The other day, I was talking with a friend who showed me a short film he was in, where a girl dreams that he overcomes many obstacles in quest for her. I made the observation that it’s true: all girls want to be rescued. Each woman wants a man to be willing to fight a battle for her, pursue her at any cost to him, slay the dragon, climb the tower, and rescue her from the evil witch’s spell. All those Disney movies didn’t make bank for nothing. The same storyline that we find over and over in fairytales, legends, and folklore across the globe is written on our hearts for a reason. It’s the gospel.
I first heard the word “archetype” when I was assigned as a summer project for my preAP 10th grade English class a paper on the archetypes in The Lord of the Rings’s prequel, The Hobbit, and in the Star Wars trilogy. My research of the assignment’s prompt led me to the Latin roots: arch, meaning ‘first’, and typ, meaning ‘print’, or of course, ‘kind’. So an archetype is the first of its kind, or really, a model for a reoccurring character-type, symbol, situation, etc. For example, in Star Wars, Darth Vader is an archetypal Satan (devil/evil) character, the light saber is an archetypal symbol of magic/knowledge/power, and Luke goes on an archetypal quest of self-discovery while in pursuit of The Force. You get the idea.
It has since intrigued me that most – arguably all – archetypes are not confined to culture, but span across the globe, which has caused many scholars to inquire of the human collective conscious, or subconscious if you’re Freud. Why do we all have these same ideas of truth, beauty, love, fulfillment, etc? I would argue that the best archetypes are written on our hearts because they are a portrait of the gospel.
The ‘plot’, if you will, of the gospel (put in fairytale-ish terms), starts with the King choosing a bride, for His Son (Eph 1:4). As all princess brides should be, she is to be pure, beautiful, and faithful. Of course, it doesn’t take long into the Bible to see that she (we) mess that up, and through evil’s deception, she is placed under a curse and unable to save herself (hence, damsel in distress). Like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, et al., we are unresponsive, “dead in [our] trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1). Here’s were the climax of the story comes: our Prince, Jesus Christ, despite our imperfections and even outright rejection of Him, tackles unfathomable obstacles to get to us. He leaves His throne and condescends to humanity, he blamelessly overcomes fleshly sin, and he even defeats the real archetype of evil himself, Satan. But this tale doesn’t end there because He still has to release the curse’s grip on His beloved. He buys back her purity by giving her his own through taking her sin and shame on Himself on the cross, dying the death she is sentenced to, and receiving the wrath of a holy God on Himself. Prince Charming can’t go this far, though, because if he dies, then the princess would have no one to marry; so to die for the princess is noble, but it doesn’t make for a good story. However, Christ our Savior did die, and then rose from the dead because sin and the grave had been conquered; our debt has been paid in full, “tetelestai” (John 19:30). The princess (believer) is saved from evil and free to marry her Prince, sin/death is conquered, and the Prince is exalted.
Sadly, I didn’t make this connection during the conversation, as I rarely do, but thought about it late into the night afterwards. What if the Author and Perfector of our faith planted the archetypal storyline into our “collective subconscious” to preach the beauty of His salvation to our aesthetic psyche?
