behind it and no redemptive purpose within it. The God of Scripture judges not as a force restoring equilibrium but as a person acting in covenant faithfulness — and always with restoration somewhere on the horizon. Justice in Herodotus arrives too late to matter to Hecuba. The play also stands in dialogue with Sophocles’ Ajax, which explored post-Trojan trauma and the cost of heroic ideology to those who survive it, and with the tradition of captive-women laments more broadly, a subversive genre that used the conquered woman’s voice to interrogate the values of the conquering culture.

Relations to Ancient Near Eastern Literature

Long before Euripides, the ancient Near East had developed a formal genre for precisely this kind of grief. The Sumerian Lament for the Destruction of Ur, composed around 2000 BCE, mourns a city annihilated by invaders: its temples desecrated, its people enslaved, its patron deity departed. The structural parallels to Trojan Women are striking — ritualized female lamentation, imagery of divine abandonment, the total collapse of a civilization’s social fabric, communal grief expressed through representative voices. Both works use the lamenting woman as a figure of intercessory mourning, one who speaks on behalf of a people too shattered to speak for themselves. The Hittite tradition contains similar city-lament forms, and the grief patterns Euripides employs appear to reflect a deep Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultural inheritance rather than purely Greek invention. What is important to note, however, is that in the Mesopotamian laments the gods who abandon a city eventually return — the lament tradition assumes a future in which divine favor can be restored. Euripides offers no such recovery. His Olympians are not temporarily absent; they are essentially indifferent, manipulated by grievance and pride, and the women’s suffering registers with them not at all. The reader who moves from the Lament for Ur to Trojan Women to the book of Lamentations is tracing a single human cry across a thousand years — the cry of a people sitting in the ruins of everything they trusted, asking whether anyone in heaven can hear them. The biblical answer, as we shall see, is the hinge on which everything turns.

Relations to the Old Testament

The most sustained biblical parallel to Trojan Women is the book of Lamentations, which mourns the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BCE. The structural resemblances are extraordinary. Both works employ communal lamentation voiced through female figures — Jerusalem personified as a widowed woman in Lamentations, Hecuba and the chorus of Trojan women in Euripides. Both dwell on destroyed temples, enslaved survivors, starving children, and the seemingly unbearable silence of a deity who does not intervene. The qinah meter of Lamentations — a falling rhythm of three stresses followed by two — enacts grief in its very sound, as though language itself has been damaged by catastrophe. Consider how Lamentations 3:19-23 moves: “Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and the gall. My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” That turn — that extraordinary pivot from “bowed down within me” to “therefore I have hope” — is the entire distance between Euripides and the gospel. The poet has not been delivered from his ruins. He is still sitting in them. But he has remembered something about the character of the God he is addressing, and that memory is enough to keep him alive. Euripides has no such memory to offer. The broader prophetic literature reinforces the framework: Isaiah declares that empires are a drop in a bucket before Yahweh (Isa. 40:15), and Deuteronomy insists that God’s ways are just and right even when his judgments are incomprehensible (Deut. 32:4). Genesis 6:11-13 diagnoses the violence that produces Troy’s ruins as the fundamental human problem — the earth filled with hamas, with brutality and injustice — and traces it to the corruption of the image-bearer, not to the whims of the gods. Where Euripides can only observe the horror, the Old Testament can explain it, and more than explain it, can promise that the God who judges is also the God who restores.

Relations to the New Testament

The New Testament enters this conversation at several critical points, and the most direct is one that deserves to be read slowly. In Luke 19:41-44, as Jesus approaches Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday, he stops and weeps over the city — not metaphorically but with tears — mourning that it did not know the things that make for peace. Here is something Euripides never imagined: not the indifferent Olympians of his tragedy, not even the judicial Yahweh of Lamentations, but God incarnate weeping over a city he is about to judge, because the grief is real, and the judgment is real, and they coexist in the same person. That is the theological revolution the New Testament brings to the lament tradition. Paul’s treatment of creation’s groaning in Romans 8:18-25 provides another crucial lens. Working through the passage carefully, Paul writes that creation has been subjected to futility — mataiotes in Greek, the same concept that drives Ecclesiastes, the hollow echo at the center of every human achievement that does not reach God — and that it groans in labor pains, waiting for liberation. The groaning is not mere metaphor. It is the sound of a world still full of Trojan women. But Paul’s critical word is the one that follows: “eager longing.” Creation waits with eager longing — apokaradokia, a word that pictures someone craning their neck to see whether help is finally coming around the corner — because the resurrection of Christ has already guaranteed that it is. Romans 1:18-32 then diagnoses the theological root of the Trojan cycle itself: the suppression of the knowledge of the Creator God, the exchange of glory for idols, and the resulting dehumanization as the society God hands over to the consequences of its own choices. The Trojan atrocities are not a random catastrophe. They are the logical destination of a civilization that substituted capricious Olympians for the living God. Colossians 2:15 and Hebrews 2:14-15 announce what no Greek tragedy could: that in Christ’s death and resurrection, the powers that hold humanity in bondage have been publicly disarmed and defeated. And Revelation 21:1-4 brings the entire trajectory to its climax — every tear wiped away, no more death or mourning or crying or pain, the former things passed away. The Holy Spirit, Paul insists in Romans 8:23, is himself the firstfruits of that inheritance, already present within the believer as a down payment on the full redemption to come — the one who takes the gospel answer to Troy and makes it personal, present, and transforming in the life of every person who trusts Christ.

