Christian Fiction
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Faith on Friday, August 29, 2008 6:37 PM
Earlier this week I re-read some of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries (specifically the ones in this collection) and greatly enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of the brilliant plotting and Chesterton’s famous wit.
When I’d finished those, I picked up Prince Caspian for old time’s sake, and lost myself for a few hours in the lovely adventures of the Pevensie children and their Narnian friends (including, of course, the Dear Little ones).
It was a good couple of days, reading-wise. And what surprised me - it shouldn’t have, but it did - was how much that particular literary foray stimulated what I think of as my “theological muscles.”
The stories I read are not explicitly about Christianity - I’m sure I didn’t read the word “Jesus” even once - but underlying the tales of mystery and adventure are the truth and goodness that Chesterton and Lewis put into the words they wrote, because they held and lived a philosophy that was based, ultimately, in the the truth and goodness of God himself.
There is a lot of “Christian” fiction out there. I’ve read some of it, plucked randomly off the shelves at the local library, and found it so unremarkable that I couldn’t even tell you a single author or book name. Of course it’s unfair to expect everything to be literature of the caliber Chesterton or Lewis wrote, but I’ve enjoyed plenty of not-literature in my day, even enough to re-read some of it. It’s not the literary caliber of the overtly Christian fiction that puts me off it; it’s the premise. As I see it, the idea behind the genre is that the way to help people become Christians, or become better Christians, is to tell them how to do it. On a basic level, I think this is simply not true.
When I was a girl we didn’t have a television and I read voraciously, through nearly everything on the youth fiction shelves of our local library. My readings also included a fair amount of Christian children’s fiction, mostly borrowed from friends. The books were intended to instill good morals, but what they mostly induced in me - even at age eight or ten - was the vague feeling that I was being preached at. I barely remember those books. I learned much more about truth and goodness, honor and loyalty, from the girlish examples of Laura Ingalls and Anne Shirley.
As an adult, I find it is much the same. I have learned the most about God and his truth from books that are certainly Christian, but latently so. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is a retelling of a pagan myth, but it has taught me more about Christianity than any other novel I’ve read. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien, is fantasy from start to finish, but is, as Tolkien himself wrote, “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” and the truth shines on every page. And whenever I read Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries, the figure of that dumpy little priest, so calmly outlining the facts of the case, worms his way a little further into my heart and calls me to be good and humble as he is.
These works don’t tell how to be a good Christian, they show it. It is a vital difference.
I haven’t got it figured out yet, but I think the trick is: don’t look for the “Christian” books, look for the books by faithful Christians.
What do you think?
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