When we look at the genre of superhero story we must suspend belief for a moment and allow ourselves to imagine that a refugee from Krypton has come to live amongst us and to help us make sure that our world does not suffer the same fate as his own. We must put doubts aside that a bite from an irradiated spider can turn a teenage boy into a spider-man or that Batman can have all those items tucked away in his utility belt and find them so easily. But it is important to realise that these stories, also contains mythic themes. That is, they speak to our understanding of who we are and what really matters in the world.
Fingeroth's Superman on the Couch explores what it is that comic book heroes tell us about ourselves and our society. He asks what it is that we find so appealing about superhero stories. His answer is that superheroes affirm our values and uphold the principles we want to see working at the heart of local and national life. They invite us to imagine that this comic book world is close to our own.
Tolkien would say that this overlap that exists between the mythic world and our own allows us to look past everyday characters, locations and objects and to "see' the wild and dangerous lurking behind the mundane, to imagine the rare and beautiful under a veneer of the common. It invites us to delight in our world, for all its frustrations, and to re-invest ourselves in its processes (pp 58-59). Immersed in the mythic, or secondary world, we are given the opportunity to rest from the harshness of the world around, the primary. As we slip out of our own situations and look down on this other place, we find opportunity to re-orient ourselves. We find our feet again, albeit in the secondary world, but because of that overlap, this is sufficient to prepare us for re-engagement with our own world (pp 65-69).
Superheroes and superhero stories help us to feel safe and secure in an uncertain world. They give substance to our hope, however fleeting, that a Superman or a Batman will someday appear to right wrongs and bring bad-guys to account. Furthermore the stories give us an opportunity to explore our super-ego as we act vicariously through the superhero. But at the same time, although we know that people like us have performed great acts of heroism, we realise that we can never become superheroes.
A careful comparison of Superman and Jesus reveals that although Jesus may bear a resemblance to Superman, the resemblance can only ever properly be said to be superficial. Superman addresses trivial symptoms but seems to remain blissfully unaware of the root causes of pain and suffering that are in the world. "The superhero's role is to get the cat out of the tree, not to prune the tree or to discipline the cat" (Fingeroth, 162). Superman is more likely to organise a benefit function to raise money for the poor or disadvantaged, than he is to address the reasons for poverty and inequity, for sin and death. Superman and Spiderman stories may fall into the feel-good category as movies, but the feeling is short lived. As soon as we emerge from the cinema, we recognise that the real world is forever unchanged.
Superheroes were known in the ancient world, but the Bible chooses not to make significant use of them in developing our understanding of who God is and what it is that he has done for us. When we think of modern superheroes and when we consider Jesus and his mission in the light of their stories, we run the risk of suggesting that Jesus is somehow remote and detached, which would not do justice to the reality of the incarnation. We also run the risk of presenting the salvation he offers as a weak and limited thing, a sort of spiritual first aid; but the reality is better explored in terms of a new creation.
We might conclude that we ought never to present Jesus as a superhero at all. But when we remember that in Hosea God presents himself as being like a moth and like rot (5:12), though in reality he bears only a very fleeting likeness to either of these things, a more judicious conclusion might be that we will be careful when we present Jesus as a superhero and we will not allow it to become a dominant image. It seems to me that this is more in keeping with the Biblical presentation.
The Bible has a rich and varied presentation of who God is and how he desires to be involved with us and to work through us in the world that he has made. This presentation grows and develops in a gradually unfolding picture of the reality about him, about us and about the world in which we live. It seems to me that most of the descriptions and metaphors that support this unfolding revelation are taken from the world, our world, the primary world. It is this world that God so loved, it is in this world that he calls us to represent him, it is in this world that he wants to be known. In this world, for as long as we can remember people have told one another myths and stories of alternate worlds, secondary worlds, where fire-breathing dragons live, where some people fly, where nightmares come true, where families of gods fight and scheme for supremacy in the same way that human families fight and scheme for supremacy in the primary world. Sometimes these secondary worlds have been mistaken as adequate depictions of the primary. Sometimes these secondary worlds have been exploited to teach us about the primary. But always the dominant presentation of all that God is and all that he draws us to has been taken from the primary.
Therefore our own presentation of who God is and what he has done must also remain firmly anchored in the primary world. We may, like certain Biblical writers before us, exploit other worlds to engage our audience and to teach them about the primary world. But if we take our audience on any flights of fantasy, we must realise that Jesus' victory in those secondary worlds is not as important as our living for him in the primary.
References
Fingeroth, D., (2004) Superman on the Couch. What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society New York: Continuum
Tolkien, J. R. R., (1964) Tree and Leaf including the poem Mythopoeia London: HarperCollins: 2001
