I'm a Metallica fan.

I considered my fanhood official when (after deliberation) I purchased a Master of Puppets t-shirt this year.

Having grown up in the wastelands of CCM, I've been playing cultural catch-up since sometime toward the end of high school (mid-nineties). I now own and listen to every Metallica studio album, as well as Garage Inc. and S&M. My experience over time has followed this pattern:

1. I hear a Metallica song I don't know, and I enjoy the sound.


2. As I listen to the song repeatedly, at some point I catch a bit of the lyric that interests me.


3. I look up the lyric and realize that James Hetfield is actually singing seriously and with depth about a weighty topic that interests me.

The first occurrence of this was when I borrowed Ride the Lightning from a friend at work in 2001. I got to the song Creeping Death and realized that it's about the 10th plague of the Exodous -- hardly the sort of thing I was expecting from one of the four defininitive 80s thrash-metal bands.

Fast forward three years, and I hear S&M being played at a friend's house. I decide I like the sound (of course - I like film scores and Michael Kamen arranged and conducted!) and purchased a copy for myself. I also purchased their self-titled 1991 album around this time. Sometime during the next year of listening, the lyrics of Through the Never sank into me and I realized how thoroughly this band was considering the same philosophical questions that preoccupy me. (I also recall contrasting that song with Joe Diffie's "Third Rock From the Sun", which I believe is inclined toward a darkly humorous escapism.)

In addition, Holier Than Thou echoes Christ's teaching in Matthew 7, and The God That Failed is about disappointment when God fails to meet our expectations. This was likely written in relation to the death of Hetfield's mother, though I believe the title phrase is a double entendre referring also to Christ's unexpected self-sacrifice.

Conversations with friends left me with low hopes for Load, but I've been very pleased over the past three months to come to appreciate "Bleeding Me", "Thorn Within", and "The Outlaw Torn". Additionally, I could listen all day to Hetfield singing

My body my temple / this temple it tilts

in The House that Jack Built. (Now I want a Load t-shirt, too.)

I'm not settled on this, but I read Bleeding Me as a reflection on the consequences of being part of fallen humanity.

The Outlaw Torn is a beautiful and plaintive prayer -- one I pray regularly, but more quietly, more privately, and with fewer guitars.

Thorn Within demonstrates that Metallica has a better understanding of sin than most culture-shunning American Evangelicals.

As so often happens when I have an idea, it turns out that somebody else has already had that idea and done something significant with it. (For example, Augustine pre-empted me on a theology of God and time.) In this case, it just now occurred to me to search for "Metallica theology" to see what other people have said, and lo and behold! Metallica and Philosophy is available for purchase.

So I decided to write this up now, before I read that book. In any case, I think there's plenty of room for a whole adult Sunday School curriculum built around serious consideration of Metallica's music...but I'm not going to search for "Metallica Sunday School" yet. I need to give my wounded sense of originality a break for now.