The Land of Unlikeness

I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about the relationship of the Harry Potter books to Christianity. When I started talking to my Mom about this, she said I should write something that she could give to a friend of hers who is interested in this subject, so here is the first of, I hope, a number of posts addressing some of the most interesting connections in that regard. So, first of all, Hi Mom, and second of all, howdy to William Burroughs who, though deceased, speaks through his words, one of which was that the word is a virus.
Now Harry Potter uses no, or very little, explicit Christian language, and in fact, many Christians find the books offensive because of its focus on wizards and magic. But any Christian who has read the books would have to be woefully ignorant of the foundational story of their own religion not to notice some strikingly similar values, like, for instance, that sacrificial love is stronger than death and has the power to rescue oneself and others from the clutches of evil. Some Christians, lets say those who enjoy the books, might say that if the books have such a Christian theme, then why doesn’t the author make it explicit, perhaps by providing handy marginal notes a la Pilgrims Progress, or making the allegory exceedingly clear, as in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. But I think that would be missing part of the power of the story, which is that it transmits the truths of Christianity in a viral form. When Burroughs says that the word is a virus he is explicating this thesis of his that written language precedes spoken language and defines human beings as creatures which can convey information to other humans yet unborn; in other words, we alone of all the species are “time binding” animals. This is something that comes up while I was teaching the New Testament this summer where it is clear that part of God’s plan involves the binding of time, that while Jesus accomplishes something “once and for all” on the cross, there is still work to be done, it is still necessary to transmit the virus. In speaking to my students I tell them the standard Christian interpretation that the second coming and the Judgment to which is leads is imagined as occurring subsequent to this transmission—this at least makes sense of missionary activity as fulfilling Jesus’ command to spread his gospel to the ends of the earth, as well as explaining God’s Judgment on whether we have believed in his Son or not, which wouldn’t really make sense (to most people) unless the folks involved had heard of this Son. But perhaps this explanation is not as exciting as it could be. Perhaps we need to weave more closely these two lines of though, that Christ’s death is a once and for all deed, yet one that still needs to be transmitted in order for it to really be done. Christ, as the Word, in taking on flesh fundamentally changes the relationship of flesh (that would be us) to words (that would also be us). Of course, for us, but even more for people who lived in Biblical times, what flesh really means is death, and what the Word means—especially Burroughs written viral word—is immortality. Perhaps I should explain the Christ event as one in which flesh is now given the opportunity to be immortal (we must still remember how strange it was for Greeks to hear Christians proclaiming a resurrected body—Spirit, fine, but body??). Of course Christian immortality is a very specific thing. It means having the moxie to die and believe that after death, not only one’s soul but one’s arms and legs will one day walk and swing again, and in the light of God. Since the length of this post is probably straining the limits of blog manners, I will say To Be Continued at this point and try to get from Burroughs to Rowling in my next post.