Get Your Pretense On!

20 • Get Your Pretense On!

out dreamed-up worlds and characters which do not exist to fight evil that is not present.

Yet, the Bible, on the other hand, is the divinely inspired record of God’s saving work in creation, Israel, and Christ. Its vision of creation and destiny read just like a fairy tale, the kind where God almighty will restore all things that humanity lost and twisted, integrating it back under his rule. Quite literally, we shall live “happily ever after.” This narrative is epic and marvelous, but it is also historically accurate and spiritually vital. The events and happenings did and will take place, as all who truly believe demonstrate by their devotion to its hero, Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord and Christ. So, to be a believer in the Kingdom of God, to hold to Jesus Christ as Messiah and Lord, does involve seeing things differently. To be a disciple is to see things as God does. And here is where the Bible and fairy tale seem to line up. As J. R. R. Tolkien said, in the biblical tale of God’s love in Christ legend and truth, fairy tale and history, myth and reality come together. In the eucatastrophic tale (i.e., “good catastrophe” story), the grace of goodness seems to laser in at the last minute, ending doom and restoring the just to their rightful places. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist.” . . . In its fairy-tale – or otherworldly – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far