How the Play Supports and How the Bible Critiques It

Euripides stood at the edge of the burning city and told the truth: without the living God, this is where every road ends — in ashes, silence, and the extinguished faces of children. He was right about the disease. But the gospel is the cure Euripides could not prescribe, because the cure required something no Greek playwright could imagine: God himself entering the burning city, not to observe it from Olympus but to carry its weight in his own body, to be stripped and shamed and killed — and then to walk out of the tomb on the third day with the keys of death and Hades in his hand. Paul says it plainly in Colossians 2:15: he disarmed the powers, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in the cross. That is not a philosophical consolation. That is a fact of history with the weight of eternity behind it. Trojan Women serves Christian reflection in several important ways before that critique lands. It tells the truth about war with a moral clarity that much ancient literature evades, insisting that heroism narratives cannot be sustained when you show their cost to the women and children who pay it. In this the play aligns with the biblical prophets, who similarly refused to allow Israel’s wars to be sanitized, and with the Psalms of lament, which insist that honest grief before God is not a failure of faith but an act of it. The dignity Hecuba maintains in the midst of total destruction reflects the image of God that clings to human beings even when every social structure that honored it has been obliterated. But the Bible’s critique of Euripides is searching and decisive. The play’s gods are capricious, motivated by wounded pride and factional loyalty, utterly indifferent to the suffering they permit. This is not the God of Scripture. The play offers no diagnosis of why Troy fell — only that it did. It cannot identify the real enemy, which is not the Greeks but the condition of a humanity that has exchanged the image of God for violence and exploitation. And most importantly, the play has no gospel. Hecuba’s last word is ash. The play ends in flames with no resurrection, no covenant faithfulness waiting on the other side, no redeemer who enters the destruction to carry it away. If Euripides’ unresolved grief is anything, it is an honest cry for the very answer he could not produce — which means that the play itself, read rightly, becomes an apologetic witness pointing toward the Christ it never knew.

Implications for Christian Belief and Practice

Reading Trojan Women as a Christian is a disorienting and ultimately clarifying experience — and it is worth acknowledging, before we close, that there is something genuinely strange about reading Greek tragedy as an act of Christian devotion. Yet this is precisely what the literary inheritance of Western civilization invites us to do, and the church has always been enriched rather than threatened by honest engagement with the world’s great literature, provided it brings Scripture as the final word. You may have stood in Hecuba’s ashes without knowing it — in a hospital waiting room, at a graveside, in the aftermath of a relationship or a vocation that ended in fire. Euripides knew that place. He described it with terrible accuracy. And he confirms what the Bible declares in Genesis 6 and Romans 1: the world without God is exactly as bleak as it looks from the ruins. For Christians tempted toward a triumphalist reading of history — as though the arc of civilization bends reliably toward justice without the intervening action of God — Euripides is a necessary corrective. The play also challenges the church to a costly solidarity with the suffering: to sit with the dying, to receive the refugee, to visit the imprisoned, to be present to grief as Christ was present to Jerusalem’s. The resurrection does not excuse the church from entering the ruins; it equips the church to enter them without despair. And what the resurrection produces is not merely a distant hope but a present transformation — a community whose life together is being reshaped, by the Spirit’s daily work, into the opposite of the Trojan cycle of pride, violence, and exploitation. This is the joy the New Testament describes as possible even in suffering: not the absence of grief but the presence of the God who answers grief, working in those who trust him a gladness that runs deeper than circumstances, a gladness Euripides longed for and could not find. The tears Hecuba could not stop, God has promised to wipe away. The justice she demanded and never received, Christ will one day render perfectly. Where the play ends in ash, the gospel begins in an empty tomb — and if that is true, and it is true, then the burning city is not your last word either. Have you trusted the One who walked out of the tomb with the keys of death in his hand? He is the answer to every Troy, including yours.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Euripides: Heracles and the God the Play Was Looking For

