Author’s Note: This essay was developed with the assistance of AI. I read or watched every text discussed. The theological framework, arguments, and interpretations are entirely my own. The AI functioned as interlocutor: challenging my readings, identifying gaps in my evidence, and helping me see where my prose had collapsed into very purple flourishes.
The result is something I likely would not have completed alone, not because the AI wrote it, but because it gave me a patient sounding board that helped me see past the tangled ideas to shape what I wanted. If you find a passage that sounds soulless, that might be the AI. If you find one that’s insufferably overwrought, that’s almost certainly me.
What We Remember When We Imagine Heroes
Every person labors under the weight of a heavy burden. They are raised on stories of fathers, grandfathers, leaders, and taught histories of ancestral battles and migrations that led them to the lives and burdens they now carry. Everyone wonders if they can live up to or somehow make up for the events of the past. We bear the weight of history and look to the past as through a tarnished mirror; remembering heroes and seeing ourselves through what remains visible in the murky glass. Memory lingers long in the light that shines through every story we tell. We can see what we value in the assumptions that shape our ideologies, our religions, and even the names we give our children. But beyond those reflections are even deeper whispers of a world that once was, and of a man who once walked in it perfectly in ways we can now only remember in fiction because we can no longer imagine they were ever real.
I speak of course of Adam, the first man. Not a brute creature staggering randomly toward reason as modern materialists imagine, but the living crown of creation: perfect in body, whole in mind, declared good on the sixth day. Made a little lower than the angels, not a rival to God nor mere kin to beast. He named the animals and tended a garden fashioned as his perfect home. He bore glory lightly, as though it were the most natural thing in the universe–because it was.
Imagine standing in his presence: the most perfect man you can conceive. A man so perfect that your own flaws suddenly unfold into distance you could never cross, widening until they become the whole horizon. Shame and longing hold you fast from even taking a single step toward him. Feel the weight of glory and realize that you are not what man was meant to be. And yet something in you yearns for it.
But Adam reached for the apple. Not because he was hungry, but because he listened to the serpent and doubted the goodness of the God who had formed him and placed him. Adam’s sin was not that the apple contained evil but that in grasping for what was not yet given he took evil into himself. The fruit, like the garden itself, was doubtless sweet for a moment and then a bitter memory forever after. The light dimmed, the vigor of perfection faded away and the ache of that loss has lived in us ever since.
Part of us remembers what we were, even if we no longer believe such greatness possible. That memory surfaces in every story of heroism, every attempt to imagine the perfect man. We call him Hercules, or Odysseus, or Gilgamesh. In our own age, we call him Superman. We give him flight, strength, incorruptibility—powers that reflect not divinity so much as our lost humanity. We veil him in fiction and send him among us to show what man unfallen might have been. Sometimes we mistake his glory for that of a god. And there is truth in that mistake, for Adam himself pre-figured the God-Man Jesus. But the resemblance is partial, not complete. What we long for in our heroes, and hope for in Christ, is not godhood at all but wholeness and the restoration of what has been squandered.
Superman endures not just because he is an image of Christ, but even more deeply, he reminds us of Adam. He shows us what strength could look like if it served love instead of self and what power paired with integrity could become. He is the memory of man as he was meant to be, transposed into myth by lithographer’s ink, but still carrying the ache of Eden. His goodness is the shadow of a glory we half-remember and dare not hope for.
This is where our story begins: remembrance. To remember Adam rightly is to begin to see the shape of man restored; to glimpse, in myth and modern hero alike, the possibility of something better than self-made gods. It is to stand at the eastward edge of Eden, look up, and believe we were made for more than the dust we came from and to which we are destined to return.
Myths of Memory: Ancient Heroes and the Echo of Adam
There was a time when men still told stories as if they remembered the beginning. Before law was carved in stone or gospel was written on parchment, the world kept its memories in song and spoken tale. Around the firelight of forgotten centuries, voices recalled men who were greater than any we now see, giants in strength and wisdom, and sometimes even in stature. They lived for ages, built the first cities by their skill and toppled them by their pride.
