For the Love of Storytelling - Featuring Nate Morgan Locke, the Reformed Mythologist

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. We have a special guest with us today from across the pond, the most cliched way to say that he is in England, our friend Nate Morgan Locke. Hello Nate.

Hello! It’s good evening for me. I don’t know what it is for you guys.

It’s late morning here. I first came across Nate’s work on the Popcorn Parenting podcast, which I believe I’ve recommended on the show, and I knew at once that he was a kindred spirit, as it were, so it’s very good to talk with you at last. Would you please tell us, since you are the Reformed Mythologist on YouTube, what is the career path to becoming the Reformed Mythologist, and I ask only out of idle curiosity.

I can do the short or the long version. Essentially I grew up in Narnia, and I mean that literally. My parents’ house is called Narnia, so that tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

I was brought up in a Christian home in which stories and storytelling were just a part of everyday life. My interests grew into sort of literature, drama, theater, film, all the usual sorts of things for storytelling. Once I had graduated from university with a literature degree, I then started to work for the Church, so these kind of combined passions in their beautiful merry dance of loving the Lord Jesus and loving storytelling basically ended up with this ridiculous phrase Reformed Mythologist. Reformed is my theology and mythologist just means someone who studies stories, so there we go.

Wonderful. When you say working for the Church, is that the Church of England?

Yes. I’m not ordained but I’ve got a Master’s of Divinity and I’ve gone through those Hebrew and Greek classes. You talk about halting toward Zion. I was halting towards the mid-terms and halting towards the finals and so on. I got my way through that so I’m fully qualified but just not ordained. I worship in an Anglican church here in the UK with my wife and my two children.

How old are your children?

They are now 15 and 13 so that’s pretty scary stuff, not because those are particularly difficult ages but just because it happened so fast. They were 5 and 3 but a moment ago.

There’s a question that Greg asks his literature questions at the beginning of each year. Is it only in World Literature or only in Expository Writing?

World Literature, Theology, Expository Writing, wherever it comes up.

He asks this question a lot because it’s a fun question. Knowing that we bear the image of God, and that is in the knowledge, righteousness, holiness and dominion over the creatures, we bear the image of the true man, the prophet, priest and king, but we do so in ways different from one another. If you had to describe yourself as prophet, priest, or king, are you a puzzle solver, or are you concerned with interpersonal peace, or do you go get the job done?

Oh, goodness me.

Or you can pick some point in-between because most of us find that. I draw a triangle on the board with prophet/king/priest.

I might have to go with maybe prophet/king. Maybe that’s it. I spend a lot of time preaching, so I travel quite regularly to preach in churches, and I’ve been doing a huge amount of boarding schools recently, which is quite a strange scenario in which to preach the gospel, so standing up in front of an audience and proclaiming “Behold, the Lamb of God” is probably my main role. So I’ll go with something on the prophet side of things, maybe with a bit of kingly stuff. I’m not quite sure why

Do you find that that’s your taste in stories as well? Do you prefer the mysteries?

Intellectual challenge or do you want to see action or do you want true love and romance and interpersonal relationships to prevail?

That’s a good one. I actually find action less and less compelling the older I get. I want less, and by action I mean the kind of really spectacular stuff, but I do like visual storytelling so in that sense I don’t want too much talking, too much dialogue in there.

Alfred Hitchcock said, “Too many films nowadays are what I call pictures of people talking.” That’s not my idea of a great film. But not so much with the explosions and gunfights and things. I’m more intrigued to just see the camera kind of take us through and show us what we need to see in order to make a compelling narrative.

I don’t think we’ve answered this question on the show, have we, Greg?

After how many years, I don’t remember. You first.

I think it’s telling that one of my favorite books is Gilead by Marilyn Robinson, in which nothing happens. That is a story about relationships, so I think I’m fairly priesty.

I agree.

It’s funny because when I was your student and you put me on your triangle on the board you were way out in the prophet corner and I was like, “No.”

There’s a bit of the prophetess about you. You want to know why. You want answers. You don’t just want to feel your way through life.

That’s true.

I am decidedly prophetic. My favorite kind of stories are mystery stories. I don’t care if there’s romance or violence or whatever going on – they all have their place – but I want something where I have to figure out, “What in the world is going on here?” It doesn’t have to be a murder mystery.

For instance, my wife and I are listening to Project Hail Mary as an audiobook right now, which I find absolutely fascinating, first because I have a science degree, but also because I’m trying to project, “What’s the next step? What do you do next? Where does this go? What’s the author trying to do here?”

It’s certainly not a murder mystery, I hope. When people die there’s an explanation for it. But I want to know what’s next, how come, where’s this going? That’s my reading and that’s me as a teacher mostly.

I’m very kingly when I’m directing a play. “Get over there, shut up, say your lines.” Priestly yes, but I keep falling back on words to minister to people. I’m not so touchy-feely, although I appreciate it and I’ll take a hug from anybody.

I raised myself on writers with a heavy emphasis upon theological content, and I get nervous when people start saying, “Yeah, theology, that’s nice but let’s know Jesus.”

