I like Harry Potter. We were born the same year (he’s just 43 days older). For years, I was suspicious from a distance. Then finally, during the pandemic, I began the long journey of reading all the books aloud to my sons. Now I appreciate Harry and the whole series, and especially the deeply Christian themes of the final book.
My sons like Harry too and have enjoyed some of the wholesome lessons they found at Hogwarts. But as Christian parenting goes, Harry’s a pretty low-level hero for our children, as are so many of the other heroes in young-adult literature. We gotta do better, much better, than simply Harry Potter.
Heroes in the Word
First on the list, of course, is the one we gather to worship each Sunday, and the one in whose name we pray. He’s the Hero who fills the pages of the Gospels in his full and remarkable humanity, in addition to being God himself. The Father made the world and authored all history in such a way as to make his Son the great Hero. Harry at his very best, in the hands of a wise Christian parent, is a faint echo of the great Hero with the name above every name — he who must be named, and continue to be named: Jesus.
Then, our Scriptures teem with men and women to admire. None of them is perfect like Jesus, but many indeed are worthy of profound admiration and emulation. They are men and women of whom our sinful world is not worthy (Hebrews 11:38). Scripture and good Bible storybooks introduce our children to such honorable figures.
Along with Jesus, the men and women of Scripture come first for me in lifting up real people as heroes for my kids. And alongside them, I enjoy filling our children’s imaginations with other real-life Christian heroes who are far more worthy of imitation and appreciation than Harry or other fictional heroes — not to mention the litany of sports and movie stars parading before our eyes today.
Heroes in Church History
Two thousand years of church history furnish Christian parents with a wealth of worthy men and women to celebrate. Hebrews 11 comes to its climax with the coming of Christ, but the cloud of witnesses, filled with those who endured great sufferings and found great victories by faith, has continued to march on for two millennia.
A few years ago, it was Eric Liddell for my athletically inclined twin sons. More recently it’s been the Do Great Things for God series, which has been ideal for my daughters. The series began with short, fully illustrated biographies of Christian women, like Corrie ten Boom and even (the living!) Joni Eareckson Tada. Being well received, the series has expanded to include men as well: John Knox, C.S. Lewis, and now Jonathan Edwards.
Edwards for Kids?
Edwards in particular, and perhaps surprisingly, has a lot to offer our children. Some of us have been hoodwinked by biased history textbooks that didn’t admire the Great Awakening and presented a coldhearted caricature of Edwards. But even among those who know how warm and bright was the heart of this pastor-theologian, we also think of him as writing some pretty inaccessible prose for modern-day readers, especially for children. Yes, we may not be reading Edwards aloud to our kids, or encouraging them to read him for themselves (at least not yet!), but the story of his life, and its many lessons, are well worth our time and attention.
For one, the young Jonathan Edwards loved to get outside and learn about God through his world. He did not need a screen to be entertained! In time, Edwards would come to be a great student of God’s word, but he first learned to make observations and ask questions and put together truths while exploring God’s world outside his home. He made forts in the woods and took a special interest in spiders. They made him curious. He wanted to figure out how they worked. He didn’t assume their existence was random or insignificant. He knew that God made them, and that everything God made mattered. God had a purpose in all his creation, and even spiders (icky to some but fascinating to young Jonathan) could be worthy of our attention when viewed as God’s handiwork.
Edwards’s life also shows our children (and us parents with them!) that God made the mind and the heart to go together. We all have our various bents and strengths. We might talk about some people being thinkers and others feelers, but Edwards emphatically breaks that mold. He was manifestly a thinker and feeler, his world-class mind serving his God-besotted and Christ-admiring heart. It does our kids good to hear that they are not either thinkers or feelers, but that God made them to know the joys of being both, to press both their minds and hearts into the full service of admiring and enjoying the majestic God who made them.
Heroes Who Need a Hero
The life of Edwards also shows us that we can have heroes who are sinners and make mistakes, sometimes grave ones. Edwards did. After more than twenty years in ministry at Northampton, he found himself as the lone pastor. On several occasions, he made missteps in practical judgment — the kind of pastoral decisions, I suspect, that would have been greatly helped if he had ministered with a team of fellow pastors. He did apologize, but damage was done. And the way he handled a change in the Lord’s Supper tradition at his church eventually led to his being fired, which I still find surprising. Great a theologian as this man was, he had feet of clay. And it’s good for our kids to learn that.
Edwards’s life shows us and our kids that we can have heroes who make mistakes, as long as we have the one Hero who did not. And not only was Jesus totally without sin, but he was so full of holiness and love and joy that he endured the pain and shame of the cross to cover the failures of all who believe in him, us and our lesser heroes alike.
Jonathan Edwards cannot replace Jesus as our North Star, but he is a worthy light to observe in the constellation of God-honoring lives. More than just saving our kids from a wrong impression of Edwards in high-school history class, I’m eager to see his life and faith woo our kids toward trust in God and fresh admiration for Jesus.
And for me, the real-life Jonathan Edwards does this far better than a fictional Harry Potter.
Desiring God