QUOTABLE

“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself… Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”

– H.L. Mencken

What is a Hero?

What is a Hero? Ben House gives us a the answer….

Heroes

By Ben House

http://benhouseblog.blogspot.com/

The emerging theme in my junior high history class is “Heroes.” I refer to it as an emerging theme because I did not set out with the agenda that keeps cropping up in our readings. That I should find myself asking myself and teaching my students about heroes is not surprising. I am a weak person, yes even a weak Christian. I need examples set before me constantly. I need to meditate on Hebrews 11 daily. My life is best sustained by a ‘cloud of witnesses.’ I do better when surrounded by the stories of our Founding Father, the pictures of the Protestant Reformers, the words of Churchill and Reagan, and the images of heroes from both Christian history and fiction.

Today I gathered up copies of The Hobbit for history class. The Hobbit? For history class? Something strange has happened to me over the past several years. I have gone from using textbooks to teach my classes to using them as aids and occasionally using them very little. A classroom that only uses a textbook is lifeless, but one without a textbook can become formless. So I use textbooks for facts, chronologies, and maps, but supplement them with other readings. The Hobbit is not history, but it tells us something about history. It is modeled after the legendary quest. It shows the development of leadership and courage. It raises the question of what is worth dying for. In one sense, it is more relevant than today’s evening news. As is the case of Tolkien’s larger epic, The Lord of the Rings, this introductory work may not be history, but it feels like history.

As I picked this book up, I was thinking of that most unheroic main character Bilbo Baggins. He would have been perfectly satisfied to stay at home and not be dragged into the journey through Middle Earth by the dwarfs. He became a hero, but he did not look or initially act very heroic.

So what is a hero? The Greeks (and the copy-cat Romans) envisioned the hero as the man with some sort of special strengths who exerted his powers to win honor. Achilles in Homer’s Iliad was one big, brawny Greek killing machine. After an interminable series of hand-to-hand combat sequences resulting in every portion of the human anatomy being noted for entrance and exit wounds, Homer swept past a host of first-string Achaian and Trojan warriors to pit Achilles against the only Trojan in his class—Hektor. The big duel is a flop. Hektor even resorted to my favored battle tactic—running. But Hektor’s feet did not free him from Achilles’ wrath. A few dozen lines of poetry later and a much dead Hektor was being dragged ignominiously around Troy behind Achilles’ chariot. While Achilles was a mighty warrior, his counter-part in Greek epic myth, Odysseus, was a man of brains or of “many wiles.” Odysseus was no slouch or fair weather soldier. He could fight and wrestle with the best, but his key strength was his mind. Aeneas, the Roman-Trojan of Virgil’s Aeneid, combined both strengths and added to that a sense of destiny or history to his epic quest of founding Rome.

Other ancient stories furthered this image of the hero. Hercules, Perseus, Prometheus, and Oedipus all further illustrate the Greek vision of the hero. The heroes were never perfect. All had their personal flaws or challenges they could not master, or fates they could not evade. Hence, some of the heroic stories are tragedies. In summary, the Greeks kept trying (groping in the dark) to envision a savior. Only when Paul crossed the waters from Troas to Philippi did the Greeks begin to get the corrective to their views of the hero.

In contrast to the Greek concepts, the Christian hero is the ordinary person who does what God would have him do in the circumstances in which God has placed him. So, does this description of the hero too drastically reduce his the status? A postman delivering letters, a teacher grading papers, or a mother washing dishes are all examples of people doing what God would have them do in their given circumstances. Of course, we would expect that same postman, teacher, and mother to be attending church, reading the Bible, and praying with and for their families. A lifetime of doing such—both the so-called secular and sacred duties—results in the greatest of commendations: God saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Greek heroism aimed at earthly honor being proclaimed by the lips of men; Christian heroism aims at the eternal blessing being proclaimed by the mouth of God. Because of the ordinariness of Christian heroes, we can all name the unsung heroes that fill our pews, teach our Sunday school classes, mow our church lawns, and preach our sermons.

Yet there are those who did stand out. There are those whose circumstances in which they were placed were quite extraordinary and who were heroic in doing what God would have them to do. The historical Christian heroes are worthy of study, but so are the fictional Christian heroes.

