Amid star-strewn heavens, a woman groans in labor pains as an enormous devourer endangers her, intent on seizing her miraculous child the moment he’s born. So unfolds the vision of Revelation 12:1–5. So too goes a crucial scene in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest film, The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025). The Revelator retells the Christmas story using Hellenistic popular culture’s meme of a mom-to-be menaced by a monster.1 I’ll do likewise with our own pop cultural equivalent, First Steps, and set these stories within a framework of four angles: the scientific, the political, the affective, and the theological. Fair warning: spoilers lie ahead.
Forces of Nature
The Fantastic Four are thoroughly science-engaged: they are pioneer astronauts Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), his wife Sue Storm (Invisible Woman), her brother Johnny Storm (Human Torch), and Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm (the Thing). Reed, their leader, is an astronomer, physicist, and inventor. Their superpowers are “scientific,” too, the result of spaceflight mutation. The Four’s powers approximate the four states of matter or, more anciently, Aristotle’s four terrestrial elements (earth, fire, water, air).2 The Thing’s body is living rock. The Human Torch self-combusts. Mr. Fantastic’s shapeshifting and Invisible Woman’s projection of rainbow-tinged forcefields suggest fluidity and atmospherics, respectively—an impression reinforced by his water-adjacent first name, Reed, and her meteorological maiden name, Storm. Their adversary-turned-ally, the former astronomer Silver Surfer, reflects Aristotle’s celestial fifth element of aether with her space alien identity and ability to phase through solids.
Moving to Revelation 12 and the Christmas story that it refracts, we find a kindred interest in heavenly bodies. In her delivery suite in the sky, the pregnant woman wears a starry crown and the sun as her maternity gown while her feet press against the moon with each contraction. Meanwhile, at the front of the New Testament, the infancy narrative in Matthew’s Gospel famously features the Messiah’s birthstar and the astrologers (magi) who follow it (Matt. 2:1–12). Returning to Revelation 12, we discover allusions to the four classical elements, too, yet unlike the Fantastic Four, they’re divided into dueling dyads: the “fiery red dragon” (CSB; emphasis mine) disgorges water to drown the woman, but the earth absorbs the flood and she soars to safety through the air on eagle’s wings (Rev. 12:3, 13–16). This elemental discord signals the cosmic conflict between good and evil.
Civics Lessons
On their alternate-reality Earth, the Fantastic Four manage to unite the nations in a planetwide pursuit of peace and security. Sue, particularly, is a consummate diplomat who brokers global disarmament and a truce between surface dwellers and the underground country, Subterranea. And just as the Four embody the classical elements, so too with the classical civic virtues laid out in Plato’s Republic. Team leader Reed plays the prudent philosopher-king. Johnny burns with a courageous (if impulsive) spirit. Ben’s temperate dependability in such supporting roles as cook, chauffeur, cheerleader, midwife, and babysitter makes him metaphorically as well as literally the team’s rock. Sue champions justice: confronted with the dilemma of sacrificing either her child or her world to the devourer, she determines to do right by both the one and the many.
In our world, Caesar Augustus laid claim to these civic virtues as head of the empire that instituted Pax Romana. On this basis, he issued the decree that prompted Christ’s birth in Bethlehem (Luke 2:1–7). But the Apocalypse tears through the virtuous veil of imperial propaganda to expose the underlying monstrosity. Revelation 12:4–5 sums up Christ’s earthly career from birth to ascension as besieged by the satanic dragon. The Gospels flesh out the threat: Rome’s client-king Herod the Great deploys first duplicity, then violence against the Christ-child (Matt. 2:7–18). At the other end of Jesus’ life, a junior Herod and Pontius Pilate collaborate in destroying him (Luke 23:1–25). In these vignettes, wisdom devolves into cunning, courage into cowardly political self-preservation, temperance into oppression, and justice into its miscarriage. Even Plato had hypothesized that a truly righteous man would suffer scourging, torture, and crucifixion.3 In Jesus, this prophecy proves true.
