The modern obsession with realism is really disappointing.   Our movies, novels and plays are ‘gritty’ and ‘earthy’ and ‘true to life’ .  We get upset by portrayals that are not completely possible or scientifically accurate.  Countless blogs are dedicated to debunking the ‘science’ in this or that  movie, and testing whether the car would have done this in real life in this particular blockbuster explosion.  Of course there still seems to be a place for the fantastic superhero movies.  But even these must have some scientifically viable plot lines.  A genetically modified spider, a wormhole or just really good engineering.  And given enough time in this world, even mutants and super heroes are bound to happen.

This outlook is also very prominent in our educational system.  The humanities are constantly belittled.  Degrees in History, Literature, and Art are chided, “what are you going to do, with that?”  The STEM fields are deified.  And the fact that women don’t often choose them is turned into a societal crisis on par with slavery.  “How dare we relegate women to humanities!”  Even the non-sciences are trying to get in on the game, by calling themselves social sciences.  All those things that women did in the home are now relegated to governments run by professionals in child psychology, early child hood development, and other faux sciences.  They are painted up with statistics and everyone pretends they haven’t destroyed yet another generation of children by treating them like a product in a factory assembly line.  We ignore  thousands of years of wisdom passed down to us, the one thing that makes us human.  But we can’t study that history, it is not real or scientific enough for us.  Like Rodney Dangerfield, that type of knowledge gets no respect.  The only purpose we have for history or literature is to teach it to our little grade schoolers.  The reason why we do this is still unclear to me.

This problem is also deeply skewing the Church.  It’s called systematic theology or literal reading.  This approach to Scripture is resulting in all sorts of distorted theology and even more distorted practice.  A lack of respect for historical events and the transmission of history through manuscripts or any other form of human tradition, undermines the soul of Christianity.  By trying to turn these studies into some form of science,in a desperate attempt to give them credibility on the modern stage, liberal scholars really make fools of themselves.  They analyze the gospel manuscripts and concoct the intermediate gospel of Q.  Which somehow God and his Church accidentally laid aside.  It’s a lot like Darwin’s missing link, which they are still looking for, somewhere in Africa I believe.  It’s buried right next to that copy of Q in gold leaf.  And even more conservative theologians are not unaffected by such thinking.  By imposing our modern hyper-literal-scientism back on ancient peoples and their texts, we miss a lot and distort a lot more.

But I will let you in on a little secret, before the hyper realism movement, people knew what real life was.  The whole point of myth, allegory and faerie land was not to escape or ignore reality.  It was to teach us more about reality by showing our world to us in a different way.  Through the looking glass, we see ourselves but also, not ourselves.  Everyone knows what evil is, everyone knows bad things happen, everyone knows what real is, we are living it every day.  That is the problem, we are so immersed in our world that it looses it’s meaning, it looses it’s enchantment.  And so it must be reenchanted for us. As Chesterton said “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”  These tales put the real world in its proper place.  They give meaning to all the facts our senses are taking in every day.  Meaning which we would not have by ourselves.  Because there is more to life that ourselves.  And without that, all the gritty experience are just meaningless wanderings.  The point was always that there is more to this world than what you see before you.  There is a vast world of the metaphysical, and we all have a sense of this which is why faerie land can reach out and touch us.  We long for it, we have a desire like hunger and thirst for it, sehnsucht, as C. S. Lewis explained it.  To kill this impulse is not more real, it is realism.  It is to deny the metaphysical, to deny the Christian.  It is to walk by sight and not by faith(II Corinthians 5:7).  We are supposed to be knights fighting the dragon, not having gritty mundane experiences.

And so, our pastors amass their professional degrees and sit in their church labs and dissect the texts with a microscope and a scalpel trying to find the exact, precise, the only meaning of a text.  As if there were only one.  As if language were so regimented and inhuman.  As if the Lord God of the Universe had sent us a secret code instead of a Man Jesus the Christ.  The Bible Scientist then  puts all these chopped up pieces into little boxes and calls them systematic theology.  Then he uses these boxes to come up with all sorts of crazy theories like the rapture.  Misunderstanding the rich metaphor of a bride running out to meet her bridegroom, which encouraged early Christians.  He tries to decipher who the Anti-Christ is, it can only be one person, as if these verses were a time capsule, confusing to everyone but us, right now today.  It’s all about us you know?  And we dare to criticize every faithful Christian before we invented this hyper realism.  “They were allegorizing the text” don’t you know?  No, I don’t know.  I think they knew the text and so were free to go beyond it.  They wove the images of scripture into their world.  When your whole culture knows the Bible and it’s images so well, you are free to make puns, and comparisons and metaphors from the text.  You can outline everything you do based on threes and sevens.  You can refer to difficult things in your life as Goliath.  Everyone knows you are not David.  They know who David was.  And now you are comparing that situation to your situation.  That’s how language works, it’s poetic.  That’s how new meaning is created and conveyed. Claiming some sort of high ground by pointing out that you are really not the real David, just makes you an ass, or perhaps a modern.  And that is the point.  There is a major split between our world and the medieval world.  Because scientific innovation has benefitted us in so many ways, we have come to depend and even to worship science.  We can’t imagine a world before the hyper literal.  It takes a lot of empathy to put ourselves in the minds of ancient peoples.  And so many today have simply declined to do so.  They are content attacking the growing few who are trying to bring it back.  And that is what is hopeful, many people are trying to bring it back. These modern trends are being resisted by something older.  The value of story and individual gifting is coming back.  The monolithic insanity of modernism is being pushed back.  Keep up the fight against this dragon too.