He Gave Us Fiction

Should Christians read, and be shaped by, fiction? Yes, yes they should.¹

I came to that conclusion pretty early on in life, admittedly because I just loved fiction, and I was also convinced that Christianity was true, and I was also also convinced (because I loved fiction and because I believed that Christianity was true) that the Christians who told that me fiction was at best a waste of time (and at worst a real evil) were wrong.

At the time (7th grade–I know this because I distinctly remember my orchestra teacher throwing his baton at me because I was reading whatever the latest Redwall book was instead of paying attention to what our conductor was saying to the cellos, but, let’s be honest, I was right to redeem the time because I played viola and when has a conductor ever cared about what the violas were doing?). At the time I remember having a kind of crisis of conscience. If fiction was not true, and Christianity was true, why did I love fiction so much? Why was I reading instead of “working?” Why was stashing a flashlight under my pillow so I could stay up later than my parentally prescribed bedtime to engrossed in The Return of the King? Was that all just a waste of time? I believe it’s absolutely not a waste of time.

But I’ll confess at the outset that I’m biased. In fact, I’m persuaded that I would not have come to be a follower of Jesus except through “fiction.” However, let me say to those who regard propositional theology as the apex of human thought, to those who say that Scripture alone is the final authority to which all truth should conform, to those who think that all knowledge is ultimately God’s knowledge: yes and amen. I agree. And yet, fiction is good and formative and a necessary part of a well-balanced diet.

But before we move on to the argument proper, let’s make the question harder. Whether or not Christians can read fiction is just too easy: absolutely they can. There’s no biblical prohibition; restful entertainment is consistent with the command to “rest;” there are obviously “fictional” stories in Scripture itself (we’ll get to that below). That Christians can read fiction, and benefit from it, is an easy argument (though some have told me otherwise), so I won’t focus on that here. I want to focus on a harder problem, and if I prove the harder problem I will prove the “easy” problem.

Here is the harder question; or, rather, here are the harder questions, for they are all connected. Must Christians read fiction? Should (non-true) story shape the Christian’s worldview? Can poetic language be normative? Is imagination necessary for knowing? Are metaphors true? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Fiction is not not true

The first thing we should talk about is genre. Readers of this blog will have seen this coming. Genre is a critical component of all interpretation. The reason we need to talk about genre is because we evaluate the truthfulness of a statement relative to the genre. If someone affirms that a particular statement “is true,” what do they mean? It depends on the context. What “kind” of conversation are we having when someone says “this is true?

The proposition “2+2=4” is true, and the thrust of that claim is obvious. The statement “all men are mortal” is also true, but it doesn’t seem as self-evident as the mathematical claim. “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thess. 5:2) is also true, but it seems to be true in a different way than simple syllogisms are true. How do we explain these differences? As we shift from different types of communication, the “rules” of what counts as “true” shift.

Now this is not to say that all truth is relative. Truth is ultimately grounded in, and defined by, the objective standard of, to put it succinctly, “what God thinks.” However, because we are not God, our ability to describe and appropriate truth is always limited. It is informed by, and in fact constrained by, a frame of reference. We cannot see, say, hear, or know “all things at once.” What we affirm as true is always true only from a certain frame of reference, within a certain cultural framework, circumscribed by a set of understood norms. We are limited by our perspective, by our knowledge, by our experience and culture and context. This is not a bad thing; it is a human thing. Limits are a function of our creatureliness.

And these limits apply also to our communication. At any point in time, in any given conversation, we are “limited” by the kind of conversation that we are having. If I’m talking about “the facts” and statistics then the standards of truth are very narrow and specific. If I’m talking about “how I feel,” then truth is broader and more subjective. If I’m proving a thesis, then the conversation should comply with the rules of logic and evidence. If, by contrast, I’m trying to provoke a response, then logic and evidence are only a part of the equation; rhetoric and artistry are equally important.

One of the “modes” by which we humans express truth is through story. I can communicate truth propositionally, and often that is the most efficient conduit for truth. Thus “love your neighbor as yourself” is true. “Thou shall not steal” and “thou shall not murder” are also true. It is also true that the kings of Israel are called to submit themselves to God’s will as they live their lives, rule the nation, and adjudicate between the good and the wicked. All of this is very propositional, but I can communicate these truths through another mode of discourse. In 2 Samuel 12 the prophet tells David these truths, but he uses fiction to do so. In this fictional story, an imaginary rich man abuses an imaginary poor man in a completely imaginary way. King David, accepting this imaginary story as a true story (which seems to be Nathan’s intent), pronounces an imaginary judgement (though David does not realize that it is imaginary) on an imaginary case. But then Samuel uses David’s words against him; David’s judgement does not “stick” to the imaginary characters in Nathan’s story, but to the very real evil of David’s own abusive actions.

