An Unlikely Hero - Fantasy
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
Yes, there is much rejoicing. We missed Bryan while he was gone on his honeymoon.
We’ve been talking about Gideon and his role in history and his legacy, and we came to the story of Jotham and the story that he told of the trees and the bramble, so we’re going to take this opportunity to discuss why we think Christians should read fantasy because this is kind of a fantasy story. Trees – news flash – don’t talk. They don’t have politics. But this story is in the Bible.
So how do we square this? How do we say, “Whatsoever things are true and right and honorable…” Why should we read things that describe things that aren’t the way the world is? Is that a sufficiently unclear question?
The passage you’re referring to – and I can never remember all the adjectives or nouns as they may be – in Philippians it says –
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
I suppose that someone pointed at that and said, “But this isn’t true; therefore…” And before we go with fantasy, I think we need to back up and talk a little bit about storytelling in general. Emily, what were you saying about this blog you discovered?
I was checking out a blog that actually drew the line at fiction in general, that because Philippians exhorts us to dwell on things that are true, the stories we read should be true stories. They should be histories. They should be narratives that tell us what really happened instead of made-up stories, whether they be in a fantasy world or in this world.
I think we probably could make a whole podcast just addressing that assertion.
In fact, we kind of already have. We talked about “Should Christians read fiction?” That episode was recorded during the summer. We talked about the philosophy of storytelling and of history and of fiction, and kind of found there wasn’t a huge distinction between those things.
First addressing “it has to be true.” That does not limit us to histories and biographies. It eliminates histories and biographies because we weren’t there. We don’t know all the qualifying circumstances. We don’t know what was relevant.
I don’t know how many biographies and histories I’ve read and enjoyed, only to find out later that they were seriously wrong, and in some cases it took some research going back to source documents and other sorts of things, and that’s assuming the source documents were in fact accurate and in fact told me everything I actually needed to know.
We’re constantly confronted with biographies that exalt the hero of the day, but then 20, 30, or 40 years later somebody writes the expose that says, “And that was all lies.” Imagine a biography written on John F. Kennedy while he was alive. Now write one today. They would bear not a whole lot of similarity to each other, and probably in another 30, 40, or 50 years we can go back and we will have even more insight as we look back at some of what fell out of that, for instance as Soviet records and government classified records in our own country become available.
To say that we will only read that which is true limits us pretty much to speaking out of our own heads about our own experience, our immediate experiences, and we can’t make judgments about anything else.
The simple fact is that anytime we tell much of anything we make stuff up because we are not God. We’re not omniscient and we cannot know all the relevant details. We can’t know what is relevant, even if the details are available. We don’t know to look for them because we’re not omniscient and don’t know everything that happened.
We have relative confidence to a point, but if we’re going to insist on only that which is true, that’s a problem. In fact, you might argue that we’re shut up to scripture because we know it is absolutely true and it has no mistakes.
Yeah, we can only think about that which is true. I suppose somebody might be able to wiggle mathematics out of that, but still there are whole math theorems and approaches to math that have proved less than reliable in the long run, or valid only to a point. There’s got to be a pun in there someplace.
Same thing with the sciences. When I was a kid we were told that tonsils and appendixes were vestiges of evolution and therefore absolutely worthless and should be removed at the first sign of trouble. I was told that if I had a fever I had the flu and needed antibiotics, and was given them on a regular basis if I had a fever, even though today we know that they do nothing for viral infections. I don’t know what was going on there. So we are more and more shut up to very very little if that’s what God meant when he said “that which is true.”
I once wrote a line as an introduction to Shakepeare’s The Tempest, the narrator introducing the play. I don’t remember it all, but I remember this. “It is required of poets not that they tell us the facts, but that they tell us the truth,” and it went on. I don’t even remember. See, I’m being less than truthful because I don’t remember exactly. If I didn’t, I probably should have gone on and said because they of all people don’t claim to be telling us the facts.
They’re storytellers. They’re telling us fiction. They’re telling us something in beautiful words and images that conveys, we hope, powerful truth, but what the words are describing may in fact have never happened. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is certainly an example of that, and it’s also an example of fantasy literature.
When we come to someone who writes fiction, there’s this funny thing. They’re labeled either in the library or in the bookstore “Fiction.”
Yeah, it’s almost like they’re advertising, “This is a made-up story.” If it is a made-up story, then it certainly isn’t a lie. The question then becomes to what degree is it telling us truth about the human condition and about God and his universe. Now, the question becomes is that legitimate?
Well, it’s the kind of thing that God does on a number of occasions, that Jesus did with his parables. We don’t know if all of his stories really happened. They may have. I tend to lean toward thinking the prodigal son and the rich man in hell and the good Samaritan probably were real events, because if they weren’t they didn’t work nearly as well. But some of them are very generic and maybe happened a million times in history or maybe only once, or maybe they were just “Suppose that…” Did one king really pass out talents to his servants, and one of them really hid it in the ground? It’s a truthful kind of situation. It could have happened. Does Jesus mean that it actually did?
