Good, True, and Beautiful Books

Would you believe me if I told you that Disney’s Hercules gives an incredibly strong picture of Jesus? Give me a minute to convince you.

Hercules, the son of the chief god, comes down to earth as a baby. He is divine, but also human. He goes through the world, conquering evil until he meets his love, Megara. Megara has sold her soul to Hades and is enslaved to him. She betrays Hercules to Hades, but Hercules still loves her, even enough to die for her. He descends into the underworld to save her, where he loses his life in the river of death while seeking to save Megara. However, his great sacrifice allows him to rise again, now fully divine, bringing his bride out of death and defeating Hades. He ascends to be with the gods and marries Megara, his beloved.

But there are all sorts of problems with Hercules being Jesus, right? At the start of the movie, he is immature and prideful, seeking his own glory by becoming a hero. Jesus never did that. And what about the pantheon of gods? That’s definitely not orthodox. And are you saying, Jesus has both a mother and a father like Hercules does?

When I first started writing Christian fantasy, I was incredibly stressed about the idea of a weaving a Christ figure into my stories because I thought that unless every aspect of the Christ figure aligned with scripture, the portrayal would be heretical. However, I’ve since come to see that Christ figures in stories can never and should never be exactly like Christ. Rather, they should reflect aspects of who he is. They can reveal his sacrificial nature, his willingness to be humiliated to save us, his love for his enemies, his victory over evil, and a hundred other things without having to be Christ.

If an author tried to capture every bit of theology about Christ and put it into a story, well, you’d just be reading the Bible. Even Aslan, perhaps the most famous fictional Christ figure, is not a one-to-one stand in for Jesus. He redeems Edmund, but not all of Narnia by his death. He has no relationship with a Holy Spirit type figure. He appears in Narnia many times in his lion form before and after his death on the stone table. Does that mean he has multiple incarnations?

Lewis himself said that Aslan was a supposal, not an allegory. He asked, suppose Jesus appeared as a lion in fantasy world. What might that be like? Lewis never tried to paint every aspect of Jesus onto Aslan, and we shouldn’t either.

My husband and I are currently reading C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces which is a Christian retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. There are at least two characters in his novel who function as a “type of Christ”, both the princess Psyche and the son of the goddess Ungit. Two Christs, you say? That seems like some high level heresy! But, similarly to Aslan, neither character is a perfect representation of Christ. Instead, both show aspects of who he is, because no character can ever perfectly reveal Christ.

When we read Christian fantasy, we can be freed from the overwhelming idea that every Christlike figure needs to perfectly be Christ. Instead, we can enjoy to seeing glimpses of Jesus in many different ways in many different characters.