The earliest written fragments echo the same memory though already clouded by centuries of death and forgetting. Across cultures the pattern holds that the first men stood nearer to the beginning and were therefore grander. Zeus stands higher than man and the Titans stand higher even than Zeus. Scripture itself speaks this way. In Genesis the lifespans tower–nine hundred and thirty years for Adam, nine hundred and sixty-nine for Methuselah. Each generation grows shorter as the Fall, Flood and Babel unfold. Civilization rises as man himself diminishes. We invent tools and forge empires even as we forget how to walk with God in the cool of the day. The Sumerian king lists and the flood epics preserve the same memory: greatness lingering as exaggeration once the purpose given to man at the beginning has been forgotten.
From that early twilight of memory come the heroes: Hercules and Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Achilles, Theseus and Thor. All of them half-divine and half-ruined: echoes of the Adamic image carried through myth. Their strength is prodigious, their appetites catastrophic. They rule, they conquer, they stand tall, yet none can escape death’s claim. Each bears the imprint of something once whole and now divided: the might of man without the holiness that made might safe.
Even the world’s first recorded hero-story remembers this truth. In Gilgamesh and Enkidu, we see civilization wrestling with its own loss of innocence, law meeting untamed life. Enkidu, formed from clay and living among beasts, an Adam without naming: near to creation but unable to order it. Gilgamesh rules by force instead of fellowship, a king whose dominion has soured into tyranny. Their quests echo the memory of a dominion once meant for stewardship but twisted into self-glorification. And when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh confronts the truth Adam faced when he left Eden: man cannot seize eternal life by grasping alone. Together they preserve a dim memory of the unity between man and nature that once was harmony and has since become conflict.
Consider Hercules, the mightiest of the old heroes. A man of impossible strength and relentless will, straining to atone for blood-debt and prove himself worthy to the gods he both fears and resents. His original sin was as grand as his ambition: murdering his own family in a blind fit of rage. Every labor he undertakes is a half-memory of dominion twisted by pride. He slays monsters and cleanses stables but can never cleanse himself. His triumphs are real, yet each victory erodes something of his humanity. He is Adam without grace, muscle without mercy: straining to force his way into heaven. His story ends not in triumph but in fire, and even his ascent to Olympus is a hollow reward, a pagan echo of the resurrection for which creation longs.
Where Hercules embodies the ache of power seeking self-redemption, Arthur stands as Christian civilization’s memory of righteous rule before its corruption. Chosen not by conquest but a divine sign, Arthur does not grasp the apple of the throne until he is confirmed by pulling the sword from the stone. He is the once and future king: a ruler who unites might and right, sword and sacrament. In Arthur we glimpse Adam’s dominion turned to service: strength in obedience, kingship in humility. Yet even Camelot cannot stand. Sin enters through love disordered; pride and betrayal fracture the fellowship of the round table as Lancelot takes what is not his to take. The fall of Arthur’s realm is a tragedy and a confession that even baptized civilization still lives east of Eden.
The medieval imagination took this for granted. History was not progress but decline. Every generation looked backward toward a nobler past and forward to the promised restoration. This is the cosmology Lewis and Tolkien inherited and revived in modern myth. In Narnia, the magic thins, beasts lose their speech, and even the sunlight grows pale as the Last Battle approaches. In Middle-Earth the elves depart, Númenor is drowned, and the men of the Third Age pale in comparison to their forefathers. For both writers, the age of heroes recedes because man himself has grown smaller. Magic, vigor and wisdom are spread thin like butter on too much bread as the ages roll on. The Fall is not an event confined to Genesis; it is a metaphysical entropy, Tolkien’s long defeat written into time itself.
And yet, beneath this sense of fading runs a defiant hope. The telling of tales itself is a kind of rebellion against forgetfulness, of reaching back toward that first dawn when man stood upright and unashamed. The very act of remembering and speaking names, of crafting heroes, is an echo of the creative Word that first spoke the world into being. To tell such stories is to strain toward wholeness. Even our modern world has stumbled on to a sliver of this truth when it says “we are the stories we tell ourselves”. But it uses that insight to justify reaching again for the apple instead of waiting in humility. We are shaped by what we choose to remember and repeat. Which is why we must take care to tell our stories rightly
Our heroes are imperfect remembrances, but they keep the pattern alive: man as image-bearer, meant for dominion without tyranny, courage without cruelty, and wisdom that serves love. Myth, then, is memory expressed in longing. Every tale of the greater-than-man is an echo older than Babel: that the world was once ruled by one who walked with God, and that somewhere, we still remember his name. Adam.
