The Facade

This summer when I was doing my 4000 mile road trip through the South and Southwest, I visited Roswell, New Mexico–y’know, the site of the famous “UFO crash.”

While there gawking at all the alien stuff on Main Street, I looked up and saw a building with a sign saying “Alien Resistance HQ.” It turned out to be a kind of Christian coffeeshop (“Defending the Planet, One Tasty Beverage at a Time”) using the “alien resistance” schtick to draw in New Agers visiting Roswell.

I had a talk with the gentleman who owns it. He’s very nice. From Detroit. An ordained Protestant minister. He founded a Christian motorcycle club. And now he spends his days evangelizing New Agers at Alien Resistance HQ. He also believes that the earth is hollow and that that’s where UFOs come from.

While at Alien Resistance HQ, I looked over the books and DVDs he had for sale. One was the book on the left. At the time, I didn’t buy it, but I did buy a DVD of a lecture by the book’s author, Michael Heiser (not the same as the guy who runs the coffee shop).

In the lecture Heiser–who is a scholar of ancient near eastern languages–critiques Zechariah Sitchin–who is a fake scholar of ancient near eastern languages.

In case you aren’t aware, Sitchen has published a number of books that are all the rage in the UFO community. In these books, he claims to have deciphered ancient texts that show that there is a planet in the outer solar system that swings into the inner solar system in a multi-thousand-year orbit. This planet is, according to the ancient texts, the home of an advanced race that gave rise to humanity and that is the basis of various world religions. He also claims they’re mentioned in the Bible.

This is, of course, pure bunkum.

Sitchen’s claims are absurd. They are not based on textual scholarship, because Sitchen has no scholarship. He is a fraud, pure and simple.

I’ve thought about critiquing Sitchen at some point, but haven’t had the occasion yet, so I was interested to see Heiser’s lecture. Got the DVD. Watched it. And it was good! I was quite pleased. Heiser takes Sitchen to task in a very gentlemanly but very devastating manner.

The lecture was so good that I decided I wanted to read Heiser’s work, including his novel, so I ordered it and read it while I was on the way to this year’s Catholic Answers Cruise. I’d like to recommend it to those who would be interested. Here’s the scoop . . .

The Facade is a novel in which Heiser explores the modern UFO phenomenon and ideas he has been pondering about aliens and how they might be related to the Bible. At the center of the novel is a character who is basically a knock-off of the author: a (then) still-in-school scholar of ancient near eastern languages who happens to have a strong interest in UFOs and something called “the divine council” (more on that in a minute).

A lot of this character’s biography seems to overlap (or at least reasonate) with Heiser’s at the start of the novel, but then the character’s biography takes a sharp turn. He is abducted by government agents who take him to a secret base where various experts have been gathered to try to help figure out how to break the news to the public of a crisis that proves the existence of extraterrestrial life. But, the reader quickly finds out, the agents running the discussion group are lying to the experts about the situation. The questions are: What is really happening here, and what–if anything–can be done about the true crisis?

The novel starts slowly. At first the experts do what experts typically do: Sit around in conference rooms and argue with each other. These discussions perform the function of getting the reader up to speed on the concepts that the novel will involve (which many readers will find fascinating), but the first part of the novel could really use some action. There’s too much “tell” and not enough “show.”

This changes, and the plot kicks into high gear. By the end of the book dramatic reversal is piling on top of dramatic reversal in a way that keeps the reader guessing until not just the book’s final pages but–for many readers–its final sentence.

I have to commend the author on several points for which he deserves a lot of credit:

1) He has written a book that attempts to seriously grapple with the question of extraterrestrial life from a conservative Christian perspective. There are hardly any books out there that do this, particularly in the direct way that this one does. It forces the reader to think through several different scenarios about what it would mean for Christians if extraterrestrial life was discovered in our day.

