I'm not one to get to down on the commercialization of Christmas. While I don't always appreciate the playing down of the true meaning of Christmas, the culture willingly recognizes this holy day in some fashion.
Christmas, it seems, cannot be swept under the rug and forgotten about. Even atheists end up celebrating the birth of God in Jesus. So perhaps it isn't so ironic that a movie like "The Golden Compass" would be timed to come out for the holiday rush of movies Hollywood uses to capitalize on the season.
I probably would not have gone to see this movie, or read the books, if it was not for my skepticism of overly zealous Christian watchdog groups, who notified me about the movie. I like "Harry Potter," for instance. I do not like people telling me what books or movies I as a Christian can read or watch. I like to make up my own mind about these things. It is a blessed freedom to do such things that Christ won for me with his own blood on the cross. That freedom could, of course, be abused by reading Playboy or watching pornography, but hearing another man out on his views on religion is not an abuse of Christian freedom. We Christians should not be so afraid of the big bad wolf. I normally find that once you chase him down he's nothing more than a scared cat in a corner. I have never understood why people are afraid of Christ, but they seem to be. All He wants to do is forgive their sins, and save them from eternal damnation.
"This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." (1 Tim. 2:3-4 (ESV).
This scared cat syndrome, I believe, is also true of Pullman's novels and the movie also. There is in fact an anti-Christian, and anti-religion message in both the movie and the books, though it is toned down to a great degree in the movie. But upon inspection, the arguments he makes are very weak, though he is right to chastise Christians for some of their historical blunders, and attempts to impose specific Christian beliefs on others.
I as a Lutheran can sympathize. The church body I belong to, The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, was started by persecuted Lutherans, who had to flee Germany in order to worship in accord with their conscience.
Then there is the history of Luther himself, which led him to write much on the proper roles of government and church in society. His book "On Secular Authority" gave germ to the seed of separation of church and state, whose proper fruit is the First Amendment.
However, I dare say that paganism and atheism are no guarantees of peace and tranquility either. History has shown that in the Coliseum, and the gulags of Soviet Russia.
Perhaps the weakest, but also the most insidious, attack on Christianity Pullman makes in the novels, is the notion that the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden was a good thing. The idea that he presents is that if it wasn't for the fall, the original sin, of Adam and Eve, we humans would not have been able to reach our full potential, or know love. The Biblical account of this historical event shows the very opposite to be true. History and experience in life also show that Pullman's take on this is not right.
According to Genesis 2 and 3, where the record of the fall is kept, Adam and Eve were perfectly happy in the peace and tranquility of the Garden of Eden. There is nothing in the account that warrants the position that without eating the fruit they would be ignorant or incapable of knowing love. In fact, all they knew in the garden was love -- love of God and love of each other.
And since God had given them the command to procreate, there is no reason to believe they were incapable of this without eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
There is no reason to believe, as is hinted to in the novels, that sex is considered evil by God. It is in fact a wonderful gift of God, to be enjoyed. But the selfish abuse of this gift outside of marriage is considered particularly harmful because it leads to so much pain and suffering in the world, painful breakups and feeling used, fatherless children, divorce, prostitution and so forth. God would spare us that pain.
The rise and fall of civilizations, the numerous wars (despite almost everyone's detestation for war) and our own failings in life point to the fact that we are patently incapable of reaching what we know our full potential to be.
So if the fall was a good thing, what keeps us from reaching that potential? Why is it for all we know is right, we keep doing what is wrong?
The Christian and Biblical answer is sin, not sex. It is an infection of sin we are born with that keeps us from being able to reach our full potential, and for that matter to know love as it truly ought to be, sans selfishness (1 Corinthians 13).
However, God is not content to leave us in our pathetic state of sinfulness. He has provided us with a solution to the problem of sin and evil, which is immensely better than the ending of Pullman's fantasy. In Pullman's trilogy, the heroes who fall in love with each other (ushering in a second fall) are forced to live unhappily till death separated from each other by walls between their worlds.
In the Bible, God willfully becomes man to suffer and die on the cross, in order to save mankind from death. It was for this reason, He promises to come again to destroy and recreate the world so that we can live with Him in everlasting innocence, blessedness and righteousness; in other words to live forever in our fullest potential.
Bror Erickson is pastor of the First Lutheran Church in Tooele. He is a graduate of Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Ind.