What Love’s Got to Do with It
In his classic study of the meaning of love, C. S. Lewis identified The Four Loves: familial affection (storge), friendship (philia), romance (eros), and divine charity (agape). Each of these loves manifests in the Fantastic Four. Love of family, especially the parent-child bond, takes center stage and stands in creative tension with the superheroes’ agapeic impulse to selflessly save the world. Ben is the only team member unrelated to the others by blood or marriage, and his steadfast friendship stabilizes the team. But the hinge on which the film turns is Johnny’s eros. His attraction to the Silver Surfer drives him to discover her backstory, which enables him to confront her with how her own self-sacrificial love has been exploited by her master, the globe-gobbling Galactus. Her response preserves the sole means of defeating Galactus, and in the end, she herself strikes the finishing blow.
World-saving agape lies at the heart of the gospel, whether in the well-known John 3:16 or in the more obscure Revelation 1:5, the foundation for the cosmic drama of chapter 12. Yet that divine love exists alongside or expresses itself in the guise of the other three. Storge echoes through the New Testament’s ubiquitous Father-Son language that characterizes Jesus’ relationship to God, as well as in the mother-child imagery of Revelation 12 and the history of the Holy Family in the Gospels’ infancy accounts (Matt. 1–2; Luke 1–2). Jesus dubs his disciples his friends just prior to his death (John 15:13–15). Lastly, the Apocalypse consummates with a vision of the bride of Christ (Rev. 21–22), thereby elevating eros to sanctified transcendence.
God(s) with Us
First Steps contains fleeting religious references, from infrequent profanity to a doomsday “Galactus cult” to the Fantastic Four’s “Hail Mary” rescue plan to the title “space god” for both the planet-eater and the child whom he hails with the words, “You are my salvation.” The most religiously grounded scenes are Ben’s interactions with yeshiva students and their teacher, then his later visit to her synagogue on the eve of Earth’s looming destruction. When she asks if he’s seeking “spiritual guidance,” he tells her that he’s come to see her instead. This exchange epitomizes the film’s superficially secular humanistic worldview, which trusts not in God but in science and global good-faith cooperation for humanity’s survival and future flourishing. Any “gods” in First Steps are simply highly developed humans/humanoids: Galactus recalls that he was once a man, and Reed and Sue’s baby, who can raise the dead, incarnates a quantum leap forward in our species’ evolution.
Here the biblical storyline diverges radically. The Apocalypse only paints in starkest colors what the rest of Scripture attests. First, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 4 and beyond, the one true God is not just another, bigger being within the cosmos but the transcendent Creator and Sovereign over all. Secondly, apart from divine grace, our reason turns to treason against our Maker (Rom. 1:18–32) and our cooperation only erects towers at Babel and gibbets on Golgotha as, deluded by the dragon, we unite in allegiance to its beastly lackeys (Rev. 12:9, 17–13:18). The savior-son to whom Revelation 12’s woman gives birth is not the apex of human or cosmic advancement but the miraculous self-insertion of God into our sin-stained story. That is the point of the virginal conception: it is God’s free fulfillment of the messianic lineage in a manner that marks a decisive break with human self-effort (Matt. 1; Luke 1:26–56; cf. John 1:13–14). No merely human being, however highly exalted—even the Blessed Virgin herself—may share in Christ’s unique role as Redeemer. And so, across the four Sundays of Advent, Christians seek hope, peace, joy, and love in Immanuel and his Kingdom rather than in any lesser leaders, heroes, and achievements.
Yet for all that, First Steps may function as a secular parable of God’s Kingdom. It heralds and hones our longing that the powers of nature, the politics of nations, the plenitude of love, and the presence of deity might combine in perfect harmony. If Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben thus prepare us—as if by outstretched gesture, unseen nudge, tongue of fire, or rock crying aloud—to welcome the true Child of Promise, they will have served us fantastically.
Footnotes
- E.g., the myths of Leto, mother of Apollo, and Andromeda, future wife of Perseus.
- As noted of the characters in the original comics by Scott Rosen, “Gods and Fantastic Mortals: The Superheroes of Jack Kirby,” in B. J. Oropeza, ed., The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Popular Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2005, 2008), 115.
- Plato, The Republic, ii, 362a; online: Book 2 – Platonic Foundation.