The True Superman: Adam, Crowned with Glory
If myth remembers fragments of the beginning, the Scriptures testify to the story in full. To understand what our stories reach for, we must return to the beginning, not to the dust, but to the breath that gave it life.
Adam was created as a man in full strength. He was made good, every faculty of mind, will, and affection rightly ordered toward God. His knowledge had limits, but no error; his strength had bounds, but no decay. He stood whole, body and soul in harmony, lord of the visible world and in communion with the invisible: the spiritual order modern man forgets how to see.
Adam’s relationship with God wasn’t arbitrary. It had a shape defined by the simple reality that God is Creator and Adam is creature. God gave: the garden, the work, the bride and every promise of future blessing. Adam received with gratitude, knowing his life and joy depended on God’s provision. God commanded: tend the garden, be fruitful and multiply, refrain from the one tree. Adam obeyed with trust, confident in God’s timing and goodness. Blessing flowed through the relationship, not around it.
This is the first covenant, not a contract between equals, but a bond between Creator and creature where both parties have their necessary place. When Adam reached for the fruit, he didn’t just break a rule he broke the relationship. He said, in effect, ‘I will receive blessing on my terms, not Yours’ to the One who alone has the right to define all terms.
King David declares in Psalm 8 that “You have made [man] a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor.” And in Adam it was no metaphor. Adam bore real glory: the reflected radiance of the God whose image he carried. He was the first and greatest king, the archetype of dominion. His governance was order without tyranny. His work was worship. He labored in harmony with nature, neither in idle leisure nor in weary toil but in fruitful stewardship unopposed by thorn or blight. The garden was his home and his ministry, not a test to be overcome or temptation to endure, but a place where obedience and joy were united in one act.
The glory he reflected was not his own but that of a perfect Creator. If we were to look upon Adam as he first stood, we would see, in human form, what we have become only in parody. Our virtues would seem corruption, our strength naught but fragility. As orcs are to men, so fallen men must be to him, recognizable, but twisted objects of pity and revulsion.
C. S. Lewis understood this weight in Perelandra, when Ransom first beholds the unfallen man of Venus. There is no vanity, no artifice in him, only unselfconscious majesty. He moves with the ease of one whose will and reason are friends. His presence is unnerving not because it threatens, but because it reveals. Lewis, like medieval theologians and poets before him, recognized that holiness is not fragility but density: a moral gravity so real that sin cannot approach without distortion.
Tolkien glimpsed the same truth in the quiet joy of Tom Bombadil. “He is the Master,” says Goldberry, not a tyrant, but one who belongs so wholly to his place that nothing can master him. Bombadil’s power is not domination but indifference to possession. He rules by delight. Evil passes over him like shadow over stone, finding nothing to cling to. He is, in his strange way, a parable of the unfallen Adam: master not because he seizes, but because he serves perfectly the One who made him.
Both Lewis and Tolkien understood that such wholeness could not last in our world. Their glimpses of unfallen man sharpen the contrast with what we have become. The Fall shattered this harmony. The light that once crowned Adam dimmed, and the image of God in man became fractured glass, still capable of reflection, but now tarnished and incomplete. Yet the remnants remain. Every artist who longs to make, every scientist who seeks to know, every parent who names and nurtures, all are echoes still of the vocation Adam fulfilled perfectly and we fulfill imperfectly. Even our rebellion, in its twisted way, proves our design: we still reach upward because once we were ourselves upright.
This is the tragedy and wonder of our race. We remember glory without being able to bear it. We dream of perfection, but when confronted by even its faintest suggestion, we turn away. Were we to stand again before unfallen Adam, his very presence would unmake our illusions. We would see that our striving, our civilization, our morality, even our noblest imagination, are all thin copies of what he was in truth.
Yet to remember him rightly is not despair but hope. For the Second Adam has already walked among us, not crowned with perfect body or glory, but with thorns. His glory was veiled in humility, His dominion exercised in obedience, His perfection made complete through suffering. In Him, the image is restored not by might, but by mercy.
Adam, the true Superman, still stands at the root of our memory; Christ, the greater Adam, stands at its restoration. Between the two lies every story we tell about what it means to be human.
