We've done it! We've topped 1,000 views! Big thanks to everyone for continuing to read the blog and please continue sharing it with your friends like Miss "Zestee" Everman did.
So what do we do when we top 1,000 page views? We celebrate by talking about what Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Hunger Games have in common! The "girl on fire" and "the boy that lived".
Happy reading! And may the odds be ever in your favor!
- V. B.
The Goblet of Fire
After the first two books, Rowling (ironically) takes a much harsher view
of the press in her books.
In this book, Easter is celebrated, and at Christmas, one of the suits of armor is singing “O Come All Ye Faithful”.
In this book, the characters are in middle adolescence. Hormones are running high and so is eros. Harry likes Cho, and Cedric does too. He’s cooler than Harry and can tell Cho how he feels. Ron is also dealing with it; he’s upset that Hermione’s gone to the ball with his former hero, Victor Krum. He’s very jealous, which means that he likes Hermione, but he doesn’t do anything about it. Hermione is frustrated with Ron because she’s waiting on Ron to grow up. Passion is a very powerful force, and it can deceive and confuse you.
Resurrection and Death
Voldemort’s resurrection is nothing like the resurrection of
Harry and especially the resurrection Christ. The power of love is much more
powerful than any dark power. A clear contrast is
made between the good news of grace, the gift of life, and the sacrifice of
Christ compared to the ghastly, self-centeredness of Voldermort’s perpetuation.
The United States has an overwhelming fear of death. Rowling wants this
contrast to have an impression on the reader, so that their opinion is developed. But rather than lecturing about the fact that death need not be feared, she weaves it right into the story. When you have to have a lecture to
explain it, that’s not much of a story.
When Cedric Diggory,
Harry’s parents, and Voldemort’s victims appear as the wands connect, this
reflects the cloud of witnesses and communion of saints in Scripture.
Harry Potter and the Hunger Games?
Rowling is attacking
some of the fundamental, materialistic assumptions running rampant through our
culture. The theory of natural selection and materialistic evolution that says that
my genes are competing with your genes, and my genes want the advantage; I’m
competing against you. I want the odds in my favor. The very idea of sacrifice and sharing has no place in
the kind of universe that is materialistic. It goes against the theory. The materialistic
understanding of what’s going on is that people will gang up on others, get rid
of them, and then turn on each other. That’s not what’s going on with Harry,
and that’s not what’s going on with Cedric. Rowling is supporting a supernatural value system in which people have worth and value and that human life is worth more than personal achievement.
The gospel in Goblet of Fire is very evident in the
Triwizard Tournament. It is a environment of natural selection. A competition
between people, against each other. This is the same sort of theme that Suzanne Collins uses in
the Hunger Games. People are fighting each other. There is no room for love in
this competition. But just like Katniss refuses to kill Peeta, Harry supersedes the system and tells Cedric about the dragons,
saves Fleur’s sister, and takes the Wizard Cup WITH Cedric rather than blasting him out of the way.
"Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in
Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard
equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the
form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being
found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the
point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly
exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so
that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in
heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2:5-11) This also comes into play when Sirius tells Ron to treat his
inferiors with the same respect as he treats his equals. This is all packed
into the idea of what should my attitude be to other people? Our value system,
as Christians, is based off of our actions toward other people.
It also plays into the fact that everyone is afraid to say Voldemort's name. Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself. But God has a name that is above all others, therefore, we need not fear anything.
Multi-Cultural Wizards
or
Voldemort and Hitler
It never occurred to
Harry that there are wizards throughout the rest of the world and that there
might be other schools in other places. We see Harry’s coming of age throughout
the series because he’s incredibly naïve. God’s kingdom is incredibly diverse
and includes all sorts of people with different tongues and cultures.
Christianity is very multicultural, which you don’t find in any other culture
in the world. There isn’t very much mixing of ethnicities in other places. You don’t find mixing (religions, tribes, etc) in the Middle East. The genocide in Central Africa was
an incredibly unnerving example of this.
Multiculturalism is not natural to human nature. Multiculturalism and the acceptance of
people who are different is not natural; naturally, we are suspicious of those
who are different from us, and to accept them we have to have some sort of
basis to connect with those different people. Our connection is the Creator
God, but without God, we have no basis to sustain it. In Europe right now,
they’re going to outlaw different kinds of behavior of Muslim people.
