Love in Action: Why we will always need Heroes

By Bethany Fehr

These days, the classic hero seems to be an endangered species. Or an obsolete relic, depending on who you ask. 

The prevailing attitude seems to be that virtuous heroes are irrelevant and unrelatable. Our culture wants gritty realism, and good guys are too good to be true. Chivalry is dead, and the traditional hero was buried with it. 

We can’t deny that the world is a scary place. Real good guys seem to be few and far between.

 Are heroically virtuous characters nothing more than head-in-the clouds escapism? Are we doing our readers a disservice by focusing on larger-than-life goodness? Are we feeding them fantasy instead of teaching them to live in the real world?

I don’t believe that for a minute. 

Heroes Offer Hope

The belief that heroes are unrealistic does contain a grain of truth. 

Heroes are not normal. 

They’re extraordinary. 

They don’t represent “the way things are.” They’re the odd ones out. They go against the status quo. 

This is why we still need fictional heroes. 

To be fair, we do need stories that help us see the world as it is, that challenge us to confront the dark places in our hearts that we’d rather ignore. But if we only go as far as identifying what’s wrong, we risk wallowing in the darkness.

The impact of honest examination only comes full circle when we offer our readers hope that the darkness can be overcome. 

And that’s a hero’s superpower. 

Heroes help us envision the way things ought to be. Rather than justifying us in staying where we are, they invite us to follow them out of the valley. They are the ones who see beyond—who believe the beauty of the future is worth fighting for and cling to their vision of restoration no matter the cost. 

In The Giver by Lois Lowry, the hero Jonas finds courage in his friendship with the one other like-minded person in his community and clings to the hope that he can spark change in a world that has lost its capacity to recognize evil. As the reader gets to know him, Jonas offers them hope that they too can find the courage to stand alone and make a difference. 

Though they represent the ideal rather than the usual, true heroes aren’t unrealistic.

We often forget that what is most common is not the measure of truth. Following Christ means that we see love as the highest reality.

God is Love, and He is the beginning and end. Love created, and He will restore. Christ’s love has already won the war, and He channels that love through His people to overcome evil and restore what is broken in the battles we face every moment.

For the world in general, true heroes offer hope that the darkness is not the ultimate reality.

 For a Christian, true heroes remind us of what we’ve known all along—that Love has overcome the world. 

Questions to Ask Yourself:

Heroes Provide Examples to Emulate

It’s a well-known fact that we become like the people we choose to hang out with.

Our friends’ and family’s mannerisms, behaviors, and beliefs rub off on us. We can even start looking like other people if we spend enough time around them. 

In the same way, storytelling not only reflects but shapes society. We vicariously live along with the characters we encounter, and they rub off on us. 

It’s not enough to try to avoid letting the bad apples shape our character. We need to actively search out people we want to reflect. Or create them, if we’re storytellers. 

God made humans to be reflective—specifically, to reflect Him.

 He created us in His image, but we’re imperfect mirrors, shattered and warped by our rebellion against Him.

In His plan to restore us to a radiant reflection of His love, He offered Himself  as the ultimate example. As we look long and intentionally at Christ through the recorded stories of His life, we begin to grow back into the reflection of God’s light that we were made for:

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” (1 Corinthians 3:18)

No fictional hero can come close to measuring up to His example, but that doesn’t mean the attempt to reflect His character is useless.

After all, Jesus calls His children to be disciples—students of His character whose goal is to learn to grow more like Him. We may be imperfect mirrors, but through Christ’s transforming power we are called to live out His love so that the world can see Him through us. 

Fictional characters who provide an example worth following, they allow us the opportunity to walk in their shoes.

Our imagination gets to practice living out love through their decisions and attitudes, preparing us for the real-life experiences that will offer similar tests of our character. 

I think this is one reason The Lord of the Rings has become an enduring classic.

When we walk the road to Mordor alongside Frodo and Sam, their example of endurance and self-sacrifice help us practice the courage our own journeys require. Experiencing Frodo’s excruciating efforts to resist the Ring’s enticement renews our determination not to let temptation win. Sam’s humble service encourages us to accept suffering in the cause of love and to consider it a blessing to bear one another’s burdens.  

When we return to the real world, these exemplary characters often continue to walk alongside us.

It can make all the difference in our outlook and choices when you know you’re not the first one to face a particular challenge.

Even if your encouraging companion is fictional, the truth that shines through them is very real because it ultimately comes from the only One who will never leave or forsake us.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

Heroes Stir Up a Desire for Goodness

Storytelling is powerful because it touches our hearts—our emotions and desires. We like to think of ourselves as logical beings, but in reality, our choices are driven primarily by desire. 

The emotional response of desire is not less valid than logic.

Western culture categorizes logic as dealing with hard facts and emotion with unsubstantial feelings. The Bible makes no such distinction.

The greatest command according to Jesus is:

“you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30) 

Love is a response of the whole person where the mind and heart work together.  

Though temptation likes to misdirect it, desire is not itself a bad thing. God made it part of us on purpose. Desire is part of how we reflect His image, and it’s meant to find its ultimate satisfaction in God Himself. 

As Christian writers, we should take advantage of the emotional nature of storytelling—not to subvert readers’ logic by manipulating their feelings, but to subvert the lure of evil by awakening desire for the good things God made us to pursue. 

This is why we still need heroes. 

Virtue is attractive by nature, and true heroes can have incredible power to show us the beauty of love lived out. 

The world tells us that goodness is dull and boring and teases us with the romance of the forbidden. Although the wrong thing often seems exciting at first, in the end it narrows our vision, strips us of the ability to experience pleasure, and leads to enslavement and death.

The path of goodness isn’t flashy and it is difficult, but it offers life and freedom, sharpens our taste for the pleasures God created us to experience, and opens up a world of endless discovery as we learn to appreciate God’s character. 

Experiencing true beauty inspires in us the quality of desire temptation can only dream of.

 When we view a beautiful painting of a landscape, we want to be there—to belong in that place. When we’re swept away by a beautiful piece of music we want to enter into it—we can’t help but attempt to sing and dance. When we meet a person with beautiful character, we want to be around them, participate in their life, and learn to be like them. 

Virtuous characters combine human connection with the beauty of art, and the result can be incredibly powerful. 

Reepicheep, the valiant mouse in C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is a character who sparks this kind of longing in me. When he stands unflinching in the face of peril, I subconsciously wish for an opportunity to follow his example.

When he shows compassion to Eustace despite the boy’s former cruelty to him, he makes me want to be a better friend. His spirit of adventure and his longing to see the end of the world make me yearn for heaven and help me better appreciate the wonders I encounter in my own journey. 

Jesus Christ set the ultimate example for what it means to be a hero.

 His life and death are the definition of beauty, goodness, and love for all time. Through Jesus, God revealed Himself—not by scaring people into obedience or prodding them to do their duty, but by drawing them with the loveliness of all He is. 

When our fictional heroes reflect the beauty of His character, they will provoke an echo of longing in readers’ hearts that might just lead them to follow. 

Questions to Ask Yourself:

Conclusion:

The world is dark, and virtue seems hard to find, but these are the very reasons why we need true fictional heroes now more than ever.  

Heroes offer us hope that looks beyond the darkness to the beauty of the not-yet.

 They offer us an example that reflects the One whose character defines love itself. They stir in us a desire that lifts us to pursue the best things.  

Chivalry will never die, because love is the one thing that lives forever. And if we continue to give classic heroism life through our characters, it may just change our world’s view of reality.