Introduction: Two Boxes As a boy, I kept adventure and God in two separate boxes. I was passionately devoted to adventure: Zorro, Robin Hood, Tarzan, Lone Ranger, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Jules Verne’s novels. In my adventure box I also had long summer days exploring the Walla Walla River where Kirby and I bent and wove willows into “forts”, talked to the bums under the bridge, and snagged trout from fishing holes. We climbed the huge sycamore trees and zinged their hard green balls at one another in battles that ranged through the yards of our neighborhood. In the field across the street from my home, we lobbed the uprooted stalks of cut corn at each other. They exploded in a delightful burst of dust and dirt clods when they landed. My childhood was filled with violence. We built forts and played war for days on end. Every stick was a sword, every ball a grenade. My adventure box was packed and overflowing. No one has ever been better at being a boy.
My God box was full too. I attended church three times a week, Vacation Bible School, and church camp in the summer. If we had revival services, our family was their every night. I grew up knowing the Bible stories better than my Sunday school teachers. It is here where the story often recounts the discovery of rampant hypocrisy in the church or explains how all this was just a bunch of brainwashing. Nope. My parents lived their faith, God answered prayers, and the biblical world view simply made sense to me. My parents encouraged me to ask any question and never suggested that faith and reason were at odds. So I was a believer—head and heart. I think I even loved God, but the church stuff seemed all about sitting, being quiet, sitting some more, not squirming, being nice, feeling guilty, praying at the altar. I loved adventure more.
In my thinking these two boxes had nothing to do with each other. Yeah, stories about David killing Goliath or Samson committing genocide against the Philistines were a little adventurous, but such stories never seemed directly connected to me being a Christian. Occasionally missionaries would tell a good snake story. And even though I caught lots of snakes at the river, missionary adventures seemed distant and irrelevant.
Yes, I knew I had been saved by grace, not works. But after salvation, the Christian life seemed all about duty—a long list of bad stuff not to do and boring stuff to do. It had nothing to do with the adventures that thrilled my heart and captured my imagination. Although I found more joy in the adventure box, I never doubted that the God box was most important.
I should add here that periodically God has taken me on adventures. In high school I, and other Christian teens, started a Christian Coffee House (Fort Agape) and ministered to teens and street people. In graduate school my roommate and I started a Bible study for graduate students which grew quickly and impacted many lives. My wife and I adopted four boys—a huge adventure. So I did indeed discover that following God is an adventure. But it was not until I became an adult that I began to suspect that adventure and God might belong in the same box.
As an adult I discovered God and adventure together in my boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia. I had read Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in 7th grade, but had not realized Tolkien was a Christian. Just when I was ready to dismiss adventure as limited to children or children’s literature, I came across knights in Thomas Malory who regularly wandered off into the woods in search of adventure. Next I discovered G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy which argues that modern literature has forsaken adventure because it has forsaken orthodox Christianity.
Long after the names of their critics have been forgotten, J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis continue to be read and become house-hold names. Neither are included or even mentioned in most anthologies of modern British literature, but over fifty years after their death, they are read more widely than most writers of their generation. I began to wonder why. Maybe it had something to do with being Christian and writing adventures.
I believe it is because they wrote adventures and that the very structure of adventure corresponds to all of our human instincts about the nature of life and the human condition. In short, adventures appeal to us because they are true. And although the structure of adventure may not always reflect how life is, readers sense that such stories reflect how life ought to be. And they both put Christian faith and adventure in the same box.
Secondly, adventures are true because they reflect essential truths of the Christian faith. The writing of well-crafted adventures, whether by Christians or non-Christians, is a redemptive act that declares important biblical truths about life. Examining the ways the structure of adventure is Christian not only helps us understand the redemptive nature of adventure stories, but helps us understand why the cultural gatekeepers of the last century dismissed adventure stories as childish or antiquarian. A theology of adventure can help writers make their adventure stories Christian and their Christian lives an adventure.