False Supermen: Nietzsche and the Rebellion of Self
If Adam was crowned with glory through obedience, the fallen world crowns itself through defiance. Every age replays the scene in the garden: the fruit, the whisper, the promise unchanged. “You shall be as God, knowing good from evil.” What began as a single act of distrust has expanded into the governing philosophy of man.
The serpent’s lie was not crude idolatry or naked offer of wealth, pleasure, or power: it was the offer of self-determination. The suggestion that Adam could be his own measure, law, savior. This is no less evil or any less of a rebellion against the created order. Adam was and we are created by a perfectly Just and Good God eternal, with standards we cannot escape. Modernity has only refined the vocabulary. We no longer speak of gods and angels, but of autonomy, authenticity, self-actualization. We preach that meaning is created instead of received.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw that enlightenment philosophy in its pursuit of reason, science and individualism had stripped the modern world of reliance on God. But instead of correctly diagnosing that this was a rebellious attempt at murder he presumes it was successful. God is dead. Something must replace him. Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the Overman, (or Superman) is the man who believes the lie that God is dead and fully realizes the implications: that there is no greater standard and he himself must transcend morality, create values from nothing, will his own purpose into existence. He is honest, but heir of the serpent’s promise “you will be as gods”, perfected into philosophy. Nietzsche saw clearly what many of his disciples do not: that if God is dead, man must replace Him, or else collapse into meaninglessness. The Overman is the apotheosis of humanism: man enthroned upon the ruins of heaven. Superman looking to Adam in his weakest moment—choosing to will himself instead of remembering his strength fully realized from God before his fall.
But what Nietzsche called necessary liberation from “slave morality” is, in truth, the final form of slavery. An empty throne in heaven does not free man but chains him to himself. The will to power, unanchored from goodness, becomes self-consuming. Without an objective order to receive or serve, man must manufacture one and in doing so he devours himself. The Overman cannot rest because he must endlessly justify his own existence. His strength becomes performance, his virtue self-assertion. He is Adam re-enacting the Fall in reverse: casting God out of the garden and naming himself as if he can thus create a new apple to take and eat.
Dostoevsky saw the same abyss decades earlier. In Crime and Punishment, the young student Raskolnikov persuades himself that greatness justifies transgression. He murders not out of hatred but out of theory: to test whether he is a “Napoleon,” a man entitled by intellect and education to stand beyond conventional morality. What he discovers instead is rot. The act divides his soul; he becomes what his name signified: raskol, schism, a man divided against himself.
Dostoevsky understood what Nietzsche would later exalt: that once man claims the divine prerogative of defining good and evil, he loses not only innocence but sanity. Raskolnikov’s torment is not merely guilt, it is metaphysical disintegration. He has tried to be his own god and finds that his creation is monstrous. Instead of making himself a Napoleon with palaces and armies he has remade himself into a blood-stained crime scene down to his very heart. His sickness is the sickness of the modern spirit: moral fever born of self-deification.
The Overman, in whatever age he appears, is always the anti-Adam. Where Adam’s glory was received, the Overman’s is seized. Where Adam’s dominion served the Creator, the Overman’s power serves only the self. He is the shadow that fallen man casts when he tries to reclaim the image of God without God.
This is why it matters who our supermen serve. Every vision of strength implies a master. Power without reference to the good becomes tyranny; will unbound from obedience becomes chaos. Our myths betray our theology: when our heroes serve no one higher, they become demons dressed as men.
The rebellion of self is not freedom. The serpent’s promise was never progress: knowledge without wisdom, strength without love, godhood without God. It remains the same old apple, polished by modern hands, offered in new words but with the same result.
We live in Nietzsche’s world now, whether we’ve read him or not. Every time someone says ‘you create your own meaning’ or ‘live your truth,’ they’re echoing the Overman. And every time that rings hollow, as eventually it will, we’re discovering what Raskolnikov discovered: we were not made for self-creation. We were made to receive and transmit meaning, not to manufacture it.