Euripides’ Heracles (c. 415 BCE) opens a window onto one of the ancient world’s most honest reckonings with suffering, and it does so through a single devastating structural inversion. In every other telling of the myth, Heracles kills his family before undertaking the twelve labors, so that the labors serve as atonement. Euripides reverses this entirely: the hero returns victorious from his final and most impossible task — the harrowing of Hades and the capture of Cerberus — only to be struck with divinely induced madness at Hera’s command and slaughter the wife and children he has just rescued from a tyrant’s death sentence. There is a man somewhere reading this who knows what it is to wake up in ruins he himself created, with no explanation that satisfies and no strength left that matters. Euripides wrote for him. The tragedy that follows is not the working out of guilt but the collapse of innocence, and the horror is deliberate: Euripides means to put the Olympian gods on trial, and he intends to convict them.

The Gods on Trial

The theological nerve of the play is Amphitryon’s rebuke of Zeus — “Either you are a truly stupid god, or else you are by nature quite unjust” — and it would be a mistake to read this as impious outburst rather than authorial thesis. Hera’s motivation is jealousy over Zeus’s infidelity, a grievance that has nothing to do with Heracles himself. Even the personified Madness, Lyssa, protests her own errand, declaring that she takes no pleasure in afflicting the righteous. When Heracles awakens to the carnage, he rejects the mythological tradition of divine misconduct as “wretched tales made up by our poets” and consciously chooses his human father Amphitryon over his divine father Zeus. The play’s ethics turn on this redefinition of heroism: physical conquest is what the culture celebrates, but Heracles declares that the madness brought him more grief than all his labors combined, and the courage he must now exercise is the harder kind — the choice to bear necessity and go on living, sustained only by the loyal friendship of Theseus, when every other reason to continue has been stripped away.

Homer, Sophocles, and the Shape of Greek Heroism

In its relation to the broader Greek literary tradition, the play operates by deliberate contrast. Homer’s Heracles is the paradigmatic strongman who sacks cities and wrestles monsters, and his suffering, when it appears at all, is incidental to his power. Sophocles’ Trachiniae gives a very different figure — one who dies in physical agony from Deianira’s poisoned garment, cursing the gods before being consumed on the pyre, essentially alone in his torment. Euripides introduces Theseus as a redemptive counterweight, a friend who refuses to abandon the hero even after he has become a source of ritual pollution. Where Sophocles’ Heracles dies in isolated agony, Euripides’ Heracles chooses to live in grief with a companion. The play also engages the Aeschylean tradition of divine justice — the Oresteia moves through blood-guilt toward institutional resolution — but Euripides refuses any such settlement. There is no divine vindication, no cosmic balancing of accounts. The only resolution is human: the stubborn loyalty of one man to another.

Gilgamesh and the Ancient Near Eastern Stream

The play participates in a much older literary stream than the Greek tradition alone. The parallels with the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh are structural and thematic in ways that reflect the deep cultural currents flowing between the ancient Near East and the Aegean world. Gilgamesh, like Heracles, is of mixed divine and human parentage; both heroes undertake superhuman labors, descend to the realm of the dead, and are brought low not by any external enemy but by irreversible personal loss — Enkidu’s death in Gilgamesh’s case, the slaughter of his family in Heracles’. Both works follow their hero into a confrontation with human limitation that no amount of strength can resolve. The resigned wisdom Gilgamesh receives — “You will never find the life for which you are looking” — finds its dramatic equivalent in Heracles’ choice to bear necessity. Dragon-slaying motifs, the underworld journey, the companion who humanizes the hero: these reflect the shared symbolic vocabulary through which ancient cultures processed the problem of heroic mortality. Euripides gives that tradition its most theologically acute formulation — the question is not whether the hero can survive the monster but whether he can survive the gods.