The fictional mode of Nathan’s discourse does not diminish the truthfulness of his story. In fact, the fictional device imparts truth in a far more evocative and impactful way than merely propositional discourse would have. The fiction brings David into the case, allows him to see something that he would otherwise be blind to, and as a result forms and changes his thinking.

Story and Worldview

Stories have a particular power in this regard. We are made storied creatures. We are bound by a story; we are anchored in a narrative. This world in which we live and move and have our being is God’s world, and God has given this world a narrative structure. It’s all one big story. We have to understand the word of God within that story. When God commands his people, he anchors those commands to a story: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt.”

Now of course there are true stories and there are fictional stories. That is an important distinction, and we’ll need to return to it, but it does not change the fact that we were made to understand through story. The point I am making is epistemological. We know things only in so far as we appropriate them within the story. Everything is meaningful precisely because it is created by God as part of his grand design to bring glory to his name by being good to his creatures. That’s the metanarrative, and without that metanarrative we cannot know what we know.

All of this is to say that when we start talking about “worldview” (whatever we mean by that, and it’s more complicated than we might think) we are bound to talk about story. A worldview is not reducible to a set of propositions. We can articulate it using propositions, and it certainly requires propositional thinking, but it’s more than that. A Christian worldview is not merely philosophical; it is eschatological. It tells a story about the world and it understands the basic constitutive elements of the world in terms of that story.

Knowledge and the Imagination

We will come back to fiction, I promise, but I need to put forward one more building block: the imagination. As we’ve already said, as creatures we are inherently limited, and that means I only have access to part of the story. How do we know things that we have not experienced? How does reading about WWII impart knowledge to me, since I was not there? I’ve never flown a plane, but I can picture it in my head. What’s doing that? The imagination is doing that. We sometimes talk about the imagination as if its primary function was found in creating “untruths.” Someone with a good imagination is usually someone we regard as adept at concocting stories out of thing air. But that’s not the primary role of the imagination. The imagination is a key component to knowing. The imagination takes the basic building blocks of your experience and shapes them around the story. I don’t need to have experienced shepherding sheep to understand Jesus’ metaphor “they are sheep without a shepherd.” What I do need to understand that is someone to tell me a story about what that’s like. I need the story so that my imagination can shape the “raw data” (the sheep, the human being tending the sheep, the wolves from which the sheep must be protected, etc.) into something that’s actually meaningful. We’re doing this all the time, but it’s so intuitive that we just don’t notice what’s going on.

Formative Fiction

This is where fiction comes in. True story is obviously able to shape the imagination, but what about fiction? Fiction is not just the result of the imagination, it’s also food for the imagination. (And remember, the imagination is constantly at work helping us to know things, so it needs to be fed)!

Fiction feeds and informs the imagination in a number of different ways. I’ll name just a few (and treat these as half-baked ideas rather than a fully worked out taxonomy). The first we’ve already met. Fiction has a peculiar power to reorder our frame of reference. Nathan’s story, though not true, engages David’s imagination, and in so doing and it “reforms” it, bringing the concepts of justice and fairness and proper judgment and his role as long back into proper order. Sometimes we have to step outside what is real to understand what is real. The ring in Lord of the Rings helped me in that way. By picturing sin and temptation as a physical object, an imaginary ring, Tolkien is able to say things about the power of greed and desire that are less easy to see when we are limited to mere propositions.

Fiction also helps us think beyond the boundaries of the limitations of our experience. Science fiction, which I know is not everyone’s cup of tea, is particularly good at this. By inventing an android with all the cognitive functions of a human being, and then having that android interact with “real” humans, Gene Roddenberry encourages us to think philosophically about the nature of personhood and the ethical obligations that we humans might have to the things we have made. That may be important as AI continues to march on, and it’s already important as scientists continue to meddle with the basic building blocks of life.

Finally, fiction reinforces the storied nature of reality itself. We see such a small part of the story, but the grand story is often “instantiated” in little stories. That’s why stories tend to have similar structures and movement, because they are patterned after the larger story. Appreciating that, attuning myself and my imagination to the way story works, helps me better understand my story, and it also helps me better communicate that story to others.

1. The title of this post was inspired by Pratt’s excellent He Gave Us Stories. [↩]