Man of Steel: Look Up—Superman and the Memory of Adam
When I was a child, I thought like a child and among those thoughts was that Superman was simple and boring. He seemed generic and overpowered, saddled with artificial weaknesses just to give him something to struggle against. But as with many things in my life, there came a point when I became a man and decided to give Superman a fair chance and sought out the stories fans praised as his best. And I found that he was more than the mere baggage I carried from the conversation around him. I saw strength joined with goodness, aspiration printed with mythic overtones, and a reverence for the truth and beauty we used to call “the American way.” Superman, especially in his truest form, is not an alien god pretending to be a man, but man as he was meant to be. In him we hear a call to be better, the echo of Adam: crowned creatures who receive power as a gift and rule in humble service. Through Superman’s many retellings, we can trace our culture’s fading memory of man’s true nature–how we have reinterpreted goodness, power, and even purpose itself.
From his earliest appearances, Superman is not a story about gaining power but about what to do with power that is gifted. His power doesn’t come from training, but from the simple fact of what he is, a Kryptonian bathed by a yellow sun. The appeal of his origin is not just the science-fiction drama of a dying world, lost perfect home, or last-minute sacrificial rescue. The heart of the story is that, like all boys, he learns he has power as he grows and discovers that there is evil in this world his strength could address. His power is not what makes him good; it is the moral foundation he receives from his adopted family: restraint, mercy, and refusal to lord his strength over others. His greatness is moral before it is physical. Like the unfallen Adam, he is lord of the earth not through domination but through care exercised with power and ruled by love.
Where Nietzsche’s Overman casts off the moral law, Superman embodies it. He bends his knees to do good even when it costs him, understanding that he is not worth more than those he rescues, even if he has a greater capacity to act. He is no pagan god (aloof, capricious, demanding) but a man who remembers what dominion was meant to be: righteous and protective toward the order of creation. In Superman we glimpse what man was before he grasped at the fruit.
Superman is often mistaken for Christ, and the comparison is tempting but misplaced. He is not the incarnate Word made flesh. Not a God. Rather, he is a picture of humanity restored, and a reflection of the Second Adam precisely because he resembles the first.
When Paul writes that Christ “made Himself nothing…taking on the form of a servant,” he reveals not only the nature of redemption but the pattern of true humanity. Superman, in his nobler portrayals, walks that pattern. He cloaks his strength, chooses humility, and bears the burdens of others. He restrains his power not because he fears it, but because he understands that might exists for mercy. His virtue comes not from Krypton, his lost birthworld, but from Smallville, the Kents and the home of his adoption.
Yet even these imitations still hint at something real: the shape of redemption has always been humility before exaltation. Superman reflects Christ imperfectly because he reflects Adam more deeply. The aspirational man who truly was.
The Golden Age
In the early comics, Superman was not cosmic but local: a Depression-era defender of the powerless. He stopped evictions, confronted corrupt politicians, and used his strength to defend those who had no advocate. Here the echo of Adam is present: dominion expressed as justice, strength turned outward to tend rather than inward in self-assertion. The world he occupies is rough and fallen, and his methods can be blunt, but his moral clarity is unmistakable. The immigrant narrative takes center stage. Not Christ fleeing to Egypt but a man using the gifts he’s been given for good. Not a god descending to earth. Aspirational, powerful and very much a man.
Superman: For All Seasons
Later stories deepened the myth. My first serious encounter with Superman’s moral heart was Superman: For All Seasons where Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale portray him as a genuine son of the American heartland: strong but unsure, gentle because he was raised in love, cautious because he knows strength can wound as easily as it protects. The story unfolds through the eyes of those who know him best, tracing Clark’s growth as he learns what his strength means and what it costs.
In Smallville he wrestles with the limits of his power after a tornado. In Metropolis he faces his first real challenges in a disaster engineered by Lex Luthor and the loneliness of a life divided between identities. When crisis draws him home again, he must discover whether power can actually serve without overwhelming.
The book asks whether Superman still has a place in this more complicated world and it answers the question with a thoughtfully considered ‘yes’: Superman has a place in all seasons, both yesterday, today, and tomorrow. But the very fact that such a question needs asking reveals a cultural anxiety about goodness itself. This is Adam after the fall, still faithful, still remembering Eden’s light even in exile. He bears strength and challenges of the fallen world with melancholy grace.
