Blog on the Lillypad
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
 | The Integrity of Fiction: Diluted Fiction is Poor Fiction. When Christian writers try to make fiction serve a purpose for which it is not designed, they produce bad fiction. Story after story about characters committing a sin and then being found out, experiencing mishap, or being eaten up with guilt form a deceptive literature. And a literature that is deceptive (or propagandistic) will be challenged by other stories about characters who never get caught, who succeed admirably by doing wrong, and who never think twice (or actually seem more charming) because they openly adhere to unscrupulous devices. Worse, deceptive literature will be challenged by reality. |
Even in the parables of our Lord, we see that the dutiful son resents the repentant prodigal, and the story ends that way. The "permanent employees" of the vineyard resent the "temps", and the story ends with the Master of the Vineyard uttering his decree that he rules the money and will pay as he sees fit. The brief, pointed parables of Christ don't stretch the reader's credibility about human nature. Even the sorrowful prodigal is pretty clueless at the end of his own triumphant story. He comes back ready to be a servant just so he can eat, fully aware of how wrong and greedy he has been. The joy of his father and his reinstatement show that the prodigal has not yet comprehended his father's mind. Christ did not belabor the state of mind of the prodigal; nor did He stretch the story to show reconciliation between the two brothers.
| If fiction tries to bend reality, fiction descends into mere propaganda, and the savvy reader quickly throws it away and moves on to better fiction. Because the ultimate reality is the truth of God, fiction can rest on Truth and should be the adornment of it. That means that fiction has to reflect the truth about us and not depict us as we want to be depicted. Christian fiction has a bad habit of depicting Christians as good people, which is contrary to truth. We are not good people. We are depraved sinners. I think the greatest flaw of Christian fiction is that it sets out to show that Christian people are good and non-Christian people are bad. The truth is, everybody's bad. We are all completely dependent on the grace of God, whether we know that or not, and whether we act on that dependence or not. That doesn't mean that fiction must show anti-heroes, but it does mean that fiction must avoid making its characters too perfect. A few flaws, presented without hesitation, make a better representation of the Truth that governs all of us. |  |
And a lot of Christian fiction relies on emotional manipulation to "get decisions" or at least evoke belief from people; but because fiction sets up a world completely under the control of a human author, fiction cannot be genuinely persuasive. The emotions, however powerful, that it generates in the reader are temporary. Therefore, fiction cannot be the basis of imparting truth or making a sustainable commitment to action. Once the emotion wears off, the reader begins to change his mind. Once he gets the story back into perspective, he goes back to what he was.
But fiction can adorn truth and give us profound insights into the truths that we comprehend. When the "mirror of reality" is well crafted, the reader can look deeply and frequently and see himself or herself, recognize common situations in the most uncommon of landscapes, and ponder the statements made by fiction. That is what fiction can do. Because the culture of Evangelical Christianity has tried to make fiction do what it cannot do, that culture has produced a lamentable literature that is---at best---forgettable, and at worst, an open deception about the way that life, salvation, and Christian experience itself all work. Instead of fashioning a beautiful adornment of Truth, we have saddled ourselves with something that reveals to the world our hypocrisies and blind spots.
And there is also the flip side of this: As important as it is for fiction to remain purely what it is, the sermon form suffers even more if it is diluted improperly with fictional elements. The Lord Jesus used parables to illustrate, but His parables were brief, pointed, and focused on the sermon. This is why he ends the story of the prodigal son without telling how the two brothers ended up, and why He ends the story of the vineyard without saying how the workers accepted the Master's decree. The parable existed only long enough for Him to illustrate by analogy and then He ended the parable. His emphasis was not the story but the sermon.
In our computer-centered lives, we could almost say that the Lord used parables as "objects" that He dropped into his sermons to clarify meaning. This use of fictional elements to clarify by analogy is obviously approved by God. But many sermons since then have failed by using fictional elements for other purposes: driving up emotion, entertaining the listeners, proving (rather than explaining) a point.
I make the claim that fiction that becomes sermonistic fails to be convincing as fiction. But the truth of greater impact is that sermons that descend into "story and adventure hour" begin to detract from Truth. It's bad form to dilute fiction. It's theological perversion to dilute sermons.
One of the greatest benefits of the Protestant Reformation was the reforming of the sermon form and the scholarly study of what makes a good sermon. The preaching of the Word of God requires scholarship and sound reasoning. Overuse of the elements of fiction in sermons demonstrates that the preacher has neither of the first two requirements.
What Makes Fiction Succeed
The Purpose of Fiction
The Structure of Fiction
The Design of Fiction
The Action of Fiction
The Limits of Fiction