What the Old Testament Refuses

The Old Testament engages the questions raised by this play with greater depth and greater honesty, precisely because it operates within a genuinely monotheistic framework that refuses to make divine sovereignty and divine goodness contradict each other. The contrast between Hera and Yahweh is not a matter of degree but of kind. Hera afflicts Heracles out of marital spite; Yahweh’s jealousy in Exodus 20:5 is covenantal — the jealousy of a husband who will not share his bride with idols, not the jealousy of a deity nursing a personal grievance. The evil spirit that torments Saul (1 Samuel 16:14) is judicial, a covenant consequence, not capricious divine sport. Psalm 82 condemns corrupt gods who pervert justice and asserts Yahweh’s unique claim to rule precisely because he alone governs with equity. Job loses everything that Heracles loses, and the Book of Job does not pretend that his suffering is painless or God’s ways easily comprehensible. What it refuses is the Euripidean conclusion that divine power and divine justice are structurally incompatible. Suffering in the Old Testament is bounded within a sovereign design that does not miscarry, even when it cannot be explained.

The News Euripides Could Not Announce

The New Testament deepens this critique and names the answer. Here is a man, as Euripides imagines him, who has conquered every monster the world could produce and wakes on the floor beside the bodies of his children with a sword still warm. He cannot explain it, and there is no philosophy that reaches him there. The gospel does not offer him a philosophy. It offers him a person. The Son of God, described in Hebrews 2:9–10 as the pioneer of salvation made perfect through suffering, did not observe human devastation from a safe distance — he entered it, bore it without guilt, died under it, and rose from it. That is not an idea. That is news. The friendship of Theseus, the most beautiful thing in Euripides’ play, is honored by John 15:13 and simultaneously surpassed by it: the laying down of life for friends is there enacted not by a loyal companion but by Christ himself, whose friendship with ruined people is precisely what constitutes his heroism. Romans 5:3–5 takes Heracles’ bare endurance and transforms it into a chain that actually goes somewhere — affliction producing proven character, proven character producing hope, hope anchored in a love that the Spirit pours into the heart and that does not disappoint. Where Heracles survives, Christ transforms. And where death swallows Heracles’ family and finally Heracles himself, resurrection swallows death: “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54).

What the Church Owes to People in Ruins

The pastoral implications are considerable, and the church has too often forfeited them by offering easy theodicy where Euripides had the courage to sit in the rubble. The play understood something that comfortable religion obscures: catastrophic suffering can descend without warning on the innocent, strength is no protection against it, and the only human resource in the aftermath may be the stubbornness of a friend who refuses to leave. The church that takes this seriously will stop rushing grieving people toward lessons and sit with them first. It will train its small groups to embody what Theseus only foreshadowed — presence without conditions, loyalty without a purity requirement. And it will proclaim, to the person still on the floor, that the Man of Sorrows has been there before them and has not stayed dead. That is not the absence of the madness. It is the God who is present within it, whose purposes do not miscarry even when everything has collapsed, and whose love — unlike Theseus’s — does not depend on being in the vicinity. If that is true, it is the greatest news Heracles never heard, and it is worth saying plainly: Christ can be known, and he is worth knowing, and he is what the play was looking for.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Euripides: Hecuba’s Cry for Vengeance and the Gospel’s Answer to the Suffering and Revenge

 Euripides’ Hecuba (c. 424 BC) stands among the most psychologically harrowing works of the Greek tragic tradition. Written during the darkening years of the Peloponnesian War, the play traces the complete moral and spiritual disintegration of the Trojan queen, once sovereign over the greatest city of the ancient world and mother of nineteen children, now enslaved and stripped of every human dignity. The drama divides into two movements: the first follows Hecuba’s futile plea to spare her daughter Polyxena from sacrificial slaughter at Achilles’ tomb; the second follows her discovery that Polymestor, the Thracian king entrusted with her youngest son Polydorus, has murdered the boy for gold. Her revenge — blinding Polymestor and killing his sons — consummates her descent. The play closes not with resolution but with prophecy: Hecuba herself will be metamorphosed into a dog, Euripides’ own verdict on what unrelenting grief and vengeance make of a human soul. No catharsis softens the ending. This is one of his bleakest compositions, and it raises a question every reader must eventually answer personally: when suffering strips away everything you have built your life upon, what remains to hold you?