I don’t know, and does it matter? Not really. What he’s saying is consistent with human nature and, more to the point, it’s consistent with the divine reality it’s portraying. This is how God deals with men, so it’s pointing to a truth beyond itself. And if the other examples aren’t good and clear, we will shortly come back to this story that Jotham tells, where trees do talk.
I will start then with the devil’s advocate question, and we can come back to the others. When Jesus told the parables there was always a point and always a very clear “Aha, that’s what he was getting at.” It wasn’t merely for entertainment, shall we say. So how do we justify deriving telling an entertaining story for the sake of entertainment, that didn’t happen, using Jesus’ example of the parables?
It seems that we’ve shifted ground to entertainment is sinful unless it’s morally profitable. Now, there is a sense in which that’s true. Everything we do should be morally profitable in a biblical sense. That is, it should glorify God and advance his kingdom. Jesus has told us to seek his kingdom, his righteousness in all things. The question is what does that mean?
If I played ball with my little girl, do I have to be quizzing her on her catechism or her Bible verses while I’m doing that? Do I have to be pointing out, “You know, this ball is just like our lives. God bounces us around.” That’s horrible, but do I have to try to find something like that in order to validate it, or can I say that the Bible commends children playing in the street and commends play for children?
It tells us we ought to love our children, and is this not me spending time with her and building a relationship doing something she enjoys, whether I do or not? Bouncing balls has never been my thing. Is not this forwarding the kingdom of God as I build my relationship with her as her father and the one who’s responsible for her Christian growth when she’s a little girl? Is that good enough or do I have to tack on to that some kind of moralistic lesson in order to validate it?
We can go through the whole gamut of human life. If I make a meal, is it alright if it tastes good? If it’s not somehow communicating biblical truth, theology or ethics, why in the world – maybe we can justify eating it in terms of “Thou shalt not kill” but why in the world should I go and make it taste good when I don’t have to, when that may distract from the very thing that I’m doing this for the glory of God? Why should I enjoy it at the same time?
We’re running into some deep theological issues and honestly some questions of mental health. Some people take an idea and run with it without really thinking through all the ramifications of it, and you can try to shoot it down one step at a time. It’s like Odin’s 8-legged horse. You can shoot out each leg one at a time, but sometimes it’s better just to say, “Shoot the horse in the head and let’s start over. Let’s get to the point.”
Here I think is where we should start, and we probably have done this before but my memory fails me. We start with God as Creator and a storyteller. First, God as Creator. God made a beautiful world full of colors and textures and fragrances and patterns, an incredibly diverse beautiful world that appeals to all of our senses, and there have been religious people who are offended at that.
God invented sexuality, and you can almost hear some religious people saying, “And I would have thought more of him had he not.” They cannot handle this because for them holiness, the glory of God, the purity of God is wrapped up in some otherworldly abstract ethereal kind of existence that is shorn of all emotion, all imagination, but you look at the Bible in vain for any such thing. The Bible is not like that. You read through the Bible and you get all kinds of wonderful things. You also get some pretty horrible gross things.
That’s what I always think when I hear the “Whatsoever things are true and right and lovely and honest and stuff” used to limit reading, because the Bible has things in it that are not lovely. Now, the Bible overall is lovely, but the story of the rape of Tamar – no, that’s not lovely at all.
It’s also interesting that you get some people and they sort of incidentally accidentally stumble into we hope unintentional Gnosticism and basically say, “Well, we should really only do things…” and it starts off with good intentions “…for God’s glory, which means that we only do things that are bad experiences, because that is more holy and we grow in piety.”
I was reminded of that quote from Douglas Adams and I kind of thought, “Maybe they would agree with this,” about “In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I think there are some people who would agree, because before that there was nothing but spirit and nothing but God. What in the world was God thinking to create all of this dirt and flesh and minerals and breeding and birthing and burping and eating?
Yeah, so the Greeks created the Demiurge, the lesser God who did all that gross stuff. He looked into the realm of Platonic form and copied it the best he could, but not being a true creator got an awful lot wrong and made a lot of icky stuff. That’s kind of where we’re left as far as the Greeks are concerned, and far too often the church or parts thereof have copied that as a pattern for holiness.
Yes, unfortunately in our attempts to write sometimes we’ve just gotten rid of fiction, fantasy, and all that altogether. We just want dry books on morality and how to be good, which of course is itself a rather hellish approach to Christianity. But if we’re going to admit fiction and such, we try to church-ify it and make it a tool for evangelism. By chapter 3 there needs to be a conversion story and all this kind of thing. And in the process, we write the worst tripe possible because we’re not telling the truth about the human condition.