“Um, yes, however, how are you going to pull that off if you don’t know about him? And the thing that tells us about him is the Bible, in words. Then we can look at the creeds of the Church and we can look at the confessions.” So that’s me.

I think it’s interesting, Nate, that you brought up visual storytelling as something kingly. We’ve talked about that a little bit with Samson, how the eye is the organ of dominion. It’s true. I hadn’t thought about that.

Yeah, In the three temptations Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof. “All these I will give you to rule if you bow down and worship me.” There’s a connection between seeing and taking/having, to borrow a line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We see something and we want it. We want to possess it, so Satan showed Jesus glory and beauty. He said, “Take this and here’s what you get out of it.”

Eve in the garden very similarly – it was pleasant to the eyes. “So take it. It’s pretty. You must have it.” We want the pretty thing.

As Christians we want it for Christ. We want this beautiful world to be won back to Christ and all that that means. Outside of Christ we want it for ourselves to corrupt it with our lusts. But there’s a decided connection in scripture between the eye-gate and the kingly action.

Nate, your latest project, looking at your YouTube channel, is the Hero’s Creed project. Where did that come from? What was the impulse?

Essentially the Hero’s Creed is a combination of the hero’s journey and the Apostles Creed. You don’t get very far in studying storytelling without coming across Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the Monomyth or The Hero’s Journey.

The more I was kind of looking at various different story structures and Freytag’s triangle or whatever else people want to put in there, I was thinking I’d quite like to be able to show how Christ in his person and work is fulfilling all of our deepest yearning for great story and great myth and great narrative.

So let’s look at Campbell’s hero’s journey and the diagram which is usually drawn, which is a kind of story clock beginning at 12 and then working it’s way around back to 12 again, and let’s plot the points of the Apostles Creed, which I think we can all agree is probably the most successful distillation of the gospel message or the Christian story that we’ve had.

I got very excited when I started to sort of draw this out for people and say we start not with the known and the unknown world, but we start with “God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,” so we start with heaven and earth which is a unity in its first creation.

It’s only after Adam and Eve sin that the barrier between heaven and earth is essentially created, the threshold with the flaming sword of the cherubim to guard the way back to the Tree of Life to put the distinction between the heavens and the earth. We see that mirrored in the building of the tabernacle as well. That’s originally one grand room and then you add in the curtain between the holy and most holy place.

I was then thinking if you now show “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son our Lord” and put those at 1:00 and 2:00, “who was conceived by the Holy Spirit” – crosses the threshold, becomes incarnate – “born of the Virgin Mary” – that’s 4:00. 5:00 is “suffered under Pontius Pilate”, 6:00, the bottom of the story clock, “crucified, died, and was buried and descended to the dead.” It all kind of piles up there in Christ’s crucifixion and burial.

Then we get to 7:00. “On the third day he rose again.” I’ll leave 8:00 and come back to that. Then we cross back over the threshold at 9:00. “He ascended into heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

Essentially that mapping out of Christ’s humiliation and exaltation is I think the best way to show people visually what we’ve been confessing verbally for centuries.

The one piece I kind of leave there at 8:00 where there’s nothing there is to say, “Why has he done this? What’s the purpose? What’s the thing that Christ has come to bring back to heaven?” Of course it’s us. We are the boon. The boon is a major part of Campbell’s work, that Christ in his work is bringing us back into relationship with the Father by his sacrificial death.

Then you can go back around again with the Holy Spirit sent at Pentecost after the ascension and Session of Christ. Then we get “the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”

Essentially I’ve just described to you what the hero’s creed is as it stands, and the plan is to use these next couple of months trying to kind of gather people’s thoughts on how best to share that with them. Is it a poster? For the moment we’ve made a poster of it, but it could be a series of videos. It could be a book. It could be a course. It could be all manner of things, but I don’t want to presume that I know what that is.

If you would like to know more about it, if you’d like to help me, I would love your help. You can sign up to the mailing list at heroscreed.com. I’m really just trying to give people some story thoughts and just get people’s feedback on how to make this a thing, as they say.

I have a couple observations. You were listing possibilities – a picture, a series. Yes, all of the above because we learn differently, and one form of learning will lead to another. “Wow, this is cool! I wish there were lectures on it.”

“Well…”

“I don’t like listening to lectures. Is there something I can read in an hour?”

“Well, take this.”

“No, that’s for nincompoops. I want something deep and meaty.”

“Here’s this 1,000-page book, carefully researched with footnotes and bibliography.”

I think you’ve bought into something that may take you a few decades, but let me encourage you to do it because what you’ve just described – and as you say it was like, “Well, yeah. I didn’t come up with it, though.” It’s one of those things that after the fact it’s like, “Well, that’s obvious.” I’ve never thought of using the Apostles Creed in that form before.

Another suggestion though – up front, not in all of those forms. But when you start doing a series or anything lengthy – and forgive me, this is my area of touchiness – you’re going to need to be very clear, because you’re going to use the word myth, which is fine – but are you saying the Apostles Creed is just a story? It just happens to be a brilliant one. Or are you saying these things historically happened, and is it just a coincidence that historically happening they fit the model of story?

