Stories, good stories, always borrow from the Christian worldview- always- a variation on a theme- A good and pleasant life is disrupted by some devastating circumstance that seems nigh to impossible to overcome. Evil plays its most horrific hand, yet, when all is said and done, Good overcomes Evil by direct confrontation. The heart of Evil is pierced and Evil’s deathblow itself dies.
To simply say that seeing Christian themes in any story is “reading into things” is a misunderstanding of stories in general and the Christian story in particular. JRR Tolkien described the fairy-story as “one of the highest forms of literature” (Letters 220), and “a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which indeed it is exhibited” (Letters 188). This act of “sub-creation” was an opportunity for Tolkien to forge entire worlds which may not possess their own life, but would still honor the real creation of God. Joseph Pearce explains, “We have come from God, … and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.” Tolkien himself explains, “…The peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. …It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history.”
“This implies the unreal fantasy world can be just as real as everyday reality, or even more so. If that is so, then the primary world must be less than real, i.e., it too must be a sub-creation, a secondary world. Reality is revealed to be just another fantasy” (George Aichele – Tolkien’s Faerie Stories).
Fantasy scholar Jack Zipes explicitly states, “…The fantastic projection of religious hope in the Bible lays the foundation … for the formation of secular hope that demands a reverence for the utterly different as good and sets ethical and moral markers to lead us to our final destination of home.”
…the fantasy of Jewish and Christian messianism, by way of its chief biblical instigators, Moses and Jesus, opens the way to paradise on earth, the promised land or
kingdom of God. Fantasy projects hope, and hope leads us home. This “solves” Tolkien’s apparently paradoxical inversion of real and unreal by asserting that the presently unreal (the no-place of utopia) will become real in the future, at which time our present realities will have become unreal” (George Aichele – Tolkien’s Faerie Stories).
The Christian story is the real mythic story- true reality. It is first the original with all other stories a copy and shadow.
I believe Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it best,
There are not two realities, but only one reality, and that is the reality of God, which has become manifest in Christ in the reality of the world.
Stories, good stories, always borrow from this Christian worldview- always. A good and pleasant life is disrupted by some devastating circumstance that seems nigh to impossible to overcome. Evil plays its most horrific hand, yet, when all is said and done, Good overcomes Evil by direct confrontation. The heart of Evil is pierced and Evil’s deathblow itself dies. This, in effect, is the Gospel.