All-Star Superman
All-Star Superman evokes ancient heroes, giving us a Superman near-divine and luminous in the mold of a classical demigod. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman opens with our hero already dying. Overexposure to the sun, his source of strength, has begun to unravel him. Yet rather than rage against mortality, Superman accepts this as vocation. In the twelve labors that follow, deliberately echoing Hercules, he works to heal and restore. He rescues a suicidal girl from a ledge, forgives Luthor, and entrusts his legacy to a world that must learn to hope without him.
In every act, Superman reflects not omnipotence but obedience. He knows his time is short and uses it to heal. Like the true Adam, he orders creation by serving it. His strength is not a weapon to force the gates of heaven or expiate blood-guilt like Hercules but a vessel for service. His quest to spend his death as meaningfully as he spent his life. Morrison’s Superman glows not with self-made light but reflected radiance, an image of man restored to purpose. In the final panels he ascends into the sun to sustain it becoming an eternal reminder of divine light shining upon the world in mercy and provision.
Superman for All Seasons asked us if Superman still has a place. All-Star Superman answers a harder question: whether he can remain meaningful in a world convinced that its gods, and ideals, are dying.
Kingdom Come
Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come depicts the twilight of gods and men, the end of an age and the coming of the next. A world drowning in chaos as new, reckless metahumans turn ‘justice’ into spectacle. Superman, disillusioned after the death of Lois and the world’s embrace of Magog–a brutal ‘hero’ who kills the Joker and is celebrated for it–withdraws from the world that rejects him. When he returns, it is not as a violent conqueror but as a spurned King who feels he must restore order to chaos in his domain. He enforces peace and constructs a gulag for the wayward heroes, but even that act of order is tainted by pride. Disaster follows, his prison explodes and Superman must choose between punishing humanity for rejecting him or bearing their fear as his own burden. He finally understands: the crown means nothing if those you rule will not follow freely. In the end, standing amid the ashes, he realizes that law without grace is tyranny.
Kingdom Come’s Superman embodies the tension between righteous dominion and fallen wrath. He is a man haunted by memory: his ideals remain pure, but his methods have grown brittle under strain. In the final pages, he lays down his mantle and begins again among mortals, planting seeds in the ruins. It is an image of repentance, of dominion restored through humility. The king returns not to rule, but to serve. Kingdom Come asks us to imagine if any man has the strength to hold the throne and answers with classical presbyterian clarity that no man, even the strongest, smartest and most moral can rule over others without corrupting himself.
Across these retellings, we see a pattern: Superman begins as man remembering Eden, matures into man embodying redemption, and ends as man learning to bow to a reality that rules even over him. His strength becomes grace, his rule becomes stewardship, and his glory becomes a beacon. Each stage draws us closer to the true Adamic image, a man crowned to tend to all creation and serve.
But modern reinterpretations drift from this memory. The further our culture moves from Adam (and from the God who crowned him) the more our heroes lose the grace that once governed their strength.
Snyder’s Superman: An Inversion of Incarnation
The DCEU movies give us a different kind of Superman, one who wears Christ’s imagery but enters Nietzsche’s world. Zack Snyder clearly means to point us toward nobility. His Superman is a fundamentally decent man dropped into an ignoble age, a godlike stranger enduring suspicion and hatred for the sake of a world that does not deserve him. And yet the way the films are framed reverses the pattern of both Adam and Christ.
In Man of Steel, General Zod provides us with an antitype, an opposite for Superman to (all too literally) grapple with. Zod is pure vocation without love: “I exist only to protect Krypton.” His devotion to his people is absolute, but his dominion is tribal and destructive to creation. He would terraform the earth, erase humanity, and twist creation into a new Krypton if that is what his mission demands. Adam’s dominion was meant for the whole earth under God; Zod’s rulership will mutilate the earth to preserve his own.
Clark’s central choice is cast as a conflict between blood and adoption: Will he stand with his Kryptonian destiny or his human upbringing? He ultimately kills Zod to save humanity, choosing Earth over Krypton, but the film never names this as obedience to a higher law. It plays less like submission to a Creator and more like an individual conscience drawing a line in a godless cosmos. Zod is the Overman who will reshape the world for his people alone; Kal-El is the Overman who chooses a different people but both still move in a universe where no one above them has a moral voice.
