Monday, May 07, 2007

Harry Potter and the Missing Scripture Lesson

When I went to pre-order the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Amazon produced its list of "what other people who bought this book also bought". So I succumbed and bought the John Granger edited book Who Killed Albus Dumbledore? What Really Happened in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? It was an interesting read – all the various chapters were originally written as articles in HP cyber fandom.

What really struck me was just how detailed and energetic the HP fandom rank and file are in their scouring of the HP canon for information to help understand this alternate world known as the Potterverse. Numerous everyday people are comparing parallel passages, debating which language is "literal" and which also "symbolic" and looking for hints of what is yet to come in the back story. Just how will the creator of this world bring it to a conclusion? At what cost, and to whom, will the world finally be put to rights?

These people are excited to study and understand this world that they get to inhabit for awhile.

Christians also believe in another world – a world revealed in the canon of writings produced by its creator; a world called the Kingdom. It too operates according to different rules than the everyday world we inhabit. Actually our text tells us that this Kingdom world is the "real" world, and that our everyday world is truly the artificial, humanly constructed world. And that the creator of this other world has made it infinitely richer and more glorious than our everyday existence.

Given this belief, you would expect that the energy expended to dig into the back story, scouring the canon for information to understand the way this Kingdom world works, and what is coming next, would greatly exceed the efforts expended by HP fandom. Or I, at least, would so expect it.

Yet it has seemed to me that this is not the case. It has seemed to me that within the evangelical tradition of which I have been a part – a tradition labelled "word-centered" by Richard Foster in his material on the various traditions of the Christian faith – has been becoming ever less and less interested in the founding and shaping texts – what HPer's would call the canon. And I am certainly not alone in this observation. The internetmonk has made a similar observation in his post The Strange Case of the Missing Scripture Lessons, and points to other posts on the same observation.

Why this is happening, I do not know. I have some suspicions, but charity demands that I not elevate them to probabilities without stronger evidence. But it concerns me. I wonder about the long-term effects this trend will have on our churches, on the faith of the gathered people, and ultimately on our broader society. I wonder how God will respond. I wonder at what point He begins to repeat His words from Jeremiah 2:

"The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink back in horror and dismay," says the Lord. "For my people have done two evil things: They have abandoned me — the fountain of living water. And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all!"

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