‘Sacramental World of Harry Potter’

If you thought the ‘Christian Controversy’ was by considering the Boston Globe reported that Harry is now a staple in college curricula across the country, you were wrong. The new face of the controversy is not whether Harry Potter is Christian but whether he is properly Christian. Frankly, that is a much more interesting conversation.

David Nilsen, a Historical Theology major at Westminster Seminary, posted a wonderfully complimentary essay on the A-Team Christian Apologetics blog (”Speak the Truth, but Do it in Love, idiot!”) about Harry Potter. In ‘The Sacramental World of Harry Potter’ he asserts that while Ms. Rowling’s Hogwarts Adventures are Christian, considering they are written in a sacramental literary tradition (English fantasy), they depart from the victory Reformation theology won by medieval Catholicism in having “desacralized” the natural world.

This “victory” was the birth of contemporary naturalism and empiricism, alas, and the departure of (some of) the Reformers from sacramental Christianity, Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglo-Catholic. Mr. Nilsen and Dr. Clark as champions of a God who is Transcendent but not Immanent except by salvific Grace are exact, I think, in noting that their beliefs (denying the “magic” used to bless natural elements in Liturgy, baptism, etc.) assemble the

Romantic tradition in English letters, a reaction in large part to precisely that desacralization of the world by Protestant theologians, problematic at best.

I would only offer as a point of reflection the possibility that one reason Harry’s story resonates so profoundly with readers everywhere (and of all beliefs) is that Coleridge and the Christian Platonists — Anglo-Protestants all — that founded the fantasy tradition were right and the desacralizing Reformers wrong. Harry’s story, as explained in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, is largely the story of Harry as a story-cipher or symbol for logos, the uncreated aspect of the human soul and the bridge amidst man and God the Logos, Whose created world is, as Lewis noted a la Barfield (and Coleridge), “mental,” i.e., essentially Logos.

Mr. Nilsen “gets” that Harry Potter is Christian in themes and info but has missed how these stories act as a effective correction, an antidote or counter-spell whether you will, to the spell of materialism and naturalism, which, again, Lewis notes, has enthralled the world since the victory of the “desacralizing” Reformers.

I covet, as always, your comments and correction. (H/T to ‘Dr. Art’ for that link.)