Firefly, Tolkien, and narrative theology

The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, from “Mythopoeia”It has been my custom, while using my rowing machine, to watch episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, which I consider one of the two greatest television shows I’ve ever seen. (I don’t believe TV as a medium has produced much true art, or many truly great stories, but I do believe both are possible.) Lately, however, I’ve been watching other things while I row, and this week, I started in on the other greatest series I’ve ever seen: Firefly. It’s the first time I’ve watched any of the episodes since the movie came out; what Joss Whedon did with the movie hit me too hard. That’s also why I haven’t posted about being a Browncoat, or linked to fan sites like “Whoa. Good Myth.” Rather like being a Mariners fan these days, it’s just been easier not to stress about it too much.Now, this might seem like an odd and pointless thing to get worked up about—so a TV show was canceled after fourteen episodes—so what? It’s still a TV show, after all. So Fox handled it badly, gave the show no real chance, and canceled it unfairly soon; is it really that big a deal? Well, it was that big a deal for all the folks who worked on the show, for one thing. Beyond that, we all have our reasons, and I’m sure mine aren’t the same as everyone else’s; but for me, it’s the story, or rather, the stories, which were untimely cut off, and the lives of the characters in those stories. Whedon, Tim Minear, and their crew of writers had a great world and a great set of characters and stories going, both enjoyable and deep; to have that brought to an untimely end is a great loss.That’s why I rejoiced when the movie deal went forward; which meant that what Whedon did with Serenity really hit me hard. I think he put his own ideas of what is artistic ahead of what was best for his creation—not only the story and the characters, but also the communities he had created, most importantly the actors, writers, and crew, and also all of us who call ourselves Browncoats. Tolkien speaks of us as sub-creators, people who create what he calls “Secondary Worlds,” creations which are real within their own laws, to the best of our ability to make them real; we create in reflection (or, perhaps better, as refractions) of the great Creator who made us, because we were made like him. The desire to be gods ourselves may have been what led us into sin, but it was not perhaps a wholly wrong one, properly channeled—for when we create, we are in a sense small gods to our creation. If we take Tolkien’s point of view, however (as I believe we should), this has a significant implication for our creative activity: we have the responsibility to be, as best as we can, good gods to our creation. Our work has to be primarily about what is best for this thing we are making, whatever it might be, not merely about what’s best for us or what we want to do. On my read, from the things he’s said, Joss Whedon violated that with Firefly/Serenity; he was a bad god to his creation.Still, though, you might say: does this matter? Wasn’t it, after all, still just a TV show? Yes, of course it was a TV show, but no, it wasn’t just a TV show. Nothing is ever just anything—especially not people; and thus, especially not stories, to the extent that they’re true stories about people. By that I don’t necessarily mean factual; there are biographies and histories which are factual but aren’t really true, because they miss the heart of the matter, while many historical fictions, though they depart from the facts, are far truer because they give us real understanding of people and events. Indeed, many novels about things that never happened and people who never lived are nevertheless true stories in that they broaden our awareness of ourselves and of others, open our eyes and minds to things we have not before seen or realized, and deepen our knowledge of what it means to be human.Stories are powerful things. It’s one thing to express an opinion, or to set forth a proposition about how the world works; it’s quite another thing to bring that opinion or proposition to life in a story. People who might reject, or at least argue with, your position if it were plainly stated may find themselves influenced by it, if your story is powerful enough and sufficiently well-crafted; and those who wouldn’t understand it intellectually in a propositional form may well get it intuitively and affectively if you bring it to life in a story. That’s what stories do with our ideas: they bring them to life, incarnating them in the lives of the characters we create, making them not merely intellectual realities, but human realities.This is one reason why the greatest of all Christian theologians is not Paul, but Jesus himself. (There are others, of course, such as the fact that Jesus was original, while Paul was derivative of Jesus.) This is something too often missed, as Dr. Kenneth Bailey points out (and as Jared Wilson has also said, though his emphasis is a little different), because we tend to see Jesus as a nice moral teacher telling quaint stories; we don’t really believe that those stories can be theologically profound and powerful. In fact, though, they can, and they are; the more overtly “theological” works in the New Testament, profound as they are, are simply developments, explications, and applications in propositional form of the truths already communicated incarnationally through the parables of Jesus, and also through the broader narratives of the Gospels, Acts, and the Old Testament. God doesn’t give us a three-point outline, he gives us a story—from which to learn, and in which to live.Of course, it’s possible to take this too far; there are those who would overbalance the other way, exalting the biblical narratives to the extent of diminishing or even discounting the NT epistles (and other non-narrative portions of the Bible—but the epistles, and particularly Paul, usually seem to be the main target). That’s not right either. What we need to remember is that the epistles, though not themselves narrative texts, are nevertheless part of a narrative; their context is a story. They were written for particular reasons to particular human beings in particular situations dealing with particular things, even if we don’t know all those particularities (in some cases, we have a pretty good idea; in others, we can only speculate); and when we read them, we read them in the middle of our own story as God speaking to us in our particular situations and issues. We need to understand them accordingly—and we need to understand that that fact is the reason why they matter.Stories matter. They matter because they’re the stuff of our life, of our reality and our nature, and the expression of the creative ability we’ve been given by (and in the image of) the one who made us—and we matter. They matter because they affect us, moving our emotions and shaping our view of the world, both for good and for ill. And as a Christian, I affirm that they matter because everything we do matters, because the best of what we do will endure forever. And if they matter, then we need to take them seriously, both as readers and, for those of us so called, as writers—for our sake, and for everyone’s.