Breaking Bad as Theological Text: A Process-Theological Reflection on Theodicy and Anthropodicy

The recently-wrapped AMC megabit Breaking Bad (set and filmed in Albuquerque) has challenged viewers to reevaluate their assumptions about good and evil, freedom and determinism, and the possibility of redemption. Walter White, the protagonist and postmodern anti-hero, is a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher and family man who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. To provide for his family after his death, he enters the crystal meth underworld, eventually securing for himself a vast underground empire and a new persona as "Heisenberg." Over the course of five seasons White makes a series of choices that implicate him in deception, betrayal, and murder, jeopardizing his own life and the lives of his family and friends. Viewers root for White at first but eventually are confronted with the realization that they are cheering for an evil man. The series raises a host of fascinating theological and philosophical questions about the nature of evil, the extent of human freedom, and the possibility of redemption. For centuries the Christian theological tradition has wrestled with these very questions and has most often framed them in terms of the problem of theodicy, or how God is to be justified in light of the reality of evil. At the same time, these questions also lead us to question the basic goodness of humanity, which is the problem of anthropodicy. The contemporary theological movement of process thought offers promising resources for responding to these challenges, particularly with its emphasis on becoming over being and its insistence that freedom and response-ability are basic qualities of human and divine life. Furthermore, the process conception of divine "lures" that require a genuinely free human response can shed light on the transformation of Walter White into Heisenberg and the (im)possibility of his redemption.