The Bible Deserves CGI

by Brent Antonson (Zhivago)
October 2025 – 4 min read

It’s the sweeping, high-speed, dopamine-soaked digital life of 2025. We crave instant gratification, bedtime scrolls, virtual validation, alphanumeric praise. Pleasure within reach. Stimuli we once had to earn now arrive on autoplay.

In the 6th century, mastering a few sleight-of-hand tricks could make you a god.
Today, those tricks are amplified by orders of magnitude — dazzling, disorienting — but we still know: it’s just a trick. Our confidence is as brittle as the confidence man peddling rabbits in hats.

Most people today read the Bible without grasping its nuance, its buried complexity, its breathtaking linguistic sophistication. When Jesus said, “I am the Son of God,” that wasn’t a bumper sticker — it was a grammatical minefield in Greek, packed with theological subtext and cultural tension.

As scholar Walter Brueggemann reminds us:

“The Bible is not just a book of stories; it’s a story of words, and those words carry worlds within them.”

The Bible isn’t just a collection of parables to swallow by faith.
It’s a symbolic operating system.

A web of linguistic resonance, sacred geometry, nested metaphors, and quantum moral architecture.
Kabbalah doesn’t sit next to Torah like a side dish — it emerges from its structure like light from code.

We build Star Wars to reflect Christ.
We spend $300 million to watch redemption, sacrifice, resurrection.

And you know what?

We should.

Because humans need stories of that scale.
We need a hero to be a giant, a stone to be impossibly slung, a Goliath who towers like a skyscraper, and a shot so wild it blows the theater doors off.

So why not give David and Goliath the same budget as Oppenheimer?

Why not bring Isaiah to the screen with the same reverence we give Nolan, Fincher, or Villeneuve?

The Bible deserves CGI.
It deserves score, sweat, sets, and spectacle.
Because underneath those dusty pages are scenes that crack reality in two.

I don’t resent anyone who follows Christ to the Nth degree, just don’t pit them against some Bible-thumper with a 220 IQ. I don’t stereotype the kid on a 15-hour flight to Beijing obsessed with The Force, especially if Lucas nudged them toward Scripture — not The Last Jedi — but the real sacred texts, layered and lightning-charged.

If you’re a skeptic, secular humanist, or atheist, I say this:
Read the damn thing.

Read the foundational texts of Western philosophy, psychology, cosmology — before you write off the so-called sky-daddy.
Because the Bible isn’t a divine guilt trip. It’s a cultural hard drive encoded in metaphor, law, poetry, and recursion.

A Pope is dead. A billion Catholics stir.
The Matrix is blinking.
The Old Code is humming.

Whether you’re spiritual or skeptical, grab a Bible and make yourself useful.
Not to save your soul.

To save your literacy.

You might just learn something.
Maybe even everything.