The Gospel and Superman

By Neil Earle

“I don’t think this world needs Superman. This world doesn’t need a Savior,” Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) tells the Man of Steel in the latest remake of one of America’s most popular fairy tales.

Later on, suspended high over Metropolis, Superman (Brandon Routh) tells Lois quite feelingly something like, “I can hear people every day. They need a Savior.”

Now this is not the “wow” moment pastor-journalists such as myself might seize upon as a chance to pontificate, either as a recommendation for or against the movie. I’m still partial to the 1978 Christopher Reeve version myself where the early details are so convincing, set as they are in breathtakingly beautiful rural Alberta (Superboy a Canadian?!) that you almost get to believe it.

No, as a longtime Superman fan from those boyhood DC Comics days of the 1950s I am not surprised when I hear such dialogue. Fact is, a fellow student and I offended a group of our colleagues at a seminary one day when we jokingly pointed out the parallels between the Gospel and the Man of Steel. We were on a roll:

You don’t have to be a genius to be able to continue the set.

This is why I was amused when a Christian book appeared in the late 1970s, “The Gospel According to Superman.” I couldn’t help but chuckle: “They beat me to it!”

This allows us a brief discourse on the differences between pop culture (Superman, Batman are classics) and high culture (The Great Gatsby, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).

The main difference, the experts say, is that high culture explores and reworks human archetypes – similar patterns of behavior that all humans share in to a certain degree with lessons for us to ponder (Gatsby’s money couldn’t buy him what he wanted). By contrast, pop culture deals in stereotypes. Stereotypes are boringly predictable stock moments and characters and situations that soon leave us feeling less elevated than we would if we read Plato or Walt Whitman or Virginia Woolf.

Pop culture is mental junk food, high culture is a beef steak, nourishing to the spirit.

Pop culture reworks the same old/same old, high culture surprises us with unexpected depths and insights – the “Young and the Restless” versus “The Ancient Mariner.”

Superman is a work of pop culture – one of its classic evocations. Yet even pop culture can touch on some universal and enduring themes on occasion. Superficial as it may seem, the fact is we are all looking for a Savior. I’m sure a hundred Christian websites could say the same thing and use this point as a launching pad for a sermon on Christ and his saving grace. And I’m not knocking that, just moving beyond it to say: Hero figures still sell. Something inside us will shell out money for a tale where genuine goodness exists and where goodness wins in the end.

Bill Moyers once asked the cultural critic Joseph Campbell a relevant question on his 1980s television series, The Power of Myth. In an almost unguarded response, Campbell answered candidly as to why the same stories keep repeating – tales of heroism and nobility, striving and self-sacrifice, trying to rescue the damsel, the city, the group. I am still surprised at his answer: “Because these are the only themes worth writing about.”

C.S. Lewis once advanced a similar concept. With Christianity, Lewis argued, the Myth became Fact. What human beings have always longed for, have always hoped for, still yearn and even pray for – the possibility of meaning, of a person who is on our side, that the universe is not apathetic but that love and caring and purpose exists at its core – that, said Lewis, is precisely what the Gospel is all about. It is the central story of our existence, the one on which all the others are merely child-like replicas. Or, in the words of 2 Timothy 1: 9-19, we need the caring God “who has saved us and called us with a holy calling…which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began (yes, before even Krypton exploded!) but has now been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.”

There it is. In the Gospel account, the Myth became fact and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. No wonder the human imagination keeps reinventing to the point of trivializing this Hero Story. It’s the only thing worth writing about.