Audio Transcript

Welcome to witchcraft and wizardry week on the Ask Pastor John podcast, driven by our Bible reading. We begin the week by asking if there’s good magic and edifying sorcery. The question is a popular one about Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and fantasy literature in general. And the question comes to us today from an anonymous woman.

“Pastor John, hello, and thank you for this podcast. I have a question for you about an ongoing debate among my Christian friends over whether there’s such a thing as good or righteous signs and wonders done at the command of a miracle worker. A lot of godly Christians think novels like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are forbidden because they feature even a good use of spells and sorcery. The mere existence of sorcery in a novel makes it bad. But on the other side of the argument, we read in the Old Testament itself that God’s holy men seem to respond to sorcerers with a matching supernatural power, creating a black-and-white contrast.

“We read about all the incredible things God did at the hands of Moses and Aaron in the plague accounts” — which we just began reading today in our Bible-reading plan, by the way. “Aaron throws down his staff, and it becomes a devouring snake, the same staff that will cause the Nile to become blood, all in Exodus 7. Aaron holds his staff, and frogs emerge from the Nile. Then he taps the ground, and gnats cover everything, all in Exodus 8. Moses holds his staff, and hail rains down on Egypt in Exodus 9. He uses his staff to rouse the wind to deliver devouring locusts in Exodus 10. Most famously, Moses lifts his staff and splits the Red Sea in Exodus 14. The same staff he uses to hit a desert stone to draw out water in Exodus 17.

“Even recently, in the New Testament, we read about Paul’s supernatural response in Acts 13:6–11. He met a magician with a form of magic of his own, causing the magician to go blind. Aaron, Moses, and Paul accomplish supernatural feats in response to their opponents. Should this argument factor into our fiction, too, for appreciating a righteous use of supernatural power?”

The debate between the helpfulness or hurtfulness of alternative fantastic fictional worlds that an author creates — say, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series — I don’t think that debate between the helpfulness and hurtfulness of creating worlds like that is resolved by showing that there are both demonic and godly uses of signs and wonders in this real world of ours.

“I’ve tasted fiction that makes me love purity, nobility, courage, sacrifice, love, hope, joy.”

It’s certainly true that there have been and always will be deceptive signs and wonders (done by the power of Satan) in this real world and godly signs and wonders in the name of Jesus in this real world, intended for the confirmation of God’s inspired word in the Bible. But to argue from the use of signs and wonders in this real world of ours to the goodness of, say, righteous sorcery or white magic in a fictional world where Satan and God are only symbolized but not present in an explicit way — that doesn’t seem to me to settle anything.

Asking the Right Question

The reason is that the question will still be there. Does the fictional, fantastic, alternative, epic world, with its different kind of nature and different kind of supernature, tend to distract readers from the real world of real nature and real supernature (as God and Satan) by replacing this world with a fictional world? That’s the question. Does it help or does it hurt — whether or not those elements of sorcery and magic are there? Does the fictional, fantastic, alternative, epic world have the literary power to awaken materialistic, small-minded, sinful, worldly, unbelieving readers to the possibility of a real world of real nature and real supernature, the real world of God and Christ? That’s the question.

Does a fictional world of fantastic happenings tend to lead people away from or toward a real world where water turns into wine, and a real man walks on water, and lame people really walk, and blind people see, and five loaves feed five thousand people, and there’s a real resurrection of the dead and a real ascending of the King into heaven, a real God-man? Does fiction send people there or distract people from there? That’s the key question, I think. Does fiction help or hurt in seeking to awaken people to reality — to the reality of God in Christ with all the strange and wonderful otherworldly realities that truly exist: creation out of nothing, pervasive providence, great bodies of water dividing in half, the sun stopping in the sky, axe heads floating, the incarnation of God into humanity by a virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection, second coming of a sovereign King?

Does the use of language to create an alternative world to tell a story help awaken people to the supernatural realities that really exist? Or do they distract and replace that reality? Do they help or do they hurt? Or another way to ask the question is whether the creation of an alternative world in fiction can effectively communicate truth about the real world and draw people into it. Can made-up reality clarify reality? Does fiction have the capacity to awaken people to the truth of the real world? I think the answer to that question is, “Some of it.”

Truth Stronger Than Fiction

Now, why do I say that? I mean, why am I optimistic about some of it and pessimistic about others? The first reason is that I have tasted both. I have been exposed to fiction that is simply corrupting — not just corrupting immediately to my morals but corrupting to my whole worldview by being shot through with a litany of non-Christian assumptions that don’t open me to the possibilities of beauty and truth in this real world but in fact inoculate me against them. I’ve tasted that kind of fiction. I think we ought to avoid it.

“The Bible, God’s word, uses fantastic fictional visions and images to serve reality.”

And I’ve tasted fiction — whether in poetry or short stories or novels — that makes me love purity, nobility, courage, sacrifice, love, hope, joy with the result that, when I read my Bible, I am freshly hungry for Reality and touchable by Reality with a capital R — Jesus Reality, God Reality, Bible Reality. This fiction hasn’t drawn me away from reality. It never tempted me to believe the fictional world was real. I don’t believe that. Most children don’t believe that. It was always pointing beyond itself. It was never tempting me to idolize an alternative world, but it was making me dissatisfied with anything less than the true God. So, that’s my first reason for saying that the fictional creation of alternative worlds may or may not serve the truth.

The other reason is that the Bible, God’s word, uses fantastic fictional visions and images to serve reality. For example, in Zechariah 5:1–11, God makes the prophet see a flying scroll twenty cubits long and ten cubits wide. “This is the curse that goes out over the face of the whole land” (verse 3). Then he causes him to see a moving basket.

“What is it?” . . . “This is their iniquity in all the land.” And behold, the leaden cover was lifted, and there was a woman sitting in the basket! And he said, “This is Wickedness.” And he thrust her back into the basket, and thrust down the leaden weight on its opening. Then I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold, two women coming forward! The wind was in their wings. They had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and heaven. (verses 6–9)

Talk about alternative realities: a flying scroll, a basket with a woman in it named Wickedness, two women with wings like wings of a stork. What in the world is all this? This is God’s fantastic, alternative, visionary world. Zechariah does not inhabit that world. He doesn’t inhabit a world with flying scrolls and women with wings. This is God’s way of communicating truth about reality by creating images outside ordinary reality. And, amazingly, God has enabled human beings, created in his image, to be sub-creators, creators of alternative realities — fiction, poetry, metaphor, epic story — which have the capacity of awakening readers to Reality with a capital R.

Is It True?

My own sense is that the truth of fiction does not depend on the absence of fictional supernature — say, the absence of white magic — but it depends on how that is used and how it all fits together. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about stories, about fairy tales, which meant more to them than it does to us — fictional stories and truth. And I think the best thing I can do is quote both of them in turn as to how Truth with a capital T is communicated through fiction or stories made up. Here’s Lewis: “The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be ‘like real life’ in the superficial sense, but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.” That quote from Lewis is in an essay called “On Stories” (21).

And Tolkien’s quote here is from his essay called “On Fairy-stories” (155):

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of his secondary world (if not in all details) are derived from Reality [with a capital R], or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?”