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| Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word |
A point King dwells on is that we are "enchanted" by the stories we read or hear. To King, a work of fiction "does not need to prove — it reveals" (p. 18). Reading a story is a form of hypnosis in which we temporarily lose our everyday selves in a "higher world" made of words. This higher world for a time shines its light into our own world and illuminates our lives.
Such a higher world differs from the one we usually experience in that it makes total sense — so much so that, like a geometric proof or a Beethoven symphony, it possesses an intrinsic inevitability, a hidden necessity. The outcome of a story is cast in stone; we can't change it. Bad as we may feel for the characters, we can't change what they do, or how their deeds affect them.
Every storybook has its own inner destiny. Every storybook can reflect our own lives back to us in a uniquely objective way. Without stories, as free subjectivities we would be as supreme monarchs are: above all laws and bounds. "A subjectivity cannot see itself — until it forgets itself; then it sees itself and its deeds through the eyes of another" (p. 17). We forget ourselves when we read stories. They in turn give us the objective mirrors we need, by which to judge our lives and deeds.
Just such a life-illuminating story is that of Jesus in the Gospel of John. Our modern minds want the claim this and the other gospels and Bible stories make on us to be subject to some sort of external proof. But like a geometric proof or a work of fiction, the Bible's warrants for belief are intrinsic to the subject matter. The internal definitions and axioms of Euclidian geometry are all that are needed to make its theorems so. The presuppositions on which Shakespeare bases his Hamlet make its outcome just and inevitable. Likewise, the basic assumptions of the Bible are all that are needed to make its truth real and its promised outcome foreordained.
When we read the Bible, just as when we read a work of fiction, we typically find it "believable" while we remain immersed in it. We engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief" for the duration of the immersion — for the story's basic assumptions do in fact make some sort of sense to us, even if we're not religious believers. The Bible, like many another story, has the power to enchant us.
The real question is not whether the Bible is "true." The question we need to ask ourselves about the Bible is whether we grant its "truth" preeminence in our lives and world after the enchantment is over. Do we believe that the way the biblical "light from above" reveals us to be, warts and all, is meaningful and valid? If so, then the religion of the Bible is true for us.
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