Learn to Read the Bible with Harry Potter

A case for reading literature.

25th February, 2019 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe

In my last post, I wrote about why reading Harry Potter won’t make you a witch. I find the idea, current in some wings of the church, that J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter will corrupt children’s minds to be unnecessarily fearful, and I doubt that those who make such claims could produce even one debased specimen to substantiate their point. At most, I can imagine little Charlie, while helping Daddy with gardening chores in the back garden, placing a broomstick between his legs and pretending he can fly. And if Daddy is a good one, he won’t call the priest to arrange an exorcism.

Like I said last time, whether a Christian finds Harry Potter to be an offence or not depends on the reader and not the book itself. This is a corollary of a wider point, that books require readers in order to mean something—if the book is closed, then you can’t read it or encounter it, and it can’t mean anything to you. Books need readers, like museums need visitors and works of art need viewers.

And in the case of those readers suspicious of Harry Potter, I would argue not only that such a view depends more on them than it does the book, but also that such suspicions are misguided, betraying a misunderstanding of what literature actually is. Quite frankly, they misunderstand how stories work. But how do stories work? In what follows, I suggest three lessons we can learn from reading literature: lessons which help us become better interpreters of the Bible.

1 // Genre

Reading literature heightens our sensitivity to genre.

Genre is important because it helps us to ask the kind of questions that can be reasonably put to a text and thus yield the kind of answers that can be appropriately expected from it. I’ve written about this in an earlier post, The Bible is a Joke, and I encourage you to go there if you are interested in how we can become better readers of the Genesis creation myths in the Old Testament or the apostle Paul’s letters to various churches in the New Testament.

One line I wrote in that earlier post, and which I still stand by, reads as follows: “Reading Genesis for a modern scientific account of creation is like reading Yeats’s poetry for cartography of Northern Ireland.” Yeats had more important things to say than geography, and Genesis more important things than the age of the universe, the precise mechanisms of human origins, and the like.

2 // Story

Reading literature teaches us that truth can be communicated through stories.

Flannery O’Conner, a great novelist and essayist of the twentieth century, reflected on the relationship between fiction and Christian (in her case, Catholic) truth:

“It is popular to suppose that anyone who can read the telephone book can read a short story or a novel, and it is more than usual to find the attitude among Catholics that since we posses the truth in the Church, we can use this truth directly as an instrument of judgement on any discipline at any time without regard for the nature of that discipline itself. Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalised by novels that they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these works are permeated with a Christian sprit.”

I think she’s right. Works of literature like Harry Potter may, despite the protestations of a fearful few, often be “permeated with a Christian spirit.” That is not to insist that the author must call her- or himself a Christian. Rather, the author’s work can be profitably appropriated by a Christian readership in a variety of ways. So, for example, Harry Potter. In my last post, I listed some quotations put by J. K. Rowling into mouth of the wise Dumbledore. These words merit reflection and for the Christian they resonate with key aspects of belief and doctrine, like how we conceptualise evil or think about death.

[On He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Voldemort]:“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

Stories and narratives have the potential to communicate profound truths, perhaps more than other forms of writing or speaking. In the case of Rowling’s Harry Potter, these stories are fictional. But when it comes to reading the Bible, we can still recognise the power of narrative to communicate truth even while affirming its basic historicity (so the Gospels and Acts in the New Testament) or when the jury is out, so to speak, and scholars debate how much material, if any, is intended to be historical (so the early chapters of Genesis or the famous story of Jonah and the whale). Given the Bible is chiefly composed of narrative material, I question whether people who think of the Bible as a book of rules or set of doctrinal propositions have actually read the thing.

3 // Imagination

Reading literature increases our imaginative faculties.

Cardinal Newman famously wrote to a friend saying, “It is not reason that is against us, but imagination.” By imagination, I (and Newman) do not mean belief in the unreal, quite the opposite, but the ability to perceive more deeply those realities that are not physical but spiritual. It is, for many reasons, becoming increasingly difficult for us to imagine that there might be something more than the material, not only because a few bad but loud scientists insist upon the opposite.

We also lack imagination because we are too influenced by the consumerism of our cultural moment, which is making us impatient and obsessed with the immediate and obvious (the Latin, obvius, literally means “in the way”). And thirdly, we are simply too busy; too busy to practice contemplation, to be silent and encounter, as Kierkegaard called it, “the moment” in which the eternal and temporal meet. If this sounds too mystic or grandiose for you, consider this: we are too busy to be bored, and as is becoming increasingly recognised boredom is essential for insight and creativity.

Reading literature invites us to inhabit new worlds, and in so doing we return to our own with fresh eyes. I have little time to discuss this important point here in much detail, but so it is also with reading the Bible.

On this point on the imagination, and this piece as a whole, I conclude with a poem by Mary Oliver:

“The World I Live In”

I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proods.
This world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.

So friends, take up and read; the Bible, and Harry Potter too.

Thank you for reading this post. If you liked it, please do share it with your friends and family. The Coffeehouse Cleric is a weekly blog on spirituality and simple living by Alex Rowe.