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“Let the Hero, born of woman,

crush the serpent with His heel.”

— Julia Ward Howe, The Battle Hymn of the Republic

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The late greatest-comedian-of-all-time Norm Macdonald once said that he believed the Bible could be trusted because it posited that every human being has a component of wretchedness and a component of divinity, both of which seemed obviously true. Especially if you’ve read Macdonald’s not-a-memoir, you should know that a great deal of what made him funny was his cogent and incisive understanding of the world. The wild paradox of human experience is that basic fact that you and I are made in the image of God, and yet that image is rendered warped, distorted, incomprehensible by our sinful natures. We are each flesh and spirit, mind and body, image of God and damnable worm, and these juxtapositions exist in awful tension at every moment of our mortal lives.

The Christ not only embodies this juxtaposition more profoundly than any mere man, but also more perfectly. His divinity is total and miraculously harmonious with His perfect humanity. Something true about the Eastern doctrine of theosis is that the hope of Christ is to one day partake in that harmony, to be raised with perfected flesh that does not conflict with the divine fingerprint of redeemed souls. But this is only made possible by the One who gave Himself up in perfect, efficacious love, and until His return, mortal man contends by the Spirit with the sin that lives in the flesh.

In the mythological structure of Christian faith, Christ is the Hero. His embodiment of complete divinity and ultimate defeat of the devil, His slaying of the dragon, victory over death itself, encapsulates and epitomizes the phenomenon of ultimate goodness. He is quite literally the Good manifested in the flesh. This powerful reality extends to all mankind by means of grace through faith, as the Christ stands at the door of each heart and knocks. The Hero sends His Holy Spirit to inhabit those who are baptized into the victory He has won. 

The persistence of our wretched state even in the midst of our sanctification is cause for constant reliance upon the grace of the one true Hero. While the call to be holy as He is holy is of indispensable importance, it is logically founded upon the most basically important fact of His unique power and accomplishment. It is only possible to typify the Hero insofar as He is, in fact, the one and only Hero.

There is a common misreading of the story of David and Goliath that places the reader in the sandals of David. This reading is erroneous because David himself, who appears to be the hero of the story, does not even make it about himself. David’s nobility is in his boasting in the God of Israel as the true Hero of the story. If David did not paint himself as the hero, even being the one who humiliated and destroyed the invincible giant of the Philistines, who am I to think I am the hero of the story? No, like the rest of Scripture, the story is not about you or me. It is about God. David typifies Christ. His heroism is an echo of the goodness of God, whom the story is intended to glorify. If I am anyone in the story, I am Saul or, by extension, the children of Israel, trusting in their own strength and wallowing in fear, relying on the hero for rescue from the taunting devil. 

The ubiquity of this misunderstanding in American evangelical culture emerges from a number of underlying psychological facts, not least of which is a reversal of the proper order of operations in reading a hero story. As Nate mentioned in his piece on villains, part of what makes  a good hero is relatability. It is important to note, however, that if we consider Christ to be the typical Hero, then our calling is to become relatable to Christ, to be molded to His shape, rather than vice versa. All too often, the pride of individualism enjoins us to mold heroes in our own image, to typify our own traits, to project our own egos onto the image of the hero. Making the hero like oneself is much easier than making oneself like the hero, but it is a fatal mistake.

This phenomenon is seen on a cultural level most obviously in the absurd disagreements over the racial identities of heroes in cinema. Sex and sexuality often get lumped into the same game as well thanks to the secular dogma of intersectionality. We know the drill: a popular protagonist is adapted to the screen with sex or race or some other identity marker changed on the pretense that marginalized persons cannot otherwise relate to the character, there is outrage on the internet, nothing changes, rinse and repeat. The problems with this justification of creating relatability are multifarious, but the aforementioned reversal of operations plays a critical role. Ostensibly, changing the ethnic identity of a cinematic character should generally be of laughably miniscule consequence. This act takes on such an emotional salience in part due to the weight of identity attributed to whatever marker is altered and the true intention in doing so.

A good hero embodies what is universal about heroism. A relatable hero is one like King David, whose intrigue as a narrative figure stems from his struggle against his innate flaws, sins, and shortcomings in that universal struggle toward the objective ideal embodied in Christ — a struggle whose ultimate moral is predicated on the grace of said Christ. I don’t have to be a Hebrew or a king to relate to or learn from David, and you don’t even have to be male to do so on the most basic levels, either. If you do find that you can’t learn from or relate to him on these grounds, this reveals what I think is a woeful ignorance about what is universal in human experience as well as what truly constitutes human identity. 

I’ve noticed a sort of contradictory trend in secular culture, especially cinema, today. It seems there are fewer and fewer authors who are able to write about characters who do not even superficially resemble themselves. Writers increasingly seem to write only about characters who not only share their language and general experience, but also share their race, sex, sexual proclivities, tastes, and personality. There is a sense in which all art is necessarily autobiographical, but that sense is not total. Part of the beauty of art is its ability to tap into the stream of shared consciousness, if you will, to reach into the depths of what is common among people. All communication, art, and culture, in fact, is predicated upon commonality. There is interplay between that commonality and uniqueness, certainly, but the commonality is what imbues it with intelligibility. 