Homer, Herodotus, and the Greek Literary Tradition

Euripides situates Hecuba within a dense web of Homeric intertextuality. The Hecuba of the Iliad is already the archetype of maternal grief — the queen who watched Hector’s corpse dragged in the dust — and Euripides compounds her losses exponentially, extending Homeric pathos into the degraded aftermath of Troy’s fall. The ghost of Polydorus draws on the Epic Cycle, particularly the traditions preserved in the Sack of Ilium, where Polyxena’s sacrifice at Achilles’ tomb is recounted. Connections with Sophocles are equally pointed: the betrayal of philia — the bonds of friendship and obligation — that drives Hecuba’s revenge resonates with the violated loyalties in Ajax, while the prophesied chain of deaths recalls the cursed households of the Oresteia. The trial-like debate between Hecuba and Polymestor before Agamemnon reflects the fifth-century Athenian fascination with forensic persuasion that Thucydides also anatomizes. In this regard Euripides and Herodotus share a deep suspicion of rhetoric divorced from genuine moral order. In the Histories, persuasive speeches routinely precede catastrophe, and Polymestor’s sophisticated self-defense before Agamemnon belongs precisely to that tradition of eloquent sophistry that the Greek literary world regarded with consistent ambivalence. Both writers understood that a civilization capable of arguing brilliantly for anything is a civilization in danger of losing the moral ground on which argument must stand.

ANE Lament Traditions

While no direct literary dependence connects Euripides to the ancient Near East, the structural and emotional parallels between the play and ANE lament traditions are striking. Hecuba’s cries over her ruined city and lost children occupy the same imaginative territory as the Sumerian Lament for the Destruction of Ur, in which a divine mother-goddess mourns a fallen city, its temple desecrated and its people enslaved. The Chorus of Trojan women functions much as the communal lamentation that structures these ANE compositions. The critical difference is one of orientation: ANE laments, even in their darkest registers, typically move toward petition and the hope of divine restoration — the gods may be approached, ritual may effect change, the cosmic order may yet be recovered. Euripides offers none of this. His gods are either absent or malicious, demanding blood sacrifices that only deepen the suffering they claim to address. The world of the play is one in which no divine petition avails and the only force available to the wronged is the naked human will driving itself toward revenge.

Old Testament Parallels and Critique

The Hebrew Scriptures engage the same landscape of suffering that Hecuba inhabits, but with a fundamentally different diagnosis and direction. The communal lamentation of Lamentations 1 over the fall of Jerusalem — “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow” — maps directly onto Hecuba’s grief, and Job’s anguished protests against divine silence share her rhetorical intensity. But the Old Testament insists that this brokenness has a covenantal explanation rooted in Genesis 3 and is oriented toward a hope latent even in the moment of the Fall, in the protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15. The lex talionis of Exodus 21:24, often misread as endorsing personal vengeance, functions canonically as a restraint on precisely the escalating retribution that Hecuba enacts. Deuteronomy 32:35 places the prerogative of vengeance with Yahweh alone: “Vengeance is mine, and recompense.” Psalm 94 voices the same cry for justice that Hecuba voices — “O God of vengeance, shine forth!” — but directs it toward the God who is himself the judge of the nations. The Old Testament’s realism about suffering is as unflinching as Euripides’, but it is theologically grounded rather than cosmically arbitrary: the cry for justice is legitimate, but its resolution belongs to God rather than to a human will consuming itself in pursuit of revenge.

New Testament Critique and Fulfillment

There is a moment in Euripides’ darkest play when Hecuba cries out, stripped of everything, and asks a question that echoes down twenty-five centuries: Who is my protector? It is the cry of every human soul that has stared into undeserved suffering and found nothing there to hold it. Paul voices the same cry from the inside of his own moral wreckage: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Both voices reach the same edge. But there the resemblance ends. Hecuba had no answer and turned her unanswered cry into a weapon, destroying what remained of her humanity in the process. Paul had the answer the whole universe had been waiting for: thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. The Son of God entered the world that Hecuba inhabits, took its full weight of injustice and grief upon himself at the cross, satisfied the justice she could never personally achieve, absorbed the vengeance that was God’s alone to execute, and rose from the dead as the announcement that the cycle is broken — not by human will consuming itself in revenge, but by divine love absorbing the cost. Polyxena died with a dignity her executioners could not extinguish; the martyrs of the early church, Perpetua among them, died in that same tradition, knowing that her courage had found its source and redemption in One who died not at the demand of a dead hero’s ghost but freely, once for all, for the sins of the world. Romans 12:19 and Matthew 5:38–48 do not merely forbid revenge; they announce that the cross has accomplished what revenge never can — justice rendered, mercy extended, and the cycle broken at its root.