The kinds of stories that get written like that may have happened if we cut away a lot of what was going on all around these people at the time, but more often than not we’re not even addressing the real sin because talking about real sin itself is rather touchy and icky. No Christian really wants to write a novel about a man dealing with pornography in his life or a family dealing with incest. (My wife points out that Doug Wilson apparently has.)
Yeah, we don’t like him. [laughing] I mean I’ve heard about the book and it sounds horrible and like the last thing on earth that I want to read.
Unfortunately, it falls into the same trap of just being bad writing. I’ve seen excerpts.
Sometimes just being a bad writer will get you there too. So we’re coming back to God who creates a beautiful world, but decrees/allows that there should be sin in this world which distorts the beauty without completely destroying it. So we have this world where there’s beauty and there’s lack of beauty. There’s truth and there are lies. There’s love and there’s hate.
He makes this the operating theater for his story, and the hero is himself, that is to say his son, who comes into this story as the hero to rescue the bride, defeat the dragon, and all the rest of it. I’m sure we’ve talked about that before.
Before we go on, I wanted to make sure we went back and picked up Bryan’s comment from before.
The thing I wanted to bring up is that you mentioned if we’re only going to stick to things that we know for a fact are true and contain no shred of subjectivity, then like you said we’re stuck with just the Bible. That sounds sort of good to some people, but the problem is that now you can’t find greater assurance that the Bible is true by looking to outside verification of its historical events. You can’t look at church history at all to see how people have interpreted that true scripture yourself, so what you end up with is a – and these are my buzzwords for the episode – bible-ist fideism.
The other thing too is that if you’re going to essentially say, “Okay, now we can’t say anything that’s not 100% objectively scientifically factually true,” then you have to throw out the Psalms and Song of Solomon and most prophetic utterances from Isaiah and Ezekiel and Amos and Obadiah etc. If the psalmist tells us, “As a deer pants after a flowing stream, so pants my heart for thee,” your heart doesn’t have lungs so it can’t pant. If you follow this to its logical end, you have to say that the Psalms were not true.
Yeah. One other thing about that whole Philippians passage, two things actually: 1) Yes, it tells us to think on these things. It doesn’t say that each thing we think about has to be all of them at the same time. 2) It doesn’t leave us to decide for ourselves how to fill in the categories.
This comes after most of scripture has been written, and we have all kinds of examples of what these things are. I appreciate your reference to the rape of Tamar, and then there’s the incident with the first Tamar and all of that, that most people wouldn’t even read out loud in church.
I once made a chart of each word and then I picked Bible verses to go with each section – things like “Praise him, all you dragons.” Anything worthy of praise – it’s praiseworthy that dragons praise God, so we can talk about dragons apparently, as long as they’re praising God in some fashion.
The battles scenes of Revelation, the destruction of the great whore, and you can go through and find biblical examples that most modern-day Christian authors wouldn’t want to dwell on or use because they don’t fit their neo-Victorian sensibilities of what is good and true and lovely and all of that. Song of Solomon, good point. The Puritans wouldn’t even let their kids read it. There’s all of that.
For that matter, neither would Jewish parents. You had to reach Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah age in order to be allowed to read it.
I sympathize to some extent. I remember as a teenager in a Christian school looking across the classroom and seeing a bunch of really young kids with the Bible open giggling. It did not take me long to figure out what verses they were looking at, but the alternative of saying, “No, this is a closed book and you may not read it until you’re at such-and-such an age and such-and-such a spiritual condition” is not one the Bible itself imposes upon anybody.
Moses, in giving instructions for what was to be done with the Torah after his death, said “Every seven years you’re going to get everybody together, men, women and children, and you’re going to read all of it out loud.” That includes things like commandments concerning adultery, fornication, bestiality, and incest. Children were supposed to hear these things because they’re going to find out. The question is from whom? If they find out by sneaking a Bible and giggling at it, that’s really not very helpful.
One of the things in solving this problem is if people would actually read the Bible and read it out loud to their children, some of these discussions would not be happening and we’d have a much better idea of what good literature actually is.
But going back to the beginning, God created, but as God creates we hear him talking amongst himself. Insert doctrine of trinity here. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are talking. “Let us make man.” From eternity – in John 17, Christ’s high priestly prayer is a very good place to seek out these doctrines – they have loved each other and they have communicated.
Titus 1 says that God promised eternal life before the world began. Promised to whom? Revelation says Jesus was the Lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world. Acts 15 says, “Known to God are all his works from the beginning of the world.”
The Persons of the trinity told each other in infinite detail what exactly they were going to do with this creation project. That is, they told the story, but here’s the catch. They told the story of what would actually happen, because when God tells a story and says it’s going to happen, it actually does. But it is a story, as I’ve said before. It has a plot. It has a hero, an antagonist, a protagonist, a setting, rising and falling action, all the things that go into good storytelling.
