As Promised:

Here is the text of the chapel I delivered this morning at school. I revised it as I was speaking because of time constraints, but that was only a revision in length, not in substance.

I hope you enjoy it. If not, please feel free to comment and let me know why.

I should also say that in connection with the topic of this chapel, I read Ephesians 1:1-23 (well, 1:1-14 because of time constraints, but I was intending to read the whole chapter). It really is a beautiful chapter.

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During the Christmas break, I took the opportunity to read a few novels. This was a welcome change from the textbooks we have to read during the semester. The novels I chose to read I chose with a purpose in mind. Concerned as we are with Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral matters I decided to read a trilogy of fantasy novels that have come into focus as of late, gathering much attention because of the controversy they created. The books are the trilogy entitled His Dark Materials, written by Philip Pullman. The first of these novels has recently been made into a movie of the same title: The Golden Compass. The trilogy is completed by the second and third novels, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass

The controversy surrounding these books has to do with the subject matter and the purpose which Pullman had in writing them. Pullman is an atheist, a convinced materialist, and in these novels lies an attack against God and his church. Many Christian leaders and organizations have urged believers not to see this movie and it took some convincing myself to actually purchase and read these books. I was interested, though, to see how Pullman writes against God, how he attacks the church, and what worldview he is implanting in the minds of the children who do read these novels, as they are intended for a young audience—published under the Yearling imprint of Random House Publishers, these books are written, published, and marketed to children in their early teens and a little younger.

The worldview which Pullman presents through these books is, at its base, materialistic. To him there is nothing beyond what is material, what we can see, hear, feel, what we can experience physically; there is no supernatural reality, there is no spiritual reality. More than this, though, his worldview as evidenced in these novels, is also one that is quite individualistic. Those people who can do for themselves, who can rely on themselves are portrayed in a better light than those who simply follow some one else’s lead or who have to look somewhere else for some justification or for some understanding of the world.

While Pullman does strongly critique the Church and belief in God, there was one phrase in these books that really caught my attention, and made me see an underlying belief or presupposition, presented quite subtly. It seems that Pullman, in his critique of Christianity, thinks that free grace means cheap grace.

Near the end of the third novel, two of the characters are discussing an ability that the main character, Lyra (a young girl) had and lost. When asking about this ability, and whether she would get it back, the other character, an angel, responds that she could regain this ability, but it will take much effort and work, unlike at first. This is the important part of their dialogue:

“You read it by grace,” said Xaphania, looking at her, “and you can regain it by work.”
“How long will that take?”
“A lifetime”
“That long…”
“But your reading will be even better then, after a lifetime of thought and effort, because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore, once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you.” (AS, 491).

To Pullman, something gained by hard work and much effort has a greater value than something that is given freely, something that comes without effort. There are many ways in which this is true. But by phrasing this in the language of grace, Pullman brings this over into an area in which this ceases to become true, because it is impossible, and it shows that he misunderstands God’s free grace.

Grace, when spoken of in a Christian context, usually refers to a quality or characteristic of God. In God’s grace, he has dealt with sin by punishing his own Son rather than his creatures who committed sin: human beings. In God’s grace, he has chosen some of those creatures who deserve nothing less than the second death to enter into everlasting life. God’s grace is his free, undeserved favour through which he gives his great and precious promises to his people, and in which process the people play a passive role except receiving these promises by faith.

It seems to be this fundamental truth that Pullman objects to. Undeserved grace freely given is (or can be) good, but grace worked at and deserved is far better. This grace depends on and works with human beings as they are, it is more natural, whereas free undeserved grace is unnatural, it excludes human beings and goes around, if not against, their nature.

This, it seems, is Pullman’s fundamental critique of faith, and the Christian faith specifically, in these novels. It directs our thoughts, our energy, and our hopes away from the world as we have it here and now, away from ourselves as we are, to something that we cannot see, we cannot touch, we cannot really do anything about. It directs us away from reality and to something else, something not real. At least, not real according to Pullman’s individualistic and materialistic worldview.