Implications for Christian Belief and Practice

Euripides, despite his skepticism toward the Olympian gods, cannot escape the gravitational pull of a moral universe in which the only available responses to betrayal and loss are passive endurance or destructive retaliation. Hecuba chooses retaliation, and her transformation into a dog is his verdict on that choice. The Christian theological tradition has always recognized that the Fall produces exactly this narrowing — that without grace, human beings driven to extremity tend toward either despair or vengeance, and both destinations confirm the damage suffering has inflicted. The practical implication is not that grief is wrong or that the cry for justice is illegitimate. The Psalms of lament, Job, and Lamentations affirm that God receives such cries and is not threatened by them. But consider where you direct that cry. Are you nursing a wound toward the slow construction of revenge, or bringing it to the God who has declared himself the vindicator of the oppressed? The difference is not temperamental — it is the difference between Hecuba’s metamorphosis and Revelation 21:4, between a soul that ends as a dog and a world in which every tear is wiped away, every death reversed, every injustice fully addressed by the one whose authority over history is not the capricious dominion of Achilles’ ghost but the sovereign, purposeful, redemptive will of God who works all things according to the counsel of his will.

Conclusion

Euripides’ Hecuba performs, with greater honesty than most ancient texts, the full cost of a world without transcendent hope. It illuminates the universal human experience of catastrophic loss, the seductive logic of revenge, and the dehumanizing consequences of letting that logic run its course. Read through the lens of canonical Christian theology, it functions as a precise negative image of the gospel: diagnosing the disease with unflinching accuracy while possessing no cure. The Homeric tradition, the ANE lament traditions, and the rhetorical world of fifth-century Athens all contribute to a portrait of humanity under the weight of the curse — powerful, eloquent, morally serious, and ultimately without resource. The Old Testament engages that same weight with greater theological depth and a latent hope. The New Testament announces the fulfillment of that hope in a death and resurrection that transforms suffering from the last word into the penultimate one. The question Hecuba asked in darkness, Christ has answered in light — and the answer is not a philosophy or a moral system but a person, and his name is the only name under heaven by which the wretched may be rescued. That is the word this ancient tragedy was always reaching for and could never find, and it is the word the gospel has been speaking ever since.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Suffer Well

VI. Summit Six: Suffer Well
“I cannot imagine a fate more awful--a fate worse than death—than a life lived in perfect harmony and balance.” Carl Jung
The question in life is not whether you will ever have to suffer. Rather, it is this: When you do suffer, how will you suffer? Will you suffer poorly, or will you suffer well?
Suffering can be the highest-octane fuel for greatness. You need to learn to turn suffering into meaning and beauty, elevating everyone around you.
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” Helen Keller
A. Suffering Defined
1. To suffer is to endure something painful. The more something means to you the more painful it may be. The power of suffering is its ability to STRIP away superficialities, ego, and distractions.
a) S: Severity—the magnitude of the pain
b) T: Time—how long you must endure the pain
c) R: Relativity—how severe your pain is when you are compared with those around you and your situation is compared with your own past or other hardships
d) I: Importance—how much the thing for which you are suffering matters
e) P: Price—how much you may or will lose as a result of the adversity
B. Ten Common Cracks and Chasms
1. Whining
a) Whining is irritating and drives others away. Often it occurs when there is a lack of merit in the whiner. It also implies inaction; the whiner is venting instead of trying to solve the problem.
2. Complaining
a) Complaining, expressing unhappiness about something, is slightly more constructive than whining. Sometimes it is good and beneficial to express our unhappiness in order to come to grips with it and to get past it. However, when overdone, it makes us weak, drains our energy, and lessens our determination. It is also contagious.
3. Blaming
a) When you blame others you give up control, taking the problem out of your power to change it. When you blame you also miss out on a vital piece of your own development. Learn from your mistakes and then move on.
4. Identifying
a) Identifying means to become one with your suffering in a bad way. You limit your potential when you label yourself according to your suffering, robbing you of the opportunity to grow through your suffering.
5. Anesthetizing
a) Often we shut down emotionally, use drugs or alcohol, become workaholics, or other electronic devices, such as TV, video games, the internet, and the like.
6. Escaping
a) You can run from suffering, but you can’t hide from it. Procrastination is one of the most popular forms of escape. We can also become driven, engage in risky behavior, or look for other socially unacceptable means to deal with our pain.
7. Rationalizing
a) Overextended strengths can become weaknesses. We can explain away almost anything. It is healthy when it helps you make sense of your life so you can come to grips with the compromises you made that got you where you are. It is unhealthy when you reason yourself out of what is possible so we don’t take responsibility for our own choices.
8. Denying
a) Denying refuses to acknowledge the pain so we don’t have to deal with it. Our culture sets up standards for what are acceptable and unacceptable ways of dealing with pain and suffering, so be careful not to evaluate someone else’s response to suffering based on your cultural standards. Denial occurs when we fail to completely accept the full magnitude of our suffering, the resulting consequences, or the severity of the source. While denial can protect us, it also denies us the tremendous power and opportunity of our suffering.
9. Pretending
a) Pretending is acting as though what we know exists does not exist. Some pretending is good, such as smiling even when you are sad, and faking it until you make it, or putting on a good front so that others are not adversely affected by your suffering. However, if others discover your deception, it will hurt your credibility and you will lose their trust. Pretending is dangerous when it becomes a barrier between others and our suffering. It also denies others the opportunity to share in our suffering with us.
10. Whitewashing
a) This is a more subtle form of pretending where we embellish something to make it look better than it really is. Whitewashing can keep us from what is real, robbing us of the benefits suffering provides.
11. Principles to Keep in Mind
a) It is human nature to use these
b) To a point, most can be used positively and for good reasons
c) Overused, all become destructive
d) These are often used with the best of intentions
e) We all use them
f) If abused, they prevent us from suffering well
C. Types of Suffering
1. Physical Suffering
“Pain is God’s megaphone.” C. S. Lewis
2. Emotional Suffering
a) Emotional suffering gets less sympathy than physical suffering. It tends to be more contagious, one’s worries easily become the worries of another.
3. Mental Suffering
a) We suffer mentally when we can’t seem to figure out and resolve a matter of great importance. It manifests itself in conundrums, quandaries, confusion, and ignorance.
4. Spiritual Suffering
a) This is usually private and hidden and occurs when we feel adrift, faithless, purposeless, hopeless and unconnected. It often occurs when we have fallen short or done wrong in some matter of great importance.
“Suffering, cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.” Mahatma Gandhi
D. Suffer Check
1. Work and Life
a) What is your single greatest cause of suffering at work?
b) What is your single greatest cause of suffering in your life?
c) On a scale of 1 to 10, rate each based on the STRIP criteria:
(1) Severity, Time, Relativity, Importance, Price
(2) Score: 5-15 (little suffering), 16-30 (noticeable discomfort), 31-45 (real pain), 46-50 (extreme suffering)
E. Positive Pessimism
1. Help alleviate some of the pain by joking about it being worse than it really is: “I’m not the nicest guy in the world, but at least I’m stupid.” “We may be on a tight budget, but at least the heating bill doubled.”
F. Bad Suffering
1. Bad suffering occurs when it makes us less instead of more; bitter rather than better. When we become meaner, smaller, or more selfish as a result of our pain, that is bad suffering. Suffering can be the ultimate excuse to stop trying. It is dangerous because no one will blame you if you quit. Suffering badly can also become a cultural norm. Suffering poorly is your right, but suffering well is your opportunity.
G. Good Suffering
1. Good suffering is elevating. It happens when we allow suffering to make us better people because of what we’ve been through. Good suffering can help strip you of all that is not essential. It can sweep you clean of pettiness, making you more magnanimous and selfless. It can also spawn hope in others, giving them the courage they need to persevere through their difficulties.
“Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.” Aristotle
2. How to Suffer Well:
a) Use suffering to help and enrich others
b) Use it to become a better person by demonstrating your highest character and virtue in the face of pain
c) Turn inward and privately harness it to expand your capacity for hardship
d) Use and transcend it by attacking life with renewed determination
e) Be human and acknowledge when it’s hard or it hurts, refusing to pretend it does not exist, robbing yourself of the potential lessons
f) Ask for help when you need it
g) Turn your suffering into a cause
h) Be open about it, letting others learn from what you are going through
3. The Suffer Well
a) How?
(1) How am I going to elevate myself and others, starting now?
b) Who?
(1) Who is most affected by how I suffer?
c) What?
(1) What is my CORE with regard to your suffering? (Control, Ownership, Reach, Endurance)
d) Why?
(1) Why do I want to suffer well?
e) When?
(1) By when will I have said or done something that demonstrates my commitment to suffer well?
4. The Suffer Shifter
a) The one area in which I currently suffer the most is:
b) On the basis of all I have learned about suffering poorly, one specific thing I commit myself to stop doing or do less of is:
c) On the basis of all I have learned about suffering poorly, one specific thing I commit myself to start doing more of is:
d) As a result of these commitments, I and the people around me should enjoy the following benefits:


