Several years ago, I found myself sitting next to Stan Lee over lunch on the Santa Monica Pier.
At the time, I knew he was someone important, but I did not realize just how influential he had become. Only later did I appreciate that the longtime editor and publisher of Marvel Comics had helped shape the moral imagination of generations of young people.
His greatest achievement was not creating superheroes.
It was creating a narrative world.
Long before the Marvel movies filled theaters around the globe, millions of young readers entered a universe where courage mattered, sacrifice was honored, good struggled against evil, and broken people could become heroes. Stan Lee built what might be called a modern mythology.
In doing so, he accomplished something many educators, politicians, and even churches have struggled to achieve.
He gave young people a story worth living inside.
Before Stan Lee and his gifted collaborators, including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, superheroes were almost flawless. Marvel changed the formula. Peter Parker worried about paying rent. Bruce Banner feared the monster within. Tony Stark wrestled with pride. The X-Men longed for acceptance. These heroes were wounded before they were heroic.
Readers saw themselves in the story.
Perhaps no sentence captures Marvel’s moral vision better than Uncle Ben’s famous words to Peter Parker: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Power exists to serve. Gifts create obligation. Ability demands stewardship. Those ideas are remarkably close to a biblical understanding of vocation.
Marvel also rejected the illusion of perfection. Its greatest battles were often internal. Fear, loneliness, guilt, temptation, identity, and loss became the real adversaries. Evil was not merely something “out there.” It also resided within the human heart.
For many young people, Marvel became more than entertainment. It became a moral universe. It answered questions about courage, belonging, sacrifice, hope, and purpose without explicitly addressing God. It functioned as what sociologist Peter Berger might call a plausibility structure, a story that helped people make sense of reality.
This helps explain why Marvel resonates so deeply.
Human beings hunger for meaning before they hunger for information.
We live in a culture overflowing with facts but starving for purpose. Advanced modernity has steadily weakened the stories, institutions, and communities that once helped people answer life’s deepest questions. Identity has become fluid. Belonging has become fragile. The distinction between good and evil has grown increasingly blurred. Many young adults no longer wonder whether life is comfortable. They wonder whether it means anything at all.
Stan Lee understood something many Christian communicators have forgotten.
People rarely commit themselves to truth until they first encounter a story that makes truth beautiful. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for the church.
Too often we present the gospel as a transaction. Pray this prayer. Receive forgiveness. Go to heaven when you die. The gospel certainly includes forgiveness, but it is infinitely larger than a spiritual transaction. It is an invitation into the greatest story ever told.
It begins in a garden and ends in a garden-city. It tells us where we came from, why the world is broken, what God has done through Christ, and where history is headed. It calls ordinary people into an extraordinary mission of making God’s kingdom visible “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Jesus did not simply invite people to believe something. He invited them to follow Someone. “Follow me.” Those two words changed history.
The Christian life is not primarily about escaping earth for heaven. It is about apprenticing ourselves to Christ and participating in God’s ongoing work of restoring His creation. It is a lifelong adventure marked by dependence, courage, sacrifice, and hope.
Marvel hints at many of these themes. It celebrates vocation, redemption, courage, and self-giving love. Yet it ultimately locates salvation in extraordinary individuals.
The gospel tells a greater story. Its hero is Christ. Its power is grace. Its mission is the renewal of all things. This is why the church must recover the power of the biblical grand narrative.
Our culture does not simply need better arguments. It needs a better story.
Stan Lee understood the enduring power of story. He gave a generation heroes worth admiring and a universe worth imagining.
The church possesses something even greater. We have the true story of the world.
Our task is not merely to defend its truth. It is to tell it so beautifully, so compellingly, and so faithfully that another generation longs to step inside and discover its place within the greatest adventure ever written.