For Pullman, redemption (insofar as we can speak of redemption in a materialistic way) must come from us ourselves. We must work to redeem ourselves, we must work to save ourselves and our world. We are the ones who can make things better for the future. Shortly after the quote I used earlier, the implications of these ideas are drawn out a little further. This quote, however, needs a little background explanation. The character, Xaphania again, refers to Dust. This is one of the major plot elements of these novels. People are trying to explain and deal with what they call Dust. As far as I can tell, this is what is produced by consciousness, and what creates or passes on consciousness, as it is adults who have this Dust, and children do not attract it until puberty. Dust cannot be seen except with special tools, but has a deep effect on the lives of conscious beings. Here is what the character says about Dust:

“Dust is not a constant. There’s not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust—they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on.
“And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and they way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious…Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost” (AS, 491-92).

It is through growing and developing as a person along our natural lines that more Dust, and therefore more consciousness is created. It is through being what we can be, what we could be if we were free from the control and constraints of the Church, of God himself that we can become better. The implicit critique in these books, at least as I found in my reading, seems to be that if this doesn’t work, if people cannot do this, cannot become better, then it is not through the fault of those few enlightened ones, but fault of those who have destroyed free thought and open-mindedness. In a word, the church.

This becomes apparent when we consider the picture of the church which Pullman paints in these novels. We have already seen that to him the church works against the natural state of human existence and directs people away from their own abilities to something that is not even real. This they do, in part, by exercising a rigid, authoritarian discipline and control over society. This is hinted at in the first novel, The Golden Compass, and made more explicit in the other two. In The Golden Compass, which is set in a parallel world similar to but different than our own, an element of its history is recounted to us, characterizing the church in this way right from the beginning of the novels:

Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church's power over every aspect of life had been absolute (GC, 30).

This is all we get here, but the picture of the church which is painted becomes more damning as the plot through the novels progresses, with the church being portrayed in Inquisition-like terms. In its desire for control, the church does not stop at intrigue, torture, even experimenting on young children. In fact, we get the impression that there is nothing the church would not do in order to protect and strengthen its own position. In the second novel, one character, unsympathetic to the church, characterizes the years of its existence as years full of “lies and propaganda and cruelty and deceit” (SK, 319).

In the third novel, a character who used to be a nun states that it was only after she left the church, when she was no longer a nun that she really began to use all her nature, and to think for herself. She says: “For the first time ever I felt I was doing something with all of my nature and not only a part of it” (AS, 446), and a little later in answer to whether she thought about good and evil, she says, “I knew what I should think: it was whatever the church taught me to think. And when I did science I had to think of other things altogether. So I never had to think about them for myself at all” (AS, 446).

What we get is a picture of a church which is concerned with controlling peoples’ lives and minds, through any means necessary. And what is worse, it forces people to ignore parts of their own nature, it forces people to become something that they are not, something less than they could be or ought to be. In essence, the church (and God) want to undo the effects of consciousness and turn people into something a little more than unthinking animals. For Pullman, original sin is the dawning of consciousness, and is therefore something good. Thus, implicitly, human beings as created were somehow less than they are now. The church desires to draw them back to this state, while those opposing the church and God desire freedom.

In one of the most vividly damning portrayals of this church, Pullman provides the thought of a priest as he is on a task in a new world. He has been sent out to kill the woman who used to be a nun because of her role in the events of the plot. On this new world, to which he has followed her, there are two races of creatures. Mary, the ex-nun, has found one of them, and becomes a part of their tribe. In an almost Rousseauean ‘state of nature’ idealism, she lives as they live, and their primitive, close-to-nature society is perfect. The priest, on the other hand, finds the other race of creatures, and controls them through fear and violence. When later he sees the race with which Mary is living, his first thoughts are to performing mission work, and he thinks:

The first thing to do here would be to convince the four-legged creatures, who seemed to have the rudiments of reason, that their habit of riding on wheels was abominable and Satanic, and contrary to the will of God. Break them of that, and salvation would follow. (AS, 464)

Salvation, therefore, depends on working against one’s own nature, and becoming something other, something less, in Pullman’s estimation.

Now there is a lot more that could be said about these novels, and there is much in these books that needs to be responded to, but I will leave that to people better equipped than myself. For my purposes now, I want to say that while Pullman’s attack against the church, against belief in God is important, I think the worldview at the heart of his critique needs addressing first, for he has everything upside-down.