Then he wrapped that up not only in history, but he summarized it into this book called the Bible, which itself contains summaries of the Bible itself. And along the way he adorned it with – as Bryan has already pointed out – poetic devices, other literary devices, and he encapsulated stories within the story. We’ve already spoken of the parables.
I think a couple things follow. Let me make a couple distinctions for us. We’ve kind of done it already. We’ve talked about fiction and talked about fantasy. Let me draw a line and I think it’s pretty standard. I don’t think it’s particularly arbitrary.
When we come to general fiction we are saying, “Look, I’m going to tell you something that never happened, but I’m going to borrow the universe that exists, including its physical and chemical constancies,” what we generally call natural laws. That is gravity will function, food will be digested, the sun will shine with light. All of that stuff that we call creation or nature, all that’s going to be real.
Yes. It’s like real life. It’s even like real life for there being this place called the United States, and maybe this place called Massachusetts or California, and there are going to be real people there that look like us and think more or less like us, and vote more or less like us, and go to psychiatrists more or less…okay, maybe not that…or maybe go to church, but probably not to the churches we go to, depending on who’s writing the whole thing.
It's a world that is very, very similar to ours, depending upon the author’s worldview and ability to deal with reality, but then into that he introduces one or more characters that he’s made up. They’re not real people. They may resemble real people. They may be based upon a real incident, based upon a true story – yeah, based, right.
Yeah, exactly. But when all is said and done, someone can read that and say, “Okay, that’s very true to life,” although the writer, after warning us it’s a made-up story, has stayed pretty close to describing God’s creation as it really is.
He may have made up a character, he may have made up a city, even a county – think of Faulkner – and in some cases a nation, some little obscure little nation in Africa. It used to be you could get away with making up little nations in southeastern Europe or southeast Asia because nobody knew about those. Now they’re all over the place in the headlines, so we’re getting to know the rest of the world and not just us. You could do these things, but you expect the world to be like it is.
Sometimes the writer may push the boundaries of probability to tell a good story, but he tries to keep it believable. There’s a contract here with the reader. “I’m going to tell you a make-believe story but it’s going to be set in a world that’s mostly like ours,” so the deus ex machina is right out. You can’t have some UFO come down and land and save the day. You can’t have the earth split up and some god arise up and say, “You are wrong!” and take the thing and run off. At that point he’s violated our trust because that’s not the kind of world we agreed to when we started reading, so that’s fiction.
Fantasy goes another step further. It says, “Look, what if the world were different?” Lewis called this supposal. “Suppose the world were different. Suppose the devil wrote letters. Suppose Christ appeared in another world full of talking animals. Suppose that the medieval idea of angels pushing the planets around was actually real. Suppose that you could take a bus ride to heaven.”
Then giving that supposal – still grounding his stories to some degree in our reality – he goes on and tells a story and we understand. “Okay, he has supposed something that isn’t true.” It’s wildly imaginative, could never happen, God definitely didn’t do it that way, but he’s told us upfront, “Look, it’s in the fantasy section of the library or bookstore. See the word fantasy? That means it’s even weirder than Pride and Prejudice, okay?”
So we either say, “Oh, that sounds fun. I might enjoy that,” or we say, “I don’t like those kinds of stories,” so we don’t sign off on the contract and we don’t read them. To a certain degree that’s our choice. We can read, we can not read.
The question becomes how far can you legitimately push this fantasy thing, because aren’t you rewriting God’s world? Well, fiction rewrites God’s world, and some of it rewrites it worse than fantasy does, because here’s the thing. Whether you’re telling fiction in the narrow sense or fantasy, who is God?
When you read 1984 or Brave New World, is God there? You kind of feel that he is because the world still operates in terms of a regularity and with the logic that presupposes the Creator God, but when you look at the future of the planet as they describe it, you begin to wonder whether or not this actually is God’s world.
Yeah, they obviously don’t believe in him, and we’re given the impression that the world is going in a direction that is not in harmony with the gospel and what the Bible says about earth’s future, so there’s that.
Fiction can make indirect statements about the reality of God, the normativeness of his law. There are books where adultery and fornication are presented as normal ways of life, and people do it in the book and nothing really bad happens, and there’s no hint that anything will happen, nor is there any hint that we should frown upon this. It’s just part of the fun of the story. That’s not God’s universe. That’s not God’s morality.
It’s one thing to say, “Yes, these people live like this,” but to somehow in the narration communicate that – and even the Bible does this occasionally – “the thing that David did displeased the Lord.” It is possible for the narrator to make it very clear, “Yeah, these people are living like there’s no God. They’re wrong.”