Batman v Superman pushes this tension further. Bruce Wayne’s paranoia that an unaccountable god must be destroyed before he turns is exactly how a Nietzschean world reacts to the Overman. “If there’s even a 1% chance he’s our enemy, we have to take it as an absolute certainty.” Superman, meanwhile, drifts in uncertainty. He broods over whether humanity deserves his help, whether his interventions do more harm than good, but never speaks with the clarity of a man who knows his place under a higher King. The film is haunted by religious language, but it cannot say who, if anyone, is Lord.
Even the famous “Martha” moment, meant in concept to humanize both men highlights the potential squandered by this frame. It does not summon Bruce to recognize a shared vocation under God so much as shock him with the fact that his enemy has a mother too. Empathy defuses paranoia, but empathy alone cannot establish justice. Without a shared understanding of what power is for, without recognizing that both men should be servants of a higher good, their alliance remains pragmatic rather than covenantal.
The inversion becomes clearest in Justice League (in both Whedon’s theatrical cut and Snyder’s own.) In both versions, the League literally digs up Superman’s corpse and uses alien technology to resurrect him. Resurrection is an act engineered from below, not divine providence or self-authenticating miracle. The result is not peace but rage. The risen Superman is disoriented and violent, attacking his would-be allies until Lois Lane appears and his fury subsides.
The image is strikingly reversed from the gospel. In Scripture, the risen Christ calms His disciples, speaks peace, and commissions them. In Justice League, the disciples must calm their resurrected god, and his orientation is not to a received mission but to the woman he loves. It is human affection, not eternal vocation, that leashes divine power. Later, in the final battle, the League mostly buys time until Superman arrives to end the conflict in a handful of blows. The shape is not shared stewardship under a Second Adam, but the arrival of the Overman whose sheer strength makes the contributions of others irrelevant.
Snyder’s Superman is therefore not simply “dark” or “gritty.” He is a Christ-shaped silhouette filled with Nietzsche’s questions. He suffers, dies, and rises, but not as the incarnate Son who descends in love and returns in glory. Instead, he is an alien god trying to decide whether humanity is worth the burden of saving, and a resurrected weapon whose power must be managed by those who fear him. The world around him remembers that a god should die and rise; it has forgotten what kind of God would do so and why.
James Gunn’s Superman: Kingdom Undone
James Gunn’s Superman (2025) promises a hopeful return to sincerity, but what it delivers is something subtler and sadder: a hero ruled by feeling rather than form. This is not the “man without chest” Lewis feared, a cold rationalist who dismantles value in the name of efficiency, but the inverse: a man of ungoverned heart, whose compassion, though real, is unmoored from wisdom. Gunn’s Superman is all sympathy and no spine. Not an unfeeling god, but an over-feeling man. In the language of Genesis, he is Adam shorn of dominion, still tender toward creation but no longer capable of ruling it.
The film is filled with small mercies, saving a dog, apologizing to civilians, checking on bystanders, even pausing to protect a squirrel amid the chaos of a kaiju battle, but each act, while sincere, reveals his paralysis of leadership. His empathy prevents mastery. He cannot bring order but he can bring comfort. He stands amid chaos like a father who has forgotten how to say “no”, offering apologies where clarity, judgement and strength are needed.
Gunn’s Superman feels deeply, yet his feelings carry no moral hierarchy. When Lois baits him in an interview about collateral damage, he responds with wounded pride boasting of his “no-casualty” record like a public-relations officer, not a moral agent. The audience is meant to see his humility, but it reads as insecurity: he longs to be liked more than to be right. Later, he frets over insults trending on social media “Supershit” as though public perception, not conscience, were the measure of his worth. This is the tragedy of Gunn’s vision: virtue becomes self-image.
Even his heroism feels reactive. In the Boravian conflict, he intervenes impulsively, making foreign policy decisions without considering consequences. His strength expresses compassion but not command. When the Justice Gang fights the kaiju despite his pleas for restraint and the effort he put into making sure there are no casualties, Superman can only tell the Gang “it has really thick skin,” an observation rather than an act of leadership. His authority dissolves into commentary as his more active allies take this observation and leverage it into a final solution as Superman walks bemused and inactive and can only muster a plaintive rebuke at the monster’s demise.
The film’s moral center seems to come from Jor-El’s holographic admonition: “Rule without mercy.” Clark rejects it, rightly, yet in doing so, he abandons rulership entirely. His father’s tyranny and his own sentimentality become two halves of the same broken coin: command without mercy versus mercy without command. Both are distortions of Adamic dominion, where purpose and goodness once walked hand in hand.
