The Theological Importance of Reading Fiction
Several months ago, I wrote a post called “The Theological Importance of Imagination” in which I attempted to dispel that nasty Modernist rumor that imagination is childish at best and evil at worst. I discussed how imagination is childlike and as such, essential to faith, hope, and love.
Since imagination is so vital to Christianity, we ought to be keenly interested in developing our capacity for imagination and prayerfully disciplining our hearts and minds, for imagination can be employed viciously just as it can be employed lovingly. This, like most true Christian work, is countercultural.
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| This is not Anna Karenina. (Fan-fiction is the funnest!) |
The most common expression of a loving imagination is empathy, the ability to “think [our]selves into other people’s places.” Empathy always results from reading good stories. When we read good stories, we enter a reality through the perspective of an other: a narrator or character or multiple narrating characters. When we’re reading a fictional reality through first person narration, we’ve put ourselves, not merely in the shoes, more like in the skin of that other, walking around in that new skin for sometimes hundreds of pages.
I’ve never been to Russia in “real life.” But I’ve spent months there, in the 1870s no less, with Anna Karenina. And through the people I met in 19th-century Russia, I learned about human nature, love, forgiveness, and a tiny bit about early turn-of-the-Industrial-century farming too.
Fiction helps us empathize with individuals and people groups we don’t understand, whether because of long distances of time and space and/or large gaps between their ideology and ours. This is huge. What we don’t understand we fear. When we act out of fear, we fail to live by faith and act out of love. So fiction serves as a bridge to other people, but it also works to connect us to the Other, to God. We need imagination to envision the Kingdom of God, a world which Jesus said is here but not yet here. We need our God-given imaginations to pray, Father, make it on Earth as it is in heaven. Fiction helps us go there, helps us engage our imaginations by journeying us to otherworldly places like Narnia and Hogwarts and Middle Earth. When stories depict light and life and love, they are, whether we realize it or not, whether the author intended it or not, pointing us to the Source of light, life and love; to Light, Life and Love himself.
I have a difficult time imagining the world completely devoid of hope, but when I first read Heart of Darkness, my capacity for understanding and empathy expanded. Heart of Darkness is a stunningly crafted world that is horrendously bleak, desolate, and violent. It’s a world in which depravity has rejected grace. I have never experienced such a world in “real life,” but reading this story gave me compassion for those who have.
Even when novels and short stories show us the shadows, when we’re forced to face all that is dark and dead and ugly in the world (and in our hearts), this too points to Christ. Like the negative of a photograph shows us what should be fully there but isn’t, dark, “ugly” art shows us our fallen condition and points to the realities that begin to take shape when God is taken out of the picture, when sin has pushed him out of the framework of our lives.
There would be a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of the poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God in the world, and about the storm of his absence, both without and within, which, because it is unendurable, unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm [to God himself]. (Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale 44)
In short, reading good fiction… by which I don’t mean only 1000-page Russian novels and horribly dark high school required reading… reading good fiction is a remarkably fruitful form of spiritual discipline and spiritual formation.
October is National Book Month. We here at Thinking through Christianity, naturally, are celebrating. In the next few weeks we’ll be discussing our favorite books, so I thought I’d tee up the ball and introduce our upcoming series by talking about why we think good books are worth celebrating and discussing on a site about a faith tradition that sometimes eschews itself from fiction.
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About The Author
Renea McKenzie
(Editor in Chief) is a poet whose work often centers around the relationships between nature and the city, loss and love, faith and protest. She holds an MLA in English Literature and an MA in African American Studies. In between her two Masters degrees, Renea took a "gap year" to study theology at the famous L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland. L'Abri is also where she read the Harry Potter saga for the first time and fell in love with the characters and the story's triumph of sacrificial love. Renea leads an incredibly talented creative writing group at her church and spends a fair amount of time binging books and Netflix and swing dancing at the historic Sons of Hermann Hall.
Childish vs. Childlike – that’s a very important distinction, thanks.
Yes. I appreciate that distinction, too. I also like the metaphor of the negative for a photograph.
I really liked your post – especially what you said about gaining empathy through a good story. I’d like to recommend reading a book I’d come across a few years ago, as a preteen. It’s called “Ten Things I Hate About Myself” and it’s by Randa Abdel Fattah (I apologise for any spelling errors in her name). She provides a wonderful insight into the insecurities of Muslim migrants (and to some extent, migrants in general)in predominantly white communities. I think it’s especially relevant today if Christians are to be loving towards our Muslim neighbours. I’m sorry if this sounds a little condescending, and I’m certain my view is biased because I don’t live in America, but looking from the outside, what we hear in the news makes people here believe that the general Christian attitude towards Muslims is the opposite of loving. I do appreciate their fears – I have Muslim friends here in India, and although I don’t agree with them theologically, what should stop me from trying to better empathize with them?
Sorry, I just HAD to say this to an American.
Excellent post save that it mostly looks at one side, empathy. That’s great, but fiction has power the other way too. I wrote about seeing things a new way in Christianity and Pop Culture, a bit of a rambly post, so here’s the relevant bit:
Some think that tales should be Biblical to be powerful. They might want to shun secular allegory for fear it might overshadow the real story. They are right, to a point. Many are moved more by the death of Aslan in The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe than the story the Passion. There is a simple reason for this, however. Most hear the story of the Passion, know how it ends, long before we can understand it. We see paintings, stained glass, crufix everywhere. The tale is often stale until, every so often, something comes along to remind a Christian exactly how horrifying the Passion was or to remind a non-believer the foundation of the faith. Sometimes that thing is an allusion. The story of Aslan shocks us more because it is unexpected. Instead of then worrying that we care about the story of Aslan more, we should use that shock to remind ourselves of the reality of the Passion.
