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This article originally appeared in the April 20, 1979 issue of Christianity Today.

If the 1960s and early 1970s became an age without heroes, an age of the antihero in literature and on the stage and the screen, the past few years have seen the emergence of a new and somewhat perplexing phenomenon, the superhero. Since" superheroes" are confined in large measure to the pages of children's comics, it may seem out of place to take them seriously enough to discuss them in Christianity Today. Yet what children are taught to a large extent determines how they will act as adults, and what adults teach children tells us a great deal about how adults think—or, as the case may be, fail to think. Of what significance is it that true heroes have disappeared, to be replaced by superheroes?

A hero is a human being who through discipline, bravery, determination, and perhaps divine assistance accomplishes seemingly incredible feats. Heroes generally must be good and serve a good cause, though sometimes brave and generous men in the service of an evil cause are deemed to be heroes-usually tragic but noble figures. Thus Robert E. Lee is honored by most of those who disapproved the cause of the South, and Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox," appears as one of the last heroes of modern times, though the cause he served was truly evil.

A superhero, by contrast, is not a real human being, but a fantasy creature—Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, et al. Superheroes, unlike the heroes of Greek mythology, have no Achilles' heel. Superman himself is vulnerable to the mineral kryptonite, but of course, he will never be killed by it. Unlike the great Achilles. Unlike the more traditional heroes of folklore and of reality, modern superheroes have no moral context. They are generally in the service of "good" and against "evil," of course. But the good that they serve is undefined, undistinguished, unmotivated, and the evil they oppose is likewise.

It is no doubt significant that one of the most successful novelists today, Mario Puzo, whose massive tales (such as The Godfather) have no heroes, but only cynicism and anti-heroes, was engaged to write the screenplay for Superman. It is due to Puzo's ability that the details of an essentially trivial and incredible tale hang together in such a way as to make it all vaguely believable. But it is probably also due to Puzo's basically cynical orientation that the good in Superman-which is abundantly evident-is without origin, frame, reference, or goal. In this it resembles the good of another modern counterfeit, Close Encounters—it is alien good, good simply by being alien. And there is a serious moral problem here: if it is the alien power, the infant stranger from the planet Krypton, who is good by virtue of his origin, then the implication is that we human beings, who do not share that origin, are under no obligation to be good, not to speak of being heroic.

There are many parallels—and they cannot all be accidental—between the infant who comes to earth from the heavens (outer space) and the One who came from heaven. Marlon Brando, the wise Kryptonian who sends his son to earth to escape the destruction of his planet, speaks of his hopes for mankind, and of "giving them my only son." But the parallels are defective, for there is nothing divine and good about being Kryptonian. The movie's first scene involves the "eternal" judgment—itself a literally blasphemous concept—of Kryptonians who are not good but criminal. This itself may be a kind of parallel to the fall and banishment of Satan before the creation. In any event, Kryptonians are not good by virtue of being Kryptonian. In fact, they do not seem to be good for any reason at all.

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July (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51