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\u2019s deathblow itself dies.<\/p>\n
To simply say that seeing Christian themes in any story is \u201creading into things\u201d is a misunderstanding of stories in general and the Christian story in particular. JRR Tolkien described the fairy-story as \u201cone of the highest forms of literature\u201d (Letters 220), and \u201ca tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the ways in which indeed it is exhibited\u201d (Letters 188). This act of \u201csub-creation\u201d 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, \u201cWe have come from God, \u2026 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.\u201d Tolkien himself explains, \u201c\u2026The peculiar quality of the \u201cjoy\u201d in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. \u2026It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be \u201cprimarily\u201d true, its narrative to be history.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis 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\u201d (George Aichele \u2013 Tolkien\u2019s Faerie Stories).<\/p>\n
Fantasy scholar Jack Zipes explicitly states, \u201c\u2026The fantastic projection of religious hope in the Bible lays the foundation \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2026the 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
\nkingdom of God. Fantasy projects hope, and hope leads us home. This \u201csolves\u201d Tolkien\u2019s 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\u201d (George Aichele \u2013 Tolkien\u2019s Faerie Stories).<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe Christian story is the real mythic story- true reality. It is first the original with all other stories a copy and shadow.<\/p>\n
I believe Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it best,<\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\u2019s deathblow itself dies. This, in effect, is the Gospel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gospel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3hM8I-uv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davecruver.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}