Author Philip Pullman Writes Another Anti-Christian...zzzz

Because seriously, that's what I thought when I read this notice. Pullman, a children's author best known for the trilogy His Dark Materials, is a devoted atheist who has, over the past fifteen years or so, allowed that particular dimension of his beliefs to run rampant over his fiction.

Northern Lights, published in 1995 and retitled The Golden Compass for release in the United States, was the first of the Materials trilogy and took aim at, among other things, the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis, which Pullman despises. Compass was an amazing read, showcasing Pullman's real gift as a storyteller and world-builder. Its sequels, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, deteriorate rapidly both as books and as vehicles to convey Pullman's worldview. The end result is a book-and-a-half's worth of story crammed into three books, with more than 95 percent of that book and a half in the first volume.

Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams, among others, wondered why Pullman had attacked only God and the church in Materials and left Jesus out of it. Pullman said he would tackle that in a future book, specifically his The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Released just before Easter in England, it will be on U.S. shelves in May.

According to the news stories, Pullman says Mary, after a visitation by a stranger she says was an angel, gave birth to twins. Jesus, the good twin, thinks the Kingdom of God is coming in his lifetime and teaches people to make themselves ready for it by helping one another and otherwise changing their ways to show love for each other. Christ, the bad twin, thinks that Jesus' message will not survive him unless it has some kind of institution set up to continue it through history, and attributing divinity to Jesus is a way for that to happen.

Why is this boring to me? For one, the latter two-thirds of the Materials trilogy has shown that Pullman has a hard time writing a good story that also preaches his worldview. He can, it seems, do one or the other but not both, and I find little reason to spend $25 to find out whether or not he now commands that ability.

For another, as strange as this Jesus v. Christ duality may seem to some folks, it's not new at all. Seminary students, one of which I was back a few years ago, get inundated with it. Most of the works along these lines are written by academics for academic settings and are rarely seen outside university libraries, or now and again on a pastor's bookshelves. They're esoteric, technical, and strewn with enough polysyllabic jargon to choke a diplodocus. And they're usually as dull as dishwater.

The standard line of thought is pretty much the storyline Pullman uses in his new book. There was a good guy named Jesus who taught people some good things, but someone morphed him into this semi-divine person that the church thinks of him as today. Sometimes the villain is Paul, sometimes the early apostles play the role, sometimes it's Constantine, the Roman Emperor whose support of Christianity went a long way towards making it the empire's state religion. Pullman simply personifies this thinking as an "evil twin," giving him the name Christ. No word on whether or not Christ has a goatee as opposed to Jesus' full beard.

Those who'd like to see what kind of storyteller Pullman can be when he's not anti-Bible thumping his readers over the head can check into his Sally Lockhart series or several of the non-Materials children's novels he's written. As for The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, you can wake me when it's over.