Is Superman a Type of Jesus?

One Sunday after worship I was talking with my friend David, the cartoonist. We got to talking about Little Orphan Annie, a comic strip created by Harold Gray in 1924, continuing into the 30s and beyond. We're both interested in the 30s because of being born in that decade. So this morning I started poking around some more into the comics and cartoons of the 30s and came upon a site by David Bruce, writer, speaker and web master ofHollywood Jesus:Pop culture from a spiritual point of view. He finds a link betweenSuperman and Jesus. That's interesting, but pushing the envelope I think. He finds hidden references to Jesus and the Bible in all kinds of movies and TV shows.

I'd like to tell you my own thoughts about this matter, especially now that another movie, Voyage of the Dawn Treader based upon  that C.S. Lewis'Chronicles of Narnia is out.

 

Some of these thoughts grow out of my own reading of C.S. Lewis, but I am also indebted to a thoughtful article by Duncan Sprague, "The Unfundamental C. S. Lewis - Key Components of Lewis' View of Scripture" in Leadership U.

Bruce suggests that Superman in the comic strips, books and later in the 1978 movie, is a kind of mythical Jew who becomes the long-awaited Messiah, is born of a virgin, dies fighting evil and rises again. He traces the roots of this myth to the fact that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, were Jews.

This sounds something like the views of C.S. Lewis who saw in the myths of old hints and shadows of God's truth, but only understood partially, vague forecasts of God's ultimate plan. A myth is a story that could be and might be true, but does not need to be historically or scientifically true because it is communicates something bigger than history or science. In the life of Christ the great stories of myth find their ultimate fleshing out in historical fact.

As Sprague writes, "this theme of myth becoming fact has been described by Lewis as the romantic longing in man. It is the longing for something transcendent, mythical and infinite to enter the finite bodily creature bound in space and time."

In that sense one could say that in Superman Siegel and Shuster created a powerful being from outside our world, sent by his father to do good and bring justice. That would make him a type of messianic or mythical figure who hints at the profound truth revealed in the life of Christ, but nothing more. Superman remains a mortal being. He can die. When he dies in the course of his fight against evil, he rescues Lois Lane and others from disaster, but his death does in no way become the sacrifice that redeems all of mankind. Only the paradoxical death of the eternal Son of God, the Word made flesh, can accomplish that. In the Christ of history God reveals the real truth and fulfills the longings of us all.

Superman and other mythical stories still appeal to us because we long for a messiah who will come to make right a world threatened on all sides by evil. That is why messianic figures remain popular in modern movies. Matthew McEver in his article on "The Messianic Figure in Film:Christology Beyond the Biblical Epic" finds them in Lucas Jackson of Cool Hand Luke, Randall McMurphy of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Mr. Keating of Dead Poet's Society and Karl Childress of Sling Blade. "Jesus still remains on the silver screen; not as a prophet and teacher from Nazareth, but rather as an unlikely redeemer in a prison, a mental hospital, a class room, or inside the home of an abused child," says McEver.

Messianic figures, ancient or modern, are still a long, long way from the revealed truth of Holy Scripture "that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation," 2 Corinthians 5:19.