This is the third post where I’ll be offering some theological reflections on community trimmed from the theology section of my recently-finished book on Harry Potter, due out in Summer ‘10.
These reflections may seem a little choppy, since they’re no longer part of a larger context, but the larger context is J. K. Rowling’s emphasis on the value of community.
In his Apologeticum (a defense of Christianity), the third-century Christian theologian Tertullian employed familial terms to describe the ideal communal relationship, one of many suggestions from the first few centuries of Christian life that our faith journey together is also built around the model of family, albeit a large and diverse family with one Father. [2] This is certainly how Jesus spoke of the community that had grown up around him; Barbara Brown Taylor observes that in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reminds his followers that “they need each other like brothers and sisters need each other . . . they belong to one family.” [3]
The Apostle Paul formalized many notions about Christianity, including this idea of family membership; Paul addressed the communities with which he was in contact as “brothers,” a term that appears more than 50 times in the letters most reliably attributed to him. In contemporary translations of the Bible, the Greek adelphoi is typically rendered as the more inclusive “brothers and sisters”; Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan argue that for Paul “to address people as brothers (and sisters)” was not simply about social convention or bonds of affection. It was, instead, the use of a new language of family that states that although the members of this family are not biologically related, they nonetheless “have the same obligations to each other as biological brothers and sisters do.” Paul was arguing that communion in Christ created new families that were to be “communities of caring and sharing,” particularly in the absence of the care of biological families, and this is wisdom we can easily understand dramatically in the story of Harry Potter. [4]
In its diversity, Hogwarts represents some essential Christian ideas about living within a varied community as opposed to the sanctity of the individual. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, described that necessity in this way:
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.
We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.
(Romans 12: 3-10, NRSV)
Borg and Crossan suggest that Paul’s vision for the ecclesia is simply this: “In Christ people are equal—everybody matters.” [5] For Paul, this diversity in the body of Christ was part of his larger understanding—that in the faith community, though people might differ in abilities, resources, and gifts, they were equal, and that together, they were part of something much larger. As Paul suggested in the Letter to the Galatians, “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3: 26-28, NRSV)
Jesus himself understood how difficult it was for his followers to get along, even while they had him to referrer their disputes; he could only have imagined that their rivalries and prejudices would grow larger and more unmanageable after his departure, and so he spoke directly to this problem in a section of the Gospel of Matthew some scholars call the “Discourse on Life in the Faithful Community.” In Chapter 18, Jesus enjoins us not to be stumbling blocks to others, and tells Peter that if his brother hurts him, he should forgive him not seven times but seventy-seven—forever, for all intents and purposes. Jesus also speaks of how to deal with the problem of evil within the community:
If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.
But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.
If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
(Matthew 18: 15-20, NRSV).
To read the end of this plea for reconciliation as a final statement of ostracism—for such it is often considered by Bible scholars—hardly represents Jesus’ true attitudes. The enemies of Jesus took him to task for associating with people outside the acceptable limits of Jewish community, including tax collectors, and the Gospel of Matthew is traditionally attributed to a tax-collector. Taken together with his earlier comments on forgiveness and community, Jesus seems to be calling for people to forge bonds that can only be broken under the most serious of conditions.
As Taylor has preached, in this passage, Jesus seems to care less about who is right and who is wrong, and more about keeping the community together, less about mere tolerance, and more about harmony. [6]
The point of community and moral formation, as J. K. Rowling suggested in her own discussion of the creation of Hogwarts, is a world in which one’s differences do not separate people in and of themselves, but are seen, instead, as a vital part of creation. Tertullian wrote that while Christians called themselves brother and sister, they also claimed kinship with all human beings. [7] This movement toward harmony, as we will see, is ultimately where we end up in the Potter stories, with even the offensive Slytherin gathered into kinship—or at least, all of those who, as Tertullian put it, “from the same womb of a common ignorance have agonized into the same light of truth.” [8]
[1] Book of Common Prayer, 504.
[2] Tertullian, Apologeticum 39.
[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven, 84.
[4] Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 187.
[5] Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul, 202.
[6] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven, 85.
[7] Tertullian, Apologeticum 39.
[8] Ibid.
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