The Shipwreck: At the heart of adventure is an abiding, even if vague, sense that things aren’t what they ought to be. Often it is a sense that something precious has been lost and must be found, that we are on journey but not yet home, or that an evil exists that has not yet been defeated. Adventure grows from a conviction that the world is not quite safe, that something has gone wrong, dangers lurk at the edge of the shire.
We see this in the classic adventure stories of Robinson Crusoe and Swift Family Robinson. The ship has wrecked. Something has gone wrong; we are left with remnants from a better time, and the challenge is to survive and perhaps thrive. In his work Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton describes his sense of the human situation: “Man has saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck.” Chesterton goes on to identify original sin as the shipwreck from which we are trying to survive and from which we are retrieving fragments of truth, beauty, and goodness that wash ashore in human culture. When Chesterton explains how Robinson Crusoe moved him toward Christian orthodoxy, he does not cite the conversion of Crusoe, but rather the wreck of the ship:
“And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship—even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.”
The shipwreck on the island corresponds to Christian theology in a number of significant ways. One of the most obvious is that no matter how ingenious our barricades and tree houses, the island is not our home. We can enjoy the discovery of a freshwater spring, the taste of the breadfruit, the results of our heroic labors, but ultimately we are looking for our rescue—our salvation. Although the island may offer tastes of paradise, there is much more than just a serpent in the garden—there are pirates. One cannot simply wait to be rescued; real battles against evil must be fought. Our courage will be tested. Nature certainly challenges our character—our perseverance, discipline, and self-possession. But there are also external enemies—pirates and cannibals.
At first glance, there may not seem anything especially Christian about this view of reality. But Christians describe the world much like a shipwreck on an island. We have lost something. Our present situation is a detour. We are sojourners here—we are headed to another place. This world contains the remnants of paradise but is over-run by pirates.
And like Robinson Crusoe we are salvaging as much as we can from the wreck of humanity. Despite the fall of humankind into all kinds of evil, humans are still created in the image of God. Despite the corruption of sin we still have a conscience that awakens us to good and evil; we still have reason that helps us see the creation’s testimony to a creator. And we have been left with longings that swing our compass needles toward God.
This perspective is quite the opposite of what dominates much of our culture today. In fact the idea that humans somehow stand apart from nature as strangers and sojourners is attacked as speciesism. We are told to feel totally at home in this world. All struggle is to be regarded as the natural processes of nature, and death as part of the “great circle of life.” According to this philosophic naturalism, nothing is truly evil; we have no enemies except our own ignorance and our own refusal to accept the cosmic harmony of all things.
Even though our culture has widely accepted these adventure-killing views, popular culture suggests we still long for adventure. The continuing popularity of The Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia in books and movies reveals that the human longing for adventure is still strong. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J.R. R. Tolkien are notorious dissenters to the naturalistic philosophy that declared the literary death of adventure. They assert that children’s literature or the cheap adventure novels of the time (called Penny Dreadfuls) are truer pictures of the world than much modern literature.
Although not a confessing Christian, Robert Louis Stevenson rebelled against the pessimism and determinism of his time, recalled the toy theater dramas of childhood, and wrote the great adventure stories Kidnapped and Treasure Island. Chesterton points out that for Stevenson this was a genuine rebellion:
“Stevenson seemed to say to the semi-suicides drooping around him at the café tables; drinking absinthe and discussing atheism; ‘Hang it all, the hero of a penny-dreadful play was a better man than you are!'”
The glory of the shipwreck metaphor is that, like Christianity itself, it is both pessimistic and optimistic. It is pessimistic in that it insists we are wrecked, stranded, with few supplies, but yet optimistic because survivors are grateful for life itself, for salvaged goods, and the hope of future rescue.
Of course the popularity of shipwreck and post-apocalyptic tales doesn’t prove that humanity was really wrecked long ago in the garden. But it might be wiser to trust the instincts of a child who longs for adventure than the musing of modern philosophers. It is at least possible that we long for adventure because such views ring true to how life should be lived. Our instinct that death is wrong and life too short may be a faint memory of a ship bound for eternity.