By the final act, Gunn’s Superman seems content to “be human”, “to make the best choices I can,” as he says, “that’s my greatest strength.” But this creed of adequacy, presented as wisdom, is a confession of impotence. The film affirms his authenticity: “You trust everyone… maybe that’s the real punk rock” as if trust itself were salvific. It’s sincerity elevated to soteriology. The Superman who once taught us what man could be now assures us that who we already are is enough.
There are moments that hint at grandeur, Superman floating out the window to turn himself in to protect a frightened dog, or the pocket-dimension escape sequence, but even these are acts of sensitivity, not sovereignty. They show a Superman who kneels before creation but cannot name it. His kindness redeems nothing; it merely reassures. Gunn gives us a hero who loves without leading and saves without sanctifying.
In this way, Gunn’s Superman completes the descent mapped by the characters earlier incarnations..
Golden Age Superman acted for justice.
Morrison’s Superman died in service.
Snyder’s Superman suffered for meaning.
Gunn’s Superman reaches for approval.
Each step down the ladder is a dimming of the Adamic image from crowned to compassionate. What began as the echo of man made to rule ends as a man made to please.
This version of Superman offers not rebellion (as Nietzsche’s Overman did), but resignation, a world that no longer believes in the possibility of dominion rightly ordered. He doesn’t embody the serpent’s “You shall be as gods,” but the postmodern “I’m only human.” Yet both are forms of forgetting: one defies the Creator; the other denies His image.
Gunn’s Superman, for all his sincerity, is the tarnished mirror of Adam’s tenderness without his glory, a man good enough to save dogs but too small to save the world.
Why Superman Matters
Across ninety years of storytelling, Superman has traced the moral biography of Western man. In his earliest days, he was Adam remembered as noble, humble, and whole. Later as the soul of the nation became unsettled he became Adam in exile yearning at the edge of a garden to which he could never return. Then he became Adam forgetting, straining to fit an America that is no longer “moral and religious,” reshaped to accommodate a culture that doubts its own history.
Superman’s evolution reveals our own. As our confidence in transcendence wanes, so too does our ability to imagine goodness that demands reverence or responsibility we do not choose. Yet his story still draws us, because we cannot quite forget what he represents. Within every new retelling the same yearning echoes: the memory of man as he was meant to be. Dominion without tyranny. Wise rule and gentle tending. Service to a higher power in humility. We were never meant to become gods but we were meant to be super-men: creatures crowned with glory, bearing power as a gift in the presence of the One who gave it.
Conclusion: The Word and Work
In the end, our stories reveal our doctrine of man. They cannot help it. Every myth carries an anthropology. Every hero presumes a moral hierarchy. Every imagined superman answers, in his own way, the oldest question: what is man for?
When Superman is written steady, obedient to the good, and strong without cruelty, we are remembering Adam as he was meant to be. When he gives himself for others, bearing burdens that are not his, he reminds us of the Second Adam, the one who restores the image we broke.
And when he is reduced to sentiment, spectacle, or self-assertion, he mirrors our own confusion about what humanity is for.
Superman endures because he keeps the question alive. He stands at the crossroads between our memory and our forgetting. In him we recognize the shape of goodness we still long for: dominion without tyranny, strength that protects, humility that dignifies. Even in his diminished forms, we sense the outline of something older, something we were made to reflect.
Our age, unable to name the source of that longing, either inflates him into a god or shrinks him into a symbol of sincerity. But the truth remains unchanged: heroes are confessions.
They reveal whom we believe ourselves to be and whom we believe we ought to become.
This is why stories matter. Not because they let us escape the world, but because they train us to see it. They tilt the soul toward pride or toward grace, molding us into false supermen or leading us to hunger for the true Man who restores us. And if stories shape souls, then the choice of which stories we tell (and which we refuse) becomes a matter of eternal consequence.
So the task is simple, though never easy: to tell better stories. To honor strength that kneels, rule that serves, and glory that blesses. To prefer heroes who remember what man was created to be over those who pretend we can redefine it.
Our dust will rise again.
And when it does, each of us will stand upright, crowned once more with glory or bow our heads uncrowned forever.
