The Ouroboros and the Cross

Have you ever seen one of those bumper stickers where Darwin’s fish is eating the Christian fish? That little fish symbol with feet grafted on and “DARWIN” stamped down the middle, its mouth wide open, swallowing up the plain Christian ichthus.

And then maybe in the next parking lot over, you see the same image flipped. The Christian fish has turned around, and now it’s the one doing the devouring. Same two fish, same mouths — just reversed. Somebody wins. Somebody loses. Pick a team.

I want to talk about a third image. An ancient one. It’s called the ouroboros — a snake bent into a perfect circle, eating its own tail. It’s one of the oldest symbols humanity has for eternity, for wholeness, for the kind of reality that doesn’t have a starting pistol and doesn’t have a finish line.

Now think for a second about the difference between those bumper stickers and the ouroboros. The bumper stickers — no matter which fish is winning — are linear. They belong to the world of cause and effect. One thing comes first, another thing comes after. Somebody sits at the top of the food chain, and somebody is lunch.

A line has a beginning. A line has an end. A line marches forward. You can measure it. You can put arrows on it. You can diagram it on a whiteboard and say, this caused that, and that caused this, and this is why we are where we are today. Linear thinking is the native language of the temporal, finite mind. It’s the grammar of science, the grammar of the courtroom, the grammar of every argument you’ve ever had at Thanksgiving dinner.

But a circle is a completely different shape. A circle doesn’t have a beginning. A circle doesn’t have an end. You cannot point to one spot on the circumference and say, “Here is where everything started, and way over there is where it all finishes.” A circle doesn’t conform to chronology. A circle doesn’t conform to cause and effect. A circle just is. A circle represents eternity.

If you go back before Genesis 1:1 — back to the God who speaks Genesis 1:1 into being — you are not dealing with a line.

You are dealing with a God who is more like a circle than like a line. A God who is, in Himself, eternal. A God outside of time. A God for whom “before” and “after” are categories He invented, not categories He is subject to.

And at the center of that God’s reality, at the center of the garden He plants in the beginning, is something very strange. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Good and evil. Together. On one tree. Not two trees on opposite sides of the garden, glaring at each other like the Darwin fish and the Christian fish. One tree. One fruit. One name that holds both words.

Notice how the story doesn’t work the way we’d expect. Good and evil are not ushered onto the stage of God’s narrative one at a time. They are not presented as a sequence. Evil does not walk on as the result of good going wrong. Good does not walk on as the response to evil running loose. They are presented to us as one complete whole — the way a circle is one complete whole.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is more like an ouroboros than it is like either of those bumper stickers.

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And now maybe you begin to see why I have such a hard time with a certain kind of question. Whenever somebody asks me, “Frank, do you believe in evolution or not?” — whenever somebody frames their question like a bumper sticker — my answer is always the same.

I answer the question with a question: What should one do with statements that require an either/or answer?

I’ll tell you what I think you should do. Any time somebody hands you an either/or question, your job is to find a way to turn it into a both/and.

Evolution does not gobble up Christianity. Christianity does not gobble up evolution. That framing is the problem. That framing is the bumper sticker. Evolution and creation, reason and revelation, science and faith — these are not two snakes trying to eat each other. When you zoom out far enough, they are one snake, curved into a circle, each end feeding the other.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as truth. I’m not saying every answer is a mushy middle. I’m saying the shape of reality is bigger than the shape of our arguments. The cross of Christ rises above one or the other. The cross is the ultimate image of both/and.

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Good Friday. The day we call good. The day Jesus of Nazareth — fully God, fully man — is arrested, tried, beaten, stripped, nailed to a Roman cross, and murdered in public.

In one way, you could argue that Good Friday is the day that evil wins. Satan has his way. The powers of darkness get everything they could possibly ask for. Humanity turns on humanity’s God and kills Him. If there were ever a scoreboard, evil would be running up the score on Good Friday.

And at the exact same time — not a minute later, not a chapter later, not after some cosmic plot twist — Good Friday is truly good. On the very day that evil is most manifest in human history, evil is destroyed. On the day the serpent bruises the heel of the Son, the Son crushes the head of the serpent. On the day the cross looks like the final victory of death, death itself is swallowed up in victory.

Now try diagramming that on a whiteboard. Try putting arrows on it. Try asking somebody, “Well, which is it? Did evil win, or did good win?” and watch that straight line curl around on itself.

There is no way to make sense out of Good Friday chronologically. There is no way to make sense out of Good Friday logically. If you try to flatten it into a timeline — evil here, good there, winner on the left, loser on the right — you will lose the whole thing. You will walk away with a pile of splinters instead of a cross.

But thankfully — and this is the word I want to leave you with — there is a way to make sense out of it Christologically.

Christologically. Through the person of Christ. Through the one who holds in His own body what no straight line and no bumper sticker could ever hold at once. Through the one who is crucified and risen, judged and judge, lamb and shepherd, predator and prey, suffering servant and king of kings, the first and the last — which is just another way of saying the circle.

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When the risen Christ says in the book of Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end,” He is not simply giving you two points on a timeline. He is telling you that in Him, the line bends into a circle. In Him, the bumper sticker becomes an ouroboros. In Him, the question “who wins, Darwin or God?” collapses — because the God who was, and is, and is to come is not competing with a process He Himself authored.

This is what a cruciform hermeneutic does. It doesn’t let you keep your tidy little either/or categories. It doesn’t let you file reality into two bins with “good guys” on one shelf and “bad guys” on the other. It grabs every straight line in your theology, every straight line in your science, every straight line in your politics, every straight line in your own biography — and it bends it around the cross until it becomes something whole.

Good Friday does that to good and evil. Easter does that to death and life. The Incarnation does that to heaven and earth. And the God of the ouroboros, the God of the circle, the God of eternity, does that to the whole story from the first page to the last.

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So the next time somebody grabs you by the collar and demands you pick a side — evolution or creation, science or faith, reason or Scripture, nature or grace, sacred or secular — remember the bumper stickers. Remember the ouroboros. Remember the tree in the middle of the garden that held good and evil on the same branches. And remember Good Friday, where the worst thing that ever happened and the best thing that ever happened happened on the same afternoon, on the same hill, to the same man, on the same cross.

Either/or is the grammar of time.

Both/and is the grammar of the eternal cross.

About the Author

Frank Balgeman, the Physics Pastor from the Santa Cruz Mountains, where faith and science aren’t enemies — they’re two ends of the same snake. His channel, Frankly You Need A Prophet, exists to read everything through the lens of the cross: the Bible, science, history, your daily scroll, and your entire life.