Chesterton has some of my favorite quotes on this.
“[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”
And Anya, don’t believe everything you hear in the news, and do not for one second, think that the news tells you the whole story. Christians are the most persecuted religion, especially by Muslims. But the news won’t tell you that. I could load you up with links, but you can find most of it yourself. Google things like ‘Coptic persecution’ or ‘hate crime statistics against Jews and Muslims in the US the year after 9/11.’ The facts don’t fit the narrative. I will admonish other Christians to be kind and understanding—it is right to do so—but the notion that Muslims are afraid of Christians is silly. We aren’t the ones burning down their religious houses and forcing their conversions.
Thank you for your kind reply, Mr. London. I definitely agree that Christianity is the most persecuted religion – I happen to read something about the persecuted church everyday. (A mailed newsletter by Open Doors. None of the events are found in the news. So I do agree the news is a biased source.)And even in my own life, I do witness some form of discrimination against my faith. My textbooks in History for the next two years talk a little bit about each religion, but they have not-so-overt comments criticizing Christianity while they just give the basic tenets of others. My History teacher (who is otherwise actually fantastic and knows her stuff) while telling us about the Crusades made a couple of comments about how she did not understand why Christians were so adamant about their way being the Only Way,and while doing the Renaissance she’s talking about how it’s better for society when religion loses its hold over society. Yet she made no such objections when we were studying the Central Islamic Lands. (To be fair, she doesn’t actively bash just Christianity – she does criticize Hinduism, her own religion, on the matter of the caste system. I think it’s the product of what Hindu fundamentalists like to call ‘Western learning’.) To sum up a long para, I do agree with what you’ve said. Your comments on fictions “power the other way” reminded me of a series called the House of Night I’d read as an unbeliever, and it struck me that they were the most blatant denial of Christianity.
About my point on the Muslims, I was referring to the fact that the guy who made the Innocence of Muslims video PROFESSED to be a Coptic Christian (some accounts say American Jew. I’ve long accepted the Indian media are liars.) and another reference to a defamation campaign (On Obama? Or Islam? Memory fails me.)led by another professing Christian, Dinesh D’Souza – and that was what got me thinking, because I vaguely seemed to remember it was name of someone who wrote a book defending Christian apologetics. Yes, I’m making the same mistake an unbeliever would by generalising and forgetting that not all those who profess practice; please forgive me – it’s not an excuse, but I’m a relatively new believer and I am not in a situation to attend church, being a minor to parents of a different religion. (Also, I can’t break their hearts – not at this point of time anyway.)
The bit from your post on pop culture is food for thought – it reminds me of one of the ways God has changed meas a Christian. Though I still have the tendency to lose myself in a story, I have begun wonder, “Is this right according to God?”
And finally, thank you so much for your posts. They help me keep in some sort of contact with believers which is not possible physically.
There is nothing to forgive. As a new believer it is to your credit that you struggle with these issues. It will be, is, your duty as a Christian to help keep your brothers and sisters on the right path. This is a good place to keep looking for discussion and support. We can probably send you links to any resources you need. Check Patheos, First Things (Catholic, but plenty of good thoughtful stuff for all Christians.)
Anyway, when you start talking about the moral culpability of a group based upon the actions of a subset of that group, you need a framework: (You might have found this at my place, but I don’t know how far back you read.)
Who is doing the act? A leader of the group or a follower?
How many are doing the act? A large group or a lone wolf?
What is the nature and magnitude of the act? Words or violence? A slap or a murder?
And what is the response of the other members of the larger group? Condemnation? Celebration? Calls to imitate or to cease?
The next time you hear a claim of moral equivalence, in this or anything else, answer those questions for each side. Compare the two. Then decide about moral equivalence.
A few final tidbits on your examples: turns out the movie was cover for a hit on the ambassador. The aggressors first advertised that it was made by a Jew and then Copts because they wanted angry buzz, and if possible riot. It sounds like the filmmaker was a Copt or at least funded by them. As to the Dinesh movie, it is libel (sorry lawyer brain kicking in) and truth is typically a defense. Just accusing someone of wrongdoing isn’t the problem. This illustrates one of the hardest problems about being a Christian. The fact that I believe something is wrong or that my neighbor is doing something wrong is not a problem, though the world thinks it is. A problem would be if I forced my neighbor to do what I believe or punished him for not. The short of a really long paragraph, Christians aren’t wrong to merely hold opinions against the conventional wisdom or to lead their own lives in accordance with those beliefs. You could probably find a lot on this if you googled difference between tolerance and acceptance. Christians tend to tolerate but not accept, and others–and some Christians–hold that tolerance and acceptance are the same thing so that by not accepting, Christians are intolerant. Debate over such things is hot talk in Christian circles these days.
For the moment I’m going back to my PJ pieces. I need to get them done and I know Adam must love it when I show up around here.
I love this post, Renea! My favorite part… (so agree both as a writer and a reader!!) “Even when novels and short stories show us the shadows, when we’re forced to face all that is dark and dead and ugly in the world (and in our hearts), this too points to God and to Christ. Like the negative of a photograph shows us what should be fully there but isn’t, this kind of art shows us our fallen condition and points to the realities that begin to take shape when God is taken out of the picture, when sin has pushed him outside the framework of our lives.”
Thanks, Krissi. That’s my favorite part too. God’s grace knows no bounds.
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