And part of this can be done by leaving questions. My 9th-graders just got done reading The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne, and of course Nathanial Hawthorne makes no statement about what God thinks about any of this business. I don’t think Nathanial Hawthorne particularly cared what God thought about the business, but part of his function as the storyteller is just raising the question of who, if anyone, was right? What could have been done differently?
That is a worthwhile question to think about, and I think as Christians we have more reason to have confidence in some of the answers we might come to.
Actually, The Scarlet Letter arguably is fantasy literature to some degree as well.
But the way you phrased it – who was right? – that’s a moral question. Hawthorne is struggling with morality, which is to say he’s wrestling with God. He may want to say, “I don’t believe in this God,” but then why do you keep asking questions that only make sense in his universe? If there is no Creator God then there is no right and wrong and your question is silly, and this was just an exercise in telling us random things that happened in this obscure corner of the world in this timeframe.
It may interest us, it may not, but why should we pass judgments and by what standard? And why would there be a standard? And why are we judging anyway? Does the fact that we’re inclined to make judgements say anything about us? No, of course not, because there’s no God. So when we’re writing, the question of God is inescapable.
We may bury it in the background. We may not want to look at it. In truly pagan cultures they have their own gods and they will write in terms of them. In the West it’s kind of hard to get away from our history and it’s kind of hard to get away from the fact that once upon a time most people believed the God of the Bible was real, so even in denying that they’re denying that.
They’re acknowledging that somebody someplace probably believes in this God, and it makes us really angry that they do, and we’re going to say something nasty to tick them off or to show them how superior we are because we don’t think that way, even though we keep talking about God implicitly sometimes more than Christians do, because we’re constantly bringing up moral issues and Christians often don’t. They don’t think that deeply sometimes.
Anyway, let’s look at the story of Jotham. Let me read it and then see what you think. We know that Abimelech, Gideon’s son by his concubine, has killed all of Gideon’s sons except this one youngest, and the men of Shechem are anointing him the king. Jotham climbs Mount Gerizim and yells down to tell them this –
The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? And the trees said to the fig tree, Come thou, and reign over us. But the fig tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us. And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man and go to be promoted over the trees?
Apparently, yeah, because it cheers us just like it cheers God. See, obviously this is a bad story.
Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow.
Bramble shadows are real close to the ground. You really have to humble yourself to get under a bramble shadow.
And if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.
The really big trees. The point he explains is if you’ve done well and honored Gideon and his household, cool. But if you haven’t, then may you and your king burn each other to pieces because you are bramble men. You are worthless. You’re non-productive. You went and found the lousiest most unproductive jerk there is, a mass murderer, to make him your king. You’re going to get exactly what you deserve from this. Then Jotham runs off.
We’re not told that Jotham was inspired by God. It is placed in scripture, but that again does not mean that God approves of it all. But we are told at the end of all of this when Abimelech finally dies –
Thus God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech, which he did unto his father, in slaying his seventy brethren. And all the evil of the men of Shechem did God rendered upon their heads, and upon them came the curse of Jotham the son of Jerubbaal [Gideon].
That sure sounds like God honored his story, and that brings us immediately to some observations, which I’d like you to pick at, if you don’t mind. What do you see in this story that goes beyond simple fiction?
They’re engaging in political activity. They’re covenanting to create a monarch, a constitutional monarchy it looks like.
Yeah, a monarchy. They don’t even want to be an anarcho or syndicalist commune.
You have the trees expressing their will to do their jobs. It’s like going out into your yard and seeing a dandelion, and the dandelion says, “Oh yes, I’m so happy to be growing here.” No, that’s the stuff of children’s stories, the anthropomorphic personification of plants.
Yeah, and yet God takes this story of talking trees and honors it and says that he honored it. He took this up, which was a curse against these people, and God himself fulfilled it and made clear that he did fulfill it. It wasn’t just a coincidence. “Well yeah, Jotham said this, but I was going to do it anyway.” There’s no hint of that.
That’s another squishy thing about the line between history and fiction and fantasy. There’s a lot in this world that sounds like it shouldn’t be real. You read about – depending on your sources – Rasputin and some strange bizarre things happened around the royal family of Russia. Was that witchcraft? Is witchcraft necessarily fantasy? Because we know that there is such a thing as witchcraft. We know that there have been demons at work in the world. That doesn’t make it unlike the world in which we live.
And I think there’s an interesting tangent that I don’t want to pursue very far, but I do know that a lot of early Christian fantasy in the 1970s and ‘80s went straight for demonism. It wasn’t, “Oh, here are Martians or Venusians or talking lions.” It was, “Here’s somebody possessed by demons, and the Christians have to battle them for the life of the world” or their community or whatever.
