The Chosen’s depiction of angels isn’t offensive. It’s meant to spark your imagination

The teaser trailer for The Chosen season six has just dropped and, predictably, the range of comments from Christians online has been as far-flung as the East is from the West.

Created by Dallas Jenkins, The Chosen has become a global phenomenon, tracing the story of the original disciples meeting and following Jesus in his ministry. While not adhering strictly to every letter in the Gospel accounts, the show nevertheless remains faithful to the themes found in the New Testament, while also giving a real sense of the background drama in the months and years leading up to the first Easter.

If there was certainty over the nature of the supernatural, there could be no art and no mystery

From a personal perspective, it has been a fantastic way of helping my dyslexic daughter to engage with the story of Jesus.

Season six will follow the story through Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin to His crucifixion and, from the look of the trailer, it’s going to be a tough, tear-jerking watch from the start.

Angelic altercations

There is also, however, a second teaser trailer, and one which seems to have brought the threat of divine judgement down on Jenkins’ head from certain quarters. The clip shows a group of fast-moving silvery figures with weapons drawn, the suggestion being that these are heavenly beings ready to strike out at Jesus’ adversaries as they close in to arrest Him.

It isn’t the appearance of angels, per se, that has caused the issue. Jesus himself says in Matthew 26: “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and He will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”

No, what has caused itching, critical fingers to take to their keyboards is the physical representation of these beings. The angels appear in the form of a Native American warrior, an African tribal leader and what might be an Asian samurai - which has caused some commentators to ask whether this is a joke.

While the shimmering colours of the angels do initially make them look like something from the Twilight saga or the Forbidden Forest outside Hogwarts in Harry Potter, there are a couple of things I’d like to offer in defence of this creative choice.

Firstly, the Bible describes angels in various ways - from the human-looking angels who visited Sodom (Genesis 19), through the winged seraphim who attend the throne of God (Isaiah 6), all the way to ominous animal-faced angels described in Ezekiel 1. This last group have feet that gleam like polished bronze, which isn’t too far away from what we see in this trailer.

Holy imagination

Secondly, this creative choice is intended to stimulate imagination. After all, from our current standpoint as human beings, heaven itself is a secondary realm - you need, to some extent, to imagine it. Any work of artistic endeavour featuring the heavenly realm engages in this sort of creativity. If there was certainty over the nature of the supernatural, there could be no art and no mystery.

“Some people make ‘certainty’ an idol,” Jenkins himself wrote in a Facebook post last week. “Having certainty in your love and commitments to others, and in God’s authority and Truth, is great…But for some folks, the need for certainty expands to everything. And they nearly always value certainty over curiosity.”

The overall reaction to the new series of The Chosen has been one of excitement, and while you can never keep everybody happy all of the time, the very word ‘teaser’ should alert us to the fact that trailers are there to generate anticipation - not to answer every question or allay every fear.

Jenkins has certainly done that with this latest offering and, given the hugely positive impact that the series has had already, the devil may well be in the detail.

Certainly, as for me and my house, angels couldn’t stop us from watching it.