E. Stephen Burnett says:

Greetings, Laura — I think both of us knew there’d be some response to your comment! Thanks for stopping by and being willing to examine the suggested arguments here. At the same time, I wonder if you were able to read part 1 of this series?

Even if so, that builds on another more proactive series about God-honoring imagination I had been working on for a while, which isn’t as much about specific books as how imagination is seen in Scripture: Imagination: for God’s glory and others’ good.

Anyway, I’ll be referring to a few of those as I go through your comment. Here’s hoping nothing even comes across as adversarial. It would be best to have a more-personal relationship, best of all in a local-church context, and be talking about this over a table (with my wife joining us to rein me in if necessary!), wouldn’t it?

I’ll also blend my thoughts with that others have already said. That leads to my first thought: that not every Christian who enjoys Harry Potter lacks Biblical discernment, and certainly not every person who does this is tempted by made-up “magic” in another world to indulge in the same here. Even if someone has experienced this temptation, or even called a Wicca cult somewhere and said “hey, how do I get into witchcraft?”, that does not automatically make the Thing that person abused sinful for every Christian. As I hope the above showed, most people already believe this in other ways; they just have not yet seen the need to apply this consistently to secular stories like Harry Potter.

I’m sorry, but these arguments don’t convince me at all. J. K. Rowling definitely has children learning witchcraft in our world.

Question 1: Is this really “witchcraft”? Are the very real and dangerous pagan religious practices that dishonor God the same as made-up “magic” like flying cars, wands that shoot energy beams, animal-transformation powers and whatnot? See more in part 1.

More on whether this is really “our world” in a moment.

Question 2: If someone else, even children, use a Thing to sin, is that my fault? Is the Thing therefore corrupted? I hope to explore more of this in part 3, on Thursday, July 21. Yet part 1 already touched more on this, and suggests that folks who with good intentions try to avoid contact with Things that others use for their own sinful purposes a) do so without specific Biblical support, b) can’t do this consistently anyway.

Question 3: Without knowing me personally, or Cymru or others who’ve commented here and said that God has used even these secular stories to echo His truths, are you sure you might not be accidentally making some assumptions? These might include thoughts like: Well, they don’t really mean that stuff, or perhaps, I wonder what their real reasons are? or even They must be more compromisers in the Church. Maybe I’m projecting, though, and in that case, please forgive me! I just know that’s what when I was growing up, I used to think that about Christians who had different media/story enjoyments than I did. (Of course, I’m not denying these folks are out there; as written above, I merely suggest their main problem is rejection of the Gospel, not merely Biblical Discernment.)

But the fact remains that, contrary to Anecdotal Evidence that says others are using this stuff to sin, many Christians simply are not — and not the non-discernment kinds of Christians, but Christians who care about what they read, and their kids read, and want to honor God actively (not just shun the world reactively) in their choices. So if nothing else, it’s Anecdote vs. Anecdote, a stalemate — like playing “Rock, Paper, Scissors” and both playing the same hand motion at the same time. 😀

Muggles (unmagical people) are ridiculed, especially Harry’s aunt, uncle, and cousin. Harry’s family is afraid of the very word ‘magic’, and his aunt is made to look like an idiot for being angry that her sister was a witch.

Question 4: Have you read the series all the way through? The whole theme was the Dursleys was that they disliked imagination and preferred “values” such as gluttony and selfishness rather than heroism and wonder. “Magic,” in that other-world (more on this in a moment!), is merely a means toward adventure and fantastic explorations, the same kind of thing you get in this world with, say, whitewater rafting and enjoying others for their own value, not just for what you can get out of them.

Moreover, the Potter series eventually crescendos in a mission to save the world from the most evil wizard ever, whose mission is to subjugate Muggles, non-magical people, as an inferior race. Your statement that the series advocates this very message hasn’t taken that into account; thus, I urge you to correct that fact error, if nothing else! 🙂

Of note: I don’t claim (and have said this before) that you must read the series to know what’s in it, or else you can’t critique it. After all, I’ve critiqued the anti-Biblical book The Shack‘s blatantly un-Biblical teachings and haven’t been able to stand reading more than the first two chapters! Instead what I suggest is that you have missed what’s actually in the books. (By contrast, no one who dislikes my critiques of The Shack‘s contents has yet claimed my understanding of the book is flawed; they just said it’s just a book, it’s no big deal, it made me feel good, and other highly Biblical objections. 😉 )

There’s quite a big difference between Narnia and Harry Potter.

Question 5: What does this prove, though? I would not deny it! 😀 But as mentioned above, no one said every series’ Story-World rules must be the same as Narnia‘s. A better case to make might be that Narnia is simply superior storytelling.

No, there doesn’t have to be a figure representing God in the fantasy world, but, wait a minute! Harry Potter takes place in our world.