2) Though the main character (representing conservative Evangelicalism) does get the best and most crucial insights, the author makes a real effort to spread the credit around to characters with different viewpoints. It isn’t as if everyone else is a bumbler who has to be corrected by the Evangelical. Characters from other perspectives–including unsympathetic characters–get to contribute important insights. The author could have gone even farther in this direction–for example by having the Evangelical only know about the Bible and ancient languages and have the UFO insights all contributed by others–but Heiser deserves credit for not having the novel simply involve a set of lectures by a know-it-all representative of his position.

3) In fact, the main character has significant flaws. He’s not in constant mortal sin or anything like that, but the effects of the Fall are clear in him. He isn’t a macho, athletic, self-confident, Doc Savage kind of scholar-hero. He’s more of an ordinary, nerdy, sincere Christian guy thrust into extraordinary circumstances.

4) The author also gives sympathetic treatment to Catholic characters. The chief ally of the Evangelical expert is a Catholic expert who happens to be a Jesuit. This character is portrayed quite sympathetically and he gets to contribute important insights (including a major one that escaped the Evangelical hero, even though it was in his own field). The author doesn’t get all of the Catholic stuff in the novel a hundred percent right (in fact, a couple of things are silly), but he’s making a serious and respectful attempt to incorporate Catholic Christians into the novel. (Also, though John Paul II doesn’t appear and is dead by the time the novel begins, he is spoken of in glowing terms.)

5) There is a conversion of sorts that occurs during the course of the novel, and it is handled far, far better than conversions typically are in novels (of this or any sort). There is no “praying the sinner’s prayer” moment, and the author shows an awareness that serious conversions usually take time and are not complete all at once. In fact, this conversion isn’t quite complete by the end of the novel, but the character in question is far down the road to redemption.

6) The author is willing to deal with subjects that would be utterly taboo in many Evangelical novels. This means, in part, that some of the subjects discussed in the novel make it not suitable for children, though that material is slight. (Also, in case you’re wondering, nobody “does it” in this novel; it wasn’t written by Andrew Greeley, after all.) It also means that he does some really cool dramatic moves. Some of these pertain to the climax of the novel, and I was delighted to see them. The last sentence, in particular, does something few Evangelical authors would have the guts to do. (It also sets up a potential sequel.)

7) The author also explores modern UFO mythology from a sympathetic but skeptical perspective. He offers conjectures about the Roswell crash, for example, that you don’t hear very often.

One of the centerpieces of the novel is the idea of “the divine council.” Before the novel began the author’s character got himself into trouble by discussing this concept in an injudicious manner among Evangelicals, and I suspect that the author has done the same thing in real life. There are a few techniques the author could use to neutralize potential criticism on this point, but he’s onto something real here.

The basic idea is that in the ancient near eastern cultures–including Israelite culture–heaven was envisioned as a divine royal court with God (or the chief god) as the king. In addition to the king, the court also contained princes, counselors, military figures, and even a prosecutor (i.e., Satan). At the bottom of the heavenly court or “divine council” were the messengers, who we know as angels (since that’s what the word angelos originally *meant* in Greek: “messenger”; the same was true of the equivalent Hebrew and Aramaic terms). Over the course of time much of this imagery faded from popular consciousness and everybody in the divine council tended to be referred to as just angels, but the traces of the original divine council metaphor are still there in the Old Testament. (This is something I wrote about a number of years ago, though I could do a better job of it now.)

The author uses the novel to introduce the concept of the divine council to his readers, and although some things in the resulting angelology he offers are quite questionable (e.g., the degree to which members of the divine council might be able to assume biological form), it is still nice to get an obscure concept being introduced to a wider audience. Up till now, it’s tended to be just scholars who have been aware of it.

All told, The Facade is a fascinating exploration of how the idea of extraterrestrial life might square with the Christian faith, and I would recommend it to anyone who would like to see this question wrestled with in fictional form.

GET THE BOOK

P.S. *DO NOT* spoil the last sentence for yourself!