What’s the connection here? The connection is God the Creator, the Storyteller made man in his image, and God writing a book. You obviously know all about that, but I think you’re going to need to say it. I think you’re going to need to tell people up front. “When I say I believe in God the Father, it’s because I believe in God the Father.”

This is not what Francis Schaeffer would call an upper-story experience. This is first-hand belief in propositional truth of something that really has happened, but because it’s God who’s doing it, it imprints on all of history and all of reality and all of human life and experience.

So are we talking literary theory or are we talking theology? Yes. We’re also talking history and philosophy of history.

Anyway, that’s my immediate two cents.

That’s such a helpful point. The essay I usually go back to is Lewis’s “Myth Became Fact.” Part of the reason for that is because when Lewis is trying to show how the gospel is true myth, one of the things he says is he references the “suffered under Pontius Pilate” line from the creed. He says, “It’s all in order. It happened under Pontius Pilate.”

That inclusion of someone who would otherwise be a completely forgotten vague off-to-the-side Roman governor for a time literally, but he gets included because of the kind of scandal of specificity of the gospel, that it has happened in a particular time and a particular date, so that we can understand that this is not dream-space, dream-time mythic kind of events. This is real history and it happens to be the culmination or fulfillment of every story that we’ve been trying desperately to tell.

There’s such a hunger for that truth, right? We’ve seen with the rise of Jordan Peterson a great understanding of the need for story, for narrative, for a myth that is true. Yet Jordan Peterson has not yet – I’m praying for him.

“Cross the line, friend, cross the line.”

Because it only works if you believe it, and he even says that in 12 Rules for Life. He says, “This only works if it’s really true. Of course it’s a metaphor.” Cool beans.

And that’s what you’re going to have to be careful of because people otherwise will quote you selectively, so you need to guard yourself.

Yes. Another thing I’d love to get your opinion on from both of you would be – I was teaching at a couple of boarding schools recently. They’re Christian boarding schools so I was kind of given free reign to go in and talk from a Christian perspective, helping the young people to understand the arguments for the existence of God.

Now, I can’t remember which one is the kalam cosmological and which one’s the teleological, and I get a bit confused so I used the teacher’s prerogative to ask the young people which one was which and to explain them for me and say whether they found any of them particularly compelling or persuasive.

Then I thought my expertise is not really in kind of the apologetics in that sense or in philosophy, but I wonder whether we could make the mythological argument for the existence of God. Essentially since storytelling is a human universal, that points us towards a storyteller. In Christianity we have the Grand Storyteller who’s not just telling the story but who has become a character within it in order that he can get the story through to his conclusion.

There’s quite a few parts to parse out within that I think, but I’m quite interested to kind of explore that as an idea. I might do it on the channel a little bit, the mythological argument for the existence of God.

Let me recast that for you presuppositionally, if you will. Christianity says that there is a sovereign God who orchestrates all things for his glory and he tells the story. Now, there are some things within the Trinity you can work on to develop those ideas that I will not go into right now, and thus he projects or creates outside of himself in the metaphysical sense this universe that is nonetheless under his control. And he orchestrates it in such a way that it glorifies him.

We have the setting and the atmosphere set up in Genesis 1. We have the hero, God. We have the victim, man, who does it to himself. The elect become the bride that needs to be rescued. We have the dragon or witch or however you want to cast Satan. Then we have all the foreshadowing of the great hero who will come as prophet/king/priest.

There’s a puzzle to be solved here. How does a holy pure God forgive sin? The Bible calls it a mystery. What kind of action is necessary to bring about this salvation? And what kind of self-sacrifice is this going to require of this hero?

As we tell this story, storytellers are going to start hanging on not the theology but the story. Then we can turn to them and say, “So, you’ve got a bunch of atoms in space. Got any stories out of that one?” We say it lighter than that, being kind about it, but we have story. We’re Christians. It’s inevitable in our theology.

“You’ve got rocks. You’ve got vanity. You love stories so much. Why would that be? And why do you mess around with them and why do you make such a big deal out of them?”

Why do we expect to find meaning in everything else?

“Why are you expecting to find meaning? That doesn’t make any sense from your point of view. It makes perfect sense from ours. Want to come over to our side and see what it looks like?”

I have some other thoughts but I’ll save them for now.

There’s such a richness to the stories that we have. There’s a tendency once you’ve got this concept, “Oh, Jesus is the story. This is one story,” then any variation on that I think in our conservative Christian circles can be, “I don’t know. Is that an okay variation to have? Is it okay that Rapunzel gives her life to save Eugene instead of the other way around? She’s the princess. She should be saved, rather than save.”

But we are conformed to the image of Christ. The bride does become more like the hero. There’s so much to explore that I think does enrich our understanding of both the gospel and of stories and of our world.

Here’s something else that goes sort of along with that. We all know people who have found a new TV series or book series and they say, “And really it’s the gospel story!”

“What do you mean by that? Odds are you’re talking about a pagan humanist writer so it’s not the gospel. Are you saying that some of the outward structures and forms echo the gospel? That’s fine, you can acknowledge that. Or are you saying that despite their paganism they’re caving into Christianity contrary to their own beliefs and they’re falling back on divine wisdom or divine mercy because they can’t find any other way out of the crisis they’ve created for their characters?” Those are two very different things.