This expression that persons can’t relate to characters depicted as looking different than themselves is literally skin-deep. It represents not only the apparent desire to shape the hero to one’s own image, but also a supreme lack of any power of sympathy. In projecting oneself onto the template of the Hero, one inevitably also projects the totality of one’s individual experience onto the continuum of what is universal. This fact can be observed as degrading our ability to communicate politically as well, as people increasingly find it impossible to respect, sympathize with, or understand opinions that they disagree with. The fact that it is possible to understand someone while simultaneously agreeing to disagree — and it is a fact — is critically endangered in the American public. This happens when feeling becomes mistaken for the Good, opinion and inclination take the throne of rationality, and subjectivity usurps objectivity. It is the very same kind of individualism that gives rise to the celebration of pride, the utmost vice. These subjective experiences have their place, but they must stay precisely there.

This individualism makes for terrible, only superficially relatable heroes because it is fundamentally true that you and I are not the Hero. We can be heroic, we can be Christ-like, we can become like little heroes, but this is only possible by a supernatural force. It takes the acting of God Himself upon the human soul to realize this potential, and this act of God is logically subsequent to the actions of Christ as the Son of Man, the Hero of all time. Heroes that follow in this ethos should not be relatable because they are perfect, but because they strive imperfectly toward the same perfection we ought to desire. 

I’ll leave the elaboration on the true meaningfulness of Superman to my friend Mr. Klumpenhower, but, as Nate mentioned in his discussion of villainy, Superman is not a good hero because of relatability. I am not particularly interested in superheroes as such, nor do I find them inherently meaningful, so I hope any offended parties will forgive my ignorance of and irreverence toward the subject, but this example is useful insofar as Superman represents a fixture of popular imagination in the contemporary United States. Superman is an intensely Christian cultural phenomenon insofar as he is meant to be purely aspirational. His classic nemesis, Lex Luthor, represents what is expected of human nature, the abuse of great power for selfishness. Superman subverts this expectation in a manner nearly incomprehensible to post-Christian sensibilities by using ultimate power selflessly. The invincible, ultimate super-human puts himself in the way of harm for the sake of others. Sound familiar yet? At this point, it is almost trite to consider that the thing that makes a fictional hero resonant is his partaking in the Good and consequent imitation — no matter how crude — of Christ as the archetype. 

The aforementioned incomprehensibility of this phenomenon to our culture is seen in the barrage of modern characters that “subvert” the Superman trope and end up becoming the very thing Superman subverts, which is the predictable human nature of his nemesis. Edgy, psycho superheroes that riff on Superman’s “truth, justice and the American way” with the subtlety of a teenage punk band like Omniman, Homelander, U.S. Agent, and even evil versions of the Superman character revert the subversion of Superman back to the expectation. Christ subverted the symbol of the cross and the power of death, and the unrepentant of Rome’s population continued in the same mockery that Christ endured on the cross itself, clearly not understanding the triumph of His resurrection and transformation of that humiliation into glory. Now, these sort of satirical characters in popular culture can be valuable in their critique of the ways in which the “American way” fails to meet the standard of the Good, but they often devolve into a devilish mockery of any objective goodness as such, a Satanic accusation that there is no such thing as the hero after all. Like the pagan Romans who mocked Jesus for dying a criminal’s death, the superhero-gone-bad trope often mocks (in multiple senses of the word) that which it doesn’t understand.

The denigrating and denouncing of a collective American-ness as an ethic goes hand in hand with the sacrilegious impulse to destroy monuments and decry any hero whose nature isn’t molded precisely after his author. It’s a Satanic impulse insofar as it represents a denial of any goodness greater than oneself. I’ll likely discuss this somewhat more in another entry.

Bad heroes in fiction are made to place the author on the throne of goodness. Good heroes emulate the one Hero by acknowledging the one Author on the throne of the Good. Whether this means an idealistic sort of character who is meant to represent perfection as best he can be written to do, or a more grounded figure who struggles painfully toward that perfection, both kinds of good depiction are good precisely because their authors acknowledge the external transcendence of Perfection Himself. Basically, well-written heroes should generally be aspirational figures to whom we relate, not relatable figures who aspire to us. They find their goodness in who they are meant and made to be rather than in who they are in themselves. Relatable heroes’ goodness is found in their trajectory toward perfection, who they are at the end of the story rather than the beginning. Heroes who superficially mimic the traits of their authors ultimately fail to embody true goodness by mistaking the appearance of man for the essence of God. We are in part wretched and in part divine, and any character that portrays man as only one of those is probably a villain, not a hero, deserving scorn rather than admiration.

And the Philistine said unto David, “Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. And the Philistine said to David, “Come to me, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field.” Then said David to the Philistine, “Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied.” — 1 Samuel 17:43-45 (KJV)