Actually, no, it takes place in an alternate imagined universe, just as much as Narnia.

Here’s how I know. In this world, are there witches, wizards, a secret society of them, wizarding schools, and any “magic” in this world as there is in Potter‘s? If not, then it’s another world — which just happens to resemble ours more closely. As Philip said: “The witchcraft of Harry Potter is clearly force-magic, which is simply fiction in the real world.”

Question 6: Because Narnia has crossover elements into “our world,” in which it’s said that there are four children, a mysterious old professor, a magical wardrobe, etc., and thus that world’s magic often reaches into “our world” also, and because any story that purports to be set in “our world” still includes things that never actually existed, how is this different from asking “suppose a few natural laws were different also”?

If there’s no God there, then where is He? Anyways, it must be written within Biblical worldview framework. Who defines right and wrong? The author? Why isn’t torture or killing with magic allowed?

Question 7: Must every author, Christian or non-, include a God-figure or mention Him or else we should not enjoy the stories? But Christ Himself, telling His stories “within a Biblical review framework,” (more on the but-He-was-Jesus bit in a second), often “left God out” of the story. For example, in two parables in Matthew, He included a king, or a man, who “stood in” for God but wasn’t pure allegory, but had an “outer darkness” to punish people. That’s close to “fantasy,” and it does not specifically include Christ or a “supposal” of Him. (More about this is in part 5 of the Imagination series.)

Question 8: Can non-Christian (or confused or professing-only Christians) authors know some about right and wrong, even if not all of it, and even despite inconsistent or baseless worldviews have such truths in their stories? Or should they, or else we should not read what they wrote? Or did Christ say that even evil people could give good gifts to their children (though He didn’t say they weren’t really evil or that these good deeds saved them)?

Although I myself enjoy some fantasy (not most modern fantasy, though), if someone’s conscience is telling them that all fantasy is wrong, well, I’m not going to be too upset. I think that discernment is at way too low of a level nowadays.

It is. But I would encourage you to go back and read the first part of the article. Christ did not say “whatever the world does, do the opposite,” or even “whatever problem most people are having, correct for that, and don’t beware opposite issues.” All of that only results in reactionary behavior that, by accident, could result in hijacking Christ and the Gospel as a means to preferred ends: even good things like discernment.

Question 9: Just because most professing Christians — and I completely agree! — fail to practice discernment, does that mean any discernment, or the strictest kind of discernment, is therefore more preferable? Or are there opposite extremes also?

Also, the parables of Jesus, we know, are perfectly fine. Why? Because Jesus told them. Is Rowling Jesus? I didn’t think so.

Question 10: Yes, and Jesus also walked through a locked door without commanding us to do the same! 😀 At the same time, does this address the prophet Daniel, who studied actual pagan mysticism manuals for God’s glory and with His help (more on this in Imagination part 4), or the Apostle Paul, who used a pagan Greek poet (a Cretan, I recall) who stumbled upon a truth about God but wrongly applied it to Zeus — before Paul stole the line and used it to lead to a call to repent and trust the true God?

And Jesus told His parables, obviously, within a framework where God was the ruler. He is God.

Indeed, yet again, many of His parables didn’t specifically include God in their Story-Worlds, and we still find His people using even actual pagan stuff in the service of the Kingdom — with or without the original authors’ permission or even willingness! 😀

But we, as humans, have to do things a little differently from Jesus. We are not the source of morals and ethics, God is. If there is no God in our stories, then our characters must either become a law unto themselves, or take their ethics from some other source (a powerful magician, nature, etc.).

Again I’d refer to the Bible’s lack of specific rules against how to set up a Story-World, or commandments that “if you tell a story, it must be like so-and-so.” And again, at least two Biblical human heroes, Daniel (Old Testament) and Paul (New) were somehow able to be exposed to actual Babylonian mythology stuff that was far worse than Harry Potter or else a Cretan poet who incidentally echoed a truth but applied it to Zeus.

None of this applies to a Christian who genuinely struggles with, say, his personal background in paganism or any passing similarities in an imaginary story. For that person, he should avoid eating the “meat.” Yet others genuinely need not worry about asking whether  a meat has been offered in a pagan ceremony (cf. 1 Corinthians 8-11:1).

Your arguments are really unconvincing, and I think perhaps you need a bit more discernment yourself. 

Perhaps so, in other areas, maybe? Yet so far I haven’t heard reasons to reject the good-parts-version of Harry Potter, or any non-specifically-Christ-including stories, based on a consistent discernment worldview that takes all of Scripture into account.

At the same time, if the only responses to this series were from praise-raisers, that wouldn’t be any fun and we wouldn’t have any iron-sharpens-iron conversation at all! Thanks for your feedback, and — optimally after you read the other columns? — maybe we’ll chat again. I hope so. If nothing else, you may see better where I’m coming from.