You’ve talked about this a little bit on the channel, haven’t you Nate? The tension between those two different approaches?

Yes. We go back to ‘made in the image of God’ without even trying to. We haven’t got anything else to play with, in a way. The line that I use most often with this – there’s that wonderful line from I think Johannes Kepler – “We think God’s thoughts after him.” He’s applying it to astronomy, but it plays true for storytelling as well.

When David is basically standing before all the resources that he’s gathered in order to build the temple, his great prayer is, “All things come from you, O God, and of your own have we given you,” so there’s that wonderful recognition from David as he looks at the materials, the gold, the cedars of Lebanon and whatever else he’s got, and he’s saying, “I’m going to give this back to you.

“I’m using my creative gifts to assemble this in accordance with the plan shown to Moses and so on, but I’m creating something not ex nihilo, not from my own resources, not from something that you haven’t heard of before, but literally using the very things that you’ve given us. I’m combining them maybe in fresh ways.”

So we do think that there is some kind of creative strength to the human being, but ostensibly we are curators rather than creators. The work of human creativity, as Tolkien says, is always sub-creation. When people who don’t know the Lord, who aren’t regenerate by his Spirit, when they create things which have mythic correspondence with the truth, Christians shouldn’t be in any way surprised. We should be like, “Well, obviously that’s going to happen.”

Now, when there is intentional distortion of what God has set into the gospel story, people can intentionally subvert things and people can try to twist the truth in a way that leads people further away from it.

When I’m talking about creativity and storytelling, often I’ll go back to Adam and Eve’s first creative work post-fall. The very first thing that Adam and Eve do post-fall is to sew fig leaves together to make coverings for themselves. I’m not into embroidery, I don’t do any needlework of any kind, I’m not a knitter or a crocheter or anything else, but I’m sure that people who enjoy crochet and knitting would be able to appreciate that’s the first example of sewing in the Bible.

I tried to point that out and some homeschooled teenage boy told me, “It might have been when God sewed up Adam’s side after creating Eve,” but in terms of Adam and Eve’s first work it’s to make these coverings.

Those coverings may have been beautiful, they may have been amazing, but they were not sufficient. It requires the Lord to make coverings through the sacrifice of an animal that they might be clothed, all of which is pointing forward to our clothing in the righteousness of Christ.

Essentially it’s that concept that fallen man in his fallen state has the noetic effect of sin. He’s incapable from his own rationale or whatever to getting to God, but he’s also got the poetic effects of sin in that his poems or his poeia, his ‘making,’ is never going to be sufficient. It will always fall short.

That is why we absolutely need the guidance of what God has revealed in scripture to help us interpret and properly understand our fictional stories that we enjoy, and I think we’re allowed to enjoy them, but the full interpretation of them can only come as scripture is brought to bear on what has been made.

We did a whole episode some time ago on “Should Christians read fiction?” I think maybe we’re pivoting into the question, “Should Christians write fiction?” and I think we’re all in agreement here, yes!

Competent Christians should write fiction. People who are gifted with writing should write fiction.

I think everybody should write fiction, even if you’re not gifted.

No, because it gives Christian fiction a bad name.

I didn’t say it should be published. I just think it’s good for people to write.

All right, I’ll give you that one.

This is a form of play. We’re telling stories that are not real. You compared it to “these are the toys that we have to play with.” In what ways does that change from childhood to adulthood?

I suppose the great thing about kids and play is that they’re pretty absorbed by it. They’re not really thinking about what it’s supposed to mean necessarily, what it’s supposed to communicate. Mostly it’s almost an unconscious act in a way.

One of the Monty Python guys does a lecture on how to be more creative, John Cleeves, a lecture you can find online, and he’s talking about different modes of mental state in order to be more creative. He talks about the play mode, and the play mode is not in any way concerned with outcome. It’s completely oblivious to the budget restrictions, to deadlines. It has no sense of responsibilities, in a way. It’s just playful.

There’s an element to which even as adults if we’re trying to write or come up with something, we play and you see what works and you test things out against each other. You just try and you put away some of those inhibitions.

If you wanted to go somewhere, if it’s going to get published or if the play is ever going to actually let people watch it, at some point you have to come out of the play mode and move into kind of executive mode in which the characters are kind of determined and decided and you have chosen to spend your money on this and not on that. Your character can’t just do this because that doesn’t go anywhere.

Probably the difference is that in childhood you can play, but if it’s going to get somewhere, if you’re going to hit your deadlines, you’ve got to snap out of that for a moment and edit.

The grownups I know who have spent time engaging in creative work have trouble actually shutting down the editor and going back to playing.

Let’s talk about our favorite children’s books and movies. I like Corduroy. I learned that you had never heard of Corduroy before this email exchange.

No. You know what’s remarkable is I had never heard of Corduroy, and then I was on the train with my daughter. We were going to the Globe Theater to watch Troilus and Cressida. It was my day off and I just said, “Lily, let’s go and watch this play,” because she’s going to learn one of the soliloquies from it.