“That was rather direct, and I’m sure you think you’re doing some good, and maybe you are,” but which one is more likely to stir interest in demonology and witchcraft? The one that has talking lions or the one that actually shows you real sorcerers, or our conception of what a sorcerer would be, at work with real demons?
Along those lines, interesting you should mention, I’ve been rereading a couple of my books on UFOs. One of them is written by two Christian authors, for whom I have a fair amount of respect. I think they are a little gullible at places, but I think by and large they understand that a lot of what passes for UFO activity is simply demonic hysteria.
Demons put things into people’s minds, as they have done for centuries, and what people think they saw they didn’t see, although demons truly can take on physical form and manifest energy patterns. This book has just been one long, “Really? You don’t say. Wow. That’s scary,” as they roll out one story after another with the constant refrain of, “And if that wasn’t far enough, listen to this one.”
While they acknowledge that some of their accounts may be open to criticism or may flat-out be lies, they have tons and tons of this kind of stuff so you do begin asking, “Wait.” They’re claiming it’s historically and scientifically true in the sense that people in some cases have seen things where there are multiple witnesses who saw the same thing and can verify it. In other cases, people at least have a consistent story that they seem to believe, and often were under hypnosis, which is itself suspicious. These are psychiatrists drawing out these stories, so in that sense it’s sort of scientific.
Exactly. Honestly, the stories they tell are far more frightening than say the goblin and Curdie, or Goldilocks and the three bears. There you’ve got anthropomorphic bears. That’s fantasy. I don’t think anyone ever fell into demonism from that.
The other book I read was by secular scientists who are absolutely convinced that UFOs are real things – that is, that they represent extraterrestrial civilization, but the funny thing is that they are more gullible than the Christian authors. It starts out with lights in the sky. “Okay, something was here. The environment has been physically altered.” Then they end up with the most ridiculous stories.
“This sounds like a bad dream,” because that’s probably what it was. It may have been demon-induced, but this did not happen. The Christian authors can say, “Yeah, it didn’t happen,” but people sincerely believe it did because demons are messing with their minds. So this whole question of what does realism mean is a good question.
I ghost-wrote a short book for junior high students on William Wallace, and there is a point where he goes into a castle and the weirdest things happen to him. I wrote it because the only sources we have say, “This is what happened.” I qualified it a little bit, but this is what the few historical sources that we have agree on, that some really weird things happened to him in this castle, so what do you do with that? Well, you qualify it a little and say, “Pshh, the poets say that…” and then you tell what happened.
Is that history or is that fantasy? I don’t know because again, in terms of what I said up front, we’re not omniscient. In terms of what you’re saying, yes, witchcraft and demonism is a real thing. So simply avoiding fantasy does not avoid having books about demons, nor does it avoid the very real possibility that those very books about demons, written realistically and even by Christian authors, might pull people into a fascination with this stuff.
There is a danger there and I kind of live along the borderline of that sometimes. “I’m not going over that line because hell is on the other side, in the most literal sense.” My friends, don’t go over there. That’s not a good place to be.
But this story isn’t like that. These are talking trees. It’s charming. It’s adorable. The trees want to get involved in politics, so all of the trees en masse – I was looking to see if it says they actually move. I don’t think it does. I think they just talk. They just keep saying – they say this, they say this.
It’s charming and lovely and sweet until you get the threat of burning them all to death.
Yeah, until the end. But along the way the trees mention God. In fact, they mention God twice, speaking of oil. “By me they honor God and man.” Wine cheers the heart of God and man. So it is possible to tell not only a fictional story but a fantasy story set in what we might think of as a different universe, one in which trees actually talk and engage in politics, and mention the true God, the God of the Bible, and God isn’t offended.
I think we should understand that he would be more offended if we left him out, because do we really want to go around imagining universes where God is locked out? I think that is horrific beyond imagination and very lonely. Are we going to create a world that we go into and leave our best friend, our Savior and our God, outside?
When we say God, it cannot be “a god later to be named.” It cannot be a generic god. It cannot be the god of therapeutic deism. It has to be the God of the Bible. It has to be the trinitarian God because he’s the only God there is. And when he comes, he brings with him all of his attributes, all of his holiness, justice, love and all that, so this universe that we’ve moved into must in some measure – actually, in great measure – reflect the morality of scripture, and that’s where the dangers lie.
You go into Narnia or you go into Middle Earth and you’re in a world you know because God is God, right is right, and wrong is wrong. There’s a great line from Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. Aragorn says to the riders of Rohan, “Good and ill have not changed since yesterday, nor are they one thing among the Elves and Dwarves and another among men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”
Maybe Tolkien was being a little preachy there, but it is certainly to the point because on this Middle Earth stands or falls. If good is not universal, then what’s the deal with Sauron? Why are we bothering him? He’s just doing his own thing. If he hasn’t actually hurt me so I have to hit him back – unless I’m just doing preemptive, “Well, he might hit me some day so I’m going to hit him first,” that’s pragmatic. That’s not ethics.