From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer

Brave New World

 In the final chapters of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, at the climax of the story, the Savage finally meets the Controller and has a philosophical and theological discussion that brings out the implications of engineering and conditioning humans to create a perfect society. While the brave new world is free of pain, suffering, violence, and need, those who inhabit it have been dehumanized and turned into slaves for the elite. Much of the debate between the two characters echoes much of what we are currently facing in our world today. Do we want a world free of suffering and pain, maintained by totalitarian control and various forms of drugs and entertainment, or do we want freedom and full expression of humanity along with all the messiness that it entails? 

In the brave new world old books and ideas are forbidden because they disrupt the well-ordered society that has been engineered by the elites. Tragedies require social instability. Without social instability there are no tragedies, so most old literature would not be understandable to those who have been engineered and conditioned to obey the new world order and who live in a society where everything that can create discomfort has been eliminated. 

While beauty is attractive, the elite don’t want people to be attracted by old things; they want them to like the new ones, even though the new things are stupid and horrible. The Controller states: “You can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage.”

However, by eliminating all that causes pain and displeasure, the brave new world has eliminated all that makes us human. In the new world order there is no Truth, no Beauty, no Love, no Passion, no Freedom, no Choice, no Hope. By engineering out all negative thoughts and feelings, the elites have created a world that is inhuman. They have been genetically engineered and psychologically conditioned, that "they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.”

By eradicating all misery and conflict, mankind has been relegated to a bland existence. The Controller states: “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

It requires a delicate balance to engineer and condition each level of society in order to achieve maximum productivity while maintaining social stability. For example, only so many humans are allowed to be Alpha pluses, otherwise there would be civil war or the elites would get their throats cut.

Instead of executing dissenters, they are sent to remote islands to pursue their own desires and exercise their will. Since they are secluded from civilization, they have no impact on society. Even science has to be controlled, so that only authorized studies and findings are allowed, otherwise war would eventually break out. 

Religion also had to be totally eradicated from society since it depends on pain, misfortune, and lack to thrive, so it also creates instability. In the brave new world there is no lack or loss to be compensated, so there is no need of religion. And when there is some displeasure, there is soma, the drug that keeps all the citizens happy. Since the elites think that people were conditioned to believe in God, they can now be conditioned to not believe in God. In the brave new world, the happy, hard-working, goods-consuming citizen in perfect and has no need of God. 

Since industrial civilization is possible only when there is no self-denial, self-indulgence is encouraged or demanded in order to keep the wheels of prosperity turning. And since there are no wars or misery, there is no need for anyone to be noble or heroic. In fact, in the brave new world, soma, the happy drug, is Christianity without tears or sacrifice. Instead of virtue obtain through self-denial, the civilized man indulges in vice and eradicates all pain and discomfort through conditioning and drugs.

To demand Truth, Beauty, Love, Freedom is to demand danger, pain, suffering, and unhappiness. The climax ends with the exchange between the Savage and the ControllerController:

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

While modern society is dehumanizing in many ways already, and it has been pushing God and Truth out in order to free men to pursue their passions unfettered, the events of the last two years show that the endgame has always been a worldwide totalitarian society where all aspects of life are carefully regulated by the elite. Much of what is happening today was warned about in Brave New World and other books, such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. We have to decide whether we want to be "happy" or fully human.

Without pain and suffering, we become shallow, selfish, self-centered, egotistical jerks. Without opposition, self-denial, and struggle, we become weak and slaves to vice. Only those who have suffered can truly love and care for others. Only those who have struggled can truly be virtuous. God created and redeemed us to become fully human, overcoming sin and self through Christ and the indwelling Spirit. Every time Man has tried to create a Utopia, he has ended up creating a Dystopia. Man is incapable of creating a perfect society because those trying to create the perfect society are fallen and sinful. Even the most righteous humans can only create a sinful, broken society. Only Christ can create the true Utopia, and it will be populated with those who have been transformed by him and empowered to live righteously and lovingly. Apart from Christ, there is no Utopia. Any promise made by Man to create a perfect society is a lie and will ultimately lead to a dystopian nightmare. We are on the verge of that happening globally, and every human being will be forced to make a choice between Christ's way or Man's way. History tells us that Man's way is doomed to fail. Choose wisely.