So we’re on the train and I go to the email to say, “Here’s a link to Corduroy” as a read-aloud on YouTube. I said, “I’ve been looking at this. Have you ever heard of this?” and her face just lit up and she was like, “Corduroy? I love that book! It’s amazing!” I said, “What do you mean? You’ve read it?” because we didn’t have it at home.

Then we had to call my wife and say, “Did we ever have this book when we lived in the States?” and she said, “No, I don’t think we did,” but somehow my daughter had read it. I think she must have read it at school at some point and just loved it, so I thought I need to share that anecdote of the fact that you reminded me because we then watched it and I can totally see why.

It’s the coming home story. I like that.

What were your favorites that you read to their kids when they were small?

I love Where the Wild Things Are. I love it as a sort of prodigal son type story. Max goes off to the land where the wild things are, and they do all the roaring and gnashing of terrible teeth, and then he’s lonely and he wants to come home, and there’s his supper waiting for him still hot.

There’s something about the very simple structure of the child who kind of rejects and rebels and then finds a family in the land, then basically returns home to grace and welcome. So that was always a big one.

I think the one that very few people I ever speak to have heard of this. Maybe you two will be the exception. It’s The Griffin and the Minor Canon. Do you know this story?

No, please tell.

Oh, it’s so good. It’s much longer so it’s not just a kind of quick picture book like Corduroy or Where the Wild Things Are. It’s written by a guy called Frank Stockton. I don’t know much about him but it’s illustrated by Maurice Sendak, who obviously wrote and illustrated Where The Wild Things Are.

It’s essentially a story – now get this – with a clergyman as hero. It’s this beautiful story of this griffin who flies to this town because above the door of the town church is a beautiful stone carving of a griffin. The griffin has no other griffins to spend time with, so he wants to spend time looking at this carving of himself and he’s very pleased with it.

Of course, everyone in town is terrified that he’s going to eat them all and they’re going to die and all this sort of stuff, so they’re pleading with the Minor Canon who runs the town to get rid of the griffin. But the griffin doesn’t want to go, and he wants to actually follow the Minor Canon around the town because he’s feeding the hungry and tending to the sick and teaching the unruly children and all this sort of stuff.

I won’t tell you the rest of the story because I really, really want more people to know about this. It is quite expensive when you try to get it online, but it is definitely worth it. It’s just such a beautiful story of the madness of crowds, the selfishness of the heart, this kind of brilliant Minor Canon, which if you’re not in an Anglican set-up you wouldn’t even know what that is.

I was going to say I have an American ignorance on this point. Is he called a Minor Canon because he’s not important? What does that mean?

He’s not a full Canon of a cathedral. He’s the Minor Canon so he’s a sort of “an assistant to the regional manager.” He’s that kind of level of guy but he’s amazing. I just find the story really compelling so find it online if you can. It’s by Frank Stockton and the illustrations are brilliant by Maurice Sendak.

In fact, as a bonus, in the introduction to the edition I’ve got, which is probably one that most people would be able to get hold of, Maurice Sendak talks about the challenge of illustrating a book and he’s got some lines in there which are really quite insightful as to the combined storytelling of picture and word and how do those relate together, and what kind of special alchemy takes place when you’re trying to use both word and image.

Great. I think it’s time to play “stump one another.” I’m going to throw you a book and you’re going to tell me how it reflects the gospel. We’ll make Greg go first. Is that alright, Greg?

As long as I know the book.

Make Way for Ducklings.

Make Way for Ducklings was the first book I ever bought for my children. I bought it before my oldest daughter Emily was born. I found in some cast-off bin in some mini American department store. I had encountered it first as a child, watching a TV program. I don’t know if this means anything to you English, but it was called Captain Kangaroo.

The host was a nice old gentleman who interacted with puppets. He would read books. He would play adult music that was the kind of thing that children would enjoy, and if he didn’t tell them it was adult music they’d enjoy it.

Are we talking like Peter, Paul and Mary?

English Country Garden.

Like classical music.

Things that are classical or semi-classical or movie themes or things like that, that children would not normally hear, but if they’re presented with some pretty pictures and told “This is fun!” they actually would enjoy it.

One of the books was Make Way for Ducklings so it was read out loud, and they were actually allowed to show you the pictures from the books, so that’s where I came across it. So when I saw it I snagged it. I’m terrified that we may have lost it someplace along the way.

There are two ducks, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard. Partly I’m saying this out loud to remind myself of what the story is. She’s about to have ducklings. They live in Boston and there’s a big lake with an island in the middle. Mr. Mallard finds this place and ensconces the mother here and she brings forth her brood. As they grow up and as he’s off looking for where they’re going to go next, she has to lead them from point A to point B, which is right through city traffic.

Now, have I ever thought about how this portrays the gospel? No, so thanks a lot.

Sure thing. I am here to serve.

What it portrays I think, as I remember, the biggest threat is cars running over the ducklings. An Irish police officer or sergeant jumps in and blows his whistle and makes way for the ducklings to get across the street. That’s about as dangerous as it gets.

