Do Our Decisions Matter? Agency and Prophecy in Deltarune – Christ and Pop Culture
On June 24 of this year, the fifth chapter of a vivid modern-day representation of faith was released. And it’s unlike anything one could’ve expected.
What sort of freedom does a person possess if they begin inside a story they did not choose?
On its surface, Deltarune looks like a game where your choices matter. It even claims heavy inspiration from EarthBound, praised as one of the best role-playing games ever released. Before the story begins, the player is invited to create a character from scratch, choosing its appearance and answering a series of strangely personal questions about its personality. The game insists these choices matter. Then, just as the player expects to begin the adventure, their “wonderful creation” is discarded, followed by the statement:
“No one can choose who they are in this world.”
The player awakens inside Kris, a withdrawn teenager who already has a family. Kris has a life that existed before the player ever arrived.
With those few words, Deltarune establishes the key question that quietly governs the rest of its story. What sort of freedom does a person possess if they begin inside a story they did not choose?
That question should sound strikingly familiar to Christians. None of us chose the countless circumstances that have shaped us. David praises God because he was “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14), while Paul reminds the Athenians that God “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). We enter a world already in motion. Scripture never treats these givens as evidence that human choice is an illusion. Instead, it consistently presents men and women as morally responsible participants within a history God already knows.
That tension between providence and agency lies at the heart of Deltarune.
Soon after the story begins, Kris and a classmate, Susie, a violent and antisocial bully, accidentally fall into a hidden realm known as the Dark World, a parallel kingdom populated by living chess pieces and other objects from the ordinary world above. There they meet Ralsei, a soft-spoken prince who explains why they have been brought there. According to an ancient prophecy preserved in his kingdom, a “human, monster, and prince from the Dark” are destined to work together to close magical ruptures called Dark Fountains before they engulf reality in an apocalypse known as the Roaring.
It is precisely this refusal to collapse sovereignty into determinism that makes Deltarune worth placing into conversation with Scripture.
For all its posturing around this prophesied event, the game refuses to outright eliminate choice.
Throughout the first four chapters, the player repeatedly determines how Kris responds to the surrounding people and places. Enemies can often be defeated through violence, but they can also be spared through acts of kindness. Though characters comment on how Kris is “different,” our friends remember the player’s decisions. Relationships deepen or fracture depending on how Kris treats others, with a unique alternative route if the player chooses to manipulate one of Kris’s pals. Deltarune continually distinguishes between an appointed end and the genuinely meaningful decisions made along the way.
Scripture likewise distinguishes between those realities but refuses to separate them or set them up in opposition to each other. Peter tells the crowds at Pentecost that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” yet in the very next breath declares, “you crucified and killed [him]” (Acts 2:23). Judas remains responsible for his betrayal as Christ had foretold it. Pharaoh hardens his own heart, even though God accomplishes His purposes through Egypt’s rebellion. Divine sovereignty and human responsibility occupy the same pages, and sometimes the same sentence!
It is precisely this refusal to collapse sovereignty into determinism that makes Deltarune worth placing into conversation with Scripture. As the story progresses, another complication emerges. The player gradually realizes they are not identical to Kris.
Beginning in the second chapter, Kris occasionally removes the glowing red SOUL through which the player controls the character, locking it away before acting independently. The sequence rightfully unsettles the player because it overturns one of gaming’s oldest assumptions, that the person holding the controller is in control. In Deltarune, the protagonist is more than simply an avatar through whom the player experiences the story. Kris possesses desires the player cannot fully command, paired with motives and actions that are sometimes performed against the player’s wishes. Rather than presenting one will, the game introduces two: the player’s and Kris’s.
While Kris’s situation is obviously unlike the human condition described in Scripture, the Bible likewise resists reducing the human will to something simple or monolithic. Paul confesses, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:15). Elsewhere he describes the flesh and the Spirit as opposing one another so that believers “do not do the things [they] want” (Gal 5:17). Scripture and Deltarune recognize that willing itself can become contested ground. Human agency is more mysterious than modern individualism often assumes.
The tension reaches one of its clearest expressions in Chapter Four, set within a Dark World formed from the town’s church. There the heroes encounter Gerson, a wise old sage who has spent years studying the nature of their world’s stories and prophecies. While Ralsei remains deeply concerned that the heroes must not stray from the course laid out before them, Gerson offers a striking counterpoint. He speaks of “the White Pen, known as Hope,” a force capable of rewriting the story itself.
Within the providence of the ultimate Author who writes our stories, our choices remain eternally significant.
A prophecy written in ink implies inevitability, but Gerson’s image of the White Pen rejects the notion that prophecy is little more than an unalterable script. The story has an author, sure. Its destination may be certain. Yet hope still possesses the astonishing ability to write within its pages. Rather than pitting agency against prophecy, Deltarune imagines the two working together; a story whose direction is wholly real coupled with participants still making choices that genuinely matter.
Scripture repeatedly portrays God’s purposes as certain without rendering human obedience inconsequential. Jonah’s warning to Nineveh that in forty days it will be overthrown (Jon 3:4) provokes repentance and God relents from the announced judgment. The prophecy summoned a response, and God changed the story’s ending. Likewise, the prophets consistently call Israel to repent as God’s sovereign purposes unfold through real human decisions. Hope lives within prophecy.
Whether or not Deltarune ultimately affirms that vision remains to be seen—the game is still unfinished. But the first four chapters consistently return to this tension. Characters inherit identities they never chose. They find themselves caught inside prophecies older than themselves. Powerfully, they continue making decisions that matter, shaping the lives around them.
Like Kris, we awaken inside stories we did not write. The Christian claim has never been that freedom consists in authoring our own existence. Within the providence of the ultimate Author who writes our stories, our choices remain eternally significant.
Do we have the strength and faithfulness to live the stories we have been given?