This has to do with fear of the outsider in a country that is no longer
Christian. So many of the values that Western liberalism, such as the tradition of the
free spirit, takes for granted has to be rooted in something. If it’s just a
material world, then Hitler can kill as many Jews as he wants to by playing on human fear of those who are different. If there’s no higher authority or value he’s violating, there
is no right or wrong. "There’s only power and those too weak to use it." Later
in the books, she fights the “higher/greater good” mentality of Umbridge. She’s not writing theology,
but she is creating a context in which values don’t work unless they come from
something greater than ourselves.
House Elves
Rowling raises difficult questions and points out flaws, but doesn’t give any
easy answers. Hermione defends the house
elves, and yet Dumbledore keeps more of them than any other person in the world. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he talks about the Holy Spirit
and freedom because Christ has set you free. You don’t find the subject of
freedom in any other document in any other religion.The Bible is one of the only books of the time to talk about
“freedom,” because "freedom" was a foreign concept at the time.
Dobby is no longer a slave, and much like Harry lays down
his life for his friends.
House elves aren’t human, but they are a different form of
life. So what ethical issues does that raise?·
Dobby is not a human, but house elves are not animals, and there’s this debate going on in the wizarding
community of where they fall. When Ron wants to go save the house elves from
Voldemort, this is when the love between Ron and Hermione blooms fully.
Dumbledore also said that Sirius never appreciated that house elves had
feelings like people. Rowling is relying on a kind of fiction that Tolkien and Lewis
brought forward. C. S. Lewis and Tolkien have non-human races in their works as well. It’s a convenient way to ponder about how
you think about other people. Angels and demons aren’t human, but they are still a life form. Humans are LOWER than angels even! Satan’s problem with the human race is that we’re made lower than the angels, yet Christ has crowned us with glory and stepped into the world and become one of us! That’s why he tries to knock Jesus off while He’s in that form. Satan figures that when God turns himself into a person, he can take over because Jesus is at his weakest. Jesus defeats him easily.
Cornelius Fudge and Self-Awareness
Fudge doesn’t want to acknowledge that Voldemort has come
back (or even could come back). Self-awareness is one of
our biggest problems in today’s society. Many parables are about people who
don’t want to deal with their own problems and situations. When the prodigal
son was finally down and out and eating with the pigs, he came face to face
with himself and saw himself as he really was. Fudge, like a lot of
politicians, believed his own propaganda, which is deadly. You must know
yourself; otherwise you can’t have a confession. Though we have Harry,
constantly getting into trouble, he’s also constantly confessing and coming
face to face with himself. When Harry and Ron weren’t speaking, both of them
needed to grow up, see themselves, find out what the problem was, confess it,
and get rid of it so that they can move on. Fudge will never confess his shortcomings, but Harry is coming
face to face with his failures.
Harry and Sin
Rowling slips the word “sin” when Harry looks in the
pensive. When Harry stumbles
upon the pensieve, Dumbledore tells him "it’s not a sin to be curious." The very
idea of sin is a powerful idea that you don’t find in every culture. In post-WWII
Japan, you find no other culture dealing with their god resigning. The emperor
of Japan was god, the same way pharaoh was god, and it’s the same kind of
religion that Moses faced in Egypt. Japan’s emperor was the son of the moon
goddess, and it was in his name the Japanese did everything that was done.
McArthur said the emperor could remain on his throne, but he must resign as god.
If the emperor is not god, who is? It was a huge cultural crisis, and the Western world sent
missionaries to Japan. From a very young age, we’ve always heard the basic story of the gospel and
have all this background. If you don’t know the story and someone tells you
“God died for your sins and you can go to Heaven when you die,” yet your
culture has no concept of sin or heaven because they teach that you don’t die but are reincarnated until you
become enlightened and cease to exist. That’s hard to take in. If you don’t
know the gospel story, it doesn’t make any sense. Our culture is becoming like the Japanese
culture, in which people no longer know the story, who Jesus is, or how it
makes sense. It’s almost lost. Western culture had a firm background built on the ideas of sin, God, and heaven, but we are losing that foundation.
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