Mostly it’s a picture of familial love. It’s cast as ducks, but in anthropomorphic language it’s a mother and father, husband and wife raising a family. He’s looking out for their long-term interest and she’s taking care of the brood at home, but she’s not confined to home. She’s able to take the children about because they are well-trained and learn to listen to the voice of their mother. And yet God in his providence has established civil authorities and such to protect her as she goes about her business.

So in some ways it’s a picture of a Christian society as it should be, but it’s done with beauty and humor and elegance. Any child coming away from it would think, “Being a mom and dad is really cool. Having kids is really cool. Cops are actually good people.”

In all of those roles there are echoes of Christ and of God the Father and Mother Church and all of that, but I think at the simplest level it’s simply that this is where Christianity can lead you to, a stable home life where everyone loves one another. They’re not pulling in different directions. God has established things to protect you, including strangely enough civil government. Cops are not scary. That’s my first thought. I’d have to go back and look at it again honestly to do much more than that.

It sounds great. You know how you have the crossing guards after school? I remember they had what was called the Lollipop Ladies or Lollipop Men in the UK, and they’d have a great big sign. I’ve often thought of that as a kind of little mini Moses through the Red Sea experience. The children are being led as the waters pile up on either side of traffic, then they can cross safely to Canaan’s side.

Greg, I think that means you get to pick the next book.

Jane Eyre.

All right! We had a severe disagreement about Jane Eyre recently, Nate. I don’t know if you know this but I am a big fan of Jane Eyre. I think it’s the best Christian novel possibly ever written in the English language because it’s a story about the transforming love of Christ.

You have this story about a child who was abused, who goes away to boarding school where she becomes a Christian. Then the rest of her life is exploring where she belongs as a Christian and what that means for the people in her past who abused her, the people in her present who are threatening to abuse her or bring her into situations that are not for her good.

It is the experience of Christ’s forgiveness to her that shapes everything she does after that. It is forgiveness for her Aunt Reed. It’s recognizing that it would be false love to stay with Mr. Rochester when he proposes bigamy, that it would not be right. She says, “It would be better to enter heaven with one arm and one eye,” and we find out later that’s foreshadowing but we’ll get to that.

Then having rejected this false love she goes to a clergyman, who of all people should know the love of Christ, but it seems that his preaching is very moving and yet he does not know the peace of Christ. So she goes there and she says, “This thing before might have been love but it wasn’t Christian, now this is Christian but I know better than this. This is not love.”

She doesn’t belong either with the family that abused her in the beginning. She does not belong with Mr. Rochester because he does not belong to Christ. Then she doesn’t belong with these people either. Where she belongs in the end is with someone who is contrite and has a spirit of repentance, with whom she shares the experience of having been transformed by Christ’s forgiveness. That’s my pitch of the book.

That’s good. I should admit that I only read Jane Eyre for the first time this year.

What a delight.

I know. I got all the way to age 42 without having read it. I’d always put it down as being a girl’s book, but I was visiting my best friend and it’s his favorite book and I said, “I’ll read it.” So I did read it and was just totally blown away by it, just thought it was exactly as you said. This is possibly the greatest book ever written and how can anyone have actually put these words down themselves.

What was really interesting was that I knew about the invisible string line that is said between Rochester and Jane, and I knew that Taylor Swift had done a song called Invisible String, which was basically calling back to it.

There is a video on the Reformed Mythologist called “What Taylor Swift Gets Wrong about Jane Eyre.” It’s essentially that she’s in her “Jane era” because she pulls in a lot of kind of textual references and things like that, but the explicitly Christian nature of the book, which Bronte was at pains to point out to people, seems to be missing so people just see it as this story about romance.

You think, “Now why is Jane making the decisions that Jane makes?” It’s exactly as you say, because she’s a Christian, and that couldn’t be more obvious when you actually read the book. That’s a very good one. She does deserve to be with the contrite and the humble, and she eventually is.

This is a bit of a pivot but I felt similarly about KPop’s Demon Hunters. You’ve seen that, yes?

Yes.

The message that people take away is not the message of the movie, I think. Jane Eyre has this magic about it so that even non-Christians understand, “This is a wonderful story,” even though that central piece is not there in their understanding, which just fascinates me. I’m like, “How do you enjoy Jane Eyre without this understanding of how Christ’s love transforms us?”

The way that the hero of KPop Demon Hunters has to reckon with grace coming from outside of herself resonated deeply.

We did a very late kind of review conversation about that on the channel. My fear is that the thing that comes across is this sort of radical self-acceptance rather than what sort of seems to be in there in some of the lines if you look carefully and you’re squinting slightly. I think there more of a Christian concept of grace than I think people come away with.

My fear was that I think songs like Golden or This Is What It Sounds Like – that they essentially will be put into the same category as This Is Me from The Greatest Showman, of being just, “You’ve got to take me as I am, and there’s nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to repent of.”

They don’t explain things very well in KPop Demon Hunters, which is the main problem with the film, but there is a nuance there which I think a lot of people miss.

So we’ve done Make Way for Ducklings and Jane Eyre. It’s Nate’s turn. I’m going to give you The Princess Bride. I’m sure you’ve seen it, although of course as you always say media consumption is optional. You aren’t morally required to have seen Princess Bride, but am I correct in thinking that you have seen it?

