Although it has been a while since I have seen a critique of
children’s fairy tales, I am always amused when I do. Someone occasionally points out how violent and
cruel many fairy tales are. This leads to concerns that those poor children forced to hear these tales
are being taught to be cruel and violent.
I’m confused by most of this. I grew up hearing and reading fairy tales and
today own a copy of all of Grimm’s fairy tales.
I am not a pacifist, but I am a long way from being violent or
cruel. Maybe I lacked sufficient
cognitive ability to understand these violent and cruel tales.
I also grew up reading the Bible, having received my first
when I was five years old—four months before my sixth birthday. The Bible, unlike the fairy tales, gave me
some problems. It starts off with lies
told to God and a brother murdering another brother, and it goes downhill after
that. Violence and cruelty is everywhere,
often instigated by God. Given how much
violence and cruelty there is in the Bible, should we prohibit children from
reading it?The problem I had with the Bible was the result of how the Bible was presented. What I heard from preachers and Sunday school teachers was that everything in the Bible was factually true. No one ever said that to me regarding fairy tales. Fairy tales were stories. There were lessons to be learned from the stories, but they were stories. The big, bad woof was not disguised as my grandma and waiting just up the road for me.
Okay, not all the violent and cruel stuff in the Bible is just a story. Some of it is all too real. But might it not be helpful for us to acknowledge to children, not to mention adults, that some of the events in the Bible are stories—stories told to get across a very important point?
The saga of Jonah, the reluctant prophet is a case in point. As a child I was enthralled by it and deeply bothered. God had a mission for Jonah which Jonah didn’t want to do, and therefore he ran from God. God, in order to get Jonah, causes a storm (that’s how I understood it) that threatened the lives of an entire ship’s crew. To save their lives, the crew was willing to kill Jonah. A big fish swallowed, but did not digest, Jonah and three days later vomited him onto the shore. Jonah did God’s bidding and was mad about it the whole time. Afterwards, Jonah pouted under a bush that grew up overnight.
While enthralled by the thought of a man surviving for three days in a fish’s belly, I was bothered by the story that presented God as willing to put other men at peril to get this one man and of men so cruel as to be willing to sacrifice a life to save their own skins. Even to a child, such images seemed contrary to the image of the God revealed in Jesus.
Then one day college Professor Ham Kimzy said of Jonah, “This is a story. The truth is not in the facts but in the story.” With this realization, Jonah took on new interest and importance.
Read the story of Jonah. Skip the sermon, and learn the truth—God has a mission of redemption and invites us to join him in the mission.