While reading these novels and preparing to write about them, I struggled to find a central theme, an image or statement that provides a way into Pullman’s messages throughout these novels. When I read what he had to say about human potential, especially since he phrased it in terms of ‘grace,’ much of what he said through the rest of the books became a little clearer. It seems to me that the primary message Pullman is making is that anything that takes us away from ourselves, anything that downplays our own potentials, our own ability to better ourselves is, to use a religious term, damnable. And by teaching people to focus on heavenly things rather than on earthly things, to look to God for redemption other than ourselves, to find the source of salvation outside rather than inside of ourselves, the church has been a negative influence through history.

The worst thing about these books is that our need for our Saviour Jesus Christ is totally rejected. First of all, nowhere in these books (as far as I can remember) is Jesus Christ ever mentioned. In his critique against the church and belief in God, Pullman nowhere explicitly mentions Christ. But this entire trilogy is, in effect, one argument against belief in Christ Jesus. If we can redeem ourselves, make things better ourselves, if we can do whatever needs to be done by our own strength and power, why do we need a heavenly Saviour, why do we need Christ? If there is no such thing as original sin to be redeemed from, why do we need a Saviour? In this way, the grace of God in Christ, freely given, is cheap and doesn’t work to better human beings, but simply works without them.

Because of Pullman’s materialism, he has to think that to be authentically human, to be authentically who were are, we have to give up whatever isn’t real, give up believing in the lie of God, the lies of the church, and just be better people. And the danger of literature is that these ideas can be presented in such an innocent and positive way. But the truth of the matter is that we are not, as we are right now, authentically human. We are not the beings that God created. Pullman may deny original sin, he may want people to stop thinking about it, about God, about good and evil as categories instead of adjectives applied to actions, but wanting something doesn’t make it so.

Human beings are not what we were created to be. As the Heidelberg Catechism so wonderfully phrases it, we were created good:

God created man good and in His image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that he might rightly know God his Creator, heartily love Him, and live with Him in eternal blessedness to praise and glorify Him (HC Lord’s Day 2, Question and Answer 6).

But we lost this status, we lost these abilities because of the fall into sin, perpetrated by our first parents, Adam and Eve, and passed down through the generations. The Belgic Confession states:

But, when man was in this high position, he did no appreciate it nor did he value his excellency. He gave ear to the words of the devil and wilfully subjected himself to sin and consequently to death and the curse. For he transgressed the commandment of life which he had received; by his sin he broke away from God, who was his true life; he corrupted his whole nature. By all this he made himself liable to physical and spiritual death (BC Article 14).

Because of all this, there is no single area of life that is not touched by sin. “Even our best works in this life are all imperfect and defiled with sin” (HC, LD 24, QA 62). To rest on our own abilities to make the world a better place means that we will fail. We cannot do it on our own, we need someone greater than ourselves to pull us out of the mire and enable in us what we have lost.

This is the great comfort of Christianity, the great comfort of knowing our Lord and Saviour—we know that he came to save us, to redeem us from the death we brought onto ourselves. To those who know Christ, to those who belong to him, this is true comfort, to which Pullman’s vision pales in comparison. What comfort is it to trust in fallible, fickle, finite human beings? What comfort do we have when we fail?

To receive, by God’s free grace the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice, to be considered righteous because of our Saviour, to be forgiven of our sins because of our Redeemer, this is true comfort. Human beings can fail and have often failed. We do not need to look any further than church history to see ample evidence of this. But, believing in Christ, becoming united with him as a member of his body, we know that even though we will fail, we will be saved, we will be redeemed, we will be made perfect like him through God’s grace. While Pullman does paint a fairly positive picture of humankind and its own inherent abilities, anyone who knows the truth of Christ will see through it. With this in mind, I have come to think that the danger of these books is not simply in its critique of the church (which is perhaps ill-informed at best) nor his open denial of God’s existence, but more importantly in the underlying worldview of individualistic materialism. While many commentators attack Pullman’s atheism, perhaps the thing we should watch out for most is his cheapening of free grace, for without grace, where would we be?