Redemption, Child Abuse, and Literary Taste

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 147702

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "mmmwintersteiger" 
<mmmwintersteiger at ...> wrote:
>
> > BAW:
> > JKR has stated that she is a Christian and that anyone who knows 
> > this should be able to figure out the ending.  Christianity is 
> > all about redemption.  A central teaching of the religion is that 
> > God became human in the person of Jesus Christ who gave his life 
> > not for good, righteous people, but for the worst sinners.  He
> > came to seek and save the lost, the sinful, the broken, the 
> > unloved.  And who is more of all those things than Tom Riddle?

michelle: 
 
> Christianity is all about redemption however these books appeal to 
> people who are not only Christian but all other religions and the 
non-
> religious as well.  To myself, and I am sure many others as well, 
it 
> would be bad literature to redeem someone like LV just because the 
> writer is a Christian.  I am glad that there are people in the 
world 
> who can forgive others no matter what they have done, but this is 
> literature not reality. I read to be entertained not to be told 
that 
> I should "forgive and forget" and "turn the other cheek".  I will 
get 
> my morals from the Bible, thank you very much, not from the fiction 
I 
> choose to entertain myself with.

Geoff:
As a Christian, I have commented on many occasions on my own personal 
take on how JKR's faith affects the books. I have posted on several 
occasions about the fact that no one is irredeemable - usually in 
connection with Draco.

On the subject of your closing sentence, I touched on this back in 
message 145828, which was in a thread "Moralising and preaching" and 
I wrote:

"I think this may depend on how you interpret moralising and 
sermonising. We often draw comparisons with "The Lord of the Rings" 
and the Narnia books. In these stories, here and there are occasions 
when folk have suggested that Tolkien and Lewis were guilty of doing 
just this in their works. In the case of Lewis, it is probably true 
because he made it clear that he intended "The Lion, the Witch and 
the Wardrobe" to be an allegory of the Christian way to faith.

If someone has a strong faith, then that is going to permeate and 
influence what they do and think and it will probably show itself in 
their writing unless they make a great effort to mask it or write 
from an opposite point of view for effect. It depends, as I said, as 
to how far you consider writing from your own world view and letting 
that underpin your fiction constitutes moralising and sermonising. 
Tolkien makes his points very subtly but if you look closely enough - 
not only in LOTR but in other books like "The Silmarillion" - you can 
see where he is coming from and what moral absolutes drive his 
characters."

One has to remember that it can be through fiction that a person can 
come to a real life acknowledgement of God and - if by a Christian 
author - a realisation of what Christ did to save men. It is also an 
interesting exercise to read about the interplay of thoughts between 
J.R.R.Tolkien, Hugo Dyson and C.S.Lewis about ideas such as myths 
which helped to finalise Lewis' faith and Christian commitment. 
Sadly, I have lost the book over the years but it is covered at some 
length in "The Inklings" which was (I think) by Humphrey Carpenter 
who was the author of the first biography of Tolkien.