I am so sorry for the delay in updating this blog, but I must beg your forgiveness. I was just recently released from one of the most terrifying forms of the Imperius Curse. I must confess the particulars are a bit fuzzy in my memory now, but I have been told that while I was at school this curse forced me to long and secluded hours in the dark with nothing but books to keep me company. After pouring over these books, I was subjected to a series of tests given to my by select professors. Soon after completing these tests, I was released from the Imperius Curse and was sent home to recover.
Now that I have fully recovered from these final tests, I have set about (using a borrowed time turner) going back in time and writing to you everything we covered in class while I was under the of this curse. A big thanks once again to Alice of Rabbiton for providing me with her parchments from these classes.
-Victor Bennet
The Gospel
- Begins with the Creator God
- Fulfillment of Scripture/Prophecy
- The Incarnation; Jesus is fully human and fully God.
- He died for our sins
- He rose from the dead
- He is exalted to the right hand of God; He has been given a name above every other name
- He gave the Holy Spirit to those who had faith
- His will come again
One of the big themes in the Harry Potter books is challenging the relativism of our own culture: there’s no right or wrong, no good or evil. Harry Potter is not a relativistic work. Rowling works ultimate right and wrong into her work as part of the natural universe.
Cultural relativism is combated with the fact that there is a creator God. He created values, and these values are built into the very creation itself. Value is given because there is a God and is invested in us. The foundation and value of a family is also found in the fact that there is a creator God.
Love
The books have a huge theme of love.
All the points of the Gospel deal with Love because God IS Love. Without God, there is no Love. Love, by definition, is a relational thing and can only exist when there is an alternative, and God's love saves us from that alternative.
The Hebrew world “hesed” is all throughout the gospels, and it is roughly translated “steadfast love.”
God does what He does
because of His "hesed" love of people. The atonement was an expression of His
love, and this idea drives the materialists mad. They try to develop some kind
of rationality because love has a supernatural quality to it.Death
After the creation of the world, God created humans. But humans fell short of the glory of God when they sinned. This is when Death is introduced. Death is also a major issue when Christ dies for us and rises again.
The books have a theme of death as well.
After the Creator God, we have the doctrine of Creation and that is where we as humans come into the story. The glory is that we’re made in the image of God, yet the tragedy is that we’ve fallen short of His image. We break the rules because we’ve fallen short of God. Death and Sin comes in, and Rowling explores the different manifestations of Sin through the books. Jesus died for our sins, death being the ultimate wages for our sins. It’s a double substitution: He died for me, and I am crucified with Him; He takes my death, and I take His life.
If we go forward to the last book, we see that Rowling isn’t a Universalist. Dumbledore tells Harry at King’s Cross Station that he can’t help Voldemort, but Harry nonetheless is the evangelist to Voldemort when they’re dueling and Harry tells him "it’s not too late".
Supernaturalism
Rowling’s books are filled with the supernatural.
The Resurrection is an excellent example of the supernatural. People just don’t come back to life every day. It’s just not normal! It's not Natural, thus it is Supernatural!
God speaking to prophets and the prophecies coming true, the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, this is all spooky. Many people ask the questions, "Is the Creator God involved in the universe, and if so, in what sense is He involved? Is this just cause and effect, or is there an order of nature, created by God in the beginning, the way the Bible tells us?" I myself, Victor Bennet have often asked these questions. Is there an answer?
Dr. Poe gives us a excellent explanation. "We cannot have God creating the fundamental forces of the universe without the idea that God can be involved in it." That is to say, if we believe that God created the entire universe, how could we believe that He is not equally involved in sustaining it? People have this idea that God lives way, way up high, and He has to come down to earth to be involved. God’s Holy Spirit has never left, hence the term: an omnipresent God. God has never left. He was here in the beginning, and He is still here today.
What Is the Mystery in The Department of Mysteries?
In the fifth book we really get up close and personal with the Department of Mysteries. We come to find out that it contains the prophecies. This brings us to the idea of prophecy in the Bible. Prophecies make the Bible different from any other book in the world. It’s easy for a holy book to claim itself true. The one thing unique to the Bible is that it contains prophecy, which is absent in all others "holy writings". The Bible is an intriguing collection of prophecies so that you’ll know the character of God as one who makes promises, keeps those promises, and thus is trustworthy.
These successions of prophecies strive to show the character of God as one who keep His promises. God is different than all the other manmade gods. Prophecies only work if there is an all-knowing being who can see the future and then can reveal it to humans. The deities of other cultures don’t speak to us, don’t know us, don’t love us, and, in Eastern religions, aren’t really even conscious of themselves existing.
When Rowling introduces the idea of prophecy in the books, she opens up an obvious question: "Where do these prophecies come from, how do they happen?" Prophecy is very different from divination. Divination tries to wrench knowledge from the universe, while prophecies are abrupt and are granted to seers, but the people are not the start of it. Prophecies come when you aren't expecting them and when you may not want them.This is how the Spirit of the Lord came upon the Biblical prophets. Amos didn’t like being a prophet, Isaiah didn’t want to be prophet, but God was able to use them nonetheless. When Trelawny actually does prophesy, she is not the source of it and cannot control it.
Talking about prophecy brings up the problem of how it works. Rowling doesn’t deal with the source of power that fuels magic. She’s already slammed Divination, and she makes sure it’s discredited. Then, she subtly raises the question of where these prophecies come from and the only sensible answer would be that there has to be something more to the universe than simply the natural world that we see and understand.
So why don't Rowling explain where prophecies come from or at least hint a bit more at what she believes? It boils down to the fact that these books are not theology or Scripture; they’re fairytales that have been influenced by Christian faith. You get a unique set of answers with her stories, and we get a whole different answer with other stories. They all point towards the ultimate answers which are contained within the Bible.
Substatutionary Deaths
Rowling’s books feature many characters’ deaths for other people. Which is the right one: did Jesus die as a substitution for us, did his death defeat death/Satan, did his death clense and heal us, did his death set us free, etc. The problem with our culture is that we’re trying to narrow it down to the one, essential “it”. In fact, Christ did it all. The modern way of thinking, by getting it down to the one thing, eliminates the one thing itself.
In the book, Harry doesn’t die for sins. He’s representing the reasonableness of a substitutionary death. In Scripture, there is typology. Harry is a “type” of Christ. He is not an allegory or even a reflection of Jesus, he is a character that has been influenced by, and shares similar characteristics with Christ. Harry is not Jesus, Dumbledore is not God, and this is just a glimmer of the real story. The big, real story, the full story, is Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment