Harry Potter and the Cross

The Harry Potter series is over. The seventh and final volume sold 8.9 million copies in its first 24 hours. That’s over 100 copies per second! Wow.

So how should Christians respond to the popular series? Dr. Donald T. Williams — a Christian literature scholar — wrote a very helpful review. In part he writes:

The central ideas of the series then resonate powerfully with central doctrines of the Christian faith, and I do not believe Rowling could have developed them as profoundly as she did without being influenced by Christian teaching.

But they do not quite rise to a Christian view of the world. For love as it comes from fallen human hearts does not conquer all. Love conquers all only because God is love and because he has sacrificed himself in his Son.

The good Potter characters seem to find this all-conquering love by somehow looking within themselves, not by looking up and outward to the Source of it, which is Christ.

One is left with the impression that it could be just love itself, love in the abstract, which conquers all, rather than the scandalously specific Love which comes only from the heart of God in the sacrifice of Christ. And only the sacrifice of that divine and innocent Victim could provide the propitiation which is necessary to the conquest of the evil which is found at the core of our own hearts. We as believers follow Christ in taking up our own crosses, in recapitulating his loving sacrifice in our own lives, indeed. The Hogwarts heroes could be read as exemplars of this truth. But only as our acts flow from that supreme Act do they participate in its power. Do Harry’s, Snape’s, and Dumbledore’s? It is, alas, unclear. To separate love and sacrifice from their Source, as if they could operate independently of it on their own, is to risk losing them as the Gospel evaporates into a bloodless humanism.

- Donald T. Williams from his review of the series.