The Gospel and Our Lack of Good Fiction  

Justin RuddySeptember 27, 2011 

As of late I've enjoyed leafing through Tony Reinke's Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books. In his chapter on the benefits of reading fiction, he quotes Flannery O'Connor on the potential perils of religious fiction: 

"Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible. His feeling about this may have been made more definite by one of those Manichean-type theologies which sees the natural world as unworthy of penetration. But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is."

Reinke's summary of O'Connor is that "good Christian fiction plants the seeds of grace deep in the soil of realism and common human experience" (123). As an avid fiction reader, I have often wondered why evangelical, gospel-centered Christianity has not given us many noteworthy novels or novelists. There are certainly a lot of answers to that question, but with this quote in view I can't help but think that there are three primary issues at play in the evangelical lack of profound, thoughtful, true-to-life fiction: 

First, as O'Connor points up, on the whole, we are not the most profound interpreters of "the natural human world as it is." I do believe that Christianity provides the best framework for understanding the world as it now stands: a glorious ruin groaning for redemption. However, and I include myself here, we have a tendency to allow our thinking about the world to get stuck in the framework itself, failing to make the proper connections to real life. This tends to make our fiction trite. 

Second, as a movement that tends to be slightly short-sighted and disconcertingly focused on the pragmatic, we find it difficult to see the payoff of writing and/or reading fiction. To play with Reinke's language, we are generous in our seed-sowing, but we do not often plant the seeds of grace deep. Writing good fiction would require that we take the long view.

Third, and this is the piece that drives the first two issues, we haven't yet fully grasped the implications of the gospel. Were we to push the gospel into every area of life we would be forced to connect our theological frameworks to "the natural human world as it is." Furthermore, the gospel would enable us to move beyond the pragmatic, microwave approach that we often take to storytelling, allowing us to dig deep into the dirt of this world to plant seeds of grace and hope. 

Ultimately, in the gospel we have all the resources that are needed for the telling of good stories. In fact, having the most compelling of all stories at the center of our lives has the potential to make us the best of all storytellers. Practically speaking, we can move toward producing better fiction by 1) encouraging a wide reading of good fiction in our churches, 2) being a receptive, constructively critical audience for burgeoning writers in our midst, and 3) praying for a deeper understanding of our world in light of the gospel that would lead us to take the long view. Obviously, there is no quick fix to the present situation, but we can hope that as we continue to grow in the gospel it will ultimately infect every area of our lives, including the stories we write and read. 

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