Harper Lee understood this and modeled the chief character of To Kill a Mockingbird after such a hero. The father to the children, Scout and Jem, was named Atticus Finch. He was an older man—in his fifties—who was a widower with two young children. He did not hunt or fish or play football (like other fathers). He lived a life filled with quiet routines: Going to the law office, sitting in his chair at home reading the paper, quietly watching over the lives and schooling and play of his children. When a black man, Tom Robinson, is accused of raping a white girl, Atticus is asked to defend Tom. The central tension surrounding the trial is Atticus’s willingness to seriously defend a…colored person…to put it nicely.

Whether in the courtroom, at home in his own living room, or in the community, Atticus calmly goes about doing his duty to his children and his neighbors. When his children witness him expertly handling a rifle and shooting a mad dog, their jaws drop in amazed unbelief. Throughout the story, the reader’s jaw drops as Atticus time and again simply does what is right. Atticus is by no means a perfect father. Strangely enough, his children call him by his name—Atticus. He falls short in teaching his daughter how to act like a lady. He is passive at points in his children’s lives. The Christian hero is never perfect, yet he is to be consistent in his efforts to do what God would have him do without counting the cost.

We read To Kill a Mockingbird in class because it introduces us to Southern society in the twentieth century and it is a good junior high beginning for reading the great Southern authors of the twentieth century Southern literary renascence. The time setting for To Kill a Mockingbird is the 1930s and the central conflict relates to the racial tensions that were prominent in Southern society (and that existed in less prominent form in the rest of the United States). In our devotional time, we read about another culture and another hero from the 1930s. In this case, the hero was a real person and the ethical conflicts were even worse than those faced in the racially divided South. Our devotional read was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a short biography by Susan Martins Miller.

Bonhoeffer faced ethical dilemmas most junior high students cannot imagine. He lived in Nazi Germany during a time in which both the faithful Confessing Church and the Jewish people were being persecuted. Bonhoeffer was not a man of perfect or model theology. One has to evaluate him in the cultural context of the German theologians of his time. Thankfully, he left a legacy of books that are genuine Christian classics. The Cost of Discipleship with its ringing declaration of the difference between cheap grace and costly grace illustrates his theology at its best and serves as a commentary of his life and martyrdom. Life Together strongly emphasizes the sense of communion Christians should have. Bonhoeffer was a theologian, a college teacher, a pastor, and a writer. But he is mainly remembered for being a martyr.

The easier course for Bonhoeffer would have been to stay quiet, minister discreetly, pray for the Nazis to lose, and bide his time until the war ended. He struggled with the ethical implications of how Christians should react when living in an evil regime. His conclusions forced him from a position of pacifism to involvement in efforts to remove (which came to mean kill) Adolph Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943. Two years later, he was hanged. Only a few days after his death, Allied armies liberated the prison where he spent his last hours.

In his struggles and writings, Bonhoeffer had asked the question, “Who stands fast?” Mrs. Miller wrote, “The ones who ‘stand fast’ spend their entire lives answering the call of God, in whatever form it takes.” I certainly hope that for myself and my students, the call of God involves easier choices than those Bonhoeffer faced. But even more than wanting the easy way out, I hope we all ‘stand fast.’

Atticus Finch’s defense of Tom Robinson was unsuccessful. The all white jury declared him guilty as charged. In desperation, Tom later tried to escape from the prison farm and was shot and killed. Atticus initially took hope from the fact that the jury made no quick decision, but was engaged for several hours before deciding against Tom. Atticus was a man of hope; he really believed that goodness and truth would triumph in time; but he was also a realist. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s efforts, along with those of numerous other Germans, to remove Hitler from power were fuitless. The best opportunity came on July 20, 1944 when Count von Stauffenberg discretely placed a briefcase filled with explosives close to Hitler. In God’s inscrutable wisdom and providence, some Nazi goof kicked the briefcase on under a heavy oaken table. The bomb went off, but Hitler was spared.

Bonhoeffer and his associates envisioned removing Hitler and replacing Nazism with a Christian culture. Given the military might of the Red Army to the east and the inability to see past immediate military objectives of the Allied armies of the west, it is hardly likely that a post-Hitler regime could have had much of a chance. Still, Bonhoeffer was right. A Christian who goes to Hollywood should go there to reform Hollywood; a Christian elected to Congress should set about the task of Christianizing the Republic; and I in my classroom seek to educate a generation of thinking Christians. We pray for God’s kingdom to come and exist on earth as it is in heaven. Duties are ours; consequences are God’s.

So my junior high kids are in for a whole year of heroes. They might forget what the Land Ordinance of 1785 accomplished, but they must never forget what faithful men and women have done in the circumstances in which God placed them