Frederick
Buechner wrote an essay entitled, The
Gospel as Fairy Tale. [1] Buechner was a Pulitzer Prize nominee, a Princeton
graduate, and holder of the Bachelor of Divinity (nowadays, Master of Divinity)
from Union Theological Seminary among whose esteemed faculty were Paul Tillich
(existentialism), Reinhold Niebuhr (neo-orthodoxy), and James Muilenberg (Old
Testament rhetorical criticism). Please note I have little to no sympathy for
their theology. In his essay, Buechner does not define what the Gospel is. The
redemptive element that the reformed theologian ascribes to the gospel is
clearly missing.
Buechner
draws from L. Frank Baum's, The Wizard of
Oz, a picture of how things supposedly really are. That we all - like the
scarecrow, tin woodman, cowardly lion, and even Dorothy herself (in her shoes)
- think that we are helpless and incapable of gaining our deepest desire or
most urgent need except through the magical help of the Great Wizard, only to
find out he's a fraud and that, all along, we had in ourselves the stuff to do
it.
Buechner
writes of Baum's fantasy:
"The
book was published in 1900, and maybe it is not stretching things too far to
say that in a way it foreshadows something of what became of the fairy tale of
the Gospel in the century it ushered in. The magic and the mystery fade. Like
the Emerald City, the city whose gates are pearl and whose walls are adorned
with jasper and onyx and sapphire turns out to be too good to be true for all
except those who see it through stained glass; and just as for Dorothy home is
finally not the Land of Oz, where all things are possible, but Kansas, where
never yet has a camel managed to squeeze through the eye of a needle, so for us
home is not that country that Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jeptha, glimpsed
from afar, but rather just home, just here, where there are few surprises. As
for the one who promises to save the world, he is in the richest sense a good
man to be sure, but like the little bald man behind the screen, when you come
right down to it [he is] not all that much of a wizard. His goodness, his love,
his simple eloquence, touch our hearts and illuminate our darkness across the
centuries, but for all of that, both we and our world remain basically
untransformed. Though he is wizard enough to set us dreaming sometimes of a
world of joy more poignant than grief, we tend to believe in our hearts, that,
however holy and precious, it is only a dream" (The Christian Imagination, 333-334).
If I
understand Buechner, he implies that the myth and make believe of the Wizard of Oz, in particular, and by
broad extension, the Fairy Tale in general, has a debilitating influence on how one
may perceive the gospel, even tempting one to treat it as belonging to the same
level of absurd, even mythical or fantastical, reality. As such, the sacred
words of the sacred Wizard turn out to be hollow, and their promises, wishful
thinking.
This
disparages the gospel. Perhaps Baum was indeed trying to make the point that we
can do what needs to be done on our own without the help of the extraordinary
and magical. Even so, to place gospel under the same construct, as Buechner
does and the way he does, is entirely unwarranted and demeaning. It betrays a
very low view of the book that reveals it and misconstrues the person and work
of its central figure, Jesus Christ.
That
aside, if it were Baum's intention to make the point that we actually do have
great potential ability, and we do not really need help from an other-worldly
figure, he succeeds. He does so in a way that he may not have in any other
genre for children. The fairy tale has its advantages. It can be a vehicle of
great ideas (however right or wrong they may be). It captures the child's
imagination in a way that the mundane does not. If I may slightly twist a
threadbare witticism - it paints truths in pictures, albeit fantastical, that
speak louder than the words of a story set in this humdrum world.
Obviously,
I am critiquing Buechner from a conservative theological point of view. However,
as a writer of Christian fantasy, neither can I let Baum slip away easily.
While Buechner demeans and reinterprets the gospel, Baum ignores it because
there is no sense at all that the scarecrow's brains, the tin woodman's
sensitive heart, the lion's courage, and Dorothy's magical shoes are the result
of common grace and providence. This is not to say that every tale of fantasy
must be written from a conservative biblical worldview, but it is to say that
without writing from that perspective, the truth can be marred or incomplete.
The
author of a truly Christian fantasy-world, whether it be a retelling of a
classic such as Beauty and the Beast,
Cinderella, or the Frog and the Prince, or whether it be a
tale that has not yet been told, must redeem the genre for the sake of the
kingdom and the glory of God. As such, it must reflect truth as it really is,
as God tells us what it is.
[1] Appearing in The Christian Imagination, ed. by Leland Ryken.
