#trigun book club sure has been an exercise in dusting off my old bible knowledge

[nepentheisms]

Volume 13 - Elendira's number, let's gooooo!

So I was pondering the significance of Livio's big throwdown fight being against Elendira, and it hit me once I looked at it in terms of their abilities: Elendira's weapon is nails; Livio's power is regeneration. This is the Crucifixion battling against the Resurrection - a very Christian metaphor being used to illustrate the conflict of ideas between Knives and Vash. Elendira acts to help carry out Knives' condemnation of humanity; she brings death and visions of death in the wake of Knives' crusade to punish those he sees as sinners. Livio, in contrast, is aligned with Vash's mission to save humanity; he's an agent for Vash's message of redemption and life persevering.

To delve into Christian soteriology for a bit, the significance of the crucifixion in the New Testament is that it is the act of Jesus taking on the punishment for all of humanity's sins. "The wages of sin is death," as Romans 6:23 says, so Jesus dies, but then Jesus rises again to complete the path to humanity's reconciliation with God. The idea is that in becoming followers of Christ, Christians spiritually share in the experience of crucifixion, death, and resurrection with Jesus. To love Jesus is to be changed as though one were raised from the dead. The passage below from Paul's letter to the Romans is an example of that perspective.

Romans 6:4-6 (NRSV):

(4) Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life. (5) For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (6) We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, so we might no longer be enslaved to sin.

It's very appropriate that Paul's words get brought up here, because I think Livio can be seen as something of a Paul figure. He's a powerful member of a religious order that opposes the followers of the Christ figure, he plays a big role in the death of a "disciple," and he undergoes an intense experience that changes him into one of the most devoted followers of the Christ figure. And the stuff Paul wrote about being crucified with Christ? Livio sure went through a crucifixion alright.

With all that said, when we bring Razlo into the equation, things get really interesting and a bit subversive when viewed through the lens of Paul's teachings in the Christian Bible. In stories that are more straightforwardly Christian in their messaging, a character like Razlo - a personality who acts as someone's darker half- would typically be treated as a force of evil to be overcome. This represents how the pre-salvation self is supposed to die so that a more Christ-like nature can take its place.

In Livio's case, however, Razlo is not extinguished after Livio chooses to live by Wolfwood's and Vash's example. Instead of being framed as the more sinful aspect of Livio that needed to be purified out of him, Razlo is portrayed as a powerful asset in preserving Livio's life, and that's something that really resonated with me - the way that Livio didn't need to erase his darker half but instead learned to work in harmony with it. In doing so, he found wholeness.