It is common knowledge that Moby Dick is the great American novel, with only Huckleberry Finn running as a possible contestant to that title. It is also common knowledge that, quite unlike Huckleberry Finn, nobody ever really reads Moby Dick. The general consensus is that it is a brilliant exposition of the brutal Calvinistic doctrine of double predestination, interspersed with interesting travelogue; and that is quite enough for anyone to know.

That’s a shame, because it really is a phenomenal book. I read it years ago while doing CPE at the Seafarer’s House in New York, so maybe the setting made the strange prose more palatable (not that I ever encountered whales or whalers in the Port of Newark). And it is not so far off from familiar Lutheran themes as our usual competitive diatribes against the Reformed world might lead you to believe. I see less as a story of predestination and more as one of the “hidden God,” God known apart from His incarnation in Jesus Christ.

Sure enough, in Melville’s novel, the Great White Whale is God or at least functions so strongly as the earthly manifestation thereof as to be indistinguishable from its source. This intuition is what drives mad Ahab’s quest to destroy the whale who nearly destroyed him years before and left him with a maimed leg. Starbuck, Ahab’s first mate, is appalled to learn the true intention of the voyage and expresses his outrage early on: “Vengeance on a dumb brute! …that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”

But Ahab replies, “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Ishmael’s narrative testifies to the whale as God’s stand-in. There are innumerable chapters devoted to description of the divine monster: its face, its tail, its blubber, its social habits, and methods for harpooning it and its kin. This may sheerly be a display of prodigious knowledge, and often it reads like a pointless digression in the book. But I suspect it’s really worship: veneration of the force beyond all forces, doxology in the praise of that which is so well studied and yet past all comprehension.

This is a mighty and omnipotent God with very little room for human opinion, desire, or even good. Ishmael’s analogy of the loom further expresses the depressing outlook for the lowly on the earth: “The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.” A man is caught between necessity and chance. There is a brief shining flame of self-will, however abrogated its freedom, but its end result is chillingly portrayed in the fate of Ahab, finally and fatally at the disposal of his nemesis Moby Dick.

Or take the case of Pip, the slave who fell overboard and was left in the great ocean—eternity and infinity—for several hours before his rescue. “He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."

Certainly all orthodox expressions of Christian doctrine, Lutheran included, teach an omnipotent God. But the cold omnipotence of Moby Dick is sinister, not comforting. Consider this paean to the tail of the great fish:

"The more I consider this mighty tale, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face."

Indeed, this God has no face! It is an interesting irony that Moby Dick is some form of God incarnate, and yet the doctrine of the incarnation cannot flesh out the terrifying omnipotence. This is, in fact, God divorced from His Son. When there is no Christ on the cross, when there is no face on God, the penalty for sin falls squarely upon the sinner and crushes him not to new life but to no life.

The exacting judgments of God, untempered by the mercy of a shared human life and a suffering death, thus range from the arbitrary to the cruel. Ahab’s crossless God is in fact less compassionate than he, though Ahab is not a particularly virtuous man. He remarks of the maddened but affectionate Pip, to whom he has drawn close, “Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.” Ahab only knows the absolute dichotomy of sinner and saint; he cannot conceive of a dialectic between the two. His God condemns man as totally depraved, while reserving for himself the title of perfect holiness; but He is so removed from the earth as to be imperceptible even to the searching soul and so engenders doubt, not faith.

In the end, this God bears the judgment himself. If He is so powerful, utterly omnipotent; if all things occur only by the providence in which mere humans believe piously amidst shudders of horror; if nothing escapes His notice or command, then finally God Himself is responsible for all sin and evil. So Ahab probes the question of theodicy, which is really the question of Ahab himself and his own death-driven nature:

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?"

And in the end, as he sets after the Great White Whale at last in sight, Ahab declares his bondage to fate, providence, or the will of the omnipotent unmoved God: “Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion yars before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.” So might Judas have spoken. Someone had to betray Christ, and that someone was none other than he; what is the use of saying that it were better he was never born? It was decreed and so it took place.

What is so revealing about the climax of the book is how it fails to mirror the story of God and man as given to us by Scripture. In both Melville’s novel and the gospel narratives, the incarnate God is pursued by men filled with hatred for all He represents. Both assert that this God is all-powerful and capable of securing His own rescue. But in the former, this terrible, faceless, powerful God devours the man who pursues Him; while in the latter, He submits. Ahab is the great representative of the human race in his desire to murder the “outrageous strength” that is God, but he fails. And that is the end of the story. A scribe survives to tell the story with no prospect of hope. How differently the gospel ends!

Art tells the truth, often in spite of itself. This tale of harsh doctrine untethered from the person of Whom it is predicated is forced to prove its own insufficiency. Only when there is a cross does omnipotence become a matter of hope and not of hatred. Only when the judge is judged in our place does justice prevail. Only when God dies is there a resurrection.