I have seen it. I’m not one of those people who sort of quotes it endlessly, as many people do. I mean I know the lines, like things being “inconceivable” and people needing to “prepare to die.”

It’s one of these things that I think we often forget as a frame narrative. It’s the grandfather, Peter Falk, and he’s reading it, so at one level you can read it as the transforming effect of a great story on a young boy, rather than the central narrative of the characters.

I quite like that because I think often when you get a story which has a frame narrative and you see the impact on the character who’s heard the tale is that that’s the journey, in a way. The journey is about a boy who was very kind of, “Eww, kissing?” He’s got his own vision of the world and the story works in a stealthy way to just undermine his confidence in his own fully-locked vision of what constitutes good storytelling.

There’s an aspect there that almost by having a frame narrative it becomes a little bit of a meta-story about how stories work for us. There’s something transformative there, but I’m sure there’s many other aspects of the Princess Bride that maybe you leaders through the decades have put on the screen and said, “This is just like Jesus!”

I remember a friend of mine bringing up The Wizard of Oz once. I had kind of posited this thesis that I think stories stick with us when they tell us something about Jesus, and she kind of looks at me and goes, “The Wizard of Oz?” I did the best I could with that example – it’s home-coming and…

Prophet, king, priest.

Yes, I’m sure I made that point.

“I need a brain.” “I need courage.” “I need a heart” – to be a true hero.

Yes, and my friend was like, “I was thinking more of the books,” and I was like, “I don’t think the books have culturally resonated on the same level with the movie,” so it’s a different experience.

So often when people talk about “the Christ types” in storytelling, you either just go to sacrificial substitutional penal atonement – it might not be penal atonement but certainly sacrifice or substitution, and that’s kind the one lens we’ve got. “Jesus died on the cross for your sins. This character died for somebody else.” Ok.

Then we get this, “Who’s the grand hero who saves the day and gets the bride?” and you kind of go, “Okay, so it’s a bit more of a grander vision of who Christ is.”

One of my favorites is actually the kind of innocent one who steps into a dark place and exposes the hearts of the people around them. Buddy the Elf is a really good example of this. Paddington Bear is quite good.

Then if we want the high-brow version you can have Prince Myshkin from The Idiot by Dostoevsky which is someone who isn’t sullied by the kind of machinations of the people who are trying to plot against each other. They haven’t got this kind of sophistication apparently, so they can easily be overlooked or looked down upon, and yet in the telling of the tale we see that it’s only through that kind of purity or innocence that we will have a resolution, that the darkness will be undone.

I think there’s often a part of that whereby if we’re totally focused on, “It’s just got to be a cruciform Christ, and why did he get crucified? Because he’s innocent, that’s what happens.” But often there’s a tendency to only use one kind of lens of the gospel when looking at narratives or other fictional stories, then we can miss some of these really beautiful ones, as I say, where we’re on the side of the innocent party who is trying to understand why everyone is behaving in this way. That’s an aspect that I think is often overlooked.

I love that aspect too of what does complete humanity look like? What is humanity supposed to be? Christ is the second Adam, fulfilling all of the duties and being what the first Adam failed to be.

This has been lovely. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations? It’s always a surprise to Greg. It’s payback for all those pop quizzes in high school.

I’ve just been reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. If you’ve not read it all or haven’t read it for a while – I was teaching my son’s home-ed co-op through some poetry stuff and I think someone had only allocated one week to do “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and I was like, “No, we’re going to spend weeks over this thing,” so that really thrilled me, just taking the time over that as an incredibly culturally resonant – “Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink,” and albatrosses being exchanged for crosses, and really interesting.

Another one is Till We Have Faces. You should always recommend C.S. Lewis when you get the chance, so a big recommend there.

Then this one is just because of the time of year, which is The Iron Giant directed by Brad Bird. I try most every autumn, or fall as you would say, so I’ll be watching that probably over the next week to kind of get those vibes. If you want a kind of clear Christ figure, you’ve got one in the Iron Giant.

That’s a great one. Did you see The Wild Robot?

I did! I was very moved. It took far too long to end. It could have been about 40 minutes shorter but the moment when he first flies off was just absolutely incredible.

With friends we all watched The Wild Robot and then we said, “Let’s get together and watch The Iron Giant. Because that was so good, let’s do more.” I think it was autumn at that time too.

Since you brought up The Rime of the Ancient Mariner I’m going to do a slightly self-promotional recommendation. There’s a new podcast shortly to be released called The Poetry Dojo where my friend David and I go through poems. We have both been privileged in the past to judge a local school’s poetry contest, where all the students in the school memorize a poem, then the top three from each class compete the week before Thanksgiving with recitations. It's always my favorite day of the school year.

Our hope is to be a resource for students getting ready for that, parents helping to coach their little ones through that, and we’ve been working through the 8th grade poems, which are a lot of really good ones. We did Ozymandias recently…

Aww, so good!