If I’m going to call him evil, then that means I’ve got some kind of universal standard that he as a fallen angel is subject to the same way I am as a man, the same way the Elves and the Dwarves are. All of these creatures are bound by a common morality, just as in the real world angels, devils, and humans are all bound by a common morality.
Yes. Sorry, my voices are not distinct. No one can tell my sarcastic voice from my regular voice. It’s a problem.
The choice of the word wizard is questionable, although the English word comes from a word that means wise, but the biblical word has other words. If you read enough and read far enough, you will find out that Gandalf is not a man. He is in fact a minor angel come in seeming flesh to contest the power of Sauron. He has been sent by the other angels, and ultimately by God, by Iluvatar himself, to challenge the devil, as it were. So what he does he does not do by spells or by magic. He does it the same way an angel does it, by being an angel, but he’s on a leash as to how much he can do.
He can encourage people to stand up to the devil, to Sauron, the enemy, but he’s not allowed to go at him directly and match his power with his power. You have to read a lot between the lines in places and read the appendices and maybe some of The Silmarillion to get all of that, but that’s what’s going on. He’s not that kind of sorcerer.
There’s an amusing incident in Lothlorien where the Elves are presenting the Company of the Ring with gifts, and among them are Elven cloaks. One of the younger hobbits – it might be Pippin, I don’t remember – says to the Elves, “Are these magic?” And the elf says, “I don’t know what that means. They’re Elven work certainly and of very high quality.”
In other words, people with special skills can make special things, the way Stradivarius can make a violin that is unmatched by other violins, or Barbra Streisand can sing a song that will bring lots of liberals to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to a liberal cause.
Tolkien is not seeing these characters as magic users, as something like Dungeons and Dragons would advocate, or any kinds of fantasy literature. There is no magic pool from which they pour. There are no demons they consult with. They are who they are, and as who they are they make stuff.
Gandalf is different in that he is an angel, and as an angel he has his own nature and his power to alter reality to some extent, given him directly by God, but also he has a job description from God that limits what he’s about to do. So there’s all of that.
Tolkien does make reference to God. Of course, Lewis does, both in his Space Trilogy and The Great Divorce and in the Narnia series, even in Till We Have Faces.
Let me just go off on this tangent. I used to wonder about Till We Have Faces because I assumed that the gods that the queen was encountering were the Greek gods, so I thought that Lewis was using the Greek gods as a symbol for the true God, and that seemed awkward and difficult at best until I finally read what Lewis actually said. He said, “No, this is the true God. It’s just that she’s getting there basically by natural theology and by revelation beyond scripture.”
I think I like the other better, thank you very much. I feel like I’m in the last book of Narnia where people get into heaven because they didn’t worship the bad god the bad way. Um, no. But, you know.
Paul on a couple of occasions does offer us a very brief supposal. “If they had known God’s wisdom they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” That’s an entire completely different conception of the universe, and Paul stops there. Another one is, “If Christ be not risen from the dead, then our faith is in vain and it’s all lost,” and he stops there.
He doesn’t tell a whole novel in which Christ did not really rise from the dead, in which case he wasn’t really God. He drops it off as a supposal to show us that’s a dead end, and then he comes back to biblical reality. So the use of universes where the true God does not exist – there may be some, but they are extremely limited and short-lived and are not places Christians should play.
So more than the question of “Did this really happen? Or could it have really happened?” is in the story, who are you hanging out with? Who’s the ultimate personality that dominates this? Is it God or is it something else? Sometimes we ask the wrong question.
The Harry Potter series – I didn’t let my girls read it until they were in their teens or so, and it had nothing to do with the magic.
Yeah, or the badly-mangled Latin that they used. It had everything to do with Harry. He was a punk. He was a liar. He had no respect for authority, and I didn’t want my girls hanging out with somebody like that for book after book after book.
Now, in the end he grows up, but not all children have the maturity to spend however many books there are with a punk and not be affected by that. We are affected by the company we keep. If you can come into a universe where God isn’t, that’s not a safe place to be.
So even when we’re telling stories of floating isles and talking trees and silver ships that sail the stars and all that, God had better be there. It had better be God’s universe. Right and wrong had better be the same for Dwarves and Elves and talking trees, or we’re in a lot of trouble.
Maybe one last tangent to go off on, the supposing that one can identify truth versus fiction is itself a very dubious claim, which we touched on a little bit but it reminded me of Jordan Peterson.
Of course, it did. Everything reminds me of Jordan Peterson, but one of the things he says is, “Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie,” and that’s because you don’t know what it means to tell the truth. You’re not ready to tell the truth. What you can do is identify the lies and stop telling them.
