Blog on the Lillypad
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
 | "Fiction doesn't lie, but it can't tell the whole truth." - Flannery O'Connor
As I mentioned before, fiction cannot be a standalone tool for evangelism. God has ordained that preaching the Word of God is the means by which the Gospel will go forth victoriously. The Gospel must be clearly and directly expounded. Fiction can be used as an adornment for Truth, but it can no more be the engine of truth than a pearl necklace can serve as the fanbelt for a tank. |
When well-meaning but misguided Christians try to use fiction to expound Truth, they end up with an emotional appeal that, at best, temporarily deceives the reader into thinking a true conversion of his or her heart has taken place, thus inviting a false and misguided profession of faith. At worst, they create such a lopsided, lumbering literary entity that it invites scorn for the sacred ideas of the Gospel and turns readers into cynics.
Fiction relies upon indirection and cannot replace or even meaningfully complement the direction of ideas that good sermons use.
 | It is possible to write very truthful fiction. Indeed, when the indirection of fiction is respected and the writer works within the confines and limits of fiction, the writer can produce very powerful fiction. Any tool used properly achieves its maximum potential. That still doesn't make fiction evangelistic, but it does mean the writer can produce a literature that refreshes the Christian with the truths that the Christian has learned by preaching and study. Fiction shows the beauty of the truths, and good fiction demonstrates the loveliness of goodness and the horror of evil.
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When I taught college English to freshmen, I noticed that they responded to straightforward, good vs. bad stories about the same way that I did. Story itself still had the power to hold their interest. We always started the English 102 semester with a quick review of some of literature's best known legends and epics. I'd start with the Pardoner's Tale from Chaucer: "Three Young men and Death," and this grimly ironic tale set them up for an introduction of narrating and discussing stories. And when I moved on to the Wife of Bath's Tale (simply telling it to them in my own words to give them an idea of the wit and feel of it), they would soon realize that this was truly "story time." They would relax and listen, surprised that a bit of English class could be genuinely entertaining. The tale from the Wife of Bath sets up a riddle for a doomed knight: "What do women want?" If he can answer this by the end of one year, his life will be spared.
As my students and I followed this knight through the story together, they were as interested and ready to guess at possible answers as any fourteenth century audience. They ventured their own guesses, and learned to repeat the riddle on cue as I would tell them the story. The answer (which I am not going to give away here) always pleased them and brought a lot of laughs. In our first class, we would cover many quick narrations of famous stories, of adventurous bits of English history, of true events that had been immortalized in poems.
 | That first class was designed to awaken them to the power of story, and they usually responded with enthusiasm by the end. I'm glad that they could still respond, for I believe that the role of story is to feed the human soul's desire to see the glorious triumph of goodness and rightness. In time, perhaps the cynicism that is so overwhelmingly marketed to teenagers and twentysomethings may take away the basic needs of the soul that they can still feel. Pretty soon, if the ultra-secularized, exceptionally shallow and oversexed commercial communications industry has its way, all things worthy of consideration and reflection will be imitated by worthless counterparts. (Rather like what Disney has done with The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules.)
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Eventually, if our society of marketing and packaging has its way, ethics and values will be reduced in the minds of men and women to mere social mores and outward behaviors rather than absolutes. At that point, story will become mere entertainment on an almost purely sensual level, and a tale will be evaluated on its shock value, graphic detail, special effects, music, and technical accomplishment rather than on what it is actually about. Because, by that time, the stories that people read or watch will not really be about anything at all. A story will be something that acts on the reader's senses rather than appealing to his mind and personality.
We Christians have a responsibility to continue to produce a genuine literature---not a collection of Chick Tracts or "Burning Hell" type films, but a true literature. We must adorn Truth with stories, poems, and films worthy of the beauty and glory of Truth. That means including unpleasant truths and not pretending them away. It means making Grace triumphant and not man triumphant in our stories. Part of a beautiful literature means including the depiction of hideous evil so that it's horror is evident and the reader recognizes that its threat is real. And the reader has to recognize that this hideous evil is in us, Christians, and we are kept from it by a Power greater than what we are.
We all come into this world and continue through it with a priori needs and desires that can be appealed to by means of story. Until those parts of us are killed or repressed into oblivion, story can continue to awaken us to the glory and the mystery that surrounds us, and it can heighten our awareness of the importance of the role that each of us can play. We are, each of us, our own story, but we hear the tale told intentively, from end to end, only when our lives are ending or are over. I'm afraid that--in losing sight of the struggle between good and evil in stories--we are in danger of losing sight of the struggle of good and evil in ourselves.
The secular world can take this away from us by depicting a world where everythng is relative. But Christian fiction can (and has,in part) deprive us of our vision of the cosmic battle by deceiving us about ourselves (presenting Christians as already good, and not as sinners being sanctified) and deceiving us about the lives we are called to live (by depicting all of our struggles ending prematurely by "Santa Claus" answers to prayer or sudden raptures that remove us from the call to take up the cross and follow Christ). Bad Christian fiction can deceive just as much as bad secular fiction, and that is the danger. The irony about fiction is that in order to write really good fiction, the Christian must always tell the truth.
What Makes Fiction Succeed
The Purpose of Fiction
The Structure of Fiction
The Design of Fiction
The Action of Fiction
The Integrity of Fiction