Yes, there are a lot of good ones. The struggle kind of is what to do with T.S. Eliot’s cat poems. They’re not the same genre as a lot of the others. That podcast will be available on Spotify and wherever you get your good podcasts.

As is my way I’m going to recommend two books. In high school Expository Writing we just finished reading Professor Gene Veith’s Reading Between the Lines. I’ve been having my students read it for a long time, decades I imagine.

I got to meet Professor Veith many years ago and got to speak on the same platform as he did, which was an incredible honor, but it’s been a long time since I actually read the book. This time I re-read the book with my students and said, “Wow, this is fantastic! I forgot that half of this was in here.”

He tackles genre and he tackles the historical development of literature and literary theory in a language that the average – maybe not average, but the well-educated high school junior, senior, or certainly college student can understand, without a ton of big words or having to bring with you a great deal of theology or philosophical context. But you will come away with having picked up a good deal of all of that. He’s a very pleasant writer and very humble man.

The other book is Cornelius Van Til’s Christian Theory of Epistemology, which I’m almost done with.

Hhere’s the second recommendation. “But that’s a thick book. I could never read that.” Read five minutes a day every school day, in my case, and after three or four or five years you’ll get through it. And what would you do if you hadn’t? You’d have just spent those five extra minutes scrolling or drinking your coffee or something. You can tackle thick books.

I mention the book now because I’m coming to the end of it where all the arguments come together, and it is very much “Here’s the Christian way of looking at things, and here’s the Christian way of a humanist looking at things, and here’s what a humanist sees when he tries to look at things Christianly and fails miserably, then looks back at himself and has got nothing.”

Dr. Van Til pulls it all together in his final chapter. Yes, it is in some respects a difficult book, and bringing some theology and philosophy to it wouldn’t be amiss, but if your complaint is simply that it’s a long book, yeah, it is. And he’s not the best writer. No, he’s not.

We have to enter into the play state, where it doesn’t matter that it’s going to take a long time. There are no deadlines.

Yes. What else are you going to do? If you don’t start learning it here, where are you going to learn it in five years? So those are my recommendations of books and also just to generally have a book with you.

I have a magical talent or paranormal gift or something that if I get into a line at the market to check out, the fact that I stepped into the line automatically means that the person two ahead of me will have credit card trouble and will take three times as long as it would take any normal person to check out. When that happens, and you’ve got a book with you, you can get through three or four pages. And if you’re me and it happens almost every single time, or you’re waiting at the chiropractor or the doctor or dentist or whatever, have a book with you, or an audiobook, I suppose. So those are my recommendations.

Van Til is kind of that way, isn’t he, that it all comes together at the end.

Yes, pretty much.

I feel strange now because I recommended The Iron Giant and you recommended a book by Cornelius Van Til. There’s a bit of a difference there, but we don’t want everything to be the same, do we.

That juxtaposition is par for the course on this podcast.

Yes, we recommend things like foot rubs and soup on a cold winter day and all kinds of things, anything that comes to mind. As you say, it breaks up the monotony and it keeps us from focusing on, “Well, you have to be prophetic in your interpretation of Christianity,” or you have to be priestly. No, you just have to be human. We can recommend that.

Do we recommend Taylor Swift’s latest album? Have you listened to it?

I have. I thought there were a lot of fun little tunes on there. Get the clean version rather than the explicit one. She’s a very prolific lady. We did a couple of video essays on the channel, one in which I talk about her songwriting genius. Another one is seeing her and Travis Kelce as kind of a celebrity version of the hieros gamos, which is the marriage of heaven and earth, because of their music and sports and the way in which that – you can watch the video if you’re interested. If not, ignore freely.

Some of my students have said, “Before you go into Mr. Uttinger’s class there are certain movies you have to have seen, or half of what he says will not make any sense to you, starting with The Princess Bride, Star Wars: The New Hope, Casablanca, and a few others.”

I know I missed a lot because I didn’t know Star Trek also.

If it’s a class, you can have prerequisites for a class. That’s allowed.

It becomes not optional when you’re taking the class you signed up for.

Thank you so much for sharing your Saturday evening with us, Nate. It’s a pleasure to speak with you and I look forward to seeing where the Hero’s Creed project goes.

Yes, absolutely. Do you want to repeat the website where people can sign up to hear from you?

It’s heroscreed.com. We did a short video there on main character syndrome, which is a big thing apparently these days, then on the bottom you can just put in your email address and we’ll send you updates and invite you to a sort of consultancy type thing.

I’m going to do a Zoom call or something in early December, but it will be an opportunity for me to really talk people through the Hero’s Creed in a bit more depth, and ask some questions about how people will find it most beneficial. I’d love as much support as people are able to give.

Thank you so much for listening, dear listener. Be sure to check out Nate’s channel on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@ReformedMythologist and The Hero’s Creed project at heroscreed.com. I definitely recommend the Popcorn Parenting series on the Reformed Mythologist YouTube channel if you’re looking for good thoughts on movies to watch with your kids.

If you’d like to get in touch with us here at Halting Toward Zion you can send us an email at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. And if you’d like to support the show you can visit patreon.com/haltingtowardzion. A big thank you to our financial supporters who keep the show rolling.

Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time.