Certainly when he penned those words he was not a Christian. As far as we know currently he is not a Christian. I’m holding out for it. But I think as Christians there’s something to be learned from that as well. To be a truth-teller is not a simple thing. We have the word of God, and that’s a fair sight more than Jordan Peterson as a pagan has. And we have his assurance that we can understand it, that he made us to understand it, that he gave us that faculty. But to say that we know what the truth is – it’s better to start with we know Who the truth is.
Exactly. “You don’t know, but you’re not ready for the truth!” which actually brings me back to Till We Have Faces because the first ¾ of the book is told from the queen’s point of view, the older sister in the Psyche legend, and she thinks – or she thinks she thinks – that her account of what has happened is honest and true. The gods have been out to get her. They’ve been unfair. They’ve been unjust. They have not behaved themselves like gods. She basically throws down the gauntlet and says, “How dare you! Justify yourselves.”
Yeah, her whole case against the gods, but in the end she opens up the book and writes the final chapter, which basically says, “I misunderstood everything.” Why do the gods not talk to us face to face? It’s because we have no faces. We don’t know the truth ourselves. We lie to ourselves about what things are and how the world works and who we are in it.
Until we finally – as VanTil would call it – reach epistemological self-consciousness, why would God bother trying to answer us when we are living in lies? This idea of truth-telling is a lot bigger, and maybe this is something we can pursue at another time. Truth-telling is harder than you think. It’s not just a matter of reciting facts.
There’s the story of the ship’s captain who had a first mate he didn’t like, so every so often in his journal, which was sent on to the home company, he would write, “The first mate is not drunk today.” Every two or three or four days – “The first mate is not drunk today.”
A true statement. The truth was he never got drunk. He didn’t drink. But having told the truth like that the way he did, eventually the company said, “Why don’t you fire this guy? Go ahead and get rid of him.”
Okay. In that case I will definitely steal the recommendation of Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories.” Then I will also double up on that with recommending a proper fiction book, which is That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.
Yes, it is. The main reason is because I was thinking of it in terms of life, and also the fact that I was listening to the album Dichotomy by Becoming the Archetype, which is based on the novel. It was a rock-out in the shower kind of listening party, basically.
It would not be your jam. We definitely both know that. Maybe St. Anne’s Lullaby would be, but that’s it.
But that’s everybody’s jam. It’s lovely. Dichotomy by Becoming the Archetype is a Christian death metal album based on That Hideous Strength.
I don’t listen to a lot of screamo, but I do enjoy that era of Becoming the Archetype because I can understand the words.
This one is the exception as well for me. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed any other kind of band. Actually, that’s not true. Wolves at the Gate has a couple songs that are like that. They’re kind of in the same vein. Anyway, we’re getting off on a tangent, so those are my recommendations – “On Fairy Stories” and Dichotomy by Becoming the Archetype.
We’re going to have another whole episode on why it’s okay for Christians to listen to death metal.
Let me do mine, just to get it out of the way. Some friends of ours have started a podcast of their own. This is Josiah and David Farschman. They’re doing a podcast about how to read literature, and it is appropriately called “How Shall We Then Read?” They’re beginning with Lord of the Rings, and some of the things we talked about will show up there as well, so check them out. They’ve only got one out so far because life is busy, but there will be more coming.
If you enjoyed any of what we were talking about, David and Josiah I think will draw it out in much more detail, particularly with reference to Tolkien and what he was trying to do.
David Farschman appeared on this podcast as a guest on our Science and Wonder episode, so check that episode out and check his podcast out, for sure.
I’m going to recommend an anime. This is my “my brain is so tired, I need it to turn off but I’m not ready to commit to going to sleep yet.” It’s called Haikyuu and it’s about a volleyball tournament.
I have a friend who’s very into anime, but she’s very into older anime and serious things, like Neon Genesis Evangelion is her favorite thing in the world, which is incomprehensible because it’s crazy. But slice of life, normal wholesome stories are not usually the typical thing that she goes for, except for this time. She’s like, “Emily, you really need to watch this because it’s so wholesome,” and she’s so right.
Yes, it’s a sports show so it’s like are they going to win or are they going to lose? That’s about the extent of the stakes, but the character growth and the leadership growth – and they really have this great older student who’s a fantastic leader but also a priest-type character as opposed to the Prophet or King, which as a person who tends towards priestliness in personality myself I appreciate because there are not a lot of really good priest-leaders.
We should do an episode about Prophet, Priest, and King as personalities and roles and the image of God and all that. So that’s my recommendation. It will be in the show notes when we get show notes to happen again, whenever that is.
That’s all we have for today. Thank you so much for listening. We appreciate you tuning in. Let us know what you think. Have we missed the strongest argument in the world against Christians reading fiction and fantasy? Let us know. [email protected] is our email address.
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